NO WOMAN, NO DRIVE

[Note by Tom Gross]

Yesterday, according to Saudi activists, an estimated 25-30 brave Saudi women risked harsh punishment by driving a car, in an extraordinary display of civil disobedience in the dictatorial kingdom.

I attach four videos on the subject below.

The first is a satirical song by a Saudi man and his male friends poking fun at the country’s driving ban on females – itself a courageous act given the kind of punishments used by the Saudi authorities for those who step out of line.

This song – based on the Bob Marley classic “No woman, No cry” – was only uploaded to the Internet yesterday and has already been watched on YouTube more than 1.5 million times:

The lyrics in the song about “ovaries” and “making lots of babies in the back seat” are a reference to this item in a dispatch three weeks ago here:

* Driving will affect your ovaries and pelvis, Saudi sheikh warns women ahead of calls to defy the despotic kingdom’s female driving ban with a mass female drive-in on October 26.

The second and third videos are from BBC and CNN reporting on the brave women who drove cars yesterday – and allowed themselves to be filmed doing so.

Authorities stopped five women who were spotted driving in the Saudi capital and “each case was dealt with accordingly,” Col. Fawaz Al-Meeman of Riyadh said.

And here is TED talk by Manal al-Sharif: A Saudi woman who dared to drive.

Her sons were assaulted at school for he daring act of driving:

Al-Sharif, who now lives in the United Arab Emirates, was one of those spearheading the driving campaign yesterday.

Saudi Arabia is poised to win a seat on the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council in elections to be held on November 12th.

To learn more about the anti-human rights work of the UN Human Rights Council – which we are all funding with our taxes – please see my articles here:

* If the UN had integrity.

* The speakers were never meant to live and tell their stories.

* There is another dispatch today, which you can read here: Senior Middle East writer for The Guardian attacks Robert Fisk’s “comedy of errors”.