text:
On the gay Saudi diplomat
MUCH has been written about the Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles, Ali Ahmad Asseri, who has gone into hiding in the US after applying for political asylum for being gay and fearing execution if he returns to Saudi Arabia.
Michael Issikoff broke the story for NBC News on Sept. 11, reporting that Asseri had claimed in an interview by email that he felt his life was in danger after the Saudi Consulate found out he was gay, had a female Israeli Jewish friend and subsequently refused to renew his diplomatic passport. According to the diplomat, employees of the consulate followed him to gay bars and presumably were monitoring his every move.
Issikoff quotes Ali Al-Ahmad of the Gulf Institue in Washington, D.C., who is a Saudi dissident, as saying that Asseri did have cause for grave concern over his own security if he returned to the kingdom because of his criticism of four Saudi princes living in the Los Angeles area and receiving salaries from the consulate, in an open letter to King Abdullah. "This statement is enough to put Mr. Asseri in danger if he returns to Saudi Arabia," said Ahmad. I disagree because most Saudis are well aware that there are numerous members of the royal family that get stipends and do nothing very constructive with their lives. The fact that Asseri did not name any names in his open letter that he posted online, seems to indicate that he is more desperate to gain asylum in the US, then to cause real embarrassment to the Al-Saud family.
A later story in the Los Angeles Times blog quotes Ahmad as saying that the consulate would probably be more concerned about Asseri's friendship with the Israeli woman, as they would be afraid that she might be a spy for Israel. That makes sense to me.
As former US diplomat John Burgess noted on his blog Crossroads Arabia, "The Saudi government certainly does not want gay diplomats representing the country. It has gay diplomats representing it already. Most are smart enough to not draw attention to themselves."
Asseri claimed in his email interview that he would killed "in broad daylight" if he returned to Saudi. I highly doubt this, as do Berger and Saudi blogger Qusay Fayoumi. The death penalty has been rarely used against gay men in Saudi, unlike in neighboring Iran. The Saudi men who were executed in 2002 for having been in a gay situation were killed for allegedly raping underage boys. But this is not to say that gay men do not get punished in the kingdom. The more masculine and well-connected ones can get away with being gay for all of their lives, mostly by avoiding the notorious religious police who love to prey on poorer Saudi gay men, the more feminine ones and foreign gay workers.
Qusay, like many younger and more educated Saudis of his generation (he's thirtysomething), believes that gay men have it easy in Saudi. "Saudi never went all Cuba on gays..." he wrote in his post on Asseri. Unfortunately, Qusay is mistaken in his rosy-tinted vision of life in Saudi Arabia. Many Filipino, Arab and Saudi gay men are regularly arrested by the religious police, who after torturing them and extracting confessions of being "gay" or "acting like women", are handed over to regular police and put on trial. The average sentence handed down is nine months to a year imprisonment with 90-120 lashes and deportation at the end of the jail term for the foreigners. How this is better than how gays were treated in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s is hard to tell. (For a glimpse of gay life in Cuba watch Julian Schnabel's excellent 2000 film Before Night Falls, which is the autobiography of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was imprisoned for two years for being gay.)
The Saudi Embassy in Washington claims that Asseri was never fired but merely transfered back to the Minstry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh after his four-year tour (and one-year extension) in the US ended.
If Asseri returned to the kingdom I doubt he would be imprisoned or killed. He could have found himself without a job and had his right to travel abroad revoked. Even so I think the US should grant him asylum. I hardly think that doing so would seriously dent Saudi-US relations. At most it would cause a tiny blip that would soon be forgotten by both sides.
Gay Saudi diplomat denied asylum by Obama administration | Rasheed's World
11/7/2011 7:12 PM
[...] than a year ago, I wrote about Asseri applying for political asylum after he claimed that the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, where he had worked [...]
Qusay
For your info Rasheed, I prefer honey colored brown tinted glasses, they work better with my complexion :)
I never said gays are not punished, they are, yet since they cannot prove anyone's sexual orientation, they only punish the more feminine acting ones based on "acting like a female" all I was saying is that the guy (this guy in particular) will most probably not be killed... that was all I was referring to, I saw the movie of the Cuban writer and him eating boiled eggs while writing :)
I never really thought about what x-diplomats really do, yes, I am sure he would not be able to travel for a while, might not find a job, but having made it all the way up to first secretary in the Saudi embassy in LA, I doubt he does not have the means or the connections to sort himself out.
Oh yeah, I guess now I need to change my bio to read mid thirty something.


text:
2010s >> 2017 >> no-1355-july-2017
Corbyn: What He Did Achieve and What He Could Not Have
Jeremy Corbyn has shown one thing – that contesting an election on a manifesto promising to tax corporations and the rich to pay for improvements in health, housing and education for 'the many' is not the vote-loser most pundits assumed. Most, including many Labour MPs themselves, thought that contesting an election with such a programme would be suicidal. In the event, it was one of a number of factors that enabled the Labour Party to increase the number of its MPs by 30 and its share of the popular vote to 40 percent. They didn't win of course but they were originally supposed to have been annihilated.
The election was still one to decide which group of politicians should run the political side of UK plc, but this time it wasn't, as in recent previous elections, just a contest between two groups both pleading that their team would be the better managers of capitalism as it is. This time it was between one group still offering this (the Tories) and another saying that they would make some changes to capitalism (Labour).
That an increased number of people voted against things as they are is at least better than voting, unenthusiastically or cynically, as if having to choose between two brands of more or less identical soap powders. If people weren't dissatisfied with the status quo and didn't hope for something better then the prospects for socialism would be hopeless.
There is a difference between being able to win votes on a comparatively left-wing programme for reforming capitalism and being able to implement it. If the Labour Party under Corbyn had done even better and actually won the election, past experience of left-wing governments has shown that it would fail to make capitalism work 'for the many not the few'.
This is not because its ministers would prove to be incompetent or sell-outs but because capitalism is a social system based, precisely, on the exclusion of the many from the ownership and control of the means of wealth production. These belong to the few, who employ the many to operate them. Under capitalism as an economic system wealth is produced for sale on a market with a view to profit, the source of this being the unpaid labour of the many appropriated by the few.
Promising to make the economic system work for the many not the few assumes the continuing existence of 'the few'. So, the Labour Party was saying in effect that under a Corbyn Labour government the few would remain in their privileged place but some of their money would be taken from them and used to benefit the many. The trouble here is that the source of the income of the few is profits, and the pursuit of profits is what drives the capitalist economic system. Threaten profits and the economic system stalls. A left-wing government which taxed profits merely to improve the lives of the many would come up against the basic economic law of capitalism of 'no profit, no production.'
Been there before
The historically-confirmed scenario for a left-wing government is: it is elected and begins to implement its programme; an economic crisis breaks out; the government reacts by backtracking on its reforms and accepting, reluctantly or not, that profits have to come first, and implements this. They lose popularity and at the next election are either voted out or re-elected on a quite different programme (not of radical reforms but merely that they won't be as bad as the other lot).
This is why we could not be enthusiastic about Corbyn. However well-meaning he might be in some ways (and, despite the smear campaign against him, he did come across as more well-meaning than most politicians), his programme was undeliverable. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work otherwise than as a system where profits have to come before people. That's the way it works and the way it has to work.
This means that politics and general elections are in fact based on an illusion – that who controls the government can control the way the economy works, whereas in fact it is the other way round; governments have to accommodate their policies to the way capitalism works. So, in the end, it doesn't matter which group of politicians is elected to form the government. Whoever they are, whatever they have promised, they will have to govern on capitalism's terms.
Put another way, if people vote to improve their lot under capitalism this will be frustrated by the operation of the economic forces of capitalism. Capitalism is not a system that can accommodate the democratic will of the people, as expressed in an election, to improve their conditions. The voters might propose, but capitalism disposes. This is the basis of the saying that changing governments changes nothing.
The aspiration to improve things is all to the good but it can't be realised within the framework of capitalism. What is required to realise the hope of those who voted for Corbyn is not to tax the few for the benefit of the many. It is to abolish the division of society into the many and the few by converting the means of wealth production from ownership by and for the few into the common property of all for the benefit of all. That would provide the framework within which to re-orient production from profit- making to directly satisfying people's needs. Not the reformist 'People before profits', but the revolutionary 'People not profits'.
ADAM BUICK

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl