Left wing big business
The Washington Times reports that Fenton Communications is working for Qatar.
In March, the queen or sheikha of Qatar, Mozah Bint Nasser al Missned, hired a U.S. public relations firm, Fenton Communications. According to the contract filed with the Justice Department, Fenton will support an “international public opinion awareness campaign that advocates for the accountability for those who participated in attacks on schools in Gaza.”
In other words, Fenton is doing Hamas’s dirty work, courtesy of Qatar. What is Fenton? It is a left wing PR firm that represents such creatures as MoveOn (the charmers who accused Gen. Petraeus a traitor). So now lefty causes not only include hating Israel, but currying favor with Qatar, a country whose deep concern for human rights in Gaza is matched by its reputation as a premier center for human trafficking. Up through 2008, the US State Department listed Qatar as tier 3: a hotbed of human trafficking that does nothing about it.
Qatar is a destination for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation. Men and women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, Thailand, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and China voluntarily travel to Qatar as laborers and domestic servants, but some subsequently face conditions of involuntary servitude. These conditions include bonded labor; job switching; withholding of pay; charging workers for benefits for which the employer is responsible; restrictions on freedom of movement, including the confiscation of passports and travel documents and the withholding of exit permits; arbitrary detention; threats of legal action and deportation; false charges; and physical, mental and sexual abuse. Nepali and Indian men are reportedly recruited for work in Qatar as domestic servants, but are then coerced or forced into labor in Saudi Arabia as farm workers. Qatar is also a destination for women from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, India, Africa, and Eastern Europe for prostitution, but it is unknown how many are trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation.
The Government of Qatar does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. Provisions of the Sponsorship Law condone forced labor activities and slave-like conditions. In addition, Qatar failed to enforce criminal laws against traffickers, lacks an effective victim identification mechanism to identify and protect victims, continues to detain and deport the large majority of victims rather than providing them with protection, and sometimes penalized workers who complained about working conditions or non-payment of wages.
In 2009, the State Department, under the human rights hostile Obama mob, upped Qatar to tier 2: still a hotbed of human trafficking, but the government says it will do something about it, although it has not actually done anything. Kind of like Obama’s Nobel.
The Government of Qatar does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. In February 2009, Qatar enacted a new migrant worker sponsorship law that criminalizes some practices commonly used by trafficking offenders, and it announced plans to use that law effectively to prevent human trafficking. Senior members of the Qatari government have indicated their plans to finalize and enact a draft comprehensive law on human trafficking. These measures constitute significant efforts by the Qatari government; because they are steps that the government has indicated it will carry out over the coming year, Qatar is placed on Tier 2 Watch List.
So lefty causes now include MoveOn, Israel hatred, and a major center for human trafficking.