Saudi Arabia announced last week that they will finally lift their archaic ban on women drivers. Soon, women in that country will be able to get behind the wheel, just like they can in basically every other country.

There is one obvious reason why this dramatic and long overdue law change finally came about: because Niagara College has a campus in Saudi Arabia. That’s right, I’m laying this historic victory at the feet of our humble local college.

Let’s rewind for those not up to speed. A few years ago, Niagara College expanded into international territory, including a campus in Saudi Arabia. This created a bit of an uproar from some folks who said we should not be building a college in a place that has such an awful human rights record. Many pointed out that the campus, despite being operated by a Canadian institution, had to follow Saudi rules, meaning the college was segregated by gender.

There were calls for Niagara College to abandon its Saudi campus because of this, however, as I’ve written before, that would be a silly thing to do. Of course we all want Saudi Arabia to smarten up and give women the freedoms and rights they deserve. But demanding that we pull our educational institutions out of the country is not going to advance us toward that goal in any meaningful way. If the two options before us are, a) more education, or b) less education, the answer should always, always, always be: more education. There’s no scenario where ‘less education’ ever leads to a society bettering itself.

But not everyone agrees, and calls for Niagara College to exit Saudi Arabia have persisted. This malarky surfaced again a few weeks ago, when a very dumb and misleading story began making the rounds. You might have seen this headline or some variation on social media a few weeks ago: “Saudi teenager arrested for dancing.”

Sounds awful right? Even for Saudi Arabia, that was pretty harsh. No kid should be arrested for dancing.

And no kid was. The story about a kid getting arrested for dancing was manufactured to paint Saudi Arabia in a negative light by making it seem like this poor, innocent 14-year-old dude just wanted to dance, and was arrested by a brutal, dance-hating regime. In reality, this little doofus was dancing in the middle of a busy intersection while his buddy filmed the whole thing for some kind of stupid viral internet prank thing.

Pull the same stupid stunt in downtown Niagara Falls, and guess what, you’re gonna be arrested here also.

When this story was making the rounds, I saw people around here making snide remarks on social media about how Niagara College had clearly failed to change Saudi laws, essentially blaming them for this kid being arrested.

That’s an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. Change is coming to Saudi Arabia, but it won’t come overnight. To expect Niagara College to have single-handedly undone centuries of customs and culture in a few years, and to have westernized an entire country, is beyond stupid.