Over 1,000 Muslims who visited the apartheid state of Saudi Arabia during the Islamic ‘Haj’ pilgrimage to the origins of the colonial movement perished in the heat. While Muslims die every ‘Haj’, this is a fairly large death toll.

And it’s being blamed on “climate change”.

Climate Change Threat Hangs Over Haj Pilgrimage as Hundreds Perish in Heat – Reuters

Amid scorching heat, 900 people died this week in Saudi Arabia. Climate change has made the Hajj pilgrimage more risky – The Conversation

Climate change hits world’s largest religious gathering as Saudi Arabia temperatures soar – Indian Express

Saudi Arabia is hot in June. That’s on average already the hottest time of the year. When the average high is 111, it’s completely possible for temperatures to occasionally pass 120, as they reportedly did.

And it’s always been hot.

It’s so hot that Islam’s legendary warlord founder Mohammed commented on it. “Whoever bears one hour of Mecca’s heat during daytime, the fire of Hell moves away from him a distance of a hundred year’s march, and Paradise approaches him by a distance of a hundred year’s march.”

That’s a nice way of comparing Mecca to hell.

Joseph Pitts, the first Englishman to visit Mecca after being captured and enslaved by Muslims, described heat so extreme that residents “felt compelled to dart back and forth across the street to escape it.”

Lawrence of Arabia described it as a “very hot town” without “trees or running water.”

Mecca has always been miserably hot in the summer.

What actually killed over 1,000 Muslims? It wasn’t global warming, as usual it was their fellow Muslims.

While registered pilgrims are transported around the shrines in air-conditioned buses and rest in air-conditioned tents, undocumented ones are often exposed to the elements, making them more vulnerable to extreme heat. Some pilgrims this year described watching people faint and passing bodies in the street as temperatures hit 120 degrees or higher.

On Sunday, in an interview on state television, the Saudi health minister, Fahd al-Jalajel, said that 83 percent of the more than 1,300 deaths occurred among pilgrims who had not had official permits.

His sister died midway through the pilgrimage, but when he contacted the tour company, it assured him that she was fine. When the company representative learned that her relatives knew about her death, he turned off his phone, Mr. al-Tawab said.

It’s not the climate, it’s the social climate that allows Muslims to do things like this to each other.