Slam delivered

Check out the slamming delivered to Saudi Arabia's religious police, "The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice", by journalist Raid Qusti:

Their mission is to stop corruption in society — which honestly they have been doing very well. They shut down brothels, crack down on drug traffickers, and detain people who do forbidden things in our cities and towns. For that we give them credit. At the same time, complaints from the public against the narrow-mindedness of some of the organization’s members are on the increase. Instead of being something to be proud of, most members of the public fear the organization as if everyone in it were phantoms or bogeymen.

People hired to do these jobs should be of the highest quality and possess considerable religious knowledge. That is not, unfortunately, what we see in reality. The reality is people in our streets and malls who are obsessed with women who do not cover their faces in public and who are implementing their own version of the law according to their own personal beliefs.

Yesterday, a local newspaper reported that a member of the commission was sentenced to lashes and imprisonment because he had defamed a woman in public because she did not cover her face. The male member of the family refused to forgive him and brought two witnesses to court who testified that they heard the man use unprintable words to the woman. I personally have spoken to people whose family members have experienced the same treatment from members of this commission. Is this what things have come to in Saudi Arabia?

Was this little slam published in London, New York or some other cosmopolitan centre? Nope, it was in the good old Arab News. Whoa, there could be some progress being made here folks.

Via Crossroads Arabia, a site well worth visiting.