Will anyone stand up for Saudi women?

The following is a brief opinion column from The Week magazine, my favorite news source. I thought it made a great point and made it exceedingly well in very few words.

If a foreign country sentenced a black man to be whipped 200 times for walking into a white neighborhood, said Anne Applebaum, the world would react with outrage. Europeans and Americans would rightly demand that the backward nation “be treated like apartheid-era South Africa,” and hit with severe sanctions.

But when a Saudi Arabian court recently sentenced a female rape victim to 200 lashes for “the crime” of being alone with a man in a car, the world grumbled and complained, and that was it. No sanctions, no boycotts, no mass protests.

Saudi Arabia, it’s worth remembering, is a country where “women still can’t vote, can’t drive, can’t leave the house without a male relative.” Why isn’t this an international issue? Clearly, Western nations feel comfortable condemning racism, but can’t wrap their heads around the reality that millions of women are still treated like chattel, to be whipped when they step out of line. Even Western feminists are so focused on their own complaints that they pay no attention to “the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.”

Isn’t it time someone stood up?

This little article is a condensed version of a longer article by Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. She obviously hasn't been reading the IBA, where people stand up all the time!