On Trial for Tweets: Rajab’s Trial Postponed

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Since he was arrested on June 13, Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, has been kept in solitary detention in conditions so squalid that outside observers have verified the “toilet and shower are unclean, unhygienic, and filled with potentially disease-carrying sludge.” His trial for comments he posted online was scheduled to start today, July 12, but at the hearing the judge postponed the start until August 2.

A request from his lawyers to release him pending the start of the trial was rejected. Rajab remains in pretrial custody.

After two weeks in these conditions, Rajab was brought to a hospital in Bahrain with an irregular heartbeat. Blood tests proved that he also has a urinary tract infection and “low mononucleosis,” but he is not receiving medicine for these ailments.

Although he is being kept in solitary confinement, his right to privacy is regularly trampled: any visits from family or his lawyers are attended by Rajab, his family members or lawyers, and two police officers, who sit with Rajab and his visitors.
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Today in History: July 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, an hour-long silent film from France starring Sarah Bernhardt, debuted on this date in 1912 in New York City. It is the first foreign feature-length film of note to receive attention in America. It is one of the earliest feature-length films, period.

Adolph Zukor’s film company, Famous Players, imported it. The film was enough of a success that Zukor and other producers started to view feature-length films as viable and foreign films as a worthwhile investment. (Zukor later merged his company with Jesse Lasky’s company, Feature Play, and in 1927, their company became Paramount Pictures, the name the company still employs.)

Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth tells a story that Hollywood told and subsequently re-told (Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, in one example) many times: the affair in the 1590s between Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the affair that Robert Tombs refers to as the “final tawdry drama of Elizabeth’s reign.”
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Brave in the Face of Indifference

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Bravery is a skill. I do not know if I have cultivated it in myself. Bravery is, of course, not what one does in the absence of fear but what one can do—what one actually does—when fear is present.

[A comment: Today is December 21, 2016. I wrote the first draft of this column almost a year ago. Sadly, the only update to offer today is this one: All the parties described below are, simply, even more brave than they were several months ago. Ali remains in prison. His father posts updates each week and sometimes more frequently on social media. We learned this summer that he earned a university degree while in prison. Dawood al-Marhoon and Abed allahhassan al-Zaher also remain in prison. Raif Badawi remains in prison. He is starting to learn of the global movement that has grown around the fight to free him. Back to the column from October 2015:]
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