The Nation

Wajeha Al-Huwaider with Phellicia Dell, Rebecca Lolosoli, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tina Brown (PRNewsFoto/The Daily Beast)

Terrible news from Saudi Arabia: After proceedings that stretched out over nearly a year and violated many legal norms, Wajeha Al-Huwaider, the prominent Saudi Human rights activist and co-organizer of protests against the ban on women drivers, has been sentenced to ten months in prison, along with her colleague Fawzia Al-Oyouni. (I interviewed Al-Huwaider here.)

Their crime? It’s a little complicated. They were accused of kidnapping and trying to help Nathalie Morin, a Canadian woman married to a Saudi, flee the country in June 2011. Morin, who has said her husband locks her in the house and is abusive, has been trying for eight years to leave Saudi Arabia with her three children. (There’s a so-far-unsuccessful campaign, spearheaded by her mother, to get the Canadian government to intervene.) Al-Huwaider says they were responding to a frantic text message from Morin, who said her husband had gone away for a week and left her locked in the house without enough food or drinkable water. When they arrived at the house with groceries, they were arrested.  

The two activists were found not guilty of kidnapping, but the judge convicted them of “Takhbib”—inciting a woman against her husband. Apparently helping an abused wife feed her children is a crime in Saudi Arabia. Can’t have that in a country where women need their male “guardians's” okay to travel, work, study or even undergo surgery, where fathers have automatic legal custody of children and the Koran, interpreted at the whim of judges, is the only legal code.

Al-Huwaider writes in an e-mail: 

We will be banned from traveling for two years following our release. We will be trapped in this women’s prison—that is, Saudi Arabia—for 3 years.

 

This is the first time in Saudi legal history that a travel ban has been imposed in a social case. This proves that the decision has really come from the Minister of Internal Affairs, and that they planned to prevent us from engaging in any human rights activities.

 

From the first session I knew that it was going to be very bad and I was always expecting the worst, but I didn’t think that the judge would be this aggressive.

 

As I see it now, it was a ‘good catch’ for the Wahabi court to convict two liberal women who have been campaigning for years to promote equality and women’s rights.

Al-Huwaider and Al-Oyouni have a month to appeal. Muslims for Progressive Values, a Canadian group, is appealing to leaders in Canada and Saudi Arabia.

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Americans can help them too:

Contact the Saudi ambassador and protest this absurd miscarriage of justice.

Contact President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and urge them to speak out about Saudi human rights abuses and make a public statement about this case. Obama can be contacted here or here.

Contact your congressional representative and senators and urge them to push the president and State Department.

Human Rights Watch has more details.

Michelle Bachmann protested against immigration reform in DC today. Read George Zornick's report here.

Representative Michele Bachmann at a rally outside the US Capitol on June 19, 2013. Photo by George Zornick.

Halfway through a passionate speech Wednesday that railed against comprehensive immigration reform, Representative Michele Bachmann asked if every person under the age of 18, amidst the crowd of hundreds, could join her on the small stage outside the US Capitol.

A surprising number of kids rushed up to the makeshift platform, filling it to a somewhat alarming capacity. Bachmann had to ask some to stand on the grass nearby instead. “We don’t want to collapse. Like our economy,” she cracked.

Then Bachmann hoisted up a lily-white infant. “Say hello to Terra. And say hello to America’s future,” she shouted, as the crowd went nuts. But, Bachmann quickly intoned, “little baby Terra is looking at a very different future.”

This rally, organized by Tea Party groups across the country and promoted by Glenn Beck on his Internet television empire for much of the past week, is basically the GOP’s worst nightmare. As party leaders and the consultant class try to convince the Republican base, 60 percent of which opposes a pathway to citizenship, to support an immigration bill, and as people like Senator John Cornyn frame their opposition as pro-reform but concerned about border security—well, you don’t want Michele Bachmann on the Capitol lawn, holding up white babies and talking about America’s future.

Representatives Bachmann, Steve King and Louie Gohmert organized the rally as a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate to show Congress—and specifically House Speaker John Boehner—that significant opposition to the idea of immigration reform exists inside and outside Congress.

Such voices have been largely marginalized in the reform debate so far, but the conservative base in the House, as we noted last week, is launching a push to force Boehner only to introduce bills that can pass with a majority of the Republican caucus. That is: only to introduce bills that do not offer a clear pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

There was, to be sure, a strong nativist tone to the rally. American and Gadsden flags abounded, as did the ever-present activists dressed up as Revolutionary War–era patriots. There were also signs: “Immigration Reform = Legalized Invasion.” Another large flag had a Jesus fish stylized with the stars and stripes; “Proud American Christian,” it read. “Shut the door,” read another. “No Amnesty for Illegals,” read several.

Bachmann and the other speakers knew their audience. “It looks like a beautiful family reunion to me. It looks like the American family is here, at your house,” Bachmann began her speech. “Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t real people that the politicians fear more than anything else. We’re seeing a lot of real people here today, and I’m so extremely grateful that you’re here.”

“Very quickly we are observing a nation that we no longer recognize,” Bachmann said. But she also apparently understood that her wider audience wasn’t limited to the people in attendance—and realized how this all might look. “And by that I mean, it has nothing to do with the color of anyone’s skin,” she continued. “It has nothing to do with anyone’s ethnicity. It has to do with our American creed: because bottom line, we are believers, and proud believers, in the Declaration of Independence.”

The heart of Bachmann’s speech, and many of the speeches Wednesday morning, was that a new wave of immigrants would further bankrupt an already broken state. “If you walk into that building, the United States Treasury, and you can get past the guards that are there, and you get over to the vault, and you say, by some miracle, ‘Would you open that vault?’—I’m just here to say, if they opened it, it would be moths and feathers that would fly out.” Her explanation of why baby Terra won’t have a future is that she would have to pay “up to 75 percent of her future income” to support an expanding welfare state.

Well, what about the CBO report, released yesterday, that said immigration reform will reduce deficits? The rally had an answer in the form of Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation expert, who assured the crowd with plenty of facts and figures that the CBO had it all wrong. In short: “The CBO is bullshit!” as one man shouted out during the lecture.

This is where, perhaps, the real danger to immigration reform lies, as members of Congress who are undecided contemplate their votes: the economic insecurity and distrust of government that have undergirded not only the Tea Party, but are also shared by plenty of other Americans these days.

That view was best expressed by a member of the Pittsburgh Tea Party who took the microphone at one point, as organizers encouraged attendees to do. “Why is it that instead of having NSA tap the phones of the American citizenry, they don’t go find out who these illegals are and who they’re calling back in their home countries, and to whom they are sending money—American money—back to their banks?” the man said. “These are the things that we want to know.”

Plenty of other signs spoke to this concern. “Exporting Illegals—Importing Jobs for Americans!” said one; “Amnesty = Cheap Votes + Cheap Labor.”

These folks share a common concern with senators like Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed liberal who spoke on the Senate floor Tuesday about the dangers of importing low-wage labor from Mexico when many Americans are out of work.

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For many people who attended the rally, these economic concerns were wedded with concerns for an explicitly white, Christian country—and combined with the fear of losing majority and political power.

“It will cause capitalism to crash,” one retired teacher from Moore County, North Carolina told me matter-of-factly about immigration reform. “Capitalism crashes, we’re into socialism.”

“These people [immigrants] don’t realize they’re being given all this stuff just to collect their votes so that people in power can gain more power—and they’re so ignorant,” she continued. “You know they spoke of their educational level, it averages the highest is about tenth grade. They’re being used as pawns. The people that are here are educated, they know what’s going on, they are aware. They also, most of them are Christian, okay, they have conscience. They know right from wrong—and it’s against their conscience just to see these people used as pawns,” she said as she sliced an apple in her folding chair. “They’re going to end up losing their freedoms. They’re just being led like sheep to the slaughter.”

Why do Aiyana Jones and Trayvon Martin matter? Read Mychal Denzel Smith’s argument here.

(AP Photo)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Revelations of the sweeping collection of data on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) require that Congress launch a grand inquest into the post-9/11 national security state. Special committees in both the House and the Senate, armed with subpoena power, should investigate the scope of activities, the legal basis claimed, the operational structure and the abuses and excesses with a public weighing of costs and benefits.

The “war on terrorism” has gone on for twelve years, and while President Obama says it must end sometime, there is no end in sight. Secret bureaucracies armed with secret powers and emboldened by the claim of defending the nation have proliferated and expanded. The surprise of legislators at the scope of NSA surveillance shows that checks and balances have broken down.

We now know that the NSA, apparently acting under the secret orders of the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), amassed phone records of and private information about Americans, drawing data from phone companies. These records admittedly give the NSA the ability to track the associations and the activities of anyone whom the agency chooses to target.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

President Obama meets with National Security staff in the Oval Office. President Obama will name Avril Haines (second on the right), a White House legal adviser, as deputy director of the CIA. (Reuters/Pete Souza/The White House)

There comes a point in most women’s lives when you realize that you’re perceived as public property. Maybe it’s the first time you’re catcalled, or maybe it’s when a teacher tells you to cover up. The experience can come in an infinite number of iterations; the only sure thing is that the first time is never the last time. Walking around in a female body means you are constantly reminded that your value exists in the way that other people—men, especially—look at you.

Stranger still, this being noticed or touched or commented upon is framed as a compliment—it’s not enough that women are meant to endure the neverending objectification, we’re actually supposed to enjoy it. Women are taught to be eager to please not just in our demeanor but in our appearance, and everyday harassment is presented as friendly conversation: “Why don’t you smile?!”

Recently it occured to me that the expectation that women enjoy male attention in all forms may be behind the many unfortunate media profiles of influential women. Whether a rocket scientist’s beef stroganoff or a White House counsel’s high heels—when it comes to covering successful women, the media prefers palatable over powerful. Articles like these are not always written by men, but they always seem to be written for them.

The most recent—and perhaps one of the most egregious—example comes from the Daily Beast, where the site’s first piece on President Obama’s pick for CIA deputy director Avril Danica Haines is headlined: “New CIA #2 Pick Used to Read Anne Rice Aloud at Her Bookstore’s Erotica Night.”

The article’s premise alone is sexist—would the racy reading habits of a male appointee ever be fodder?—but the content is even worse. A neighbor is interviewed about Haines, “reminiscing about when when she would rehab her apartment in ‘jeans or a pair of shorts’” and reporters Ben Jacobs and Avi Zenilman inexplicably include an explicit Anne Rice excerpt that Haines may have read. They paint a picture that rivals Penthouse Forum:

[The event] at the bookstore featured a room lit with red candles where guests held chicken tostadas, waiting to eat as Haines read aloud the opening pages of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaire, which features passages such as:

‘He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his hand, he thrust his sex into her.

‘He was holding her up as he did this, to gather her mouth to him, and as he broke through her innocence, he opened her mouth with his tongue and pinched her breast sharply.’

What possible purpose would including such an explicit passage serve other than to present a very sexual visual of Haines?

When taken to task on Twitter (by me and many others), Zenilman defended the piece by tweeting that the article “makes clear that her openness was refreshing,” and that the storyline was “appealing.”

But appealing to whom?

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When the presumed audience is always male, women’s objectification becomes the norm. A woman’s humanity, her intellect, talent and substance pale in comparison to how “appealing” she can be to men. And the danger of the male gaze is that it does tangible harm. When the media focuses on powerful women’s sexuality, their credibility is undermined. Research shows that when female politicians have their appearance covered—even favorably—she pays a price at the polls. And in everyday life, the assumption that women’s appearance must meet male approval isn’t just burdensome—it’s harassing. This is especially true for young women who bear the brunt of the male gaze everywhere from school to the airport.

In a media landscape where sexist hit pieces on powerful women are common, “appealing” profiles are especially insidious. But objectification is not a compliment, even when well-intentioned. Old habits die hard for men who have been raised to believe what they think about a woman is the most important piece of information they can relay. But ogling isn’t journalism, and until some men learn as much, we’re going to be stuck with a media that is more Peeping Tom than press.

Former Obama campaign staffers are protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. Read Zoë Carpenter’s report here.