Saudi Arabia's infamous morality police abruptly shut down a dinosaur exhibit. Ordinary Saudis took to twitter and had the last laugh.
Some of the funniest tweets:LIKE much that moves in twitter-mad Saudi Arabia these days, it started with a single message. A lady in Dammam, the hub of the oil industry on the kingdom’s Gulf coast, tweeted a complaint from a local shopping mall. Agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, she said, were causing an unpleasant scene. The government-salaried vigilantes, a bearded auxiliary police force familiarly known to Saudis as the Hayaa, which is supposed to enforce public morality, had marched officiously into an educational exhibition featuring plaster models of dinosaurs, turned off the lights and ordered everyone out, frightening children and alarming parents.
It was unclear precisely why the religious police objected to the display, which had been featured at shopping centres across the Gulf for decades. Malls are one of the few public spaces where Saudis mix socially, and so often draw the Hayaa’s attentions. ...
- Maybe it is just a temporary measure until the Hayaa can separate male and female dinosaurs and put them in separate rooms.
- One of the female dinosaurs had been caught in public without a male guardian.
- I confess, I saw a naked dinosaur thigh and felt aroused.
- They worried that people would find the dinosaurs more highly evolved than themselves.
- Hello Stone Age: We have some of your people—can you please come and collect them?
(at The Economist)
