The Saudi slaveholder I wrote about just over a year ago was convicted in state court Friday:
ARAPAHOE COUNTY – Screams and sobs filled a packed courtroom Friday when a jury found a Saudi man guilty of keeping an Indonesian woman captive in his Aurora home and sexually abusing her.
"What did he do?" one of Homaidan Al-Turki’s daughters cried repeatedly as she was carried out of the courtroom over the shoulder of a male supporter of the defendant.
Al-Turki, 37, was convicted of 12 felony counts of unlawful sexual contact with use of force, one felony count of criminal extortion and one felony count of theft. He also was found guilty of two misdemeanors: false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit false imprisonment.
The original charges included rape and kidnapping, so the jury persuaded itself to reduce those for some reason. No matter. He faces from 96 years to multiple life sentences for these convictions. In October, he’ll face federal charges of forced labor, document servitude, and harboring an illegal immigrant that should net him another life sentence or two.
Al-Turki is a grad student at the University of Colorado and either works for (according to the news reports) or owns (according to Gates of Vienna and Militant Islam Monitor) a book publishing and translation company that specializes in books about Islam with an extremist Wahhabi perspective. According to Militant Islam Monitor, he also has ties to terrorist organizations and may be related to the Saudi royal family.
The fact that Al-Turki is a believer in the only faith I know of that still defends slavery apparently came up in the trial:
The defense also argued that prosecutors were engaged in "Islamaphobia" during the trial, putting emphasis on Al-Turki’s Muslim faith rather than on facts.
Friday, the courtroom was packed with Al-Turki’s supporters, many of them with the Colorado Muslim Society.
Ah, yes, the Colorado Muslim Society — it claims to represent "moderate Islam," and the local media buy into that claim, despite overwhelming evidence that it’s a Saudi-controlled, Wahhabi Sunni organization. I’m not surprised that its members were eager to demonstrate their support for their slave-owning friend. I wonder how many others in the organization keep an Indonesian "maid" imprisoned in the basement.
Coincidentally, an Egyptian couple just pled guilty to slavery charges in California. In my post last year, I quoted Daniel Pipes’ contention that slaveholding among Saudis in the U.S. is probably fairly common, is aggressively supported by the Saudi government, and is largely ignored by our own government. Let’s hope that these two cases signal a less craven U.S. government attitude and are just the beginning of serious efforts to put a stop to these bastards.
I’m going to repeat what I said last year because it can’t be said often enough:
Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and radical Islam in general should be all the evidence anyone needs to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the leftist multicultural BS about no culture being better than any other. These people still defend and practice slavery, and we’re supposed to worry that making a jihadist uncomfortable might bring us down to their level??
Yes, we had slavery in this country. And our society is still paying the price today. But look at the historical context: Slavery existed and was accepted as normal in every human society throughout history — until the 18th century, when voices in the United States and Great Britain were raised against it. Those voices spoke of liberty and natural rights and free will, and they proclaimed slavery to be a moral outrage.
In a hundred years, those ideas and moral values had swept through the Western world and made people ashamed of a practice they’d accepted for thousands of years. Those ideas and values are part of — are fundamental to — Western culture. And, by damn, it IS morally superior to the barbaric 8th-century culture that still enslaves people, that declares women property, that flays people’s flesh for dancing, that imprisons Christians for praying in their homes, that saws people’s heads off with a dull knife for being Jewish.
No, it doesn’t bother me that interrogators at Gitmo may have failed to show sufficient respect for the beliefs of their jihadist captives. It bothers me that they haven’t expressed contempt for those barbarous beliefs.
See also: Unspeakable evil
UPDATE: Al-Turki was sentenced on August 31.