Rogers Kennedy

Bringing you the facts that others don't want you to have.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

https://t.co/ZBuhRnXHY8

[Mike Kupari 🚀💥 @RocketPulpHack]

I worked in Qatar from 2004-05. I lived in a villa in the city of Doha.

As I understood it (never looked it up, so don’t @ me if the details are off) to be a citizen of the State of Qatar you had to be at least 3rd generation. Citizens got a cut of the money from the country’s state-owned gas industry, varying depending on who they were. Citizens were also only like 1/3rd the population.

Everyone else was imported labor, and there was a sort of caste system. The Filipinos were the merchants, usually working in retail businesses. There were Indians and Sri Lankans there too, and a lot of them were private taxi drivers.

At the bottom were the people from Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, etc. They worked construction and such.

Immigrants didn’t have any rights. Your sponsor confiscated your passport from you, and you couldn’t legally leave the country without an “exit letter” from them. If you ran off, they’d put an ad in the paper that you’d “absconded.”

This happened to me, as an American citizen, working for an American goddamn company! (Dyncorp. Would not recommend.)

Even their military immigrant labor. Only the officers were actually Qatari citizens.

Women had a hard time. Many were brought there thinking they’d be working as house cleaners but would end up as indentured servants.

If you were a westerner, hanging out at the hotel bars (one of the few places where alcohol was served), you’d be approached by Chinese girls. They were prostitutes, but most of them hadn’t planned on doing that. They got in country, got their passports taken, and found out their sponsor had all these “fees” they wanted them to pay, skimming off the money they were trying to earn up to send home.

Every year or so the Qatari government would crack down on it and deport a bunch of them, only to ignore it again when it was convenient.

Their entire economy is built on resource extraction and exploitation of people from poor countries. Back then, the technical jobs were more or less outsourced to westerners. I don’t know how it looks there today.

Were there open-air slave auctions or anything? No. Their system was subtler and more sanitized than that.

We had two military bases there then. Now it’s just Al-Udeid Air Base. In my opinion, this should be closed. We should pull chocks and unhitch Qatar from our wagon. We have other Arab allies that aren’t as beholden to militant Islamists and aren’t harboring Hamas.

That’s not going to happen, though , and we all know why.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I went to Qatar in February of 2020 on a photography work trip for a hotel that was launching there.

It was the first time in my life I had seen slavery.

Qatar was building new infrastructure for the World Cup and brought in thousands of slaves from other counties to do the work.

It was truly horrifying.

Something like 6,000 of them died just building the roads and stadiums.

So… when I saw all those conservative influencers posting about Qatar and how beautiful and amazing it was…

That set me off.

Qatar used actual modern day, real life SLAVES in like FIVE YEARS AGO to build those skyscrapers you’re standing in front of, you dumbasses.

Sit the fuck down.

[Larry Sanger @lsanger]

Good catch of obvious bias: an article documenting the mass rapes on October 7 in NYT is undermined by a Wikipedia article in a totally one-sided way.

The opening paragraph has all of one sentence summarizing the piece, all of 44 words. The rest of the opening section has 144 of criticism, overwhelmingly negative.

There is also a table of testimonial evidence in the article, which has red (or pink) background color-coding, suggesting which items of testimony are credible and which are not. The mealy-mouthed authors left out anything like a legend explaining what the background color even means.

This illustrates very well how activists (of various kinds—here, pro-Hamas) have taken over Wikipedia and essentially bully everyone else into acceding. If you do not, they get their allies to block your account. That's how it works.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Please send your football questions to Abubaker Abed at Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Ireland (or Indonesia).

[عيديت بار Idit Bar @bararit]

هادي قصة لازم العالم العربي يسمعها:
عائلة "خزام" اليهودية من بغداد، تهجرت من وطنها وسُلب منها كل شي.
واليوم، يطالب ورثتهم فرنسا ترجع لهم مبنى السفارة الفرنسية ببغداد، أو تعوضهم على الأقل عن 50 سنة من الاستيلاء.

اليهود بالدول العربية ما كانوا مستعمرين، كانوا أبناء البلاد اللي صار لهم ظلم كبير:
طُردوا، نُهبت أملاكهم، وتحولوا لاجئين بلا ذنب.
صار وقت نكسر الصمت ونحكي الحقيقة!

This is a story the Arab world needs to hear:
The Jewish Khuzam family from Baghdad was forced to flee their homeland and had everything taken from them.
Today, their descendants are demanding that France return their former property — now the French embassy building in Baghdad — or at least compensate them for nearly 50 years of illegal use.

Jews in Arab countries were not colonizers - they were sons of the land.
They were wronged: expelled, robbed of their property, and turned into refugees for no reason.
It’s time to break the silence and speak the truth!

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

@UKLFI @BBC Can you post the source?

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

@amjadt25 @ammarmahmoud When Hamas stole your aid, did you stop sending aid?

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Guess...

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

By this point we can tell the bots by their emojis.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Capturing real-time events in Nigeria.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Rafah, Southern Gaza Strip, Nigeria.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Journalist from the Gaza Strip, Nigeria.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Gaza in Nigeria is not that bad an idea.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

🇮🇱🇪🇺Israel is doing Europe's work for them. Any threat, such as the one by Macron, to reduce Mossad's presence in Europe will only result in more of their own citizens being murdered.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

@aaamohammed89 @Dani_Blek A few drones on Aramco and your stock market dips and you fold against a bunch of hill Shiaites.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

🇮🇷Due to the lack of water, land and infrastructure, Iran wants to move the capital. Pezeshkian: "When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget. If we had, maybe it would have been done."
And what was that money spent on?

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

The PA is trying to stifle efforts to allow Gazans who want to leave the strip do so. They are promoting the suffering of Gazans who are looking to get better lives and de-facto imprisoning them.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

Hamas is causing famine in Gaza.

[Rogers Kennedy @FactHatch]

@MaxNordau The Vatican takes no refugees and has no illegal immigrants. Put a few next to the pope's room and he will change his tone.