Mecca To Get World's Biggest Hotel

Via the Guardian:

Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the crowning feature of the holy city’s crowning glory, the superlative summit of what will be the world’s largest hotel when it opens in 2017. With 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for the sole use of the Saudi royal family, the £2.3bn Abraj Kudai is an entire city of five-star luxury, catering to the increasingly high expectations of well-heeled pilgrims from the Gulf. Modelled on a “traditional desert fortress”, seemingly filtered through the eyes of a Disneyland imagineer with classical pretensions, the steroidal scheme comprises 12 towers teetering on top of a 10-storey podium, which houses a bus station, shopping mall, food courts, conference centre and a lavishly appointed ballroom.

According to Euromonitor, Mecca ranks 17th in international visitors annually.

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SAUDI ARABIA: Gay Man Sentenced To Three Years For Hook-Up Profile

Via Gulf News:

A court in eastern Saudi Arabia has sentenced a homosexual man to three years in jail for engaging in “immoral acts”. The man, in his 30s, was also ordered to pay a SR100,000 fine by the court in the port city Dammam in the Eastern Province. According to a report in local news site Sabq, the man was apprehended by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice after he posted pictures of himself naked on social media and offered to have sex for free with other men. “Offensive” pictures and chats with other people were found on his confiscated mobile, Sabq said on Tuesday. Homosexuality and cross-dressing are social and legal offences in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE.

Some major US-based hook-up apps have warned their foreign users that it might be possible to pinpoint their location via the apps' geolocation function. The above-linked story does not say how the arrested man was identified.

SAUDI ARABIA: Gay Man Sentenced To 450 Lashes And Three Years In Prison

Dubai's English-language Gulf News reports that a Saudi Arabia court has sentenced a young man to 450 lashes and three years in prison for attempting to meet other men via Twitter.

The man, 24, was arrested after he posted several tweets calling for homosexual relations and expressing his readiness to meet gay men, local daily Al Watan reported on Tuesday. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police, was alerted about the tweets and was able to apprehend the young man after it set him up using an undercover agent. His mobile phone was searched and several “immoral” pictures were discovered, prompting the Commission to refer his case to the public prosecution. During the trial, the prosecutor requested a harsh punishment and the confiscation of the mobile phone on charges of promoting debauchery. The suspect reportedly admitted to using his account on the microblog to contact and communicate with homosexuals. The court decided that the 450 lashes would be given over 15 sessions.

Gulf News concludes its report by noting that homosexuality is forbidden in "Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states that also comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE."

Saudi Police Arrest 35 Men At "Gay Party"

Gay Star News reports:

Saudi Arabia police have arrested 35 people and accused them of being gay. The men, allegedly dressed in women’s clothes, were arrested at a beach resort in the western city of Jeddah. According to local reports, neighbors contacted the religious police complaining of the loud music being played at the party. The police took the arrested men to the station and kept the dresses and music equipment until an investigation is complete. LGBTI rights in Saudi Arabia are non-existent. Homosexuality is taboo and punished with jail, flogging, chemical castration or even death.

Saudi Arabia is one of ten nations where homosexuals acts are punishable by the death penalty.

Saudi Arabia Bans 50 Baby Names

Via Gulf News:

Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry has banned 50 given names including “foreign” names, names related to royalty and those it considers to be blasphemous. Saudis will no longer be able to give their children names such as Amir (prince), Linda or Abdul Nabi (Slave of the Prophet) after the civil affairs department at the ministry issued the list, according to Saudi news sites. It justified the ban by saying that the names either contradicted the culture or religion of the kingdom, or were foreign, or “inappropriate”.

The banned non-Arabic names: Alice, Elaine, Lauren, Linda, and Sandy.

SAUDI ARABIA: Lashes & Prison For Four Men Convicted Of Naked Dancing

CNN reports:

Four Saudi men accused of dancing naked on the roof of a car and posting a video of the incident online have been sentenced to as many as 2,000 lashes and up to 10 years in prison, and fined thousands of dollars, a newspaper reported this week. A criminal court in Buraidah, Saudi Arabia, handed down the verdict on Wednesday, according to the newspaper al-Sharq. Three of the men were sentenced to three to seven years in prison and 500 to 1,200 lashes, and one man received the harshest sentence -- 10 years and 2,000 lashes.

(Tipped by JMG reader Win)

Saudi Arabia's War On Witches

An interesting article from the Atlantic:

The Saudi government's obsession with the criminalization of the dark arts reached a new level in 2009, when it created and formalized a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" to educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their spells. Saudi citizens are also urged to use a hotline on the CPVPV website to report any magical misdeeds to local officials, according to the Jerusalem Post. [snip]

By 2011, the unit had created a total of nine witchcraft-fighting bureaus in cities across the country, according to Arab News, and had "achieved remarkable success" in processing 586 cases of magical crime, the majority of which were foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia. Then, last year, the government announced that it was expanding its battle against magic further, scapegoating witches as the source of both religious and social instability in the country. The move would mean new training courses for its agents, a more powerful infrastructural backbone capable of passing intelligence across provinces, and more raids. The force booked 215 sorcerers in 2012.

(Tipped by JMG reader Eric)

Headline Of The Day

Details. Sadly, there are no photos.

SAUDI ARABIA: Gays And "Tomboys" Banned From Government Schools

According to a report on Emirates 24/7, Saudi Arabia has banned gay boys and "tom boys" from attending government schools and universities.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the most feared law enforcement authority in the oil-rich country, has been asked to enforce the new orders, Sharq Arabic language daily said. “Instructions have been issued to all public schools and universities to ban the entry of gays and tom boys and to intensify their efforts to fight this phenomenon, which has been promoted by some websites,” it said. The paper did not make clear who issued those instructions but said gay and tom boy students can go back to schools and universities if they prove they have been corrected and have stopped such practices. It said high-level orders have been issued to the Commission to immediately enforce the new rules and to step up efforts to combat this phenomenon and other “unacceptable behavior” in public places.

More on this as information becomes available...

SAUDI ARABIA: Women Get Right To Vote

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has graciously extended the right to vote to women.

“We refuse to marginalize the role of women in Saudi society in every field of work,” Abdullah said yesterday on state television. “Women have the right to submit their candidacy for municipal council membership and have the right to take part in submitting candidates in accordance with Shariah.” Saudi Arabia enforces gender restrictions interpreted from the Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam. Men and women are strictly segregated in public, including at schools, restaurants and lines at fast-food takeouts. That keeps women out of sales jobs in malls and stores, unless the outlet caters exclusively to a female clientele, and they are also barred from driving.

Now they just need someone to drive them to the polls.

Tweet Of The Day - Bryan Fischer

Fischer: U.S. Should Outlaw Blasphemy

SAUDI ARABIA: Man Sentenced To 500 Lashes And 5 Years In Prison For Gay Sex

A Saudi court has sentenced a man accused of having gay sex to 500 lashes and five years in prison.

The 27 year-old man, who was arrested by the kingdom’s religious police, was also convicted of publishing photos on the internet and on mobile phones of himself wearing women’s underwear, the newspaper reported without giving his name. The court fined him 50,000 riyals ($13,300), the newspaper said.

Hopefully this outrage will be denounced by Secretary Clinton.

Gay Saudi Diplomat Seeks U.S. Asylum

Saying that his life is in danger and that if he goes back to Saudi Arabia "they will kill me openly in broad daylight,” a gay Saudi diplomat has requested asylum in the United States.

The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, the first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, has informed U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials that Saudi officials have refused to renew his diplomatic passport and effectively terminated his job after discovering he was gay and was close friends with a Jewish woman. In a recent letter that he posted on a Saudi website, Asseri angrily criticized his country’s “backwardness” as well as the role of “militant imams” in Saudi society who have “defaced the tolerance of Islam.” Perhaps most provocatively of all, he has threatened to expose what he describes as politically embarrassing information about members of the Saudi royal family living in luxury in the U.S.

The United States granted it first asylum request based on sexual orientation in 1994, after a 73 year-old ban on homosexual immigrants was finally overturned in 1990.

STOP! Mecca Time!

In Mecca, Saudi Arabia is building the world's largest clock atop what will be the world's second-tallest building. The structure is meant to help further Saudi Arabia's goal to establish Mecca as the replacement for the global standard of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

Bearing a striking resemblance to both St Stephen’s Tower, which houses the bell of Big Ben, and the Empire State Building, the Saudi upstart aims to outdo its revered British rival in every way. The clock’s four faces are 151ft in diameter and will be illuminated by 2million LED lights along with huge Arabic script reading: “In the name of Allah”. The clock will run on Arabia Standard Time which is three hours ahead of GMT. When a glittering spire is added, topped with a crescent to symbolise Islam, the edifice will stand at nearly 2,000 ft, making it the world's second tallest building. The clock of Big Ben, by comparison, is just 23ft in diameter, while its tower stands at a mere 316ft.

Residents of Mecca will also be reminded that it is time to pray when 21,000 green and white lights, visible at a distance of 18 miles, flash five times a day. But Islamic scholars hope the clock’s influence will stretch far further than the sands of Saudi Arabia, as part of a plan for Mecca to eclipse the Greenwich Observatory as the “true centre of the earth”. For the past 125 years, the international community has accepted that the start of each day should be measured from the prime meridian, representing 0 degrees longitude, which passes through the Greenwich Observatory. A standard time by which other clocks were set was needed to organise global travel and communications, but in the Islamic world the idea that it should be centred on a part of London is seen as a colonial anachronism.

Saudi Arabia's leading cleric contends that Mecca is the correct choice because "it's in perfect alignment with magnetic north." The world's scientists disagree.

Today In Islamic Fatwas

An Islamic cleric in Saudi Arabia has issued one of the most bizarre fatwas yet. Via Salon:

As many of us know, women and men in Saudi Arabia must be careful not to mingle, as the insanely strict Islamic law bans mixing between the sexes who are not related. Recently, the Saudis have issued a fatwa that forces women who come into contact with unrelated men on a regular basis to breastfeed them so that they can be considered “relatives” and not potential lovers. The strangest part is, this isn’t the actual issue at hand. The issue is, how do the men get the milk? I know, it just gets weirder.

According to the Gulf News, Sheikh Al Obeikan, a consultant to the Ministry of Justice and an adviser to the royal court stated, “the man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman. He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the woman without breaking Islam’s rules about mixing.” This fatwa applies to men who regularly come into contact with the same woman, or men who live in the same house with a woman. The woman has to pump her breast milk into a glass and give it to the unrelated male. Doesn’t that sound appetizing?

According to the story, Islamic women often breastfeed their nephews too, so that they and their daughters can be in the same room once they grow up. It makes them "breast milk siblings."

(Via - Dan Savage)

Saudi Arabia: 1000 Lashes And A Year In Jail For Gay YouTube Clip

A man in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 1000 lashes and a year in prison for appearing in an internet video in which he dresses as a policeman and appears to be making sexual advances to an unseen male detainee.

A 27-year-old Saudi man from Jeddah has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes, a year in jail and a fine of 5,000 riyals ($1,330) after appearing in an amateur gay video. The film, which lasts 2 minutes and 46 seconds, shows him dressed in a police uniform asking to inspect someone’s driving licence and then flirtatiously demanding “physical comfort” after saying the licence is expired. He later opens his shirt and rubs his chest, removes his cap flaunting his long hair and waves a gun suggestively. That’s as far as it goes. Arab News says: “The video quickly spread online and through SMS… Attempts have been made to block the video from being viewed in Saudi Arabia.” The man has not been officially named but he is named on the internet as Ahmad al-Faqih. He was arrested in January and reportedly tried in a closed court. He was charged with impersonating a police officer, committing a “general security” offence and being homosexual. The man who filmed the video was also arrested but his fate has not been reported.

Here's the clip.

Dubya's Legacy