Posted on 01/10/2019 5:05:33 AM PST by Texas Fossil
On the evening of Saturday, 5 January, a desperate situation began to unravel on a newly created Twitter account.
Fleeing her Saudi family in Kuwait, Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, sent out a series of tweets pleading for help from an airport hotel room in Bangkok.
At the time she had 24 followers.
"I'm the girl who ran away to Thailand. I'm now in real danger because the Saudi embassy is trying to force me to return," her first-ever tweet in Arabic read.
--copyrighted tweet image at link
Then she said something that would be hard to ignore: "I'm afraid. My family will kill me."
People noticed and the first tweet with the hashtag #SaveRahaf was sent out.
Within minutes of that, Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy translated the Arabic tweets into English and sent it to her hundreds of thousands of followers.
A few hours later that tweet caught the attention of Human Rights Watch and eventually Phil Robertson, its Bangkok-based Asia deputy director, who sent this out.
snip
Renouncing Islam, or apostasy, is a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
This is one of the biggest issues the world faces from this point forward. The consequences of this is not honestly discussed enough.
This one appears to have a good outcome.
How odd the use of “unpicking” in the headline. “Unpacking” would make more sense. Thinking it might be a Britishism, I looked it up in the Oxford dictionary...
Carefully analyse the different elements of (something), especially in order to find faults.
‘Elisabeth did not want to unpick the past’
I don’t get it.
Social media, justifiably maligned for all its badness, used in this case to do something very good.
Yes, agree.
Technology itself if neutral force which can be use for good and for bad.
Human nature is a very mixed bag.
Well it is not my title, probably the one who chose it is not primary in English.
I’m not good at any foreign language either.
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