Starbucks mother flouted the law, say religious police in Saudi Arabia

A US businesswoman living in Saudi Arabia fears for her life after the religious police issued a rare statement defending her arrest this month for having coffee with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.

Yara, a 37-year-old married mother of three, said that she was strip-searched, forced to sign false confessions and told by a judge that she would “burn in hell”, before she was released on February 4.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice denounced her publicly with a statement posted on the internet on Monday night saying that her actions violated the Sharia of the country.

“It’s not allowed for any woman to travel alone and sit with a strange man and talk and laugh and drink coffee together like they are married,” it said.

“All of these are against the law and it’s clear it’s against the law. First, for a woman to work with men is against the law and against religion. Second, the family sections at coffee shops and restaurants are meant for families and close relatives,” it continued.

The commission contested the version of events from Yara, saying that she was never strip-searched or forced to sign confessions. It accused her of wearing make-up, not covering her hair and moving around suspiciously while sitting with her Syrian colleague, who was also arrested but later released.

In the surreal world of the islamist nation, what passes for "normal" is truly a manifestation of insanity.

You know, a point comes when a reasonable person has to acknowledge that the calendar reads 2008, not 1408. A reasonable person has also got to notice that the supposed "isolated incidents™ committed in the name of the backward death cult of islam and the retrograde, inhuman brutality carried out in Allah's name really aren't so isolated. The holy warriors who are responsible for these acts actually seem to be disturbingly ordinary in the context of their faith.

So few of us appear to be capable of noticing this simple phenomenon, let alone capable of expressing outrage over it.