Last week one was sentenced to 11 years, another had to flee the country, a third could be arrested at any moment. And what were Manahel, Maryam and Fawzia al-Otaibi’s ‘crimes’? A few social media posts that outraged Saudi Arabia’s conservatives


In September 2022, Fawzia al-Otaibi was a week into a trip to her home country of Saudi Arabia, staying with a friend near the Bahrain border, when her phone rang. As soon as she heard the male voice on the other end of the line, she realised that returning had been a terrible mistake.

It was a police officer who, in 2019, had tracked her down and fined her for public indecency after she had posted a video on her Snapchat account, showing her dancing in jeans and a baseball cap at a concert in Riyadh. She and her two sisters, Maryam and Manahel, had become targets in a campaign of arrests, threats and intimidation by the Saudi authorities after they had used their popular social media channels to post about women’s rights. For her, the dancing clip wasn’t a political statement; it was just about sharing a happy moment with her followers.

After the fine, Fawzia left Saudi Arabia for Dubai and hadn’t been back to her home country in three years. She thought the authorities had forgotten about her. She was wrong.

  • ealoe@ani.social
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    8 months ago

    The sooner we can stop being dependent on fossil fuels so shitholes like this place can go back to being irrelevant the better. Medieval opinions with unlimited money, what could go wrong?

      • Land_Strider@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Goes from a tangent immediately to nuking millions of people, at least all their livelihoods and culture.

        I get the rage against the above-mentioned medieval approach to anything, let alone affairs of humans, but if we go with the nuking way for these, we can hardly find a country not deserving of nuking, even just taking current/recent things about them in mind.

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          The alternative is continued conflict and death in the middle east as well as continued death or the planet from climate change. I think that takes precedent over the obscenely rich who use slavery to build vanity projects.

          • Land_Strider@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Good way to end continued conflict and death with this one simple trick. No more bad feels through media if you accept to take this one day/week/month of gruesome coverage! Who needs to work out, maybe just not put more wood to the underlying problems of conflict when you can simply sit in your comfy home halfway across the planet and not hear about Middle East after nuking it?

            Oh, climate change is caused by those who experience the effects the most, so they must be main reason why the climate is going bad? Look how they fucked up their environment, it is basically uninhabitable desert all around already! Those no-good oil-drilling bastards!

            On the topic of oil, we also would like to say that we purchase dirt cheap oil from them because our empire toppled the previous empire controlling them, and we agreed to keep slaving and harem-loving tribes in power and actually make them rich by buying oil from them. Oh well, we don’t like them being rich tho, so we sell them weapons to keep their slavery and harem-loving, also shariah law enforcing going, all the while taking their richness back into our pockets. That’s how good we are, and how bad they are. They basically ask for being nuked, am I right?

            /s after writing such bullshit inspired by the comment I’m replying.

            Edit: I assumed they are American, but in case they say “I’m not American”, my point is moot so let’s nuke the Middle East.

          • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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            8 months ago

            The alternatives are also more likely than getting any country with a nuclear arsenal to attack their energy supply like jfc