Public relations in Saudi Arabia 5

Watch how a Muslim immigrant worker is humiliated in Saudi Arabia.

Press the cc button for English translation.

Will the release of this video cause angry protests to break out among the Muslims of Europe, do you think?

Will the UN take up the worker’s cause?

Will US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vice President Joe Biden express their outrage in a televised speech?

Will pigs grow wings?

 

The orderers 302

 

A hundred years ago, when a workers’ paradise was about to be born in Russia, there was a joke which may by now have fallen down the collective memory-hole. It went like this:

Communist rabble-rouser: “Come the revolution we’ll all be eating strawberries and cream.”

Voice in the crowd: “But I don’t like strawberries and cream.”

Communist r-r:  “Come the revolution you’ll bloody well have to like strawberries and cream.”

There is a type of human personality that believes he/she knows what’s best for everyone, and will go to any length to force everyone, “for their own good”, to do as he/she decrees.

People of this type often choose to be sociologists, priests, politicians or  bureaucrats. They are always collectivists, always authoritarians, always a pain in the neck. Theirs is the stuff great despots are made of. And many gods. And a certain type of murderee.

Their deep ambition is to possess total power. Not one of your secrets left unexposed. Not one of your  shelves or drawers unsearched. All your files downloaded. All your emails read. Your thoughts policed. Your actions monitored. Your words recorded.

They will tidy you into neat “housing-units”. They will count out the calories you consume. They will ration the energy you may use. They will decide how long you may live. They will tell you what you may know. They are merciless in punishment – they’ll trim off lone wolves and obstinate dissenters as fast as a barber will trim your neckline. They have no use for innovation, or for change of any sort. They grudge you leisure in case you use it for thinking. They know what work you should be doing and you’d better be doing it how and where and for how long they say.

(Doctors and army officers really do have to exert authority over other adults. They are exempted from this post’s otherwise sweeping condemnation.)

These order-imposers, these self-elected benefactors, these interfering meddlers just simply cannot mind their own business. They can see what needs to be “put right” and cannot rest until they’ve done it.

You can protest until you drop: “What’s it to you what I do? It doesn’t harm you! I don’t interfere in your life, so don’t interfere in mine!  If you don’t like seeing me do it, don’t look…”

Still he/she will insist, “But don’t you understand, it does you harm. It’s bad for you. You must do this instead. I’m only trying to be helpful. I care what happens to you.” –  “You” being all of us except himself/herself. As if we were all children.

Usually they are puritans. Occasionally one pops up who lusts for destruction speedily, and might even orchestrate chaos to achieve the perfect order of utter annihilation. Nothing is so tidy as a world cleansed of human life.

Whatever their particular way and final goal, they are the Enemy.

This is from PJ Media, by Joe Hicks:

If you enjoy having a Big Gulp along with your burger and fries, you’d better drink up fast if you live in New York City: do-gooder Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks you are too irresponsible to know what’s good for you. He believes super-large sugary drinks contribute to all sorts of bad health issues, so he’s determined to make you downsize whether you like it or not.

The mayor’s ban on these drinks could go into effect as soon as early next year, and would affect drinks larger than 16 ounces. Bloomberg’s ban is aimed at drinks sold only at movie theaters, restaurants, or from street carts, meaning you could still get your large-sized drink fix at convenience stores, supermarkets, or other retail sellers.

This isn’t Bloomberg’s first foray into the “nanny state,” or employing excessive state action to protect people from themselves by restricting freedom. Under Bloomberg’s leadership — and via an equally meddlesome and liberal city council — the city has banned trans fats from food preparations in restaurants (the ingredient that makes french fries, doughnuts, and other deep-fried foods taste so yummy) and has forced chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus.

Bloomberg, in one of his most Orwellian moves, even banned donations of food to the homeless because the city didn’t have the ability to monitor these much-needed and welcomed gifts for things like fat, salt, or fiber content — a concern not typically voiced by individuals desperate for a meal.

Of course, the mayor’s rationale is the protection of public health. After all, there is an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. However, who among us really believes regularly downing upwards of 32 ounces of soft drink is a healthy thing to do? And since anyone addicted to gigantic-sized soft drinks can easily ask for a second 16-ounce drink or find a nearby retail outlet, is this ban likely to impact obesity among people already making unhealthy decisions?

And what business is it of the mayor’s anyway?

For libertarians and conservatives, the far greater concern is government intrusion into our private lives. There can be no confusion about this: controlling the intake of food and drink is simply not a function of good government as outlined by the framers of our Constitution. …

The problem of meddling “I-know-best” bureaucrats obviously isn’t just an affliction local to New York City. In 2008, Los Angeles City Council member Jan Perry succeeded in imposing a resolution banning any new fast food restaurants in a 32 square-mile area of South L.A. Like Bloomberg, her rationale was the disproportionate rates of obesity and diabetes among the largely poor, black, and Latino residents of her district. The racist, infantilizing message: poor minorities living in South L.A. are too stupid to make their own food choices. Her patronizing solution: experiment with their lives by forcing them to eat what she wants them to eat.

If government bureaucrats can ban the types of fast food outlets available, manipulate the size and types of drinks we can consume, and regulate every aspect of food preparation, what couldn’t they attempt to ban? Some studies have suggested that red meat is “unhealthy.” Will Bloomberg next propose a measure limiting red meat intake to one steak per month? Will the nanny state do-gooders ban hot dogs, or force Americans to take part in government exercise programs like those promoted by the first lady? …

Now listen up. You gotta eat every one of those strawberries, no arguments.

But cream? Do you know there are 20 calories in just one tablespoon of cream?

It oughta be banned.

 

(Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor’s Business Daily.)

The stupidest foreign policy 231

UNRWA, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is an organization that exists solely to keep millions of Palestinians as stateless dependents, or as cossetted beggars to put it more bluntly. This cruel policy was decided upon by Arab leaders way back in the late 1940s, in order to bludgeon Israel and the West with their own sense of compassion – the Arabs themselves having no such bothersome thing –  and the Western powers have gone along with it ever since. How many more generations must be condemned to this fate?

Mark Kirk, the Republican US Senator from Illinois, recently decided it was time for questions to be asked about the ever-growing numbers of Palestinian “refugees”.

Cliff May wrote on May 31, 2012, at the National Review:

Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee, on a unanimous and bipartisan basis, approved legislation requiring the State Department to tell Congress how many of the five million Palestinians currently receiving assistance from UNRWA were among the approximately 750,000 individuals displaced during the war against Israel, and how many are their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A statement from Kirk’s office explained that, “With U.S. taxpayers providing more than $4 billion to UNRWA since 1950, the watershed reporting requirement will help taxpayers better understand whether UNRWA truly remains a refugee assistance organization or has become a welfare agency for low-income residents of the Levant.”

Kirk’s legislation was strenuously opposed not just by UNRWA but also by the State Department.

– And by Patrick Leahy, Democratic Senator from Vermont.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

“I always look at what is in the United States’ interest first and foremost, and this would hurt the United States’ interests,” Senator Leahy stated firmly.

It is of course difficult to find as compelling a national interest as the UNRWA, a refugee agency created exclusively for the benefit of five million Arabs, approximately 30,000 of whom are actual refugees, but all of whom hate the United States.

Senator Leahy, who could not discover a national interest in the Balanced Budget Amendment, drilling for oil in ANWR or detaining Muslim terrorists, all of which he voted against,  finally discovered a binding national interest 5,500 miles away in Jordan, where “refugee camps” like Baqa’a (pop. 80,000), which are virtually indistinguishable from local towns and cities, complete with block after block of residential homes, stores and markets, multi-story office buildings, schools, hospitals and assorted infrastructure, must not be looked at too closely.

In Jordan, Palestinians from West of the River do actually have citizenship and are not, like the other “refugees”, stateless.  (Some two-thirds or maybe even three-quarters of the population of Jordan is native to the region of Palestine as defined under the post World War One British mandate. Jordan is, in fact, the Arab state of Palestine.)

As a city which will soon celebrate its 50 year anniversary, Baqa’a is older than many modern Israeli cities and is as much a refugee camp as any of them. … [But in] Baqa’a no one does anything for themselves because they are all eternal refugees with an entire UN agency dedicated to wiping their bottoms for them. A unique and singular honor in a world full of authentic refugees who have been driven out by rape squads and genocide, without getting their own minders in blue.

Senator Mark Kirk’s heretical proposal to begin reforming the UNRWA by distinguishing between people who could have some claim on being refugees from the vast majority who cannot, met with Leahy’s declaration that … “it would hurt the United States’ interests.”

It is no doubt in the best interests of the denizens of Baqa’a and their Jordanian rulers, who need to spend that much less money taking care of their people, but ignorance certainly doesn’t do the United States and its interests any good. A refusal to seriously examine the books does, however, benefit the UNRWA and politicians like Leahy who continue to support this boondoggle. …

Where exactly is the compelling national interest in standing behind the UNRWA’s 1.23 billion dollar biennial budget, and not just the budget, but a refusal to reform the methodology for accounting where all that money is going to? Before Washington D.C. cuts another quarter-of-a-billion dollar check to one of the biggest wastes of money in an organization that excels at wasting money, even more than D.C., it’s entirely sensible to ask whom the money is going to and how long we will be making out these checks?

There are currently five million people living off the UNRWA dole. Sooner or later there will be fifty million. Jordan’s government has done everything possible to inflate the UNRWA welfare rolls and keep cities like Baqa’a and their people on the Western dole. …

Thomas R. Nides, the Deputy Secretary of State, took a position against the amendment, calling the number of refugees a “Final Status Issue” that can only be resolved when Israel and the PLO militias complete their negotiations, at some unknown date. Diplomats have developed a bad habit of insisting on a dysfunctional status quo tilted toward the Muslim side, until the messiah of final status finally comes. There can be no Jewish housing in Jerusalem, because it’s a final status issue, we can’t count the refugees because it’s a final status issue, and we can’t question the final status, because that too is a final status issue.

After twenty years of negotiations, that have led to nothing except a rump terrorist state that is one big Baqa’a inside Israel, it’s ridiculously clear that there will never be any final status negotiations

Final status, for all intents and purposes, means forever. It’s an excuse for maintaining Baqa’a and the United Nations budget, and nothing else. But suppose that we might one day look forward to final status negotiations, there is no reason why an objective like what makes one a refugee, cannot be addressed by the nation funding the refugees. Final status agreements cannot defer the dictionary or common sense. And unless we are expected to keep on funding Baqa’a on its 100 year anniversary or its 200 year anniversary, sooner or later the numbers have to be added up, and people whose only claim to the bottomless aid bucket is that their great-grandfather was on the losing side of a war of conquest, started by their side, will have to get a job. …

What conceivable national interest has there ever been in picking up Soviet leftovers like the PLO, and pouring billions of dollars into a sewer, which only spits up more terrorism, hate and chaos? When Senators and Deputy Secretaries talk about national interests, what they really mean is the interest of Muslim monarchies in the Gulf … 

The UNRWA, Baqa’a and the PLO aren’t an American interest — they’re a Muslim interest. What Leahy and Nides really mean is that it’s in America’s national interest to cater to Muslim interests. Nides comes closest to saying that, when he writes that cutting UNRWA aid would place a heavy burden on our allies in the region, who despite their billions in oil wealth and their passionate feelings on the subject, somehow can’t be bothered to cover the cost of feeding, teaching and caring for Baqa’a.

The King of Jordan found 1.5 billion dollars to build the Red Sea Astrarium, a local version of Disneyland, but the Hashemite monarchy, like the House of Saud, the Al-Thanis, the House of Sabah, and every other bunch of burnoosed tyrants with palaces and investments across the world, can’t be asked to care for their own people in their 50 year old refugee camps, who are kept that way because it’s an easy way to sock the gullible West for another few billion dollars to fund their terrorist training bases.

Even if there were a valid reason for the United States to champion Muslim interests by carving up Israel in order to create yet another Sunni Muslim state, it would not be a national interest, it would be appeasement. … A foreign policy of feeding other people to the beast, in the hopes that he won’t feed on us, is not a national interest — it’s craven cowardice that has no hope of succeeding.

The future of the United States will not be secured by turning Washington D.C. into the front office for a bunch of medieval tyrannies that have no future. …

To return to Cliff May’s article, he reports and comments:

There are 1.8 million Palestinians who hold Jordanian citizenship and yet are counted as refugees, despite the fact that under international law — specifically, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Article 1C, the “Cessation” Clause) — a person stops being a “refugee” once he “has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality.”

Would anyone suggest that a Pakistani citizen, the descendant of a Muslim who left India following the post–World War II partition of the subcontinent into two states, should be classified as a refugee?

It should be obvious that UNRWA’s beneficiaries are being used as cannon fodder.

– To be kept as beggars forever if the Arab leaders continue to have their way.

Incredible as it must seem to the logical Western mind, the Arab plan is to keep the Palestinian refugees as refugees dependent on hand-outs from the charitable democracies even if they attain a Palestinian state. 

They have been told by their own leaders that they will be denied Palestinian citizenship even in a future Palestinian state. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” Abdullah Abdullah, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, stated last year, “but … they are not automatically citizens. … Even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [area of a projected Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Why not? Because statelessness makes them more lethal weapons of war. Ambassador Abdullah explained: “When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

The end of the “game” being the liquidation of the State of Israel – the goal of the Arabs to which the State Department closes its ears and mind, because to acknowledge it would be to confess that the  whole notion of a “peace process” is nothing but a game, a farce, a protracted stupidity. As a policy, the State Department’s obstinate stance helps neither the refugees nor Israel. It prolongs the misery of  the one and the insecurity of  the other. How it serves the real long-term interests of the United States is impossible to see.

A nation’s tragedy 116

The English always had rude words for foreigners: Wogs, Wops, Spiks, Frogs, Krauts …

But they were, nevertheless, a tolerant nation.

Until tolerance became compulsory.

And the intolerable was foisted upon them.

This is from Townhall, by Diana West:

Back in 2001, Britain’s political parties signed a fantastic pledge. They agreed to say nothing to “stir up racial or religious hatred, or lead to prejudice on grounds of race, nationality or religion.”

This gag order did more than keep the parties polite. Vital issues — from massive immigration and multiculturalism to their eradicating effects on British civilization — were officially banned. Thus, such concerns became impermissible thoughts. Not that such issues weren’t already thoughtcrime, as George Orwell would have put it. But this unprecedented pledge turned “violators” into political lepers.

I thought of that elite code of cowardice this week when a London judge sentenced a 42-year-old British secretary named Jacqueline Woodhouse to 21 weeks in jail. Her crime? An expletive-laden rant about immigration, multiculturalism and the disappearance of British civilization. Not in so many words. But that was the unmistakable gist of Woodhouse’s commentary one January night on the London Underground.

This same week, another London judge ordered two black girls, 18 and 19, to perform community service after a savage physical attack on two white legal secretaries. “I am satisfied what you both did, you did that night because you were fueled by alcohol,” Judge Stephen Kramer said, as though tut-tutting a child’s unknowing apple theft.

A few months ago, another London judge freed four Somali Muslim women who set upon a white couple, yelling, “Kill the white slag,” and other anti-white slurs. The gang beat the woman to the ground and ripped out a patch of her hair. Judge Robert Brown was lenient because, he ruled, as Muslims, the women were not used to being drunk.

Jacqueline Woodhouse was drunk, too, but that was no mitigating factor in her case. She harmed no one, but that was no mitigating factor, either. Judge Michael Snow invoked the “deep sense of shame” Woodhouse’s display elicited, because “our citizens … may, as a consequence, believe that it secretly represents the views of other white people.” …

Thanks to YouTube, [“thoughtcrime”] becomes continuous spectacle. Woodhouse’s court-deemed “victim,” Galbant Singh Juttla, recorded and uploaded her display. …

The video clip records her as saying (more or less, “bleep” being substituted for expletives):

“All bleeping foreign bleeping bleeps. … Where do you come from? Where do you come from? Where do you come from?”

She estimated that 30 percent of the train’s passengers were in the country illegally. …

Expletives fly [from others] regarding England: “This bleeping country is a bleeping joke.” …

“I wouldn’t mind if you loved our country,” she said … to a Pakistani beside her.

“Long live Pakistan,” he said twice in Urdu, later leading a chorus of the Pakistani national anthem.

Woodhouse then notices her “victim” recording her. “Oh, look, he’s filming,” she says. “Hello, government.” She leans into the camera.

“Why don’t you tell us your name, as well?” Juttla the “victim” says.

“Why don’t you tell me where you’re from?” she says.

“I’m British, I’m British, yeah? I’m British,” he tells her.

“Right. OK,” she says.

“So, what’s your problem?” he says.

“Oh, what’s your problem?” she says.

“Yeah, you should watch what you say.”

“Watch what I say?”

“Yeah.”

“I used to live in England. Now I live in the United Nations.”

“So keep your mouth shut then.”

“Why should I?”

Twenty-one weeks in jail, folks.

Why, Woodhouse quite rationally asks, “am I not allowed to express my opinions?”

“We don’t want to hear your opinions,” Juttla replies.

This tears it. “Why is it all right for you but not all right for me?” She’s shrieking now, her voice cutting the air like a ragged-edged razor.

There is background laughter, but nothing is funny. For a few, farcical minutes, a nation’s tragedy, its unmarked passing, has taken the spotlight, the lead role played by a drunken secretary because there is no one else.

“Just keep your mouth shut,” Juttla says for the umpteenth time.

“Why should you open your gob and I can’t open mine?”

“Because you questioned me first,” he says, which isn’t true. Juttla questioned Woodhouse first, asking for her name. Surely, Big Brother would want to know.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Not one rule for you and one rule for me.”

Oh, yes, Jacqueline. One rule for indigenous islanders.

One rule for everyone else.

John Edwards and his God 120

John Edwards, former Senator, Democratic nominee for Vice President in 2004, and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and again in 2008, cares deeply about his hair.

He does not care to be honorable, decent, or trustworthy.

And his God is – predictably, since no God is better than his creator – as ethically challenged as John Edwards himself.

CBS News reports:

After nine days of deliberation over a case that proved at times both bizarre and sordid, a jury on Thursday found John Edwards not guilty on one of six charges of campaign finance corruption. A mistrial has been declared on the other five counts.

Speaking in front of the courthouse after the verdict and mistrials were announced, … “I don’t think God’s through with me. I really believe he thinks there’s still some good things I can do,” he said.

Yup. He’s surely not done all he can. And it depends what he and his God mean by “good”.

His record so far:

Adultery. “The joys of childhood are as nothing compared to those of adultery” says the schoolboy howler. But his wife , dying of cancer, grudged him those joys, and many believe she had a case for sympathy.

Lying. He denied having the adulterous affair, and bribed an aide to lie too by claiming paternity of his mistress’s baby.

Misuse of campaign funds – unproven but strongly suspected.

A person so typical of the Left’s anointed, being vain shallow and hypocritical, cannot suddenly stop fooling some of the people all of the time.

We wait in eager anticipation to see what the pair of them – he and his God – will cook up for our entertainment next.

Eric the Unjust 101

When such a man as Eric Holder is in charge of justice for the nation, the nation should not expect to get it.

As Attorney General he has turned the DoJ into the powerhouse of  a “political protection racket”.

The quoted words are those of Thomas Sowell, who writes, with unfailing good judgment:

Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities.

This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own Department of Justice from completing the prosecution of black thugs who stationed themselves outside a Philadelphia voting site to harass and intimidate white voters. 

This may have seemed like a small episode to some at the time, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

The U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting that case – J. Christian Adams – resigned from the Department of Justice in protest, and wrote a book about a whole array of similar race-based decisions on voting rights by Eric Holder and his subordinates at the Department of Justice.

The book is titled Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes. …

Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights.

What Attorney General Holder has been complaining loudly about, and launching federal lawsuits about, are states that require photo identification to vote. Holder calls this blocking minority “access” to the voting booths.

Since millions of black Americans – like millions of white Americans – are confronted with demands for photo identification at airports, banks and innumerable other institutions, it is a little much to claim that requiring the same thing to vote is denying the right to vote. But Holder’s chutzpah is up to the task.

Attorney General Holder claims that the states’ requirement of photo identification for voting, in order to prevent voter fraud, is just a pretext for discriminating against blacks and other minorities. …

Despite Holder’s claim, a little experiment in his own home voting district showed how easy it is to commit voter fraud.

An actor – a white actor, at that – went to a voting place where Eric Holder is registered to vote, and told them that he was Eric Holder. The actor had no identification at all with him, either with or without a photo. He told the voting official that he had forgotten and left his identification in his car. Instead of telling him to go back to the car and get some identification, the official said that that was all right, and offered him the ballot. The actor had the good sense not to actually take the ballot, which would have made him guilty of voter fraud — and, being white, he would undoubtedly have been prosecuted by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

But the actor had made his point. When a white man with no identification can go to a voting site, impersonate a black man who lives in that district, and get his ballot offered to him, then it is far too easy to commit voter fraud.

Does not Attorney General Eric Holder understand that? Of course he understands it! The man is not stupid, despite his other failings.

His failings: racism, bigotry, base instincts, moral corruption, a crippled sense of justice, an oversupply of gall …

Holder’s pooh-poohing of voter fraud dangers, and hyping the “threat” of denying minorities “access” to the voting booth, are completely consistent with his drive to (1) maximize the number of votes by black Democrats and (2) spread as much fear as possible among minorities that they are under siege, and that the Democrats are their only protection and salvation.

It is a political protection racket, with payoffs in votes.

Nor can Holder’s boss, Barack Obama, be unaware of voter fraud. After all, he comes from Chicago, where voting officials refuse to discriminate against dead people.

Rep. Darrell Issa has taken steps to hold the Attorney General  in contempt of Congress over Operation Fast and Furious. Even if he gets away with that operation – providing Mexican cartels with guns which are then fatally used against US border guards – and with letting black criminals off the hook, and with whatever other injustices he has disgracefully and sarcastically used his position to perpetrate, thanks to J. Christian Adams and Rep. Darrell Issa, Holder stands before us stripped of respect, his moral turpitude exposed to the world.

As we say in our Articles of Reason:

Justice may be elusive, but judgment is inescapable.

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