The woes of a British publisher who was jailed in Dubai for "unlawful conjugal relations" (i.e., with someone she’s not married to) in public makes me think of the obvious: what if someone was jailed for this in a "Christian" country with a lot less money (and that’s most of them these days, compared to Dubai.)

In my novel The Ten Weeks, just such a situation in a very Christian country is presented to two teenagers.  I’m confident that, given the hard time this woman is facing, she would gladly take what either of the teenagers took in the novel, which (in one case) was brutal enough.

It used to be that conjugal relations outside of marriage were unlawful in our sociey, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.  So why do our dogmatically tolerant Western societies flinch from the usual assault on Third World things they don’t like, i.e., U.N. sanctions, a diplomatic blitz, media whine, military intervention, etc.?

To start with, the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is a part) is a very wealthy country, buying up Western assets, especially dollar denominated ones, with the flood of petrodollars that are coming in with current oil prices.  At that elevated wealth level, money not only talks, it yells.

Beyond that, our elites have a strange blind spot for Muslim moral enforcement, especially in the U.K., as Melanie Phillips reminds us of.

Between the two, this woman will have to do what everyone else does when in trouble abroad: get a good lawyer and hope for the best.