Abandoned

[boston bean]

Dubai is being promoted as a luxury high-class paradise in the desert, but the reality is brutally different, as Australian Alicia Gali discovered. Gali took a job in the UAE with one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, Starwood. What happened next makes this story a must-watch for every Australian planning on travelling through the region.

Gali was using her laptop in the hotel’s staff bar when her drink was spiked. She awoke to a nightmare beyond belief: she had been savagely raped by three of her colleagues. Alone and frightened, she took herself to hospital. What Alicia didn’t know is that under the UAE’s strict sharia laws, if the perpetrator does not confess, a rape cannot be convicted without four adult Muslim male witnesses. She was charged with having illicit sex outside marriage, and thrown in a filthy jail cell for eight months.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/features/article/-/17094076/abandoned/

Video at link

[NYC_SKP]

1. Good Lord.

As I read this I anticipated the worst and there it was: the victim becomes the accused and convicted.

[boston bean]

2. Starwood hotels is criminal in this, IMHO.

Did you watch the videos?

[ismnotwasm]

5. I did

They were very hard to watch.

[boston bean]

12. Starwood wouldn't give this women her passport.

Jessum Chrissum! Why the hell does anyone, except oneself, have control over one's own passport?

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

3. That's appalling!

A national embarrassment for the UAE.

[ismnotwasm]

4. Oh my god

This is just horrid.


I knew Dubai has a sex trafficking problem, but since its a monarchy, I didn't realize it was under Sharia law--i guess I don't know much at all. I hope tourism just drops to nothing---it probably won't, but what bullshit.


I have a couple of nurse friends who have gone to Saudi Arabia, and worked in hospitals catering to royalty. They had to be more cautious, but the same 'party' atmosphere was available.

[NYC_SKP]

6. Starwood runs Westin, Sheraton, Four Points, and other hotel properties.

I avoid using their hotels, it's been years, in fact.

Now I have even more reason to avoid them.

No, I didn't watch all of the first video yet, and there's a second part.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

7. They are off my list

Last edited Mon May 13, 2013, 12:11 AM - Edit history (1)

The Starwood complete list:
Westin
Sheraton
Four Points by Sheraton
W Hotels
Le Méridien
St. Regis
The Luxury Collection
Aloft Hotels
Element Hotels

Done with them all!

[BlancheSplanchnik]

8. jesus!!!!! GODDAMMIT. Women should not have to be the victims not only of men,

But victims of the government, business, society and culture as well??????????

GODDAMMIT I'm sick of this!!!!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. What's sad is the number of Conservatives who,...

...really believe they are the only thing to stop Sharia Law because Liberals are idiots who believe the world is all rainbows and butterflies.

Meanwhile, they rail against a secular society here as if "secular" means "anti-Christian".

[cprise]

10. Dubai charges of forced labor:

On the other hand, Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are easily deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.

At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15% percent of the population -- whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash -- constitutes a leisure class whose obedience to the dynasty is subsidized by income transfers, free education, and government jobs. A step below, are the pampered mercenaries: 150,000-or-so British ex-pats, along with other European, Lebanese, and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two-months of overseas leave every summer.

However, South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor." Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an exposé on Dubai, "The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British."

"Like their impoverished forefathers," the paper continued, "today's Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them"

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2005/07/dubai-sinister-paradise

[defacto7]

11. As corporate America drools. n/t

[redqueen]

13. This has been exposed for years.

I don't know why artists perform there, or movies are filmed there, or why anyone would go there on vacation.

The country should he boycotted just like South Africa was.

[Texasgal]

14. This is digusting!

AND infuriating!

I've just finished a book about a young womens journey to work as a paramedic for the Saudi royal family, she raped over and over again by the royals that held on to her passport before she could flee. Just awful.

[3catwoman3]

15. So, it is OK...

for 4 men to stand around and be WITNESSES to a rape without any expectation that they might try to STOP it? And just how many perpetrators are going to confess?

WTF?????????????????

[geek tragedy]

16. Corporate greed and medieval fundamentalism are an unholy alliance.

Men have carte blanche to rape women wherever sharia law holds. Even the glitzy 'modern' theocracies like the UAE.