Spring Break
A World Tour Of The Kafkaesque
Bryan Murphy
Issue date: 11/30/07 Section: Commentary
Having conducted an anti-thorough and thoroughly unprofessional review of the happenings of the world in the last few weeks, it seems fair to say that recent times haven't been the best of times for common sense and sanity. An amateur would conclude that there's nothing quite so sensible that it can't be contorted into terrible nonsense, provided one has enough idle man-hours and bureaucratic man-power to do so.
Consider this week's column something of a World Tour of the Kafkaesque. Let's begin our journey in the small, yet influential emirate of Dubai. Dubai is famous for its glittering, cosmopolitan skyline, its lenient free-trade laws, its booming tourist economy and, increasingly, its unjust prosecution of homosexual rape.
The ball got rolling when Alexandre Robert, a 15-year-old Frenchmen, took a summer vacation to Dubai. Alexandre was walking in the scorching July sun of the small desert state when an acquaintance of his rolled up in a car and offered a ride. Sweltering, Robert accepted.
Not fated to receive the sort of ride he'd imagined, Robert was instead taken to a deserted patch of desert, threatened with a knife and club and forcibly sodomized by his acquaintance and two other Emirati men.
Robert turned to the authorities for help, but, unfortunately for him, Dubai isn't a great fan of homosexuality; in fact, there is no law against male rape in the emirate, but only the charge of "forced homosexuality" - a charge which, the police threatened, could be applied to Robert himself if he were to speak up.
Robert spoke up and perhaps coincidentally was not informed until two months after the attack that one of his rapists was HIV-positive. The lawyer defending the rapists testified in court that, "[Robert's] symptoms prove that he suffers from a disease which makes him ask others to have sex with him ... he has become an addict to submissive sex. Therefore, he couldn't have been forced to have sex with the suspects." Dubai's handling of this case of homosexual rape dovetails nicely with the case of heterosexual rape in Saudi Arabia, our good friend and woman-hating ally, where an 18-year-old female victim was sentenced to 200 lashes.
Consider this week's column something of a World Tour of the Kafkaesque. Let's begin our journey in the small, yet influential emirate of Dubai. Dubai is famous for its glittering, cosmopolitan skyline, its lenient free-trade laws, its booming tourist economy and, increasingly, its unjust prosecution of homosexual rape.
The ball got rolling when Alexandre Robert, a 15-year-old Frenchmen, took a summer vacation to Dubai. Alexandre was walking in the scorching July sun of the small desert state when an acquaintance of his rolled up in a car and offered a ride. Sweltering, Robert accepted.
Not fated to receive the sort of ride he'd imagined, Robert was instead taken to a deserted patch of desert, threatened with a knife and club and forcibly sodomized by his acquaintance and two other Emirati men.
Robert turned to the authorities for help, but, unfortunately for him, Dubai isn't a great fan of homosexuality; in fact, there is no law against male rape in the emirate, but only the charge of "forced homosexuality" - a charge which, the police threatened, could be applied to Robert himself if he were to speak up.
Robert spoke up and perhaps coincidentally was not informed until two months after the attack that one of his rapists was HIV-positive. The lawyer defending the rapists testified in court that, "[Robert's] symptoms prove that he suffers from a disease which makes him ask others to have sex with him ... he has become an addict to submissive sex. Therefore, he couldn't have been forced to have sex with the suspects." Dubai's handling of this case of homosexual rape dovetails nicely with the case of heterosexual rape in Saudi Arabia, our good friend and woman-hating ally, where an 18-year-old female victim was sentenced to 200 lashes.
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Kim O'Brien
posted 11/30/07 @ 3:07 PM EST
One thing you won't here from Hillary, Huckabee, Obama, Thompson, and McCain is "Regime Change" for Saudi Arabia and Dubai. These repressive regimes receive massive US military assistance serve to hold back the multitude of disposed immigrant workers and their own people from the oil wealth these areas possess. (Continued…)
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