#so i think in the UAE the difference between different classes of south asians is even more pronounced. esp when they basically are the

[menalez]

The thing about that hyperdemona is that she actually comes from a privileged background from her country. A lot of christians from kerala(her state, which is also mine) were from upper caste backgrounds and were casteist feudal lords like their upper caste hindu counterparts. She also admitted to some of her ancestors owning slaves back in the day here,

https://www.tumblr.com/hyperdemona/732628331223302145/do-you-come-from-any-kind-of-noble-family-just?source=share

A lot of kerala christians are very islamophobic and support the BJP,

https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/chrisanghis-rise-christian-right-kerala-170777

It was revolting how she kept trying to defend her racism by citing her father being an immigrant worker in UAE. Trust me, most people from privileged backgrounds like hers who migrate to Gulf countries from kerala are very different from the lower caste and exploited Indian labourers. These NRIs(a term for non residential Indians) usually work white-collar jobs and are one of the richest demographics in kerala.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/nris-and-jewellers-top-keralas-rich-list/articleshow/42655846.cms

That she mixes the experiences of these privileged sections with those of poor, lower caste Indians who actually suffer from racism and discrimination is just further proof of her bigotry. And she really don't care for these exploited workers either, she just want to use them to one-up the middle eastern women who called out her racism. She loves using the experiences of underprivileged people from our country to paint herself as a victim when she never suffered from any of that.

yeah bahrain also has a lot of migrant workers and there absolutely is at least two groups of south asians in the country, the people who work in awful exploitative jobs like construction, domestic work, kitchen work, delivery drivers, etc and then the people who work more prestigious & valued work such as engineers, doctors, even teachers (the latter aren't valued as much but certainly have it a lot better than the people in the first group). of course, in general people are racist regardless but when they realise you're a south asian from a more educated and respected background, the racism is more toned down compared to how they treat domestic & construction workers for example. i grew up being perceived as south asian & ppl still assume im south asian in bahrain and people have directed all sorts of racism at me. even other south asians were racist to me bc i was darker-skinned than my south asian teachers who would look down on me. its a real problem, for sure, regardless of class. but class does make a difference. the way people will be overtly racist about "bengali workers" (from my experience bangladeshis & sri lankans are the ones dehumanised the most, it might also be bc a good number of pakistanis and indians in bahrain can be quite upper class) is quite shocking tbh, like i cant even put into words how vile they can be.

im not going to assume anything about her beliefs based on her being a christian from kerala, i didnt see her expressing the stuff you mentioned ppl of her background often believing in and i think assuming she does believe that falls into stereotyping anyways but. her saying her family had slaves until the mid-1800s is pretty wild to me, especially saying they enslaved a whole caste of people in her area... and yeah i think based on that, her father probably is not one of the people who faced exploitation akin to slavery in UAE, the type of exploitation that has claimed the lives of up to tens of thousands of south asians in the gulf per year.

i do want to emphasise again tho that i think even more well-off south asians can face racism in the gulf, in general people in the gulf are quite racist and ive had to grow up facing that directed at me a lot. quite colourist and classist too. but my light-skinned, south asian, well-off friends have generally not faced that kind of prejudice so.. i do think the racism is several factors combined and if you have a certain background as a south asian in the gulf, you can have it a lot better than for example black/part-black arabs & dark-skinned people of colour, or even filipinos & indonesians, in the gulf will. and certainly worlds better than what a lot of south asians in the gulf experience.

south asians in the gulf do not have one shared experience ultimately. but i think many will notice the contempt people have for south asians, even if they don't face that contempt directly and have privileges protecting them from that level of racism.

all that said.... palestinians are in a different region and have literally nothing to do with that stuff. palestinians get treated like shit in the gulf too. it makes no sense to say racist shit about palestinians and then justify it by saying its ok bc arabs in UAE are racist to south asians, it really doesn't. it doesnt make sense to justify being racist by pointing to arabs also being racist, but like, using it against palestinians is nonsensical.

[mideastsoccer]

Sudan puts Saudi-UAE religious and cheque book diplomacy to the test

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts and Tumblr

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ chequebook diplomacy driven-soft power strategy is being put to the test in Sudan where a stand-off between protesters and the country’s ruling military council is at a decisive point.

With protesters refusing to tear down barricades in front of the military headquarters in the capital Khartoum and surrender the street, breaking off talks with the military council and demanding immediate instalment of a civilian government, the stand-off has become a battle of wills.

Like in Algeria, Sudanese protesters have learnt from the 2011 popular Arab revolts that initially securing their success in forcing a long-standing leader to step down depends on their ability to sustain mobilization and street pressure.

Both Sudan and Algeria have, in the wake of the toppling of presidents Omar al-Bashir and Abdulaziz Bouteflika, promised elections and arrested and/or detained officials and/or businessmen on corruption charges in a so far unsuccessful bid to pacify demonstrators and persuade them to end their protests.

With elections scheduled for July in Algeria while Sudan’s military is talking about one or more years of pe-election transition, Algerian protesters may have a leg up on their Sudanese brethren.  

Nonetheless, protesters have also learnt that pledges of support by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt potentially are a Trojan horse. The UAE and Saudi Arabia led the regional effort to roll back the achievements of the 2011 revolts that toppled the leaders of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia.

Egypt joined the counterrevolution after general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president in a UAE-Saudi-supported coup in 2013.

As a result, protesters have also learnt that they are up against formidable opponents, who include not just the militaries and associated businessmen and politicians who have a vested interest in the ancien regime, but also their regional backers.

Saudi, UAE and Egyptian backing for renegade Libyan Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar in the battle for Tripoli, the seat of the United Nations-recognized government, serves as an immediate reminder of the obstacles and risks the protesters face.

It has prompted at least some Sudanese to demand that the ruling military council reject US$3 billion in aid offered in recent days by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

So far Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt have paid lip service to the Sudanese and Algerian protesters while trying to bolster military efforts to be seen to be meeting their demands yet maintaining ultimate grip on their countries’ politics.

The removal of Mr, Al-Bashir in Sudan was of particular importance to the counterrevolutionary states because of the fact that he came to power with the support of Islamist forces, the Gulf states and Egypt’s bete noir.

Sudan moreover is geopolitically important because of its strategic location in the Horn of Africa, a battleground for rival camps in the Middle East, Mr. Al-Bashir’s playing of both sides of the Middle East divide against the middle, and the granting to Turkey of access to Suakin Island that faces the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah.

Initial indications are that protesters’ fears that Saudi and UAE cheque book diplomacy comes with strings attached are not unfounded. Anti-Saudi and UAE sentiment has also been fuelled by the two states’ acquisition of Sudanese agricultural land in recent years and opposition to the war in Yemen.

The head of Sudan’s military council, Lt. General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan, developed close ties to the Gulf states in his former role as commander of Sudanese forces that are part of the Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen.

Mr. Burhan, in apparent recognition of the 22-month old UAE-Saudi led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar, refused to meet with Qatari foreign minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani days after receiving a Saudi-UAE delegation. Sudan has since said it was working out arrangements for a Qatari visit.

Similarly, UAE and Saudi cheque book diplomacy has also bolstered Mauritanian support for their fight against Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.  

This week’s visit by Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan to Iran during which the two countries agreed to form a joint quick reaction force to combat militant activity on their shared border, increase Iranian electricity sales to Pakistan and build a railway linking Islamabad, Tehran and Istanbul, puts the effectiveness of Gulf cheque book diplomacy to the test.

Pakistan appeared to be tilting toward Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Iran after the kingdom and the UAE pulled the cash-strapped South Asian nation back from the brink with $US 10 billion in financial aid and pledges of another $10 billion in investment.

Saudi Arabia’s greater emphasis on cheque book diplomacy coincides with a substantial cutback in global funding of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservativism to the tune of an estimated US$100 billion over the last four decades.

The cutback means that funding has been focused on regions that are of geopolitical importance to the kingdom such as the troubled Pakistani province of Balochistan that borders Iran and Yemen.

The cutback, however, does not mean that the fallout of the Saudi funding is no longer felt around the globe.

Some analysts believe that crown prince Mohammed bin Salman gives Saudi-backed ultra-conservative preachers a freer hand in Southeast Asia as opposed to Europe where he tries to project himself as an Islamic moderate. If so, its an approach that has produced at best mixed results.

Two Saudi-educated religious scholars, Bachtiar Nasir and Zaitun Rasmin, played a key role in ultra-conservative mass protests in 2016, the largest in Indonesian history, that brought down Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, aka Ahok, an ethnic Chinese Christian and ally of Indonesian president Joko Widodo.

Both students in the 1990s at the Islamic University of Medina, a key Saudi vehicle for the promotion of ultra-conservatism, Messrs. Nasir and Rasmin have since their return to Indonesia propagated a puritanical strand of Islam and built a substantial following among the middle class.

However, in contrast to the kingdom, that more recently has been pushing in countries like Algeria, Libya and Kazakhstan a quietist, loyalist interpretation of Islam, Messrs. Nasir and Rasmin have advocated political activism similar to the kingdom’s Sahwa or Islamic Awakening movement that called for peaceful political reform.

The movement, believed to have been partly inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, lost ground with the banning of the Brothers in the kingdom and the arrest of many of its leaders after the rise of Prince Mohammed.

Messrs. Nasir and Rasmin have aligned themselves with the far-right Sunni Muslim Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI), whose leader, Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, a charismatic preacher and one-time vigilante of Yemeni descent, fled in 2017 to Saudi Arabia, where he has been allowed to reside to escape sexual harassment charges.

The alliance provides Messrs. Nasir and Rasmin a mass base that they can mobilize. The two men, moreover, huge followings on social media. Mr. Nasir has 1.1 million followers on Instagram, 526,000 on Facebook, and 217,000 on Twitter.

Mr. Rizieq was briefly detained and questioned in November by Saudi police after he flew a black flag inscribed with the Muslim principle of tawhid or the oneness of God at the back of his Mecca residence. The flag resembled ones used by jihadists, including the Islamic State.

“Are you a criminal for installing the flag on your house? I don’t think so... I think Rizieq is not a threat to my country. If he had violated any laws, he would have undergone a legal process. Rizieq doesn’t have problems,” commented Usamah Muhammad Al-Syuaiby, the Saudi ambassador to Indonesia.

Despite the seeming differences with Saudi policy, Mr. Rasmin appeared to be doing the kingdom’s bidding when he travelled to Malaysia in advance of the 2018 elections to support those segments of the Sunni ultra-conservative community that wanted to ensure that scandal-tainted prime minister Najib Razak would be re-elected.

Saudi Arabia had sought to help Mr. Razak, who stood accused of defrauding Malaysia’s 1MDB state fund of billions of dollars, by publicly supporting some of his questionable assertions. The Saudi strategy failed with Mahathir Mohamed’s defeat of Mr. Razak and the souring of Saudi-Malaysian relations.

Ultra-conservatives toeing the Saudi line argued that a defeat of Mr. Razak would lead to chaos. They denounced those who voted against him as khawarij, literally ‘those who walk away’ but frequently defined as ‘the dogs of hellfire.’

In an interview with Utusan, the newspaper of Mr. Razak’s party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Mr. Rasmin backed the ultra-conservative argument that “it is prohibited to elect or let a non-Muslim be elected,“ a reference to the fact that Mr. Mahathir’s alliance included non-Muslims and liberals.

Taken together, developments in Sudan, Algeria, Pakistan and Southeast Asia, suggest that the effectiveness of Saudi and UAE religious and cheque book diplomacy hangs in the balance. The developments raise the question whether short-terms successes can be maintained long-term.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture.