Saudi slaveholder sentenced
Posted by Richard on September 1, 2006
Hooray! Colorado’s notorious Saudi slaveholder, whose arrest and conviction I blogged about, was sentenced Thursday:
CENTENNIAL (AP) – A man convicted of sexually assaulting an Indonesian housekeeper and keeping her as a virtual slave was sentenced Thursday to 28 years to life in prison.
Homaidan Al-Turki, 37, denied the charges and blamed anti-Muslim prejudice for the case against him. He said prosecutors persuaded the housekeeper to accuse him after they failed to build a case that he was a terrorist.
…Prosecutors and FBI agents said Al-Turki and his wife, Sarah Khonaizan, brought the woman to Colorado to care for their five children and to cook and clean for the family. An affidavit said she spent four years with the family in the suburban Aurora home, sleeping on a mattress on the basement floor and getting paid less than $2 a day.
Here’s the money quote from the story, though (emphasis added):
Al-Turki said he treated the woman the same way any observant Muslim family would treat a daughter.
"Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit," he told the judge.
"The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution," he said.
That was a rare moment of openess, revealing the ugly, barbaric truth behind the civilized facade of the Saudi brand of Islam. Women are chattel, and men treat them — use them — like cows or goats.
I’m going to repeat yet again what I said last year and this past July because it can’t be said often enough:
Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and radical Islam in general should be all the evidence anyone needs to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the leftist multicultural BS about no culture being better than any other. These people still defend and practice slavery, and we’re supposed to worry that making a jihadist uncomfortable might bring us down to their level??
Yes, we had slavery in this country. And our society is still paying the price today. But look at the historical context: Slavery existed and was accepted as normal in every human society throughout history — until the 18th century, when voices in the United States and Great Britain were raised against it. Those voices spoke of liberty and natural rights and free will, and they proclaimed slavery to be a moral outrage.
In a hundred years, those ideas and moral values had swept through the Western world and made people ashamed of a practice they’d accepted for thousands of years. Those ideas and values are part of — are fundamental to — Western culture. And, by damn, it IS morally superior to the barbaric 8th-century culture that still enslaves people, that declares women property, that flays people’s flesh for dancing, that imprisons Christians for praying in their homes, that saws people’s heads off with a dull knife for being Jewish.
No, it doesn’t bother me that interrogators at Gitmo may have failed to show sufficient respect for the beliefs of their jihadist captives. It bothers me that they haven’t expressed contempt for those barbarous beliefs.
A like-minded reader said
Contratulations to Colorado law enforcement for treating this man like the human garbage he most certainly is.