Well, Alcyone, I do get the impression that these women (or the 16-year-old girl that was hanged) need to be saved and taken care of. But *not* the way the men in their countries are doing it.
Well, of course what they're doing is atrocious, Mellie. And we do need to find a way to help them. But as alcyone says, we can't appoint ourselves judge, jury and executioners of entire cultures and communities. Judging their social mores and customs without fully understanding how and why they came to be, finding them wanting against our own so-called universalist ideology and trying to readjust their way of life to fit ours would negate an entire history's worth of post-colonial moral and socio-economic lessons. We can't allow ourselves to become cultural imperialists, even for a good cause, because that would be a) racist and b) bring us down to the level of those very cultural extremists that we try to protect these people from.
