toledoblade.com --

STRAIGHT from the news pages, here’s a case of Middle Eastern justice that ought to be pondered by Americans as they fill up their cars with gasoline made from Saudi Arabian oil.

After being raped about 18 months ago, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 90 lashes for having been sitting in a car with an unrelated man when she was kidnapped and assaulted.

When the woman’s lawyer appealed and complained publicly about the severity of the sentence, the court increased the penalty to 200 lashes. And added six months in jail.

That’s right. Under the Saudi legal code, based on a strict version of Islamic law known as Wahhabism, female victims of crime are punished along with the real offenders, in this case a band of seven men.

This woman’s crime, although we are loathe to dignify use of that word, was meeting privately with a man who was not her husband or a family member.

Her lawyer’s offense was pointing out the injustice, which the court then turned against the victim by increasing her punishment.

We shouldn’t have to point out — but we will anyway — that the raw barbarism and misogyny represented in this case are abhorrent to and incompatible with virtually every precept of modern Western thought and ideals, especially when masquerading as a foundation for law that governs the everyday life of human beings.

The fact that the United States, which gets at least 15 percent of its oil from Saudi Arabia, indirectly subsidizes and perpetuates these cruel practices under the repressive Saudi government only makes them more repugnant.

The woman in question was 19 when she was raped, reportedly by a gang of men, who kidnapped her from a car where she was talking to a former boyfriend about return of some photographs.

She and the ex-boyfriend, who also was sexually assaulted, originally were sentenced to 90 lashes each, harsh even by the standards of Saudi courts, which legal sources say typically prescribe 60 to 80 lashes for adultery. But adultery was not alleged. As for the attackers, the New York Times reported that their sentences ranged from ten months to five years and 80 to 1,000 lashes. Their prison terms also were lengthened after the case went public.

Not surprisingly, further public comment on the case has been muted inside Saudi Arabia. The tribal kingdom does not pretend to be a democracy and the medieval treatment of women in its society is well known.

But we’d be remiss if we failed to point out that the leaders of a nation with a system of justice that countenances such cruel and unusual punishments should not be surprised when westerners categorize them as uncivilized and culturally backward.

The American people, meanwhile, are caught between distaste for anti-democratic governments abroad and their own nation’s shameful reliance on imported oil, much of it from the Middle East, for transportation.

Perhaps such policy failures would be more meaningful if motorists, the next time they fill up their gas tank, would envision a woman barely in her 20s facing 200 lashes for no crime at all.

That’s the way American petro-dollars are being put to work in some of the darker corners of the world.

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