If we let our women wear burkas we will appreciate their modesty? Oh, so you LET your women wear them? We appreciate our women without enslaving them and treating them like cattle like your glorius culture does. If you want respect then earn it. You wouldn't know honor if it bit you on the nose. Start by showing respect for your women and your neighbors whoever they may be. Then it may be returned to you.

The problem with you and your culture is it's all about "honor" not right and wrong or human decency...i

Kay - in the way you are actually defending this culture, without a single word of reservation, I think you are a disgrace for women. While I acknowledge the importance of virginity in many cultures, the extreme zeal and terror by which this practice is maintained in Muslim countries today, is abhorrent. We wouldn't be mocking these people if they didn't terrorize women to fake their virginity, hang out their bloody sheets for all to see, kill those women who are not virgins, kill anyone who would sell this virginity-faking-device, while on the other hand, have no similar demands for the purity of men. Any culture that espouses such barbaric and chauvinistic medieval rituals and punishments in the 21st century, is a culture that DESERVES to be disrespected. BTW, we really don't need to read a plastic description of your defloration. Wahid, I have just one question for you: in Islam, is the virginity of MEN also a matter of honor? Are men also supposed to stay sexually pure before wedding? I will now quote what you said, reversing the genders: "every self-respecting Arab female must ensure that her husband is a virgin when she marries. Otherwise, her family honor will be at stake." Now how realistic is THAT... Yup. Chalk another one for those wonderful Muslim double-standards.

"copying from one source is plagiarism; copying from many is research." do you really have to rely on the bbc to vouch for the fact that "in some conservative arab societies there is a stigma about pre-marital sex"? is this in doubt or is the bbc more qualified than ynet in this area? is pre-marital sex accepted in israeli arab society, for instance? if you lift a story from the bbc, why not give them credit for it?