The Autocrats Club

The Arabs have a club .....

The Arab League

...... the Arab League. 

Dirty Arab War Hots Up

The fierce social media war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia has intensified, with residents of each state attacking each other over the internet... and competing for ways to show loyalty to their own state. Baby naming is one such way e.g. a Saudi national has named his new baby girl 'Al-Saudia' in response to a Kuwaiti father who last week announced that his daughter would be known as 'Qatar.' (noticeably its only girls who can be given stupid names, whereas boys all remain as Mohammed's).

But it seems to have gone extra dirty, when this picture started trending around the Arab world ....

Plane At Ben Gurion Airport ....

 

..... What? You can't see what's so offensive or dirty about this picture?

Our Friends In The Middle East

The news that Saudi Arabia is alleged to be the biggest exporter of illiberal and bigoted ideologies in to Britain is hardly news at all. In fact it's better described as "olds".

Saudi Influence Is Via Money And Hard-line Ideology.

This is because it's been known for at least a decade (and in all likelihood several decades), that they have been exporting Wahhabi ideology to the rest of the world.

Indentured Indignities

Not so long ago I posted on one of the modern forms of slavery, indentured servants in the Asian and Muslim regions (as opposed to people trafficking). So perhaps its no surprise that a scandal has erupted in Singapore, where a couple starved their Filipino maid.

Ms Gawidan The Maid, Lim Choon Hong
 and his wife Chong Sui Foon

The couple, finance trader Lim Choon Hong and his wife Chong Sui Foon, pleaded guilty and were convicted and jailed with sentences of three weeks, and three months respectively, for starving their domestic worker. This after their maid ran away and went to a charity .... where she was found to have lost 20kg (44 lbs) - about 40% of her body weight after being kept on a restricted diet of bread and instant noodles. 
 

Djinn and Gone

On the 13th and 14th of May 2015, over 180 middle and elementary girl students in Saudi Arabia were reported to have refused to attend classes at the Al- Shalail village girls school. The school located in Southern Madinah province in Western Arabia, had already had nine girl students who had allegedly fainted, and were said to have experienced 'spasms' at the beginning of the school term following the holidays ..... I used to experience something similar myself!

Mass Hysteria Cases Are Not Uncommon (Like This Case In Bangladesh) But Rarely Blamed On Djinn

Modern Slave Trade

Some times a story kind of tells itself .... I stumbled across this image on the Internet.

Malayan Flyer Selling Maids

And this unlocked a whole new story, that was apparently little reported outside of the South East Asian area. It appears that Indonesia is the main source for cheap female domestic servants (or 'slave labour', depending upon your point of view) in the greater region (with Filipinos being the other source). Of course this leads to much abuse, including imprisonments, beatings, rapes and murder, and the stories of their mistreatment by the Arab employers of Saudi Arabia are legion.

Indonesian Maid In Saudi Employers Car

However, when it was reported in Jakarta that the door flyer above was circulating in Malaya, there was much outrage. Demands that the Malayan government do something (probably the standard request to 'kill the perpetrators'), were legion, but then it turned out that this kind of indignity was common regionally. Reports came in from all over that adverts selling Indonesians as servants were common. 

Indonesian Maids in Singapore

The trade is openly advertised in Singapore, and in fact any country around that region where the standard of living was higher than in Indonesia ...... it just goes to show that slavery has survived. It is still being practised in North Africa and Arabia (where there were over 300,000 slaves in 1960 when it was abolished - but carried on because the law was never enforced), with recent reports alleging that a castrated black African slave was sold on a Facebook style advert last year.

Alleged Slave Sold in Saudi Arabia (Facebook) 2012

  
So it is still practised in the Muslim world, but just not in the traditional form. Debt Bond slavery has now disguised the trade, and allows slaves to be owned, bought and sold and moved around the globe in much the same way as before the West tried to abolish it in the 19th and 20th centuries.    

Storm In A 'D' Cup

Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, has warned the kingdoms shop owners that employing women is a "crime and prohibited by Islamic sharia law" ....

Praying To Mecca or M&S?

..... but the King has apparently decided that on this issue he will bow to pressure from women's rights campaigners. So from this week, certain shops will not be allowed to employ men.

 

Mad Mullahs

I can never resist highlighting the pronouncements on women by Muslim clerics ..... 

 

Saudi Clerics Debate On Women's Issues



.... they are often as mad as hatters, but because they are listened to by the men of Islam, they are also incredibly dangerous.

Our 'Friends' In The Middle East

While the 'West' has its attention turned to Libya, the Saudis and their surrogates in Bahrain have been given a free hand in their suppression of the Shia majority in that small kingdom.

Bahraini Police Torture A Man

Now I am not a conspiracist, and I don't believe that this is 'deliberate' or because its the mad 'Shia's' who are being suppressed we turn a blind eye.

Vulture Is Israeli Spy .... Saudi's Convinced

After the Egyptians accused a Shark of being a Mossad agent ....... 

 

The Arabs Always Missed
  The Real Vulture Spy!

 

....Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel.

Nobel Prize, Ignoble Politics

China's behaviour over the award of the Noble Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo one of their own citizens, but one who is in prison for protesting for human rights, has been nothing less than shameful

..... but the behaviour of some of their 'friends' around the world has been equally disgraceful.

 

The Saudi's, Our Civilised Friends

Last week the Saudi ruler King Abdullah was feted in a visit to the UK. He was hailed as a ‘reformer’ and ‘liberal’ by the certain delusional sections of our Government, although thankfully not by the press at large.

 

Younger King Abdullah

 

The Saudi’s are given far too easy a ride in the UK and US, for one simple reason, OIL …..