State Sponsored Abuse & Legalized Slavery of Foreign Workers in Arab Countries!!!

[GHook93]

You always hear the cry-baby Muslims bitch about how bad they are treated in Western countries for not providing them more welfare, special treatment and Sharia law. They scream racism, but look how they treat foreign workers! It's LITERALLY THE EQUIVALENT OF SLAVERY!!!

They take poor young people, promise them the moon and the stars, then once they arrive, they take their passports, force them to live in slums, do not allow them freedom of movement, work them to the bone, beat them, humilate them and in many many cases mutilate, rape and murder them! This is all CONDONED by the government of countries like Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt, UAE, Qatar etc. It's sick, but then again Radical Islam is NOT the problem, Islam itself is the problem!

Robert Fisk: Arab Spring has washed the region's appalling racism out of the news - Robert Fisk - Commentators - The Independent

The problem with all this is that Muslim societies – or shall we whittle this down to Middle Eastern societies? – are allowed to appear squeaky-clean in the face of such trash, and innocent of any racism themselves.

A health warning, therefore, to all Arab readers of this column: you may not like this week's rant from yours truly. Because I fear very much that the video of Alem Dechasa's recent torment in Beirut is all too typical of the treatment meted out to foreign domestic workers across the Arab world (there are 200,000 in Lebanon alone).

Many hundreds of thousands have now seen the footage of 33-year-old Ms Dechasa being abused and humiliated and pushed into a taxi by Ali Mahfouz, the Lebanese agent who brought her to Lebanon as a domestic worker. Ms Dechasa was transported to hospital where she was placed in the psychiatric wing and where, on 14 March, she hanged herself. She was a mother of two and could not stand the thought of being deported back to her native Ethiopia. That may not have been the only reason for her mental agony.

Lebanese women protested in the centre of Beirut, the UN protested, everyone protested. Ali Mahfouz has been formally accused of contributing to her death. But that's it.

The Syrian revolt, the Bahraini revolution, the Arab Awakening, have simply washed Alem Dechasa's tragedy out of the news. How many readers know – for example – that not long before Ms Dechasa's death, a Bengali domestic worker was raped by a policeman guarding her at a courthouse in the south Lebanese town of Nabatieh, after she had been caught fleeing an allegedly abusive employer?

As the Lebanese journalist Anne-Marie El-Hage has eloquently written, Ms Dechasa belonged to "those who submit in silence to the injustice of a Lebanese system that ignores their human rights, a system which literally closes its eyes to conditions of hiring and work often close to slavery". All too true.

How well I recall the Sri Lankan girl who turned up in Commodore Street at the height of the Israeli siege and shelling of West Beirut in 1982, pleading for help and protection. Like tens of thousands of other domestic workers from the sub-continent, her passport had been taken from her the moment she began her work as a domestic "slave" in the city; and her employers had then fled abroad to safety – taking the girl's passport with them so she could not leave herself. She was rescued by a hotel proprietor when he discovered that local taxi drivers were offering her a "bed" in their vehicles in return for sex.

Everyone who lives in Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt or Syria, for that matter, or – especially – the Gulf, is well aware of this outrage, albeit cloaked in a pious silence by the politicians and prelates and businessmen of these societies.

In Cairo, I once remarked to the Egyptian hosts at a dinner on the awful scars on the face of the young woman serving food to us. I was ostracised for the rest of the meal and – thankfully – never invited again.

Arab societies are dependent on servants. Twenty-five per cent of Lebanese families have a live-in migrant worker, according to Professor Ray Jureidini of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. They are essential not only for the social lives of their employers (housework and caring for children) but for the broader Lebanese economy.

Yet in the Arab Gulf, the treatment of migrant labour – male as well as female – has long been a scandal. Men from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in the billionaires' paradise of Kuwait – and are consistently harassed, treated as third-class citizens, and arrested on the meanest of charges.

Saudi Arabia long ago fell into the habit of chopping off the heads of migrant workers who were accused of assault or murder or drug-running, after trials that bore no relation to international justice. In 1993, for example, a Christian Filipino woman accused of killing her employer and his family was dragged into a public square in Dammam and forced to kneel on the ground where her executioner pulled her scarf from her head before decapitating her with a sword.

Then there was 19-year old Sithi Farouq, a Sri Lankan housemaid accused of killing her employer's four-year-old daughter in 1994. She claimed her employer's aunt had accidentally killed the girl. On 13 April, 1995, she was led from her prison cell in the United Arab Emirates to stand in a courtyard in a white abaya gown, crying uncontrollably, before a nine-man firing squad which shot her down. It was her 20th birthday. God's mercy, enshrined in the first words of the Koran, could not be extended to her, it seems, in her hour of need.

 

[High_Gravity]

This post is spot on I have seen how people from countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc are treated in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they are treated worse than dog shit. Incredibly low wages, extremely poor living conditions and for most of them their passports are held by their employer so they can't even leave unless the employer agrees, the women that work as maids are beaten and raped in alot of instances, terrible situation for them over there.

 

[JStone]

This post is spot on I have seen how people from countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc are treated in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they are treated worse than dog shit. Incredibly low wages, extremely poor living conditions and for most of them their passports are held by their employer so they can't even leave unless the employer agrees, the women that work as maids are beaten and raped in alot of instances, terrible situation for them over there.

Legalized slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until a few decades ago. Though, Saudi women are treated like slaves today, except, they can't run errands in the car.

 

[High_Gravity]

This post is spot on I have seen how people from countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc are treated in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they are treated worse than dog shit. Incredibly low wages, extremely poor living conditions and for most of them their passports are held by their employer so they can't even leave unless the employer agrees, the women that work as maids are beaten and raped in alot of instances, terrible situation for them over there.

Legalized slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until a few decades ago. Though, Saudi women are treated like slaves today, except, they can't run errands in the car.

I remember reading that slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until WW2.

 

[JStone]

This post is spot on I have seen how people from countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc are treated in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they are treated worse than dog shit. Incredibly low wages, extremely poor living conditions and for most of them their passports are held by their employer so they can't even leave unless the employer agrees, the women that work as maids are beaten and raped in alot of instances, terrible situation for them over there.

Legalized slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until a few decades ago. Though, Saudi women are treated like slaves today, except, they can't run errands in the car.

I remember reading that slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until WW2.

I believe institutionalized slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in the 60s, but, you could be correct.

At its height, one-third of the Roman Empire were slaves but at least they built things. The Saudis just milk the Earth for its oil

 

[High_Gravity]

Legalized slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until a few decades ago. Though, Saudi women are treated like slaves today, except, they can't run errands in the car.

I remember reading that slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until WW2.

I believe institutionalized slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in the 60s, but, you could be correct.

At its height, one-third of the Roman Empire were slaves but at least they built things. The Saudis just milk the Earth for its oil

In a way slavery still exists in the Kingdom, women are pretty much the property of men there and cannot do anything without the approval of a man, and third country nationals make shit wages and are treated like dogs.

 

[JStone]

I remember reading that slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until WW2.

I believe institutionalized slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in the 60s, but, you could be correct.

At its height, one-third of the Roman Empire were slaves but at least they built things. The Saudis just milk the Earth for its oil

In a way slavery still exists in the Kingdom, women are pretty much the property of men there and cannot do anything without the approval of a man, and third country nationals make shit wages and are treated like dogs.

To be fair, the 10,000 members of the "Saudi Royal Family" like their Rolls Royces, Aspen vacation homes, Savile Row suits, jewels, gambling junkets and high-priced hookers. There's a limit to what can go to the rest of the population

 

[High_Gravity]

I believe institutionalized slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in the 60s, but, you could be correct.

At its height, one-third of the Roman Empire were slaves but at least they built things. The Saudis just milk the Earth for its oil

In a way slavery still exists in the Kingdom, women are pretty much the property of men there and cannot do anything without the approval of a man, and third country nationals make shit wages and are treated like dogs.

To be fair, the 10,000 members of the "Saudi Royal Family" like their Rolls Royces, Aspen vacation homes, Savile Row suits, jewels, gambling junkets and high-priced hookers. There's a limit to what can go to the rest of the population

Whats always interested me is the leadership in the Arab countries always induldge themselves in the things they deny to the rest of their population like gambling, sex, drinking etc. its ok for them to have that but not the people.

 

[JStone]

In a way slavery still exists in the Kingdom, women are pretty much the property of men there and cannot do anything without the approval of a man, and third country nationals make shit wages and are treated like dogs.

To be fair, the 10,000 members of the "Saudi Royal Family" like their Rolls Royces, Aspen vacation homes, Savile Row suits, jewels, gambling junkets and high-priced hookers. There's a limit to what can go to the rest of the population

Whats always interested me is the leadership in the Arab countries always induldge themselves in the things they deny to the rest of their population like gambling, sex, drinking etc. its ok for them to have that but not the people.

One reason the Arab League never resettled the "palestinian refugees" after the Arab League started the 1948 War is to cynically deflect from their domestic problems and forever agitate the street about the "poor palestinians" It's an Arab shame.

Lebanese American Fouad Ajami, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2011

The [UN] vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and] statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone. '"

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a "right of return," would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can't be had in the world of nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people's history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people's chances.

Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.

But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history's verdict could be overturned, that the "right of return" was theirs.

There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave.The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat's, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter's gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.

Fouad Ajami: The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State - WSJ.com