Be Careful When You Report Rape In Dubai Or You May End Up 16 months in Jail
Dubai
A court in Dubai has sentenced a young Norwegian woman, Marte Deborah Dalelv, to 16 months in jail after she brought charges of rape against a colleague.
Dismissing her allegations, the court instead found her guilty of drinking alcohol and wanting the sex that she alleged was forced upon her. Meanwhile she was fired by her Qatar-born employer, the interior designer Wissam al Mana, who is otherwise known as Janet Jackson’s latest husband.
The circumstances are complicated but, could she be a victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice? Could it also possible that she got herself drunk and consented to sex as being drunk after all will invariably lead to all sort of immoral behavior as the local judges and juries perceived it?
Janet Jackson with new husband Wissam al Mana: he fired alleged rape victim Marte Deborah Dalelv.
Why would the 'victim' of a terrible crime receive a jail sentence?
Understand that Asia is not America, let alone Norway. To a Westener watching the world from a vantage point in East Asia, the episode illustrates in microcosm a troubling fact: globalism is a one-word oxymoron. It has never made sense and probably never will. Cultures are different and, in their attitude to truth and human rights, the many brands of Asian culture are particularly remote from Western expectations.
Certainly, all American wishful thinking to the contrary, the world is NOT converging to American values. Yes, of course, more and more consumers around the world are drinking Coca-Cola and eating Big Macs. But this is a superficial observation that says nothing about any values worth the name.
Of course, Dubai, which is the most populous constituent of the United Arab Emirates, seems on a superficial view to be highly Westernized. A more accurate description is that Dubai is highly economically advanced. It is home, for instance, to major regional operations of such U.S. corporations as Hewlett-Packard EMC, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. It also boasts the world’s tallest building, the 163-floor Burj Khalifa. Meanwhile the Emirates airline, which is based in Dubai, counts, on some measures, not only as the world’s largest international carrier but the world’s best (it was so designated a few months ago by the British consultancy, Skytrax).
But Dubai’s official religion is Islam — and Islam forbid the exposure of a woman's skin other than her face and hands. Alcohol is 'haram' - forbidden, so is being alone with the opposite sex. This means that Westerners are tolerated only under sufferance. Western women in particular are not always welcome especially when many blatantly ran around in skimpy bikinis on the beaches. This despite the fact that Dubai features one of the most disturbingly imbalanced male-female ratios in world history: in the overall population, males outnumber females more than three to one. The ratio for adults is probably even more imbalanced.
Foreign prostitutes, particularly Russian and Indian ones, seem to be welcome. The status of ordinary decent local women in Dubai is powerfully symbolized by the fact that wives when found guilty of deceiving her husband can be beaten initially with a symbolic soft cloth and much later with 'impunity' if she persists with her deceit so long as no marks are left.
Justice in an American sense does not apply in Dubai. Marte Deborah Dalelv’s fate is that she has been indicted on a crime – drinking alcohol and having sex with a man other than her husband – that is widely tolerated though abhorred among other foreign residents of Dubai.
The larger point here is that Eastern and Western cultures are in many ways incompatible. Rudyard Kipling made the point more than a century ago: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
Probabaly, on appeal, Marte Deborah Dalelv will be shown some leniency.
Asian legal systems for the most operate quite differently from anything Americans are used to and that can lead to unpleasant surprises.
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