This post was prepared for a new blog tracking the right of migrants in the Middle East, Migrant-Rights.org. Migrant-Rights.org is an initiative spearheaded by Esra’a al-Shafei, a Bahraini activist who also founded MidEastYouth.com and FreeKareem.org.

Sushar Rosky, born 1987, hangs from the balcony of the apartment in which she worked as a maid for only 20 days in Sidon, Lebanon. She hung herself with bits of cloth carefully tied together in 2005. No investigation was conducted into the circumstances leading up to her death.

Almost ten years ago, Lina Abu-Habib wrote one of the first reports for the journal Gender & Development about female domestic workers from Sri Lanka in Lebanon. At the time, a little less than 20,000 work permits were granted for Sri Lankan domestic workers in Lebanon. Abu-Habib described the dehumanizing process of maid-selection as “catalogue shopping for maids” who would then be transported from Sri Lanka to Lebanon by intermediary agencies profiting off the exchange. She writes that “If the employers do not ‘like’ their new maid for any reason, or if she happens to have any health or other problem, she may be ‘returned’ to the employment agency, who will ensure that she is quickly ‘replaced.’” This is a process that one might use to describe buying a computer or kitchen appliance through the mail. A report one year later by Reem Haddad likened the situation to slavery.

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The right in America is not Islamophobic. In fact, it often goes to special lengths to emphasize its impartiality towards the Muslim faith. In the March 2007 edition of the California Patriot, for example, Aditya Kashap confirms suspicions that there are good Muslims somewhere in the world: “it is quite obvious to me that most Muslims are not violent, are law abiding, and are also diligent workers.” Some of these law-abiding Muslims are even so grateful that they work day and night to prove themselves by taking up employment at Wal-Mart and registering Republican. But this isn’t good enough for Kashap, who goes on to justify racial stereotyping in television. No matter how you twist it, these prejudices end up affecting all Muslims.

In the same magazine last November, Sid Radhakrishnan wrote an entreaty to the Muslims of the world, calling upon the good moderate ones to speak up. “More than a billion Muslims worldwide are lovers of peace and family” so Sid is horrified: “moderate Muslims everywhere, does [the violence in Iraq] not boil your blood?” As he wallowed in desperation thinking of all the good Muslims’ souls, Radhakrishnan managed to remain unperturbed by the ongoing American occupation of Iraq. He similarly wouldn’t want death-by-foreign-occupation to bother any Muslims or, god forbid, cause their blood to boil.

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A look at the case of Abdelkarim Soliman, the disingenuous media attention surrounding it, and the implications this has for human rights activists in the Middle East.

Abdelkarim Soliman, also known as the blogger Kareem Amer, is just one of the many hundreds of innocent people who have suffered at the hands of Western ally Hosni Mubarak’s regime. His case is unique to these in two ways: it is the first known case involving a the crime of blogging, and it has drawn much attention around the world, including that of the right-wing democracy evangelists in the United States.

But why was so much press coverage drawn to Soliman’s unjust situation, when less than a week before his verdict the arrest of 75 civilian members of the Muslim Brotherhood was largely ignored, enraging few outside of Egypt? If Soliman’s imprisonment was indeed an example of a reactionary Islamic government, as those right-wing pundits like to claim, then how in the same week could such a reactionary government effectively shut down a popular religious social organization?

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