Mick Hartley

45 years in prison for opposing the regime on social media

There's so much going on elsewhere that we forget about Saudi Arabia. Isn't it slowly liberalising, or something? Well no....no it isn't:

Saudi Arabia has handed down its harshest ever sentence to a women’s rights activist, sentencing her to 45 years in prison for opposing the regime on social media.

Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was convicted in the Specialised Criminal Court for “using the internet to tear the social fabric” and “violating the public order by using social media”, according to a court document received by rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn).

Little is known about Qahtani or the accusations but it comes a fortnight after Salma al-Shehab, a University of Leeds doctoral student, was sent to prison for 34 years in what was believed to be the harshest such sentence in the kingdom.

Reports of the sentence also emerged on the same day a video was released on social media showing security forces beating women, shocking them with tasers and dragging them by their hair during a reported hunger strike over poor conditions at an orphanage in Khamis Mushai, in the southwest of the country....

Last year US intelligence agencies concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation that led to the murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. President Biden promised to make the kingdom a “pariah state” but apparently reversed that policy by visiting the crown prince in July, giving him a fist bump.

We need the oil.

Abdullah Alaoudh, Dawn’s director of research for the Gulf, said Qahtani’s sentence showed “how emboldened Saudi authorities feel to punish even the mildest criticism from its citizens”.

Shehab’s conviction included retweeting and following Saudi dissidents and human rights activists on Twitter.

This year Riyadh carried out a mass execution of 81 prisoners — many of them rights activists — for what it described as terror-related offences, despite promises to curtail its use of the death penalty....

Alaoudh said: “In both the al-Shebab and al-Qahtani cases, Saudi authorities have used abusive laws to target and punish Saudi citizens for criticising the government on Twitter, but this is only half the story because even the crown prince would not allow such vindictive and excessive sentences if he felt that these actions would be met by meaningful censor by the United States and other western governments. Clearly, they are not.”

At work in Oregon

Russell Lee, 1942;

July 1942. "Grant County, Oregon. Malheur National Forest. Greasing a logging truck."

July 1942. "Oakridge, Oregon. Population 520. Town telephone switchboard."

July 1942. "Grant County, Oregon. Malheur National Forest. Lumberjack on truckload of logs."
[Photos: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration]

Not considered citizens

The good news: North Korea’s political prison camp population has fallen by around 20,000 compared to last year. The bad news: it's because so many are dying.

The population of North Korea’s political prison camps has decreased by around 20,000 compared to July of last year, Daily NK has learned. 

According to a source in the country last Friday, the fall in the prison population is due to deaths caused by disease and other causes outstripping the number of new arrivals to the camps. 

According to the source, no quarantine or medical supplies or services were provided to Camp 14, 17 or 18 in the first half of the year, causing deaths to spike.

“Even new arrivals are dying, with waterborne diseases on top of cases of COVID-19-related fevers,” he said.

As prisoners at political prison camps are not considered citizens, the authorities show no concern at all for their health....

In particular, aside from deaths from healthcare-related problems, a significant number of prisoners also died from accidents due to the camps’ terrible labor conditions, as well as torture.

Diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria

Lisa Selin Davis at UnHerd on the unquestioning gender affirmation approach in the US:

Several parents I spoke to for this article told me their children were initially hospitalised for suicidal ideation, anorexia, and other mental health conditions. Once admitted, however, the children were diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria and encouraged to transition, often against their parents’ wishes. Their other mental health issues were then largely ignored....

In effect, the mental health profession has performed a U-turn. Whereas it was once understood that complex comorbidities such as depression, anxiety, or eating disorders might be the source of adolescent gender dysphoria, today, American doctors increasingly see it……. as the cause of all other comorbidities. Treat the dysphoria, the thinking goes, and the other conditions melt away.

A woman I’ll call Daria had entered her 17-year-old son into a psychiatric hospital treatment program for anorexia. Forty-eight hours later, while he was still on a feeding tube, a counsellor called to ask about her son’s gender issues. He’d never had any, Daria responded.

A week later, still barely eating, he was transferred to a residential programme. A counsellor there called Daria to say her son was actually her daughter and should start on oestrogen. Daria was sceptical, but the clinicians told her: “We have to address the gender or the anorexia just may never go away.”...

Eventually, Daria found a private psychiatrist, who urged the staff at her son’s residential mental health facility not to engage with anything gender related. Only then, Daria reported, did her son start to eat.

More grim stories where that came from. Let's hope some serious lawsuits will help to rid these doctors of their gender obsession. It's a medical disaster zone.

The racist anti-racist

On Canada's wonderful anti-racism programme. Terry Glavin:

I really don’t know how to describe this accurately and succinctly without making it sound fantastical. It’s two things in one go.

It’s “Diversity and Inclusion” Minister Ahmed Hussen’s Heritage Canada using its “anti-racist program” funds to pay a drooling Jew hater (who appears to loathe the Kurds and also calls Quebeckers low-IQ “frogs”) to lead diversity sensitivity training sessions for the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission. That much has now been reported. The Global News version: “Feds taking action over ‘disturbing’ tweets by anti-racism project consultant.” Well, isn’t that good of the feds.

But it’s also a story about Heritage Canada requiring federal broadcast regulators to take instructions about inclusiveness from a crank who’s a regular on the Khomeinist regime’s Press TV and the Kremlin’s RT & Sputnik propaganda platforms. He also does duty as a megaphone for Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad and frequently collaborates with the notorious Eva Bartlett in that vast “far-left” global network of pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad disinformation operations.

It’s all the same story. It’s all the same guy. His name is Laith Marouf. Here’s his rap sheet on the Documentation Project run by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Here’s a little gallery of his racist obscenities on Twitter....

The specifics of the hubbub involve Marouf’s role as a key beneficiary of a $133,822 Anti-Racist Action Program grant from Hussen’s Heritage department to the “Community Media Advocacy Centre,” where Marouf is ensconced as its senior consultant. CMAC was awarded the contract to build “an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting,” if you don’t mind.

Marouf’s vileness came to public notice last week on Twitter, which is where news increasingly breaks these days. It appears to have been the polymathic journalist, disc golfer and all-round brainiac Jonathan Kay who kicked everything off on August 12 by drawing attention to Marouf’s rancid Twitter output. For instance: "You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters."

And here is Jonathan Kay, at Quillette - How an antisemitic bigot named Laith Marouf built a lucrative career as a Canadian government-funded ‘anti-racist’

There are few politicians who’ve embraced the anti-racism movement more fervently than Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With great fanfare, his government has launched multiple programs intended to eradicate the “racism, discrimination, and xenophobia” that Trudeau describes as being a major contaminant within Canadian society. Alas, it has now been revealed that a major beneficiary of this Liberal anti-racism largesse is one of Canada’s most outspoken bigots, whose company was promised C$130,000 (about US$107,000) in public funds to mount a six-city national tour aimed at “building an anti-racism strategy” within the Canadian broadcasting industry. And the resulting scandal has become international news.

The bigot in question is Laith Marouf, a fanatical Palestinian-rights activist and one-time campus firebrand whose activities I’ve been following, on and off, for two decades—beginning with his 2001 expulsion from Concordia University in Montreal. Marouf had attacked a campus security guard who’d been trying to help apprehend him for spray-painting anti-Israeli graffiti on a local building. Yet he was able to get the expulsion overturned, and even held on to his gig as VP Internal with the Concordia Student Union (CSU) executive, whose membership was then largely intertwined with a militant student group known as Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (of which Marouf would become Chapter Coordinator)....

In an era when people can get fired for clicking the like button on a problematic social-media post or using the wrong pronoun, this out-and-proud hatemonger has—until just days ago—maintained his entree with Canadian broadcast regulators, even while tweeting that “there are none on this earth more cunty than Zionists”; describing his desire to beat up “ugly inbred fucking Zionist Colonist tourists”; rhapsodizing about the coming liberation of Palestine, when “all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists … will return to being low-voiced bitches of their Christian/Secular white supremacist masters”; and describing his personal “motto” as being that “Life is too short for shoes with laces, or for entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head.”

Worth reading in full, as Kay demonstrates how cleverly Marouf has intertwined Israel/Palestine with the current Canadian infatuation with white colonial guilt.

What I am reporting here is, in many ways, a parochial political story. Canada’s governments, at all levels, have a long history of using popular-sounding causes as a pretext to dole out cash to activists and community-group leaders, who in turn promote the government’s largesse by slapping “Funded by the Government of Canada” logos on their content. But Marouf’s surreal career arc as a racist anti-racist also presents larger lessons about the manner by which benign-seeming progressive jargon can now be used as a smokescreen for truly toxic ideas and personalities.

Plus of course antisemitism isn't even seen as racism in many progressive circles. It's punching up, you see..

Deep South, 1942

John Collier in Alabama and Florida:

May 1942. "Childersburg, Alabama. Street scene."

May 1942. "Childersburg, Alabama. Rooms for rent."

May 1942. "Childersburg, Alabama. Police force."

June 1942. "Baker, Florida. Crossroads in nearest town to Escambia Farms."
[Photos: Shorpy/John Collier for the Farm Security Adminisration]

Lesbians out of Pride

While I was away the most significant development on the trans front was the LGBTQ+ march in Cardiff on Saturday. It turned into the GBTQ+ march, as lesbians were removed by the police. It's where we've been heading for a while now, but still, it comes as something of a shock to see it spelled out so clearly: lesbians are no longer welcome in the great glorious multi-coloured Pride world. They don't want to have sex with men who claim to be women - and that's unforgivable.

Julie Bindel in the Spectator:

The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it....

The protest, captured live on film, is yet another example of how the word ‘lesbian’ has returned to being a dirty word.

The hostility towards any lesbian that stands her ground amongst the new cool queers has been building for some time.

The women at Pride Cymru were carrying banners adorned with the words, ‘trans activism erases lesbians' and 'lesbians don't like penises', which caused a major kerfuffle amongst the crowd. Rather than having a word with the individuals that were screaming abuse, police decided to eject Get the L Out. So, lesbians were kicked off a so-called Pride procession whilst the rest of the LGBTQQIA2Spirit+ crowd, many of whom will doubtless be heterosexual kinksters, stayed.

The hostility towards any lesbian that stands her ground amongst the new cool queers has been building for some time. In 2018, at the first Get the L Out protest, the gay male MC joked on stage that the protesters should be dragged off the parade 'by their saggy tits'....

As Angela Wild, a founder member of GTLO told me, they protested the march to highlight the appalling treatment of lesbians by the queer-identified crowd, and the climate of sexual coercion that lesbian have to navigate daily. 'The way we were treated, both by the LGBT crowd and the police who refused to let us march and failed to protect us is a clear reflection of the current anti-lesbian image brought by trans activists,' says Wild.

From the LGB Allaince:

LGB Alliance has released the following statement on yesterday’s events at Pride in Cardiff. pic.twitter.com/I3Tgk4qVXA

— LGB Alliance (@ALLIANCELGB) August 28, 2022

Intermission

Off for a few days. Back Tuesday the 30th.

Putin and Syria

Ah yes - remember Syria? Though now overshadowed by Ukraine, it was the greatest humanitarian disaster of this century and marked the moment when Putin was allowed to flex his muscles, and the West gave up. Roger Boyes in the Times:

Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, is a great survivor. Since the Arab Spring of 2011, the smart money has been on Syria’s ruling house of Assad crumpling as rival rebels, jihadists, regional and great powers pulled it apart. Instead, he was snapped in summery chinos the other day with his cheerful children and his well-groomed wife walking through Aleppo, a city he once shelled, as if they were holidaying among ancient Greek ruins.

He has outlived other Middle Eastern dictators for two reasons. First, Vladimir Putin decided that Russian military firepower should anchor the British-educated Assad in power. He is now Moscow’s client tyrant. Russian military intelligence, the GRU, helps keep him alive. Second, a clear if unstated decision has been reached by leaders in the West and East to whitewash his multiple crimes.

There is some legal process under way. A Syrian officer was sentenced in a German court to life imprisonment in January for his part in mass killings. Interviews with Syrian refugees have helped pinpoint a burial site outside Damascus; bodies from detention centres were ferried to hospitals and then taken by refrigerated truck to be dumped in a hole. Witnesses said they bore the marks of torture.

But Bashar is still a long way from the Hague. It’s where he should be. According to the UN, since March 2011 about 350,000 Syrians have been killed, 14 million others displaced. Opposition activists estimate the death figure at well over half a million. And the Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented the killing of 14,664 Syrians due to torture.

These horrors have been brushed under the carpet, partly because of the new atrocities emerging from Ukraine but also because of the protective shield thrown over Assad by Putin. The banners strung on the country’s power stations read “SYRIA IS PROTECTED BY GOD” above the usual weak-chinned portrait of Bashar. Yet it has long been clear it is the Kremlin leader who has kept Syria in play.

After sarin nerve gas was released on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, horrifically killing 1,400 people, it became obvious that Assad can get away with pretty much anything. Though the UN registered it as a war crime, there was only a lukewarm western attempt to hold Assad accountable. Barack Obama, after setting a red line on the use of chemical weapons, snatched at the first opportunity to avoid an outright military confrontation with the Assad-Putin axis. Putin offered to help inventorise and dispose of Assad’s chemical weapon stocks, and the US in effect ceded control of Syria to the Kremlin. What followed over the years were at least 200 documented chemical weapon attacks — the inventories having been predictably incomplete — and the literal rolling of chlorine barrel bombs on to bread queues.

Russia’s techniques included flying long-range bombers overnight from Rostov — now the hub of operations against Ukraine — and the tactic of striking hospitals and then “double-dipping”, returning for a second run to hit the emergency services. The Russian top brass is so proud of its Syrian campaign that commanders eagerly passed on the lessons to military academies. The feeble western response to enforcing red lines also suggests to the Kremlin that it has an escalation option, one that can expose all the cracks in Nato’s supportive alliance.

Assad is now attempting to rebuild Syria, but his only friends are Russia and Iran....possibly Turkey. It's not looking good.

The way he’s going about this reveals just how half-baked his leadership has become: a branch of his intelligence service has been reaching out to so-called travel influencers who are allowed to roam supposedly secure parts of the country, accompanied by a minder, to film themselves interacting with smiling merchants against a backdrop of unbombed sights. There are slow-mo images of the fluttering Syrian flag and a smattering of crude anti-American propaganda. One vlogger recently stopped off at Sednaya, apparently unaware that the town housed one of Assad’s most notorious detention centres where human rights groups have recorded 72 types of torture, including crucifixion and eye-gouging.

If Assad chose foreign exile he would certainly be targeted by one of his many enemies. Syria is now his marbled prison. He has got away with all this thanks to Russian brawn and western indifference.

Syria and Ukraine...what's the common factor? Vladimir Putin.

Mossad "may be behind the attack on Rushdie"

I wondered at the time why no one had yet blamed the Jews for Salman Rusdie's stabbing - to torpedo the JCPOA talks, and paint Iran in a bad light. Give it time, I said. And here we are:

A professor in Denver has suggested that Israeli intelligence agents from Mossad may be behind the attack on Sir Salman Rushdie in New York earlier this month.

Nader Hashemi, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, theorised in a podcast that a Mossad agent may have persuaded suspect Hadi Matar, 24, to carry out the stabbing....

He appeared to suggest that Israel may have been behind the attack due to its government’s opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal, continuing: “Israel has taken a very strong position against reviving the Iran nuclear agreement. We were in very sensitive negotiations. It looked like an agreement was imminent and then the attack on Salman Rushdie takes place.

“I think that’s one possible interpretation and scenario that could explain the timing of this.”

I admit I didn't see it coming from America - but yes, why not?