posted October 29, 2013 10:50 AM            

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‘No Woman, No Drive’: Saudi Arabian music video spoofs ban on female drivers
By Max Fisher | October 27 at 1:02 pm

Saudi Arabian performer Hisham Fageeh, well known on the Arabic-speaking Web for his funny YouTube videos, which often contain a degree of social commentary, has posted a new video spoofing his country's practice of forbidding women from attaining driver's licenses. Fageeh parodies the Bob Marley song "No woman, no cry" with lyrics lampooning Saudi Arabia's car-related gender restrictions, which Saudi women are challenging this week with a mass protest drive.

It's in English (with Arabic subtitles) and it's dead-on. Here's the video, followed by a bit of background:

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZMbTFNp4wI[/video]

Regular readers may recognize Fageeh, who sometimes appears on the highly popular Saudi YouTube video series La Yekhtar, a skit-based program that uses comedy with a touch of social commentary to explore life for young people in Saudi Arabia. We've previously profiled La Yekhtar, hosted by Fahad Albutairi, who also appears in Fageeh's video above.

This video, like La Yekhtar itself, may surprise some Westerners, who typically only hear about Saudi Arabia in the context of oil, extremism or its severe gender-based restrictions. But there's much more to the country than that, and not just because the music and humor is much better than you'd expect from the common depiction of Saudi Arabia as "backwards." As Fageeh told the outlet Euronews, "If I’m being ambitious, I’d like ... for people to think that Arabs and Saudis can joke and they can laugh. I think that’s what is really important to us – that people abroad understand that.”

It's also a reminder that some Saudi men do actively support women's efforts for greater rights. When women drove in protest in 2011, many had brothers or husbands sitting in the passenger seats, taking photos and videos to help broadcast the demonstration and further the movement. The video nicely skewers not just the restrictions but, ever so subtly, the ideas behind it: that women are fragile and must be protected by men in ways that also just happen to put them under male dominance, that women exist primarily to serve men and reproduce, and above all that the driving restrictions are means of forcing women to submit even their freedom of movement to male control.

Read more about how Saudi women are challenging the driving ban – and how that effort has gained them some real influence.

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Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University.

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LOve & LIght ,
HRH
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Got the Wings of Heaven on my Shoes, I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose. You know it's all right. It's OK. I'll live to see another day. We can try to understand The New York Times' effect on man. Whether you're a Brother or whether you're a Mother, you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.

posted November 01, 2013 11:57 AM            

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Opinion: It’s Time to Change Women’s Place in the Arab World

Written by : Tariq Al-Mubarak
on : Monday, 7 Oct, 2013

Every part of the world has seen changes in women’s social status at different times in history. The authoritarian male–female relationship, which entails men viewing women as their property, once existed in Europe. Not that long ago, women in Europe gained the right to vote—and we can say the same thing about China prior to the Cultural Revolution. In the Arab world, we all know that women in general went through similar stages with regards to the right to education and work. Therefore, women in the Gulf are no different from their sisters elsewhere, apart from the delay in giving them their rights and reforming the patriarchal relationships between men and women. For decades, Gulf societies—and this varies from one Gulf state to another—have been fiercely fighting for women to receive no more than basic schooling.

Due to the influences of both globalization and mass communication, we have shifted to a new lifestyle where it is no longer possible to prevent change. Therefore, it is no longer possible to use terms like “Westernization” or to speak of ways to counteract that Western trend, as they both belong to the period of history where it was possible to control the scale of mutual influence among people around the world. Today, we find ourselves face-to-face with a new generation of women—women who are open to the world and who constantly draw comparisons between lifestyles in the Arab world and the West, thanks to the media and their experiences of studying abroad.

Tens of thousands of female students are learning what independence means, due to the several years they spend studying in the West. Young people, both men and women, have become responsible for building their personalities and giving a special meaning to their lives. This new self-regard is crucial to forming their hopes for the future, and it cannot be ignored simply because it is a cultural trait, especially in an open world such as ours today.

Those monitoring the language of women on social networks right now will notice a tone indicative of suppressed anger that results from the difference between their own sense of self and their position in the current social system. Their anger largely wells up from the need to recognize the individuality of women in the world we live in today, whether we like it or not. This individuality is being violated in several ways. Women are viewed as a burden on men in many dealings with the government. They are unable to move around the cities in which they live unaccompanied by a man due to a lack of public transportation or restrictions on women driving cars. They sign up to a broken system of marriage—broken because of the values on which it was established and its authoritarian nature. And that is not to mention other issues, including divorce and child custody.

We need to reconsider some concepts of Islamic jurisprudence, keeping in mind the human dignity that has been endorsed by all religions.

Some members of our societies have already objected to changes made in the status of women, such as allowing them to be educated and awarding them scholarships to study abroad. These detractors base their arguments on exaggerated assumptions and fears aimed at undermining key human rights. And after these changes have been made, their assumptions have been shown to be mere exaggerations—exaggerations made at the expense of a large part of society.

It is high time we moved forward with bringing about change, in order to live up to the aspirations of this promising generation of Gulf women.

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posted November 01, 2013 12:00 PM            

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Saudi writer who opposed ban on women driving held

By AYA BATRAWY, Associated Press | October 30, 2013

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi authorities have detained a columnist who supported ending his country's ban on women driving, activists said Wednesday.

The activists, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said Tariq al-Mubarak was called by investigators in the capital Riyadh concerning a stolen car over the weekend. When he arrived at the Interior Ministry's Criminal Investigation Department on Sunday, he was interrogated instead about his role in a campaign launched by reformers seeking the right of women to drive in the kingdom.

When his friends were informed they could pick him up at the investigator's office, they too were detained for several hours and questioned over the campaign's activities, activists said.

Human Rights Watch and activists who know al-Mubarak say he remains in detention with no access to a lawyer. The New York-based organization called for al-Mubarak's immediate release and on authorities "to stop harassing and trying to intimidate activists and women who defied the driving ban."

The spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Mansour al-Turki, could not be reached for comment.

In a column published in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat the day of his arrest, al-Mubarak said extremists are intimidating people from exercising their rights. He said the courts in Saudi Arabia do not have sufficient provisions to deter those who threaten and terrorize others from exercising their freedoms because "rights and freedoms ... are not instilled in our culture, nor our interpretation of religion."

Al-Mubarak, who also works as a schoolteacher, was among a core group of active young Saudis calling for women's right to drive.

Around 60 women claimed they got behind the wheel Saturday to oppose the ban. The campaign sparked protest by the kingdom's ultraconservative religious establishment.

The reformers behind the Oct. 26 driving campaign say their efforts are ongoing and that they continue to receive videos by women filming themselves flouting the driving ban.

The activists told The Associated Press that they have been followed for the past several days and are anticipating arrest. They have put in place contingency plans and emergency numbers for journalists and rights organizations to call in case they are detained.

At least two women have been fined recently by police for driving, the activists said. Samia El-Moslimany said she was given a nearly $135 fine for driving in the kingdom, though she has a U.S. driver's license.

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LOve & LIght ,
HRH
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I seen a girl on a one-way corridor, stealin' down a wrong-way street, for all the world like an urban toreador she had Wheels on - on her Feet.
Well, the cars do the usual dances, same old cruise and the curbside crawl, but the rollergirl - she's takin' chances, just love to see her take them all.

posted August 24, 2014 04:49 AM            

ISIS Email To Family Of Executed American Journalist James Foley Revealed

U.S. police officers thinking you have it so bad living in fear about if you're going to live to go home at the end of your shift in the same condition you started it in or not, then you should consider becoming a writer.

posted August 16, 2016 12:37 PM            

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Originally posted by HRH-FishAreFish:
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, "Syria has been the most dangerous country in the world for journalists for more than two years. In addition to Foley, at least 69 other journalists have been killed covering the conflict there..."

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