Activism

Badawi’s Absence Is a Presence at Prize Ceremony

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Raif is not a criminal. He is a writer and a free thinker: that is all. Raif Badawi’s crime is being a free voice in a country which does not accept anything other than a single opinion and a single thought.”—Ensaf Haidar

Ensaf Haidar, the wife of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, accepted the 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, this morning. Badawi’s absence was itself a presence at the ceremony. He remains in Dhaban Central Prison, where he was moved late last week, as I reported here at the time.

Badawi is the young Saudi writer who was found guilty of “insulting Islam” in his essays on his website and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes with a cane. On January 9, 2015, the first set of 50 blows was delivered in a public whipping. He has not been caned since. The international movement on his behalf, sparked by a young wife’s determination to make the world know her imprisoned husband’s name, led Amnesty International to declare months ago that it has received more signatures for petitions demanding his release than any other in its long and remarkable history. As far as I am concerned, Ensaf Haidar should be on every publication’s end-of-year list of Most Heroic People of 2015.

The European Parliament’s press release about the ceremony noted that Badawi is not the first honoree who was unable to accept the award in person; Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist in Myanmar, won the citation in 1990 when she was under house arrest and forbidden from leaving her country. In 2013, she was able to receive the prize in person. One hopes that Raif Badawi also is able to receive the prize in person someday and that a generation will not pass until that day. But one knows that the ongoing fight for justice and freedom of thought is, at its heart, supremely patient.
Read More

A Thank You from Movements.org

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The website Movements.org was launched last year as a tool to “crowdsource human rights.” It is a great idea. In the last five years or so, many crowdsourcing sites have been started and most of them are geared toward raising money for specific projects. Movements does not raise funds, but awareness.

If you know about a human rights violation and you think the world needs to know about it, you post a statement about it there in your language. Activists read about it and take it from there. On the other side, if you are an activist looking for a story that has not received much attention yet, several dozen new ones are posted each day. If you are someone who cares about human rights as an issue, as a philosophical idea, but you do not know where to begin, who to contact, or what to say, Movements.org is a fine place to start. In certain ways, it puts the human back into the phrase “human rights,” because the cases featured on the site are stories of individuals, not the usual eye-tiring and heart-saddening litany of overwhelming numbers.

Readers of this website know that I have recently featured the story of a photographer named Shawkan, who has been in prison in Egypt for two and a half years now. Today, Movements.org cited TheGadAboutTown.com in a section of the website called “Success Stories.”
Read More

Inside Anonymous: Covering The Collective

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the first time in its two-year history, The Gad About Town is presenting a guest post. I am profoundly happy about this, and I hope to present more in the future.

In recent weeks, I published four pieces about two different operations launched by the Anonymous movement (#OpParis, #OpParis, Day 2, and #OpKKK), and they are written from my perspective as an outsider looking in but with some trusted sources guiding me. I am an informed outsider.

Walter Yeates, also known as Smooth, is a reporter who has interviewed, on the record, leaders of and participants in the operations against Daesh under the banner of #OpParis.

Thank you, Smooth, for writing this and asking me to publish it. It’s an honor. What follows is his own account.—Mark Aldrich, The Gad About Town
Read More