saudi arabia – Moe Lane

Salesforce: loves doing business in gay-killing Saudi Arabia, hates doing it in Indiana.

Oh, isn’t this nice of the company: “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is helping employees who are uncomfortable with Indiana’s controversial religious freedom law to transfer out of the state.” Salesforce, in case you were wondering, is a company that does ‘customer relationship management’ for companies, as can be seen here…

…Wait. That can’t be right. Saudi Arabia? They sell services in Saudi Arabia? They execute gay people in Saudi Arabia! Well, that says ‘partner,’ so maybe Salesforce has an out there…

…erm. Turns out that NSI is Salesforce’s gateway to the Gulf area – including Saudi Arabia, which is by the way a place where they execute gay people. But seriously, is Salesforce actually selling services in Saudi Arabia?

Guess they are! Which is odd, because SAUDI ARABIA EXECUTES GAY PEOPLE.

Look, if you don’t want to do business in Indiana, Arkansas, or any of the other 20 states that have RFRA laws, fine. It’s a free country. But if you’re going to brag about how you’re happy to pull people out of flyover country because you don’t like a state’s particular attitude about the morality of forcing people to bake a cake for a wedding, at least mention how you plan to help out those of your employees who are living somewhere where being caught being gay leads you to the whipping post or the scaffold. …Oh, wait, silly me. That’s why Salesforce has the consulting firms and affiliates and partnerships: plausible deniability. That way the Saudis can keep executing all the gay people that they like, and Marc Benioff can keep cashing those sweet, sweet petro-dollar backed checks.

And Benioff can keep sneering! Mustn’t forget the sneering. That’s probably the best part for him, really.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Speaking as somebody who supports same-sex marriage: I think that it is frankly not moral to support a group like Salesforce. And it’s not because they do business in Saudi Arabia: it’s because they have carefully calibrated their moral outrage to the point where it never interferes with their bottom line. Salesforce avoiding Indiana is a gesture: avoiding Saudi Arabia would be an economic hardship. And we can’t have that, can we?

Human trafficking at Saudi diplomatic compound in Virginia?

I really hope that this was an unfortunate misunderstanding that will be cleared up very shortly.

A case of “possible human trafficking” at a Saudi diplomatic compound in Virginia is under investigation, Homeland Security confirmed to News4.

Agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement/Homeland Security Investigations and Fairfax County police were called to a home in the 6000 block of Orris Street in McLean overnight and, in the words of a source familiar with the investigation, “rescued” two women. One woman reportedly tried to flee by squeezing through a gap in the front gate as it was closing.

…because if it’s not, well. We tend to get a bit touchy on the subject of human slavery on American soil.

Bad touchy.

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t care what the rules are in other countries. This is the United States of America: we are not like other countries.

Ethical oil’s excellent enemies: Saudi Arabia & Think Progress.

Perfect together!

One of the nicest things about being a mainstream supporter of the Global War on Terror is that you are blessed, for a given value of ‘blessed,’ with a collection of the vilest, most despicable, most appalling domestic enemies in recent political history. Nazis, Communists, Stalinists, Maoists, blackshirt anarchists, Jew-haters of various flavors, anti-human deep ecologists, anti-Israel conspiracy theorists… honestly, by the time that the antiwar movement was done they had managed to taint most of the groups out there that I casually despise, and virtually all of the progressive ones. I’d like to pretend that this marvelous example of contagious karma isn’t really that big a deal, but honesty forces me to admit that the nasty, somewhat cognitively challenged nature of the Other Side was a powerful factor in keeping the antiwar folks firmly under the rocks that are in fact their native environment.

I mention this because it’s exciting to see this dynamic play out over in the ‘ethical oil’ arena as well. Continue reading Ethical oil’s excellent enemies: Saudi Arabia & Think Progress.

Saudi Arabian Government Shakeup.

A positive one.

I missed this over the weekend, but via Chapomatic and Crossroads Arabia comes news of a certain amount of quiet moderation in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi king shakes up religious establishment

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia The Saudi king on Saturday dismissed the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing the owners of TV networks that broadcast “immoral” content, signaling an effort to weaken the country’s hard-line Sunni establishment.

The shake-up – King Abdullah’s first since coming to power in August 2005 – included the appointment of a female deputy minister, the highest government position a Saudi woman has attained.

The king also changed the makeup of an influential body of religious scholars, for the first time giving more moderate Sunnis representation to the group whose duties include issuing the religious edicts known as fatwas.

Continue reading Saudi Arabian Government Shakeup.