Sacrilegious Saudi NEOM experiment

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIbhKDuGTjc

Here's the official website:  https://www.neom.com/

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIU4FvJicr0

PRAECURSATOR
Published on Jul 27, 2019

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Praecursator007
Wall Street Journal:  https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/26/8931389/saudi-arabia-mega-city-neom-plans-futuristic-dystopian-ai-robot-fake-moon
Jinn speaking about NEOM:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgeU5nYrFzo
Backing hymm:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY5fmZX1A1o

NEOM Antichrist, Dajjal, Jinns, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jamal Khashoggi, New Future, Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, Saudi News, Arab News, Klaus Kleinfield, Future King Of The One Eyed Kingdom, Future King of Saudi Arabia, Saudi investments, Saudi deals,

[yankeedoodle]

SCI-FI KINGDOM Inside Saudi Arabia's $500billion futuristic megacity 'Neom' boasting flying taxis, robot maids and fake moon
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4385780/inside-saudi-arabia-megacity-neom-robots/

Neom will be a Jetsons-style ultra-modern metropolis in complete contrast to the other very conservative parts of the desert kingdom.



Backed by Saudi's $500 billion Private Investment Fund, the group which purchased Newcastle United, the plans for Neom are so ambitious that some of the technology doesn't even exist yet.

The city will be located on the border with Jordan and Egypt and will start welcoming residents and businesses by 2025.

It is being "built from scratch", powered by solar and wind and will be 17 times the size of London.

According to Neom's chairman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known by his nickname MBS), the urban area will be "be drone-friendly and a centre for the development of robotics."

Planning documents show the city will have flying taxis - a vehicle depicted in science fiction films such as Blade Runner and Back to the Future II.

The plans say that "driving is just for fun, no longer for transportation."

Saudi wants to attract "the brightest and the best" professionals to the city and create a major commercial hub to rival Dubai in the UAE and Doha in Qatar.

The documents say that robot maids will clean the homes of these highly paid foreign workers meaning they won't have to worry about household chores.

Cloud seeding will also be used to make rain clouds in the incredibly dry country which is the size of Western Europe.

The process involves dumping substances such as dry ice, using planes or drones, into clouds to create rainfall.

Some of the other bizarre proposals for the city include "dinosaur robots" in a Jurassic Park-style attraction and "robot martial arts" where machines will fight each other for entertainment.

The kingdom also wants to create a giant artificial moon which will light up each night and serve as a major landmark.

MBS recently declared that he wanted the sand on the city's proposed Silver Beach to "glow" in the dark.

However, two sources close to the project told the Wall Street Journal that engineers have not figured out a way to do that safely yet.

Saudi announced the construction of Neom at the 2017 Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh.

Speaking at the event, Marc Raibert, the CEO of robotics firm Boston Dynamics, said machines could also be used as "security" in the metropolis.


An artist's impression of Neom - a futuristic city being built in Saudi

He said robots "could perform a variety of functions, covering areas such as security, logistics, home deliveries and even looking after the elderly and infirm."

The ambitious metropolis is being built by thousands of workers who are reportedly being housed in cramped conditions with six sharing a tiny room when sleeping.

Human rights activists have called on western firms to boycott the development because of the kingdom's human rights record, particularly since the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

Khashoggi was killed in the Turkish city's Saudi embassy before his body was chopped up in a crime which was condemned by world leaders.

The development of Neom has also resulted in local tribes being forcibly removed from the area, reports say.

"It's absolutely a disaster and I'm disappointed," said Alya Alhwaiti, a member of the Huwaitat tribe that is being displaced by the project.

Her cousin, Abdulrahim al- Huwaiti, was killed while battling attempts to demolish his home last year. She now lives in the UK and accused western firms that have joined the project of "not caring about human rights".

Saudi has not ruled out allowing alcohol in the city, a senior official said on Wednesday, in what would be a historic change for the deeply conservative Muslim country.

Unlike other Gulf countries where foreign workers have limited legal access to alcohol, a blanket ban remains in the kingdom, which hosts Islam's holiest sites.

Yet Neom is part of Salman's Vision 2030 plan to diversify Saudi's oil-dependent economy.

The city will operate under its own founding law that is still being formulated.

Joseph Bradley, CEO of NEOM's Tech and Digital Holding Company, could not confirm if booze would be allowed under the new law, but said "everyone understands" the need to attract foreign talent and tourists.


The area where Neom is being built is a barren costal area populated by tribes which are being displaced, reports say

Speaking in Riyadh, he said: "What we get asked a lot is this whole notion around is there going to be alcohol, what are you going to do around this?

"To be clear, Neom is meant to be competitive. We want the world's best and brightest to come to Neom."

He added: "Understand that it is our intention to attract the most diverse and most talented workforce and we are doing everything that we can and that we will do to attract that workforce."

The founding law should be approved by the board within one to two years, he said.

"I have not seen the specifics of the law in regards to (alcohol)," Bradley said.

"But I can tell you very, very clearly that everyone understands that we're going to build a founding law that attracts the tourism market, that attracts the tech market, that attracts the manufacturing market."

Among his reforms since becoming Crown Prince in 2017, Prince Mohammed lifted a ban on women driving and curbed the powers of the religious police.

But the reforms have been accompanied by a crackdown on critics of his rule, including female activists.

Legalising alcohol would break a major taboo in a country known for Wahhabism, a rigid form of Islam.

[yankeedoodle]

Saudi Arabia's Neom megacity dreams get wilder, enriching foreign consultants
Overseas employees of Saudi projects paid tax free incomes close to $1m, while local displaced tribespeople receive scant compensation
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-neom-megacity-enrich-foreign-consultants

Saudi Arabia's ambitious, boundary-pushing Neom megacity is making foreign consultants richer to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a new report, while local displaced tribespeople receive scant compensation or languish in jail.

A new report published by Bloomberg on Thursday interviewed 25 current and former employees of Neom and reviewed 2,700 pages of internal documents, revealing the weird and wild futuristic dreams of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - and just how handsomely foreign consultants are paid to help achieve it.

'MBS will pay any money for PR and to clean his reputation. He will do anything to pretend he's turning Saudi Arabia into a civilised country'

- Alya al-Huwaiti, Saudi activist

Neom - the new Saudi megacity touted to be 33 times the size of New York City - will include a 170km straight line city, an eight-sided city that floats on water, and a ski resort with a folded vertical village, among other grandiose and architecturally challenging projects.

According to Bloomberg, Neom's senior foreign consultants are being offered tax free salaries of up to $900,000, for ideas that will most likely never see the light of day.

"If I had to put a bottom line for all the work that I did in this era, it was presentations and PowerPoints that went into the garbage the next week," one former manager said.

"It was the least productive part of my whole life in terms of doing real things and the most productive in terms of the money I got."

Locals displaced and imprisoned
The project is being built in the Tabuk province of northwestern Saudi Arabia, where the Al-Howeitat tribe have lived for centuries, but have since been displaced.

In April 2020, tribal activist Abdul-Rahim al-Howeiti was shot dead shortly after making videos protesting against his eviction to make way for the megacity.

Saudi activist's killing exposes local tensions over Neom construction
Read More »  https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tribal-activist-reportedly-killed-protesting-saudi-neom-megacity-project

"MBS will pay any money for PR and to clean his reputation," Alya al-Huwaiti, a UK-based activist and dissident member of the Al-Howeitat tribe told Middle East Eye, upon reading how much consultants are being paid for projects on her ancestral land.

"He will do anything to pretend he's turning Saudi Arabia into a civilised country. But it's not true, because [a civilised country] wouldn't have all these prisoners, and kill people or force them to be displaced."

The Bloomberg report claims that compensation packages for displaced tribespeople can reach up to 1 million riyals ($266,000) for owners of large properties and 100,000 riyals ($27,00) for those with smaller homes.

Huwaiti rubbishes the figures cited in the report: "This is bullshit, not true at all."     

She is in regular contact with her tribespeople back home, who she says are receiving figures closer to $3,000.

"One hundred and fifty people there have disappeared from the face of the earth. They are in jail," she claims.

"Abdul-Rahim's brother and nine of his cousins, who refused to move, are in prison and have been on hunger strike for one month," adds Huwaiti. "The government didn't let us contact them or reach them. There is a big mystery about their destiny."

Flying elevators and marble beaches
Bloomberg's report sheds new light on how fantastical some of the ideas for the new megacity are.

An internal "style catalogue" for Neom includes "elevators that somehow fly through the sky, an urban spaceport, and buildings shaped like a double helix, a falcon's outstretched wings, and a flower in bloom".

Some of the questionable ideas have since been shelved.

One of them, called "Silver Beach", was a seaside lined with "crushed marble... which would shimmer in the sun like silver".

The plan was ditched in 2019 because, according to former employees, it wasn't imaginative enough for Neom's leadership.

Saudi Arabia's MBS allegedly invokes the pharaohs as his Neom dreams grow wilder
Read More »  https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-mbs-neom-megacity-pyramids-pharaoh

Another plan for a $200bn solar field was also cancelled not long after being announced.

"Neom is a fantasy project. Nothing has happened on the land except a couple of buildings that belong to MBS by himself," Huwaiti tells MEE.

Trojena, the ski resort announced earlier this year, would require "blowing up large portions of the landscape" to build an artificial lake, according to Bloomberg.

Andy Wirth, an American hospitality executive, left the project in 2020 after raising concerns about the environmental and logistical implications.

"We couldn't even estimate the build cost," Wirth said. "We were hanging buildings on the side of cliffs, and we didn't even know the geology."

Fantasy ideas influenced by Hollywood
Former employees said that Neom CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr had a short temper and often issued threats to workers.

He once said he would "pull out a gun and start shooting if he wasn't told who was to blame" for two e-sports companies cancelling a partnership with Neom over human rights concerns, according to two witnesses. Al-Nasr disputed the claims.

Elsewhere, Neom hired consultants and designers who had worked on fantasy and dystopian Hollywood films, including Guardians of the Galaxy, the Dark Knight trilogy, World War Z and I Am Legend.

One high-end tourist destination called the "Gulf of Aqaba" will feature marinas, nightclubs and a destination boarding school, according to internal documents.

Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told designers of the project that he favoured the "cyberpunk" aesthetic - a science fiction subculture in which computer technology is juxtaposed with an oppressive and dystopian society.

An internal document for the Gulf of Aqaba outlined "post-cyberpunk" as one its guiding philosophies, which it described as a futuristic world with slim skyscrapers and sleek flying cars.

It identified the best example of this style as the Marvel movie Black Panther.

[abduLMaria]

So MBS the Moron is going to build a Ski Resort in the middle of the Saudi desert.

Damn, it must be a Wasteland between his ears.  And not just Morally.

The good news - Saudi Arabia will have a Hard Meeting with Reality.

The bad news - they will have to use so much Oil to make their delusion happen, there will be less for everybody else.

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22b4bBlDKSg

Djinns and Glass Palaces: Is New Saudi Desert City Utopia or Horror Story?
https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/djinns-palaces-desert.html

Saudi Arabia's The Line has been lauded as the world's most futuristic city plan, and for good reason. The vertical, walled smart city will run entirely on renewable energy and aims to revolutionise urban planning, putting humans first.

Catering for some nine million residents, the mirrored twin-skyscraper city will stretch over 106 miles across the north-west of the kingdom and will be situated within the prospective NEOM city, part of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's ambitious Vision2030 project. Funded in part by the Public Investment Fund (PFI), the country's sovereign wealth fund, The Line is expected to be completed by 2025.

"At The Line's launch last year, we committed to a civilisational revolution that puts humans first based on a radical change in urban planning," said Bin Salman in July. However, rather than the utopian image being projected and promoted by Riyadh, The Line has been described by critics as dystopian and resembling something out of a sci-fi movie.

Much has already been written about the controversy surrounding the city functioning as a state surveillance hub, especially as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will form the backbone of its infrastructure, replete with "countless sensors, cameras and facial recognition technology".

Yet this cyberpunk megaproject is also potentially unsettling for another interesting, albeit overlooked reason: the occult dimension concerning the Islamic belief in jinns in the ultra-conservative country.

To this day in the holy city of Makkah there exists the Mosque of the Jinn, one of the oldest in the city, where according to narrations, a group of jinns pledged allegiance to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) after hearing him recite from the Qur'an. There is also an area known locally as Wadi Al-Jinn, some 30 kilometres north-west of Madinah, a mysterious valley famed for peculiar occurrences of vehicles apparently moving without the driver behind the wheel, although scientific probes have deduced that the cause of such optical illusions are the high magnetic fields in the area.

Article continues after bonus IC video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYqNOdMe8M8

The belief in the existence of jinns is indisputable for most of the world's estimated 1.8 billion Muslims, including the minority "Qur'anists" who rely solely on the Holy Qur'an as a source of authority in Islam. This is because these created beings are mentioned several times in the Divine scripture.

They are also mentioned in the narrations of the Prophet. Jinns are beings unseen to the human eye made of "smokeless fire" whose world exists in parallel to our own; the name derives from the Arabic root j-n-n denoting that which is hidden or concealed. Like humans, they can be among the believers and non-believers and are capable of performing both good and bad deeds.

Recorded in pre-Islamic literature in the region, jinns have captivated and continue to captivate popular imagination, be it in folklore and cultural "jinn stories" that continue to permeate much of the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia, or even in the west, not only among the Muslim diaspora but also in contemporary arts and literature.

The abode of the jinns is particularly fascinating as they are mostly thought to live in highly remote areas, including the desert. According to Professor Ali A Olomi, a historian and scholar of the Middle East and Islam at Penn State University in Abington, some jinns choose to live among humans while others live in a hidden realm alongside ours.

One legendary jinn is said to have a "massive carnelian and gold palace". We can find similar mention of this in western creative writing, in the Oz books for example, with a recurring character, Jinnicky the Red Jinn, described as living in a "red glass castle". In the relatively more recently published The Golem and the Djinni, one of the protagonists, a jinn, lives in a palace of glass in the Syrian desert.

Olomi has also pointed out that in folklore jinns are also known to be builders, credited with constructing many cities and monuments of the ancient world. This is perhaps influenced by the Qur'anic mention of Prophet Sulaiman (peace be upon him) ordering jinns to build a grand palace with a floor made of glass. In present-day Oman, there even exists a fortress and city named Bahla, believed by locals to have once been a jinn city.

Jinns featuring in Saudi news stories was not uncommon or unheard of prior to June 2017 when Bin Salman became the de-facto ruler and started to implement his reformist and modernising project. Earlier that year, though, Al-Arabiya did a small feature on the village of Laynah in northern Saudi Arabia which is "famous for its miraculous water wells that go back to the reign of Prophet Suleiman. The legend has it that the wells once reached 300 in number, and that they were carved in the solid rocky soil in Laynah by King Suleiman's army of jinns to provide water for the king's army."

However, the hidden beings did make a slight comeback in the news back in 2019 when it was reported that the Saudi authorities had started to promote and develop pre-Islamic sites amid efforts to boost the kingdom's tourism industry. It was all part of the effort to diversify the economy away from oil revenues.

Al-Ula in northern Saudi Arabia is some 300 kilometres from NEOM, with its notable landmark being the rock-hewn tombs of Madain Saleh, which is hoped will attract millions of tourists. The development was met with disapproval from some members of the clerical establishment, who have traditionally discouraged Muslims from visiting such sites as they are deemed to be the ruins of cursed past nations, or haunted by jinns. At the time, Al-Monitor observed that beliefs about jinns being present at desolate archaeological sites are prevalent across the Middle East, but do "not usually take on as sinister a tone as it has in Saudi Arabia."

For the Saudis, Al-Ula and NEOM represent the old and the new; the ancient and the modern: "Both cities are centre pieces of the crown prince's determination to grow and diversify the nation's economy away from reliance on fossil fuels, and living examples of how the great strategic plan is focused not only on building the nation's future, but also on safeguarding its past."

As a fundamental belief, jinn will continue to feature in Saudi society and culture, even if the country is becoming more secular as it undergoes rapid social transformations and modernisation. In the case of The Line, and unlike the Valley of the Jinn, driverless cars will be explained through the existence of AI rather than supernatural occurrences, and the "glass palace" will most likely be constructed by cheap, foreign, underpaid labourers, rather than invisible beings. The project's success is still far from certain, though, and it is already beset with several challenges. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what future narratives may emerge from the envisioned shiny structure in the far northern corner of the Arabian Desert.

[abduLMaria]

Maybe they can hook up with Israeli Adam Neumann, of WeWork.

[yankeedoodle]

50-year in prison for tribesmen who rejected expulsion for MBS' Neom
The sentence comes amid reports that officials shut off water and electricity and used surveillance drones to evict the Howeitat tribe to make way for MBS' $500 million dream city.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/50-year-in-prison-for-tribesmen-who-rejected-expulsion-for-m

Two members of the Howeitat tribe in Saudi Arabia who were forcibly expelled to make room for the $500 billion Neom megacity received harsh jail sentences for the mere reason of demonstrating against the project, according to a UK-based rights organization.

Just for supporting their family's refusal to be forcibly evicted from their houses in the Tabuk area of northwest Saudi Arabia, Abdulilah Al-Howeiti and his relative, Abdullah Dukhail Al-Howeiti, both received a 50-year prison sentence and a 50-year travel ban, according to Alqst.

The Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal's decisions in their cases were just the latest in a slew of lengthy sentences imposed by Saudi courts this summer.

Salma Al-Shehab, a student at Leeds University and mother of two, and Nourah bint Saeed Al-Qahtani, a mother of five, received sentences of 34 and 45 years respectively in response to tweets that were critical of the Saudi government. Alqst reported last week that writer, translator, and computer programmer Osama Khaled received a 32-year sentence for "allegations relating to the right of free speech."

According to unverified reports, a third member of the Howeitat was also sentenced at a Saudi court. "The lengthy prison sentence handed [out] against members of the Howeitat tribe follow a dangerous pattern we are seeing unfold in Saudi Arabia," Ramzi Kaiss, legal and policy officer at MENA Rights Group, told Middle East Eye.

Since US President Joe Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia in July, Kaiss said there had been a "more repressive approach by the Saudi state security and judicial authorities against individuals exercising their right to freedom of speech."

Alqst's head of monitoring and communications, Lina Al-Hathlou, said, "This is becoming a new trend. No one will be saved from this. I think that anyone who gets arrested now will be handed a lengthy sentence."

'They are being watched'
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman originally revealed the plans for Neom in 2017, when he claimed a futuristic city would be constructed on Saudi Arabia's northwest coast.

Little has been built as of yet, but huge sums have been paid to experts, and increasingly bizarre plans have been made public. Nevertheless, the Saudi government has made efforts to rid the province of Tabuk's 170 km of its inhabitants, many of whom are Howeitat.

According to reports, compensation for displaced tribespeople who owned large properties ranged up to 1 million riyals ($266,000) and 100,000 riyals ($27,000) for those who owned smaller dwellings. But according to information previously provided to MEE, relocated Tabuk households are often given payments of roughly $3,000.

Howeitat tribespeople have reported since December that the Saudi authorities' campaign to drive them from their land has escalated. New measures include cutting water and electricity supplies and deploying surveillance drones above residences, MEE has been told.

According to Alya Al-Howeiti, a UK-based activist and a member of the tribe, 150 Howeitat have been jailed for opposing the Neom project, including the recently condemned tribesmen.

Western consultancies condemned
Saudi's new megacity will include a 170km straight line city, an eight-sided city that floats on water, and a ski resort with a folded vertical village, among other grandiose and architecturally challenging projects.

Prior to Abdul Rahim's killing, the tribe and human rights organizations wrote an open letter to three consulting firms urging them to end their work on Neom "unless and until" negative effects on human rights were addressed.

MEE asked the same consultancies - Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and Oliver Wyman - about the continuous allegations of human rights violations facing the Howeitat.

A Boston Consulting Group spokesperson said, "We do not comment about specific clients and projects to protect client confidentiality." The other two companies did not respond.

"These companies should condemn the violations being committed and consider reassessing their involvement in projects that promote wide-scale human rights violations," said Kaiss.

"If violations are not addressed or mitigated, then these companies should responsibly halt their engagement in these projects and with the authorities promoting abuses, instead of causing further harm."

Saudi Arabia's government and Neom also did not respond to requests for comment.

https://twitter.com/MayadeenEnglish/status/1548357702086062080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1548357702086062080%7Ctwgr%5Ec16a7778bfa791c6815362d1790be8f428ba55f3%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.almayadeen.net%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F50-year-in-prison-for-tribesmen-who-rejected-expulsion-for-m

[yankeedoodle]

Surprise!  Surprise!  Apparently, according to this UK Column Report, NEOM is part of the greater Israhell project.  Again, what a surprise!   

At 48:30 here:  https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/uk-column-news-20th-december-2023