"…have married Saudi nationals who were sent to the United States to study in our colleges and universities. Once they accompanied their Saudi husbands back to Saudi Arabia, they soon found out that they lost all civil rights and became prisoners. Their children fall into that same category of slavery and are denied even the basic human rights."

Say what?

Despite the use of a highly charged word like "slavery," these women were not coerced into wedlock. The women, whose personal misjudgment Roush has turned into a cause celebre, were not gulled into romantic entanglements with Saudi men; they entered into the relationships willingly. Like most self-indulgent American females, they were probably just following their highest calling—their hormones.

Saudi Arabians are adherents of the strictest form of Islam, Wahhabism, which is as austere as the religion the Taliban practiced. When a woman takes up with a man, especially a Wahhabi Muslim, does she not investigate the type of belief system he espouses? What did these gals think he was doing each time he took out the prayer mat and faced Mecca? Yoga? Did these women not give a dried camel's hump when the men let loose with the odd hint about helping Christians, Jews, and non-Wahhabi Muslims on their journey to hell?

Want to tell me that until they had successfully 'lured' the women to Saudi Arabia, the Land of the Moderates, these Saudi men never revealed any of their founding beliefs? Or did their women simply choose to believe that they'd housetrain their pet Muslim extremist in no time? In the tradition of American insularity, the women Roush speaks for were probably convinced they would turn their Wahhabi paramours into sensitive Westerners, who share the housework, carry the newborn in a papoose, and dutifully grind away at the wife's G-spot at night, just like Cosmo Magazine instructs.

Put it this way, back in the days when these women were experimenting with an Arabian lifestyle, they'd have been far better off taking up with a Ba'athist moderate and emigrating to the secular, pro-woman, and booze-friendly Iraq than to Saudi Arabia. It doesn't get much worse than Saudi Arabia, where uttering a loud Hail Mary can get you in trouble with the authorities.

Prior to my own immigration odyssey, I informed myself somewhat about my new destination. Before they slunk off to live there, didn't the women now entombed in Saudi Arabia case the country? A trip to the library is all it takes to find out about the dismal status of women in Saudi society. Admittedly, I underestimated the degree of socialism in Canada, my first escape route from South Africa. And I certainly missed the mark in assessing the general anti-intellectualism and baseness of U.S. society, my second and last sanctuary. These, however, are small oversights when you consider that, sadly, and when all is said and done, there aren't any freer nation-states than these two.

I certainly think I would have noticed if the country I was headed to enforced a State religion, and had in tow an energetic religious police, or Mutawaa'in. In one incident, the Saudi Mutawaa'in caused the death by fire of a number of schoolgirls. The devout coppers refused to allow the girls to escape because their heads were immodestly uncovered (the fire, presumably, had incinerated their headgear).

A responsible woman doesn't tether the future of her tykes to such a place.

My now grown-up girl only just survived the perils of the public school system in Canada. Energetic parental vigilance and awareness were key. To detect the corrosive elements of the public school curriculum in North America, a mother has to take pains to educate herself. That's not necessary in Saudi Arabia. Plain for all to see in a Saudi ninth grader's readings is a tract entitled "The Victory of Muslims Over Jews." It's a hadif—a statement by the Prophet Mohammed—and it reads as follows:

"The last hour won't come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them so Jews would hide behind rocks and trees. Then the rocks and trees would call: oh Muslim, oh servant of God! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…"

The very 'pabulum' that nourished Bin Laden and other extremists before him is compulsory for all Saudi students. At least 35 percent of school studies there are devoted to this kind of religious education, something I sure would have noticed in my kid's curriculum.

Some things are facts of life: Saudi Arabia is a ruthless "medieval theocracy." It has been for a very long time. The U.S. government will rarely protect its citizens. There is no such thing as the Right Wahhabi Guy.

As sad and as hard for a mother to live with as it is, the truth is that wannabe Wahhabi western women who bind the future of their children to Wahhabi men are first and foremost responsible for what becomes of their children.

© 2003 By Ilana Mercer. Ilana is a columnist for WorldNetDaily.