A Swedish tv reporter, Petter Ljunggren, did an investigative report on anti-Semitism in Malmo.

Ljunggren wanted to know what it feels like as a Jew in Malmo, so he put on a kippah and Star of David, and went out to walk the streets.

He was followed by an undercover reporter who filmed everything.

Along the town’s main road, Ljunggren was immediately confronted. One man told him he should leave if he was wearing that ‘Jewish shit’.

Another shouted at him that he’s a Jew-devil. People shouted at ‘dirty Jewish pig’ and “Jewish pigs, we’ll kill you’. In the neighborhoods of Lindängen and Rosengård, he was harassed so much, he considered just leaving.

So that’s horrifying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Enough of this exotic foreign far away bullshit, let’s look at some humdrum local bullshit. Let’s look at Cindy Jacobs and Bobby Jindal.

“A living prophet that has a direct line to God” was one of the dubious public figures that joined Bobby Jindal at a prayer rally this weekend.

Televangelist Cindy Jacobs, who claims to possess the ability to raise people back from the dead, joined the Republican governor of Louisiana for an event called “The Response,” which many speculated to be the kickoff to his presidential campaign. It was held Saturday at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, despite protests from students and faculty.

If Cindy Jacobs can raise people from the dead, can she show us? Can she show us one or more people she’s raised? From the dead? Can she raise someone from the dead on live tv while we watch? I ask because I don’t think I believe her claim, and I’d like to know what she’s done to substantiate it.

On Friday’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow reviewed the many bizarre claims of the self-proclaimed prophet. In addition to the revival of a dead child in Pakistan, Jacobs claimed that she was able to curtail the number of deaths at a past shooting at the Washington Naval Yard.

She also claimed that the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was responsible for the deaths of thousands of fish and birds, which “fell out of the air” once gays and lesbians were allowed to serve in the military.

Oh well that one’s true. I remember that one. It was a mess.

In the segment, Maddow speculated that the event was an attempt to establish Jindal as the most right-wing of the presidential candidates, yet questioned the wisdom of partnering with bedfellows like Jacobs, as well as the event’s antigay sponsor, the American Family Association.

The competition to be the most ludicrously off-any-maps right-wing presidential candidate is the source of a lot of dead fish.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

For a spot of whimsy – a house full of built-in ramps and bridges and portholes for cats.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOVxfuSYPk

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Reuters reports that Nigeria’s military finally managed to pull its socks up and stop Boko Haram from devouring yet another spot on the map, which is a good thing since this spot on the map has two million people in it. It’s a Chicago.

Other places weren’t so fortunate.

Nigeria’s military repelled multiple attacks by suspected Boko Haram militants on Borno state capital Maiduguri in the northeast, security sources said on Sunday, but the insurgents captured another Borno town.

The assault on Maiduguri, with a population of around two million, began just after midnight. Sources at two hospitals said at least eight people had died and 27, mostly civilians, had been injured. A second attempt to take the city’s airport in the afternoon was also repelled.

A raid on Monguno, 140 km (80 miles) north, began later in the morning and the town fell under militant control by the late afternoon.

…

The militants also simultaneously attacked another town, Konduga, which is 40 km (24 miles) from Maiduguri, but the military said it had thwarted the raid.

But don’t worry, the Super Bowl will still take place.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sure enough: Massimo knows how to do it. Compare his first paragraph:

Much has been written about the terrorist attack on the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, which took place on 7 January 2015. Some of the commentary has been insightful, some full of pious platitudes about defense of free speech by sources with not exactly a stellar record in that department, and some of it has ranged from the woefully uninformed to the downright awful. It is, therefore, with some recalcitrance that I write these lines, particularly because I’m coming to the issue from what I feel is an increasingly rare point of view: that of a moderate liberal atheist.

No puffing out, no pointless baroque ornamentation, no pretending to be saying something more technical than you are, no vanity, no display. God how I hate that other kind – its whole purpose seems to be vanity.

While it is undeniably the case that — at this particular historical juncture — it is Muslim countries that tend to lag behind much of the rest of the world both politically and in terms of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and women’s rights, history easily teaches us that this has nothing to do with Islam per se, and logic demands that we therefore stop looking for solutions by demonizing that particular faith.

What should we, instead, talk about? I suggest a division of (critical) labor of sorts. Roughly speaking, we in the secular West need to back off a bit from dismissive verbal assaults on Islam, and instead engage in a more nuanced indirect push toward facilitating internal discussion and cultural change within the Muslim world. It is a basic principle of psychology that people rarely respond to outside threats and denunciation by changing their minds; on the contrary, they usually retrench in their behavioral patterns. But if their minds are exposed to “friendly” (intellectual) fire from within, the chances for long lasting change improve significantly. This is a minor version of the same principle according to which one cannot force nations to become democracies by bombing the hell out of them, but one can, and ought, to do a lot of cultural and economic work to make that change happen organically. Arguably the most positive thing the West can do is to consistently help moderate Muslim voices to be heard by giving them a platform at every opportunity.

In the past I probably would have disagreed with much of that. I no longer do, and I have been doing what I can to help moderate liberal Muslim voices to be heard by giving them a platform at every opportunity. I do the same for ex-Muslims and atheists, of course, which Massimo might not agree with, but we cross paths more than we used to.

The second thing that the secular West ought to do is to stop being so darn hypocritical about its own credentials. While European countries, the US, and several places in the non-Western world (e.g., Japan) indeed arguably are the best examples of democratic societies that the world has seen to date, they are still rife with inequality, discrimination, violence, political and religious opportunism, and a number of other maladies that require constant soul searching, not to mention a significant downgrade of the “we are the best” mantra so mindlessly repeated especially by American media and politicians. Holier than thou attitudes do not help constructive dialogue.

That too. It’s horribly easy for an American to do that, what with our massive prison population, our death penalty, our gun culture, our religion of football – I could go on and on.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The academic journal Science, Religion & Culture has a special issue on Islam, Culture and the Charlie Hebdo affair. The first article I’ve opened is Free Speech is Free for Whom? by Hussein Rashid, an adjunct prof at Hofstra. I…don’t like it. It’s written in a form of academese that I’m very allergic to – the kind that wraps its points in such a cloud of pseudo-technical verbiage that…well that two things:

1. people like me can’t stand to read it
2. the unwary are fooled into thinking it’s profound

He’s saying less than he appears to be saying, in other words, and in doing so he makes it hard to pin down what he is saying because of the sheer annoyance of reading.

There is an analytic issue in attempting to create a conflict between a religion and a concept. Aside from the obvious lack of parallelism, neither has an agency of its own. A religion is constituted by the actions and interpretations of those who claim adherence to it; free expression must be exercised to be real.

In other words, religions and concepts aren’t people. True.

What makes the narrative so compelling is that it indexes other symbols. If free speech is “good,” then everything associated with it must be good. This includes ideas of democracy, secularism, Enlightenment, Reformation, and modernity. Two of these terms refer to historical moments, the meanings and values of which are not generally agreed upon in specifics. The other three terms are also ill-defined, and mean different things in different cultural contexts, even in the semiosphere represented by the “West.”

In other words, we need to define our terms. Ok.

In a state of competition, if free speech is good, then Islam must be bad. The religion indexes a series of depictions of the “Other,” such as violence, lack of culture/civilization, poor gender roles, superstition/illogic, and primitiveness. This construction, a significant part of Orientalist discourse, goes back centuries. However, the ways in which the “Other” is constructed is not limited to Muslims, but is used to describe minorities of any type, whether they are minorities by religion, race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality.

By questioning the very narrative engendered by the attacks on the workers of CH, we understand the ways in which post-Enlightenment liberal values are, in fact, methods for continued exclusion. That we can offer such a critique does not mean that the aspirations of these values is inherently problematic. Rather, they too have no agency, and it is in the ways in which these values are referenced and applied that is problematic. Specifically at stake is the idea that the Enlightenment is the teleological end for humanity; as a result there is only way to be modern; and the liberal values generated by the Enlightenment are neutral and should be universally accepted.

In other words…oh never mind, you can see where he’s going. That’s enough for me. Massimo Pigliucci also has an article in the issue; that’s bound to be much better.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Amnesty has a new report on violence against women in Egypt. Melissa Jeltsen at the Huffington Post reports on the report.

The damning report, released by Amnesty International, urged the government to present a comprehensive strategy to combat violence against women before the upcoming parliamentary election.

“Recent measures to protect women taken have been largely symbolic,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International, said in a press release. “The authorities must prove that these are more than cosmetic changes by making sustained efforts to implement changes and challenge deeply entrenched attitudes prevalent in Egyptian society.”

In June 2014, Egypt criminalized sexual harassment for the first time. Women’s rights advocates have been skeptical of the new law, and have noted that some of its burdensome requirements — such as requiring women who are sexually harassed or assaulted to have two witnesses to the crime — may render it difficult to enforce.

More like impossible. It’s almost as bad as the sharia version of rape: it’s not rape unless four men watched.

Sexual harassment is ubiquitous on Egyptian streets. In a 2013 survey by UN Women, more than 99 percent of women reported being sexually harassed in public. According to Amnesty, public assaults on women, such as the horrific attacks on female protesters by mobs that captured international attention in 2013, have been on the rise.

“Targeting women and girls for violence, including rape and other forms of sexual violence during mass protests, also impairs or nullifies their enjoyment of other fundamental rights, including freedoms of assembly and expression and the right to participate, on an equal basis with men, in the political life and events shaping the country’s future,” the report said.

The bullies get to enjoy full rights, and their victims get to enjoy none. That’s the whole point of bullying, and it’s why not bullying is better (because fairer).

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American women’s rights activist, said it was incredibly important that Amnesty connected domestic, street and state violence against women.

“Women in Egypt are entrapped by institutional, systematic violence,” she told The Huffington Post by email. “Unless combatting that violence becomes a priority, unless women can live safe and dignified lives, no revolution has taken place. We must overthrow the Mubarak at home as well as on the street, not just the one who sat in the presidential palace. That double revolution that us women must undertake — against the misogyny of the state and the street, and by extension the home, is Egypt’s key to freedom.”

Overthrow it all.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An Egyptian doctor has been found guilty of killing a girl by cutting up her genitals, the BBC reports.

Opponents of FGM were dismayed when Raslan Fadl was acquitted in November of charges relating to the death of 13-year-old Suhair al-Bataa.

But after an appeal, a court in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura sentenced him to more than two years in prison.

The campaign group Equality Now called the ruling a “monumental victory”.

Although FGM was banned in Egypt six years ago, it remains widespread.

That’s a different system from the one in the US. Here an acquittal can’t be appealed: that’s double jeopardy and it’s a no-no.

Fadl was sentenced to two years in prison for manslaughter and three months for performing the FGM procedure, according to Equality Now. His clinic was also ordered to close for a year.

Suhair’s father was meanwhile given a three-month suspended sentence.

The practice of FGM was banned in Egypt in 2008 but the country still has one of the highest rates of prevalence in the world.

So, it seems good that there’s a conviction on the books at last – but Orla Guerin’s analysis says maybe not all that much.

Activists say justice has finally been done for Suhair al-Bataa and a precedent has been set. “The new sentence will deter doctors from performing this dangerous practice,” said Manal Fawzi, who campaigns against FGM in southern Egypt.

Maybe so, but it took a dogged campaign by local and international groups to ensure a prosecution was brought. The sentence was broadly welcomed but media interest has waned in the wait for the initial verdict, and the appeal result is not expected to garner too much attention.

Tiny tiny tiny steps.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So there’s this hospital in Clermont-Ferrand with a mural of what looks like a gang-rape…

A fresco depicting four superheroes committing what has been interpreted as a gang rape is currently the subject of a huge scandal in France. The mural—which is painted on the wall of a hospital in Clermont-Ferrand—depicts Wonder Woman having anal sex with Batman while Superman comes in her mouth. Supergirl is there, fisting, and the Flash is getting a handjob. It’s causing its fair share of controversy in a country still dealing with the emotional fallout of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The outrage kicked off on Saturday, when the Facebook page Les médecins ne sont pas des pigeons (“Doctors aren’t dupes”) published a photo of the fresco. The mural was first created 14 years ago (according to a comment on the page), but a recent addition has turned it from a mere rape mural into an overtly political rape mural.

Here’s the story complete with the mural in question, now that you’ve been warned about the content. NSFW if others can see your screen.

These speech bubbles—it’s unclear whether they were added in Photoshop or if someone actually painted them on the wall—read, “Take it deep,” “Take that health reform,” and “You should inform yourself a bit better!” They’re thought to be intended as an attack on the reforms proposed by the French Health Minister Marisol Touraine last November. Those reforms—which proposed to clamp down on doctors charging over the odds for consultations by outsourcing the payment to health insurance companies—were rejected by the French National Medical Council (CNOM) on the grounds that they “didn’t answer the needs of doctors on the ground, and of the patients.”

Fans on the Facebook page have been defending the fresco by referring to the recentCharlie Hebdo case and to the principle of “freedom of expression,” with many suggesting it was hypocritical to say the Prophet Muhammed could be depicted in cartoon form but that you shouldn’t create an image implying the rape of the health minister.

The two are not comparable.

Anyway…is this normal for French doctors? Porn murals in their break room?

The French feminist association Osez le Féminisme (“Dare Feminism”) was quick to react to the Facebook post, publishing an article on its website asking for the fresco to be erased and for measures to be taken against the authors. The post also called the mural “misogynistic” and said that it wrongly used “rape as a means of showing discontent towards a Minister and her law.” It warned that such representations could “eroticize extreme violence” and contribute to building a “degrading image of women.”

Yes, they could, in fact it would be odd if they didn’t.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Australia some awards were handed out.

Rosie Batty has been named Australian of the Year for her campaign against family violence in an award ceremony that saw four women take the nation’s top Australia Day honours for the first time in history.

Ms Batty rose above her personal tragedy and the great loss of her 11-year-old-son, Luke, who was murdered by his father on a cricket oval in February last year.

Her story jolted Australia into recognising that family violence could happen to anyone and she has given voice to many thousands of victims of domestic violence who had until then remained unheard.

She now champions efforts to fight domestic violence, making many media and public speaking appearances to shine a spotlight on the issue and call for systemic changes.

Courage and strength to her, and congratulations on the award.

Women were awarded the top honours in all four award categories for the first time in the history of the Australian of the Year awards.

Jackie French from NSW was named Senior Australian of the Year, WA’s Drisana Levitzke-Gray was named Young Australian of the Year and Juliette Wright from Queensland was named Australia’s Local Hero.

…

Children’s author and conservationist Ms French, whose books include Diary of a Wombat, said “a book can change a child’s life and a book can change the world”.

“Every book a child reads creates new neurons in that child’s brain. If you want intelligent children, give them a book,” she said.

Fist bump!

H/t John Morales

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Meanwhile, in London – a baffling plan is afoot.

The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is hoping to profit from selling its expertise to the prison service in Saudi Arabia, a country notorious for public beheadings, floggings, amputations and courts that regularly violate human rights.

A new commercial arm of the justice ministry, staffed by civil servants, has bid for a £5.9m contract in Saudi Arabia. Just Solutions international (JSi) will also soon start setting up a probation service in Macedonia, and is in the running to build a prison in Oman.

???????????

How can any branch of the UK government have anything whatever to do with the prison service in Saud-family Arabia of all things? What next? A contract to paint flowers on the handles of the sticks they use to flog people?

Human rights groups have raised concerns about the MoJ working so closely with a regime currently under scrutiny over the botched execution of a woman who died protesting her innocence and the harsh punishment meted out to a liberal blogger.

Allan Hogarth, Amnesty’s UK head of policy and government affairs, said: “Amnesty has serious concerns about Saudi Arabia’s justice system, given its use of the death penalty, the prevalence of torture in detention, and its use of cruel and degrading punishment.

Also? There’s the fact that the “justice system” is clogged with people who committed nothing recognizable as a crime. The UK MoJ shouldn’t be going within a thousand miles of it.

The ministry said that all JSi projects had to be signed off by the Foreign Office and the local embassy after an evaluation that covered human rights, but declined to provide further details on the grounds that the project was “commercially sensitive”.

Oh, well, if it’s commercially sensitive that makes all the difference. If there’s a chance the UK government can make some money off the deal, then human rights can just go take a flying leap, yeah?

The JSi bid was featured in a December report to parliament that also gave details of a memorandum of understanding on judicial cooperation signed by the UK and Saudi Arabian justice ministers in Riyadh in September.

A memorandum of understanding. On judicial cooperation. With the Saud family.

It said the contract would be “to conduct a training needs analysis across all the learning and development programmes within the Saudi Arabian prison service”. The legal affairs blogger David Allen Green first drew attention to the the contract on his Jack of Kent website.

Like all the overseas projects run by JSi, it aims to raise funds for the National Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation services in England and Wales.

Blood money. Dirty filthy blood money. You bastards.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Bad. Now Boko Haram is attacking Maiduguri, which is not a village but a city.

Fighters from the Islamist militant group Boko Haram have launched an attack on the key city of Maiduguri in north-eastern Nigeria.

Fierce fighting was reported on the outskirts. The military is carrying out air strikes, and a curfew is in place.

Maiduguri is home to tens of thousands of people who have fled Boko Haram attacks and was visited on Saturday by President Goodluck Jonathan.

Another Boko Haram attack was reported in Monguno, north of Maiduguri.

Bad bad bad news.

The attack appeared to have begun in the Njimtilo district on the edge of the city.

Nigerian military spokesman Chris Olukolade tweeted that a curfew had been imposed in Maiduguri following an attack there and elsewhere in Borno state.

A resident of the Moronti area, Buba Kyari, told Agence France-Presse: “It is flying bullets everywhere. All we hear are sounds of guns and explosions. A rocket-propelled grenade hit and killed a person from my neighbourhood who was fleeing into the city.”

The BBC’s Chris Ewokor in Abuja says the military are carrying out co-ordinated air strikes and ground attacks against the insurgents.

The party of Men With Guns is winning more territory.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Seth Shulman, editorial director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, reviews Michael Shermer’s new book at the Washington Post. Remember, the subtitle of that book is “How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.”

If you read carefully, I think you can detect that he doesn’t think much of it but wants to be polite or encouraging. It’s possible that I’m just reading that in, but…that’s the sense I get.

‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of protesters in Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. King’s use of that quote stands as one of history’s more inspiring pieces of oratory, acknowledging that victories in the fight for social justice don’t come as frequently as we might like, while offering hope that progress will come eventually.

But is the contention empirically true?

No. We don’t know how any arc of the moral universe bends. We can’t know. It’s trivially easy to summon up moments crossed with locations when saying such a thing would just be insulting – a hot afternoon at Auschwitz for instance, or a cold night at a Siberian gulag.

Michael Shermer, a professor, columnist for Scientific American, and longtime public champion of reason and rationality, takes on this question and more. In “The Moral Arc,” Shermer aims to show that King is right so far about human civilization and that, furthermore, science and reason are the key forces driving us to a more moral world. It is at once an admirably ambitious argument and an exceedingly difficult one to prove.

If only the claim were that science and reason are among the key forces driving us to a more moral world. That would be a much easier claim to back up, and a less annoyingly self-congratulatory one as well.

To his credit, Shermer tackles this broad agenda with an abundance of energy, good cheer and anecdotes on everything from “Star Trek” episodes and the reasoning of Somali pirates to the demise of the Sambo’s restaurant chain. The anecdotes provide leavening but don’t alter the fact that this is a work of serious and wide-ranging scholarship with a bibliography that runs to nearly 30 pages. The effect can be kaleidoscopic and even a bit scattershot at times, but that doesn’t detract from the truly impressive array of data Shermer assembles.

Oh really? I bet it does. That’s one of the places where I detect (or think I detect) politeness veiling Shulman’s criticism. That kind of thing is one reason I have never liked Shermer’s writing, long before I clashed with him personally.

Shulman cites the precedents of Pinker and Harris.

Overall, Shermer does a good job of mining the scholarship in these and other areas, but his approach and the sheer breadth of scope ultimately make his argument seem more of a survey and less focused than some of these other works.

Faint…praise…

Somewhat less convincing are Shermer’s sections on the role of science as a moral force for good, which mostly boil down to anecdotes in which science has helped supplant superstition since the Enlightenment. It is true, of course, that (as far as I know) we’re no longer burning “witches” at the stake for phenomena we don’t understand. But I hoped Shermer would grapple more with the vexing ways in which science has contributed — and arguably continues to contribute — to moral atrocities, from the role of Nazi scientists to the development of biological weaponry.

Shermer’s case seems more anecdotal and even arbitrary than it should to really prove his grand case. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book’s provocative breadth and found much of the material fascinating and well chosen. I greatly admire Shermer for tackling such an ambitious project and hope the book spurs many discussions and much further scholarship on this important subject.

Meh. I’m not a fan of that kind of ambition unless you’ve got the chops to pull it off. I prefer people who know their own strengths and weaknesses.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post has the story of Abdullah’s daughters, but he makes clear that he’s reporting reports as opposed to an investigation. He says there are some doubts as to how confined the daughters are. Maybe they’re only a little bit held against their will.

Abdullah’s reforms, writes one commentator, have “all the substance of a Potemkin village, a flimsy structure to impress foreign opinion.”

Closer to home, moreover, there are a few women related to the late monarch who may object to the praise being heaped upon him. Abdullah, like other Saudi royals, had numerous wives — at least seven, and perhaps as many as 30. He had at least 15 daughters. Four of them, according to news reports, live under house arrest.

…

Fayez claims her daughters’ supposed incarceration, which has gone on for some 13 years, was both a mark of Abdullah’s vindictive streak and intolerance of his daughters’ modern, independent upbringing. She says the four have been locked away for more than a decade, subject to abuse and deprivation.

She said it last April. Apparently her ex didn’t sue her for libel, even though she’s right there in London, convenient for libel tourism even after the tweak to the libel law…so that seems like an indication that she’s not telling a big ol’ story.

Last year, various news stations managed to reach Sahar, 42, and Jawaher, 38, who live in a separate compound from Maha, 41, and Hala, 39. In an interview with RT last May, the pair described how they were running out of food and water.

…

There are some doubts about the extent to which the women are living in genuine captivity. When confronted with the daughters’ claims, Saudi authorities have been tight-lipped, insisting that the situation “is a private matter.” The women have not been formally charged with any crime.

Maybe they’re allowed to go outside for half an hour once a week? Who knows.

Since the spasm of media stories last year, reports on the condition of the princesses have dried up. On social media, their mother continues to call for their release, using the hashtag #Freethe4. She holds regular protests in London urging action.

Our dear dear ally.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And then something else…Good luck trying to read this dry-eyed.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A cartoon by Arifur Rahman.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ok I’d seen a couple of mentions of imprisoned Saudi princesses and hadn’t followed up, but thanks to yazikus posting some extracts in comments I now have. I didn’t realize they were Abdullah’s daughters. His own god damn daughters, imprisoned in some dark rooms on his say-so. It’s a tale of horror.

Sahar, Maha, Hala and Jawaher Al Saud are daughters of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi Arabian monarch who is worth an estimated $15 billion.

They grew up rich, and had a nice life. They wanted to study abroad and travel, then marry and have children.

Now they are prisoners.

Not only has the 89-year-old king forbidden any man to seek his daughters’ hands in marriage, he’s confined them, against their will, in separate dark and suffocating quarters at his palace.

The king’s eldest daughter, 42-year-old Sahar, spoke with The Post in a rare and surreptitious phone call.

“We are cut off and isolated and alone,” she says. “We are hostages. No one can come see us, and we can’t go see anyone. Our father is responsible and his sons, our half-brothers, are both culprits in this tragedy.”

Why are the princesses being held captive?

Because they believe women in Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive Islamic nations in the world, should be free. Their mother, Alanoud Al Fayez, long ago fled to London.

When the sisters openly spoke in opposition to women being illegally detained and placed in mental wards, the king had enough and no longer considered them his daughters.

“That was it for him. It was the end for us,” Sahar says.

That’s your “reformer” right there. That’s your man of wisdom and vision, Barack Obama. That’s your ally in the war on terror, everyone who said that.

“They once had a normal life for Saudi Arabia, but they are free thinkers, and their father hates that,” mom Al Fayez says. “They are compassionate about the plight of women in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Arab world. The injustices that we see are terrible, and someone must say something.”

She was handed over to him in an arranged marriage. In the first four years she had four daughters – so she was worthless and Abdullah The Reformer divorced her, though he didn’t bother telling her so until two years later. It’s nothing to do with her, after all.

In Saudi Arabia, a husband can divorce his wife without her knowledge.

“Really, he had divorced me a number of times and he’d abuse me, beat me and had me beaten by guards,” Al Fayez says. “And the more I took the abuse, the more I was abused.”

Abdullah the reformer. Abdullah the wise.

In 2001 she fled to London. Her daughters couldn’t go with her because Abdullah had taken their passports. She thought he would eventually let them go, if only to avoid embarrassment.

Nope.

In 2002, less than one year after her escape, Abdullah began tormenting his daughters. They are in intermittent phone contact with their mother and have told her that he’s drugged their food and water to keep them docile.

“They had felt some oppression before I left, but when he found that I had gone, he vowed that he would kill the girls, slowly,” Al Fayez says. “At one point, he tried to get me to come back, saying that he would take away the divorce and release them, but that wasn’t true and I know that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t trust that.”

It was then, about 2005, that she first began to fear for her daughters’ safety, she said. “That’s when I thought, now he’d do anything, even punish them till they die, which is exactly what he’s trying to do now.”

The king locked Sahar and the youngest, Jawaher, now 38, in one area of the palace, while confining Mahar, 41, and Hala, 39, to yet another closet-size and unkempt room.

Doctors aren’t even allowed in for checkups.

“The rooms they are locked in are so hot, they wilt from the desert heat,” Al Fayez says. They suffer from dehydration, nausea and heat stroke.

Her daughter Sahar says the king is starving them all to death. They haven’t had a full meal in more than a month, she says, and are forced to eat canned goods that they pry open with nail files.

I have to pause and take some deep breaths right now.

Power, running water and electricity are shut off at random, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Their rooms are overrun with bugs and rodents.

“Our energy is quite low, and we’re trying our best to survive,” Sahar says. Their “gilded cage” is only gilded on the outside. “We live amid ruins. You hear ‘palace,’ but we don’t feel like we’re in a palace at all.”

Some liar at the Saudi embassy in London told the Post they’re fine, fine. They can go anywhere they want to, it’s just that armed security guards have to go with them. Their mother says that’s a lie.

All four women are routinely tortured, sometimes by their own relatives.

“They come in, the men, our own half-brothers, and they beat us with sticks,” Sahar says. “They yell at us and tell us we will die here.”

Will things get better for them now?

What do you think.

“Sahar is very bright and has always made us laugh. She’s the eldest, and she’s an artist and a free thinker,” Al Fayez says.

“Maha is sensitive but has a penchant for business and politics. Hala is compassionate and brilliant; she majored in psychology and graduated at the top of her class. She loves to play the piano and compose music. Jawaher, my youngest, is very similar in character to Maha. She also loves music and hopes to earn a degree in sound engineering.”

Her daughters, she says, have much to offer. She says she taught each of them to be strong, to stand up to their powerful father, and now that has backfired.

She tried lawyers, but – surprise! – Abdullah refused to be questioned.

Sahar tells The Post that she’s constantly threatened by her father and has been told that death is the only way out.

“My father said that after his death, our brothers would continue to detain us and abuse us,” she says.

Al Fayez is frantic. Time, she says, is running out.

“My daughters want the right to see their mother, and I want to see my daughters,” Al Fayez says. “They are just trying to hold on to their sanity.

“They are suffering . . . with no hope for salvation.”

It’s a god damn outrage. We’re sucking up to these shits while this is going on.

Raif, Sahar, Maha, Hala, Jawaher.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)