On Point: Good taste wins one

Published November 21, 2006 at midnight

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So we have not hit bottom yet. American popular culture may be only a decade or two from reaching the depths once reserved for the Roman Colosseum, but for the moment we still have our standards. And those standards do not include giving O.J. Simpson a forum in which to exploit and mock the memory of two people he is widely believed to have killed.

"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," said Rupert Murdoch in announcing cancelation of the book If I Did It and the accompanying TV special.

Everyone has a favorite moment in this fiasco. My own came Friday when Simpson's publisher, Judith Regan (whose Regan Books is owned by Murdoch's News Corp.), notified the world that she in fact was a neglected victim in the story and that her behavior, squalid as it might appear to the uninformed, was an exercise in personal therapy.

As a victim herself of domestic violence, Regan was just seeking "closure" when she decided to assist Simpson. She wanted his "confession" (which of course he never made) for her "own selfish reasons."

"For me," she says, "it was personal."

If you are incurably old-fashioned, you expect someone under fire for complicity in one of the most notorious publishing decisions in years to choose one of two courses: Offer an apology - as Murdoch finally did Monday - or defend the action based upon some larger principle involving, say, the public interest or freedom of expression. Regan of course preferred a more modern justification: Why, her own mental health was at stake!

In the struggle between Regan's mental health and America's cultural health, somehow America won.

Colorado's roving emissary

If King Abdullah or Crown Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia were concerned about the quality of justice meted out to one of their subjects residing in Colorado, why didn't they just ask their ambassador to investigate?

Or why not set up a conference call with state and Arapahoe County prosecutors so Saudi royalty could hear the evidence against Homaidan Al-Turki, who was convicted and sentenced in June to 28 years for treating his family's nanny from Indonesia as a captive sex slave?

Did it really require a personal visit from state Attorney General John Suthers, who took a weeklong trip to the Saudi kingdom, to reassure his majesty and the crown prince that Al-Turki was not the victim of anti-Muslim bias?

Foreign nationals are convicted in Colorado courts on a regular basis. Surely Al-Turki's friends and relations are not the first to consider their loved one a victim of alleged American intolerance and bias. Shall we dispatch the AG on a lengthy mission to smooth ruffled feathers and justify our legal system every time these suspicions surface - or only when they involve a monarch presiding over one of the most reactionary autocracies on Earth?

No wonder they were shocked

To be fair to the Saudis, you can't really blame them for their shock at Al-Turki's sentence.

According to the State Department's annual report on human rights, it is common practice (although illegal) for employers in Saudi Arabia to confiscate the passports of their domestic workers, as Al-Turki did with his nanny.

Moreover, foreign embassies "receive many reports that employers abused foreign women working as domestic servants. Some embassies of countries with large domestic servant populations maintained safe houses to which their citizens may flee to escape work situations that included forced confinement, withholding of food, nonpayment of salaries, beating and other physical abuse, and rape."

And guess what? "It was almost impossible for foreign women to obtain redress in the courts due to the courts' strict evidentiary rules and the women and servants' own fears of reprisals."

So yes, it must have been a tremendous surprise to Al-Turki and his supporters abroad that he would end up serving hard time for his abuse of a servant. But those are the facts of life in the modern world, and the king shouldn't need the Colorado AG to explain them to him.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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