Shut the woman up
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a woman to 34 years in prison for having thoughts.
A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.
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Salma al-Shehab, 34, a mother of two young children, was initially sentenced to three years in prison for the “crime” of using an internet website to “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security”. But an appeals court on Monday handed down the new sentence – 34 years in prison followed by a 34-year travel ban – after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider other alleged crimes.
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By all accounts, Shehab was not a leading or especially vocal Saudi activist, either inside the kingdom or in the UK. She described herself on Instagram – where she had 159 followers – as a dental hygienist, medical educator, PhD student at Leeds University and lecturer at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, and as a wife and a mother to her sons, Noah and Adam.
Saudis have a lot of money invested in Twitter.
Khalid Aljabri, a Saudi who is living in exile and whose sister and brother are being held in the kingdom, said the Shehab case proved Saudi Arabia’s view that dissent equates to terrorism.
“Salma’s draconian sentencing in a terrorism court over peaceful tweets is the latest manifestation of MBS’s ruthless repression machine,” he said, referring to the crown prince. “Just like [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi’s assassination, her sentencing is intended to send shock waves inside and outside the kingdom – dare to criticise MBS and you will end up dismembered or in Saudi dungeons.”
While the case has not received widespread attention, the Washington Post on Tuesday published a scathing editorial about Saudi Arabia’s treatment of the Leeds student and said her case showed that “commitments” the president had received on reforms were “a farce”.
“At the very least, Mr. Biden must now speak out forcefully and demand that Ms. Shehab be released and allowed to return to her sons, 4 and 6 years old, in the United Kingdom, and to resume her studies there,” it read.
He probably won’t though.
This is horrible. She’s being made an example of. From the WaPo article:
Not that it really matters what possible views she might have expressed, it’s still awful to put her in prison at all, but 34 years, and the issue she primarily promotes is women’s right to drive? Got to persecute those Shiites, got to persecute women, can’t have any of them getting any ideas.
Perhaps this kind of nonsense is an extreme act in order to extract promises from outside countries in exchange for leniency. Horrible, regardless. She’s a political pawn.
One more reason to move away from oil based energy. We wouldn’t have to suck up to these troglodytes.
Mike Haubrich
For some data on what works to get away from fossil fuels see:
https://app.electricitymap.org/map
It shows how much CO2 is emitted per kWh of electricity generated for regions where they get data.
Color coded from green for very low through shades of brown to black for very high.
You can click on a region to get how much electricity came from what source over the last hour or day.
Spoiler alert:
The regions that are consistently green use a mix of hydro, geothermal & nuclear for most of their electricity.
The regions that try to use a lot of solar or wind vary from fairly green to quite brown, because when the wind isn’t blowing & the sun isn’t shining they burn natural gas to provide the electricity they need.
That’s fascinating, especially in Quebec. That’s reliant on Hydropower, which has been damaging to the enviroment in ways not related to energy productions, such as interfering with natural migrations of fish and the flooding of lands that had been forested. Calculating energy costs is very complicated, and I wonder if the load measured for oil, coal, and natural gas takes into account the amount of energy used to convert the carbon based fuels into the end product ready for combustion.
I’m open to nuclear energy, pending a long-term viable solution for spent fuel storage that doesn’t do further harm to the environment, and who knows maybe someday fusion will move from being always 20 years into the future to actually getting closer year by year.