Just a minor oversight.

Via TWS:

The Guardian had a story last week about the soon-to-be completed Abraj Kudai, a new hotel in Mecca which will have 10,000 guest rooms, 70 restaurants, four helipads, and five floors reserved for the sole use of the Saudi royal family.

Totally unmentioned by the Guardian is that you’re not allowed to stay there unless you’re Muslim.

Several years ago a wrote a piece on the steroid-level religious discrimination by which Saudi Arabia declares two entire cities off-limits to non-Muslims:

The Koranic revelations were given to the prophet Muhammed in Mecca, which was then a pagan place. Soon after, he left Mecca and traveled to Medina, where he assembled an army, returning to conquer Mecca in A.D. 630. “The Prophet then ordered, on the basis of what he said was God’s command to him, that the environs around Mecca should only be for Muslims,” explains Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.