5.17.14 LMD Released in the UK, QAL heading to Australia?

Metal Glambert ♂ ‏@metalempress 23m
A night at the deserted, blacklisted Beverly Hills Hotel nyp.st/1lxPk4u via @nypost

Reporter Maureen Callahan went to the Beverly Hills Hotel in the wake of a celebrity-led boycott. What she found there was surprising.


BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — There’s an old saying that The Beverly Hills Hotel is where you go to be seen, and the Hotel Bel-Air — its sister establishment — is where you go to hide out.

For the first time in more than 100 years, that’s no longer true — because there is almost no one to see, or to see you, at The Beverly Hills Hotel.

The hotel pool, once crawling with Hollywood’s elite, is now deserted.

I had my choice of seats in this surprisingly clubby, cozy dining room.

Ten days have passed since Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, Sharon Osbourne, Kim Kardashian and other great geopolitical thinkers engaged in a boycott here. Their stance: The hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, who has just instituted Sharia law in his small Southeast Asian nation; until the sultan sells the hotel, or reverses his recent decision, no one should book a room or a banquet hall or a power lunch.
“We’re just making people aware,” Leno told CNN. “It’s not a political issue. This is not something that’s debatable.”

Actually, it is.

Read more:  nypost.com/2014/05/17/a-night-at-the-deserted-blacklisted-beverly-hills-hotel/

Not so simple, is it.

Sent from my HTC One using proboards

No it sure isn't.  A lot of people's lives are effected.

Wanted to write this all day long, but only getting to my computer now. Somehow my earlier post got totally muddled up, an older version printed and the newer one was gone. I noticed, but could not fix it anymore.

So, here I go again, because it just needs to be said:

Sharia law impacts women first, lgbt second and many others third.

It plays out differently in different countries, because local customs, different versions of Islamic religious beliefs and politically different forms of radicalism create a unique cocktail of legal problems in each case. Brunei is presently on the forefront of the discussion, because the existing laws have been radicalized and penalties made harsher under the new laws in ways otherwise only found in Africa and Arabic world. In Asia, Brunei is a first, but neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia are not far off and are also heavily Islamic, so there is reason to fear that this could spread. 

The lgbt community is targeted along with the female population. Separating these causes and/or seeing them as separate is not helping either side. It is a violation of human rights as defined by the United Nations, in either case.

We should work together. Presently, this is not happening, for various, but ultimately harmful reasons.
A petition should focus on all that find their human rights violated under the new law, not only on lgbt. Ignoring in this case, the rest of the straight population who is just as much imprisoned or harmed or killed, is foolish. I just today had an article open on my computer that did the opposite. It complained about this  petition, that is sponsored and supported by the gay community in Hollywood, which is neglecting the fate of females, so it initially caught my eyes. Then, I had to read to my dismay, that this article then tried to downplay or deny the fate of the gay community in a senseless attempt to somehow bring more attention to the female situation.

At both sides, I want to yell: Our problems are tied at the hip, they are not separate, let's go at this together, but neither side wants to listen, unfortunately. I am unhappy, that this petition does not center around the UN human rights declaration as the guard rail for discussion of right of all humans. This is not just a lgbt issue.

I do believe that the limited support for this petition is tied to these overall flaws, not to the fact that there would not be more support for gays, if the requests were set up right.


ETA: This article gives a high level overview, and give or take a few sentences that I could have done without, is trying to be informative on a basic level. It shows really well how intertwined things are with the specific local situation in Brunei.

www.dw.de/sharia-in-brunei-the-sultans-new-laws/a-17627008