Last week one was sentenced to 11 years, another had to flee the country, a third could be arrested at any moment. And what were Manahel, Maryam and Fawzia al-Otaibi’s ‘crimes’? A few social media posts that outraged Saudi Arabia’s conservatives
In September 2022, Fawzia al-Otaibi was a week into a trip to her home country of Saudi Arabia, staying with a friend near the Bahrain border, when her phone rang. As soon as she heard the male voice on the other end of the line, she realised that returning had been a terrible mistake.
It was a police officer who, in 2019, had tracked her down and fined her for public indecency after she had posted a video on her Snapchat account, showing her dancing in jeans and a baseball cap at a concert in Riyadh. She and her two sisters, Maryam and Manahel, had become targets in a campaign of arrests, threats and intimidation by the Saudi authorities after they had used their popular social media channels to post about women’s rights. For her, the dancing clip wasn’t a political statement; it was just about sharing a happy moment with her followers.
After the fine, Fawzia left Saudi Arabia for Dubai and hadn’t been back to her home country in three years. She thought the authorities had forgotten about her. She was wrong.
The sooner we can stop being dependent on fossil fuels so shitholes like this place can go back to being irrelevant the better. Medieval opinions with unlimited money, what could go wrong?
Goes from a tangent immediately to nuking millions of people, at least all their livelihoods and culture.
I get the rage against the above-mentioned medieval approach to anything, let alone affairs of humans, but if we go with the nuking way for these, we can hardly find a country not deserving of nuking, even just taking current/recent things about them in mind.
The alternative is continued conflict and death in the middle east as well as continued death or the planet from climate change. I think that takes precedent over the obscenely rich who use slavery to build vanity projects.
