The only good news here is that is that it has sparked an international outcry—which comes just in time to embarrass the barbaric Saudi regime at the Riyadh OPEC summit. (AFP, Nov. 16) From The Telegraph, Nov. 17:

A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she was the victim of a gang rape.

The sentence against the 19-year-old Shia woman from Qatif, in the Eastern Province of the country, was passed because she was in the car of a man who was not a relative at the time of the attack, which contravened strict Saudi laws on segregation.

A court had originally sentenced the woman to 90 lashes and the rapists to jail terms of between 10 months and five years but increased the punishment after an appeal, saying the woman had tried to use the media to influence them.

According to the Arab News newspaper, the woman was gang-raped 14 times.

Her offence was in meeting a former boyfriend, whom she had asked to return pictures he had of her because she was about to marry another man.

The couple was sitting in a car when a group of seven Sunni men kidnapped them and raped them both, lawyers in the case told Arab News.

The former boyfriend was also sentenced to 90 lashes for being with her in private.

The victims' lawyer, Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, was also ordered to face disciplinary action after he spoke to the media about the original sentence.

"My client is the victim of this abhorrent crime. I believe her sentence contravenes the Islamic Sharia law and violates the pertinent international conventions," he said.

"The judicial bodies should have dealt with this girl as the victim rather than the culprit.

"The court blamed the girl for being alone with unrelated men, but it should have taken the humane view that it cannot be considered her fault."

The crime of rape can carry the death penalty in Saudi Arabia.

So the US claims to be defending Western values, progress and secularism in Iraq—while backing a regime that carries out these sort of atrocities. Meanwhile, idiot-leftists in the US have no problem with the fact that the jihadist "insurgents" they cheer on in Iraq subscribe to precisely the same standards of sharia "justice"—and are, in fact, quietly backed by the Saudi regime.

We hate to say it, but among the only people who seem to have a consistent position on this question are the neocons—who would cut US ties to the Arab regimes generally. The fact that the victim in this case is a Shia is particularly telling. Washington's neocons would use Saudi Arabia's substantial and politically marginalized Shi'ite minority as cannon fodder in their hubristic schemes to actually break up the Kingdom—despite the fact that the Shi'ite Islamist leadership is no more progressive, and having played precisely this card has brought utter disaster to Iraq. So no, the neocons really don't have a consistent position on this...

That leaves the intelligent left, of which we hope we are a part—the left that actually has an analysis, and principles which it will not compromise—and therefore remains in intransigent opposition to both Islamism and imperialism.

There's still a few of us out here...

See our last post on the "girl from Qatif"