Cisco and Nokia want to assure you that the economic crunch won't prevent them from flooding Saudi Arabia with computers and cell phones. Which is interesting because many jihadists avoid Facebook lest their networks get infiltrated. And Saudi women who want to avail themselves of Faccebook - they face a slightly different problem:

A woman was beaten up and shot dead by her father for talking online with a man she met on the website Facebook. The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the "strife" the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation. It said the man shot his daugther after discovering she had been chatting online to a young man she had met on Facebook. ?Security sources assured Al-Arabiya.net that the father beat up his daughter and then shot her dead,? it said. A leading Saudi preacher told Al-Arabiya.net that Facebook was a "door to lust" for women and called for it to be blocked to prevent social "strife".

Which is kind of unfair since Saudi men get to use new communication technologies in a myriad of ways. It's not just that jihadists use tech to extend their assymetrical reach into the West. It's the small stuff. The real everyday stuff. A Saudi men who wants to cast off one of his wives and send her crawling to whatever male relative will take her in - that's the kind of thing that can get awkward. Unless he does it by cell phone:

Living in a high-tech world, many husbands have opted for new ways of divorcing their wives rather than confronting problems head on through discussion and dialogue. Jawhara, a divorcee, said that she received a message on her mobile phone from her husband that read, "Pack your things and go to your family before I return, you're divorced." Jawhara promptly telephoned her brother, asking him to pick her up. He, however, asked her to wait for her husband and ask him why he had divorced her. "I stayed and when he came he repeated what he said. I told him that I was off to my family and that he should keep his children," she said. Munira Asaad was faced with a similar situation when her husband asked her, through an SMS message, to take their children and leave home. "At first I thought it was a joke. But when he came home he hit me and asked me to leave.

At times like this I like to remember the sophisticated lessons of political Islam's Western apologists: Muslim repression is, at worst, no different than what used to happen in medieval Europe. Allowing men to easily and readily dissolve sanctified marriage bonds - that's how I remember Church-dominated Europe. Although: wasn't there something big that happened one time when the Pope refused to annul some guy's marriage? What was up with that?

References:
* Cisco Expo 2009 opens in Riyadh [ITP]
* Saudi Arabia welcomes the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic [Zawya]
* Why Osama Doesn't Have a Facebook Account [Wired]
* Facebook girl beaten and shot dead by her father for talking online [Daily Mail]
* Saudi Men Taking Advantage of Technology, Divorcing Wives via Text Message.... [Weasel Zippers]

Previously:
* Hey Gals, Check This Out - If You're In Egypt You Can Pretty Much Forget About Fighting Back When You're Assaulted
* Hey Gals, Check This Out - If You're A Young Egyptian Girl Your Dad Will Offer You To Pathetic Iraqi Shoe Throwers
* Hey Gals, Check This Out - If You're A Maid In Saudi Arabia, You Might Have To Be Tortured And Mutilated