Blog #3 best thing I read

  This is a grim take on the best thing I read this week, but I personally think the Human Rights Watch has a knack for producing entries that draw people in while staying concise and focusing on very relevant current events. Growing up in the US free speech is often something you hear pretty consistently, it is such commonplace in the US and so tied to our nations history that we often take that liberty for granted. Globally the amount of citizens who have free speech are still far outnumbered by the ones who do not. Everyday citizens get murdered for speaking, but since that is not a prevalent issue in America news outlets and our society as a whole tends to forget it still occurs, or whether there is something the US could do to help those citizens and lessen global effects. The man who was just murdered in Saudi Arabia over a tweet was a respected family man and an educator, not just a statistic which the article does a good job point out. Organizations such as the human rights watch need money to conduct their work, if they are trying to get a team of global legal experts to analyze global law for a way to protect targeted citizens, those groups don’t do work for free. The Human rights watch does a great job of not only including an embedded donation page within their article and on their website, but they play into the most American of ideals by prominently displaying all donations can be used as a tax write off! So not only are Americans now aware of an issue they may not of known was occurring, but they understand the flagrant fuck you those laws are to the principles America itself stands for. If you donate now you are doing it for America and sweet baby freedom, but if that is not enough hopefully the fact that you can write it off and find economic advantage out of it will be. 

      An issue with a lot of human rights pieces is they are too long. The issues certainly merit all of the discussion that is put forth, if not more, but the average person can not absorb, or at least has no interest in absorbing that much information in one sitting. The Human rights watch does a great job keeping their writings concise and absent of large opinion pieces. They provide all the information that is necessary to have a basic understanding of the issue without force feeding you the reasons for why this is an issue or why you should decide to help them, these are all global catastrophes, they are confident people largely know their significance just by reading the often terrifying facts. Their staff is also very specialized based on the region or specific issue at hand, right at the top they provide the info of the author and their credentials/ why you should trust them as an authority. They also do a great job of including the names of important figures and organizations so people could do further searches on them if they desire. This specific piece does a great job of including pictures of the people responsible so a face can be put to a horrific incident like that, further humanizing it. Words on a paper have difficulty generating compassion at times, but add a genuine human face and it can have a much greater impact and feel less like fiction. 

     Possibly the most astounding part of the entire incident is how little the government of Saudi Arabia seems to care, despite them admitting exactly what happened. In a lot of circumstances where a nations government can end up looking bad, you will see them either fail to comment or deny allegations when asked by news sources. In this case the crowned prince of the Saudi government is not only admitting that someone was murdered on the basis of their tweets. Even though they have admit the situation occurred, sadly the government seems to show no remorse and would rather make excuses and future promises to remedy the situation. The crowned prince essentially said all nations have laws they do not like and wish to change and they will work on doing that in the future, there is a far difference though between unjust laws and legislation Vs laws that lead directly to the death of an innocent person. He has gone as far to say he will attempt to rid the nation of this law, but as the article points out this is not the first time that promise has been made and even more recently under his power they bolstered the law without alerting the global community. This brings up a situation where you can no longer trust the government of Saudi Arabia to give true information and must rely on the work of journalists and researchers willing to put themselves at risk. The fact that writers put themselves at such great risk to write stories such as this hammers home the point of significance to me and I think resonates with readers. This article is about how the government of Saudi Arabia murdered someone over a tweet, yet this women is William to put out her credentials and write a piece on that same government; which clearly has no moral objections to killing someone over speech. It further emphasizes how important this issue is and the need to give people a voice at the risk of danger, if you keep the persecuted voiceless nothing can ever change!!