One Year After He Was Flogged, Raif Badawi Remains a Prisoner

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One year ago today, a young writer was publicly whipped by his government for his writings. His words “insulted” his nation’s official religion, his government decreed. The worst part, of course, was that he published his words and that others in his nation read those words and even shared his opinions.

Today is the 1325th day he has spent in prison. After he was arrested, after a long trial, he was found guilty of having ideas that his country does not favor, even finds to be a threat. The authorities declared that his website “propagates liberal thought,” and the search for a punishment that it deemed proper took over a year to calculate. He spent that year in prison.

Raif Badawi’s writings include statements like this: “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear,” so the Saudi Arabian judicial system decided to live up to that observation.
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Good. Bad. Not Indifferent

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with Prince Hamlet. They are his old college buddies, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to attempt to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to, well, no one can figure out who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. [Emphasis mine.]

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather or to compare Klout scores but are indeed spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.
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In Memory of Ruqia Hassan Mohammed

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

ISIS found a way to make the story of Ruqia Hassan Mohammed even sadder and more infuriating than it already was. She was executed by the Islamic State last summer or fall, but ISIS’ communications experts kept this secret and used her social media accounts for months to pose as her and thus draw out her friends and allies to betray their locations.

Ruqia Hassan Mohammed was a Syrian Kurd who was born in 1985, studied philosophy, and in recent years became a reliable source of information about what life is like in a war zone, specifically, what life is like in Raqqa, Syria. In 2013 control of that city, which once had a population approaching a quarter-million people, changed hands several times. Chaos reigned. It was governed by the Assad regime, then government loyalists, then the Al Nusra Front, and then Daesh—the Islamic State.
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