Posted in: Honor Killings
Published on Jan 13, 2019 by Phyllis Chesler
Published by Israel National News
Rahaf's Saudi family will never, ever stop coming after her
The Saudi teen remains in real and terrible danger because she has renounced Islam. She has shut down her Twitter account due to death threats.
Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, a Saudi teenager, has just
tried to save her own life—and in so doing, has risked death for shaming her
family and her country.
Rahaf fled her family vacation in Kuwait, took a
plane to Bangkok, barricaded herself in her hotel room at the airport and began
posting about her plight on social media. She demanded political asylum.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. In this
case, the ammunition is digital and governmental.
Via her smartphone, Rahaf claimed that she had
renounced Islam and that her family would surely kill her if she was returned
to them. Rahaf obtained 90,000 followers on Twitter. The media began to cover her plight.
The Thai government had been about to deport her
back to the family which Rahaf claimed had beaten and imprisoned her for up to
six months at a time for minor, alleged offenses. And then, it changed its mind
and allowed Rahaf to meet with an official from the UN’s refugee agency
(U.N.H.C.R.).
Rahaf wanted asylum in either Australia or
Canada and both countries considered her request even as she
was being vetted for “refugee” status.
But make no mistake. She remains in real and
terrible danger. She has shut down her Twitter account due to death
threats. Her family will never, ever stop coming after her.
She is a disobedient woman and as such deserves
constant humiliation, beatings, broken bones, solitary confinement, and, if she
is lucky, a forced marriage to a man the age of her grandfather, who already
has three wives and twenty children. She is also an apostate. This is a capital
crime.
By now, her father and brother are probably
already in Thailand. They are both her “guardians” or “minders” and she has
absolutely no western-style “agency” over this matter.
They are claiming that she needs “medical attention.”
I have conducted four studies about honor killing globally. I am
now working on a fifth study which seeks to identify the variables associated
with successfully escaping from being honor killed. Rahaf exemplifies a
pattern.
For reasons as yet unknown, Rahaf has decided that
her life is worth preserving and that she no longer has to absorb the
normalized brutalization and subordination that Saudi women are fated to
endure. In addition, she has cannily used the power of social media to attract
attention to her plight. Further, she has been able to liaison with government,
international, or law enforcement authorities who believe she is in
danger—or who know that if they return her and she is “disappeared” or murdered
that they would be viewed as accomplices by a watchful world.
In this instance, the internet has played a crucial
role in her potential salvation.
So many other Saudi women and dissidents were not
as lucky. According to Ali Alyami,
the founder of the D.C. based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi
Arabia (CDHR), other Saudis have tried to save their own lives but have not
been successful. He notes Hamza Kashgari (2012) and Dina Ali Lasloom, (2017)
both of whom tried to escape after being labeled, respectively, a heretic and a
disobedient woman. They were both sent back to the Kingdom and have not been
heard from ever since. Alyami also notes how many men and women are literally
rotting in prison in Saudi Arabia as dissidents and feminists.
I
remember the tragic 1977 case of Saudi princess Mishaal bint Fahd al Saud,
who fell in love with a young man of her own choice and was trying to escape
from the Kingdom. Her fiancé (not her lover) was be-headed in a botched
execution and she was, mercifully, merely shot to death. Being an al Saud did
not spare her. Au contraire.
I
remember the forty-seven Saudi women who, in the early 1990s, launched the first Drive-In and
who were arrested, fired from their jobs, and placed under house arrest for
more than a year.
Today,
Eman Al-Nafjian languishes in prison where she is being tortured and sexually
assaulted as a campaigner for women’s rights.
The
feminist revolutions in the West have caught fire in the East where some of the
bravest people on the planet are demanding their freedom and dignity.
I
hope the world’s governments heed their cries and grant them political asylum.
They are Children of the Enlightenment and it is the midnight hour.
Rahaf
has just been granted asylum in Canada! I wonder how much it will cost them to
provide security for her for the rest of her life?
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