Women as Writers

Couple Smeared Online Awarded $13.78 Million in Libel Judgment

On Friday, three years after a Collin County jury acquitted the Leshers and their employee of aggravated sexual assault, a Tarrant County jury awarded the couple $13.78 million in a libel judgment. The ruling sends the message that people have the freedom to write what they please online, but they can be held accountable.

The award is the largest ever assessed in an Internet libel case, the Leshers’ attorney, Meagan Hassan, said Tuesday…

“This was clearly a vendetta,” [plaintiffs' attorney] Hassan said. “We originally sued 178 John and Jane Does, and it all came down to two IP addresses.”…

The abuse grew so bad that the Leshers closed their businesses and moved away from Clarksville, where they had lived for more than 20 years, Hassan said. Mark Lesher now practices law in Mount Pleasant and Texarkana, and his wife has given up her salon. Continue reading »

Honoring Adrienne Rich

I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile. The woman who first heard oppression named and analyzed in the Black Civil Rights struggle. The woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male violence. The woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding are also accountable. The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor’s language sometimes sounds beautiful. The woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act.

–Adrienne Cecile Rich in “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” from here, h/t Letecia Layson

Syrian Blogger Razan Ghazzawi (Razaniyyat – رزانيّــــات) Arrested

I am one of those people who are against including children in protests at times of revolutions, children should stay home, especially in cities like Homs and Idleb. But the children martyred last night in Karm El-Zeitoun were home, and that did not protect them, it rather killed them. Yesterday regime army bombed the neighborhood of Karm El- Zeitoun in the city of Homs and destroyed several buildings, two whole streets were evacuated, and 27 civilians killed, many were injured…

The names of children killed by the regime in Karm El-Zeitoun Massacre 26-1-2012 are:

1-Waed Hamsho
2-Sana’ Akrah
3-Najem Akrah
4-Samira Bahader
5-Sidra Bahader
6-Abdel Ghani Bahader
7-Kinana Akara
8-Ali Akrah

The above is an excerpt from iconic Syrian Blogger Razan Ghazzawi‘s February 13 blog post.  Ghazzawi, who was born in the United States, has been blogging courageously under her own name since 2009 and has been arrested in the past.  As of today she has been arrested again, for what she’s been writing, along with human rights activist Mazen Darwish, who heads the Syrian Center for Media and Free Expression.  Women bloggers put human, human faces on the horror of war.  There were not just “eight children killed” in “fighting in Syria.”  The children whose names are written here were killed by the Syrian regime.  For atrocities like this to end, ever, the dead must have faces and names.

Anyone giving information to international media or international NGOs may be targeted,” said Soazig Dollet, Middle East and North Africa researcher for Reporters Without Borders. She said in the past, arrested Syrian journalists have been interrogated, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. (More here)

Learn about the war in Syria here.

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