In 2020, the online news organization The Intercept revealed that HRW’s then-Executive Director, Ken Roth, accepted a $470,000 donation from a Saudi billionaire based on the condition that HRW would not use the money to protect the rights of the persecuted LGBTQ-plus community in the Middle East.
Roth was compelled to return the donation after The Intercept report.
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I am so sorry, Stamets. I am an ally with a queer daughter. Every day I worry about the world she’s growing up in. She’s been very bullied in school, but most kids don’t know other kids’ sexual orientation at 13, so they didn’t bully her for that (although, of course, middle schoolers still love to call each other anti-LGBT slurs), but I’m much more worried about what adults will do to her. At her age, she’s not truly aware of how bad it can be, but I do my best to educate her. Her best friend is a trans boy. His rights have already been taken away here in Indiana. He can’t get gender-affirming care and the school legally has to deadname him even though his parents are supportive. He’s already doing things like cutting himself and vaping, so he’s obviously already pretty messed up. I really worry that he won’t make it to adulthood. What hope do either of them have when human rights organizations won’t even talk about how they’re being oppressed and even victims of genocide?
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I get it. I think you’ve probably seen me say before that Star Trek missed a huge opportunity in the 90s to represent the community when Berman refused to let Bashir and Garak be a couple. It’s so sad that it took until Ellen came out in 1997 to even hope for more positive LGBT representation on American television and there’s still precious little of it. I can’t remember which cereal brand it was, but a few years ago, within the past decade, an ad showed a kid eating cereal and they had two dads and people lost their shit. Even in 2023, much of America (and from what you’re saying Canada too) isn’t ready for characters like Stamets and it’s just wrong. Even the fact that Discovery is on Paramount+, which is still pretty niche, shows it. Heaven forbid a regular network have a couple like Stamets and Culber that have a deep and abiding love for each other. The only other example I can think of right now is the Harley Quinn cartoon and you have to have Max to see it. (But it’s really good, I highly recommend it.)
Look what happened with Dylan Mulaney and Bud Light. It wasn’t even a huge ad campaign. They were given a few cans of Bud Light and did a photo shoot with them and posted it online. That’s it. That’s all they did. And suddenly Kid Rock was shooting cans of Bud Light with his rifle. Fucking insanity.
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I just hope representation continues in media. My daughter came way after Ellen and I think she’s still too young to really get into Harley Quinn (I don’t mind the language or the violence, I just think a lot of the plot, especially the references, would go above her head), but I hope eventually she’ll find people on TV that represent her.
I’ve been showing her Daria. I keep thinking how much better a show it would have been if Daria and Jane’s friendship developed into love. The way it’s written, I kind of think the creators wanted it to go that way.
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I haven’t seen either version, but I’ve heard very good things. Britain has been more accepting than America (although there’s obviously still a lot of bigotry) because there have been some very famous gay actors and comedians in the country throughout the second half of the 20th century. There were two openly gay characters on a very popular 1960s radio sitcom (radio is still a very popular dramatic and comedic medium in the UK) called Hancock’s Half Hour. They spoke in Polari, which was well-known as a coded language in the British gay community. Kenneth Williams, who played one of them, was beloved by the British public and he made absolutely no secret of his sexual orientation.
And, of course, there’s been a long history of men and women in drag in the UK. Christmas pantos always involve men dressed in women’s clothing and women dressed in men’s clothing and it wouldn’t be Christmas in Britain without them.
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I don’t know if my daughter sees her that way, but she does often speak in a deadpan way and is sarcastic and misanthropic (she inherited it from me!), and was at the bottom of the pecking order in a school full of idiots and assholes, so she definitely identifies with Daria anyway.
Sorry you’re dealing with this. I know families in similar situations. A friend’s daughter tried to Roblox herself, and my daughter’s friend is trans. It’s important as a family to always support them. There are groups on the internet that do meetups for social organization.
I’m less worried for her, especially now that she’s out of that school and doing online school, than I am for her friend. I don’t know him well at all, he’s only been over at the house once and I was busy at the time and she ran into him by chance at a renaissance festival we went to and I let them go off and look around together, so I can’t really say for sure how he’s doing, but based on what my daughter says, he’s pretty messed up. He’s also smoking weed at 13. I admit, I smoked weed when I was 16 or 17, but I was in high school. This boy is in the seventh grade. If I didn’t think my daughter wasn’t totally disinterested in weed and vaping, I’d consider him a bad influence, but I’m glad she is disinterested because he needs friends.
My worry for my daughter is more long-term. She’s mostly safe as a child, for now anyway, but not her friend. His safety is a far bigger concern at his age.
I do not say the following lightly: in order to make a home where I feel truly comfortable I moved to a different country which is societally more accepting than where I was born.
I hope that your daughter and her friend will have the freedom to find their community and build happy lives. Sometimes that means leaving forever.
Some of us do give a shit, even some people you wouldn’t expect. I try to get people to listen to and understand others’ struggles and it’s more effective than you think, but it’s mostly people in my daily life.
I read yesterday about the PR that Saudi Arabia and UAE have been doing to work their way up a “trust index”, among other things.
There are few, if any, uncorrupted organisations or countries, and I now believe that it is simply human nature to be monstrous. Anything else requires herculean strength or absolute bull-headedness.
When I was young I watched Star Trek as an idealist looks Ng towards a brighter future, now I enjoy it as fantasy. If an interplanetary federation were to exist as it is portrayed, humans would have to be a minority to avoid contamination of ideals and truth.
Oh good, even human rights organizations don’t care about queer people. What are they supposed to do? Who can they turn to?
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Jesus… I don’t even know what to say about that. I’m just horrified and appalled.
And that guy is not even the only one. Who knows how long police sat on evidence about Jeffrey Dahmer? I doubt they were all that concerned that he was murdering men for over a decade.
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Don’t think about the downvotes. There are a lot of reddit trolls on lemmy who like to show up and downvote everything. There are people in this world who care. You are not an “issue” - you are a person. Your life matters.
The sudden media narrative that virtually every NGO operating in the Middle East is secretly anti-Semitic does not make a lot of sense, and has the appearance of a spin campaign.
Eh, it could be but it seems like a stretch. I don’t think it has to do with antisemitism. It’s just kinda like when countries put oil execs in charge of environmental policy. It seems like this has been a problem for a while. People were probably just not paying as much attention in 2020 when that article came out.
Yep. To be clear, though, it’s not the reporting of corruption etc. that’s the problem; it’s the timing of the reporting that’s suspicious.
I agree. Any individual story may or may not be accurate but that’s not the point. We’ve seen the very abrupt and simultaneous reporting and discussion on many scandals in a variety of human rights organizations, usually based on innuendo or very shaky evidence. My suspicion would be Israel is behind this but there are many other governments that are hostile to independent NGOs which could be taking advantage of the situation to undermine trust in them.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/i24-news/
Israeli source slinging mud at a group that is calling them out.
rated least biased. Editorially, they cover both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and cover USA news with impartiality. When reporting on former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a slightly negative tone
Not that mediabiasfactcheck is infallible, but it seems like if anything they are biased against the Right Wing Israeli government. I’ve heard that MEMRI has problems with translating Arabic in unfavorable ways, so, we will have to wait and see if the leaked documents actually say what they claim.
They didn’t imply they were for human rights
don’t forget silencing hamas rape victims
Okay? So this was revealed in 2020 and the director guy returned the donation. Why is this being written about again 3 years later? Is someone trying to push a narrative in order to deflect from some other subject?
I’m not sure if it’s clear that there was an additional previous incident with HRW accepting money from Saudi Arabia. It’s not a long article, and it’s not behind a paywall. The current issue is potentially much more damning, accepting millions, not just hundreds of thousands, and this time from Qatar, which has an arguably worse human rights record than Saudi Arabia. Remember all those workers (slaves?) who died to build the World Cup facilities?
Always helps to read the article before posting. 😉
click the goddamn link if you have questions, jesus fucking christ.
Neither i24 nor memri are unbiased sources, but if this is true, it certainly would account for a lot of the anti-Israel bias that has been coming out of human rights watch lately.
Yeah, it can’t be the genocide.
It’s them inappropriately defining this as genocide or whatever other buzzwords will generate outrage. This is clearly about defense for Israel and not eliminating an ethnic group.
Yes, those 5000+ children that Israel has killed were a real risk to Israeli security.
Is that tragic? Yes. Is it genocide? No. Words mean things.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
Sure sounds like what they’re doing to Palestinians in Gaza to me. Or do you think they’re going to let the innocent people they didn’t murder come back now that they’re occupying it?
You know, because Israel is famous for giving Palestinians their homes and their land back.
What is being done in Gaza is genocide.
The “genocide” debate here is activists trying to seize the high ground after Hamas’s hideous acts. Their hope, after an assault of such barbarity, is to label the response “genocidal” and hope that people chase that shiny lure instead of remembering why this war happened at all.
So all the children they killed were part of Hamas?
Israel is neither trying to destroy Arabs nor Muslims, What they are doing is defending themselves against a hostile nation that declared war on them by slaughtering their civilians. Sometimes keeping themselves safe means annexing land, and a genocide this does not make.
Israel’s intent is not to destroy any group, if that were their intent, they would have done it by now. They certainly have the capability. Their intent is to keep themselves safe from people who are trying to kill them and refuse to surrender.
Palestinians are a specific ethnic group. Interesting that you aren’t acknowledging that. And the majority of Palestinians that have been murdered were not part of Hamas.
As far as calling Gaza or Palestine a nation, that’s laughable. When has Israel ever acknowledged their sovereignty?
Or do you think they’re going to let the innocent people they didn’t murder come back now that they’re occupying it?
Given than this hasn’t happened yet, it feels a little premature to go tossing around words like genocide.
How long do we have to wait for them not to let Palestinians back into Gaza before we can call it genocide?
Seems like the people who say it’s too early to talk about gun legislation in America every time there’s a mass shooting.
It seems like most people claiming Israel wants to reoccupy Gaza genuinely don’t realize that Israel voluntarily disengaged in 2005, closed the existing settlements, and withdrew all military. Or that part of the reason that Hamas was able to execute the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history was due to Israel’s willingness to ease border restrictions.
Religious rhetoric always sounds borderline insane to me so maybe they are secretly peaceful, but the Israeli government is using some pretty violent biblical examples if what they want is peace. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament
