Detained for Driving? On-Air Justification of Rape? The Middle East Strikes Again!

The Middle East, as a region, is no stranger to breaches on women’s rights. We witness such violations so frequently that our judgement has been desensitized, with many simply shrugging off these truly despicable acts and beliefs.

Saudi Arabia has – despite us being in the 21st century and having the whole world recognize that women are, in fact, human beings who do have every single right to freely commute in the vehicle of their choice – held on tight to its law banning women from driving.

Last month, two Saudi women, Loujain Al-Hathloul, 25, and Maysa al-Amoudi, 33, were detained and had their passports confiscated for attempting to drive through the UAE-Saudi Arabia borders; they have now been imprisoned for 50 days, awaiting trial.

Both women are activists who support the Saudi Women Driving campaign and had attempted to drive into their home country in demonstration against the aforementioned law.

Al-Hatoul filmed herself on the way to the border, stating her objective. The video now has over one million views on YouTube.

On another equally devastating note, last Friday, Egyptian news anchor Amany El-Khayat went on air on Al Kahera Wal Nas, a privately-owned channel, commenting on the rape charges held against two Egyptian policemen.

The despicable crime took place on Dec. 21, during which two policemen raped a woman in a patrol car in Cairo’s Shubra area. The detained policemen were released in exchange for a bail of 1,000 LE on Jan. 10.

El-Khayat took to the screen to voice her appalling opinion on her show 30/6, stating, “Is rape not carried out by the police sector? Of course it is. It takes places in so many institutions and sectors. It is natural… This is a society of 90 million.”

She continued to calim that the Egyptian Ministry of Interior is being “targeted” and that these policemen were “being used” and that “their social needs were being taken advantage of” in some ploy she seems to have imagined due to the lack of any concrete, empirical evidence proving the existence of said scheme.

Allow me to entertain El-Khayat’s viewpoint for a minute and ponder over her supposed “theory”. The fact that this whole incident was, as El-Khayat believes, staged by some unknown party does not, in any way, magically take away the blame from the offenders nor does it lessen the depravity of the crime.

Moreover, the fact that the Egyptian population is a massive 90 million does not, in any way, make rape “natural”; El-Khayat has no right to collectively insult a whole country’s morals by making up an unproven correlation between the size of its population and the normality of rape.

Let us not sit here and attempt to justify an unjustifiable act in order to show our support or loyalty to a certain institution or regime. Let us, for once, call a spade a spade and tell it like it is without attempting to justify atrocities with conspiracy theories.

It truly is heart-wrenching to witness the current ideologies thriving within the Middle East. Two women who have admittedly broken a law, yet have harmed no one in the process, are currently behind bars, while two men who have committed an unspeakable crime violating the physical, emotional and psychological well-being of the victim are freely roaming around.

To add insult to injury, a media figure who has her fair share of viewers has outspokenly justified said crime, vicariously letting go of any grain of her humanity, in a clear attempt to highlight her political allegiance. We are at loss for words.

WE SAID THIS: Don’t miss Sexual Assault at Cairo University and Victim Blaming in Egypt.