Maybe Billy Clinton should have a peek behind this vail. Probably too busy whoring for Gulf petro-dollars.

Posted by: MP at July 3, 2008 6:49 PM

recently i was in a email conversation with British convert to islam and he was very animatedly insisting there is no slavery under islam is it any wounder that it still exists when non arab western muslims call pointing out that practices like slavery are accepted as normal muslim behavior and infidels pointing them out are called racist and islamapphobiac

Posted by: ISLAMSNOTFORME at July 3, 2008 6:50 PM

"an Arab royal family..."
-- from the article above

Use of the phrase "royals" for people who a generation ago were simply tribal chiefs -- Abu Dhabi Town did not, when J. B. Kelly worked for Sheikh Zayed, have more than a single third-rate inn, some forty years agto -- is a bit comical. They used to be sheikhs, now they have become self-appointed princes, even kings. Is the Ruler of Bahrain, as the British useed to designate him, now a King? It's fun: Promote Yourself.

But even if we were to pretend to go along, and refer to different "royal" families among these tribal rulers with oil wells, which one might it be? The Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi? The Al-Maktoum (they of the racehorses) of Dubai (and a long time ago, of Abu Dhabi)? Could it be the Al-Qasimi of Sharjah? Or from one of the other tinier emirates?

Does it matter?

It could have been so many of them. The As-Sabah of Kuwait, the Al-Thani of Qatar, the biggest "family" of them all -- the Al-Saud of their very own personal "Saudi" Arabia.

They might all have had "17 nationals" from various countries removed from their benign employment. They might all have been discovered to be mistreating, because treating as slaves, their domestic servants.

No one should be surprised.

Posted by: Hugh at July 3, 2008 8:52 PM

This kind of thing -- but never interfered with before on such a scale -- has been happening for decades all over Western Europe. They of course have slaves, or virtual slaves, at home, where they know they cannot be touched. In Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates, anywhere that Money and Power and Islam mix.

But so confident are they -- and why not? -- of being above the law, of being able to flout the laws of mere Infidel states whom, they believe (and fearful Infidels have given them every reason to believe), would not dare to prosecute them, for they have been allowed to believe that Western governments will continue to mistakenly think that they need to do favors in order to be "allowed" to buy, at the market prices available to all, oil from this or that producing state. It's all nonsense, and has been a combination of nonsense and blague ever since -- see J. B. Kelly's "Arabia, the Gulf, and the West" -- the Arab members of OPEC bamboozled the West into thinking that political favors had to be done, even though oil is fungible, and always available at market prices. During the so-called Arab boycott of 1973, the United States and the Netherlands, states characterized by the Arabs then as "too supportive of Israel" in fact received a greater percentage of oil than did Great Britain and France, states deemed by the Arabs as exhibiting a "friendly -- i.e., hostile to Israel -- attitude.

In fact, it is far easier for oil-consuming nations to blockade or boycott a particular oil-producer -- see Libya, see Iran (tankers full of Iranian crude sit mournfully in the Gulf, waiting for buyers, with their owners price-cutting like mad)-- then it is for oil-producing nations to prevent any particular oil-consuming nation from buying, on the international market, oil at the market price. For more on this, "Arabia, the Gulf, and the West" is useful; so are the no-nonsense writings of such oil economists as Philip K. Verleger, or Eli Kanovsky, or -- in the past -- Morris Adelman of M.I.T.

Yet when a Saudi prince, needing a little extra cash, uses his private jet to smuggle 66 suitcases full of cocaine into France, or other Saudi princes and princelings are caught in a bribery-and-corruption scheme involving a contract for Western weaponry and planes, whether it be BAE today or Lockheed yesterday, or any of the deals which always, and everywhere, in the Arab East involve corruption and pay-offs to some of the local ruling famlies or their courtiers, the Saudis and others are sure that they can threaten -- and in the BAE case they did so threaten -- if the whole matter, the whole investigation, is not dropped. And though the Law Lords spoke, and stood up for the rule of law -- my, my, what an idea -- it is still unclear what will happen about that investigation into BAE, its works and days.

The slaves come with the masters when they visit London, Paris, Brussels. They come, and usually they are kept hidden from view. But sometimes a slave will esape. An Indonesian girl, or a Thai girl, one of those who tells the same fantastic and yet utterly believable and dreary tale, about being beaten, about having passport taken and threats made, about having to clean toilets with their tongues for punishment, and so on -- yes, here and there, a few times a year, there is a case. It could be on Avenue Foch. It could be in Marbella. It could be in Monte Carlo. It could be in Park Lane, or Cadogan Square. Oh, it could be just about any posh place in the Western world.

It is a sign of political intelligence, and of recovered moral health, for Western authorities to do something -- as they have apparently done here. It would be a good sign of the Western press, radio, television, were to discuss the legitimacy of slavery in Islam, discuss the enslavement of blacks in west Africa and in the Sudan, discuss the evidence for the continuance of slavery deep within Saudi Arabia, discuss the slave-like conditions of work for domestics in the rich Arab sheikdoms, and provide a partial list of all those cases, so briefly reported on, so quickly forgottne, of runaway domestic slaves.

This kind of thing will point up the moral contrast between civilization and barbarism -- a barbarism in this case having a good deal to do with the sanctioning of slavery by Muhammad's example, in order to help immunize Westerners against any conceivable appeal of Islam, or any confusion as to where, on the civiilziational phylogenetic scale, Islam stands. It stands very low indeed. Finally, there is the fact that these modern-day slave-owners -- slavery was stamped out not by an Arab or Muslim Wilberforce, but by outsiders, by Westerners, by Christians offended by the idea of slavery. in North Africa, it was the French. In the Persian Gulf, it was the British. Even then, it was only the slave trade that was stamped out. Slavery continued to exist, and right into the mid-20th century black slaves were still being surreptitiously smuggled into Arabia from Africa.

It was not until 1962 that, most reluctantly, Saudi Arabia agreed to outlaw slavery. At the time there were hundreds of thousands of slaves, in a population of a few million (the Saudis have always given out false population figures, as do the Gulf sheikdoms, unwilling to let the outside world know how rich per capita, but also how weak and vulnerable they are). It was entirely a result of Western pressure, in an age when the West had not yet been buffaloed into believing that it needed to do the rich Arabs favors, or be solicitous of their primitive ways, and ways of thought.

The action in Brussels will be regarded uneasily by Arabs who use Western Europe as a combintatio fun-fair-and-brothel, and that's good. The less spaniel-candying to them, the better. The more they feel monitored, and subject to the laws of a superior civilization, unafraid of them and indeed no longer hiding its contempt for them -- a Franco-Armenian acquaintance who spent years in "Saudi" summed it up thus: "Money can buy everything, except civilization."

Arab supremacism -- think of those daggers-and-dishdasha boys, performing their tribal-dance routine, with those sneers of cold command - and that deep belief that they can flout Western laws and get away with everything -- needs to be held up for ridicule, and they need to be taken down a peg.

Or possibly two.

Posted by: Hugh at July 3, 2008 9:30 PM

Every day, same old Islam.

Posted by: Liberal Guy at July 3, 2008 9:41 PM

ISLAMSNOTFORME: I had a similar exchange (well, with an Ahmadi, so not quite a real Muslim) who claimed "Islam ended slavery." They got quite upset when I disagreed with their assertion and even more upset when I showed proof in the Quran and Hadith (*) that slavery was endorsed by Islam and practiced by Muhammad and his henchmen.

Islamic deception is alive and well in the 21st century. (We don't have to accept it, though.)

(*) Such as Quran 4:24 or Hadith: Muslim Book 008, Number 3432 or Bukhari Volume 3, Book 34, Number 432, to name but a few examples.

Posted by: Liberal Guy at July 3, 2008 9:57 PM

THE RIGHTS OF SLAVES UNDER ISLAM

According to the Hughes Dictionary of Islam, slaves had few civil or legal rights. For example:

a) Muslim men were allowed to have sex anytime with females slaves - Sura 4:3, 4:29, 33:49.

b) Slaves are as helpless before their masters as idols are before God - Sura 16:77

c) According to Islamic Tradition, people at the time of their capture were either to be killed, or enslaved. Shows you that they were at the bottom of the barrel to start with.

d) According to Islamic jurisprudence, slaves were merchandise. The sales of slaves was in accordance with the sale of animals.

e) Muhammad ordered that some slaves who were freed by their master be RE-ENSLAVED!

f) It is permissible under Islamic law to whip slaves.

g) According to Islam, a Muslim could not be put to death for murdering a slave. Ref. 2:178 and the Jalalayn confirm this.

h) According to Islam, the testimony of slaves is not admissible in court. Ibn Timiyya and Bukhari state this.

i) According to Islamic jurisprudence, slaves cannot choose their own marriage mate. - Ibn Hazm, vol. 6, part 9.

j) According to Islamic jurisprudence, slaves can be forced to marry who their masters want. - Malik ibn Anas, vol. 2, page 155.

From the link below -

http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/slavery.htm

Posted by: arjun.sevak at July 4, 2008 2:41 AM

Yep...same sh*t, different day.

Posted by: Madame Vengier at July 4, 2008 6:37 AM

I can think of one reason Billy would want to lift the veil..

Posted by: pulsar182 at July 4, 2008 2:36 PM

How do we know they only enslave and rape adult women?

We don't, do we?

And there are rather a lot of unresolved disappearnaces of western children.

Posted by: Monty at July 4, 2008 4:37 PM

New readers who have begun lurking or posting here at Jihadwatch/ dhimmiwatch only recently, may like to consult this 2005 story from the dhimmiwatch archives, concerning the torturing and mistreatment of maids in Saudi Arabia.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/006072.php

Don't just read the featured article: scroll on down through the comments field till you come, first, to a posting by Hugh, which contains the following remark

"a [New York Times] story about Sri Lankan "guest workers" and their treatment in the Arab states where they are routinely beaten (so routinely that the preparatory course for such would-be maids is to explain that if they do not do thus and so they will be beaten), raped, tortured, and murdered (about 100 bodies are returned, without explanation, each year, just to Sri Lanka)"

and then, a bit further down, another posting (by 'silvester') which provides extended transcripts from that same NYT story about Sri Lankan women working in Arab Muslim countries.

It contains this horrifying passage:

"the most gruesome cases [of abused maids, coming home to Sri Lanka] were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.

"The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more.

"Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families."

Can one begin to imagine what has been the fate of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands, the untold millions of kafir children and women seized and enslaved by Muslims over the past 1350 years? How many have been simply...sadistically used, and abused, and used, and abused, until they died? And then replaced, and the replacements similarly abused unto death.

It doesn't make economic sense: if you damage your workers so badly, the work won't get done, or will be substandard. That suggests to me that it isn't about getting work done - it's about using work as a means to dominate and destroy.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at July 4, 2008 8:48 PM

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Really?

Lord Acton stated that:

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely".

I think there is a big difference and Lord Acton was right in his observation.

For instance whilst you Americans suffer Church leaders who clearly are corrupted by power (from money?) the founder of their religion, Christ, by all accounts had absolute power and was not currupted.

And throughout the centuries there are examples of saints who have not been currupted and even in Nigeria today, where church leaders are as corrupted as their american examples, there is one lady who is in charge of the Food and Drugs Agency who is famous for not being corrupted and has made it possible to trust the bottled water on sale even.

In case you still don't follow the logic, if you leave the word "tend" out you also are stating that all people with power are bad so perhaps you have something in common then with the communist justification for a workers' revolution and you have no possibility of good leadership.

Any how when the shiek of Dubai replaced his father in 1960s (or 1950s can't be bothered to remember exactly) Dubai the harem were put in sacks and droppped into Dubai Creek to be disposed of.

Women where I live are treated like slaves by the mo-ites who also treat the women that don't wear veils like meat to be devoured....

So of course the royal mo-ite families are examples of their culture too, only on a grander scale.

Posted by: exposesithlords at July 5, 2008 5:56 AM