What a human rights organization said about the abusive treatment of laborers in Saudi Arabia deserves contemplation and appreciation, regardless of the fact that some news media limited themselves to mentioning only Saudi Arabia though the situation and problem are similar in other countries in the region. Even though the report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch released on July 15 may be unacceptable to some here in the Kingdom, especially among influential classes, we all must take notice and take a stand.
The trade in foreign servants and laborers has reached a stage almost equivalent to slavery. The slave trade originates in many cases in expat worker's home countries where unscrupulous individuals collect huge amounts of money from poor job seekers in exchange for a job and work visa. In the Kingdom, similar "slave trade" companies collect such large sums of money from the imported laborer that nothing is left for him. These poor people have come to Saudi Arabia in search of the means to provide the daily bread for their families back home. But they are often left struggling for survival and remain at the mercy of their employer.
The stories are horrific and embarrassing, detailing the transformation of those who came as laborers into beggars on the streets, jobless and with no means for a living. Some are fortunate enough to collect a hundred dollars a month, a pathetic amount for most of us, but to the desperately poor, food for their loved ones. The Saudi authorities must put an end to this inhumane phenomenon. It has become a curse on the country just because a minority that has no compassion in their hearts is trading laborers' visas with few restraints.
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From The Middle East Information Center, extracted from an article in The New York Times (link found in Gene Expression).
When she was 17, marrying age for a Saudi girl, Salha al-Hefthi was presented with a husband. ... He was the son of her father's brother — her first cousin — and everyone, including the bride, agreed that "a first cousin was a first choice," she said. The couple had two healthy boys, now 22 and 20, but their third child, a girl, was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a crippling and usually fatal disease that was carried in the genes of both parents. Their fourth, sixth and seventh children were also born with the disorder. Spinal muscular atrophy and the gene that causes it, along with several other serious genetic disorders, are common in Saudi Arabia, where women have an average of six children and where in some regions more than half of the marriages are between close relatives.
They do with each other what they won't let their sheep do...
Across the Arab world today an average of 45 percent of married couples are related, according to Dr. Nadia Sakati, a pediatrician and senior consultant for the genetics research center at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. In some parts of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the south, where Mrs. Hefthi was raised, the rate of marriage among blood relatives ranges from 55 to 70 percent, among the highest rates in the world, according to the Saudi government. Widespread inbreeding in Saudi Arabia has produced several genetic disorders, Saudi public health officials said, including the blood diseases of thalassemia, a potentially fatal hemoglobin deficiency, and sickle cell anemia. Spinal muscular atrophy and diabetes are also common, especially in the regions with the longest traditions of marriage between relatives. Dr. Sakati said she had also found links between inbreeding and deafness and muteness. ...
... and religious fanaticism.
Mrs. Hefthi did not know it when her daughter was born, but Ashjan, now 18, would never walk. Her childhood would be filled with terrible colds, sore throats, assorted other illnesses and an obsessive longing to walk and run like her older brothers. "Why can't I walk," she would shout to her mother when she was 6.
Because genetically, Mommy and Daddy are the same thing as brother and sister...
"It is God's will," her mother would say. "In paradise you will walk." ...
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
07/24/2004 9:46:22 AM ||
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No wonder filthy muslims are so fucking stupid. They're all retards. They eat shit...and bark at the moon.
Posted by: Halfass Pete ||
07/24/2004 11:53 Comments ||
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I have seen 1 in a million type health conditions in some rural Alaska villages where the pool of marryable people gets into the cousin thing. Problem is that the only solution is to expand the gene pool.
In SA, for the most part it seems that they have hardly even started. Their culture perpetuates this phenomenon. The culture will have to change before the gene pool starts changing.
On another note, anybody heard if Anon1617 and her husband got out of Saudi Arabia yet?
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
07/24/2004 13:45 Comments ||
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Why don't they cut out the middle (wo)man and just F themselves.
Posted by: ed ||
07/24/2004 16:35 Comments ||
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AP - intermarrage of blood relatives is also a huge problem in Amish and Mennonite communities in the Midwest. As you might imagine, birth defects are statistically common. For Amish children 9 years old and younger, the death rate from congenital defects is 50 percent higher than that among white, non-Amish children.
Thankfully, the last two generations have tried to address the problem by looking for prospective husbands and wives outside their local geographical area but as you said, until and unless the gene pool expands past the puddle stage, defects will be both severe and common.
The Amish and Mennonite share a great many traits with the 'slims - One day I'll flesh out this theory at a later time and post it here for comment when time permits. But where they differ, and this is huge - when confronted by people who have different religious backgrounds than themselves, their first thought is to ignore them, not kill them.
#5
... and everyone, including the bride, agreed that "a first cousin was a first choice," she said.
While religious fanaticism, and terrorism especially, may not result from inbreeding, they most certainly rely upon tightly interwoven familial structures and their bonds of trust.
This sort of reliability's price is now coming into focus, at least for the outside world if not for the Arabs themselves. Distrust of outsiders (i.e., xenophobia), an inability to accept cultural or doctrinal diversity and consistent discouragement of progressive social elements are all coming home to roost.
If Arab nations cannot overcome these somewhat easily surrmountable obstacles, they will stumble and fall into the pit of humiliation and despond they have so furiously dug for themselves over the last several centuries.
I say, let them. They have so severely bitten any and all helping hands that the onus of advancement and self-improvement is now entirely upon themselves. They have the wealth and access to technology needed to bring their societies forward unaided by the benison of Western offices. If they are unable to do so, let them fester and subside back into the oozing puss of their own infected culture.
Should any continued embrace of terrorism be exhibited as a route towards unearned expansion of religious political domain, it shall serve as their death knell.
#6
This problem of theirs stems from the fact that they have't been overran by a meanass bunch that rapes, kills, loots and burns, in that order (snicker), and have their gene pool deepened. Nothing like a runthrough by a Genghis Khan look alike to freshen up the family tree.
Posted by: Old Fogey ||
07/24/2004 20:35 Comments ||
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A woman has turned in nearly 1,300 guns to federal police, responding to a government campaign for citizens to surrender privately held weapons. The woman had kept the guns at home since her father, an arms collector, died eight years ago, federal policeman Wagner Castilho said Saturday. Police did not identify the woman, who is expected to receive up to $65,000 for her arsenal turned in Friday. The government is paying Brazilians to surrender their weapons in an effort to reduce the country's murder rate, one of the world's highest.
According to UNESCO, Brazil has 27.1 homicides per 100,000 people -- the fourth-highest in the world. Sixty-eight percent of those killings are committed with firearms. The government pays up to $98 for each weapon turned in, depending on the gun's caliber and age. In Sao Paulo state alone, police have collected more than 3,000 weapons since the program began on July 15, Castilho said. In Rio de Janeiro state, more than 1,100 firearms have been turned in. But most are old, and some even date back to World War II, police said. The total for Brazil was not immediately available. But the Rio newspaper O Globo put the number at more than 10,000. The government hopes to take 80,000 guns from the streets by Dec. 23, when a tough new gun law takes effect. The new law prohibits the possession of firearms in public and raises the minimum age for gun ownership from 18 to 25. It also requires owners to register their guns with the ministries of defense and justice.
Posted by: Mark Espinola ||
07/24/2004 5:49:57 PM ||
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Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/24/2004 03:39 ||
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The Barbary Apes are not really apes, but monkeys, the only ones native to the European continent (if one excludes media-dhimmis and retro-red agitators).
Nevertheless, lefties should be pleased to learn that Churchill could find the time to concern himself with environmental issues at the height of the war. It won't outweigh his hostility to communism and his fondness for aerial bombing in their minds, but it might mitigate his status as a Great Satan.
#2
And Churchill's concern for the apes and the legend of their presence at Gib being of official concern is the basis for a funny novel "Scruffy" by Paul Gallico. In it the entire population is reduced to one, a malign and bad-tempered speciman. Hilarity ensues. There are still apes, there, too. I have a snapshot of one of them sitting on the hood of the Very Elderly Volvo, eating an apple.
The train that derailed Thursday night east of Istanbul was traveling faster than it should have been, the Turkish transportation minister says. The train was traveling at 73 mph (118 kph) instead of the 50 mph (80 kph) set for the stretch of track it was on, Binali Yildirim said Friday. But when asked about the definite cause of the wreck, he said, "We don't know." The derailment killed 36 people and injured 81. Yildirim dismissed the notion of suspending the Istanbul-Ankara train service until an investigation into the crash is complete, and said service will resume as soon as the tracks are cleared and repaired.
Accelerated train service on the line began in June, cutting the time of the commute between Ankara and Istanbul from seven to five hours. Yildirim said that during the preparation for the accelerated trains all precautions were taken and all the concerns that were raised were taken under consideration. After lengthy studies the railroad tracks were deemed fit to sustain accelerated speeds, he said. At the site of the wreck, one woman remained missing. Rescue teams searched the wreckage with cadaver-sniffing dogs, to no avail.
The wreck caused five cars to topple; three had been turned upright by mid-morning. The train's two engineers have been detained for questioning. The train derailed about 7:45 p.m., according to the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was en route to Ankara from Istanbul when it left the tracks near the town of Pamukova, about 115 miles from Istanbul. Erdogan, who attended a celebration for the new express service between largest city and its capital when it went on line in June, visited the crash site Thursday night. He offered his condolences and said an investigation was under way. "We don't know the exact reasons yet. They are searching if there are any technical problems," Erdogan said. The new service was part of a program by Erdogan to improve and modernize Turkey's railways. The train, with 234 passengers and nine crew members on board, left Istanbul about 6 p.m. at an initial speed of 95 mph, according to Muammer Turker, a spokesman for the railroad company in Ankara. But had slowed down at the time of the accident, the spokesman said. One male passenger, a longtime traveler along the route, told Turkish broadcaster NTV that he was in the fourth car when the train began to shake violently, leaned left, then lurched right and left the tracks. He said the train had shaken with unusual intensity earlier in the trip, at times to the point he could not stand.
Posted by: Zenster ||
07/24/2004 12:16:29 AM ||
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The Bosnian city of Mostar Friday joyfully unveiled its rebuilt 16th-century bridge, almost 11 years after its destruction in war became a symbol of the conflicts that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. The new "Stari Most" (Old Bridge) over the Neretva River, which separates the mainly Muslim and mainly Croat sides of Mostar and a front line during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, was inaugurated at a spectacular ceremony with a guest list of international dignitaries.
Fireworks lit up the sky high above the elegant single-span arch and nine of Mostar's legendary divers, brandishing torches, leapt into the green rushing waters of the Neretva from the bridge packed with children singing an anti-war song. "I think this is a new beginning, that's what citizens have been telling me too. You can feel a special atmosphere all over," Mostar's Muslim mayor, Hamdija Jahic, told Reuters earlier Friday.
More than 2,000 people took part in the evening ceremony, including Bosnian folk dancers, child choirs and brass bands from both sides of the divided town as well as leading Bosnian musicians and singers. Hundreds of Mostar citizens and tourists watched the celebrations, perched in houses and cafes around the bridge. Thousands then flooded the Old Town, eager to take a walk across the bridge. "This feeling is hard to describe. I spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life here. I just hope other things in Mostar will soon look more like they were before," said Amela Hadrovic, a 38-year-old ethnic Muslim office worker, after crossing over.
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Posted by: Zenster ||
07/24/2004 12:35:00 AM ||
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This is just great, with a little over 3 months to go.
Increased federal scrutiny of the electoral process in the upcoming presidential election has Lubbock County officials scrambling to find up to 269 Spanish-speaking election clerks by November. Elections Administrator Dorothy Kennedy was notified Thursday of the new bilingual clerk requirements in a memo from Texas Sec retary of State Geoffrey Con nor. Training and staffing that number of election workers could cost as much as $27,000. However, County Commis sioner James Kitten said he was less worried about the cost and more worried about the county's ability to find that many election workers before November. "Over the past few years, getting workers has been difficult to start with," he said. "That's the big issue. You can't really have an election without workers."
Although Texas has required bilingual election materials and bilingual clerks for nearly 30 years, the state never specified how many bilingual clerks should be in each precinct, according to a copy of Connor's memo obtained by The Ava lanche-Journal. The memo, which was sent to election administrators in every Texas county, recommended at least one bilingual clerk for each voting precinct in which voters with Spanish surnames constitute at least 5 percent of the population. According to the state's formula, Lubbock County must assign three bilingual clerks to 19 precincts, two bilingual clerks to 22 precincts and one bilingual clerk to another 22 precincts. Kennedy will assign the remaining 146 workers to "take care of the other precincts that don't hit the 5 percent threshold," she said.
Connor's urgency stemmed from the U.S. Department of Justice's decision to spotlight Texas' compliance with bilingual election requirements, according to the memo. "In light of the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election, the 2004 general election will be examined very closely," Connor wrote. "DOJ has given us advance notice that bilingual election clerks will be one of the election issues that they will be monitoring closely." According to Kennedy, federal officials might be assigned to observe the vote in Lubbock County. One complaint raised during the 2000 election was the lack of Spanish-speaking election workers, especially in Florida, Kennedy said. Election officials across the country acknowledge, though, that the problems in Florida could have happened anywhere, she said. "We just don't want it in Lubbock County," she said. "We want no problems with elections (here)."
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#1
Why do we need Spanish speaking clerks? Or Arab, Korean, or Eskimo? This is the USA and we speak English here. If you want to vote, learn the friggin language. Can anyone imagine moving to Mexico, Spain, Italy, or Korea and demanding to vote in English? This is a clear demonstration on how far we have fallen as a nation.
From Popular Mechanics, an article by Jim Wilson (link found in Free Republic)
.... In reprisal for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev had ordered the KGB to place America in the crosshairs of a sabotage campaign. Over the next 20 years, KGB agents would take advantage of the thousands of miles of unguarded Canadian and Mexican borders to bury caches of high explosives throughout the United States. On Moscow's command, agents could use them to blow up ports, dams, power stations and pipelines. ...
Christopher Andrew, ... [the co-author of] The Sword And The Shield, a history of the KGB, expands upon the extent of the operation. "Among the chief sabotage targets across the U.S. border were military bases, missile sites, radar installations and the oil pipeline which ran from El Paso, Texas, to Costa Mesa, Calif.," he says. The KGB also had plans to put America in the dark. Operating from a safe house in Big Spring Park, near Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, KGB terrorists planned to attack powerline interconnection points serving the Northeast. Montana was the focus of what Andrew believes would have been a two-stage attack against Flathead and Hungry Horse dams. "[The documents] identified a point, code-named Doris, on the South Fork River about 3 kilometers below the dam where [they] could bring down a series of pylons on a steep mountain slope that would take a lengthy period to repair," says Andrew.
"The KGB also planned a probably simultaneous operation in which commandos would descend on the Hungry Horse Dam at night, take control of it for a few hours and sabotage its sluices. In 1967, a number of frontier crossings were reconnoitered, among them areas near the Lake of the Woods and the International Falls in Minnesota, and in the regions of the Glacier National Park in Montana."
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Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
07/24/2004 10:26:16 AM ||
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TELEFON!
Posted by: Stephen ||
07/24/2004 11:13 Comments ||
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Stephen, good catch.
Posted by: Matt ||
07/24/2004 11:17 Comments ||
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...If you've never read The Sword And The Shield , by all means do so. You will drop through the floor when you read what the KGB was prepared to do to us in wartime.
There is a second volume to the story as well which has not yet been published because it names names of Americans and Britons who willingly served the KGB, and the publishers have been threatened with more than one lawsuit.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
07/24/2004 13:55 Comments ||
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al Qaeda guide book?
Posted by: Capt America ||
07/24/2004 22:42 Comments ||
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Posted by: Mark Espinola ||
07/24/2004 17:46 ||
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Talk about a meaningless milestone! Their fry are even smaller, as are those of most fish. I've read accounts from hobbyists of newly-hatched fry losing fights with daphnia...
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
07/24/2004 21:50 Comments ||
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College engineering students are flying their high-tech creations this week in the 14th Annual International Aerial Robotics Competition, paving the way for a new generation of surveillance gear that could help soldiers during urban warfare. Their aircraft resemble radio-controlled model airplanes and helicopters that hobbyists fly for amusement, but the ones buzzing around an urban warfare training center at Fort Benning are equipped with Global Positioning receivers, gyro compasses and computers that allow them to fly without any human intervention. This year's competition was hosted by the Soldier Battle Laboratory at Fort Benning, which develops and tests new high-tech weapons for soldiers. "It gives us an opportunity to see the cutting edge," Mike Kennedy, a robotics projects officer at the lab. "These kids are cutting edge. They're doing things the Army can't do yet."
Ten teams, some from as far away as Canada, were represented. Their goal, set several years ago, is to build a robotic plane that can fly 3 kilometers, pick out a symbol on a building, identify all the open windows and doors and then launch a probe that could send video images of the interior to soldiers at a safe distance. The first team to accomplish the mission gets $40,000 in prize money. None of the teams were expected to reach the ultimate goal this year. The Georgia Institute of Technology team has reached the second of four levels last year: flying autonomously for 3 kilometers and identifying open windows and doors. Kennedy said none of the aircraft were expected to launch the video probe this year. "Possibly next year," Kennedy said, holding up his hands with fingers crossed. "A soldier could program the aircraft to fly in, identify a building and launch a probe or some vehicle. And he can see what is inside the building from 3 kilometers away."
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Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/24/2004 03:33 ||
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Ya know, this might cut down on the amount of crime outside of prison. I wonder how many people will think twice about committing a crime if they know that their freedom AND their cig's are on the line.
From Clinical Genetics, an article by R. Bromiker, et al. (Link found at Gene Expression.)
The aim of this work was to determine the impact of parental consanguinity on congenital malformations in a mixed urban and rural Arab community in Jerusalem, Israel. ... Of 561 infants, 253 (45%) were born to consanguineous couples. The incidence of major congenital malformations in the offspring was 8.7, 7.1 and 2.6% in cases of first cousins, all consanguineous, and non-consanguineous couples, respectively. ... Parental consanguinity was also associated with an increased incidence of death in previous siblings ...
Consanguineous marriages have been described as an important factor contributing to an increased occurrence of congenital malformations and subsequent morbidity and mortality among the offspring. With in the general population, the incidence of congenital malformations spans a wide range. With few exceptions, the frequency of major malformations reported in western countries ranges between 1.0 and 2.4%. By contrast, the risk for congenital malformations in the offspring of marriages between first cousins has been reported to range between 2.9 and 8.0%. ...
The increased incidence of genetic abnormalities in the offspring of consanguineous couples most likely arises from the homozygous expression of recessive genes inherited from their common ancestors. The incidence of major malformations found in the current study in the offspring of first cousins (8.7%) was more than three times higher than that in the newborns of unrelated parents (2.6%). This incidence is higher than that generally reported in the western literature; however, in other publications from the Middle East, an even higher ncidence was reported. ...
Excellent study in medical genetics by the Middle East Arabs -- they managed to demonstrate the genetic perils of consanguineous sex nicely. Too bad for them the Western world except for parts of West Virginia had figured this out several hundred years ago.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
07/24/2004 9:34:49 AM ||
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Jeesh Mike - please use the big fat crayons when leading the class this early - :)
Consanguineous - (Merriam Webster) - of the same blood, specificlly, descended from the same ancestor.
#2
Nice, just the image I needed. Arab men beating on and raping their first cousins. Just the thought makes my blood boil.
Sure, the article doesn't mention beatings or rape, but we all know at least some do so behind closed doors.
Posted by: Charles ||
07/24/2004 11:01 Comments ||
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One must always marry outside of the clan. A suspicious and withdrawn race like the Scots figured this out exactly how many centuries ago? The drawbacks of maintaining an insular culture are finally coming back to haunt Arab society.
It is difficult to wish so much suffering upon innocent children, but parents who have knowingly wed their own first cousins deserve nothing better. It is cold comfort to think that immense amounts of medical resources in such an undeveloped region will be diverted to the care and feeding of so many crippled offspring. However, these sort of albatrosses are most deservingly strung around Arab society's collective neck.
Witness TF-1196 told her story: Rebels used machetes to hack all movement and life out of her husband. Then a rebel young enough to be her child raped her. She raised the rounded tips of her arms to show why she had not signed her statement, delivered before a U.N.-backed war crimes court for the diamond-rich west African nation of Sierra Leone. "After they had killed my husband, a rebel ... chopped off my right and left hands with a cutlass, into four bits," TF-1196 -- a middle-aged, downcast village woman -- told the court.
Survivors this week and last have started telling their accounts in one of Africa's most heartless wars: a 1991-2002 campaign by rebels who killed, raped, kidnapped and hacked to pieces hundreds of thousands of civilians in hopes of terrorizing Sierra Leone into ceding permanent control of its government and diamond fields. Rebels, many of them children as young as 5, followed Foday Sankoh, whom they called Pappy. Sankoh gave his fighters AK-47s, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines -- and encouragement to kill in the most brutal way their immature minds and unmolded judgment could devise.
The majority of the rebels' campaign played out in Sierra Leone's countryside, leaving even the death toll uncertain. Victims' accounts likewise are attracting little world notice, in contrast to war crimes trials for conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But the stories -- coming out in a sterile, specially built courtroom in a country that is officially the world's least-developed -- stand up to any in testimony to the reaches of human cruelty. This "diamond-rich west African nation" ranks as the "world's least-developed." Go figure. Follow the money and find the true criminals. Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Zenster ||
07/24/2004 12:15:34 AM ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
