The horrendous treatment of women in this manner is utterly unacceptable and there
is nothing we can do about it, except boycott his businesses in whatever way we can.
Anywhere it can be read without a paywall?
You should be able to see it. You get 4 free articles. I’m sorry I am computer illiterate and don’t know
how to transfer the article here. Can you instruct me?
@skydy - open the article, highlight all the contents, press [CTRL] [C] (this copies what is highlighted). Switch to COTH, start a new post in this thread, press [CTRL][V] (this will paste what you copied). This is assuming you are on a PC.
There is a LOT of text. It would be pages here. How do I highlight the entire thing? I’m sorry,:o I really am quite ignorant about all of the computer functions.
[h=1]A PrA selfie taken by Sheikha Latifa, grinning as she and Tiina Jauhiainen, her friend and capoeira instructor, crossed the border into Oman last March. By Vivian Yee
- Feb. 10, 2019
“There’s no justice here,” she said in a video she secretly recorded last year. “Especially if you’re a female, your life is so disposable.”
So it was with a jolt of astonishment that her friends overseas read a WhatsApp message from her last March announcing that she had left Dubai “for good.”
“Is this real,” one of them, an American sky diver named Chris Colwell, messaged back. “Where are you.”
Her escape — planned over several years with the help of a Finnish capoeira trainer and a self-proclaimed French ex-spy — lasted less than a week.
Within a few days of setting sail on the Indian Ocean in the Frenchman’s yacht, bound for India and then the United States, the sheikha went silent. She has not been seen since, except in a few photos released in December by her family, which says she is safely home after surviving what they said was a kidnapping.
Yet thanks to the video she made before fleeing, her face and voice have made their way around the world, drawing more than two million views on YouTube, spurring avid news coverage and marring Dubai’s image as a world capital of glitz and commerce.
Like the young women who have fled Saudi Arabia’s restrictive regime, Sheikha Latifa has made sure no one can forget how few freedoms are allotted to women in the Middle East’s most conservative societies — or how costly crossing Dubai’s ruler can be.
For all its megamalls, haute cuisine and dizzying skyscrapers, Dubai can flip at speed from international playground to repressive police state. It has drawn headlines in the West for detaining foreigners for holding hands in public and drinking alcohol without a license. Last year, it was widely condemned for holding a British academic, Matthew Hedges, after accusing him of being a British spy. In recent years, the authorities have also intensified a crackdown on internal dissent.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ordinary Emirati citizen or a member of the royal family or an expat from a close ally like the U.K.,” said Hiba Zayadin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “If you’re harming that carefully tailored image,” she added, “you will face the consequences.”
Over the video’s 39 stark minutes, her voice composed and forceful, Sheikha Latifa described in fluent English her life of constricting privilege and stunted hopes. She hoped it would change if she could win political asylum in the United States.
“I don’t know how, how I’ll feel, just waking up in the morning and thinking, I can do whatever I want today,” she said. “That’ll be such a new, different feeling. It’ll be amazing.”
Fearing for her life if she was caught, she said she was recording the video in case she failed.
“They’re not going to take me back alive,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. If I don’t make it out alive, at least there’s this video.”
Sheikha Latifa first faced rigid restrictions after her sister’s failed escape attempt years earlier.
When she was 14, her older sister Shamsa escaped from her family’s security detail on a trip to England. Her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, owns a large estate there and a prominent thoroughbred racing stable, Godolphin.
Hervé Jaubert, right, spoke at a news conference in London after Sheikha Latifa was captured aboard his yacht. He said he was helping her escape. Sheikha Latifa’s father said Mr. Jaubert had kidnapped her.CreditAssociated Press
[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/31/world/00sheika3/merlin_136931847_31df5fb7-3e73-44e3-b334-eac1a6500388-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
Hervé Jaubert, right, spoke at a news conference in London after Sheikha Latifa was captured aboard his yacht. He said he was helping her escape. Sheikha Latifa’s father said Mr. Jaubert had kidnapped her.CreditAssociated Press
News reports at the time said Emirati personnel eventually tracked Shamsa to a street in Cambridge, forcing her into a car. When a Scotland Yard detective began investigating her case as a kidnapping, Dubai authorities refused to let him interview her. The case dead-ended there.
Sheikha Latifa said Shamsa, the only of 30 siblings to whom she was close, had been drugged into docility ever since.
Horrified by Shamsa’s treatment, Sheikha Latifa said she tried to escape across the border to Oman. Retrieved almost immediately, she said she was held in solitary confinement for more than three years.
Emirati family law allows women to be punished for disobeying, and she said she was frequently pulled out of bed to be beaten, deprived of medical care and, until the final few months, even a toothbrush.
Even after she was released at 19, her life was defined by her family’s constraints as much as by its wealth.
She lived in a palace behind high walls, with 40 rooms spread over four wings — one for each female relative who lived there, said Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish woman who had been training Sheikha Latifa in the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira . There were about 100 servants and an athletic compound with its own swimming pool and spa. Wherever the sheikha went, a Filipino maid went too.
But hers was a life of enforced, confined leisure. She could spend her money only on hobbies and sports, including horseback riding and scuba diving, or on treating friends to lunch or manicures. She was not allowed to study medicine as she had wanted, friends said. Nor could she travel, even to the next-door emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of seven city-states making up the United Arab Emirates. She pressed friends to describe every trip for her “like she was traveling with me,” said Stefania Martinengo, her friend and skydiving coach.
She was also barred from visiting any nonpublic places, even friends’ homes. An avid sky diver, she once parachuted secretly into an unapproved part of the city for 20 minutes of kayaking with Mr. Colwell.
When friends rode along in the boxy black Mercedes that often ferried her around, she put on headphones and sat in silence, refusing, in front of the driver, to say a word.
Skydiving was her chief distraction.
Dropping into the sky, “you’re equal to everyone,” Ms. Martinengo said. “You don’t talk, you’re just flying. I think she enjoyed being free in the sky.”
At first glance, she seemed neither fabulously wealthy nor wildly unhappy.
Introducing herself as Latifa, she was often taken for just another local woman. Under the all-covering abaya she wore in public, she usually dressed in T-shirts and athletic pants. She demurred her way out of most photos. She listened rather than talked. She never outright complained about her situation, friends said.
She never spoke about her family. Dubai’s dazzlingly wealthy flaunted their lives on Instagram; she was barely Googleable.
But she fantasized about running her own life. She talked about starting an Emirati skydiving team, hoping her father would let her travel to international competitions. A vegan who had become passionate about wellness and detox, she planned to invest in a yoga-and-juice center in Europe with Ms. Martinengo. Almost no one realized that she had been planning to run for several years.
She first contacted Hervé Jaubert, whose website describes him as a former French intelligence officer and “no ordinary man,” who had once managed to escape Dubai in a small rubber boat by dressing as a woman.
She then enlisted Ms. Jauhiainen. At one point, they trained to dive and swim to Oman via underwater scooter.
Ms. Jauhiainen said Sheikha Latifa wanted to help other women who had been trapped in similar situations, and she wanted to get Shamsa out. If necessary, she thought she could work as a skydiving instructor.
To show that she was safe at home, the government of the United Arab Emirates distributed this picture showing Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, left, with Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, in December.CreditUnited Arab Emirates News Agency
[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/11/world/00sheika1/merlin_148480365_80fd74b3-3563-43af-aa32-0b1e66393481-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
To show that she was safe at home, the government of the United Arab Emirates distributed this picture showing Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, left, with Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, in December.CreditUnited Arab Emirates News Agency
“I’m ready to flip burgers or do anything as long as I have my freedom,” she told Ms. Jauhiainen.
A few days before they left, she sneaked out of a mall to record the video at Ms. Jauhiainen’s apartment.
“I’m feeling positive about the future,” she said. “I’m feeling like it’s the start of an adventure. It’s the start of me claiming my life, my freedom, freedom of choice.”
The morning of the escape, Sheikha Latifa was driven to eat breakfast with Ms. Jauhiainen at a restaurant, as she often did. According to Ms. Jauhiainen, they got into her car and made for Oman, where they rode an inflatable raft, then Jet Skis, out to Mr. Jaubert’s yacht. A selfie they took in the car shows Sheikha Latifa grinning behind mirrored sunglasses, elated.
“We’re like Thelma and Louise,” Ms. Jauhiainen joked, referring to the 1991 American film.
“Don’t say that,” Sheikha Latifa protested. “It has a sad ending!” As they sailed toward India on the evening of March 4, the women were getting ready for bed belowdecks when they heard loud noises. They locked themselves in the bathroom, but it filled with smoke. The only way out was up.
On deck, armed men whom Ms. Jauhiainen identified as Indian and Emirati pushed Mr. Jaubert, Ms. Jauhiainen and the Filipino crewmen to the ground, tying them up and beating them. They told Ms. Jauhiainen to take her last breath. Ms. Jauhiainen saw Sheikha Latifa on the ground, tied up but kicking, screaming that she wanted political asylum in India.
Before long, an Arabic-speaking man boarded. He made it clear, Ms. Jauhiainen said, that he had come to retrieve the sheikha.
“Just shoot me here,” she cried, Ms. Jauhiainen recalled. “Don’t take me back.”
Then she was gone.
Her father, Sheikh Mohammed, did not address her whereabouts until December, when the BBC was about to air a documentary. His office issued a statement saying that she was safe in Dubai, celebrating her 33rd birthday with family “in privacy and peace.” (Ms. Jauhiainen said the sheikha had not chosen to spend her birthday with family in years.)
The statement accused Mr. Jaubert, whom it called a “convicted criminal,” of kidnapping her for a $100 million ransom.
Sheikh Mohammed did not reply to a request for an interview sent to his office. The Emirati embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Things have only gotten stranger since.
On Christmas Eve, Dubai released the first public photos of Sheikha Latifa since her disappearance. They showed her sitting with Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who confirmed that she had met the sheikha at her family’s request. Ms. Robinson said Sheikha Latifa was safe with her family, but said she was receiving psychiatric care, calling her a “troubled young woman” with a “serious medical condition.”
“This is a family matter now,” Ms. Robinson said.
The sheikha’s advocates were taken aback that a respected human rights crusader had seemingly embraced Dubai’s official line. They disputed that she had a psychiatric condition, apart from any she might have developed because of imprisonment or drugging.
“I know 100 percent for sure that she doesn’t need mental care,” Ms. Martinengo said. “Maybe now, after all these treatments, but not before. How can you think that a person who’s been in prison for nine months wouldn’t seem troubled?”
Friends also found Sheikha Latifa’s appearance in the photos — slightly dazed, her eyes missing the camera — concerning.
With negative attention thickening around her, Ms. Robinson issued a statement saying that she had made her assessment “in good faith and to the best of my ability,” adding that the sheikha’s “vulnerability was apparent.”
By mid-January, a lawyer who had been working with activists left the sheikha’s case without explanation. Several friends still in Dubai said they were too frightened to speak, while Mr. Jaubert abruptly stopped responding to requests to be interviewed for this article.
Sheikha Latifa had little doubt about what would happen to her.
“If you are watching this video, it’s not such a good thing,” she said in her video. “Either I’m dead, or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation.”
Well, I tried posting the article, and it says “unapproved”. :sadsmile:
Oh. Perhaps it’s to much text? Thanks for trying. How did you highlight the entire text?
The length might have done it in. As for highlighting the whole, its magic! 
When highlighting past what you can actually see on your browser window, you just move the mouse down while holding the button in and the page keeps scrolling down, and you just keep going until its all highlighted… then you let go of the button on your mouse. And voila, all highlighted!
1 Like
It also shows up on Apple News, if you have that. But you should be able to see a certain number of NYT articles free each month. It will tell you how many you have left, IIRC.
[h=1]A PrA selfie taken by Sheikha Latifa, grinning as she and Tiina Jauhiainen, her friend and capoeira instructor, crossed the border into Oman last March.
By Vivian Yee
- Feb. 10, 2019
- [LIST]
At 32, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum went nowhere without a watchful chauffeur.
“There’s no justice here,” she said in a video she secretly recorded last year. “Especially if you’re a female, your life is so disposable.”
So it was with a jolt of astonishment that her friends overseas read a WhatsApp message from her last March announcing that she had left Dubai “for good.”
“Is this real,” one of them, an American sky diver named Chris Colwell, messaged back. “Where are you.”
“Free,” she responded. “And I’ll come see you soon.” She added a heart.
Her escape — planned over several years with the help of a Finnish capoeira trainer and a self-proclaimed French ex-spy — lasted less than a week.
Within a few days of setting sail on the Indian Ocean in the Frenchman’s yacht, bound for India and then the United States, the sheikha went silent. She has not been seen since, except in a few photos released in December by her family, which says she is safely home after surviving what they said was a kidnapping.
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Yet thanks to the video she made before fleeing, her face and voice have made their way around the world, drawing more than two million views on YouTube, spurring avid news coverage and marring Dubai’s image as a world capital of glitz and commerce.
Like the young women who have fled Saudi Arabia’s restrictive regime, Sheikha Latifa has made sure no one can forget how few freedoms are allotted to women in the Middle East’s most conservative societies — or how costly crossing Dubai’s ruler can be. [h=2]Editors’ Picks[/h] 
[h=3]A New Breed of Hunters Focuses on the Cooking[/h] [IMG2=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“full”,“src”:"https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/03/business/03REILLY-01a/03REILLY-01a-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) [h=3]He Committed Murder. Then He Graduated From an Elite Law School. Would You Hire Him as Your Attorney?[/h] [IMG2=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“full”,“src”:"https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/07/arts/07carpetbagger1/merlin_150272292_e5d1b309-db06-4ccc-b4cf-39817e22ed0b-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) [h=3]The Path to Oscar Victory for Every Best Picture Nominee[/h] CreditCreditVideo by Free Latifa
For all its megamalls, haute cuisine and dizzying skyscrapers, Dubai can flip at speed from international playground to repressive police state. It has drawn headlines in the West for detaining foreigners for holding hands in public and drinking alcohol without a license.
Last year, it was widely condemned for holding a British academic, Matthew Hedges, after accusing him of being a British spy. In recent years, the authorities have also intensified a crackdown on internal dissent.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ordinary Emirati citizen or a member of the royal family or an expat from a close ally like the U.K.,” said Hiba Zayadin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “If you’re harming that carefully tailored image,” she added, “you will face the consequences.”
Over the video’s 39 stark minutes, her voice composed and forceful, Sheikha Latifa described in fluent English her life of constricting privilege and stunted hopes. She hoped it would change if she could win political asylum in the United States.
“I don’t know how, how I’ll feel, just waking up in the morning and thinking, I can do whatever I want today,” she said. “That’ll be such a new, different feeling. It’ll be amazing.”
Fearing for her life if she was caught, she said she was recording the video in case she failed.
“They’re not going to take me back alive,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. If I don’t make it out alive, at least there’s this video.”
Sheikha Latifa first faced rigid restrictions after her sister’s failed escape attempt years earlier. [h=2]Sign up for The Interpreter[/h]
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When she was 14, her older sister Shamsa escaped from her family’s security detail on a trip to England. Her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, owns a large estate there and a prominent thoroughbred racing stable, Godolphin.
Hervé Jaubert, right, spoke at a news conference in London after Sheikha Latifa was captured aboard his yacht. He said he was helping her escape. Sheikha Latifa’s father said Mr. Jaubert had kidnapped her.CreditAssociated Press
[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/31/world/00sheika3/merlin_136931847_31df5fb7-3e73-44e3-b334-eac1a6500388-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
Image[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/31/world/00sheika3/merlin_136931847_31df5fb7-3e73-44e3-b334-eac1a6500388-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)Hervé Jaubert, right, spoke at a news conference in London after Sheikha Latifa was captured aboard his yacht. He said he was helping her escape. Sheikha Latifa’s father said Mr. Jaubert had kidnapped her.CreditAssociated Press
News reports at the time said Emirati personnel eventually tracked Shamsa to a street in Cambridge, forcing her into a car. When a Scotland Yard detective began investigating her case as a kidnapping, Dubai authorities refused to let him interview her. The case dead-ended there.
Sheikha Latifa said Shamsa, the only of 30 siblings to whom she was close, had been drugged into docility ever since.
Horrified by Shamsa’s treatment, Sheikha Latifa said she tried to escape across the border to Oman. Retrieved almost immediately, she said she was held in solitary confinement for more than three years.
Emirati family law allows women to be punished for disobeying, and she said she was frequently pulled out of bed to be beaten, deprived of medical care and, until the final few months, even a toothbrush.
Even after she was released at 19, her life was defined by her family’s constraints as much as by its wealth.
She lived in a palace behind high walls, with 40 rooms spread over four wings — one for each female relative who lived there, said Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish woman who had been training Sheikha Latifa in the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira . There were about 100 servants and an athletic compound with its own swimming pool and spa. Wherever the sheikha went, a Filipino maid went too.
But hers was a life of enforced, confined leisure. She could spend her money only on hobbies and sports, including horseback riding and scuba diving, or on treating friends to lunch or manicures. She was not allowed to study medicine as she had wanted, friends said.
Nor could she travel, even to the next-door emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of seven city-states making up the United Arab Emirates. She pressed friends to describe every trip for her “like she was traveling with me,” said Stefania Martinengo, her friend and skydiving coach.
She was also barred from visiting any nonpublic places, even friends’ homes. An avid sky diver, she once parachuted secretly into an unapproved part of the city for 20 minutes of kayaking with Mr. Colwell.
When friends rode along in the boxy black Mercedes that often ferried her around, she put on headphones and sat in silence, refusing, in front of the driver, to say a word.
Skydiving was her chief distraction.
Dropping into the sky, “you’re equal to everyone,” Ms. Martinengo said. “You don’t talk, you’re just flying. I think she enjoyed being free in the sky.”
At first glance, she seemed neither fabulously wealthy nor wildly unhappy.
Introducing herself as Latifa, she was often taken for just another local woman. Under the all-covering abaya she wore in public, she usually dressed in T-shirts and athletic pants. She demurred her way out of most photos. She listened rather than talked. She never outright complained about her situation, friends said.
She never spoke about her family. Dubai’s dazzlingly wealthy flaunted their lives on Instagram; she was barely Googleable.
But she fantasized about running her own life. She talked about starting an Emirati skydiving team, hoping her father would let her travel to international competitions. A vegan who had become passionate about wellness and detox, she planned to invest in a yoga-and-juice center in Europe with Ms. Martinengo.
Almost no one realized that she had been planning to run for several years.
She first contacted Hervé Jaubert, whose website describes him as a former French intelligence officer and “no ordinary man,” who had once managed to escape Dubai in a small rubber boat by dressing as a woman.
She then enlisted Ms. Jauhiainen. At one point, they trained to dive and swim to Oman via underwater scooter.
Ms. Jauhiainen said Sheikha Latifa wanted to help other women who had been trapped in similar situations, and she wanted to get Shamsa out. If necessary, she thought she could work as a skydiving instructor.
To show that she was safe at home, the government of the United Arab Emirates distributed this picture showing Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, left, with Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, in December.CreditUnited Arab Emirates News Agency
[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/11/world/00sheika1/merlin_148480365_80fd74b3-3563-43af-aa32-0b1e66393481-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
Image[IMG]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/11/world/00sheika1/merlin_148480365_80fd74b3-3563-43af-aa32-0b1e66393481-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)To show that she was safe at home, the government of the United Arab Emirates distributed this picture showing Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, left, with Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, in December.CreditUnited Arab Emirates News Agency
“I’m ready to flip burgers or do anything as long as I have my freedom,” she told Ms. Jauhiainen.
A few days before they left, she sneaked out of a mall to record the video at Ms. Jauhiainen’s apartment.
“I’m feeling positive about the future,” she said. “I’m feeling like it’s the start of an adventure. It’s the start of me claiming my life, my freedom, freedom of choice.”
The morning of the escape, Sheikha Latifa was driven to eat breakfast with Ms. Jauhiainen at a restaurant, as she often did. According to Ms. Jauhiainen, they got into her car and made for Oman, where they rode an inflatable raft, then Jet Skis, out to Mr. Jaubert’s yacht. A selfie they took in the car shows Sheikha Latifa grinning behind mirrored sunglasses, elated.
“We’re like Thelma and Louise,” Ms. Jauhiainen joked, referring to the 1991 American film.
“Don’t say that,” Sheikha Latifa protested. “It has a sad ending!”
As they sailed toward India on the evening of March 4, the women were getting ready for bed belowdecks when they heard loud noises. They locked themselves in the bathroom, but it filled with smoke. The only way out was up.
On deck, armed men whom Ms. Jauhiainen identified as Indian and Emirati pushed Mr. Jaubert, Ms. Jauhiainen and the Filipino crewmen to the ground, tying them up and beating them. They told Ms. Jauhiainen to take her last breath. Ms. Jauhiainen saw Sheikha Latifa on the ground, tied up but kicking, screaming that she wanted political asylum in India.
Before long, an Arabic-speaking man boarded. He made it clear, Ms. Jauhiainen said, that he had come to retrieve the sheikha.
“Just shoot me here,” she cried, Ms. Jauhiainen recalled. “Don’t take me back.”
Then she was gone.
Her father, Sheikh Mohammed, did not address her whereabouts until December, when the BBC was about to air a documentary. His office issued a statement saying that she was safe in Dubai, celebrating her 33rd birthday with family “in privacy and peace.” (Ms. Jauhiainen said the sheikha had not chosen to spend her birthday with family in years.)
The statement accused Mr. Jaubert, whom it called a “convicted criminal,” of kidnapping her for a $100 million ransom.
Sheikh Mohammed did not reply to a request for an interview sent to his office. The Emirati embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Things have only gotten stranger since.
On Christmas Eve, Dubai released the first public photos of Sheikha Latifa since her disappearance. They showed her sitting with Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who confirmed that she had met the sheikha at her family’s request.
Ms. Robinson said Sheikha Latifa was safe with her family, but said she was receiving psychiatric care, calling her a “troubled young woman” with a “serious medical condition.”
“This is a family matter now,” Ms. Robinson said.
The sheikha’s advocates were taken aback that a respected human rights crusader had seemingly embraced Dubai’s official line. They disputed that she had a psychiatric condition, apart from any she might have developed because of imprisonment or drugging.
“I know 100 percent for sure that she doesn’t need mental care,” Ms. Martinengo said. “Maybe now, after all these treatments, but not before. How can you think that a person who’s been in prison for nine months wouldn’t seem troubled?”
Friends also found Sheikha Latifa’s appearance in the photos — slightly dazed, her eyes missing the camera — concerning.
With negative attention thickening around her, Ms. Robinson issued a statement saying that she had made her assessment “in good faith and to the best of my ability,” adding that the sheikha’s “vulnerability was apparent.”
By mid-January, a lawyer who had been working with activists left the sheikha’s case without explanation. Several friends still in Dubai said they were too frightened to speak, while Mr. Jaubert abruptly stopped responding to requests to be interviewed for this article.
Sheikha Latifa had little doubt about what would happen to her.
“If you are watching this video, it’s not such a good thing,” she said in her video. “Either I’m dead, or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation.”
Beyond disturbing, and I had thought the Maktoums were a bit more enlightened. After all, Sheikh Mohammed’s junior wife is none other than Princess Haya of Jordan, and (FEI involvement aside) doesn’t strike me as the subservient type at all. I wonder what she thinks of her husband’s treatment of his daughters? How could an educated, intelligent woman step quietly aside and grant what amounts to tacit approval of her husband torturing and imprisoning his own daughters? My estimation of her has plummeted.
I wonder what would happen if racegoers in the UK, Australia, Japan, and the US (anywhere but in Dubai, really) were to show up en masse at Darley-sponsored races and festivals sporting “Free Latifa!” and “Where is Shamsa?” t-shirts?
On another note, and it’s sad to consider, but I imagine a daughter of the ruler of Dubai would have a difficult time getting another country to grant her political asylum. Unfortunately it’s a diplomatic hot potato, albeit a hypothetical one right now, but I can’t see the US, UK, or Ireland doing the right thing and protecting these women.
1 Like
What ever made you think the Sheikh was “enlightened” and why would you think that princess Haya has had any more say in family matters than any other woman in her situation has done?
It is a human rights issue that has not changed.
Princess Haya did what her husband allowed her to, and no more. Most women are not allowed the privileges that she was by her husband, the law keeps all women subservient.
No woman there has rights. Her husband’s word is law. Princess or not.
2 Likes
He has something like 23 children, and had multiple wives - 6? Yes, the treatment of women and children and poor people is just barbaric.
Yeah, I am gonna say my friend Moustafa, a cab driver who is originally from Libya and has not a drop of royal blood in him, is far more enlightened than the Maktoums. He and his family are naturalized citizens and he owns his cab company, a family affair. Moustafa has always welcomed my questions about his faith and family…
He moved his family to the US 20 years ago because he wanted his children to have better opportunities; he emphasized that it meant much to him that his daughters would be able to pursue higher education and careers in whatever field they wished. I once asked Moustafa if he had arranged marriages for his children. He said no, that it is still done, but that Allah wishes for marriage to be joyous and fulfilling for the woman as well as for the man and he trusts his daughters’ judgment in their choice of spouse.
Moustafa, who never attended college or university and hasn’t had the opportunities afforded to Dubai’s male rulers, is more erudite and has a better understanding of what constitutes basic human rights than Sheikh Mo and his bros.
4 Likes
Video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=rFpM3SW1W3Y
She is not the first female member of her family to “disappear”.
What do y’all not understand about President of the FEI and UAE Equestrian races?
Also - arranged political marriages still take place.
The Royal family of Dubai have been paying lip service to horse sport regulations for many years, in order to raise their profile, whilst engaging in all sorts of covert nefarious behaviour.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/ho…nment-jet.html
They are just as bad as the Saudis.
Thank you Texarkana.
