"Slavery is a part of Islam"

Daniel Pipes noticed last week's arrest of a Saudi couple in Denver for keeping a slave. In a new FrontPage article, Pipes says it's business as usual for Saudis and mentions half a dozen similar instances involving Saudi diplomats and members of the royal family. They're the tip of the iceberg. Pipes links to a 2003 Joel Mowbray article documenting that Saudis in the U.S. are merely continuing the practices of their homeland (emphasis added):

More than 8 million of Saudi Arabia's 21 million residents are foreign nationals who work in largely menial or blue-collar positions. About 1 million work as domestics, such as gardeners and maids. The vast majority of the 400,000 maids are women from Asia, with most of them hailing from extremely poor countries. ...

Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, but it treats domestic servants in much the same way fugitive-slave laws treated blacks in pre-Civil War America. Saudi newspapers run bounty ads announcing the "escape" of domestics and requesting the help of fellow Saudis in the return of this "property." Women who do not find their way to government-run shelters-themselves viewed by human-rights experts as largely a PR ploy-face a harsh fate. Notes Amnesty International's Brian Evans: "Women who go to the police station seeking help actually get locked in jail until their employers come and pick them up."

Saudi "abolition" of slavery in 1962 was purely a PR move. The laws around the handling and transfer of slaves are still in place and govern what happens to the "escaped" servants discussed by Mowbray. Pipes notes that the radical Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia defend slavery:

... Although slavery was abolished in the kingdom in 1962, the practice still flourishes there. Ranking Saudi religious authorities endorse slavery; for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan insisted recently that “Slavery is a part of Islam” and whoever wants it abolished he called “an infidel.”

Pipes describes why Saudi slaveholders usually face little risk of punishment in the U.S.:

The U.S. State Department knows about the forced servitude in Saudi households and laws exist to combat this scourge but, as Mowbray argues, it “refuses to take measures to combat it.” Finally, Saudis know they can get away with nearly any misbehavior. Their embassy provides funds, letters of support, lawyers, retroactive diplomatic immunity, former U.S. ambassadors as troubleshooters, and even aircraft out of the country; it also keeps pesky witnesses away.

Given the U.S. government’s louche attitude toward the Saudis, slavery in Denver, Miami, Washington, Houston, Boston, and Orlando hardly comes as a surprise. Only when Washington more robustly represents American interests will Saudi behavior improve.

Back in April, when Crown Prince Abdullah was feted in Crawford, I expressed my disgust at our ongoing sucking up to the Saudis:

In between the schmoozing, the sucking up, and the US promises to make it easier for Saudis to come here (!), did anyone on our team think to express some freakin' OUTRAGE that these clowns are still sending Wahabbi Islamofascist literature to American mosques and teaching hatred of Christians and Jews in their madrassas?

At that time, my first concern was ongoing Saudi support for Islamofascists in this country. But the Islamofascist religious and political philosophy that completely controls Saudi Arabia and permeates -- no, constitutes -- its culture is an abomination in so many ways.

Daily Pundit has it about right:

Saudi Islam is a curse on the world. Its hold on the Saudi government needs to be destroyed. If we have to destroy the Saudi government in the process, that wouldn't bother me much, either.

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.