British sipping their own medicine

I'd love to know if anyone else shares my conflicted feelings about the case of Marcus Fakana, the 18-year-old British youf on whose behalf crowds are now said by the Guardian to be protesting because he's been condemned to prison for a year in Dubai for holiday sex with a willing girl of 17. As so often, I cannot help feeling deeply sorry for Fakana, who certainly doesn't deserve this as an individual, while simultaneously feeling very differently about him as a Briton, when I remember that if the girl had been 15 instead of 17 and just as willing, the authorities in his country would be inflicting crueller, longer-lasting punishment on him, and most of his compatriots would be calling for the punishment to be harsher still. Instead of "Protesters march in London for release of teenage boy in Dubai jail", we would be reading "Public outrage over man given lenient sentence for paedophilia in Dubai." I find it a breathtaking example of the rigid self-righteousness and bigotry of the British who are so sure of the perfection of their laws that they think it's outrageous that another country should get away with having just slightly different ones. I have little doubt that in a few days or at most weeks, the emir of Dubai will pardon Fakana because, contrary to much anglo popular mythology, anglo bullies almost invariably get their way with governments they pretend not to regard as culturally and racially inferior. What is troubling my conscience though is that I realise deep down that his release will annoy me because if "the British" (and I suppose it must be admitted that the protesters may have little support*) are really in anguish over Fakana being in prison, that their anguish is richly deserved because of their own cruelty and hypocrisy on the same subject. And then of course it's very hard to escape that faint glimmer of hope that seeing cases like this, some intimation of their own inhumanity and injustice might somehow one day seep through the wall of their bigotry. [* The test that matters here is if the British government concludes that support is general enough for it to have to bully Dubai. I suspect they'll decide it is.] www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112 (https site) Protests about Dubai jailing [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst]