Tag: Saudi Arabia

Organ Donation: Should National Origin Matter?

I didn’t really follow the Jesica Santillan case very closely, and missed an interesting fact about Santillan — she was apparently in the United States illegally. According to a number of reports, her mother smuggled her into the country hoping that she would receive better care in the United States than in Mexico.

Doing a Google search on Santillan turns up a number of opinions on this state of affairs. There’s the hardcore anti-immigrant folks who think Santillan’s case is a tragedy because it will just encourage more people from Mexico to take the often dangerous step of illegally crossing the border. There’s also plenty of sentiment that it doesn’t matter — here’s a young woman who needed a transplant, and her nationality be damned.

Of course Santillan is a very sympathetic figure. In the 1980s, there was less sympathy for a number of wealthy foreign nationals — including the wife of a prominent Saudi Arabian diplomat — who came to the United States for organ transplants.

In response United Network for Organ Sharing decreed that transplant centers must limit to 5 percent the number of transplants they do for foreign nationals. In 2002, 936 of the 22,709 organ transplants operations in the United States were performed on foreign nationals.

One of the major problems with this system us that UNOS appears to have no serious guidelines for deciding when an organ should go to a foreign national over a U.S. citizen. The American Society of Transplant Surgeons proposed giving U.S. citizens first shot at any organs, with foreign nationals qualifying only if there were no citizens who could take the organ (and, to be fair, something like that appears to have happened in the Santillan case), but UNOS appears to have never formally adopted that guideline, leaving such decisions up to whatever policies transplant centers themselves want to formulate.

Sources:

Immigration, organ issues mix: Medical community faces quandary of who is most deserving recipient. Scott Dodd, Charlotte Observer, February 21, 2003.

Saudi Arabia Confiscates Risque Abayas

The BBC reported earlier his month that religious police and commerce officials in Saudi Arabia were cracking down on what they thought were risque abayas.

The abaya, of course, is a head to toe black cloth government that women are required by law to wear in Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Saudi Arabia confiscated 82,000 abayas on the grounds that they were indecent because they contained decorations or they were not thick enough. According to an Arab News report,

The confiscated cloaks were found to be revealing, tight and carried drawings and decorations in violation of a fatwa, or religious ruling, which requires that “decent women?s cloaks” should also be thick and open from the front only.

These abayas are reportedly becoming popular with women in urban areas of Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness that country has a Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to prevent women from wearing loose fitting black head to toe garments.

Sources:

82,000 ?indecent? abayas seized from major cities. Arab News, May 6, 2002.

Saudi Arabia bans ‘indecent’ cloaks. The BBC, May 5, 2002.

Saudi Arabia Defends Torture

The New York Times reported this weekend that Saudi Arabian delegates were not at all happy when the United Nations Committee Against Torture pointed out that its legal system is in direct violation of the 1987 Convention Against Torture.

Specifically, the United Nations committee pointed out that flogging and the amputation of limbs are outlawed by that treat. Saudi Arabia, of course, continues to actively engage in both of these practices and Saudi Arabian diplomat Turki al-Madi defended his country’s legal system by saying,

This law has existed for 1,400 years. And the committee wants to change it. I’m sorry, you cannot.

Is there any more succinct expression of what separates Western and Arab governments and cultures? It is a shame that a fundamental misunderstanding of oil has led to such a close relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

By the way, the amputations are punishment for theft, whereas flogging is generally applied to those who drink alcohol or commit sexual transgressions (such as adultery or premarital sex).

Source:

Fair Penalties Or Torture? U.N. at Odds With Saudis Elizabeth Olson, New York Times, May 18, 2002.

Saudi Troops Massing? Puhleeze.

Via Instapundit comes the funniest headline of the week courtesy of Yahoo!, News,

Saudi troops mass on border with Jordan following reports of Israeli military buildup

Of course, this is not your father’s massing of troops. According to the report,

The eight brigades, compromising 8,000 soldiers equipped with armored personnel carriers and missile launchers, moved into the Tabuk region in northern Saudi Arabia, the officials said.

What are they going to do, committ mass suicide in protest if the Israelis provoke them? The last time I checked Israel has an army consisting of about 200,000 regular troops as well as 400,000 people who have had military training and can be called up very quickly. And, of course, equipped with all the latest military gear that the United States can sell them. If Israel wanted to it could once again route all of the Arab states in a shooting war. The Saudi buildup is simply that country’s version of a maneuver my cats love whereby they try to make themselves look bigger and meaner than they really are hoping it will deter potential threats. Of course Saudi Arabia’s biggest threat is Islamic extremism from within (which it actively promotes).

Saudi Arabia: Write a Poem, Go to Jail

Saudia Arabian authorities have arrested poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired an editor at a state-run newspaper over a poem that Musalam wrote complaining about judicial corruption in Saudi Arabia.

The BBC presented a partial English prose translation of the poem,

It is sad that in the Muslim world, justice is suffering from a few judges who care for nothing but their bank accounts and their status with the rulers. Your beards are smeared with blood. You indulge a thousand tyrants and only the tyrant do you obey.

Real incendiary stuff there, eh?

Apparently what disturbed the Saudis more than anything was that sales of the newspaper skyrocketed after the poem was published. Wouldn’t want people getting the idea that the Saudi Arabian government is a corrupt monarchy, now would they?

Source:

Saudi author arrested over poem. The BBC, March 20, 2002.

Saudi Arabia’s Religious Police Allegedly Contribute to Death of 15 Girls

On Monday, March 11, 2002, a fire destroyed a school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 15 girls — most of whom were crushed to death in a panic to exit the building. But rescue efforts at the fire were hampered when members of Saudi Arabia’ religious police — the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — refused to allow either girls to leave the building or firefighters to enter the building. The reason? The girls were not wearing their traditional head scarves or black robes.

The English-language Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that a member of the COmmission told men trying to enter the building to try to save the girls that, “it is sinful to approach them” because they were not wearing the required garb.

Meanwhile, a civil defense officer told Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Eqtisadiah that he saw members of the Commission “being young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya . . . We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behavior. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the [school’s] gates.”

The official response from the Saudi Arabian government has been to claim that the people blocking access to the school were not really members of the Commission. In an article in the Saudi English-language newspaper Arab News, the Civil Defense Department now claims that it has information “which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah girls? school were really members of the organization.”

As the Wall Street Journal put it, this claim smacks of a bad cover-up, but either way this is exactly the sort of attitude toward women and girls that Saudi Arabia’s leaders have long promoted with their funding and promotion of Islamic extremism.

Source:

Were commission members at fire tragedy impostors? Khaled Al-Fadly & Saeed Al-Abyad, Arab News, March 17, 2002.

Saudi police face deaths criticism. Reuters, March 14, 2002.