• #Arabian_Transfer

    “Arabian Transfer” is a photographic series highlighting the transitory condition
    of six cities in the Arabian Peninsula – #Abu_Dhabi, #Doha, #Dubai, #Kuwait_City, #Manama,
    #Riyadh – representing them as places of passage for cultures and people.
    “Arabia” is historically a mythical place of the Western imagery, of exchange with the
    East, but in recent decades cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha have appeared as new
    worlds, new global epicentres made possible by a condition of hyper-mobility of people,
    cultural models, images, finances, goods, transferred from one place to another.
    These cities are mostly populated (as well as physically built) by expats from
    around the world, and today represent a living laboratory in which the local identity
    aspirations are measured against Western models and the traditions and cultures
    of origin of the inhabitants. In the title, the word “Transfer” refers to a place where
    travelers can spend some time, but can’t be a final destination, a condition that
    happens to the large majority of people living in those countries.

    These photographs were taken between 2010 and 2017 in the margin of other researches
    on spectacular architecture in the Gulf. In this series I wanted to avoid the sublime
    and grotesque character that photography tends to acquire in representing the most
    spectacular aspects of these landscapes; but I also sought to give substance to the
    abstract imagery of the new skylines – which remain in the background as the New York
    by Dos Passos to which the title refers.
    In these images I have favored a more intimate and direct relationship with the cities
    and their inhabitants, which took place mainly by walking and spending a lot of time
    on the streets and in urban areas, without hiding the difficulty of the metropolitan
    condition. Through everyday habits, gestures and faces, I tried to bring out a sense
    of presence, showing how these cities are actual places where people live, and where,
    in the extreme and paradoxical form that characterizes them, it is possible to
    recognize the global contemporary condition to which we ourselves participate.

    https://www.michelenastasi.com/portfolio/arabian-transfer
    #photographie #Michele_Nastasi #péninsule_arabique #Arabie #villes #urban_matter #villes

    ping @albertocampiphoto

  • “الرياض أهم من القدس″ هشتاج ينتشر على “تويتر” انتشار النار في الهشيم بمشاركة مشاهير المملكة ويؤجج العداوة بين أبناء الأمة العربية.. ما الذي يحدث؟ وما الرسالة من ورائه؟ وهل هو نتيجة للتقارب السعودي – الإسرائيلي؟ وهل وقعت الواقعة؟ | رأي اليوم
    http://www.raialyoum.com/?p=783193

    Enorme buzz dans les médias sociaux arabe autour du hashtag #riyadh_plus_important_que_Jérusalem. Un intellectuel de renom, Al-Ghadhami, évoque, parmi beaucoup d’autres, la "trahison des Palestiniens". Pour l’auteur de l’article, il s’agit clairement de préparer l’annonce d’un accord entre Saoudiens et Israéliens.

    Dans le même temps, on parle beaucoup de négociations par Mahmoud Abbas, représentant officiel de la Palestine bien que fort peu populaire chez lui, pour un accord avec les Israéliens sous l’égide de l’administration Trump (http://www.raialyoum.com/?p=783179).

    #palestine #catastrophe_arabe

  • Arabie Saoudite : Une athée belgo-saoudienne tue 32 personnes dans un attentat suicide Gabriel BOULNOIS ,14 septembre 2016, Nordpresse.be
    http://nordpresse.be/arabie-saoudite-athee-belgo-saoudienne-tue-32-personnes-attentat-suicide

    Quels sont les faits ?
    13h51 – Les caméras de surveillance montrent une forme vaguement humaine dissimulée sous un niqab, entrer dans le centre commercial du Granada Center à #Riyadh. A ce moment, rien ne laisse présager de la suite des évènements.

    13h52,5 – Elle lance sa première attaque et retire violemment son niqab. L’un des témoins, encore traumatisé, nous raconte « C’était horrible, elle portait un T-Shirt avec la photo de Lara Fabian et un pantalon patte d’eph. Vous vous rendez compte, un pantalon ! » Cette seule agression visuelle fera 18 victimes dont 17 hommes et 1 femme qui succomberont de crises cardiaques résultant d’un désire sexuel incontrôlé. Face à cette horreur, la plus part ferment les yeux. Des dizaines se mettent à prier tandis que des centaines tentent de se ruer vers les sorties de secours. Dans le chaos ceux qui prient sont piétinés par ceux qui courent les yeux fermés, 3 décèderont suite à leurs blessures.

    13h54 – Elle se dirige vers un groupe de quinze d’adolescents qui étaient restés figés face à cette scène, et lance sa deuxième attaque en criant « Allah n’existe pas ». Envahit par le doute, dix des adolescents commencent à s’interroger sur l’islam, sur le sens de la vie, sur les dogmes qui les empêchent de vivre. Trois d’entre eux décèderont d’une hyperactivité cérébrale tandis que les sept autres tomberont dans la mécréance.

    13h56 – Heureusement, les cinq pieux adolescents restants, grâce à la force que leur procure l’ignorance de leur religion d’amour se jettent sur la mécréante et la tabasse à mort avant qu’elle n’ait eu le temps de faire plus de victimes.

    14h05 – La BAAA (Brigade Anti Athées et Apostats) encerclent le bâtiment, fait évacuer le quartier et abat les sept adolescents contaminés par la mécréance avant qu’ils ne deviennent raisonnables.

    15h30 – La foi de toutes les personnes présentes a été contrôlée par la police religieuse et aucun autre terroriste mécréant n’a été détecté. Le bilan final fait état de 33 morts dont l’attaquante, de dizaines de blessés et de centaines personnes traumatisées.
     
    Que savons-nous de la terroriste ?
    Il s’agit d’une athée belgo-saoudienne de 23 ans. Née d’un père belge et d’une mère saoudienne.

    Les images de vidéosurveillance n’ont pour le moment pas permis de déterminer si la terroriste était déjà armée d’un esprit critique ou si elle se l’est procuré sur place. Toutefois, des livres non islamiques auraient été retrouvés chez la terroriste. Parmi ces livres, certains feraient l’apologie de la libre pensée ou encore de la laïcité selon des sources proches de la police religieuse.

    Les premiers éléments de l’enquête laissent à penser qu’elle se serait radicalisée au contact d’organisations athées francophones via les réseaux sociaux. Aucunes de ces organisations athéistes n’a encore revendiqué l’attentat ce qui pourrait laisser croire qu’elle aurait pensé par elle-même.

    Ses parents la décrivent comme une femme insolente et déséquilibrée, qui passait son temps à s’interroger et à remettre en question les affirmations les plus absurdes du Coran. Son propre père nous raconte qu’une fois elle a même osé demander « Pourquoi on ne doit pas boire d’alcool maintenant, si on y aura droit plus tard et pour l’éternité ? »

    Réactions à l’international :
    Le CCIB (Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en Belgique) a fermement condamné cet « acte barbare qui démontre l’incapacité de tous les athées à tolérer l’obscurantisme ».

    Jan Jambon, ministre de l’intérieur belge a tenu à exprimer, dans une brève intervention de 56 minutes, son soutien à tous les musulmans dans leur lutte pieuse contre la réalité.

    Lara Fabian a de son côté déploré que son image soit associée à un évènement aussi terrible, et plus particulièrement à un pantalon patte d’eph.
    Dieu lui-même s’est désolidarisé de l’action de la jeune femme lors d’une déclaration laconique : « Sur ce coup là, j’y suis pour rien. »

    Et maintenant ?
    Cet attentat est le plus meurtrier jamais commis par des athéistes. Certains savants de l’islam affirment que le coran a prédit que cela n’était que le début, d’autres affirment que le coran avait prédit cet acte isolé. Tous s’accordent sur le fait qu’il faut faire des amalgames et durcir la loi islamique qui est trop laxiste envers les athées. Ainsi, l’athéisme étant seulement puni par la peine de mort en Arabie Saoudite, les grand sages du wahhabisme ont décrété qu’à partir de maintenant les athées seraient tués puis maudits.

    Du côté des victimes, des imams sont déjà sur place afin de renforcer leur foi et leur haine des athées. Le grand conseil des imams wahhabites a déjà promis que les cinq héros bénéficieront d’une bourse d’étude afin de devenir imams et a lancé la construction de cinq nouvelles mosquées en Belgique afin de les accueillir.

    #athéisme #Arabie_Saoudite #attentat #Belgique #humour
    NDR : Je me demande si le site de Nord Presse n’est pas un cousin du #Gorafi

    Il y a aussi cet article :
    Le Vatican autorise la naissance d’homosexuels.
    http://nordpresse.be/vatican-autorise-naissance-dhomosexuels

    La décision vient de tomber, les bébés homosexuels ne seront plus interdits par l’église catholique.
     
    Le pape François a transmis l’information lors des Journées Mondiales de la Jeunesse. En effet, lors de ces événements, une grande majorité des jeunes présents font partie de la communauté gay et il était important pour le pape d’éclaircir certains points.

  • Diplomatic Activity Portends “Coup” in Saudi Foreign Relations
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/diplomatic-activity-portends-coup%E2%80%9D-saudi-foreign-relation

    Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Abdullatif al-Zayani attends an extraordinary GCC meeting of foreign ministers, on February 14, 2015, in the Saudi capital #Riyadh. AFP/Fayez Nureldine Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Abdullatif al-Zayani attends an extraordinary GCC meeting of foreign ministers, on February 14, 2015, in the Saudi capital Riyadh. AFP/Fayez Nureldine

    Riyadh has seen a flurry of diplomatic activity from the Gulf in the past few days amid talk of changes in Saudi foreign policy under #King_Salman_bin_Abdulaziz. The new policy would be geared toward establishing a Sunni alliance against Iran and mending fences with #turkey, #Qatar, and the #Muslim_Brotherhood. After (...)

    #Mideast_&_North_Africa #Ankara #Ansarullah #Articles #Egypt #Kuwait #Mohammed_bin_Nayef #Sabah_al-Ahmed_al-Jaber_al-Sabah #Saudi_Arabia #syria #Yemen

  • Saudi-sponsored summit to mend ties between #Egypt and #Qatar
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/22989

    On the surface, it appears that the discord between #Cairo and #Doha is over. The Egyptian president will stop in #Riyadh on his way back from China for a Saudi-sponsored meeting with Qatari Emir #Tamim_bin_Hamad_bin_Khalifa_al-Thani. It will be the first official meeting between the two men since the overthrow of the #Muslim_Brotherhood regime more than 18 months ago strained Egyptian-Qatari relations, leading to a “media and financial war.”

    #Abdel-Fattah_al-Sisi #Articles #GCC #Mohammed_Mursi #Saudi_Arabia #Mideast_&_North_Africa

  • Saudi-sponsored summit to mend ties between #Egypt and #Qatar
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/saudi-sponsored-summit-mend-ties-between-egypt-and-qatar

    Egyptian President #Abdel-Fattah_al-Sisi meets with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz hold a meeting in #Cairo on June 21, 2014. Al-Akhbar Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi meets with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz hold a meeting in Cairo on June 21, 2014. Al-Akhbar

    On the surface, it appears that the discord between Cairo and #Doha is over. The Egyptian president will stop in #Riyadh on his way back from China for a Saudi-sponsored meeting with Qatari Emir #Tamim_bin_Hamad_bin_Khalifa_al-Thani. It will be the first official meeting between the two men since the overthrow of the #Muslim_Brotherhood regime more than 18 months ago strained Egyptian-Qatari relations, leading to a “media and financial war.” (...)

    #Mideast_&_North_Africa #Articles #GCC #Mohammed_Mursi #Saudi_Arabia

  • Why is #Saudi_Arabia flooding the #Oil market?
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/why-saudi-arabia-flooding-oil-market

    An Iraqi oil worker works at Al-Doura oil refinery. (Photo: Getty Images-Oleg Nikishin) An Iraqi oil worker works at Al-Doura oil refinery. (Photo: Getty Images-Oleg Nikishin)

    Oil prices declined sharply in the past few weeks, with Brent crude dropping to a two-year low as Saudi Arabia continued to slash its oil prices, raising many questions about Saudi Arabia’s policy towards its depletable wealth.

    Hassan Chakrani

    read more

    #Economy #Articles #Iran #OPEC #Riyadh #US

  • Seventy undocumented #migrant_workers flee Saudi detention center
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/seventy-undocumented-migrant-workers-flee-saudi-detention-center

    Nearly 70 undocumented migrant workers, mostly Ethiopians, have fled from a detention center in the Saudi capital, local media reported Friday, adding that authorities have rearrested 25 of them. Police have been cracking down on undocumented migrants since the expiration in November of a seven-month amnesty during which they had to regularize their status or leave the country, in operations that have sparked deadly clashes. read more

    #Riyadh #Saudi_Arabia

  • New Texts Out Now : Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh : Oil, Urbanism, and Revolt
    http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18310/new-texts-out-now_pascal-menoret-joyriding-in-riya
    Très stimulant entretien ! Je viens d’acheter le livre...

    Joyriding in Riyadh is the first book in English that analyzes contemporary Riyadh. With more than six million inhabitants, Riyadh is the third most populated Arab city; it is also the capital of the wealthiest state in the region. The book looks at the recent history of the city from the conflicted points of view of its princes, planners, developers, realtors, and joyriders. In the 1960s, the princes didn’t want a big city, with its problems and its dangers, but rural migration contributed to creating a huge metropolis. The Greek urbanists didn’t really understand the growth of Riyadh (nobody did), and sort of blind-planned the city. Realtors started with modest projects, but the 1973 oil bonanza exceeded all their hopes. They unexpectedly became the actual makers of the city as we know it today. All these characters’ expectations about the city were trumped by the logics of urbanization and real estate development.

    Joyriders belong in majority to migrant communities who left the Saudi countryside to seek opportunities in the capital. They are the product of the massive rural migration that fueled urban growth since the 1960s. If a few migrants managed to attain wealth and influence, most of them were betrayed by the city’s exclusive economy. Often dropouts and jobless, the youngest migrants or sons of migrants run amok in those areas where real estate development is raging: they steal cars and destroy them on freshly asphalted roads in the midst of new developments, where no police force is yet able to stop them. Their road revolt feeds off the two channels of rent distribution: real estate and consumer good import.
    [...]
    espite having the highest Twitter penetration rate in the world, Saudi Arabia hasn’t undergone the kind of political change that we’re told was triggered by social media. Joyriding in Riyadh shows that there is something else to the story of mobilization than virtual connections, and that physical infrastructure plays a vital role in providing opportunities for the emergence of class consciousness and activism. Marx noted that it took centuries for the burgers of the Middle Ages to develop class consciousness, whereas railroads allowed the proletariat to swiftly understand both its predicament and its collective power. Railroads were at once the epitome of industrial capitalism and the best way to connect isolated work forces. Today’s roads are as ambiguous. As one of my interviewees put it, car-possessing local elites benefited from the roads that were supposed to bring “development” to the people. Roads created huge investment opportunities for the clients of the royal family, and carried state power and nepotism deep into Saudi society. Joyriding in Riyadh shows how western experts, Saudi investors, and Riyadh youth have turned these instruments of authoritarianism into tools of anarchism and disorder.

    What does the study of urban spaces in Saudi add to our understanding of the Arab uprisings? There is a vague sense among those who study the region that the heart of the Middle East lies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and that the south of the Arab world, from Mauritania to Upper Egypt to the Gulf, is peripheral. Scholarship on the 2011 uprisings tends to reinforce that stereotypical geography: the action seems to happen around the Mediterranean, from Tunis to Cairo to Benghazi to Damascus, while many would probably contend that the hinterland personifies political reaction.

    It is true that Saudi Arabia didn’t experience an uprising of the scale of those which dethroned Ben Ali, Mubarak, or Qaddafi. Yet labeling the country as counterrevolutionary would be misleading: if the Al Saud helped repress the Bahraini revolution and supported field marshal El-Sisi’s coup in Egypt, they welcomed change in Libya and supported the Syrian insurgency. Treating Saudi Arabia as the epicenter of the counter-revolution would also be unfair to those who, from Jeddah to Riyadh to Qatif, courageously protested corruption, economic inequality, and repression. Demonstrations took place, people immolated themselves in several towns, women came out to protest repression.

    Yet the Saudi revolution didn’t take place. The Saudi system of power, often described as vernacular, “Islamic,” or exceptional, relies in reality on transnational networks, arms sales, corruption, and on the creation at home of an economy that is both connected to and insulated from international dynamics. The country’s economic importance generates enough resources to not only silence a large part of the population, but also turn it into an active promoter of authoritarian government. Contrary to widespread stereotypes, the Saudi opposition is highly vocal, articulate and transnational (think of Osama bin Laden or Salman al-’Awda). It scares the state, which has the means to sustain an impressive array of repressive tools. The level of political violence that Saudis experience is extremely high, and largely explains the stability of government in the country.

    But there is more to this story than forced acquiescence. Saudis resent the system almost as much as they benefit from it, and this mix of protest and acquiescence is one of the topics of Joyriding in Riyadh. The book shows that physical infrastructures, produced at the intersection of global networks and local powers, became targets and symbols for popular uprisings. “Roads bring invaders,” as Arabian Peninsula leaders would say a century ago. They now bring state power and economic violence to the sprawling suburbs of Riyadh. In a system where the state itself is out of reach, it is roads, cars, and cops that are everyday targets of car riots against infrastructures, commoditization, and trade monopolies. Pedestrian demonstrations may be rare in Riyadh, but for more than three decades, car demonstrations occurred on a daily basis in those very places where financial investments and royal power reshape the cityscape.

    #Riyadh #Arabie_Saoudite #Pascal_Menoret

  • Possible Iranian-Saudi rapprochement to impact region
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/possible-iranian-saudi-rapprochement-impact-region

    Vice President of the European Commission Catherine Margaret Ashton (L) and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Mohammad Zarif attend the so called EU 5+1 Talks with #Iran at the UN headquarters in Vienna, on May 14, 2014. (Photo: AFP-Dieter Nagl) Vice President of the European Commission Catherine Margaret Ashton (L) and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Mohammad Zarif attend the so called EU 5+1 Talks with Iran at the UN headquarters in Vienna, on May 14, 2014. (Photo: AFP-Dieter Nagl)

    Statements by Saudi Foreign Minister #Saud_al-Faisal on Tuesday point to a significant development in the relationship with Iran. Saudi’s so called “hawk” and Iran’s number one enemy in the kingdom is now welcoming a dialogue with the Islamic (...)

    #Mideast_&_North_Africa #Articles #Baghdad #Barack_Obama #Bashar_al-Assad #Catherine_Ashton #Hassan_Rouhani #Homs #Lebanon #Mohammed_Javad_Zarif #Riyadh #Saudi_Arabia #syria #Tehran #US_Congress