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[ by Charles Cameron — how a half-baked, re-raked tale from 2007, now showing on my local Facebook, gets things all wrong ]
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Let’s set the record straight.

It seems that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times did the amplification in this case. He tweeted, and Mia Farrow retweeted him, so we know what he said:

!! RT @NickKristof: No words: A Saudi woman is gang-raped by 7 men; then a Saudi court sentences her to 200 lashes! http://t.co/Vm6M6AzwZG

— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) September 27, 2013

I can’t find Kristof’s original tweet, I guess he’s deleted it. About the same time Mia Farrow was RTing it, though, and thus saving it for the record, he tweeted:

I'm wondering (via @JMHall_) if the Saudi case that the Examiner is reporting is the old 2007 Qatif Girl lashing case, rather than a new one

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) September 27, 2013

And if you go to JM Hall‘s twitter stream, you’ll see that he was schooling Kristof on this one, and pointed him to an NYT piece from 2007. Funny, that — being an NYT piece and all…

**

Anyway, the word got out on Facebook and went at least a little viral. And that’s sad. Because while the story does illustrate the state of jurisprudence in Saudi in 2007, the raped girl never actually received those 200 lashes — she was personally pardoned by the King.

Which should be a reason for rejoicing, not condemnation.

But here’s how it was presented on my FB page —

That does somewhat encourage the reader to think she did in fact receive those lashes, doesn’t it?

**

I understand, Nick Kristof tweeted it — and he’s the good guy who helps a whole heap of socially beneficial causes around the world that deserve all the support and encouragement he can bring them. I’m not disputing that, in fact I’ll gladly stipulate it.

But the story was wrong, and wrong in a damaging way. And forwarding or endorsing this sort of thing makes me very sad. Let me explain why.

The Examiner.com is an outfits that “operates a network of local news websites, allowing ‘pro–am contributors'” — nothing wrong with that, you just need to be careful when you read them, in other words.

The Examiner article in question quotes the Clarion Project, calling it “the women’s rights-centered news portal” when it’s far better known as the source of a whole lot of anti-Islamic propaganda — the Muslim organization CAIR lists Clarion among the “Islamophobia Network’s inner core” groups, while Clarion views CAIR with similar distaste. Okay, maybe they cancel each other out, let’s stipulate that, too.

But the article then states that the Clarion piece was posted “on Sept. 22, 2013” — whereas if you click through, you’ll find it’s actually dated Thu, November 15, 2007 — it’s 5 going on 6 years old. So why drag it up again now?

**

Retired US diplomat John Burgess who blogs about Saudi Arabia quotes to us, in a blog post from December 2007 and titled ‘Qatif Girl’ Receives Saudi Royal Pardon, an article from Agence France Presse in Riyadh, also dated December 2007, which can tells us what actually happened — how this unhappy story ended:

RIYADH (AFP) — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has pardoned a teenage girl sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes after being gang raped, Al Jazirah newspaper reported on Monday.

The ruling against the 19-year-old girl in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom had attracted widespread international condemnation, including from human rights groups and the White House.

The Arabic language daily said it had been informed of the royal pardon from its own, unidentified, sources.
But in the same article, the kingdom’s Justice Minister Abdullah bin Mohammad bin Ibrahim Al Shaikh told the paper the king had the “right to overrule court judgements if he considered it benefiting the greater good.”
The minister added that the king, who is viewed by many as a cautious reformer, was concerned with “the needs of the people and the court judgments that are made against them.”

Got that? Pardoned. By the King. Who is viewed as a cautious reformer.

I hope Kristof and Farrow have let their friends know…

**

So the Examiner writer whose work Kristof and others are quoting has:

picked up a nasty story from Saudia Arabia almost six years ago,

that actually didn’t end in a girl being given 200 lashes for being raped

but resulted in the King personally pardoning her,

thus moving Saudi jurisprudence in a very welcome new direction

— and posted it without any of the redeeming parts, with attribution to a group that’s not exactly friendly to the House of Saud, and getting the date wrong by almost six years in the process… And then well-meaning, generous people — Nick Kristoff and some of my friends among them — circulate this ugly and incomplete story, without first checking to see what truth there is to it.

I quoted a source without checking its veracity only the other day [1, 2, 3], so I’m in no position to go around blaming people who don’t check their sources. But seeing this particular story of the 200 lashes go viral makes me sad — because repeating it only stirs up righteous anger, disgust and hatred.

Rape is terrible. A penal code that sentences people to 200 lashes is way, way beyond my sense of justice. But I don’t believe stirring up hatred between nations or against religions is the path we want to choose…

[ by Charles Cameron — some of my own poems, some of my own theology, and a damn fine French police procedural on Netflix ]
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Engrenages / Sprial, season 4 episode 9

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Madhu, a wonderful friend of this blog, encouraged me some while back to post some of my poems here. I don’t do it often, and I hope you will at least tolerate it when I do.

This one, for instance:

The rolling dice
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That there is a murder to be committed, this the god knows, that the car
travelling through the woods contains victim and victor paired like dice strung
on a rear-view mirror, this the god knows, but it is the tops of trees
the god attends to, oblivious of the car which moves on its inerrant way
between them, the topmost branches it she or he observes, the upper
and as the car is first heard approaching, middle, and as it rolls into view
in left field, lower branches, the car now drawing his attention, riddle
of the two men still obscured by deflecting windows, roof doors tyres and

the leaves, the fallen, as though the two men from their high estate had fallen
to this, to the ground, among leaves which become mulch, the one sooner
and the other later, man become mulch as the god had become man, a
seasoning, of the ground, fall, a leavening of the earth, spring, in that primal
and primordial turning of planets and years on which between tree top
and mulch, between before and when with no after, two men’s dice are rolled.

**

As you know, I’m interested in the workings of the imagination, and find much of its power concentrated in the specific theologies and rituals of the world’s religions. My poems, accordingly, allow me to explore themes at the intersection of human behavior in all its light and shade, with the divine, in all its brilliant clarity, depth of heart, and, well, ineffableness, inscrutablemness, indescribability.

Indescribable? The word the Athanasian Creed uses is Incomprehensible:

As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible.

You see, for my purposes the word god refers precisely to a greater unknown that nevertheless permeates and can inspire us — and simply saying that indescribable is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent gives us very little understanding. Inspiration and revelation are, for me, poetic openings on what cannot in any definitional sense be known, but from which our lives can glean radiance, love, clarity, courage.

**

In my attempt to glean some of that harvest for myself, and to spread some of what I glean around in words, I have found myself writing a long, continuing series of poems that take their central motif from films. If god, or whatever name you might use to point to that Incomprehensible — that medium “in which we live and move and have our being” — if that is indeed conscious of all that is, I’m inclined to wonder how it (he, she, other, all or none of the above) perceives, in a way that makes sense to me.

And the “seeing” that most extends my own outward perception of the world is the seeing done by cameras and brought to me by movies. So I give “god” in this series of poems all the zooms, overhead shots, close-ups, jump cuts, helicopter rides, narrative thrust, slomo, freezeframe and other tricks that film is capable of… to get a human glimpse of an omni-director who might even, like Hitchcock and Renoir, choose to make a cameo appearance in his (her its or other) own film.

And what films do I use? The one’s I’m watching between fatigue and sleep, for late-night entertainment — usually thrillers, and on Netflix. The poem above and the two which follow were written this last week, triggered by an episode of Engrenages, a French policier [trailer here] which shows in the UK under the title Spiral, and which has been called “France’s answer to The Wire” in this Guardian write-up from an early season: Meet Spiral’s feminist anti-hero.

I like it very much — but have to put it on pause from time to time, when a poem comes on through.

**

Okay, here are the other two poems from the set of three, drawn from my viewing of Engrenages, season 4 episode 9:

Still rolling
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The spade wasn’t used, wasn’t needed, wasn’t necessary, the dice rolled,
no murder was committed, did the god know this, no, that the car
traveling through these trees would roll back the two men out of the woods
and into some new relation, clearer for being less fearful, though
he wild with hope and he sweating with regret might yet change course
as the god already knew or might know or might not if there be such
a they it she or he know, passionate impassive or nonexistent, or might
mightily decide — but the dice had rolled, the car parts the trees, departs

the woods, burial and the eventual arising of young two leafed tree sprouts
will continue though the car has left to right of view, and still, moved,
the god sees, observes, reflects, and builds, in his own extended image,
narratives of birth and eventful or eventless lives and meaningless or
on some perhaps many occasions meaningful deaths, and — who knows,
perhaps the god if any, rebirths after eventful nonevents, and thus onwards.

and this one:

Stopt
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And then again the car, in the woods, its doors wide open like wings,
surely the god would lift the car above treetops, clouds, into some other,
some blue, some empyrean, yonder, where murder would no longer
be needed, necessary, where no dice would roll but puffballs,
tossed clouds. hither and yon without pattern or purpose, repeating
yet that eternal pattern, that this car so still might forever roll,
this breath so quiet might breathe, life under the trees and under these
stars continue, continue, one death less than the god expected, the

car wings watching to carry the spirit windward, deprived of the death,
the murder uncommitted is no murder but if it be committed, even
here late in the day in the woods, in this word, committed, then
there is murder under the high trees a few paces from the sad car, the
corpse carrier, the fortuneless car carriage, and a man who stood
upright yet walked crooked perhaps is fallen, flat, dead and truly buried.

**

Caroline Proust as police captain Laure Berthaud, in Engrenages

Please feel free to comment on any or all of this: the ideas about a greater-than-human perception, poetry, cinema, Engrenages, these particular poems…

[ Charles Cameron — receiving messages from the dead via Twitter ]
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I was surprised late last night when a tweet from the account of the late American jihadi Omar Hammami showed up in my Twitter stream:

[arabic text, hit “refresh” if the tweet-image is slow loading]

— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013

It was in Arabic as you can see, so I took it to Google Translate — which never quite makes sense but almost — and thought I recognized it, checked it out with the Quranic Arabic Corpus translation section, and it did look very much as though what @abumamerican had posted was from the Quran 7. 43:

Praise to Allah, who has guided us to this; and we would never have been guided if Allah had not guided us.

I checked with whoever was posting in @abumamerican’s name, and got the reply “you r right. Sura E Alaraf”.

**

Okay, that’s one part of any Islamist communication that interests me a great deal, and others often not so much — the epigraph, the scriptural basis on which the communication in question is based. Everything that follows should be read as a possible variation on that theme — see my earlier ZP posts Speak the Languages, Know the Modes of Thought and especially Close reading, Synoptic- and Sembl-style, for parallels, patterns.

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In any case…

Follow for current updates on #Alshabab's atrocities in #Somalia with an inside view: @ibnjubayr @eyeonsomalia_ @sayfuladl

— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013

After that first, epigraphic tweet, a whole stream of further tweets from @abumamerican followed, many of them in English, and many of them indeed dealing with the notion that Omar Hammami had died remaining faithful to the Guidance, while his killer, Zubeyr / Godane, had gone wildly astray from it.

Others are better qualified than I to discuss the details of what the spectral @abumamerican said and will perhaps continue to tell us. For the moment, I can recommend these two sources:

Clint Watts post, Omar Hammami’s Ghost Tweets On Westgate, Kenya & Shabaab

Sahan Journal’s 8 Reasons Why al-Shabaab Killed al-Amriki

**

Keep your eyes open, there will be more…

[ by Charles Cameron — a small devotional exercise for our sometimes too-secular world ]
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In the upper image of the pair above, a crowd in Raqqa, Syria, is protesting the desecration of a church by Islamist enthusiasts who had pulled down the cross atop a church. The people of Raqaa took to the streets in protest, chanting:

Syria belongs to Muslims & Christians.

The Roman Catholic devotion known as the Stations of the Cross involves a prayerful mini-pilgrimage around fourteen “stations” representing stages in the passion and crucifixion of Christ — each of which is traditionally marked with an image of the “station” in question. In the case illustrated in the lower panel above, the station is that of Simon of Cyrene, who was pressganged into bearing the weight of the cross on his shoulders for part of the way, to give the agonized Christ some relief.

The good people of Raqqa are thus enacting, informally, with courage and grace, the Station in which Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross. And there’s an echo here, too, of Christ’s injunction recorded at Luke 9.23:

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

There’s a spontaneous beauty that crosses the lines between two world religions — and secularism — in all this.

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But the cross itself also suffers its indignities, and thus the two images of the pair that follows can also be considered Stations of the Cross.

In the upper image (below), the cross is removed by State of Iraq and al-Sham militants from its proper station atop the church, to be replaced with their black banner one of their number is holding, while in the lower image we see another screen cap of the townspeople, who have retrieved the cross and are carrying it through the streets to safety:

The people are chanting:

Syria belongs to Muslims & Christians.

[ by Charles Cameron — of tweets, and telephones, and terminal points with teletype equipment ]
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The White House RTs Rouhani, Rouhani RTs State.

Is this a “sign of the times”?

Was any bookmaker offering odds on this happening?

**

Would I have been excited enough to want to write it up if I’d just found out, fifty years ago, that the White House had a “red telephone” that connected directly to the Kremlin?

I doubt it — but this article from the Smithsonian, There Never Was Such a Thing as a Red Phone in the White House informs us that it wasn’t a question of telephones either — it was…

two terminal points with teletype equipment, a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit and a full-time radiotelegraph circuit.

Now — why am I feeling just a tad saddened by that tidbit of lifelong learning?