ninme

The Times - Starbucks mother flouted the law, say religious police in Saudi Arabia

A US businesswoman living in Saudi Arabia fears for her life after the religious police issued a rare statement defending her arrest this month for having coffee with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.

Yara, a 37-year-old married mother of three, said that she was strip-searched, forced to sign false confessions and told by a judge that she would “burn in hell”, before she was released on February 4.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice denounced her publicly with a statement posted on the internet on Monday night saying that her actions violated the Sharia of the country.

“It’s not allowed for any woman to travel alone and sit with a strange man and talk and laugh and drink coffee together like they are married,” it said.

Yeah! It’s against the law! Only a whore would sit in a Starbucks with her colleagues while the power is our in her office because only a whore would have a job as a managing partner in a finance company!

So yeah, meanwhile, wouldn’t it be nice if Starbucks made a statement about this? Maybe something as small as “Starbucks Inc would like to reassure the Saudi authorities that their outlets are clean, well-lit, smoke-free locations with a welcoming ambience for all patrons, and where it is extremely unlikely that any western devil-woman will seduce unwitting males on the comfortable plush couches.”

ninme casts a disparaging eye south towards Starbucks headquarters

Original story here.