Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Top Middle East Ally!

"A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her." Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, grand mufti (interpreter of Islamic law) for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Which is good, as every good Wahhabi Muslim knows that prepubescent daughters are extremely valuable to fathers that may owe large sums of money to "a close friend". Of course, said "close friends" should abstain from sex with their "wives" until they* hit puberty -- at which point the wife can ask for a divorce.

Sarcasm doesn't even begin to cover the bubbling rage I feel when I read stories like this. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda, funding suicide bombers across the Middle East (outside the kingdom, of course), and the designated government interpreter of Islamic law okaying fathers selling 7-year-old daughters to over-40 pals to cover gambling debts -- GFY, Saudi Arabia. G. F. Y.

I'm off to sleep before I lose my voice from all this cursing under my breath. Thank God the US government hasn't been propping up the ruling regime for the last 70 years or so. They definitely would never do anything like that**.

* The wives
** Except for in extreme cases, like Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, ok, fine, everywhere except Canada and the countries that the CIA was never able to infiltrate.