Slashdot Mirror
Australian Deported From Bahrain Over Facebook Posts
An anonymous reader writes "Australian English instructor Tony Mitchell recently moved to Bahrain where he was offered a job at the state-run Polytechnic University. He described himself as a witness of the various horrifying events in the struggling country (see The Atlantic's four-part series). Mitchell was eventually fired, evicted, and forced to flee because of posts he made on Facebook."
This is unfortunate--there is a great deal that is quite wrong in the world, that is in effect only available on a pull-basis. I met a guy at a panel discussion a few months ago who had been personally tortured by Kaderov, the governor of Chechneya for Moscow. Why the hell do we waste so much time on what they put on the news, when you could actually be reporting that kind of thing on the news? Five to ten minutes a week that isn't a sound-byte, but is someone talking about an issue, would be a massive increase to the information most Americans receive.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
To be fair we never allowed that censorship law to pass. There are still forces at work to get the internet censored but currently it's uncensored here in Australia.
He does.
It is. They are not mutually exclusive.
I support people standing up for whatever they believe in, and I certainly support this guy's cause. At the same time, I have no idea where this notion that one should be free from consequences if they are doing what they feel is right has come from. It is not a thing to be proud of, but it is a reality. Black people were arrested and beaten constantly standing up for their rights in the civil rights area. I'm sure none of them wanted to be, and but I also don't remember them going on about how they were in disbelief that they were arrested for breaking the law. They expected it. That was their way of standing up and drawing attention to how bad things were.
So yes, he is welcome to stand up to oppressors, but he has to also be willing to accept the consequences of doing so. That's pretty much the crux of the whole "taking a stand" thing; if you're only doing it with the expectation there will never be consequences, you're not exactly going out on a limb are you? Frankly he should be quite happy with the results. Things aren't too bad for him and he has made the news nationally and internationally. That's damn close to a best case scenario for people hoping to effect change.
No, they didn't do it out of a "lack of giving a fuck about any rights". Have you ever met a WW2 vet? They were ALL there for a noble cause that they understood, even if they were scared shitless of the prospect of being in the war. Not a single one of them "didn't give a fuck" about rights. These were real heroes; they were there to save the fucking world from the oppression that Hitler represented and actively implemented on the people he didn't exterminate, because the reality was that he was going to take over Europe and eventually get to American soil, after consolidating a European base with his incredibly effective war machine. That was the mindset of every fucking soldier over there, not this paranoid oppression of free speech bullshit. This was the absolute prime example of "They came for the Jews, and I did nothing. They came for the gays, and I did nothing. Then they came for me, and nobody was left to help.", and every person knew it. They were undoing the damage he had done to German society, not trampling over the rights of the German people, and for anyone to say otherwise is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.