Kuwait: How Muslims use religion to silence critics.

(Kuwait city) In February this year the body of Filipino maid Joanna Demafelis was found inside a freezer in Kuwait.  She had been reported missing last year and her employers were arrested in Damascus, where they had fled hoping to evade  justice.  Joannas dreadful murder exposed the dreadful conditions that Filipinos face in the Middle East resulting in the Philippines banning its citizens working in the country. The abuse that  foreign workers face across the ME is down to how the Muslim states operate. Where domestic workers are employed under a sponsorship system that gives employers the right to keep their passports and exercise full control over their stay. Rights groups say this leaves workers across the region open to exploitation and abuse.

As a result of the ban the Kuwaiti government signed an agreement with Manila in May allowing domestic workers to retain their passports, which are usually taken by employers and to refuse to be transferred to other employers without their consent. Plus they get 4 days off a months and 7 hours sleep a day.

Well that didn’t go down well with Sondos Alqattan, a Kuwaiti blogger who has over 2.5 million people following her for her beauty tips. She opined her disgust at this move releasing a video where she stated:

“How can you have a servant at home who keeps their own passport with them? What’s worse is they have one day off every week,.. “If they run away and go back to their country, who will refund me? Honestly I disagree with this law. I don’t want a Filipino maid any more.”

Well that outburst didn’t go down well for this so called social media star and after she was openly denounced as a racist and a bigot, resulting in many makeup companies dropping her like a hot potato .She has decided to fight back. In a new video posted to her now private Twitter account on Thursday, Alqattan called the backlash to her comments:

 “A foreign media campaign” designed to attack Islam, the hijab, Kuwait and the wider Gulf region. Of course I did not have to offer any apology, because I was telling the truth. Keeping a domestic worker’s passport is deemed an enslavement and racism [by these people]. Why judge me [over keeping] my worker’s passport, with the aim of ensuring my safety? These people express more outrage over my remarks than they have over humanitarian crises and massacres in Syria, Iraq and Gaza. Are these humanitarian values?”

The stupid racist bigot also stated she was going to reveal the names of companies which ditch her , so that her 2.5 million followers can boycott them. Talk about a sense of self importance.

Did you see what she did, by invoking the name of Islam, she silences those in the region who don’t wish to be murdered by those who find offence in everything.  We see that tactic in play across the world and increasingly in the West, where critics of Islamic intolerance are now being silenced with surreptitious death threats. You know like British MP Sarah Champion in my last post. And the worse part , our governments allow these bigots to get away with such behaviour.