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Podcast: De Balie
Episode: Freedom Lecture: The Price of Activism
Description: ‘Allah is Lesbian’, those words appeared on a T-shirt worn by Ibtissame ‘Betty’ Lachgar in London, in protest and in solidarity with two lesbian activists who had been sentenced to death in Iran. When she set foot in her home country, Morocco, Lachgar was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for blasphemy.Morocco’s long history of political protest and dissent has an equally long record of state repression, which includes the political imprisonment of activists, journalists, and critics of the authorities. For decades, human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Associatio...