Alan Taylor, writing in Tempers Flare During Protest Against the Dakota Access Pipeline for The Atlantic, sets up Robyn Beck’s photo essay:

In south central North Dakota, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have been joined by hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in a protest against the ongoing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.8 billion oil pipeline meant to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields through the Dakotas and Iowa, to Illinois. Over the weekend, protesters were attacked by dogs and sprayed with pepper spray after clashing with private security contractors at a site being bulldozed for the DAPL, which—according tribal officials—was damaging burial and cultural sites. The tribe and its allies have been battling the pipeline construction on the ground and in the courts, fearing not only destruction of sacred cultural sites, but the endangerment of their water supply should an oil spill ever occur.

The United States has a horrible record with treaties and honoring the lands of Native Americans. Given the most worthless parcels of land, Indians find ways to survive, yet, when White Men discover unbeknownst wealth\, all deals are off and the fights begin anew.

Sara, writing for 350.org, emails:

Friends,

Over the weekend, peaceful protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline were met with guard dogs and pepper spray while defending sacred burial grounds from bulldozers. This is shocking and saddening, but it’s also a wake up call.
If built, Dakota Access would carry toxic fracked oil from North Dakota across four states and under the Missouri River, immediately upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. That makes it a threat to the sacred land and water of Native communities and a disaster for the climate.
Tribal leaders are taking the Army Corps of Engineers to court over the unjust pipeline approval process, but President Obama could step in any time and say “no” to this whole thing — like he did for Keystone XL.
Tell President Obama to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Sign the petition today.

For months, thousands of Indigenous activists have set up resistance camps along the pipeline route in a historic moment of nonviolent resistance. We know that to defeat a pipeline, it takes a movement of people from all corners of the nation.

It’s Keystone XL all over again. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is rushing to approve this dirty oil pipeline that would stretch over 1,100 miles. And the construction continues, despite the irreparable damage the pipeline would cause to our climate, culture, and communities.

Can you sign our petition telling President Obama to join the tribal nations and say no to the Dakota Access Pipeline?

Building pipelines used to be easy for the fossil fuel industry. Thanks to years of work by the climate movement, they now face opposition everywhere they turn.

Let’s show them what we’re made of—and help defeat Dakota Access for good.

Onwards,
Sara for 350.org team

To be alive and working in the United States of America in the 1950’s was something of miracle. You were living in the world’s greatest nation and the booming middle class was fueling an economic expansion unlike any the nation had experienced and one in three workers was a member of a union. That number was multiplied by owners of non-unionized companies—like the one my father worked for—who knew that if they didn’t match union wages in their industry then they soon be dealing with a union shop themselves.

Thanks to union busting and terrible trade deals that shipped good-paying American jobs overseas where workers would toil for pennies on the dollar, only about one in 10 American workers are part of a union and the Middle Class built by organized labor is constantly shrinking.

Jon Schwarz, writing in Happy Labor Day! There Has Never Been a Middle Class Without Strong Unions for The Intercept explains:

The entire Republican Party and the ruling heights of the Democratic Party loathe unions. Yet they also claim they want to build a strong U.S. middle class.

This makes no sense. Wanting to build a middle class while hating unions is like wanting to build a house while hating hammers.

Sure, maybe hammers — like every tool humans have ever invented — aren’t 100 percent perfect. Maybe when you use a hammer you sometimes hit your thumb. But if you hate hammers and spend most of your time trying to destroy them, you’re never, ever going to build a house.

Likewise, no country on earth has ever created a strong middle class without strong unions. If you genuinely want the U.S. to have a strong middle class again, that means you want lots of people in lots of unions.

The bad news, of course, is that the U.S. is going in exactly the opposite direction. Union membership has collapsed in the past 40 years, falling from 24 percent to 11 percent. And even those numbers conceal the uglier reality that union membership is now 35 percent in the public sector but just 6.7 percent in the private sector. That private sector percentage is now lower than it’s been in over 100 years.

Not coincidentally, wealth inequality – which fell tremendously during the decades after World War II when the U.S. was most heavily unionized – has soared back to the levels seen 100 years ago.

Only the power of masses of people can defeat the power of masses of money.

In 1931 Florence Reece asked Which side are you on? Today, the question still stands.

Found on a postcard sent by Cousin John West from Wales:

Thou shall:

1. Worship sheep
2. Drink beer
3. Wear three feathers with pride
4. Not slay dragons
5. Love rugby
6. Not be too friendly with the English
7. Keep a welcome in the hillside
8. Learn our Anthem (not just the chorus)
9. Eat and “enjoy” leek soup
10. Congregate and drink on International match days

Correct at time of Sermon on the Mount(ain Ash)

More after the jump… Continue Reading »

It would have been a dramatic page one lead story in the Plain Dealer. ¶But it turned out to be just another piece of corporate propaganda posing as news. ¶The Greater Cleveland Partnership endorsed its Mayor Frank Jackson’s income tax increase. Was anyone surprised? This is prelude to a strong push by the PD for the Jackson tax hike. It was a free page one ad. ¶The story led the PD on Sunday August 28th as if it were a major event.

It would have been had the GCP had NOT endorsed the tax increase. Now that would have been news.

However, finding Joe Roman and his corporate gang in favor of an increased tax on working stiffs hardly seems front page news. The GCP has strong-armed mayors, council member and county council members into huge debt for their desired projects to benefit private interests. We are getting the bills.

Happy Labor Day.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership—made up of the top corporate/legal bosses of the city—NEVER rejects a tax that isn’t aimed at them.

And believe me none are aimed at real wealth.

The list they’ve pushed on the public is long:tThey are the sports sin tax, the arts sin tax, the hike in the sales tax for the convention center, the so-called medical mart and the 600-room money-draining county-owned hotel. Not to mention the new County headquarter building. As Jackson said they’ve given billions of dollars.

The list is long. The reminders to voters mostly absent. The PD never Continue Reading »

Ralph Nader, in President Obama: Will You Speak to the Civic Community? writes to President Barack Hussein Obama:

Dear President Obama,

There is much commentary these days about your legacy and your continued strivings to further extend your administration’s reach in the remaining months of your second term of office. Your recent expansion of public land reserves and the large expansion of our country’s ocean sanctuaries in the regions surrounding Hawaii and Guam are described as part of your environmental legacy.

I write once again to invite you to meet with the Washington-based, full-time nonprofit civic action and service community. On several occasions during your presidency, I have recommended that you speak to a thousand or more leaders of the national civic community in a downtown D.C. hotel ballroom or auditorium such as historic Constitution Hall.

Nonprofit organizations have millions of dues-paying members throughout the country supporting the fundamental bulwarks and seed corns of our beleaguered democracy.

They cover the important advocacy areas of peace, civil liberties and civil rights, antipoverty and health, consumer protection, environment, labor safety, access to justice, worker rights and many traditional secular and religious charities Continue Reading »

I stopped watching the presidential debates when the League of Women Voters declared that the newly instituted corporation, The Commission on Presidential Debates, would “perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.” Seven debates (soon to be eight) later we can see just how big a fraud the commission has been.

Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein emails:

Here’s the story of how the elites deceived the American public:

1988 was a milestone year.

Up until then, the League of Women Voters impartially sponsored presidential debates.

That setup didn’t cut it for Democrats and Republicans, which had corporate interests in mind.

So they teamed up to create a corporation called the Commission on Presidential Debates. They set out to deceive Americans by using an official-sounding word like “commission” in their name.

Think about it: Political opponents were willing to work together for the greater evil.

The League of Women Voters immediately withdrew its sponsorship of the presidential debates because the demands of the establishment parties would — in its own words — “perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.”

Even when Donald Trump ran for president in 2000, he said it was “disgraceful and amazing” that the commission on presidential debates could “get away with” keeping candidates out of the debates. In true Trump fashion, he threatened to sue if another presidential candidate’s lawsuit to open up the debates failed.

We’re done with being deceived.

We’re calling for a real debate — one run by an impartial group that isn’t swayed by the scent of the dollar or bullied by establishment elites.

And if Jill doesn’t get on the debate stage, you can bet we’ll be outside Hofstra University demonstrating for justice for the American people.

Tell the media you will no longer be deceived. It’s time to open up the debates and allow all four candidates on stage.

It’s in our hands!
The Stein/Baraka Campaign Team

I didn’t either.

[Update @ 0614: To the names Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid and Megan Rapinoe we can now add Nate Boyer.

Kaepernick explains taking the knee.

We [Kaepernick and Reid] were talking to [Nate Boyer, the former Army Green Beret and long-snapper] about how can we get the message back on track and not take away from the military, not take away from pride in our country but keep the focus on what the issues really are. As we talked about it, we came up with taking a knee because there are issues that still need to be addressed and there was also a way to show more respect for the men and women that fight for this country.

Four down, 46 to go to get to a movement.]

Then there were three. In the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie, it’s an organization, and the movement cannot be far away.

Guardian Sport, writing in ‘It was a little nod to Kaepernick’: Megan Rapinoe kneels for Star-Spangled Banner for The Guardian, explains:

Colin Kaepernick’s protest against racial injustice in the US appears to be slowly spreading with the soccer international Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the national anthem before Seattle Reign’s NWSL game against the Chicago Red Stars on Sunday.

Kaepernick’s protest first came to prominence last week, and has sparked debate across America. His latest refusal to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner came on Thursday when his team, the San Francisco 49ers, played the San Diego Chargers. He was joined by his team-mate Eric Reid.

Yesterday I commented on a guest editorial by Rosemary Bunt and also sent the comment as a letter to the editor to The North Royalton Post. Latter in the day I noticed that the newspaper group’s publisher, Bruce Trogdon, had also written about Kaepernick’s protest. Trogdon is not happy:

I am all for free speech, being the Libertarian that I am. So by all means, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick should be able to sit for the national anthem. He should also be able to continue to wear his Fidel Castro/Malcolm X T-shirts to press conferences.

And then he should be able sit on his unemployed butt because that is what he would be if he worked for me.

As a Libertarian, I also believe in the right of the business owner to run his business as he sees fit, to hire and fire employees based on whether they are good or bad for his business.

If I owned the 49ers, I would say, “Sure Colin, we support your right to say what you think.” And then I would cut him so fast it would make your head spin. The faster cancer is cut out, the better.

Football is a business, and Kaepernick has a $100 million contract. I would suggest to him that he latch on to some kind of football team in his beloved Communist Cuba. Maybe his buddy Fidel would give him $100,000,000.

The goal of such firings is, of course, to smack down the dissenters. Union busting capitalists and their thugs would agree whole heartedly with Trogdon’s stance that the faster cancer is cut out, the better.

You’re not in good company Bruce. Perhaps there is more than a little Jonathan E. (Fast forward to timemark 1:51:05) in Colin Kaepernick .

Happy Labor Day!

Cousin, and shipmate, John West shipped us two Scottish flags this week. The first is the Royal Standard of Scotland. The second (mouse over the above image to view) is the National Flag of Scotland, also known as St. Andrew’s Cross or The Saltire.

Thanks to John’s generosity we now have the complete set of flags for Gaelic peoples in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. The next step, I think, is to purchase a nautical flag pole with yardarm and gaff so that we can fly all four at once beneath our own flag.

Rosemary Bunt wrote this week’s guest column for the North Royalton Post on the topic of San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick under the unfortunate headline: You can’t fight racism sitting down. (I’m sure this was a copyeditor’s, and not Bunt’s, choice of words.)

I replied:

Good morning Ms. Bunt,

I would remind you of other African Americans who chose to sit: Rosa Parks and the dozens of other NAACP members of which Parks was only one, who volunteered to sit and not be moved as an act of civil disobedience.

I would recall to you Joseph McNeil, Izell Blair, Franklin McCain and David Richmond who sat at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and who were later joined by other student members of SNCC in Winston-Salem and Durham and Raleigh and Charlotte and Fayetteville and High Point and Elizabeth City and Concord.

I would refresh your memory concerning gold medal winner Tommie Smith and bronze medal winner John Carlos who, at perhaps the most personal moment in their lives, stood with heads bowed and fists raised at the 1968 Summer Olympics as a silent protest to the hate and prejudice and bigotry in their country.

I would encourage you to consider the actions of the 30 footballers at the University of Missouri who just last year sat down in protest of University President Bowen Loftin’s failure to take action against a pervasive and hostile culture of racial hatred on the school’s Columbia campus.

Finally, I would like you take note of the courage of Colin Kaepernick who has now morphed his protest (and been joined by teammate Eric Reid) by choosing to take a knee during the singing of our national anthem, an action of particular significance in American sports.

I sincerely hope that Kaepernick and Reid inspire others to follow suit.

Do all you can to make today a better day,

Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write

So, how easy is this whole persuasion game? This easy.

Adams, in backing up his statements in the video, links to Whatever you think, you don’t necessarily know your own mind by Keith Frankish.

Frankish, an English philosopher, writer and a visiting research fellow with the Open University in the UK as well as an adjunct professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete, lives in Greece. He begins:

Do you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question. We all know what we think, don’t we?

Most philosophers of mind would agree, holding that we have privileged access to our own thoughts, which is largely immune from error. Some argue that we have a faculty of ‘inner sense’, which monitors the mind just as the outer senses monitor the world. There have been exceptions, however. The mid-20th-century behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle held that we learn about our own minds, not by inner sense, but by observing our own behaviour, and that friends might know our minds better than we do. (Hence the joke: two behaviourists have just had sex and one turns to the other and says: ‘That was great for you, darling. How was it for me?’) And the contemporary philosopher Peter Carruthers proposes a similar view (though for different reasons), arguing that our beliefs about our own thoughts and decisions are the product of self-interpretation and are often mistaken.

Evidence for this comes from experimental work in social psychology. It is well established that people sometimes think they have beliefs that they don’t really have. For example, if offered a choice between several identical items, people tend to choose the one on the right. But when asked why they chose it, they confabulate a reason, saying they thought the item was a nicer colour or better quality. Similarly, if a person performs an action in response to an earlier (and now forgotten) hypnotic suggestion, they will confabulate a reason for performing it. What seems to be happening is that the subjects engage in unconscious self-interpretation. They don’t know the real explanation of their action (a bias towards the right, hypnotic suggestion), so they infer some plausible reason and ascribe it to themselves. They are not aware that they are interpreting, however, and make their reports as if they were directly aware of their reasons.

Many other studies support this explanation.

In talking with Alex Jones, Adams hammers at his thesis from the git-go when he says: People are irrational all the time.

I love how Adams makes his point with both Rubin and Jones when they attempt to co-opt his message for their own purposes. Adams deftly calls them out for their own conformation bias in both interviews, repeatedly.

If we accept that we can’t trust our own minds—which Adams says is liberating—how might we reframe our reality.

For hosting the Republican National Convention, Cleveland received $50 million (as did Philadelphia for hosting the Democratic National Convention) from the federal coffers for the purposes of providing security during the convention. Setting aside why $100 million in tax payer dollars went to funding two private freak shows parties we have to ask where all that money went.

Much has been written about riot gear and assault rifles, but reading Sam Biddle’s piece this morning in The Intercept, I have to wonder: what else might now be in the hands of Cleveland police?

Biddle, reporting in Leaked Catalogue Reveals a Vast Array of Military Spy Gear Offered to U.S. Police, writes”

A confidential, 120-page catalogue of spy equipment, originating from British defense firm Cobham and circulated to U.S. law enforcement, touts gear that can intercept wireless calls and text messages, locate people via their mobile phones, and jam cellular communications in a particular area.

The catalogue was obtained by The Intercept as part of a large trove of documents originating within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where spokesperson Molly Best confirmed Cobham wares have been purchased but did not provide further information. The document provides a rare look at the wide range of electronic surveillance tactics used by police and militaries in the U.S. and abroad, offering equipment ranging from black boxes that can monitor an entire town’s cellular signals to microphones hidden in lighters and cameras hidden in trashcans. Markings date it to 2014.

Cobham, recently cited among several major British firms exporting surveillance technology to oppressive regimes, has counted police in the United States among its clients, Cobham spokesperson Greg Caires confirmed. The company spun off its “Tactical Communications and Surveillance” business into “Domo Tactical Communications” earlier this year, selling the entity to another company and presumably shifting many of those clients into it. Caires declined to comment further on the catalogue obtained by The Intercept or confirm its authenticity, but said it “looked authentic” to him.

“By design, these devices are indiscriminate and operate across a wide area where many people may be present,” said Richard Tynan, a technologist at Privacy International, of the gear in the Cobham catalogue. Such “indiscriminate surveillance systems that are not targeted in any way based on prior suspicion” are “the essence of mass surveillance,” he added.

The technology included in the Cobham catalog is not science fiction or the product of some Truther’s addled mind. We should all think differently when any city starts putting up trash cans, wall clocks, smoke detectors, streetlights and bug zappers. They may not be as beneficial (for We The People) as a not-so-benevolent administration would have citizens believe.

We keep laughing, and maybe we can laugh Donald Trump back into the Trump Tower, but even if we can keep him out of the White House, I’m really worried about the beast he has drawn out of the darkness because his all-but-rabid followers will not go easily back into their caves if their leader is defeated.

During a speech here in Cleveland yesterday Vice President Joe Biden was heckled. Biden lost his cool and responded inappropriately.

Dan Roberts, reporting in ‘My friends died,’ heckler shouts. ‘So did my son,’ Joe Biden shoots back for The Guardian (no mention of the incident that I can find so far in local media), writes:

It was a retort perhaps only one American politician could have produced, and one that silenced the room.

Faced with a determined heckler during a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden reached for a very personal response in Cleveland on Thursday.

“My friends died, my American friends,” the heckler was shouting, remonstrating with the vice-president over US policy in Syria.

“My friend died,” he repeated, challenging Biden to explain his recent demand that Kurdish allies withdraw from captured Isis territory.

Interrupted again while trying to explain the complex Middle East policy, something snapped on stage after the third shout of “my friend died”.

“Will you listen? So did my son, OK?” shot back the vice-president, instantly silencing both the heckler and those in the crowd who had been trying to drown out the disruption by shouting: “Hillary, Hillary.”

Biden’s son Beau, an Iraq war veteran and former attorney general of Delaware, died of cancer last year at the age of 46.

I get that Biden was frustrated. I get that he is a man who has lost a wife, a daughter and a son. We’re not supposed to outlive our children, let alone our entire family. The death of Beau Biden was a personal tragedy for his father, but we all have lost people we loved.

That loss is not the equivalent of that of the man in the audience. Biden, by virtue of his position as the person a heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world, is culpable in the death of that man’s friend.

People die in wars and politicians—as well as those of us who elected them, or failed to prevent their election—are responsible for those deaths. We have their blood on our hands. We can pretend that that is not the case, but we can’t change the reality.

Sorry Joe, you, and we, owe that man an apology for your false equivalency.

Perhaps, I hope, that is what happened backstage after the speech.

Gold Medal Olympian Tommie Smith told Nancy Armour—reported in Tommie Smith, iconic 1968 Olympics activist, defends Colin Kaepernick’s protest for USA Today—that:

Colin is 28 years old and realizing that things are not quite like what they said it would be. He’s just speaking out (but) he used a platform that many Americans don’t agree with. He’s being vilified in how he brings the truth out. I support him because he’s bringing the truth out—regardless of how done. If it’s not done violently, at least he should be heard

Kaepernick’s public dissent has gown now to a protest of two and, perhaps taking a cue from Smith and Bronze Medal Olympian John Carlos, adopted an active posture.

From The Associated Press: Colin Kaepernick, 49ers teammate kneel during national anthem.

Colin Kaepernick and San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid kneeled during the national anthem Thursday night, continuing the quarterback’s preseason protest of American racial injustice and minority oppression.

Kaepernick and Reid dropped to one knee while a naval officer sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and dozens of military members unfurled an oversized flag at the Chargers’ Qualcomm Stadium.

Kaepernick received scattered boos when he dropped to a knee, but the protest was otherwise unremarked by the San Diego crowd.

I find myself wondering if the protest will spread (I think that will be the case) and if high school and college football players will follow (I find the latter much more likely than the former, but I do expect scattered reaction among high school players).

The BBC sent writer Linda Pressly to Northeast Ohio to report on the long-term opioid/heroin problem in the former colonies. The headline set me off: Smack In the suburbs. Like so many other social problems that only become problems when they affect the white suburbs, the current epidemic has been a problem for decades. (My own extended-family experience goes back decades.)

To their credit, the people at WCPN are not new to this story, but the BBC’s hanging the story on the suburbs tag makes me angry because of the tunnel vision behind the piece.

This is how Pressly begins:

The US is in the throes of a heroin and opioid epidemic—drug overdose has become the leading cause of accidental death, overtaking traffic accidents.

It is a health crisis with tentacles reaching across the social spectrum. Lorain County, in the state of Ohio, is mostly suburban and middle-class, with a large rural hinterland.

Its population is only 305,000 but for the last three years, the number of fatal opiate overdoses has hovered at around 65. This year it only took six months to reach that figure.

Avon Lake is the county’s wealthiest community—an upmarket [we would say upscale, JH] suburb of the city of Cleveland. Here, on the shores of Lake Erie, the scourge of opiates—prescription pills and street heroin—is tearing at the fabric of a tightly-knit neighbourhood.

Anyone paying attention (and paying attention is a real problem for us) would have seen the problem coming. Until recently we even dismissed the rising tsunami with the throwaway tag of Hillbilly Heroin (yeah white people were dying, but they were poor white trash so they didn’t count).

Sadly, until a scourge strikes White Middle Class Suburban Man, we all too often can’t be bothered.

Welcome to our nightmare.

Gene pissed his pants at time mark 2:50…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 8” with Ralph Ellison.

ELLISON: You know, I’m still thinking of your question about the use of Negro experience [How representative of the American nation would you say Negro folklore is?] as material for fiction. One function of serious literature is to deal with the moral core of a given society. Well, in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for that moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. The very center of Twain’s book revolves finally around the boy’s relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him. There is a magic here worth conjuring, and that reaches to the very nerve of the American consciousness—so why should I abandon it? Our so-called race problem has now lined up with the world problems of colonialism and the struggle of the West to gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased rather than lessened. Looking at the novelist as manipulator and depicter of moral problems, I ask myself how much of the achievement of democratic ideals in the U.S. has been affected by the steady pressure of Negroes and those whites who were sensitive to the implications of our condition, and I know that without that pressure the position of our country before the world would be much more serious than it is even now. Here is part of the social dynamics of a great society. Perhaps the discomfort about protest in books by Negro authors comes because since the nineteenth century, American literature has avoided profound moral searching. It was too painful and besides there were specific problems of language and form to which the writers could address themselves. They did wonderful things, but perhaps they left the real problems untouched. There are exceptions, of course, like Faulkner who has been working the great moral theme all along, taking it up where Mark Twain put it down.

I feel that with my decision to devote myself to the novel I took on one of the responsibilities inherited by those who practice the craft in the U.S.: that of describing for all that fragment of the huge diverse American experience which I know best, and which offers me the possibility of contributing not only to the growth of the literature but to the shaping of the culture as I should like it to be. The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it.

Again, Ellison knocks me over with his sense of purpose and vision. He is most likely not unique in his views, but I have not yet read of any other writers who has grasped this essential core of what being a novelist means. I confess that getting back on my feet after considering his words is difficult, but nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I’ve written about Saudi Arabia’s injustice toward Raif Badawi before and I continue to follow the story. I’ve known that the House of Saud, long aligned with Wahhabism, views Badawi as a dangerous threat to Islam. I did not know that in 2014, two years after Badawi was first arrested and later sentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes for the crime of insulting Islam, that then King Abdullah introduced laws defining atheism as terrorism aimed at stopping political and religious dissent that could “harm public order.”

This is acountry that we consider our friend and ally.

People don’t hate the United States because of our freedom.

They hate us because of the friends we keep.