PROF. SEYED MOHAMMAD MARANDI ON IRAN-ISRAEL WAR TENSIONS AND COLLAPSING US MIDDLE EAST SUPREMACY

 

 Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran and advisor to Iran's nuclear negotiations team (https://x.com/s_m_marandi) joins to discuss the true motives of Iran as geopolitical tensions reach an all-time high amid the most brutal Israeli-US war in a generation. 

Why Does the Middle East Have the Lowest Cancer Rates in the World - Dr. Berg

Poverty-stricken Indian women forced into prostitution in Middle East

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Madagascar maids: Misery in the Middle East

Forced to work as a "slave maid" for wealthy families in Lebanon for 15 years, Abeline Baholiarisoa - a 59-year-old woman from Madagascar - finally achieved her freedom in March.

Madagascar's government chartered a plane to evacuate her and 85 other women.

The youngest of her four children, whom she left behind when he was six years old, played a key role in her evacuation, tracking her down via a welfare agency that rescues "slave maids", she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she was trapped in "a living hell" after being duped into going to Lebanon.

Continue reading the main story

A recruiting agency had promised her a nursing job for three years, with a salary of $800 (£486) a month.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she thought it would give her a chance to save money, which she could send to her children.

But her dream was shattered the minute she touched down in Beirut.

"It was a trap, because as soon as I got there they took away my papers and said my contract didn't mean anything," Ms Baholiarisoa says.

"They said, 'Abeline, this is null and void.' For the next 15 years they shattered my life and the lives of my children."

Ms Baholiarisoa says she was put to work as a maid with another Malagasy woman in the house of a rich couple with newborn triplets.

"We didn't have time to eat or sleep - night and day. We didn't even have time to clean ourselves.

"I worked 24 hours a day and received $160 a month. From this, I had to pay the lady of the house money for my food because they only gave us a quarter of a loaf of bread and some bits of fruit each day."

'Women crippled'

Continue reading the main story

Ms Baholiarisoa says she ran away from her first job after seven months and her second job after two years.

But with no papers and no way to return home she was forced to accept maid jobs for 12 more years.

Fabienne Marie Ange - a social worker with Madagascar's Union of Qualified Domestic Workers (SPDTS), which specialises in helping "slave maids" - says many of them are so traumatised that they do not even know where they are.

"Sometimes in Lebanon the boss gives them drugs to keep them strong. They have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they don't eat properly. It has an effect on their mental [health]," Ms Ange says.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she refused her employer's attempts to give her pills for "stress", but she knew of people who ended up with an "empty brain" after taking them.

"You become like a beast, like an animal made for work," she says.

Some women are forced to work in Lebanon's clubs and streets as prostitutes, while some maids sell their bodies on the side just to pay for food, Ms Ange says.

According to SPDTS President Noro Randimbiarison, some of the women have died in mysterious circumstances in Lebanon.

When their bodies were eventually returned to Madagascar, it was discovered that several of them had missing organs.

"Some families decided to open the coffin and found that the girl didn't have eyes, her eyes had been replaced by doll's eyes, or they didn't have a tongue or intestines or the heart. This really happens. It's real," says Ms Randimbiarison.

Medical reports on the cause of death are vague - and some families have been told that the women committed suicide by jumping off tall buildings, she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa claims women were pushed from windows, sometimes to cripple them just enough so they could not run away; others disappear, fuelling suspicion that they were killed.

'Trafficking rackets'

"We have no idea how many women have died out there or have gone mad because if you ask a boss where is his maid they say she ran off with someone and it's over," she says.

"Where is the proof that she's run off and they haven't buried her in the courtyard? We don't have any proof."

Madagascar's Minister of Population Nadine Ramaroson, the only government minister tackling the issue, says "a very organised network" involving senior government officials and businessmen emerged in the 1990s to engage in human trafficking.

Government officials provide fraudulent work permits, travel and identity document for around $5,000 per trafficked woman, social workers say.

Ms Ramaroson says the government is trying to break the criminal networks, but it is not easy.

While one job agency flew 300 women to Jordan last month with the government's approval, 43 women bound for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were stopped from boarding planes.

Ms Ramaroson said all were recruited from remote rural areas with high illiteracy and poverty levels. Some 16-year-old girls were given forged identity papers showing their age as 21.

She said their contracts stated they would work in top institutions "when these girls don't even know what electricity is".

Ms Baholiarisoa considers herself lucky. Given up for dead by her older children, her youngest child - now an adult - contacted SPDTS to help trace his mother.

They picked up one of her many calls for repatriation at the consulate in Beirut, she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa now helps SPDTS track down other women trying to escape Lebanon and to prevent other women from being duped into taking jobs in the Middle East.

"If the madam at SPDTS hadn't taken me in with open arms I don't know what I would have done," she says.

"It pains me that these girls are leaving because I know what awaits them, especially the beautiful ones."

From the plane load of women rescued in March, Ms Baholiarisoa is the only one with a job.

Some of the women have returned to discover husbands remarried and children adopted.

Others, like Ms Baholiarisoa, have to rebuild relationships after much hurt and loss.

source

Freedom

"I was born in Tunisia,
I grew up in Egypt,
I've fought in Yemen.
Now I'm sacrificing myself in Libya with hopes of victory
My name is Freedom"

Out of the City, out of control

Sex and The City 2 is beyond awful - it gives Western women a bad name

You may be wondering why it has required two contributors to write an article condemning Sex and the City 2 as possibly the most racist, sexist and offensive piece of cinematic trash produced in the last decade. This has been necessary due to the fact that only one writer was able to sit through the whole film and did not feel she could fully convey her fury without the aid of another – one who had repeatedly left the film in disgust and napped intermittently for its duration.

We are both free-thinking, intelligent young women who went into Sex and the City with pretty low expectations; merely the desire for a couple of hours of escapism and over-the-top fashion. Neither of us are easily offended – in fact we tend to be fairly offensive ourselves. In fact, one of us cites Jeremy Clarkson, the most politically incorrect man on the planet, as her comedy idol. Yet Sex and the City 2 achieved such a high level of racial insensitivity and bigotry rarely witnessed in contemporary culture that even we were left squirming. Michael Patrick King, the film’s director, should be Clarkson’s new muse, so efficiently has he managed to offend both men and women from virtually every corner of the globe.

The film appears as though it has been written by kids on work experience. Racist kids on work experience. The one-liners veer between the disgustingly vulgar and the downright unfunny – for instance, in the middle of the desert Samantha shrieks: ‘Lawrence of my labia!’ Disgusting because the woman now looks like a badly preserved corpse, and incredibly offensive given their environment. Throughout their trip to ‘Abu Dhabi’ – the film was in fact made in Morocco, because shockingly, the values of the makers of Sex and the City coincided very little with those of the Arab Emirate states – the women sublimely embody the stereotypical ‘ugly American’ abroad, offending everyone within earshot.

There are ‘hilarious’ references to ‘The Real Housewives of Abu Dhabi’, mocking observations about the difficulties of eating in a niqab, and a satirical gem in the creativeness of a ‘burkini’.

The women waltz carelessly through the Middle East, figuratively raping every cultural sensitivity they encounter along the way. Presumably, the writers are attempting to satirise the oppression of women by some Muslim traditions, but they are in fact too stupid to make a valid satirical point and end up merely offending.

Any attempt at making a valid point about the lives of Muslim women backfired and managed to spectacularly offend not only followers of Islam, but also British and American audiences who are tainted by association with these crass and vulgar stereotypes.

The film steadily buries its audience under a suffocating mountain of sexism, racism and decadence until it can take no more. One cannot comprehend why the actors of Asian descent who signed up to play the male servants were so willing to be involved in a production which so brutally belittles their heritage and reinforces every racist stereotype already regrettably in existence.

We could also comment on the homophobia, the rampant excesses of the lives of the four women which no longer bear any relation to reality and the reduction of women to shoe-obsessed, tactless harpies, but to address those issues would turn this into an entire essay.

It is sufficient to state that if this is the picture that some Middle Eastern countries are given of Western society, one can almost understand the motivations of Muslim extremists.

By the time we left, we would have greeted the demise of these insensitive, idiotic characters with applause and can only pray that Sex and the City 2 will never be the image by which Western women are judged by those in the Middle East.
source

Gulf sex shop offers marriage guidance

MANAMA — Usually veiled and wearing a modest, flowing abaya, Khadija Ahmed looks an unlikely owner of the conservative Gulf's first sex shop.
She sees nothing wrong, however, with selling "joy jelly," edible undies or the vibrating accoutrements offered by such niche boutiques around the world, insisting that nothing in Islam forbids the pleasures of the bedroom.

"It's not a sex shop in the Western sense," she explained, "but a place to help married couples, and only married couples, enjoy sex to the full."
Ahmed, who admits that she cannot, of course, check identity cards to see whether clients are married or not, got the idea for the business as she came to realise how many men and women were having extra-marital affairs.

Her shop, named Dar Khadija, aims "to provide a service to married couples by making their sex lives more exciting than the lure of an affair.
"Why do married men and women go looking for love elsewhere? Because of the routine that couples fall into."

If whips and leather bondage suits are what you're seeking to pep up your sex life then you won't find them in Dar Khadija.
Nevertheless, it does offer risque bedroom accessories and kinky lingerie, plus a selection of ladies' clothing which range from jeans and tops to fancy evening dresses and embroidered abayas.
And edible underwear.

"The feedback from the clientele has been good. One of my customers told me that I saved his marriage, just as he was about to get divorced," she said.
"That makes me happy as I told myself I might have helped a couple to stay together and a family has not broken up."

Ahmed, 32, launched Dar Khadija online in 2007 and goods were available by mail order only. However, as business prospered she secured permission for a shop, the only one of its kind in the Gulf.
In neighbouring Saudi Arabia, with its notoriously strict brand of Sunni Islam, such an outlet would be unthinkable.

But Bahrain's relatively liberal environment has made the Gulf archipelago an attraction for visitors from more conservative Muslim states in the region, especially Saudis, many of whom travel every weekend across the 30-kilometre (19-mile) causeway that links the two countries.

Of course, there has been criticism and unwanted attention.
Appearing on a television show, aired from Lebanon, some callers told her that her business was shameful and that she shouldn't be wearing the Islamic headcover.
The incomprehension of customs officials or the conservatism of its retail supervisors have sometimes led to her orders -- she imports most of her stock from the American market -- being rejected or severely delayed.

Ahmed is defiant about the moral legitimacy of her business, which won the approval of authorities and has no shortage of clients, mainly thanks to its website.
"Nothing in Islam forbids sexual pleasure. Ask that question to any devout Muslim and he will not tell you otherwise," she insisted.
As she spoke, a man in his 50s enters the shop and asked for massage cream to help "improve his performance."

He said he heard about the shop when he saw Ahmed appear on television, and talked to her at length about brands and prices.
Curious onlookers and teenagers are discouraged
"I only deal with responsible adults, and I have male and female customers, with a slightly larger proportion of women," she said.
"A stable family is our desire for everyone... and I have the feeling I am helping in my way," she added.
"As for perversions, that's not my business."

source

Middle East remain rooted in the Middle Ages

Interesting article from Robert Fisk in The Independent:

Why is the Arab world – let us speak with terrible sharpness – so backward? Why so many dictators, so few human rights, so much state security and torture, so terrible a literacy rate?

Why does this wretched place, so rich in oil, have to produce, even in the age of the computer, a population so poorly educated, so undernourished, so corrupt? Yes, I know the history of Western colonialism, the dark conspiracies of the West, the Arab argument that you cannot upset the sheikhs and the kings and the autocrats, the imams and the emirs when the "enemy is at the gates". There is some truth to that. But not enough truth.

Once more the United Nations Development Programme has popped up with yet one more, its fifth, report that catalogues – via Arab analysts and academics, mark you – the retarded state of much of the Middle East. It talks of "the fragility of the region's political, social, economic and environmental structures... its vulnerability to outside intervention". But does this account for desertification, for illiteracy – especially among women – and the Arab state which, as the report admits, is often turned "into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support"?

As Arab journalist Rami Khouri stated bleakly last week: "How we tackle the underlying causes of our mediocrity and bring about real change anchored in solid citizenship, productive economies and stable statehood, remains the riddle that has defied three generations of Arabs." Real GDP per capita in the region – one of the statistics which truly shocked Khouri – grew by only 6.4 per cent between 1980 and 2004. That's just 0.5 per cent annually, a rate which 198 of 217 countries analysed by the CIA World Factbook bettered in 2008. Yet the Arab population – which stood at 150 million in 1980 – will reach 400 million in 2015.

I notice much of this myself. When I first came to the Middle East in 1976, it was crowded enough. Cairo's steaming, fetid streets were already jam-packed, night and day, with up to a million homeless living in the great Ottoman cemeteries. Arab homes are spotlessly clean but their streets are often repulsive, dirt and ordure spilling on to the pavements. Even in beautiful Lebanon, where a kind of democracy does exist and whose people are among the most educated and cultured in the Middle East, you find a similar phenomenon. In the rough hill villages of the south, the same cleanliness exists in every home. But why are the streets and the hills so dirty?

I suspect that a real problem exists in the mind of Arabs; they do not feel that they own their countries. Constantly coaxed into effusions of enthusiasm for Arab or national "unity", I think they do not feel that sense of belonging which Westerners feel. Unable, for the most part, to elect real representatives – even in Lebanon, outside the tribal or sectarian context – they feel "ruled over". The street, the country as a physical entity, belongs to someone else. And of course, the moment a movement comes along and – even worse – becomes popular, emergency laws are introduced to make these movements illegal or "terrorist". Thus it is always someone else's responsibility to look after the gardens and the hills and the streets.

And those who work within the state system – who work directly for the state and its corrupt autarchies – also feel that their existence depends on the same corruption upon which the state itself thrives. The people become part of the corruption. I shall always remember an Arab landlord, many years ago, bemoaning an anti-corruption drive by his government. "In the old days, I paid bribes and we got the phone mended and the water pipes mended and the electricity restored," he complained. "But what can I do now, Mr, Robert? I can't bribe anyone – so nothing gets done!"

Even the first UNDP report, back in 2002, was deeply depressing. It identified three cardinal obstacles to human development in the Arab world: the widening "deficit" in freedom, women's rights and knowledge. George W Bush – he of enduring freedom, democracy, etc etc amid the slaughter of Iraq – drew attention to this. Understandably miffed at being lectured to by the man who gave "terror" a new name, even Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (he of the constantly more than 90 per cent electoral success rate), told Tony Blair in 2004 that modernisation had to stem from "the traditions and culture of the region".

Will a solution to the Arab-Israeli war resolve all this? Some of it, perhaps. Without the constant challenge of crisis, it would be much more difficult to constantly renew emergency laws, to avoid constitutionality, to distract populations who might otherwise demand overwhelming political change. Yet I sometimes fear that the problems have sunk too deep, that like a persistently leaking sewer, the ground beneath Arab feet has become too saturated to build on.

I was delighted some months ago, while speaking at Cairo University – yes, the same academy which Barack Obama used to play softball with the Muslim world – to find how bright its students were, how many female students crowded the classes and how, compared to previous visits, well-educated they were. Yet far too many wanted to move to the West. The Koran may be an invaluable document – but so is a Green Card. And who can blame them when Cairo is awash with PhD engineering graduates who have to drive taxis?

And on balance, yes, a serious peace between Palestinians and Israelis would help redress the appalling imbalances that plague Arab society. If you can no longer bellyache about the outrageous injustice that this war represents, then perhaps there are other injustices to be addressed. One of them is domestic violence, which – despite the evident love of family which all Arabs demonstrate – is far more prevalent in the Arab world than Westerners might realise (or Arabs want to admit).

But I also think that, militarily, we have got to abandon the Middle East. By all means, send the Arabs our teachers, our economists, our agronomists. But bring our soldiers home. They do not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice upon which the al-Qa'idas of this world feed. No, the Arabs – or, outside the Arab world, the Iranians or the Afghans – will not produce the eco-loving, gender-equal, happy-clappy democracies that we would like to see. But freed from "our" tutelage, they might develop their societies to the advantage of the people who live in them. Maybe the Arabs would even come to believe that they owned their own countries.

UAE compensates slaved and abused child jockeys

Munna Mia was just five when his family flew to the Middle East to escape the hardships of Bangladesh -- but all that awaited him was a life of danger, pain and hunger as a child camel jockey.

His father, a bricklayer, had been offered a job in the United Arab Emirates by a recruitment agent who told him he could bring his wife and three children if he paid a 4,500-dollar fee.

Grinding poverty and a lack of jobs in Bangladesh drove Mia's father to scrape together some of the money by selling the land he owned and getting loans from family and friends.

The rest he borrowed from the agent, with the promise it would be repaid with money he earned in Dubai.

But the dreams of Mia and his family were shattered when they arrived, and he and his two brothers -- all aged between three and eight -- were forced to ride in camel races for long hours under the desert sun.

"We didn't get much to eat and every morning they would weigh us. If we were even a gram over 20 kilograms we would be beaten with a stick that gave us electric shocks," Mia told AFP.

"My brothers and I were separated from our parents and lived in a hostel with other jockeys.

"For a year, they trained us by just throwing us on top of a camel and I often fell off. I still have lots of problems because of all the injuries."

Mia and his brothers were among thousands of South Asian children used as camel jockeys in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states after being brought in by traffickers or under false pretences with their families.

"The hot sand would burn my feet. We'd come back at night and we were exhausted. Every day I'd wonder if I would die," said Mia, who rode in races until he was nine.

He seldom wore a helmet and his uniform was a cotton pair of shorts and T-shirt.

The UAE this week gave Bangladeshi authorities nearly 1.5 million dollars to compensate almost 900 former child jockeys for the injuries and abuse they suffered.

Bangladesh's deputy home affairs minister, Tanjim Ahmed, whose department is in charge of distributing the funds, said each child would get between 1,000 and 10,000 dollars depending on their circumstances.

The money would pay for their medical treatment and education, he said.

"Using children as camel jockeys was despicable. It stirred the world's conscience," Ahmed said, adding that the UAE government told him that robots were now being used in place of children.

The UAE officially banned child jockeys in 1993 although abuses remained widespread until 2005.

According to the UK-based human rights group, Anti-Slavery International, around 2,000 unaccounted for child camel jockeys have not yet returned to their families from the Gulf states.

Christine Jaulmes, a spokeswoman for the charity Unicef, which has helped track down former child jockeys, including Shameem, says: "We cannot trace all of the children who have been involved in camel racing.

"Also, many children were killed during racing by falling from the camels and so on, so we don't have a record of these children."

Many children will never find their way home. They are unable to identify their families and home communities and often do not speak their native language because they were put to work at such a young age.

Shameem is actually among the lucky ones. Now thirteen, he could receive up to $10,000 in compensation, a fortune for most Bangladeshis, 40 per cent of whom live on less than two dollars a day.

For his family, who are still struggling, this money is an answer to their prayers - finally they can see a path out of poverty.

Tanjim Ahmad, the Bangladeshi state minister who is managing the fund at the home affairs ministry, says he hopes the UAE compensation initiative "will encourage other countries to take the necessary steps to prevent child labour and to invest in anti-trafficking operations".

"We do appreciate the efforts [of] the UAE, once they identified the problem ... we intend to use those funds to rehabilitate those children affected by this horrible episode," he says.

For those children who are under 18 years of age, the government plans to put the money into trust funds that would pay the former jockeys interest until they come of age and can access the money.

In addition, funds will be made available from these accounts for families to pay school fees – an important part of rehabilitation and reintegration.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Shameen's family still dream of a better life back in the UAE.

Abul, now a carpenter, continues his battle against poverty and, although their experience in the UAE was heart-wrenching, he knows he can earn more money if they moved there again.

Perhaps they will eventually use their new found wealth to try anew. If they ever do return, one thing is for certain, Shameem and his brothers intend to stay as far away as possible from the camel track.

Are we allowed to Abuse Servants?

Every year, millions of women leave their own families in Africa and Asia to look after other people's in the west. But many domestic workers find themselves abused, beaten, raped, even murdered.

The slum mothers of Manila Metro are permanently elsewhere, maids and nannies to the world, with about one in seven Filipino workers abroad at any given time. It's a worldwide phenomenon. About 300m economic migrants from India, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America and southeast Asia are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is closer to a billion. Were these international foreign workers to constitute a state, a migration nation if you like, it would rank as the world's third largest. They are an economic powerhouse. Migrants from the developing world sent home an estimated $300bn last year.

Consider the figure. It's nearly three times the world's foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums, or "remittances" as they are known, bring Morocco more money than tourism, Sri Lanka more money than tea and, in the Philippines, this foreign legion of workers is so essential to the government that the economy would collapse without them. More than half the world's migrants are women, many caring for children abroad while leaving their own at home.

More than any other country, though, the Philippines has become synonymous with migrant labour. In Greece, for example, the modern Greek word for a maid is a "Filipineza". The most recent figures show that there are 1.2m Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) registered in Saudi Arabia, closely followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. And with workers in at least 170 other countries, OFWs are everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world's seafarers come from the Philippines. But behind the hard-earned dollars sent home, there are many tales of abject exploitation and sorrow, sexual abuse, violence and even murder.

A tattered billboard welcomes drivers on the dusty highway that winds its way towards the down-at-heel town of Alaminos, 170km north of Manila: "May God Praise Our Seafarers and Overseas Foreign Workers". Underneath the sign is the sponsor of the tribute, the town's largest shopping mall, which has sprung up largely on the back of OFW remittances. Just short of her 22nd birthday, Jennifer Perez would have passed the same sign as she left her village home in the northern Luzon province of the Philippines in the summer of 2006.

Like most migrant domestic workers heading for the Middle East, she packed a roll-on bag, stuffed with loose clothing, befitting Jordan, the Muslim country that would become her new home. Fatefully, she also packed her aunt's mobile phone to allow her to text her parents. Clutched in her left hand was the rosary her mother had given her before departure. She was proud of the carefully laminated documents in her luggage: certificates for 12 hours of on-the-job-training in elderly care, first aid, CPR and hospitality services, and the driver's licence she would never get to use.

A college graduate with a degree in physical education and dance, Jennifer had signed up to work for two years in the Jordanian city of Irbid, a dusty, nondescript settlement an hour north of Amman. A few days later, barely 24 hours after arriving in Jordan, Jennifer fell asleep in her small room in her employers' house. She was woken by her female employer (a dentist whose husband was a member of the prominent Obeidat tribe), who stormed into the room with the mobile phone that had been hidden in Jennifer's luggage, and threatened to confiscate it. Like most foreign domestics, Jennifer was banned from having contact with the outside world.

A fight broke out between the two women and, moments later, Jennifer fell four storeys from the kitchen veranda, landing squarely on her back. As the young woman lay in a coma in a Jordanian hospital, her employer claimed it was a suicide attempt. Jennifer's family say their daughter, like hundreds of Filipina workers in the Middle East over the past two decades, was simply thrown off the balcony. The woman was arrested and charged with assault as Jennifer, by now a quadriplegic, fought a losing battle to stay alive. Her employer was released after posting an undisclosed bail.

Speaking two years later from Alaminos, Jennifer's father, Herminiio, himself a former OFW in Saudi Arabia, claims his daughter's death - and those of hundreds of domestic workers abroad - is a tragedy of globalisation.

"It is easier for these girls to go abroad than ever, with agents now paying their airfares and then taking half their salaries," Herminiio says. "My daughter was a slave. She was treated like an animal, a nothing. Every day we read in the newspapers about families who have gone through similar hell: young girls raped, abused, beaten, murdered. A transaction seems to take place when a Filipina domestic helper goes abroad. When she steps over the threshold of her employers' home she gives up her human rights and her freedom. My message to these girls is the money is not important. Poverty is terrible, but it allows its own freedoms from violence and abuse."

What made his daughter's story harder to take was the fact that it took so long for her to die - nine months in total. "We had to fight to get her home," says Herminiio. "We were crippled with medical expenses and had to hold a television appeal to raise funds for her flight. She came home a quadriplegic and died of a broken heart, despite being surrounded by the people she loves and who loved her. Every time a domestic helper returns to the Philippines dead, why is she always ruled to have killed herself? Why are so many of our girls killing themselves, jumping out of windows, off roofs and balconies; are they all insane?"

Migrants have been leaving the Philippines in search of work for decades. The key difference now, however, is where they migrate to. Mired in red tape and post-9/11 paranoia, the US is no longer an attainable promised land. That role has been taken on by the Middle East. The big Arab oil states have small populations but, until recently, grand development ambitions. Only through foreign labour can their lofty aims be achieved, which is why more than 14m migrants, many of them Filipino, are active in the Arabian peninsula alone.

The winter rain is whipping off the Mediterranean sea and pounding the stained glass windows of the 17th-century crypt in the heart of Old Beirut. Inside, the narrow pews are packed with browbeaten women: a league of nations in their Sunday best - maids from India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Philippines. Below, in the catacombs, there is only silence. There, the women who have chosen not to be part of the morning congregation sit and contemplate their lives. In the darkness of the church, they seek sanctuary from their lives as slaves. In the past two years alone, more than 100 maids have died in Beirut in sinister circumstances, victims of abuse by cruel masters and mistresses. Countless more have been beaten, raped and even tortured. The walls of the basement are plastered with "Missing" posters of maids who have fled abusive owners, their whereabouts now unknown.

One unnamed Ethiopian maid, in a government hospital after "falling" from a 12th-floor balcony, says her Lebanese employer pushed her off. The police, as is normally the case, dispute her claim and are hoping to deport her as soon as possible. The 25-year-old's testimony, which has been made public, is chilling: "Madam asked me to hang the clothes. Then she came and pushed me from behind." Too frightened to let her name be published, she said her employer had frequently threatened and abused her. "Madam would tell me, 'I will spill hot oil on you.' She would take a knife and threaten to kill me. She would beat me with shoes, pull my hair to the floor."

Her testimony, along with thousands of others', has been gathered by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The group claims that, every week, one of an estimated 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon dies. Normally it is recorded as "suicide" or falling while trying to escape their employer. Another major cause of death is untreated illness - hospitals cost money and maids aren't seen as worth the expense. HRW claims that maids in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Middle East, are increasingly vulnerable to beatings, rape and murder - and there are no laws to protect them from abusive employers.

Indrani Ekanayaka is a 27-year-old Sri Lankan who has lived for the past year in the basement of a Beirut shelter run by the Christian charity group Caritas, after fleeing an abusive employer. She says there are thousands of women like her still suffering in silence. "I was paid for the first year and a half, but then I wasn't paid for the next eight years. When I asked for money, Madam would swear at me and break glasses against the wall. I was only given some bread and rice to eat. Fruit was forbidden. I was not allowed to speak to my parents. They thought I had died," she says, the tears welling up. "I managed to escape. I got a copy of the key they used to lock my door at night and I crept out. I'm certain if they'd caught me they'd have killed me. I filed a police report, but they only told me I would be deported. Now, they have a new maid, a Filipina. They are abusing someone else. I came to Beirut from Lebanon because I had the chance to help build a home for my parents and sisters, but my life is a nightmare."

Indrani, who has four sisters at home and a family torn apart by the country's civil war, believes she has let her family down. "My family expected great things of me, that I would have enough money for a house and a good life, but all I have had is torture and misery and I am left with nothing to show for it. I am penniless. I think I will go back next year and then I will probably have no option but to try another country. I know there is no work for me at home and that's why there are so many young Sri Lankan women all over the world, suffering like me, to send money home."

The majority of abused domestic workers in Beirut, however, are Filipina. One is Mila, 27. "I left Manila for Beirut at 22," she says, "because it was an easy choice to make. Stay and watch my family starve or leave and help to feed and clothe them. My parents were getting elderly and it was me and my sister's jobs to make sure they were secure. I approached an agent in Manila who told me a job in Beirut as a domestic maid, a cleaner, a cook and a babysitter rolled into one would make 10 times as much as I could make in Manila. I accepted on the spot and my parents spent their last few pesos for admission to the airport lounge from where I left. And then I suppose they went home to cry and wait for the money. I wasn't paid for a year and my sister was also struggling abroad, so they had to rely on loan sharks."

When Mila arrived in Beirut she was imprisoned in the basement of a home with only iron bars for a window. "It was damp and it felt like a torture chamber. At times my madam, who told me she was my 'owner', made me do everything. I had to cut her toenails, scrub her feet, wash her clothes, cook and clean. I had to look after her nephews, light her cigarettes. My life was a living hell. Her partner would try and molest me and threatened to tell the mistress I was a prostitute if I didn't comply. I only managed to escape in the end because I got a letter out to a lawyer who turned up at the door and then the mistress simply threw me out on the street. I'm still fighting to get my salary from her. She owes me a year and a half's wages, about $5,000."

Nigerian Agnus Iyo Emeka, 27, is another maid at the Beirut refuge. She came to Lebanon to be a domestic worker, suffered beatings and torture at the hands of her employer and was sexually assaulted by her employer's husband. "Many women who come to the centre talk about how they are treated as sex objects by the Arab men," she says. "It starts off with simple groping, but in most cases ends up in full rape. I was assaulted by my owner's husband. I also had a friend who was raped; she lived in the same apartment block and the man of the house raped her every day for months, until she jumped from a third-floor window and broke her pelvis. So many young women have died in Beirut. I have personally known two who have died - I knew them from church. Praying one day and dead the next."

Another victim of abuse in the Beirut refuge is Ayalnesh Alameraw, a 26-year-old from Ethiopia. "I came from Addis Ababa five years ago. An agent approached my parents and offered to take three of their daughters to 'Europe', but they only took me. My sisters were spared. I thought I was going to London. I had never heard of Beirut until I boarded the plane." Ayalnesh was taken to the agency offices and given her uniform, a pink domestic outfit, but no training. "My first madam was the cruellest woman I have ever met," she says. "I was beaten for staining clothes and fined six months' wages for 'damage'. I was beaten with shoes, belts and even a thin iron bar. I tried to escape five times and each time I was taken back to her by the police. They always caught me and ordered me to return or I would be put in prison. They never listened to any of my stories. They didn't waste a single drop of ink on me until I jumped from a fourth-floor window. Looking over a balcony and being so desperate to escape that you will risk your life is impossible to explain to someone who has never been imprisoned. You may think being imprisoned in a tiny apartment isn't really a prison, but in a city where you have no voice and no rights and nobody hears your screams or cries for help you are in a hell."

When Ayalnesh recovered from her fall she was sent to a detention centre to await deportation. "My madam filed a complaint with the agency and accused me of stealing. I was inside the centre during the 2006 bombing campaign by the Israelis and we thought we would be buried alive in the rubble." The sick went untreated, and almost everyone, eventually, in the stifling summer heat, became ill. "As the war continued we became a hindrance and six of us were taken to Caritas, who still look after me now. I can't go back to Addis. I have a family of seven brothers and sisters and my parents are simple cattle raisers. I have more chance of being a success abroad." Ayalnesh, like many foreign workers, believes her best chance of being treated fairly is now in London, a growing market for domestic workers.

A ragged flock of starlings flies across the roof of the Kalayaan drop-in centre in Holland Park, west London. It's a hard building to find. The narrow entrance blends into the concrete facade rendering it almost as invisible as the women the unit was created for. Only thin writing scratched on the buzzer identifies your location. In the adjacent courtyard, wealthy Londoners sit in the garden of a wine bar. Laughter fills the air. Above them, in a cramped office, domestic workers sit crouched over plates of noodles speaking to each other frantically in broken English.

"The foreign girl next door to you in London never rests," says Gita, a maid from northern India. "She works day and night and is never allowed to leave the apartment. She sleeps in the kitchen with the dog. She does the dirty work. She wipes the bottoms of the young and the old, she gives baths, she washes clothes. She barely eats. That is my story, this is my life even now." And according to Gita, this is the story all over London. "It is happening next door to many of you," she says, "but you just don't realise it. The girl escapes, but her owner finds her in the street and takes her back. I was held prisoner for two years and I wasn't paid a penny for my last year's work. This is the dream your country has to offer."

Around Gita, the other women softly clap their hands in timid solidarity. Few have the confidence to raise their own voices. Britain, and London in particular, is one of the fastest growing markets in the world for recruiting foreign domestic workers. Many of these workers are migrants, serving "cash-rich, time-poor" British families as cleaners, nannies and cooks. Behind closed doors many are exploited and abused. Kalayaan, a campaigning group for migrant domestics, recently conducted a survey which showed that 86% of migrant maids work more than 16 hours a day, 71% have been deprived of food, 32% have had their passports withheld by their employers and 23% have been physically abused. Many of the women who visit the Kalayaan shelter sleep in hallways or in converted cupboards in small London apartments.

Gita, who now works for a new family, also claims, like many of the domestic staff, to have been sexually abused. "I worked for an Indian family in Hampstead. There were bars on the basement window where I slept. At first I only had a duvet cover to sleep on and then later a mattress on the floor. I was up at 5am to prepare roti for the madam and I worked until midnight each night. Sometimes I wasn't given any food and was pushed around by their eldest daughter. Although I shopped for the children's food, the wife never asked me to eat with them. I felt she would notice if I ate their food, so I borrowed money from a neighbour's maid to buy noodles and ate when I could."

The family told Gita they were sending her money home, but they never did. "The husband would come home and make advances on me. After a few months he started raping me. This went on for five months. Many of the maids in the UK are sexually abused, but are too frightened to report it for fear of deportation. Eventually I broke down in tears in front of his wife, but she didn't believe me, and later she was so furious she came at me with a hot iron. I realised she was going to burn my face. I put my arm up when she charged at me and she burnt that instead. Later that night she threw me on the street at 3am and I turned to Kalayaan." Proving what happened to Gita is impossible, she says.The family left Britain earlier this year.

Another London-based worker, Divia, reveals how she was forced to sleep on the stone floor of her madam's kitchen in the West End. She was fed so little her eyesight started to fail and she began to show symptoms of severe malnutrition. Her diet was entirely based on leftovers from the family table. "I was so thin I would faint with hunger. But I have heard stories worse than mine in Kalayaan. When I hear of young girls who work for Arabs in London swallowing acid it makes me depressed. I know that could have been me.

"Sometimes I feel thankful that I had the strength not to try and take me own life. The women I met here are so filled with sadness, they are constantly on the verge of tears at the abuse they receive behind closed doors, but they have no voice and are too terrified of the authorities to trust them. They have seen other women deported for causing a fuss."

According to Kalayaan, stories like Divia's are not uncommon. In the past few weeks a domestic worker in Knightsbridge, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, attempted suicide after years of abuse by her employer. The woman, a Filipina, swallowed acid and is now permanently disabled. Scotland Yard is investigating the case.

Kalayaan spokeswoman Jenny Moss believes the situation is not improving. "There is a saying here which is used by the Filipina workers: 'Kung walang hirap, walang ginhawa', which means 'Without suffering, there can be no ease,'" she says. "Many of these women enter their working relationships here in Britain quite simply expecting to be treated badly. At Kalayaan we register about 350 new domestic workers each year, the majority of whom have been exploited or abused in the UK. Domestic workers are dependent on one employer for their work, their immigration status and their accommodation, and this makes them extremely vulnerable. They often feel they have little choice but to accept their working conditions - no matter how abusive."

It is late in downtown Manila. A young prostitute, no older than 14, stands in a yellow mini-skirt in front of a paunchy Welshman who has, fingers clicking, called her out from a group of around 30 skinny girls. As he heaves himself off a tiny bar stool he flicks up her skirt at the front to inspect her and with a wave of his hand sends her back to the goldfish bowl they stand in. Outside on Burgos Street, one of the most notorious red-light strips in Asia, the dark skies finally open up, breaking the intolerable humidity. Within moments the hot rain runs down the heavily made-up faces of the lowly street girls, the youngest of all the prostitutes, pathetic and ghoulish in their thin clothes and tottering high heels. Sheltering under the awning of a snack bar, Cristiana puts her hands out for a cigarette and shivers.

"The rain is bad for business," says the 15-year-old. As she speaks, she absentmindedly scrawls her number in the menu of the café she is taking shelter in. The menu she is holding is scribbled over with messages: "Hi! Hello! My name is Maria." "I'm Tina. Call for your heart's desire." Inside the café western men bounce tiny Filipina girls on their thighs like babies, the youngsters' infantile appearances exaggerated by their white ankle socks. The younger they look the more money they will make.

"I want to go to Europe, to work abroad as a massage therapist or a nurse. I would be happier there," says Cristiana. "I am working here to pay my way through my entrance exams to become a nurse. That is the dream we all share. To leave these islands for a better life."


REMEMBER

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) quoted God as saying: "O My servants, I have forbidden oppression for Myself and have made it forbidden amongst you, so do not oppress one another." - Hadith Qudsi 17

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Fear the cry of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God." - Fiqh-us-Sunnah, Volume 3, Number 1

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Help the oppressed (sorrowful) and guide those who have lost their way. - Sunan of Abu-Dawood, Hadith 2244


Remember, Kindness leads to Paradise:

Narrated Aisha (a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him): "A poor woman came to me along with her daughters. I gave her three dates. She gave a date to each of them and then she took up one date and brought that to her mouth. . .but her daughters expressed desire to eat it. She then divided the date that she intended to eat between them. This (kind) treatment impressed me and I mentioned what she did to (the Prophet Muhammad) He then said: 'Verily God has assured Paradise for her because of (this act of kindness).'"


A man once came to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and asked what act of penitence he could perform for a sin he had committed. The Prophet asked the man if he had a mother. When the man replied that his mother had died, the Prophet asked if he had a maternal aunt. When the man replied that he had, the Prophet said: "Then be kind to her." - Al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 1274

Middle East in trouble due to low Oil prices

Apparently, Iraq is in trouble because the Oil prices have collapsed dramatically.

Six years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, the collapse in the price of oil is devastating Iraqi hopes of reconstructing an economy shattered by 30 years of war and sanctions. A year ago, as the price of oil approached $150 a barrel, Iraqi leaders were optimistic they would have enough money to rebuild the country.

Since then the price of a barrel of oil has slid to just $50 a barrel, leaving Iraq, on the sixth anniversary of the US-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam, facing what one official in Baghdad called a "catastrophe".

The oil shock also presents the US President, Barack Obama, with a fresh headache, threatening to complicate his plans to restore stability to the country and withdraw US troops. Not only is there too little money for reconstruction, there is not enough to maintain and expand the oil industry, the government's only source of revenue.

Meanwhile, Gulf states are gearing up for life after fossil fuels

Alongside the development of aviation hubs, financial services and free-trade zones, states in the region are also concentrating on becoming international centres of hi-tech research and development, based on the Western model of the science park. So some of the world's largest transnational corporations including Shell, Microsoft and General Electric (GE) are in Doha today for the formal opening of the science park Qatar hopes will secure its place as a world centre of research.

The purpose-built, $300m (£215m), 45,000 sq m Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP) is part of a multi-decade "national strategy" to invest the Gulf state's oil and gas wealth for economic stability, social development and non-carbon revenues.

The futuristic architecture houses laboratories, training facilities and office space for research in fields considered central to the diversification of the tiny state's economy – energy, health, environment and IT. Private sector participants including Total, Chevron, EADS and Rolls-Royce are among the 21 companies that between them have already committed to project funding of $225m over five years, which will be matched by the Qatar Foundation that oversees the QSTP. The park will house the first stem-cell bank for the Middle East.

The research facilities are next door to Qatar's "Education City", a 14 million sq m, newly built campus. The plan is for an education system allied with applied, commercial research.

One has to be careful though about jobs in the Middle East nowadays. With oil prices collapsed the economies are in doldrums.

Lured by the promise of a well-paid investment banking job in the growing markets of the Gulf, Ghassan Darwiche left Lebanon for Qatar in 2005.

He landed a banking job in Qatar and then started working at the Standard Chartered Bank in Manama, Bahrain in 2007.

In 2008, he transferred to the wealth management department.

He believes the move was a logical one because of the Gulf's prospering economy; global oil and gas prices were high and investment in the banking and real estate markets showed continued growth.

However, by January 2009, the department had became a "loss entity" for the bank.

"People were pulling out money because of the global financial crisis," he said.

The bank then downgraded his department to commercial banking – credit card and insurance applications. Darwiche believed that he was being demoted and quit.

"We all want to climb the ladder. The Arab and European staff left, but the Indian banking professionals tended to stay and accept the downgrade. I didn't want to go backward in my career," he said.

However, three months after arriving in Beirut and finding no job opportunities for someone with his skills, Darwiche believes he would have fared better had he stayed.

"I'm one of the many victims of the financial crisis but the question now is what to do next."

According to Lebanon's finance ministry, there are some 350,000 Lebanese people working in the Gulf states, which in the past decade had become popular employment destinations.

However, with world markets in recession and foreign investments dwindling, fortunes have been reversed; the ministry says 15,000 Lebanese expatriate workers have returned in recent weeks.

They can be seen at bars and coffee shops in Beirut, lamenting about their newfound joblessness, finding solace among others in the same situation.

May Allah help all our brothers and sisters in this period of difficulty. Amen.