Lubna The Last Brave Arab: It's a Girl!
Sudanese female journalist Lubna Hussein is braving flogging (40 lashes), fine, and possible prison by refusing United Nations protection. She is facing charges of immorality for wearing pants (she would get similar charges in Saudi Arabia and a few other places). She has refused to avail herself of the protection accorded the staff of the UN for which she worked. To make that point clear she announced her resignation from her job with the United Nations. She insists on being tried as a Sudanese citizen.
Lubna said that she is not challenging anyone. She said "I am a citizen, and not above the law. But the law cannot be above the constitution.”
She was to be sentenced and flogged today, but the judge has announced that she will now be sentenced in August.
Often it is said that there is strength in numbers, but not in the Arab world: men quickly tuck their tails between their legs and abandon hope to the goons and thugs of the oligarchies. A brave woman from Africa has shown that one Arab can resist despotism to the point of inviting public flogging (she would get at least 40 lashes, which won’t leave much skin on her back).
Lubna’s brave defiant gesture shows that, in a compliant and subservient Arab world, the seeds of hope may be with the women. By defying a despotic regime and eschewing an available loophole she has unmanned Arab men. Her sentence will be like forty lashes for each Arab man in his most sensitive, most cherished, and most worried-about place (no, it is not the brain).
This must come as a shock to Arab men, the equivalent of a kick in the groin. Worse than having one’s regulation thick black mustache shaved off (for a moderate Arab man), worse than having the shaggy beard shaved off for a fundamentalist Salafi Arab man.
Cheers
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