Everybody has by now seen the scandal that IKEA created by removing women from its catalog in Saudi Arabia. At home, things are very different, as my most viewed posting exemplifies. But the Swedish company IKEA didn't really apply Swedish (and, really, universal) standards of treating humans equally. They decided, for profit reasons obviously, that they should comply with the anachronistic, offensive, stupid, fascist, oppressive rule of a theocratic state, Saudi Arabia, namely, that women are second-rate beings (for religious reasons--don't forget) and remove them from their catalogs:
The question then is this: If we have democracy at home, and certain consequences of it, do we forget it when we go abroad in order to be "nice" to (or make profit in) a dictatorial theocratic regime?
Answer: no, we should not.
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