The sheikhdom strikes back

Saudi Arabia is getting panicky.

The oil sheikhs who run the totalitarian police state are sensitive to the way the American people are beginning to catch on to their repressive, duplicitous style.

A case in point is the way the largest Saudi newspaper, Asharqalawsat, went after American mother Pat Roush last week.

Roush's daughters, both American citizens, were kidnapped by their Saudi-born father 16 years ago and taken to the oil kingdom. Roush's attempts at seeing her daughters and getting them freed from the confines of Saudi Arabia to make their own choices have been thwarted – both in Riyadh and, for political reasons, in Washington.

In response to interest in Congress, which has scheduled hearings next month on American hostages in Saudi Arabia, the official newspaper viciously smeared Roush in a recent report.

The report contends Roush married Khalid Gheshayan in the 1970s and converted to Islam. The report claims, using unnamed family sources, that Roush had multiple abortions before the couple was married and that she "forced" Gheshayan to marry her.

"In fact, outside of a few minor details, the whole article is a lie," says Roush. "For the record I am not a Muslim, never practiced Islam and never converted to Islam. The question of Islam in this case is not an issue. Whatever religion I am (by the way I am a devout Catholic) is not what we are addressing here and now. What is important is my two daughters – their lives, their future and their freedom."

Roush rightly charges that the real issue is why American women are being held in Saudi Arabia in violation of their constitutional rights as American citizens.

Roush says Alia, now 23, has been sold to a relative in an arranged marriage and is now pregnant.

"She will be a brood mare for this man for the rest of her life," she says. "I want more for my little girls than that. I want my daughters to be free human beings – to walk as children of the light in a free country where they decide where they want to live, how they want to worship God and who they want to marry. I want my daughters to be able to love and live with freedom without a Saudi man as their prison guard."

While the Saudi newspaper claims the women want to remain in Saudi Arabia, Pat Roush just wants them to make that decision without coercion.

"Why don't you bring them to the United States and then ask them where they want to live and if they want to return to Saudi Arabia?" she said in a letter to the Saudi newspaper. "This is a free country. We allow our daughters to speak for themselves not through some man who owns them, controls them and threatens them."

One of the things that concerns the Saudis is that Pat Roush is raising the stakes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Saudi relations.

"I am fighting not only for their [her children's] freedom, but for a total change in policy between the United States and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia," she says. "No one should have to endure the pain and suffering that my daughters and I have gone through. I am fighting for freedom and justice."

It's funny, but with all the talk about "Mideast peace," there is precious little concern expressed for freedom and justice. These are values practically unknown in the Arab world.

Is it possible to achieve peace without freedom and justice?

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick made the point eloquently in the 1980s that free republics seldom attack one another. This is the great unspoken, but highly relevant point about the Mideast conflict.

The U.S. is using military force to dismantle what President Bush calls one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes the world has ever known in Afghanistan. That regime was sponsored by Saudi Arabia. That regime was a creation of Saudi Arabia. That regime was modeled after Saudi Arabia.

Yet, because of its oil power, Saudi Arabia is treated much differently by the United States. It is considered somehow a "moderating" influence in the Mideast. It is not.

The charade is over, and Pat Roush's plight is a perfect illustration of how the U.S. has kow-towed for too long to a regime that permits no religious freedom, keeps women in bondage and holds American citizens hostage.

Let the hearings begin.

Special resources:

Get "Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict"

"Trojan Horse" and "Israel and the War of Images"

"From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict"

"Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine"