It’s not exactly a secret that Saudi Arabia is sensitive to criticism and tends to deal with dissidents through chainsaws or imprisonment. What makes this case particularly chilling, however, is that Shehab is not some high-profile activist in exile with millions of followers. has 159 followers on Instagram and just over 2,500 followers on Twitter. She is not someone who has been in the public eye all the time. She’s just an ordinary person with a Twitter account who, in between tweets about her sons, has occasionally retweeted people critical of Saudi Arabia and expressed her support for women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was also jailed by status. The message from the oil-rich, rights-poor kingdom here is very clear: it doesn’t matter who you are – if you criticize the regime, you’ll regret it. Shehab has been held since January 2021 and has said she has been in solitary confinement for 285 days. God knows how she was treated during that time, but I think it’s pretty well established that Saudi prisons are not pleasant places, especially for women. Unfortunately, her case only gained attention in the West this week when the Washington Post picked it up and published an article demanding that Joe Biden speak out strongly on the issue. Not surprisingly, the Post led the charge on this: Post Opinions contributor Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, was brutally murdered nearly four years ago, and a US intelligence report found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman , authorized his assassination. If you assassinate a prominent dissident on foreign soil and cut up his body with a bone saw, there should be real consequences, don’t you think? Joe Biden once promised there would be. vowed to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. And then, a few months ago, he crawled into Saudi Arabia to beg for oil and greeted Prince Mohammed with a fist bump. While this may seem pathetic on the surface, Biden assured us he was tough behind the scenes. The White House said Biden “raised specific cases of concern” about human rights — something that must have left the prince truly horrified, truly shaking in his boots. In response to those concerns, Biden apparently made some commitments about “reforms and institutional safeguards in place to protect against any such conduct in the future.” “Any such behavior” is a very sanitary way of saying “saws journalists with a bone saw”. As the Washington Post noted in its scathing article, Biden’s “commitments” to reforms were clearly “a hoax.” Of course it was a prank! Any idiot could see that Prince Mohammed wasn’t going to suddenly become passionate about human rights just because Biden told him to stop with the killing. I’m sure Biden himself knew the pledges were a hoax. But here’s the thing: Saudi Arabia is a useful ally that buys a lot of expensive weapons, supplies a lot of oil, and spends a lot of money with companies like McKinsey, so it’s convenient for the West to go along with this farce. Indeed, in recent years, large sections of the Western media have been falling over themselves trying to portray Prince Mohammed as some kind of amazing “reformer”. In 2018, for example, after Saudi Arabia lifted the world’s only ban on women driving, there were dozens of puff pieces about how amazing the crown prince was. CBS interviewed him and announced that he was “liberating women.” The New York Times Thomas Friedman wrote a supplemental article titled “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring at Last.” The fact that Saudi Arabia was simultaneously imprisoning women’s rights activists and bombing Yemen, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, played no small part. Shame on every person who played along with the MBS narrative and helped to sportwash and sanitize Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. Autocrats have no power without potential and Prince Mohammed has no end.
Utah school secretly investigated whether winning student athlete is transgender
A girl in Iowa crushed her peers in a state-level school sports competition. Instead of congratulating the child, the parents of the girls he beat immediately demanded an inquiry into his gender. And they got one: the gender police searched the girl’s school records dating back to kindergarten to make sure she was assigned female at birth. This isn’t an isolated incident: The Utah High School Activities Association has reportedly looked into other complaints about athletes “not looking feminine enough.” This is a chilling reminder, for those who need reminding, that attacks on trans rights affect us all. “We warned that this is a possibility,” noted one trans activist, “that everyone would accuse everyone who is successful of being trans… It’s about judging women’s bodies. And no body is safe.”
Florida court rules 16-year-old not ‘mature enough’ for abortion
But she is mature enough to have a baby! That’s Republican logic for you.
Los Angeles strippers are unionized
Dancers at a Los Angeles strip club have filed a petition to join the national union representing theater actors in the US. “We love what we do,” one dancer, Velveeta, said in a statement. “We would like our jobs even more if we had basic worker protections.”
Rwanda could be one of the first countries to eliminate cervical cancer
Cervical cancer is the most common cancer affecting women in Rwanda. The country has become a leader in expanding testing, awareness and vaccination against HPV – which is linked to cancer. Officials believe Rwanda can become the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer.
The week in the patriarchy
An intrepid seal made its way 150 meters from shore and crossed two cat fins to enter the hallway of a New Zealand home, shocking the family who lived there. How did the cat (Coco) feel about the intruder? Coco wasn’t available for comment, but as she ran off the property and into a neighbor’s house, we can only assume she wasn’t a fan of the seal. Apparently this is not entirely unusual in New Zealand: young seals like to roam around. As the homeowner noted, “I guess like all teenagers, they don’t necessarily make rational decisions.”
