A Photo I Missed

Apparently, this photo went viral a couple of years ago. I didn’t see it at the time. I came across it because I’ve been reading older posts the blog Infidels Are Us. I used her blog as a source for some information a couple of days ago. I hadn’t realized at the time that her own family members have been attacked for leaving Islam. As it happens, they converted to Christianity.

She put up a link to a video that appeared on the website Vice, “Rescuing Ex-Muslims: Leaving Islam.” The video starts with a shocking, dreadful attack captured on closed circuit video. It wasn’t until after I watched it I that I realized that the opening footage was of an attack on the father of the young woman who writes Infidels Are Us. I went back and read some other posts on her blog, including a post in which she describes her own experience of that night. It adds to the immediacy to hear about it in her voice. We see these things on the news and we learn, after a time, to disassociate them from real people who lead lives not unlike our own. Reading her version really broke down that self-defense for me.

The Vice video contained footage about about a Saudi ex-Muslim who fled Saudi Arabia. A couple of years ago, her parents made her go to the Grand Mosque in Mecca. There, she took the following photo:

At the end of the video, the young woman who took the photo is in Cologne, Germany.