Winning The War On Terror

Here is why we ultimately will prevail in the war on terror, from the Jerusalem Post:

A Saudi Arabian female journalist whose battered face publicized the problem of domestic abuse left her country hiding in a truck last weekend across the border to Bahrain, according to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Rania al-Baz, 29, the Saudi TV presenter who was comatose in a hospital for days last year after being brutally beaten by her husband, was prevented by Saudi authorities from flying to Paris, where she planned to participate in a conference on women's rights and to promote her book, Defiguree, her publicist, Margaux Ferro of Michel Lafon Publishing, told The Jerusalem Post. ...

Baz, who was an announcer with Saudi Television's Channel 1, raised the issue of domestic abuse in her country after she agreed from her hospital bed in April 2004 to allow photos of her swollen black-and-blue face to be published. Never before had the issue been publicly raised in the Saudi Kingdom, which keeps its problems in private.

"I want to use what happened to me to draw attention to the plight of abused women in Saudi Arabia," she told Arab News after surgery to repair one of 13 fractures to her face.

But some Saudis lashed out at her appearance, saying she presented her country and Arabs in general in a bad light for showcasing the issue of domestic abuse.

Arab nations' supression of women deprives them of one-third of their potential productivity (one-third of the population is too young or too old to add to productivity), putting them at a hopeless disadvantage against Western nations.

And, no religion, no society, can suppress a significant part of its population in this era without it causing upheaval. If Arab states choose to tie repression and mistreatment of women to Islam, then the protest will be against Islam. If they tie it to Arab social norms, it will be against Arab social norms. In either case -- and I prefer that it be the former -- it will come.