Waffle

I've seen a lot of justified outrage over this: The trial and conviction of an illiterate woman as a witch in Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Saudi legal system and government really are that backward, vicious and barbaric. As Human Rights Watch writes in its original report on the case:

The religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence against absurd charges that have no basis in law.

“The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes like ‘witchcraft’ underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal investigations,” said Joe Stork, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Fawza Falih’s case is an example of how the authorities failed to comply even with existing safeguards in the Saudi justice system.”

The judges relied on Fawza Falih’s coerced confession and on the statements of witnesses who said she had “bewitched” them to convict her in April 2006. She retracted her confession in court, claiming it was extracted under duress, and that as an illiterate woman she did not understand the document she was forced to fingerprint. She also stated in her appeal that her interrogators beat her during her 35 days in detention at the hands of the religious police. At one point, she had to be hospitalized as a result of the beatings.

The judges never investigated whether her confession was voluntary or reliable or investigated her allegations of torture. They never even made an inquiry as to whether she could have been responsible for allegedly supernatural occurrences, such as the sudden impotence of a man she is said to have “bewitched.” They also broke Saudi law in multiple instances, ignoring legal rules on proper procedures in a trial.

The judges did not sit as a panel of three, as required for cases involving the death penalty. They excluded Fawza Falih from most trial sessions and banned a relative who was acting as her legal representative from attending any session. Earlier, her interrogators blocked her access to a lawyer and the judges, and denied her the right to professional legal representation, thus depriving her of the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses against her. She claims that some of the witnesses were unknown to her and that others had made statements against her only as a result of beatings.

As I say, the outrage is justified, and Saudi-Arabia deserves widespread condemnation and ridicule. However, condemnation and ridicule aren't going to stop Fawza Falih from getting executed. So I've been asking myself and others "what are we going to do about this?"

And I don't have an answer. It's easy to think of fun things you can do to protest. We could threaten to reprint cartoons representing the prophet Mohammed until the Saudis relent, or we could boycott Saudi oil until you forgetthey relent, or, and I should stress that my next suggestion won't be any less feasible than the previous ones, we could collectively travel back in time to September 12, 2001 and put that loathsome backwater in our crosshairs along with Afghanistan and instead of Iraq.

The only thing I can think of that ordinary people can do is to talk to both the Saudi government and their own. Write letters to your Saudi consulate or embassy, write to your MP/congressman/whatever, write to your Foreign Secretary, and tell them, politely (in other words, don't borrow phrasing from this blog post), why you think Fawza Falih should not be executed. Unfortunately, neither HRW nor Amnesty International provide ready templates, but you and I can do this in our own words. Campaign.

By the way... I'm not suggesting that this is the only thing that can be done. Just that I can't think of anything else, but this is likely to be a failure of my own imagination as much as anything else. If you have a better idea, or even a hare-brained idea that might lead us to a better one, tell me. reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com.

Contact info for the Saudi embassy in the Netherlands HRW's letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

Three posts by Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings that I want to be able to quickly find again should the need arise, concerning Barack Obama's track record in office, why Hilzoy endorses him and the inadequate response to the Obama phenom by the Clinton campaign:

Mistakes are Expensive Barack Obama (posted in 2006) Obama actually.

Nothing to add to these—I'm just posting them for future reference.

Starship Stormtroopers, an eminently readable essay, or perhaps a transcripted speech, by Michael Moorcock from 1977, about authoritarianism in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature:

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

Note: misspelling of "Tolkien" in the quoted section corrected because I'll have no part in spreading it around.

Being Unhealthy Could Cost You Clarian Health is taking a novel approach to reducing health-care costs: It's penalizing workers for indicators of poor health For employees at Clarian Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning. In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index [BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat] is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they'll be charged $5 for each standard they don't meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they'll be charged another $5 in each check.

But why stop there? The real money's in cancer and heart disease. I'd say lung cancer should be worth at least $150 per paycheck, and a heart attack should be cause for immediate suspension without pay. That should teach people to take care of themselves! (Via Sadly, No!)

I have nothing to add to this

As recently as the 1980s [...] Ronald fucking Reagan could not-so-boldly call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and be widely regarded as having departed only ever-so-slightly from the hardcore militant industrialist anti-communist line. Ronald Reagan! Mr. "Evil Empire" himself wanted, or so he claimed, to eliminate all nuclear weapons from on Earth! Now it’s seen as a risky move (with a whiff of sixties fervor) for a Democratic primary contender to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against small, decidedly non-nuclear asymmetrical threats holed up in friendly nations? What? What dank, perverted path are we on? Twenty years from now, will Unity ‘28 scion Chelsea "LeMay" Clinton sadly note the unseriousness of those neo-stinking robo-hippies opposed, on principle, to nuking PETA? Or the NEA? A meth lab, maybe? The odd Mexican?

Twenty years ago, everybody in this country (give or take a baker’s million blazing nutjobs) understood that the use of nuclear weapons was a cataclysmic, final act of madness, a step towards global suicide to be avoided at (almost) any cost. Now, absent an enemy with any real ability to do us harm, the idea that nuclear weapons should be available to use on caves full of crazy idiots armed with weapons that were the height of military sophistication approximately seventy years ago, this idea is the conventional wisdom? Of the Democratic Party? The party that ostensibly wants to end the war in Iraq? Where have you gone, Robert McNamara / A nation turns its loony eyes to you, doot doot doo.

What the fuck, seriously. What. The. Fucking. Fuck. I want off this ball, blundering downhill. I want to go home, to the nation I imagined I lived in.

Parrotline has run the numbers of the death tolls of the various wars in the 20th-Century haemoclysm, separating them by religious affiliation. World War II is, quite wisely, listed separately because it's a complex event and separating out all the religious affiliations involved is going to take the scholars until Doomsday. Numbers are shown for deaths in 20th/21st-century wars by religious affiliation of warring parties and deaths in worst 20th/21st-century genocides by religious affiliation of killers and victims. The final scorecard:

Wars involving European-Christians and Asian Buddhists (incl. WWII) have killed 154.8 million people in the past century. Wars involving Muslims (incl. WWII) have killed 25.6 million people in the past century.

Major genocides & atrocities committed by European-Christians and Asian Buddhists have killed 84.0 million people in the past century. Major genocides & atrocities committed by Muslims have killed 3.5 million people in the past century.

I found this more than a week late, but Yeltsin: An Obit of a Drunken, Bloblike Train Wreck of a Revolutionary Leader by Matt Taibbi is still worth a read because it's well-written and gives a better insight into why the Russians didn't care much about ole' Boris than the "they prefer an authoritarian over a buffoon" line that was common in the conventional obits. (Via Majikthise)

Jon Swift:

If Chris Muir drew Charles Schulz's Peanuts, for example, he wouldn't have bothered drawing a panel showing Lucy pulling the football away at the last minute when Charlie Brown tries to kick it. That would be too Old School for him. Instead, Muir would just have Lucy say, "Democrats always pull the football away at the last minute when you are trying to kick it, Charlie Brown." Lucy and Charlie Brown would also probably be in their underwear.

Internet meme in 5... 4... 3....

Noteworthy things I've read today: Digby on religious literacy in the US. Amanda Marcotte on guns, bad faith arguments and pleasure as a positive good.

Chris Lightfoot is dead. I liked his weblog. He dropped off my radar a bit when he stopped posting frequently, but had he returned, I would have found out from many other bloggers linking to him enthusiastically. He only wrote when he had something to say, and when he did it was almost always good. I wasn't aware of his many other online roles (he was involved in Pledgebank and mySociety. I can only second mySociety's recommendation to

sift through his blog and marvel at the quantity of primary research and original coding that went into it. Documenting and exploring his work would provide material for many years of research, and yet all this was accomplished by the age of 28.

Chicken Yoghurt finds Britain’s bookworms misanthropic and death-fixated.

Digby on the latest round of bullshit claims that "Teh Left" is uncivil and hateful because, oh my stars and garters, Teh Left uses swears:

I have to admit that I'm even more surprised, however, that the manly warriors of the rightwing blogosphere are so genteel and restrained, which they seem inordinately proud of, as if they've won first prize from the Boston spinsters crochet society or something. There has always been a particular type of prissy conservative male who shares certain characteristics with fluttery Victorian ladies who get all breathless (and aroused) in the presence of muscular, earthy language. I didn't realize that the alleged he-men of the rightwing blogosphere were like this but I suppose I should have. It certainly explains why they haven't joined the military.

And The Poor Man, a few days ago, ran a blogger's style guide to civility and seriousness.

Speaking of civility, read The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness" (via)