Where is the outrage over the near-slave conditions for domestic workers in Arab countries?

Mitchell Bard writes here that there is no outrage over the prevalence of slavery, or of near-slave conditions for domestic workers, in the Arab countries.

The ILO reported, for example, “In Saudi Arabia, where migrant domestic workers do not enjoy the same rights as other workers in the country, they can be subjected to economic and physical abuse and exploitation, the confiscation of passports by employers, and the de facto persistence of a sponsorship system.”

One of the worst countries has long been Qatar, which has a population of 3 million and more than two million migrant workers making up 95% of the private sector workforce.

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In Qatar, there are only a few hundred thousand Qataris; the rest are foreign workers. Qataris pretend to work at their well-paid government sinecures, while the real work of the country is performed by the 95% who are migrant workers of two types: the ill-paid, ill-treated workers from Africa and south Asia, and the professionals, who are ex-pats from Europe and North America.

According to the ILO, “Since 2010, when Qatar was awarded the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, there have been widespread reports of severe labor rights violations against migrant workers, including forced labor.” These included accusations of mistreatment of the workers employed to build the stadiums.

The construction workers in Qatar, as in the rest of the Gulf Arab states, are predominantly Indians and Pakistanis. They are poorly paid, overworked, and generally badly treated.

To secure the opportunity to host the World Cup, the country was forced to implement reforms. The ILO has been working with the government of Qatar but concluded: “There is a universal recognition that the work is not complete.”

The report [from the GSI] also noted concerns about human trafficking in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Syria and Yemen were also among the countries accused of the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

According to the GSI, Syria, Iraq and Yemen had the highest prevalence of modern slavery and the highest absolute number of victims, accounting for 76 percent of the victims in the region. The indexers acknowledged problems in gathering data and “the likelihood of a significant underestimation of the extent of modern slavery in this region.”

The GSI also noted that the Gulf countries provided “limited protections for migrant populations most vulnerable to modern slavery” and “have taken very few steps to protect the rights and safety of the millions of migrant workers who make up their construction and domestic work sectors.”

One might expect the people who want to tear down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial because of those presidents’ ownership of slaves might have an iota of concern for today’s slaves. The social justice warriors so consumed with the behavior of Israel do not look beyond its borders and the disputed territories to see the widespread abuses in the region. Not even slavery can distract them from their myopic focus on the Jews.

The diseased sympathy of those who claim to be concerned about Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians but are strangely silent about the five million slaves in Arab countries, suggests that their real motivation is not concern over such putative mistreatment but, rather, prompted by a desire to delegitimize the lone Jewish state, and ultimately, to see its destruction and its replacement by an Arab “Palestine” extending “from the river to the sea.” Those who refuse to condemn the near-slave conditions in which five million people, mainly domestic servants and construction workers, work in Arab countries have forfeited the moral right to attack Israel.

And one more thing. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that treats its foreign workers not as slaves, but fully as equals. The nearly 200,000 Palestinians who cross into Israel every day to work are paid Israeli wages for the same work – that is, ten times what they can earn in Gaza and the West Bank. They are subject to the same labor laws as are Israeli workers, with the same rights to safe working conditions, the same number of hours in the workday, and the same number of workdays in the week that Israeli workers in comparable jobs must work. This needs to. be brought up every time Israel is hauled over the coals for its supposed “mistreatment” of Palestinians. And we should also bring up, as a perfect expression of the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel army, the indifference of its members to the slavery-like conditions that foreign workers must endure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

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TD

1 year ago

Criticizing the Qatari gov’t is what got my comments shadow-banned on Youtube.

There was a video that labeled Israel an apartheid state; so replied and said Qatar is the one that practices apartheid and is a sexist regime. My comments were shadow-banned after that.
Making another account, VPN, contacting them doesn’t help; I’ve tried.

I hope Elon & others cause all these elitist companies maximum disruption and break-up.

Last edited 1 year ago by TD

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D

TD

1 year ago

Reply to  TD

Musk indicated that Twitter might also become a rival video-sharing platform to Youtube.

Yes, maximum disruption to the big tech industry.

#BreakThemUp

Last edited 1 year ago by TD

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dunce

1 year ago

aren’t they all muslims???

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Snowedin

1 year ago

The liberal commie demos do not care about what happens to the people in the muslime countries as it is not white people who are enslaving the people . NOW and the women’s Lib groups do not care what the muslimes do to the women in the US either. The corrupt US government will not criticize muslime behavior.

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D

ed

1 year ago

Where are all the screaming demands for reparations ?!?!?!

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D

VietVetinOhio

1 year ago

WHERE ARE THE FEMINISTS? BESIDES PUSHING FOR PRE-BIRTH BABY KILLING, THEY SHOULD BE ON THIS TROUBLING PRACTICE.

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w, a, carr

1 year ago

As I have said I would be more impressed if the univeristies and other institutions in the West who are so bent out of shpe about historical links to slavery, applied their brains to dealing with the actual slavery that exists mainly in the Islamic world. That would of course involve dealing with people who have vast wealth which they often invest in the West, it would also be labelled ‘islamophobic’ no doubt by the very people who complain about historic slavery connections.

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