Friday, September 30, 2011
Daniel Lewin (Levin) - An Israeli Hero Of Flight 11 on Sept 11, 2001
Excerpt from "Year to the Twin Towers Disaster" Yediot Ahronot, Seven Days Magazine Section 6 September 2002. Translation by IMRA:"Danny Lewin was the first victim of the biggest attack in history that morning, in which almost 3,000 people died. An internal memorandum of the Federal Aviation Administration sets that in the course of a struggle that took place between Lewin, a graduate of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal , and the four hijackers who were assaulting that cockpit, Lewin was murdered by Satam Al Suqami, a 25 year old Saudi.
Some time after the attack the Lewin family in Jerusalem received a telephone call from the FBI offices in New York. On the line was the agent responsible for the investigation of the attack on Flight 11. He told Peggy and Charles Lewin that there is a high degree of certainty that their son Danny tried to prevent the hijacking. The FBI relied, among other things, on the testimony of the stewardess Amy Sweeney.
Sweeney called Michael Woodward, the flight services supervisor in Boston, from the rear of the plane: "a hijacker slit the throat of a passenger in business class and the passenger appears to me to be dead." To this day the American investigators are not convinced that Danny Lewin was murdered on the spot. An additional stewardess, Betty Ong, who succeeded in calling from a telephone by one of the passenger seats, said that the passenger who was attacked from business class seat 10B was seriously wounded.
The Lewin family, Danny' parents and brothers, have no doubt that Danny battled the hijackers. And it is for them a tremendous consolation. "I wasn't surprised to hear from the FBI that Danny fought. I was sure that this is what he would do," Yonatan, his younger brother, said. "Danny didn't sit quietly. From what we heard from the Americans, the hijackers attacked one of the stewardesses and Danny rose to protect her and prevent them from entering the cockpit. It is a consolation to us that Danny fought. We see it as an act of heroism that a person sacrifices his life in order to save others. An act of heroism that everyone should do at such an instance and particularly suitable for Danny."
That battle in the business section ended quickly. Lewin was overcome and bled to death on the floor. Two additional flight attendants were knifed and the captain was murdered. The hijackers were already inside the cockpit. They announced to the passengers to remain quiet in their seats.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Negotiating for What?
Peace talks can achieve nothing at this time, so why not consider other options?
by Moshe Dann
Insisting that the Palestinian Authority engage in negotiations rather than appeal to the United Nations for recognition is based on the belief that an agreement that will end the conflict is possible. However, both sides know that Israel cannot offer anything that will satisfy Palestinian demands and that the Palestinians refuse to agree to minimal Israeli requests.
Why then pretend they will? If the emperor has no clothes, why call for a fashion designer?
The idea that creating a second Arab Palestinian state will solve the problem not only defies reality, it prevents other options and undermines Israel's legitimate claims.
Why not consider other options? Because anything less than a Palestinian state and full sovereignty negates the Arab resistance movement that has sought Israel's destruction for the last 63 years.
Variations of a "two-state solution" – "land for peace,” which produced the Oslo Accords and fueled Palestinian demands for statehood - assumed the conflict was over territory ("the occupation"), not Israel's existence. And both Israeli and Arab negotiators at the time were careful to avoid core issues, which would have blocked an agreement and since then have remained to haunt and destroy.
After Israel broke the terrorist infrastructure, allowing modest cooperation, despite ongoing terrorism - and with Arafat no longer around - there seemed to be hope. But Hamas’ rise, a massive campaign of de-legitimization financed by Arabs and many European countries, a hostile US Administration, and spreading unrest throughout the Arab world have radically shifted the balance against Israel. Nothing can be taken for granted any more - even solemn peace treaties and international agreements.
The lid is off and the pot is boiling over.
The belief that Palestinian Arabs deserve a state is a powerful idea; if so, why not give it to them? And if negotiations will not lead to that state, why engage in them? For Israel, the illusion of negotiations buys time in the hope for recognition and acceptance; for the Arabs, negotiations only postpone their goal – Palestinian statehood and Israel’s elimination.
Alternative to 2-state plan
The problem is what constitutes that state; what are its permanent borders, can it be stable and will it end claims against Israel and end the conflict? Arab leaders have refused to commit to any answers - leaving the problems open, and the possibility of future violence a clear and present danger.
The only way Israel can rescue itself from this self-defeating position and avoid another policy failure is by offering an alternative to the "two-state" plan for another Palestinian state. This assumes that Israel must act in its self interest, independent of what Palestinian Arabs do, or don't do. It removes decision-making from the prison of false promises and addictive hopes to doing what is necessary to ensure Jewish survival.
Policy makers need to confront what is, not what they would like. That means understanding what Arab and Palestinian leaders really want, and how they try to get it.
For Arabs, it is about recognition and legitimacy for Hamas as a negotiating partner; it is about "the Nakba" of 1948 – the establishment of Israel and "the occupations" of 1949, and 1967. It is about core issues: "the Palestinian Right of Return," "al Quds" (Jerusalem), and complete Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – for starters.
Since the Oslo Accords, Israeli diplomats, led by Shimon Peres, made a Palestinian state the cornerstone of Israeli policy. That has been a proven mistake. It led directly to the Palestinian bid for international recognition. Instead of reducing Palestinian Arab demands, it inflated them. Instead of moving towards accommodation, it led to conflict. Rather than promote reality, it encouraged the fantasy of Israel's demise.
As visions of a new Middle East sink into quicksand swamps of revolutions and counter revolutions throughout the Arab world, those concerned about Israel's survival must focus not only on the dangers of a Palestinian state, but Israel's needs.
Israeli policy can remain committed to peace without another Palestinian state. This requires a paradigm shift, a bold and imaginative new direction based on Jewish and Israeli – not Palestinian - sovereignty. This policy entails refuting charges of "illegal occupation," "illegitimate settlements," racism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. These accusations cannot be avoided by shifting attention to Israeli achievements in technology and science.
Shifting the focus from external form – statehood and symbols – to internal substance – values, purpose and transparency - moves the question to fundamentals: Will a Palestinian state be a force for stability and safety, or a combustible mixture primed to explode?
Advocates for another Palestinian state need to explain why those who are concerned about Israel's survival and regional peace need not be worried. Only then can negotiations become a play instead of a ploy.
The author is a PhD historian, writer and journalist living in Israel
Ynet News
by Moshe Dann
Insisting that the Palestinian Authority engage in negotiations rather than appeal to the United Nations for recognition is based on the belief that an agreement that will end the conflict is possible. However, both sides know that Israel cannot offer anything that will satisfy Palestinian demands and that the Palestinians refuse to agree to minimal Israeli requests.
Why then pretend they will? If the emperor has no clothes, why call for a fashion designer?
The idea that creating a second Arab Palestinian state will solve the problem not only defies reality, it prevents other options and undermines Israel's legitimate claims.
Why not consider other options? Because anything less than a Palestinian state and full sovereignty negates the Arab resistance movement that has sought Israel's destruction for the last 63 years.
Variations of a "two-state solution" – "land for peace,” which produced the Oslo Accords and fueled Palestinian demands for statehood - assumed the conflict was over territory ("the occupation"), not Israel's existence. And both Israeli and Arab negotiators at the time were careful to avoid core issues, which would have blocked an agreement and since then have remained to haunt and destroy.
After Israel broke the terrorist infrastructure, allowing modest cooperation, despite ongoing terrorism - and with Arafat no longer around - there seemed to be hope. But Hamas’ rise, a massive campaign of de-legitimization financed by Arabs and many European countries, a hostile US Administration, and spreading unrest throughout the Arab world have radically shifted the balance against Israel. Nothing can be taken for granted any more - even solemn peace treaties and international agreements.
The lid is off and the pot is boiling over.
The belief that Palestinian Arabs deserve a state is a powerful idea; if so, why not give it to them? And if negotiations will not lead to that state, why engage in them? For Israel, the illusion of negotiations buys time in the hope for recognition and acceptance; for the Arabs, negotiations only postpone their goal – Palestinian statehood and Israel’s elimination.
Alternative to 2-state plan
The problem is what constitutes that state; what are its permanent borders, can it be stable and will it end claims against Israel and end the conflict? Arab leaders have refused to commit to any answers - leaving the problems open, and the possibility of future violence a clear and present danger.
The only way Israel can rescue itself from this self-defeating position and avoid another policy failure is by offering an alternative to the "two-state" plan for another Palestinian state. This assumes that Israel must act in its self interest, independent of what Palestinian Arabs do, or don't do. It removes decision-making from the prison of false promises and addictive hopes to doing what is necessary to ensure Jewish survival.
Policy makers need to confront what is, not what they would like. That means understanding what Arab and Palestinian leaders really want, and how they try to get it.
For Arabs, it is about recognition and legitimacy for Hamas as a negotiating partner; it is about "the Nakba" of 1948 – the establishment of Israel and "the occupations" of 1949, and 1967. It is about core issues: "the Palestinian Right of Return," "al Quds" (Jerusalem), and complete Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – for starters.
Since the Oslo Accords, Israeli diplomats, led by Shimon Peres, made a Palestinian state the cornerstone of Israeli policy. That has been a proven mistake. It led directly to the Palestinian bid for international recognition. Instead of reducing Palestinian Arab demands, it inflated them. Instead of moving towards accommodation, it led to conflict. Rather than promote reality, it encouraged the fantasy of Israel's demise.
As visions of a new Middle East sink into quicksand swamps of revolutions and counter revolutions throughout the Arab world, those concerned about Israel's survival must focus not only on the dangers of a Palestinian state, but Israel's needs.
Israeli policy can remain committed to peace without another Palestinian state. This requires a paradigm shift, a bold and imaginative new direction based on Jewish and Israeli – not Palestinian - sovereignty. This policy entails refuting charges of "illegal occupation," "illegitimate settlements," racism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. These accusations cannot be avoided by shifting attention to Israeli achievements in technology and science.
Shifting the focus from external form – statehood and symbols – to internal substance – values, purpose and transparency - moves the question to fundamentals: Will a Palestinian state be a force for stability and safety, or a combustible mixture primed to explode?
Advocates for another Palestinian state need to explain why those who are concerned about Israel's survival and regional peace need not be worried. Only then can negotiations become a play instead of a ploy.
The author is a PhD historian, writer and journalist living in Israel
Ynet News
Yes, Muslims Kill Muslims
By Daniyal Noorani
How often is it that after a terrorist attack in Pakistan, you hear the following statement on TV or from people around you? Aik Musalman Musalman ko nahi maar sakta (A Muslim won’t kill another Muslim). Every time I hear this statement or a similar one, I want to bang my head against a wall. While having a conversation with my driver, regarding the Eid bombings of a Shia mosque in Quetta he said, “The Taliban couldn’t be responsible for the attack, since a Muslim would never attack people in a mosque.” Even after thousands of people have been killed in suicide bombings by religious extremists, a large number of Pakistanis still have misplaced sympathies for extremists or fail to hold them accountable. This mindset needs to be challenged and the myth that “Muslims don’t kill other Muslims” needs to be debunked once and for all. Otherwise, if this attitude of denying the problem and deflecting the blame on RAW, CIA, BLA, Mossad, etc continues, there is no plausible way that an effective counter extremist movement can be conceived in Pakistan.
It is a sad fact, but Muslims have been killing Muslims from the early days of Islam. Out of the first four caliphs, three had Muslims involved in their murder, two of them were killed in a mosque and one was murdered while offering his prayers. The first Islamic Civil War, also called the first Fitna, started in 656, just 14 years after the Prophet Mohammad’s (pbuh) death and lasted for 5 years. A number of battles were fought during this period, in which scores of Muslims were killed by other Muslims. Unfortunately, there is precedent for Muslims killing Muslim in Islamic history.
If one wants to ignore history and just look at the present, there are still numerous examples of Muslims killing other Muslims in Pakistan. Recently, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for an attack in Quetta that killed at least 26 people and injured over 60 in two suicide attacks, targeting the residence of the deputy chief of the paramilitary force. If one goes a little further in the past (like a month), the TTP claimed responsibility for a devastating suicide attack on a mosque in Khyber Agency that killed over 50 people. Most recently, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has reached a new low by attacking a school bus, which killed four children. This attack was considered to be revenge against the residents of Kala Khel for forming a lashkar against the TTP. The large number of occurrences of such events makes it difficult to deny that ‘Muslims’ are carrying them out.
A recent report in the Christian Science Monitor highlighted how the sacrifice of 3,000 plus security personnel killed in operations against al Qaeda and Taliban militants since 9/11 went unrecognised because of fear of antagonising the religious right by the army. The people who they fear antagonising are likely the same people who defend and sympathise with the extremists. The fact that the army does not highlight its sacrifices against the extremists must not only be demoralising for the troops, but showcases how Pakistan has ceded the public space to extremists. Politicians, generals, philanthropists, businessmen, every Pakistani needs to unite and raise his/her voice against extremists and their heinous actions. There should be no room to sympathise or empathise with groups who have no regard for innocent life.
After this article, I am sure people will call me naive for believing the media and falling victim to the various spy agency’s trap, but it is time to call a spade a spade. It cannot be denied that Muslims are killing innocent civilians in the name of Islam and maligning the religion. Pakistanis must unabashedly and equivocally condemn the killing of innocents by anyone, particularly those brazenly claiming responsibility for it. No longer can Pakistan afford to have a deflecting attitude with respect to militancy and a unified voice must be raised against it. No longer should the Kalma be used as proof of innocence.
Tribune.Com
How often is it that after a terrorist attack in Pakistan, you hear the following statement on TV or from people around you? Aik Musalman Musalman ko nahi maar sakta (A Muslim won’t kill another Muslim). Every time I hear this statement or a similar one, I want to bang my head against a wall. While having a conversation with my driver, regarding the Eid bombings of a Shia mosque in Quetta he said, “The Taliban couldn’t be responsible for the attack, since a Muslim would never attack people in a mosque.” Even after thousands of people have been killed in suicide bombings by religious extremists, a large number of Pakistanis still have misplaced sympathies for extremists or fail to hold them accountable. This mindset needs to be challenged and the myth that “Muslims don’t kill other Muslims” needs to be debunked once and for all. Otherwise, if this attitude of denying the problem and deflecting the blame on RAW, CIA, BLA, Mossad, etc continues, there is no plausible way that an effective counter extremist movement can be conceived in Pakistan.
It is a sad fact, but Muslims have been killing Muslims from the early days of Islam. Out of the first four caliphs, three had Muslims involved in their murder, two of them were killed in a mosque and one was murdered while offering his prayers. The first Islamic Civil War, also called the first Fitna, started in 656, just 14 years after the Prophet Mohammad’s (pbuh) death and lasted for 5 years. A number of battles were fought during this period, in which scores of Muslims were killed by other Muslims. Unfortunately, there is precedent for Muslims killing Muslim in Islamic history.
If one wants to ignore history and just look at the present, there are still numerous examples of Muslims killing other Muslims in Pakistan. Recently, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for an attack in Quetta that killed at least 26 people and injured over 60 in two suicide attacks, targeting the residence of the deputy chief of the paramilitary force. If one goes a little further in the past (like a month), the TTP claimed responsibility for a devastating suicide attack on a mosque in Khyber Agency that killed over 50 people. Most recently, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has reached a new low by attacking a school bus, which killed four children. This attack was considered to be revenge against the residents of Kala Khel for forming a lashkar against the TTP. The large number of occurrences of such events makes it difficult to deny that ‘Muslims’ are carrying them out.
A recent report in the Christian Science Monitor highlighted how the sacrifice of 3,000 plus security personnel killed in operations against al Qaeda and Taliban militants since 9/11 went unrecognised because of fear of antagonising the religious right by the army. The people who they fear antagonising are likely the same people who defend and sympathise with the extremists. The fact that the army does not highlight its sacrifices against the extremists must not only be demoralising for the troops, but showcases how Pakistan has ceded the public space to extremists. Politicians, generals, philanthropists, businessmen, every Pakistani needs to unite and raise his/her voice against extremists and their heinous actions. There should be no room to sympathise or empathise with groups who have no regard for innocent life.
After this article, I am sure people will call me naive for believing the media and falling victim to the various spy agency’s trap, but it is time to call a spade a spade. It cannot be denied that Muslims are killing innocent civilians in the name of Islam and maligning the religion. Pakistanis must unabashedly and equivocally condemn the killing of innocents by anyone, particularly those brazenly claiming responsibility for it. No longer can Pakistan afford to have a deflecting attitude with respect to militancy and a unified voice must be raised against it. No longer should the Kalma be used as proof of innocence.
Tribune.Com
The Victim’s View of Islam
by Bill Warner
Recently the McCormick Foundation financed a seminar about the print media reporting about Islam. The seminar was held under the auspices of the journalism school at MTSU, a state university in Murfreesboro, TN. It is part of the Establishment program of constructing the fine details of Establishment Islam.
The lectures and workshops were lead by Muslims and supporters/apologists/defenders of Islam. The apologists and Muslims contend that the only other view of Islam is that of contemptible bigots, who are driven by the usual demons of hate and prejudice. So all the “good” people, the Muslims and their defenders, gave lectures on the beautiful truth of Islam and how to deal with the “bad” people who oppose Islam. The “good” people have the view that there is there the truth of Islam and the rest of the world is morally corrupt.
This division of the world into good and evil has its benefits, but it is too broad a brush in this case. There is another view of Islam besides the “good” Muslims and their apologists. To see this, go back 1400 years to Medina. In Mecca Mohammed had “proven” his divine status by claiming to be in the same lineage of prophets such as Moses and Noah. There were no Jews in Mecca and the story played well enough. Mecca was the home of “Islam, the religion of peace”.
However, in Medina the town was half Jewish, consisting of three tribes. The Jews of Medina told Mohammed that he was not a prophet and this shattered his foundation as a prophet. Mohammed’s attitude about Jews went from being a spiritual brother to that of an archenemy.
Two years later the last of the Jewish children were kidnapped and adopted as Muslims, the Jewish women were sold into slavery and 800 Jewish males were beheaded. Medina was Judenrein, cleansed of Jews.
What are we to make of this well-documented event and the fact that it is only one of over 70 events of assassination, executions, raids, tortures, enslavements, battles and brutalization of the Kafir (non-Muslim) Arabs around Mohammed? All of this is recorded in the Sira (Mohammed’s biography).
The Muslim’s point-of-view is about this vast suffering is that it was a triumph for Islam, a victory and cause for celebration.
The apologist’s point-of-view of this violence is: that was then, this is now. Christians have done worse. Let’s not be judgmental.
Then there is the third view, that of the Kafir victims of Islam. Mohammed led a nine-year rage of jihad against them. There were pagan Kafirs, Jewish Kafirs and Christian Kafirs, but they were all Kafirs who were annihilated. The cause of all of this suffering was an intellectual idea—Mohammed is the prophet of Allah and every person must declare this “truth” or be subjected to violence. The Kafirs were the victims of Islam, then and now.
The story of the jihad against the Kafirs is told in the Sira and the Hadith (the Traditions of Mohammed). No one was allowed the luxury of avoiding Islam. If you were in the neighborhood of Mohammed, then you had to be for him or suffer violence. After Mohammed had conquered all of Arabia, he died while in the next phase of jihad, the conquest of the Christians to the north of Arabia.
This brutal story is told with great vehemence and force. Mohammed and Allah rejoice at the suffering of the Kafirs. And who cares? The apologist agrees that the violent triumph of Islam over all neighbors was a wonderful success for humanity. The Kafirs are human garbage to be put into the disposal of jihad. Who cares about dead Kafirs? Who cares about the annihilation of native cultures?
Why is it that the history of the Native Americans, Blacks and other minorities can be told, but not the Kafirs? Why can those victims have a place in history, but the suffering to the Kafirs is denied? Why do they have no history? Why can’t the victims of jihad and their history be given a valid seat in the marketplace of ideas?
This denial of the suffering of Kafirs can be seen in how our history books are written. The rise of Islam is glorious, but the suffering of the Christians in Turkey, North Africa, the Middle East, the suffering of the Hindus in Pakistan, the suffering of the Buddhists in Afghanistan are all denied. The victims do not exist in our history. If you die at the hands of Islam, you are invisible to history.
Notice that those who have no compassion for the Kafirs in the story of Mohammed’s martial triumph of Islam don’t care about Islam’s victims today. Islam and its apologists don’t give a damn about the suffering today of Christians in Africa, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, the Sudan and on and on. Jewish apologists for Islam do not see the 1400 year old annihilation of the Jews in Arabia being connected to the jihad to annihilate Israel today.
There is another thing about the apologists for Islam. They never refer to Islam’s doctrines of jihad, ethical dualism, subjugation of women and the rest of the Sharia. Instead, they constantly refer to the opinions of Muslim “experts”. But, those who support the victims of Islam talk about the foundational experts--Allah and Mohammed. Once you know Allah (the Koran) and Mohammed (the Sira and the Hadith) you do not need opinions of experts. Why? If the expert agrees with Allah and Mohammed, the expert is right, but redundant. If the expert disagrees with Allah and Mohammed, then the expert is wrong. So who needs the experts’ opinions if you know the facts of Allah and Mohammed?
Why is it when the foundations and the journalism schools meet to talk about how to report about Islam, the victims of Islam have no voice? Why is justice served by denying the deaths of 270 million Kafirs in the Tears of Jihad? Why is it that those who recognize the suffering of the victims of Islam today and 1400 years ago are called bigots and contemptible? Why is it that those who asks for the victims’ story be told along side of the apologists and Muslims are said to be Islamophobic and Muslim-bashers? Why is it that those who know the doctrine of Allah and Mohammed are told they are ignorant and despicable?
There are three views of Islam. The victims’ view is as valid as the oppressor’s view or the apologist’s view. The truth of victims of Islam’s suffering must be told and heard. It is too bad that the foundations do not have the will to finance the complete truth about Islam, instead of the soothing lies told by the Muslim “experts” and their sycophant apologists.
Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study of Political Islamhttp://www.politicalislam.com/blog/the-victims-view-of-islam/
copyright (c) CBSX, LLC, politicalislam.com
Recently the McCormick Foundation financed a seminar about the print media reporting about Islam. The seminar was held under the auspices of the journalism school at MTSU, a state university in Murfreesboro, TN. It is part of the Establishment program of constructing the fine details of Establishment Islam.
The lectures and workshops were lead by Muslims and supporters/apologists/defenders of Islam. The apologists and Muslims contend that the only other view of Islam is that of contemptible bigots, who are driven by the usual demons of hate and prejudice. So all the “good” people, the Muslims and their defenders, gave lectures on the beautiful truth of Islam and how to deal with the “bad” people who oppose Islam. The “good” people have the view that there is there the truth of Islam and the rest of the world is morally corrupt.
This division of the world into good and evil has its benefits, but it is too broad a brush in this case. There is another view of Islam besides the “good” Muslims and their apologists. To see this, go back 1400 years to Medina. In Mecca Mohammed had “proven” his divine status by claiming to be in the same lineage of prophets such as Moses and Noah. There were no Jews in Mecca and the story played well enough. Mecca was the home of “Islam, the religion of peace”.
However, in Medina the town was half Jewish, consisting of three tribes. The Jews of Medina told Mohammed that he was not a prophet and this shattered his foundation as a prophet. Mohammed’s attitude about Jews went from being a spiritual brother to that of an archenemy.
Two years later the last of the Jewish children were kidnapped and adopted as Muslims, the Jewish women were sold into slavery and 800 Jewish males were beheaded. Medina was Judenrein, cleansed of Jews.
What are we to make of this well-documented event and the fact that it is only one of over 70 events of assassination, executions, raids, tortures, enslavements, battles and brutalization of the Kafir (non-Muslim) Arabs around Mohammed? All of this is recorded in the Sira (Mohammed’s biography).
The Muslim’s point-of-view is about this vast suffering is that it was a triumph for Islam, a victory and cause for celebration.
The apologist’s point-of-view of this violence is: that was then, this is now. Christians have done worse. Let’s not be judgmental.
Then there is the third view, that of the Kafir victims of Islam. Mohammed led a nine-year rage of jihad against them. There were pagan Kafirs, Jewish Kafirs and Christian Kafirs, but they were all Kafirs who were annihilated. The cause of all of this suffering was an intellectual idea—Mohammed is the prophet of Allah and every person must declare this “truth” or be subjected to violence. The Kafirs were the victims of Islam, then and now.
The story of the jihad against the Kafirs is told in the Sira and the Hadith (the Traditions of Mohammed). No one was allowed the luxury of avoiding Islam. If you were in the neighborhood of Mohammed, then you had to be for him or suffer violence. After Mohammed had conquered all of Arabia, he died while in the next phase of jihad, the conquest of the Christians to the north of Arabia.
This brutal story is told with great vehemence and force. Mohammed and Allah rejoice at the suffering of the Kafirs. And who cares? The apologist agrees that the violent triumph of Islam over all neighbors was a wonderful success for humanity. The Kafirs are human garbage to be put into the disposal of jihad. Who cares about dead Kafirs? Who cares about the annihilation of native cultures?
Why is it that the history of the Native Americans, Blacks and other minorities can be told, but not the Kafirs? Why can those victims have a place in history, but the suffering to the Kafirs is denied? Why do they have no history? Why can’t the victims of jihad and their history be given a valid seat in the marketplace of ideas?
This denial of the suffering of Kafirs can be seen in how our history books are written. The rise of Islam is glorious, but the suffering of the Christians in Turkey, North Africa, the Middle East, the suffering of the Hindus in Pakistan, the suffering of the Buddhists in Afghanistan are all denied. The victims do not exist in our history. If you die at the hands of Islam, you are invisible to history.
Notice that those who have no compassion for the Kafirs in the story of Mohammed’s martial triumph of Islam don’t care about Islam’s victims today. Islam and its apologists don’t give a damn about the suffering today of Christians in Africa, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, the Sudan and on and on. Jewish apologists for Islam do not see the 1400 year old annihilation of the Jews in Arabia being connected to the jihad to annihilate Israel today.
There is another thing about the apologists for Islam. They never refer to Islam’s doctrines of jihad, ethical dualism, subjugation of women and the rest of the Sharia. Instead, they constantly refer to the opinions of Muslim “experts”. But, those who support the victims of Islam talk about the foundational experts--Allah and Mohammed. Once you know Allah (the Koran) and Mohammed (the Sira and the Hadith) you do not need opinions of experts. Why? If the expert agrees with Allah and Mohammed, the expert is right, but redundant. If the expert disagrees with Allah and Mohammed, then the expert is wrong. So who needs the experts’ opinions if you know the facts of Allah and Mohammed?
Why is it when the foundations and the journalism schools meet to talk about how to report about Islam, the victims of Islam have no voice? Why is justice served by denying the deaths of 270 million Kafirs in the Tears of Jihad? Why is it that those who recognize the suffering of the victims of Islam today and 1400 years ago are called bigots and contemptible? Why is it that those who asks for the victims’ story be told along side of the apologists and Muslims are said to be Islamophobic and Muslim-bashers? Why is it that those who know the doctrine of Allah and Mohammed are told they are ignorant and despicable?
There are three views of Islam. The victims’ view is as valid as the oppressor’s view or the apologist’s view. The truth of victims of Islam’s suffering must be told and heard. It is too bad that the foundations do not have the will to finance the complete truth about Islam, instead of the soothing lies told by the Muslim “experts” and their sycophant apologists.
Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study of Political Islamhttp://www.politicalislam.com/blog/the-victims-view-of-islam/
copyright (c) CBSX, LLC, politicalislam.com
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Palestinian Wonderland
Palestinian statehood bid based on irrational worldview, flawed interpretation of history.
by Asaf Romirowsky
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found are a great way to understand the Palestinian narrative. Specifically, Carroll uses time and space as the plot device while drawing on chess imagery, mirror themes, opposites and time running backwards. As such, it provides the perfect “logic” to the irrational Palestinian worldview and interpretation of history as they attempt to achieve statehood through unilateral declaration of independence at the United Nations this month.
This is the same historical read that has convinced Palestinians that it is Israel and the West that created the Arab-Palestinian refugees, rather their own Arab leaders who did indeed put them in this state intentionally. Today, the perfidy of Palestinian society lies in its division, dysfunctionality, and complete denial of the reality it lives in.
The historical truth is that the notion of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state existing alongside Israel has never been part of the Palestinian worldview. The Palestinians have also always rejected the notion of a single bi-national state.
Palestinian society has never seen Jewish sovereignty or Israel's existence as a “right.” The only right in the Palestinians’ narrative of the conflict is their own connection to the land. They do, however, see Israel as a temporary military fact. But believe there will come a day, the narrative goes, when they will be able to defeat the Israelis. Their recent appeal to the UN is a new and cynical turn that should not mask the history of rejectionism.
In November 1947, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommended the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian representatives and Arab states rejected this recommendation and consequently launched a war against the Jewish community. A close look at the General Assembly’s final tally in 1947 highlights this rejectionism when 33 countries voted for partition, 13 against and 10 abstained. The countries that rejected co-existence with the Jews and blocked Arab-Palestinian statehood overwhelmingly came from the Arab/Muslim world: Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Yemen.
Talk is cheap
The reality is that a unilateral statehood bid is yet another Palestinian halo of “normalcy” that undermines every accepted model for peace even according to UN standards. Unilateralism was never accepted as the modus operandi, but rather, mutually agreed upon concessions by the parties as illustrated by UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338, the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap for Peace.
Talk is cheap. Land and lives are precious. If the Palestinians genuinely want to talk about statehood they need to come to terms with accepting and recognizing Israel and first get their own territories under control, stop firing rockets at Israeli towns, and start creating a decent civil society.
Pragmatically, the larger issue of Palestinian statehood raises a basic question - do Palestinians really want a state and are they prepared to take responsibility for their own people under such a rubric? In accordance with reality of Through the Looking-Glass, where time and space can be turned around, the answer would be yes, but at the expense of Israel’s creation to begin with.
Asaf Romirowsky is a Philadelphia-based Middle East analyst and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum
Ynet News
by Asaf Romirowsky
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found are a great way to understand the Palestinian narrative. Specifically, Carroll uses time and space as the plot device while drawing on chess imagery, mirror themes, opposites and time running backwards. As such, it provides the perfect “logic” to the irrational Palestinian worldview and interpretation of history as they attempt to achieve statehood through unilateral declaration of independence at the United Nations this month.
This is the same historical read that has convinced Palestinians that it is Israel and the West that created the Arab-Palestinian refugees, rather their own Arab leaders who did indeed put them in this state intentionally. Today, the perfidy of Palestinian society lies in its division, dysfunctionality, and complete denial of the reality it lives in.
The historical truth is that the notion of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state existing alongside Israel has never been part of the Palestinian worldview. The Palestinians have also always rejected the notion of a single bi-national state.
Palestinian society has never seen Jewish sovereignty or Israel's existence as a “right.” The only right in the Palestinians’ narrative of the conflict is their own connection to the land. They do, however, see Israel as a temporary military fact. But believe there will come a day, the narrative goes, when they will be able to defeat the Israelis. Their recent appeal to the UN is a new and cynical turn that should not mask the history of rejectionism.
In November 1947, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommended the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian representatives and Arab states rejected this recommendation and consequently launched a war against the Jewish community. A close look at the General Assembly’s final tally in 1947 highlights this rejectionism when 33 countries voted for partition, 13 against and 10 abstained. The countries that rejected co-existence with the Jews and blocked Arab-Palestinian statehood overwhelmingly came from the Arab/Muslim world: Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Yemen.
Talk is cheap
The reality is that a unilateral statehood bid is yet another Palestinian halo of “normalcy” that undermines every accepted model for peace even according to UN standards. Unilateralism was never accepted as the modus operandi, but rather, mutually agreed upon concessions by the parties as illustrated by UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338, the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap for Peace.
Talk is cheap. Land and lives are precious. If the Palestinians genuinely want to talk about statehood they need to come to terms with accepting and recognizing Israel and first get their own territories under control, stop firing rockets at Israeli towns, and start creating a decent civil society.
Pragmatically, the larger issue of Palestinian statehood raises a basic question - do Palestinians really want a state and are they prepared to take responsibility for their own people under such a rubric? In accordance with reality of Through the Looking-Glass, where time and space can be turned around, the answer would be yes, but at the expense of Israel’s creation to begin with.
Asaf Romirowsky is a Philadelphia-based Middle East analyst and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum
Ynet News
Jordan is Palestine
Establishing 2nd Palestinian state west of Jordan River would be great folly.
Haim Misgav
The Jewish State was established in the Land of Israel. Not in Uganda, not in South America and not in any other area offered to the Jews at one time or another as a response to their distress. The League of Nations, which granted Britain the mandate to form the Jewish people’s national home, referred to the entire territory on both sides of the Jordan River.
One should be aware of the following: There was no “Jordanian people” to the east of the Jordan River that sought independence there, just like there was no “Palestinian people” west of the Jordan River.
Hence, When David Ben-Gurion drafted the Declaration of Independence he did not determine the State of Israel’s borders. He too knew that at the end of the war forced upon the small Jewish community by Arab states, the borders will be different than the “partition boundaries.”
The Jewish state’s first prime minister also knew that any territory to be conquered by the IDF will remain part of the state, and will not be called “occupied territory.” The Jewish state will become its legal owner based on the international conventions that designated the whole of the Land of Israel, on both sides of the Jordan River (yes, Mr. Jordanian King) for a Jewish home.
Unfortunately, only parts of Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem and the Jordan River Valley were conquered in that just war. These parts were overtaken by members of the Hashemite Kingdom. No nation in the world recognized this Jordanian takeover, as it was clear to everyone that the real sovereign of these territories is the Jewish people. When the Brits ended their mission in the Land of Israel in 1948, after being defeated by the Jewish people’s fighting forces, they in fact returned the land to its natural sovereign: The Jewish people.
Annex Judea and Samaria
Jordan’s king, who heads a state that in fact does not comprise a nation, but rather, a hodgepodge of tribes that arrived from across the desert coupled with what is known as “Palestinian refugees,” is certainly right to be concerned about the fate of his puppet state. This state has a family known as the “royal family,” which rules the country, and nothing else. One of these days we may be able to view it as the “Palestinian state” the whole world is so eager to see.
Establishing yet another Palestinian state west of the Jordan River would certainly be a great folly. Firstly, because such state would seek to unite with its sister-state across the River. Secondly, because the many Arabs in the Galilee and northern Israel would also seek to connect to their sister state.
Hence, if the Jewish residents of our country seek life, we should quickly annex the territories freed from foreign control in the Six-Day War, just like David Ben-Gurion did at the end of the War of Independence when he applied Israeli law to all the territories conquered in that war. Any other solutions would raise question marks over our right to live in Beersheba or Eilat or Lod or Jaffa, not to mention many other communities in the Galilee, on the Coastal Plain and in the Negev.
Further withdrawals are certainly not an option. “Land for peace” is a false formula. The Oslo Accords, which now mark their 18th’s anniversary, were no more than one huge folly, as were the other withdrawals - from south Lebanon, from Gush Katif, from northern Samaria, and from our Sinai communities. Those who fail to understand it now may end up finding themselves drinking the Mediterranean Sea’s water one of these days, as Arafat wished for us in the past.
Dr. Haim Misgav is a law lecturer at the Netanya Academic College
Poster's Note:
Reminder:
LET THEM SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES!!!!
1) "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel. For our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of Palestinian people, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism". (~ Zahir Muhse'in, Member PLO Executive and the hoax of "Palestinian" identity - March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper "Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw"~)
2) Throughout his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: terrorist or peace maker) Arafat asserts at least a dozen times: "The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."
3) 7/67, Yassir Arafat & Khalad Hassan re Israel's post-war peace initiative.
"Horrific! If the Arab states made peace with Israel, the Palestinian cause would be lost forever" (quoted in Alan Hart, Arafat - Terrorist or Peacemaker)
4) "We are the Government of Palestine, the army of Palestine and the refugees of Palestine." (~ The Prime Minister of Jordan, Hazza' al-Majali, August 23,1959 ~)
5) "Palestine and Transjordan are one, for Palestine is the coastline and Transjordan the hinterland of the same country." (~ King Abdullah, at the Meeting of the Arab League, Cairo, 12th April 1948 ~)
6) "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it". (- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937 -)
7) "Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; there is one people and one land, with one history and one and the same fate." (~ Prince Hassan, brother of King Hussein, addressing the Jordanian National Assembly, 2nd February 1970 ~)
8) "We consider it necessary to clarify to one and all, in the Arab world and outside, that the PALESTINIAN PEOPLE with its nobility and conscience is to be found HERE on the EAST Bank The WEST Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its overwhelming majority is HERE and nowhere else." (~ King Hussein, quoted in An-Hahar, Beirut, 24th August 1972 ~)
9) "The new Jordan, which emerged in 1949, was the creation of the Palestinians of the West Bank and their brothers in the East. While Israel was the negation of the Palestinian right of self-determination, unified Jordan was the expression of it." (~ Sherif Al-Hamid Sharaf, Representative of Jordan at the UN Security Council, 11th June 1973 ~)
10) Past "President Bourguiba (of Tunisia) considers Jordan an artificial creation presented by Great Britain to King Abdullah. But he accepts Palestine and the Palestinians as an existing and primary fact since the days of the Pharaohs. Israel, too, he considers as a primary entity. However, Arab history makes no distinction between Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians. Most of them hail from the same Arab race, which arrived in the region with the Arab Moslem conquest." (~ Editorial Comment in the Jordanian Armed Forces' weekly, Al-Aqsa, Amman, 11th July 1973 ~)
11) "With all respect to King Hussein, I suggest that the Emirate of Transjordan was created from oil cloth by Great Britain, which for this purpose cut up ancient Palestine. To this desert territory to the bast of the Jordan (River)., it gave the name Transjordan. But there is nothing in history which carries this name. While since our earliest time there was Palestine and Palestinians. I maintain that the matter of Transjordan is an artificial one, and that Palestine is the basic problem. King Hussein should submit to the wishes of the people, in accordance with the principles of democracy and self-determination, so as-to avoid the fate of his grandfather, Abdullah, or of his cousin, Feisal, both of whom were assassinated." (~ Past President Bourguiba of Tunisia, in a public statement, July 1973 ~)
12) "How much better off Hussein would be if he had been induced to abandon his pose as a benevolent 'host' to 'refugees' and to affirm the fact that Jordan is the Palestinian Arab nation-state, just as Israel is the Palestinian Jewish nation-state." (~ Editorial Comment in the publication The Economist of 19th July 1975 ~)
13) "Palestine and Jordan were both (by then) under British Mandate, but as my grandfather pointed out in his memoirs, they were hardly separate countries. Transjordan being to the east of the River Jordan, it formed in a sense, the interior of Palestine." (~ King Hussein, writing in his Memoirs ~)
14) " There is no Palestinian nation! There is an Arab nation, but no Palestinian nation. This was invented by the colonial powers. When are the Palestinians mentioned in history? Never!" (~ Azmi Bishara, former Arab Knesset member, on Israel television. ~)
15) "Palestinian Arabs hold seventy-five per cent of all government jobs in Jordan." (~ The Sunday newspaper The Observer of 2nd March 1976 ~)
16) "Palestinian Arabs control over seventy per cent of Jordan's economy." (~ The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram of 5th March 1976 ~)
17) "There should be a kind of linkage because Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people." (~ Farouk Kadoumi, head of the PLO Political Department, quoted in Newsweek, 14th March 1977 ~)
18) "Along these lines, the West German Der Spiegel magazine this month cited Dr George Habash, leader of one of the Palestinian organizations, as saying that 70 per cent of Jordan's population are Palestinians and that the power in Jordan should be seized." (Translated by BBC Monitoring Service ~ From a commentary which was broadcast by Radio Amman, 30th June 1980 ~)
19) "Jordan is not just another Arab state with regard to Palestine but, rather, Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan in terms of territory, national identity, sufferings, hopes and aspirations, both day and night. Though we are all Arabs and our point of departure is that we are all members of the same people, the Palestinian-Jordanian nation is one and unique, and different from those of the other Arab states." (~ Marwan al Hamoud, member of the Jordanian National Consultative Council and former Minister of Agriculture, quoted by Al Rai, Amman, 24th September 1980 ~)
20) "The potential weak spot in Jordan is that most of the population are not, strictly speaking, Jordanian at all, but Palestinian. An estimated 60 per cent of the country's 2,500,000 people are Palestinians ... Most of these hold Jordanian passports, and many are integrated into Jordanian society." (~ Richard Owen, in an article published in The Times, 14th November 1980 ~)
21) "There is no moral justification for a second Palestine." (~ The Freeman Center - September 3, 1993 ~)
So the concepts "Palestinians" and "Palestinian People" and "Palestinian nation" and "Palestinian national self-determination" and "historical Palestine" are all hoaxes to facilitate the Arab terrorist destruction of Israel. What does that tell us about what possible solutions to the conflict may work?..and what does it tell us about what will NOT work?
Ynet News
Lessons from 9/11? What Lessons?
by Dennis Prager
In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world's elites -- as exemplified by leading media and academics -- was, "What did America do to provoke such hatred?"
Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with "What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans?" or "What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?"
As long as people keep asking what America did to incite such hate, nothing will have been learned from 9/11.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred because of a law of human life that has been true since Cain killed Abel: The worst hate the best (and the second best and the third best and so on). Evil hates good.
The United States of America is a flawed society. As it comprises human beings, it must be flawed. But in terms of the goodness achieved inside its borders and spread elsewhere in the world, it has been the finest country that ever existed. If you were to measure the moral gulf between America and those who despise it, the divide would have to be calculated in light-years.
If the academic and opinion elites of the world had moral courage, they would have asked the most obvious question provoked by 9/11: Were the mass murderers who flew those airplanes into American buildings an aberration or a product of their culture?
As far as those elites are concerned, only the first explanation exists. The 19 monsters of 9/11 were, for all intents and purposes, freaks. They were exceptions, no more representative of the Arab or Islamic worlds than serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was of America. According to the elites, the hijackers happened to be Muslim -- only in name, we have been constantly reassured -- but were not produced by anything within Arab or Islamic society. Even to ask whether anything in those worlds produced the 9/11 terrorists -- or Britain's 7/7 terrorists, or Madrid's March 2004 terrorists, or Palestinian terrorists, or the Taliban, or Hamas -- is to be a bigot, or an "Islamophobe," the ingenious post-9/11 label to describe anyone who merely asks such questions.
It can be said, therefore, that not only has the world learned nothing from 9/11; it has been prohibited from learning anything.
The Muslim regime of Iran violently represses its people and (along with the Muslims of Hamas and of Hezbollah) vows to exterminate the nation of Israel. Muslim mobs murdered innocent people because of cartoons in Denmark. The Muslims of the Taliban throw acid in the faces of girls who attend school. Muslim mobs kill Christians and burn churches in Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere. And we are told that the mere mention of these facts is an act of bigotry.
After 9/11, the normal and decent question that normal and decent people -- people who fully and happily recognize the existence of vast numbers of normal and decent Muslims in the world -- would have posed is this: What has happened in the Arab world and parts of the Muslim world?
But as this, the most obvious question that 9/11 prompted, has not been allowed to be asked, what lessons can possibly be learned?
The answer is, of course, none.
But that has not stopped our media and academic elites from drawing lessons.
And what are those lessons? One is that America -- not the Islamic world -- must engage in moral introspection. The other is that we must oppose all expressions of religious extremism -- Jewish and Christian as well as Muslim, since, according to the Left, America's conservative Christians are as much a threat to humanity as are extremist Muslims.
Perhaps the best-known exponent of these non-lessons has been Karen Armstrong, the widely read religious thinker and former nun. She was invited to give a presentation on compassion at the nation's religious memorial service this past Sunday. And what was her message?
"9/11 was a revelation of the dangerous polarization of our world; it revealed the deep suspicion, frustration and rage that existed in some quarters of the Muslim world and also the ignorance and prejudice about Islam and Middle Eastern affairs that existed in some quarters of the West ..."
There you have it: Muslims have rage and deep suspicion; the West has ignorance and prejudice.
If that's what the world learns from 9/11, those who died that day died in vain.
Town Hall
In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world's elites -- as exemplified by leading media and academics -- was, "What did America do to provoke such hatred?"
Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with "What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans?" or "What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?"
As long as people keep asking what America did to incite such hate, nothing will have been learned from 9/11.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred because of a law of human life that has been true since Cain killed Abel: The worst hate the best (and the second best and the third best and so on). Evil hates good.
The United States of America is a flawed society. As it comprises human beings, it must be flawed. But in terms of the goodness achieved inside its borders and spread elsewhere in the world, it has been the finest country that ever existed. If you were to measure the moral gulf between America and those who despise it, the divide would have to be calculated in light-years.
If the academic and opinion elites of the world had moral courage, they would have asked the most obvious question provoked by 9/11: Were the mass murderers who flew those airplanes into American buildings an aberration or a product of their culture?
As far as those elites are concerned, only the first explanation exists. The 19 monsters of 9/11 were, for all intents and purposes, freaks. They were exceptions, no more representative of the Arab or Islamic worlds than serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was of America. According to the elites, the hijackers happened to be Muslim -- only in name, we have been constantly reassured -- but were not produced by anything within Arab or Islamic society. Even to ask whether anything in those worlds produced the 9/11 terrorists -- or Britain's 7/7 terrorists, or Madrid's March 2004 terrorists, or Palestinian terrorists, or the Taliban, or Hamas -- is to be a bigot, or an "Islamophobe," the ingenious post-9/11 label to describe anyone who merely asks such questions.
It can be said, therefore, that not only has the world learned nothing from 9/11; it has been prohibited from learning anything.
The Muslim regime of Iran violently represses its people and (along with the Muslims of Hamas and of Hezbollah) vows to exterminate the nation of Israel. Muslim mobs murdered innocent people because of cartoons in Denmark. The Muslims of the Taliban throw acid in the faces of girls who attend school. Muslim mobs kill Christians and burn churches in Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere. And we are told that the mere mention of these facts is an act of bigotry.
After 9/11, the normal and decent question that normal and decent people -- people who fully and happily recognize the existence of vast numbers of normal and decent Muslims in the world -- would have posed is this: What has happened in the Arab world and parts of the Muslim world?
But as this, the most obvious question that 9/11 prompted, has not been allowed to be asked, what lessons can possibly be learned?
The answer is, of course, none.
But that has not stopped our media and academic elites from drawing lessons.
And what are those lessons? One is that America -- not the Islamic world -- must engage in moral introspection. The other is that we must oppose all expressions of religious extremism -- Jewish and Christian as well as Muslim, since, according to the Left, America's conservative Christians are as much a threat to humanity as are extremist Muslims.
Perhaps the best-known exponent of these non-lessons has been Karen Armstrong, the widely read religious thinker and former nun. She was invited to give a presentation on compassion at the nation's religious memorial service this past Sunday. And what was her message?
"9/11 was a revelation of the dangerous polarization of our world; it revealed the deep suspicion, frustration and rage that existed in some quarters of the Muslim world and also the ignorance and prejudice about Islam and Middle Eastern affairs that existed in some quarters of the West ..."
There you have it: Muslims have rage and deep suspicion; the West has ignorance and prejudice.
If that's what the world learns from 9/11, those who died that day died in vain.
Town Hall
Islam's Stranglehold on Israel
by Benny Morris
"Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it [a reference to the Medieval Crusader kingdoms]," states the 1988 Charter or constitution of the fundamentalist Muslim Hamas, the organization that rules the Gaza Strip and may well command the support of the majority of Palestinians.
And, to be sure, Islam these past two weeks has definitely been closing in on the Jewish state, with Israel's ambassadors in the two major Middle Eastern states with which it had good relations, Turkey and Egypt, being sent packing.
Of course, the circumstances of each case were different (history has that ability to give us infinite variety). In Ankara , the government expelled the ambassador because of Israel's refusal to apologize for implementing its blockade of the Gaza Strip, from which, over the past decade, masses of rockets have been fired on the country's southern towns and villages; in Cairo, it was the mob, unleashed by the so-called “Arab Spring,” and uncurbed by the country's interim military government, which overran and vandalized the Israeli Embassy and forced Israel's diplomats and their families to flee for their lives.
But in both cases, it was Islam which gradually eroded secularism and brought down pragmatic, prudent governments in the region, which drove the diplomats from their posts—much as Islam, in Hamas's take, wishes to do, and will do, to Israel itself, the ultimate alien and other in "their" Middle East.
For months, captivated by the spectacle of falling dictators and English-proficient spokesmen avowing democracy,Westerners deluded themselves into believing that the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world were presaging a new birth of freedom. And over the span of a century or two, who knows? maybe democracy will evolve in Cairo and Sana and Damascus (though I wouldn't bet on it). But in the short and medium terms, in our lifetimes, what this tumult is certainly delivering is the ruination of responsible government, chaos—as in the streets of Cairo on Friday night, when the mobs, apart from destroying the Israeli Embassy, ransacked the interior ministry and assorted police stations—and a surge in, and possibly, finally, a takeover by, radical Islamism. And, at the end of the tunnel, possibly a resumption of war.
After Friday night's events, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed that, despite the attack on its diplomatic mission, Israel would cleave to its peace with Egypt. (A few days earlier, he said something similar, wiping the spit from his face, about trying to maintain cordial relations with Ankara.)
But Israel's wishes may prove insufficient. For decades, the Islamists of Egypt, represented chiefly by the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of the Palestinian Hamas) but also by more extreme Salafists (such as those that gave us Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's successor as head of al-Qaeda), have preached the necessity of Israel's destruction and the annulment of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979, alongside the uprooting of all Western influence and values from the lands of Islam (vide the anti-Semitic, anti-Western rants of the late Said Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood).
Peace between Egypt and Israel has been steadily unraveling these past few months. Last month, it was the attack by Islamist and Palestinian gunmen from Egyptian Sinai against Israeli traffic north of Eilat, which the Egyptian media almost uniformly (and mendaciously) described subsequently as an Israeli treaty-violating assault on Egyptians and Egyptian soil; this week, it was a weak and vacillating Egyptian regime (its head, General Tantawi, during Friday night's fiery events played possum, simply refusing to take calls from Israeli and American leaders) which bowed before the anger of the "Street" and gave the mob its head (though, at the last minute, under pressure from President Obama, the military at last sent in commandos and rescued the six Israeli guards from the embattled embassy premises).
The Israeli ambassador may yet return to Cairo and the embassy may yet resume normal operations—after all, Washington will exert pressure, and the Egyptian military is dependent on American grants and spare parts. But in a few months' time the army is due to step aside and the Egyptian populace—educated on the knees of Islam and, since 1948, on unremitting hatred of Israel—will go to the polls and elect a civilian government. The likely result will be the installation of an Islamist government or, at the the least, a coalition government with a major Islamist component. The peace treaty with Israel will then undergo a slow or abrupt death, and my guess is that much of Egypt's secular middle class will run for the hills (meaning will try to emigrate to North America and Europe). But Israel cannot emigrate, and it will have no choice but to hunker down and fortify its formerly peaceful border with Egypt.
Unfortunately, the events in Egypt are part of a wider pattern, one episode feeding the next. In large measure it was set in train in 1979 with the Islamist Revolution's victory in Teheran (ironically, the year Israel and Egypt signed their peace treaty). Since then, most of the anti-Israel fury and operations in the region have been orchestrated if not supported in one way or another by Teheran.
In Tahrir Square, during Friday's mass demonstration that ended with the "conquest" of the Israeli Embassy offices, one banner read: "Turkey, a model of manliness." The reference was to Ankara's diplomatic initiative of the previous week, the downgrading of relations with Israel to the level of second secretaries (effectively, the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador) and suspension of all defense contracts between the two countries.
The Turks presented this as a result of Israel's refusal to apologize for the armed seizure of the Gaza-blockade-running Turkish flotilla last year. In fact, the gradual dissolution of Turkey's ties with Israel has been in the cards since the Turkish Justice and Development Party under Recep Erdogan took power in 2002. But the Turks played a careful, slow game so as not to rile Washington and the EU. Now that Erdogan has cowed his internal opposition and the Turkish army brass and stabilized Turkey's international position (while taking the measure of President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world), Ankara's Islamists have let their deep anti-Israeli sentiments out of the bag. Last week Erdogan threatened to send Turkish warships to accompany a new blockade-running, Gaza-bound flotilla.
A complete severing of Turkish-Israeli and Egyptian-Israeli relations is only a matter of time. The processes may well be triggered by the coming weeks' prospective Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence and the violece that will inevitably accompany it. And the likelihood is that these events will not be restricted to Palestine, Egypt and Turkey: the thrust and weight of Islam and the Arab "Street" will likely lead to wider sanctions against Israel around the Middle East.
The National Interest
"Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it [a reference to the Medieval Crusader kingdoms]," states the 1988 Charter or constitution of the fundamentalist Muslim Hamas, the organization that rules the Gaza Strip and may well command the support of the majority of Palestinians.
And, to be sure, Islam these past two weeks has definitely been closing in on the Jewish state, with Israel's ambassadors in the two major Middle Eastern states with which it had good relations, Turkey and Egypt, being sent packing.
Of course, the circumstances of each case were different (history has that ability to give us infinite variety). In Ankara , the government expelled the ambassador because of Israel's refusal to apologize for implementing its blockade of the Gaza Strip, from which, over the past decade, masses of rockets have been fired on the country's southern towns and villages; in Cairo, it was the mob, unleashed by the so-called “Arab Spring,” and uncurbed by the country's interim military government, which overran and vandalized the Israeli Embassy and forced Israel's diplomats and their families to flee for their lives.
But in both cases, it was Islam which gradually eroded secularism and brought down pragmatic, prudent governments in the region, which drove the diplomats from their posts—much as Islam, in Hamas's take, wishes to do, and will do, to Israel itself, the ultimate alien and other in "their" Middle East.
For months, captivated by the spectacle of falling dictators and English-proficient spokesmen avowing democracy,Westerners deluded themselves into believing that the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world were presaging a new birth of freedom. And over the span of a century or two, who knows? maybe democracy will evolve in Cairo and Sana and Damascus (though I wouldn't bet on it). But in the short and medium terms, in our lifetimes, what this tumult is certainly delivering is the ruination of responsible government, chaos—as in the streets of Cairo on Friday night, when the mobs, apart from destroying the Israeli Embassy, ransacked the interior ministry and assorted police stations—and a surge in, and possibly, finally, a takeover by, radical Islamism. And, at the end of the tunnel, possibly a resumption of war.
After Friday night's events, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed that, despite the attack on its diplomatic mission, Israel would cleave to its peace with Egypt. (A few days earlier, he said something similar, wiping the spit from his face, about trying to maintain cordial relations with Ankara.)
But Israel's wishes may prove insufficient. For decades, the Islamists of Egypt, represented chiefly by the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of the Palestinian Hamas) but also by more extreme Salafists (such as those that gave us Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's successor as head of al-Qaeda), have preached the necessity of Israel's destruction and the annulment of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979, alongside the uprooting of all Western influence and values from the lands of Islam (vide the anti-Semitic, anti-Western rants of the late Said Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood).
Peace between Egypt and Israel has been steadily unraveling these past few months. Last month, it was the attack by Islamist and Palestinian gunmen from Egyptian Sinai against Israeli traffic north of Eilat, which the Egyptian media almost uniformly (and mendaciously) described subsequently as an Israeli treaty-violating assault on Egyptians and Egyptian soil; this week, it was a weak and vacillating Egyptian regime (its head, General Tantawi, during Friday night's fiery events played possum, simply refusing to take calls from Israeli and American leaders) which bowed before the anger of the "Street" and gave the mob its head (though, at the last minute, under pressure from President Obama, the military at last sent in commandos and rescued the six Israeli guards from the embattled embassy premises).
The Israeli ambassador may yet return to Cairo and the embassy may yet resume normal operations—after all, Washington will exert pressure, and the Egyptian military is dependent on American grants and spare parts. But in a few months' time the army is due to step aside and the Egyptian populace—educated on the knees of Islam and, since 1948, on unremitting hatred of Israel—will go to the polls and elect a civilian government. The likely result will be the installation of an Islamist government or, at the the least, a coalition government with a major Islamist component. The peace treaty with Israel will then undergo a slow or abrupt death, and my guess is that much of Egypt's secular middle class will run for the hills (meaning will try to emigrate to North America and Europe). But Israel cannot emigrate, and it will have no choice but to hunker down and fortify its formerly peaceful border with Egypt.
Unfortunately, the events in Egypt are part of a wider pattern, one episode feeding the next. In large measure it was set in train in 1979 with the Islamist Revolution's victory in Teheran (ironically, the year Israel and Egypt signed their peace treaty). Since then, most of the anti-Israel fury and operations in the region have been orchestrated if not supported in one way or another by Teheran.
In Tahrir Square, during Friday's mass demonstration that ended with the "conquest" of the Israeli Embassy offices, one banner read: "Turkey, a model of manliness." The reference was to Ankara's diplomatic initiative of the previous week, the downgrading of relations with Israel to the level of second secretaries (effectively, the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador) and suspension of all defense contracts between the two countries.
The Turks presented this as a result of Israel's refusal to apologize for the armed seizure of the Gaza-blockade-running Turkish flotilla last year. In fact, the gradual dissolution of Turkey's ties with Israel has been in the cards since the Turkish Justice and Development Party under Recep Erdogan took power in 2002. But the Turks played a careful, slow game so as not to rile Washington and the EU. Now that Erdogan has cowed his internal opposition and the Turkish army brass and stabilized Turkey's international position (while taking the measure of President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world), Ankara's Islamists have let their deep anti-Israeli sentiments out of the bag. Last week Erdogan threatened to send Turkish warships to accompany a new blockade-running, Gaza-bound flotilla.
A complete severing of Turkish-Israeli and Egyptian-Israeli relations is only a matter of time. The processes may well be triggered by the coming weeks' prospective Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence and the violece that will inevitably accompany it. And the likelihood is that these events will not be restricted to Palestine, Egypt and Turkey: the thrust and weight of Islam and the Arab "Street" will likely lead to wider sanctions against Israel around the Middle East.
The National Interest
Child Abuse as Public Policy in the Palestinian Authority
by David Meir-Levi
From Aristotle to Gandhi to Jimmy Carter, world leaders have asserted that one must judge a nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable. How then should one judge a society whose leaders condemn the most vulnerable, its own children, to a lifetime of sociopathic hatred and to the macabre belief that the highest calling in their precious young lives is to wage unremitting war and die a martyr’s death?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) set up its own educational system in 1994, shortly after the Oslo Accords were signed (9/1993). Prior to the 6-Day War (6/1967), the schools of the West Bank and Gaza Strip used Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks, which the Israeli government censored after achieving sovereignty over those territories, due to the extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish language of these texts. However, in 1994 the PA’s new Ministry of Education reintroduced the uncensored Jordanian and Egyptian texts, full of belligerent and anti-Semitic expressions. In response to international criticism, the Ministry undertook the creation of a new set of textbooks, gradually phasing them in from kindergarten through high school, while slowly phasing out the objectionable Jordanian and Egyptian texts.
Much has been written to expose, or to defend, the Palestinian Authority’s new textbooks. Critics accuse the PA of the gross misuse of public funds from donor nations to support hate-education, of the violation of international legal norms with the virulence of that education, of wrecking catastrophic psychological damage on young children, and of preparing the next generation for more hatred, more terrorism, more war. Critics acknowledge that the new textbooks are an improvement over their predecessors; but they still contain misleading, inaccurate, biased, selective and distorted history, with confusing and inaccurate maps that show “Palestine” as all of Israel, with Israeli cities like Tel Aviv replaced by Arab towns, and the exclusion of almost all of Jewish history from discussion about the Middle East. This biased education seems to have the goal of raising a generation of Palestinian children who will strive to carry on the terror war if their parents do not achieve victory in their own lifetimes.
Defensive assessments of these new textbooks assert the polar opposite,[iv] arguing that the new textbooks are fine, that the detractors are misled or misdirected by right wing Zionist prejudices, and that the PA should be congratulated on the way that its new Education Ministry has handled the difficult job of teaching Palestinian nationhood and history while under siege.
Interestingly, some of these very supportive reports, perhaps inadvertently, validate some of the negative assessments. Professor Nathan Brown, in a generally very positive assessment of the PA textbooks, notes that concepts of civil behavior such as peace, tolerance, and dialogue are important themes, but there is “not a single reference to tolerating Jews or Israelis” (pp. 17 ff.). PA textbooks contain lessons that value peace, pluralism, forgiveness, integrity, and tolerance in historical and present-day contexts; but there are “no references…to these values regarding Jews, Judaism, or the state of Israel”. In short, PA textbooks continue to “…do little to support peace and avoid sensitive issues connected with peace.”
The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and information (IPCRI) offers perhaps the most dispassionate, comprehensive and detailed examination of the PA textbooks. On the basis of its in-depth analysis of the entire sequence of textbooks as introduced into classroom use over the past 15 years, the IPCRI studies discern a clear pattern. The PA textbooks started out overtly anti-Israel with skewed and falsified history, incitement to violence, and the exaltation of martyrdom. Over the years they have been moderated, with the most vitriolic hate-teach expunged; but they still reflect some bias and imbalance.
It seems plausible to suggest that the textbooks were cleaned up under international pressure: threats from USA to defund the PA, reports such as those coming from the UK’s Taxpayers’ Alliance [vi] urging no UK money for “hate education”, and EU threats to cut aid. But the desire to imprint on the next generation the need to continue the terror war against Israel is still very much alive; and that brings us to two additional aspects of PA education that must be explored. First, educators acknowledge that much teaching occurs beyond the textbooks and outside of the classroom. Under the leadership of the PA, incitement and hate-teach occur in the classrooms and on TV and radio.
Classroom incitement has been thoroughly documented[vii] as has hate-teach and hate-preach on PA TV and radio, where Jews and Israelis are represented as demonic figures; and the need to wipe Israel off the map is a frequent theme in the eulogies of suicide bombers, martyrs whose deaths in terror attacks intending mass murder endear them to Allah. The goal seems to be to create a seething, raging population of young people far more interested in wiping Israel off the earth’s face than in achieving peaceful coexistence.
And they do not wait until the children start school. Palestinian Authority and Hamas preschool television and radio programming could be called Terrorism for Tots; and such programming continues well into high school. A Hamas weekly program starred a Palestinian version of Mickey Mouse, Farfur, who tells children to pray until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership” and in the meantime to oppose the “oppressive invading Zionist occupation.” Farfar is ultimately beaten to death by an enraged Israeli “settler,” and is replaced by an intrepid young bee who buzzes the same message to the preschool viewers. Similar messages are encouraged in the classroom with supplementary material and teacher-guided self-expression that encourage martyrdom and glorify terrorism and terrorists.
So while defenders point out the improvements in the textbooks, they ignore the fact that incitement and hatred and martyrdom are still very much a part of the education process for Palestinian children from early childhood onward.
Second, the role of Hamas in West Bank education is generally unnoticed, but is crucial for an understanding of the impact of PA education on Arab youth. Since 2007 Hamas shares power with Fatah in the West Bank, and the coalition agreement of 2006 puts Hamas in control of the Ministry of Education. Over the last few years, the Minister of Education has moved Hamas loyalists into key positions in the education system. Fatah educators complain that: “When a high-level education job opens up, it goes to a Hamas supporter, with appointees often leapfrogging over other candidates with stronger credentials. Since 2007, eight of 14 West Bank school districts are controlled by Hamas, up from none in 2006, and new teachers are hired routinely from graduates of Islamic teachers’ colleges that are Hamas strongholds.” The Hamas teachers’ union includes some 18,000 teachers in West Bank private and public schools. The latest textbooks already demonstrate Hamas influence. It is not difficult to foresee the future of PA education in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Hamas leadership.
New textbooks may appear more moderate, but the classroom environment, the old hate-filled textbooks, TV, radio and the Hamas stranglehold on the Education Ministry all promise more Jew-hatred, more Israel-hatred, and endless exhortation to children’s suicidal martyrdom. Hamas uses its own children as political pawns, encouraged to participate in violent demonstrations, taught the virtues of mass murder, and exhorted to die a martyr’s death: a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, and a gut-wrenching example of horrifying child-abuse raised to the level of public policy. How does one judge a society that invests so much effort and resources into the intellectual and emotional abuse of its own children?
Do the Palestinian Authority textbooks inspire children to mass murder and suicidal martyrdom? The accurate answer right now may be: not as much as they used to; but if Hamas has its way, it won’t be long before they do again. Meanwhile, other resources do exactly that, in the Palestinian classroom, media, and society.
Can a government so filled with hate and bigotry that they crucify their own children on the cross of jihad and Jew-hatred realistically be expected to develop a nation that will work toward peace?
Front Page Magazine
From Aristotle to Gandhi to Jimmy Carter, world leaders have asserted that one must judge a nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable. How then should one judge a society whose leaders condemn the most vulnerable, its own children, to a lifetime of sociopathic hatred and to the macabre belief that the highest calling in their precious young lives is to wage unremitting war and die a martyr’s death?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) set up its own educational system in 1994, shortly after the Oslo Accords were signed (9/1993). Prior to the 6-Day War (6/1967), the schools of the West Bank and Gaza Strip used Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks, which the Israeli government censored after achieving sovereignty over those territories, due to the extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish language of these texts. However, in 1994 the PA’s new Ministry of Education reintroduced the uncensored Jordanian and Egyptian texts, full of belligerent and anti-Semitic expressions. In response to international criticism, the Ministry undertook the creation of a new set of textbooks, gradually phasing them in from kindergarten through high school, while slowly phasing out the objectionable Jordanian and Egyptian texts.
Much has been written to expose, or to defend, the Palestinian Authority’s new textbooks. Critics accuse the PA of the gross misuse of public funds from donor nations to support hate-education, of the violation of international legal norms with the virulence of that education, of wrecking catastrophic psychological damage on young children, and of preparing the next generation for more hatred, more terrorism, more war. Critics acknowledge that the new textbooks are an improvement over their predecessors; but they still contain misleading, inaccurate, biased, selective and distorted history, with confusing and inaccurate maps that show “Palestine” as all of Israel, with Israeli cities like Tel Aviv replaced by Arab towns, and the exclusion of almost all of Jewish history from discussion about the Middle East. This biased education seems to have the goal of raising a generation of Palestinian children who will strive to carry on the terror war if their parents do not achieve victory in their own lifetimes.
Defensive assessments of these new textbooks assert the polar opposite,[iv] arguing that the new textbooks are fine, that the detractors are misled or misdirected by right wing Zionist prejudices, and that the PA should be congratulated on the way that its new Education Ministry has handled the difficult job of teaching Palestinian nationhood and history while under siege.
Interestingly, some of these very supportive reports, perhaps inadvertently, validate some of the negative assessments. Professor Nathan Brown, in a generally very positive assessment of the PA textbooks, notes that concepts of civil behavior such as peace, tolerance, and dialogue are important themes, but there is “not a single reference to tolerating Jews or Israelis” (pp. 17 ff.). PA textbooks contain lessons that value peace, pluralism, forgiveness, integrity, and tolerance in historical and present-day contexts; but there are “no references…to these values regarding Jews, Judaism, or the state of Israel”. In short, PA textbooks continue to “…do little to support peace and avoid sensitive issues connected with peace.”
The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and information (IPCRI) offers perhaps the most dispassionate, comprehensive and detailed examination of the PA textbooks. On the basis of its in-depth analysis of the entire sequence of textbooks as introduced into classroom use over the past 15 years, the IPCRI studies discern a clear pattern. The PA textbooks started out overtly anti-Israel with skewed and falsified history, incitement to violence, and the exaltation of martyrdom. Over the years they have been moderated, with the most vitriolic hate-teach expunged; but they still reflect some bias and imbalance.
It seems plausible to suggest that the textbooks were cleaned up under international pressure: threats from USA to defund the PA, reports such as those coming from the UK’s Taxpayers’ Alliance [vi] urging no UK money for “hate education”, and EU threats to cut aid. But the desire to imprint on the next generation the need to continue the terror war against Israel is still very much alive; and that brings us to two additional aspects of PA education that must be explored. First, educators acknowledge that much teaching occurs beyond the textbooks and outside of the classroom. Under the leadership of the PA, incitement and hate-teach occur in the classrooms and on TV and radio.
Classroom incitement has been thoroughly documented[vii] as has hate-teach and hate-preach on PA TV and radio, where Jews and Israelis are represented as demonic figures; and the need to wipe Israel off the map is a frequent theme in the eulogies of suicide bombers, martyrs whose deaths in terror attacks intending mass murder endear them to Allah. The goal seems to be to create a seething, raging population of young people far more interested in wiping Israel off the earth’s face than in achieving peaceful coexistence.
And they do not wait until the children start school. Palestinian Authority and Hamas preschool television and radio programming could be called Terrorism for Tots; and such programming continues well into high school. A Hamas weekly program starred a Palestinian version of Mickey Mouse, Farfur, who tells children to pray until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership” and in the meantime to oppose the “oppressive invading Zionist occupation.” Farfar is ultimately beaten to death by an enraged Israeli “settler,” and is replaced by an intrepid young bee who buzzes the same message to the preschool viewers. Similar messages are encouraged in the classroom with supplementary material and teacher-guided self-expression that encourage martyrdom and glorify terrorism and terrorists.
So while defenders point out the improvements in the textbooks, they ignore the fact that incitement and hatred and martyrdom are still very much a part of the education process for Palestinian children from early childhood onward.
Second, the role of Hamas in West Bank education is generally unnoticed, but is crucial for an understanding of the impact of PA education on Arab youth. Since 2007 Hamas shares power with Fatah in the West Bank, and the coalition agreement of 2006 puts Hamas in control of the Ministry of Education. Over the last few years, the Minister of Education has moved Hamas loyalists into key positions in the education system. Fatah educators complain that: “When a high-level education job opens up, it goes to a Hamas supporter, with appointees often leapfrogging over other candidates with stronger credentials. Since 2007, eight of 14 West Bank school districts are controlled by Hamas, up from none in 2006, and new teachers are hired routinely from graduates of Islamic teachers’ colleges that are Hamas strongholds.” The Hamas teachers’ union includes some 18,000 teachers in West Bank private and public schools. The latest textbooks already demonstrate Hamas influence. It is not difficult to foresee the future of PA education in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Hamas leadership.
New textbooks may appear more moderate, but the classroom environment, the old hate-filled textbooks, TV, radio and the Hamas stranglehold on the Education Ministry all promise more Jew-hatred, more Israel-hatred, and endless exhortation to children’s suicidal martyrdom. Hamas uses its own children as political pawns, encouraged to participate in violent demonstrations, taught the virtues of mass murder, and exhorted to die a martyr’s death: a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, and a gut-wrenching example of horrifying child-abuse raised to the level of public policy. How does one judge a society that invests so much effort and resources into the intellectual and emotional abuse of its own children?
Do the Palestinian Authority textbooks inspire children to mass murder and suicidal martyrdom? The accurate answer right now may be: not as much as they used to; but if Hamas has its way, it won’t be long before they do again. Meanwhile, other resources do exactly that, in the Palestinian classroom, media, and society.
Can a government so filled with hate and bigotry that they crucify their own children on the cross of jihad and Jew-hatred realistically be expected to develop a nation that will work toward peace?
Front Page Magazine
The Arab-Palestinian Obsession
by Caroline Glick
If nothing else, the Arab-Palestinians' UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority - or Fatah - or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.
Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.
There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO - including the issue of Palestinian statehood - would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.
The PA was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.
By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel's expense.
In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians' behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won't change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with Lebanon's Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new "State of Palestine" will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian "refugees."
This is true, he said, even for the "refugees" who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian "refugees" living inside "Palestine."
As he put it, "Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens."
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority?
Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans?
Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN?
Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?
The Palestinians have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel's right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs - the so-called Palestinian "refugees" - as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel's destruction.
And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel.
Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Instead, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.
Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas "government" employees.
Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA's status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.
Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA's routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.
Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians' decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.
After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.
Alas, this is not the case.
The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.
The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.
There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.
The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.
This "Blame Israel First" mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.
Despite the Palestinians' refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah's unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel's right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.
In the paper's view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "has been the most intractable" party to the conflict. Netanyahu's crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.
Of course, that is not how the Times put it. In the Times' words, Netanyahu has been "building settlements."
Intrinsic to the Times' claim, (and to the Obama administration's EU-supported demand that Israel disregard Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), is an embrace of the Palestinians' bigoted position that Jews must be banned from the future Palestinian state.
That is, like the administration and the EU, the Times' support for the "just Palestinian cause" is so comprehensive that its editors never even question whether it is reasonable for them to be completely committed to the establishment of a racist state. It is this inability to consider the significance of their actions that removes Western support for the Palestinians from the realm of policy and into the sphere of neurosis.
The second lesson of the US and European unwillingness to oppose the Palestinians' UN statehood bid is that the Obama administration and the EU alike are obsessed with getting on the right side of inherently anti-Western international institutions.
Here, too, the reason that the position is an obsession rather than a considered policy is because no conceivable rational US or European interest is advanced by strengthening the UN and similar bodies.
Administration officials have repeatedly said that they do not wish to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution at the Security Council because they do not want to isolate the US at the UN. It is due to their aversion to isolation that the administration has worked so intensively in recent weeks to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plans, by pressuring Israel to give them massive concessions.
It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the White House that standing alone at the UN more often than not means standing up for US interests, and that standing with the crowd involves sacrificing US interests.
As for the EU, their automatic support of the UN is somewhat more reasonable. Although the UN majority systematically empowers states and forces that are hostile to Europe, many EU member states share the UN majority's anti-Israel and anti-American positions. So by voting with the majority, EU member states are able to act on their prejudices without having to own up to them. Moreover, many EU states have irredentist Islamic minorities. Joining the Israel-bashers at the UN is a low-cost way to appease them.
On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.
Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.
Perhaps not.
But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.
Town Hall
If nothing else, the Arab-Palestinians' UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority - or Fatah - or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.
Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.
There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO - including the issue of Palestinian statehood - would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.
The PA was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.
By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel's expense.
In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians' behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won't change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with Lebanon's Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new "State of Palestine" will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian "refugees."
This is true, he said, even for the "refugees" who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian "refugees" living inside "Palestine."
As he put it, "Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens."
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority?
Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans?
Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN?
Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?
The Palestinians have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel's right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs - the so-called Palestinian "refugees" - as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel's destruction.
And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel.
Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Instead, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.
Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas "government" employees.
Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA's status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.
Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA's routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.
Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians' decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.
After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.
Alas, this is not the case.
The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.
The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.
There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.
The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.
This "Blame Israel First" mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.
Despite the Palestinians' refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah's unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel's right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.
In the paper's view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "has been the most intractable" party to the conflict. Netanyahu's crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.
Of course, that is not how the Times put it. In the Times' words, Netanyahu has been "building settlements."
Intrinsic to the Times' claim, (and to the Obama administration's EU-supported demand that Israel disregard Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), is an embrace of the Palestinians' bigoted position that Jews must be banned from the future Palestinian state.
That is, like the administration and the EU, the Times' support for the "just Palestinian cause" is so comprehensive that its editors never even question whether it is reasonable for them to be completely committed to the establishment of a racist state. It is this inability to consider the significance of their actions that removes Western support for the Palestinians from the realm of policy and into the sphere of neurosis.
The second lesson of the US and European unwillingness to oppose the Palestinians' UN statehood bid is that the Obama administration and the EU alike are obsessed with getting on the right side of inherently anti-Western international institutions.
Here, too, the reason that the position is an obsession rather than a considered policy is because no conceivable rational US or European interest is advanced by strengthening the UN and similar bodies.
Administration officials have repeatedly said that they do not wish to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution at the Security Council because they do not want to isolate the US at the UN. It is due to their aversion to isolation that the administration has worked so intensively in recent weeks to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plans, by pressuring Israel to give them massive concessions.
It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the White House that standing alone at the UN more often than not means standing up for US interests, and that standing with the crowd involves sacrificing US interests.
As for the EU, their automatic support of the UN is somewhat more reasonable. Although the UN majority systematically empowers states and forces that are hostile to Europe, many EU member states share the UN majority's anti-Israel and anti-American positions. So by voting with the majority, EU member states are able to act on their prejudices without having to own up to them. Moreover, many EU states have irredentist Islamic minorities. Joining the Israel-bashers at the UN is a low-cost way to appease them.
On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.
Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.
Perhaps not.
But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.
Town Hall
Shia Face Systematic and Pervasive Discrimination in Saudi Arabia
U.S.: Shia Face Systematic and Pervasive Discrimination in Saudi Arabia.Shia face systematic and pervasive official and legal discrimination, including in education, employment, the military, housing, political representation, the judiciary, religious practice, and media. Primary reasons include the widely-held view that Shia are polytheists and that they commit apostasy by practicing some of their worship activities, historical Sunni-Shia animosity, and suspicion of Iranian influence on their actions.
(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - US secretary of state Hillary Clinton expressed deep concern about the Saudi government which denies its people the most fundamental human rights : the right to believe according to their own conscience – including the freedom to not believe or not follow the religion favored by its ; the right to practice their religion freely, without risking discrimination, arrest, or violence; and the right to educate their children in their own religious traditions; and the freedom to express their beliefs.
The Saudi government did not respect religious freedom in law, but generally permitted Shi'a religious gatherings and non-Muslim private religious practices.
Muslims who did not adhere to the government's interpretation of Islam faced significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination, including limited employment and educational opportunities, underrepresentation in official institutions, restrictions on religious practice, and restrictions on places of worship and community centers.
In Saudi Arabia , authorities continue to repress Shi'a Muslims, Sulaimaniya Isma'ilis , and others who do not share the government’s religious views.
Now, as you know, the protection of religious freedom is a fundamental concern of the United States going back to the earliest days of our republic, and it remains so today.
U.S. Department of State
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor July-December, 2010 International Religious Freedom Report
September 13, 2011
Saudi Arabia
The laws and policies restrict religious freedom, and in practice, the government generally enforced these restrictions. Freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law and is severely restricted in practice. The country is an Islamic state governed by a monarchy; the king is head of both state and government. According to the basic law, Sunni Islam is the official religion and the country's constitution is the Qur'an and the Sunna (traditions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). The legal system is based on the government's application of the Hanbali School of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence. The public practice of any religion other than Islam is prohibited, and there is no separation between state and religion. The government did not respect religious freedom in law, but generally permitted Shia religious gatherings and non-Muslim private religious practices. Some Muslims who did not adhere to the government's interpretation of Islam faced significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination, including limited employment and educational opportunities, underrepresentation in official institutions, restrictions on religious practice, and restrictions on places of worship and community centers.
There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom by the government during the reporting period. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) and security forces of the Ministry of Interior (MOI) conducted some raids on private non-Muslim religious gatherings, and sometimes confiscated the personal religious materials of non-Muslims. However, there were fewer reported charges of harassment and abuse at the hands of the CPVPV compared with the previous reporting period. Although many intolerant statements had been removed, some school textbooks continued to contain overtly intolerant statements against Jews and Christians and intolerant references by allusion against Shia and Sufi Muslims and other religious groups. For example they stated that apostates from Islam should be killed if they do not repent within three days of being warned and that treachery is a permanent characteristic of non-Muslims, especially Jews.
There were reports of societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice. Conservative vigilantes sometimes harassed and assaulted citizens and foreigners.
Senior U.S. officials discussed a number of key policies concerning religious practice and tolerance with the government, as well as specific cases involving infringement on the right to religious freedom. On January 16, 2009, the Secretary of State redesignated the country as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). In connection with this redesignation, the Secretary issued a waiver of sanctions on the same date "to further the purposes of the act."
Section I. Religious Demography
The country has an area of 830,000 square miles and a population of 27.1 million persons, of whom approximately 18.6 million are citizens, according to the government. There is no accurate figure for the number of foreign residents. The government estimated there were 8.5 million foreign workers in the country in 2010. Figures from foreign embassies indicated the foreign population in the country, including many undocumented migrants, may be even higher, exceeding 12 million. Estimates provided by foreign embassies include two million Indians, two million Bangladeshis, 1.5 million Filipinos, 1.5 million Pakistanis, 1.5 million Indonesians, one million Egyptians, one million Yemenis, 400,000 Syrians, 500,000 Sri Lankans, 350,000 Nepalese, 250,000 Palestinians, 150,000 Lebanese, and 100,000 Eritreans.
Approximately 85 to 90 percent of citizens are Sunni Muslims, who predominantly adhere to the Hanbali School of Islamic jurisprudence. A number of Sunni citizens also adhere to the other Sunni schools of jurisprudence (the Hanafi, Maliki, and Shaf'i schools).
Shiites constitute 10 to 15 percent of the population. Approximately 80 percent of Shia are "Twelvers" (followers of Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdi, whom they recognize as the Twelfth Imam) and are primarily located in the Eastern Province. Twelver Shia adhere to the Jafari school of jurisprudence. Most of the remaining Shiite population are Sulaimaniya Isma'ilis, also known as "Seveners" (those who branched off from the Twelvers to follow Isma'il ibn Jafar as the Seventh Imam).Seveners reside primarily in Najran Province, around the residence of their sect's spiritual leader in Al Mansourah. In the western Hejaz region, there are approximately 100,000 Ashraf (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) and 150,000 Nakhawala, or "Medina Shia." Additionally, statistics put the number of Zaydis (followers of Zayd ibn Ali, whom they recognize as the fifth Imam) at approximately 500,000. The Zaydis reside primarily in the cities of Jizan and Najran along the border with Yemen.
Comprehensive statistics for the religious denominations of foreigners are not available, but they include Muslims from the various branches and schools of Islam, Christians (including Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, and more than one million Roman Catholics), Jews, over 250,000 Hindus, over 70,000 Buddhists, approximately 45,000 Sikhs, and others. In addition to European and North American Christians, there are Christians from East African, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the Palestinian territories, India, Pakistan, and other South Asian countries. The Filipino community is 90 percent Christian.
In 2010 the country hosted approximately three million Muslim pilgrims during the annual three-day Hajj pilgrimage and four million Umra pilgrims throughout the year from throughout the world.
Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom
Legal/Policy Framework
Please refer to Appendix C in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for the status of the government's acceptance of international legal standards http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/appendices/index.htm.
Current laws and policies restrict freedom of religion. According to the basic law, Islam is the official religion, and the country's constitution is the Qur'an and the Sunna. There is no legal recognition or protection of religious freedom, and the government allowed only private practice of non-Muslim religions.
The basic law establishes the country as a sovereign Arab Islamic state and establishes the Qur'an and the Sunna as the constitution. Neither the government nor society in general accepts the concept of separation of state and religion.
The government considers its legitimacy to rest in part on its custodianship of the two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina and its promotion of Islam. The official interpretation of Islam is derived from the writings and teachings of 18th-century Sunni religious scholar Muhammad ibn 'Abd Al-Wahhab, who advocated a return to what he considered the practices of the first three generations of the Muslim era and urged Muslims to be stricter in their obedience to Islam. The country's religious teaching opposes attempts by the Muslim reform movements of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to reinterpret aspects of Islamic law in light of economic and social developments, particularly in areas such as gender relations, personal autonomy, family law, and participatory democracy. Outside the country this branch of Islam is often referred to as "Wahhabi," a term the Saudis do not use.
The Islamic judicial system is based on laws derived from the Qur'an and the Sunna and on legal opinions and fatwas (rulings) of the Council of Senior [Religious] Scholars. Established in 1971, the council is an advisory body of 20 persons that reports to the king. The council, supported by the Board of Research and Religious Rulings, is recognized as the supreme authority on religious rulings by the basic law. It is headed by the grand mufti and is composed of Sunni religious scholars and jurists, as well as the minister of justice. Government universities provide training on all the Sunni schools of jurisprudence but focus on the Hanbali school; consequently, most Sharia judges follow its system of interpretation. Three members of the council belong to non-Hanbali schools, representing the Maliki, Hanafi, and Shaf'i schools; however, there are no Shiite members. Scholars are chosen at the king's discretion and serve renewable four-year terms, with most members serving for life. Sharia is not based on precedent and rulings can diverge widely. In theory rulings can be appealed to the appellate and supreme courts, but these higher courts must agree to hear the case. In 2009 for the first time ever, a member of the council was dismissed after he criticized the king's establishment of a mixed-gender university.
The government permits Shiite judges presiding over courts in the Eastern Province to use the Jafari school of Islamic jurisprudence to adjudicate cases in family law, inheritance, and endowment management. There were six Shiite judges, all located in the Eastern Province cities of Qatif and al-Ahsa, where the majority of Shia lived. Shia living in other parts of the Eastern Province, Najran Province, and the western Hejaz region had no access to local, regional, or national Shiite courts.
The Majlis al-Shoura (the Consultative Council) is responsible for drafting resolutions for approval by the Council of Ministers and the king. The king appoints the Consultative Council's 150 full-time male members and 13 part-time, female, non-voting advisors. Advisors can attend sessions and may offer their opinion, but have no voting power. There are five Shiite members. According to the council charter, the members should be "scholars and men of learning." There are no term limits for the Consultative Council's members; however, every four years the king must replace 50 percent of the council.
The two mosques in Mecca and Medina do not come under Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call, and Guidance (MOIA) jurisdiction. They are the responsibility of the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Shrines, which reports directly to the king; its head holds a rank equivalent to a government minister. Thousands of other mosques existed in private homes, at rest stops along highways, and elsewhere throughout the country. There were no public non-Muslim houses of worship, but private Christian religious gatherings took place throughout the country.
The CPVPV is a semiautonomous agency authorized to monitor social behavior and enforce morality consistent with the government's interpretation of Islam. The law defines the CPVPV's mission as "guiding and advising people to observe the religious duties prescribed by Islamic Sharia, and to prevent committing [acts] proscribed and prohibited [by Sharia], or adopting bad habits and traditions or taboo [sic] heresies." The purview of the CPVPV includes public gender mixing and illegal private contact between men and women; practicing or displaying non-Muslim faiths or disrespecting Islam; displaying or selling media contrary to Islam, including pornography; producing, distributing, or consuming alcohol; venerating places or celebrating events inconsistent with approved Islamic practices; practicing sorcery or magic for profit; and committing or facilitating lewdness, including adultery, homosexuality, and gambling. Full-time CPVPV field officers are known as mutawwa'een; they do not wear uniforms, but are required to wear identification badges and can only legally act in their official capacity when accompanied by a regular policeman. In practice CPVPV officers often act as public morality enforcers. According to the latest public statistics, the CPVPV has more than 5,000 staff members, including 3,583 CPVPV field offices throughout all 13 provinces. Additionally there are over 1,600 administrative support personnel. The CPVPV reports to the king through the Council of Ministers, and the minister of interior oversees its operations on the king's behalf. Religious vigilantes and/or volunteers unaffiliated with the CPVPV also exist but often act alone, sometimes even harassing and assaulting citizens and foreigners.
The 24-member Human Rights Commission (HRC) was established in 2005 by the Council of Ministers to address human rights abuses and promote human rights within the country. The board does not include women, but each regional branch includes a women's branch operated and staffed by women. The board previously did not have Shia members, but now includes at least one. The HRC regularly follows up on citizen complaints, including complaints of favoritism or unfair court decisions, but has not specifically addressed issues of religious freedom and tolerance and does not issue a report on its actions.
No law specifically requires all citizens to be Muslims, but non-Muslim foreigners and many foreign and Saudi national Muslims whose beliefs are deemed not to conform with the government's interpretation of Islam must practice their religion in private and are vulnerable to discrimination, harassment, detention, and deportation for noncitizens. Legally children born to Muslim fathers are deemed Muslim, and conversion from Islam to another religion is considered apostasy and punishable by death. Blasphemy against Sunni Islam is also punishable by death, but the more common penalty is a long prison sentence. There have been no confirmed reports of executions for either apostasy or blasphemy in recent years.
The law discriminates against adherents of religions deemed polytheistic and to a lesser extent against Christians and Jews, who are mentioned in the Qur'an as "People of the Book." The government officially does not permit non-Muslim clergy to enter the country to conduct religious services, although some do so under other auspices and are able to hold services. These entry restrictions make it difficult for non-Muslims to maintain regular contact with clergy. This is particularly problematic for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, whose faiths require that they receive sacraments from a priest on a regular basis. However, many non-Muslims continue to gather for private worship, and the government generally allows the discreet performance of religious functions of all faiths.
Shia face systematic and pervasive official and legal discrimination, including in education, employment, the military, housing, political representation, the judiciary, religious practice, and media. Primary reasons include the widely-held view that Shia are polytheists and that they commit apostasy by practicing some of their worship activities, historical Sunni-Shia animosity, and suspicion of Iranian influence on their actions.
The MOIA determines the qualifications of Sunni clerics and is responsible for investigating complaints against them, particularly clerics who issue intolerant fatwas or promote intolerance, violence, or hatred. In 2003 the MOIA created a program to monitor all government-paid clerics. Provincial committees of senior religious scholars supervise full-time MOIA employees who monitor all mosques and clerics, through scheduled and unscheduled visits and receipt of public complaints. Based on their reports, the committees summon clerics accused of preaching extremist ideologies. If the provincial committees are not able to dissuade these clerics from their thinking, the clerics are referred to a central committee or dismissed. Under this program, the MOIA has removed 3,500 imams from duty since 2003, but none were removed during the reporting period. On August 12, in a move to curb extremist and absurd fatwas, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz decreed that only members of the Council of Senior [Religious] Scholars, and those whom the king permits, may issue public fatwas. The MOIA also monitors and posts counter-arguments on extremist online forums and Web sites.
The government requires noncitizen legal residents to carry an identity card containing a religious designation for "Muslim" or "non-Muslim." Older residency cards bear religious denominations such as "Christian."
The Naturalization Law requires that applicants attest to their religious affiliation and requires applicants to get a certificate endorsed by their local cleric.
Freedom of religious assembly is severely limited, because the government does not allow individuals to publicly assemble based on religious affiliation. This freedom is also limited in other ways, including the government's hindering of the establishment and maintenance of non-Sunni places of worship. All new mosques require the permission of the MOIA, the local municipality, and the provincial government, which is functionally part of the MOI. The MOIA supervises and finances the construction and maintenance of most Sunni mosques, including the hiring of clerical workers, while the other approximately 30 percent of Sunni mosques are at private residences or were built and endowed by private persons. Individuals responsible for the supervision of a mosque are selected from the local community. The imams received monthly MOIA salaries ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 riyals ($667 to $1,333), depending on the seniority and educational level of the individual. The MOIA estimated that in 2010 it was financially and administratively responsible for 75,000 Sunni mosques, 15,000 of which are Friday mosques (larger mosques that host Friday prayers and include a sermon). According to data provided by the MOIA in October, it employs approximately 75,000 Sunni imams and 15,000 Sunni Friday khateebs (sermon leaders) to staff these mosques.
Unlike for Sunni mosques, the government does not finance construction or maintenance of Shiite mosques, and the process for obtaining a government-required license for a Shiite mosque is reportedly unclear and arbitrary. However, Shia have the right to manage their own mosques and to be supervised by Shiite scholars.
Discussion of sensitive religious issues such as sectarian differences was rare, and criticism of Islam is forbidden. Officially the government allows religious materials for personal use in the country; customs officials and the CPVPV do not have the authority to confiscate personal religious materials. Furthermore, the government's stated policy for its diplomatic and consular missions abroad is to inform foreign workers applying for visas that they have the right to worship privately and possess personal religious materials and to provide the name of the appropriate offices where grievances can be filed.
The government prohibits the public propagation of Islamic teachings that differ from the official interpretation of Islam and restricts the public religious training of non-Sunni groups and clergy.
Regardless of a student's personal religious traditions, public school students at all levels receive mandatory religious instruction based on the government's interpretation of Islam. Students in private international schools are not required to study Islam. Muslim students of other nationalities must obtain a waiver from the Ministry of Education (MOE) to attend private international schools, but obtaining the waiver was rarely a problem. Private religious schools not based on the official interpretation of Islam are not permitted.
The government observes the following religious holidays as national holidays: Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
Shiite courts' powers are limited by the fact that any litigant who disagrees with a ruling can seek a new decision from a Sunni court. Sunni court rulings can void Shiite court rulings, and government departments can choose not to implement judgments rendered by Shiite judges. Jurisdictionally these courts are only allowed to rule on cases in the Qatif and al-Ahsa areas; Shia from other regions cannot use such courts.
Discrimination is manifested in the calculation of accidental death or injury compensation. In the event a court renders a judgment in favor of a plaintiff who is a Jewish or Christian male, the plaintiff is only entitled to receive 50 percent of the compensation a Muslim male would receive; all other non-Muslims are only entitled to receive one-sixteenth of the amount a male Muslim would receive. Furthermore, judges may discount the testimony of non-practicing Muslims or individuals who do not adhere to the official interpretation of Islam and disregard the testimony of a non-Muslim in favor of the testimony of a Muslim. Moreover, courts adhere to the Qur'anic stipulation that in cases of capital punishment the value of a woman's testimony is only one-half that of a man's.
Restrictions on Religious Freedom
The government generally enforced legal and policy restrictions on religious freedom vigorously. There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom by the government during the reporting period.
Sunni clerics, who received government stipends, occasionally used anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-Shiite language in their sermons. It was common for preachers in mosques, including the mosques of Mecca and Medina, to end Friday sermons with a prayer for the well-being of Muslims and for the humiliation of polytheism and polytheists.
Most Shia expressed general concerns about discrimination in religious practice, education, employment, political representation, the judiciary, and the media.
The government generally limited public religious practice to activities that conform to the official interpretation of Islam. Practices that diverged from the official interpretation, such as celebrating Maulid Al-Nabi (the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad) and visits to the tombs of renowned Muslims, were forbidden. Enforcement was more relaxed in some communities than in others. For example, authorities allowed Shia in the Eastern Province city of Qatif greater freedom in their religious practices, including the public commemoration of Ashura (the "day of grief"). This event was held with minimal government interference. In other areas with large Shiite populations, such as al-Ahsa and Dammam, authorities restricted Shiite religious activities, including public observances of Ashura, public marches, loudspeaker broadcasts of clerics' lectures from Shiite community centers, and, in some instances, gatherings within those centers.
Shia described restrictions on their visits to Mecca and Medina as interference by Riyadh-based authorities in private Muslim worship. In addition government religious authorities continued the practice of destroying ancient Islamic historical sites.
Shiite mosques in mixed religious neighborhoods reportedly were required to recite the Sunni call to prayer, which is distinct from the Shiite call, at prayer times. Moreover, although Shia combine two of the five daily Sunni prayers, Shiite businessmen were often forced to close their shops during all five prayer times, in accordance with the country's official Sunni practices.
The government's stated policy is to permit private worship for all, including non-Muslims, and address violations of this policy by government officials; however, the CPVPV sometimes did not respect this policy. Individuals whose ability to worship privately had been infringed could address their grievances through the MOI, the government's official Human Rights Commission (HRC), the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR, a quasi-autonomous NGO), and when appropriate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The HRC and the NSHR reported that they did not receive any complaints against the CPVPV in the past year and that they have never received complaints regarding violations of religious freedom.
The government restricted the ability of religious leaders and activists to express views critical of the religious establishment. Consequently some Shia faced obstacles in constructing their mosques. For example, provincial officials in Al-Ahsa have blocked construction of some new Shiite mosques and community lecture halls, as well as withdrawn some permits for existing mosques and lecture halls. Shia in other parts of Saudi Arabia were not allowed to build Shia-specific mosques. However, the government did approve construction of some new Shiite mosques in Qatif and Al-Ahsa -- sometimes after lengthy delays due to the numerous approvals required -- but did not approve construction of Shiite mosques in Dammam, home to many Shia.
The government did not officially recognize several centers of Shiite religious instruction located in the Eastern Province, provide financial support for them, recognize certificates of educational attainment for their graduates, or provide employment for their graduates, all of which it does for Sunni religious training institutions. In contrast to previous reporting periods, none of these centers were subject to forced closures.
The government refused to approve construction or registration of Shiite community centers, so Shia were forced to build such facilities in private homes. These community centers sometimes did not meet safety codes, and the lack of legal recognition made their long-term financing and continuity considerably more difficult.
During the reporting period, there was significant public discussion, including in the media, questioning the official version of religious traditions and criticizing their enforcement. However, discussion of sensitive religious issues such as sectarian differences remained limited, and criticism of Islam was forbidden. Individuals who publicly criticized the official interpretation of Islam risked harassment, intimidation, and detention, and foreigners who did so risked deportation. Journalists and activists who wrote critically about the religious leadership or who questioned theological dogma risked detention, travel bans, and government shutdowns of their publications.
Moreover, the government continued to exclude Shiite perspectives from the state's extensive religious media and broadcast programming. The government sporadically imposed bans on the importation and sale of Shiite books and audiovisual products. The government also blocked access to some Web sites with religious content it considered offensive or sensitive, including the Al-Rasid Web site, in line with a broader official policy of censoring objectionable content, including political discourse and illicit materials. In addition, terms like "rejectionists," which are insulting to Shia, were commonly found in public discourse and could be found on the MOIA official Web site.
In higher education the government discriminated against Shia in the selection process for students, professors, and administrators at public universities. For example, Shia constituted an estimated 2 percent of professors at a leading university in al-Ahsa, an area with a population that is at least 50 percent Shiite.
At the primary and secondary levels of education in al-Ahsa, there continued to be severe underrepresentation of Shia among school principals, with approximately 1 percent of area principals Shiite, and none in al-Ahsa schools for females.
In Qatif, where Shia constitute approximately 90 percent of the population, many male principals and even some male religious teachers in primary schools were Shiite; however, there were no Shiite principals or religious teachers in Qatif's public female primary schools. There are a small number of private schools for girls in Qatif.
A new curriculum was implemented throughout the country in 2010 for first, fourth, and seventh grades. Math, science, and English textbooks for these grades were improved by the removal of all religious references. The new religious sciences and Arabic textbooks for those grades, however, continue to contain intolerant language. Approximately 100 schools piloted a new curriculum for second, fifth, and eighth grades in 2010 that reportedly contains a reduction in intolerant language, which is scheduled to be implemented in all schools next year. Reform programs for the other grades are being developed, but most schoolchildren used textbooks that retained language intolerant of other religious traditions, especially Jewish, Christian, and Shiite beliefs, and included commands to hate infidels for their kufr (unbelief) and kill apostates. Unrevised school textbooks continued to contain intolerant statements alluding to Shia and Sufi Muslims, and other religious groups, some inciting to violence. For example, the monotheism textbook for twelfth grade boys states that those who worship tombs -- a likely allusion to include Shia and Sufi Muslims' practice of visiting tombs of venerated Imams -- thereby commit apostasy by action. The text goes on to state that once a finding of apostasy has been confirmed, legal consequences apply, including that if the apostate refuses to repent, he must be killed.
Shia faced significant employment discrimination in the public and private sectors. A very small number of Shia occupied high-level positions in government-owned companies and government agencies. Many Shia believed that openly identifying themselves as Shia would negatively affect career advancement. Shia were significantly underrepresented in national security-related positions, including the Ministry of Defense and Aviation, the National Guard, and the MOI. Shia were better represented in the ranks of traffic police, municipalities, and public schools in predominantly Shiite areas. There was no formal policy concerning the hiring and promotion of Shia in the private sector, but anecdotal evidence suggested that in some companies, including the oil and petrochemical industries, a "glass ceiling" existed and well-qualified Shia were passed over for less qualified Sunni colleagues.
Qatif community leaders described allegedly prejudicial zoning laws that prevent construction of buildings over a certain height in various Shiite neighborhoods. The leaders claimed the laws prevented investment and development in these areas and aimed to limit the density of the Shiite population in any given area.
In contrast to previous reporting periods, there were no reports that MOI officials and/or CPVPV members pressured sponsors and employers not to renew the residency cards of non-Muslims they had sponsored for employment if it was discovered or suspected that those individuals had led, sponsored, or participated in private non-Muslim worship services. Similarly there were no reports that CPVPV members pressured employers and sponsors to reach verbal agreements with non-Muslim employees that they would not participate in private non-Muslim worship services.
Members of the Shiite minority were also subjected to political discrimination. For example, although Shia constitute approximately 10 to 15 percent of the citizen population and approximately one-third to one-half of the Eastern Province population, they were underrepresented in senior government positions. There were no Shiite ministers, deputy ministers, governors, deputy governors, or ministry branch directors in the Eastern Province, and only three of the 59 government-appointed municipal council members were Shiite. However, the Shia were proportionally represented among the elected members of the municipal councils, as they held 10 of 11 seats on the Qatif and al-Ahsa councils. An elected Shia headed the Qatif municipal council. However, the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council) -- the 150 strong, all-male, all-appointed body that advises the king and in some cases can initiate legislation -- only has five Shiite members.
Judicial discrimination against Shia was evident during the reporting period. Shiite leaders argue that the one court of appeals on which Shiite judges sit has no real authority and only verifies documents.
In addition to these discriminatory practices, Nakhawala leaders claimed the Shia in their community faced even more problems, particularly in comparison to the Twelvers in the Eastern Province. They claimed to hear anti-Shiite sermons and statements regularly in their neighborhoods. Unlike the case with Shia from the Eastern Province, there were no prominent Nakhawala Shia in government bodies such as the Consultative Council or the HRC. The Nakhawala also averred that their surname ("al-Nakhly," which roughly translates as "farmers" and identifies their minority status and sect) facilitated systematic discrimination against them in employment and education.
The Sulaimaniya Isma'ili community also continued to face additional obstacles in Najran Province. Community leaders asserted that the government discriminated against them by prohibiting their religious books; allowing Sunni religious leaders to declare them unbelievers; denying them government employment; and relocating them from the southwest to other parts of the country, or encouraging them to emigrate.
Abuses of Religious Freedom
There were reports of abuses of religious freedom in the country, including that of religious prisoners and detainees. Non-Muslim groups in different parts of the country were detained and harassed for worshipping privately. Harassment of Shia during religious worship and communal gatherings continued. The frequency of arbitrary arrests of Shia in the Eastern Province reported in the local media remained about the same as in the previous reporting period. A few high-profile death penalty cases involving alleged witchcraft continued.
The government continued to prohibit public, non-Muslim religious activities and non-Sunni activities in predominantly Sunni areas. Many of the reported related abuses were difficult to corroborate, because of witnesses' or victims' fears that disclosing such information might cause harm to themselves or to others. Moreover, information regarding government practices was generally incomplete because judicial proceedings usually were closed to the public, despite provisions in the criminal procedure law that require court proceedings to be open. Many non-Muslims worshiped in secret because of continuing fear of harassment and intimidation by police or the CPVPV, as well as police detention or deportation.
Police detained and imprisoned an unknown number of persons on charges of sorcery, black magic, or witchcraft; there were a few media reports each week on such arrests. Anti-sorcery departments exist within the CPVPV branches across the country, with the responsibility to investigate and report incidents of "sorcery" to local police. From media reports it appeared that some accused sorcerers were charlatans or quacks but others, mainly Africans, appeared to be engaged in traditional spiritual or healing practices.
On February 10, 2010, Rasid.com, a Shiite blog, reported that the authorities summoned a number of prominent Shia in al-Khobar and informed them that Shia were no longer allowed to pray in Sunni mosques.
On March 10, 2010, Rasid.com reported the arrest of Mohammad Jasim Al-Hofoufi, a Saudi Shiite teacher accused of reading polytheistic Shiite supplements at Al-Baqi'a cemetery. Sources indicate that Al-Hofoufi was sentenced to three months' detention and 60 lashes.
On March 19, 2010, four CPVPV officers and one uniformed police officer raided an Indian Christian prayer service being held in a private residence. The CPVPV took photographs and video in addition to confiscating Bibles and religious instruments. Police arrested the pastor and two worshippers and detained them in the local police station until their release on March 23.
On March 29, 2010, security authorities reportedly detained three Shia, including the brother of Abdullah Saleh al-Muhanna, a prominent Shia and former city mayor of Khobar, who was himself detained in May 2009. All three men were arrested for taking part in religious activities during Ashura in January 2010 and were sentenced to one month in prison in Khobar. They were released after serving the sentence. In August 2010 an arrest warrant was again issued for Al-Muhanna and another Shiite cleric, Sayed Mohammad Bager Al-Nasser, who on January 14, 2010 had been detained for having performed Friday prayer in a Sunni mosque. On November 29, 2010, the arrest warrant for Al-Nasser was enforced. The reason for his arrest was his continued insistence on establishing Shiite places of worship in Al Khobar, according to Rasid.com. No further details were reported at the end of the reporting period.
On August 2, 2010, the investigation service authority in Medina raided the ranch of Shiite preacher Mohamed Ali Al-Emary. Al-Emary's son Kazim was arrested 10 days earlier. Kazim Al-Emary remains in custody, and no additional information was available at the end of the reporting period.
On October 1, 2010, members of the CPVPV disrupted a private Catholic religious service and detained 13 foreign nationals overnight before releasing them the next day.
On October 26, 2010, police in Qatif detained Sheikh Saeed al Bahhar, the imam of Imam Reza Mosque in Tarot Island, and Mohammad Hassan al Hubail, the administrator of the mosque, for allegedly establishing a ceremony marking the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The administrator of Imam Al-Hadi Mosque in the village of Sanabis, Hussein al Dubaisy, was also arrested. As of the end of the reporting period, all three remained in detention centers.
On November 20, 2010, Shiite religious scholar Sheikh Hassan al-Baqshi from Hofouf in al-Ahsa was released after having been detained for three days for organizing congregational prayer.
In January 2009 Yemane Gebriel, an Eritrean pastor, fled the country to an undisclosed location after multiple threats from the CPVPV, following his 2005 arrest. There was no update on Gebriel's status at the end of the reporting period.
In February 2009 a group of Shia trying to visit the Baqi'a cemetery in Medina clashed with police and the CPVPV. Several religious and political leaders from the Shiite community wrote open letters to the king calling for the release of Shiite youth who were detained as a result of the incident. Eventually a delegation of Shia from Qatif, al-Ahsa, and Medina met with the king, after which the king announced the immediate release of all detainees.
In March 2009 Hamoud Saleh Al-Amri, a Saudi convert to Christianity, was released from prison on the condition that he not leave the country or appear in the media. On January 13, 2009, Al-Amri had been arrested for discussing his Christian faith on his blog. The case received international attention and advocacy groups such as the Arab Network for Human Rights Information campaigned for Al-Amri's release. This was the third time Al-Amri had been detained; he was held for nine months in 2004 and for one month in 2008.
In May 2009 Rasid.com reported the arrest of prominent religious figure Sheikh Ali Hussein Al-Amar for collecting and spending money on hussainyat (Shiite places of worship).
In May 2009 police in Khobar arrested Hajj Abdullah Saleh Al-Muhanna, a Shia, for leading prayer services in his home. Without facing trial, Al-Muhanna was released from prison on June 30, 2009.
On August 24, 2009, King Abdullah ordered the release of 17 Sulaimaniya Isma'ili Shiite men jailed after riots in Najran Province in 2000.
Between August and October 2009, at least eight Shiite men from al-Ahsa were reportedly arrested for taking part in religious activities during Ashura in January 2009. Most of the men were sentenced to one week in jail and transferred to al-Ahsa General Prison.
On September 3, 2009, Hadi al-Mutif, a Sulaimaniya Isma'ili Shia who has been on death row for 16 years for an offhand remark "insulting the Prophet Mohammad," received an additional five-year sentence for criticizing the government's justice system and human rights record on a tape smuggled out of prison and broadcast on Alhurra television in 2007. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported that Al-Mutif has been in solitary confinement for more than a year, reportedly in response to two suicide attempts. Al-Mutif remains in prison, but authorities are reviewing his case.
On September 20, 2009, the government released Naif al-Baqshi, the brother of a prominent Shiite cleric in al-Ahsa, after he spent 18 months in prison. Al-Baqshi was imprisoned in June 2008 without any official charges.
On September 20, 2009, the government released Sulaimaniya Isma'ili activist Ahmad Turki al-Saab after 18 months in Al-Hayer prison for organizing a petition campaign demanding the removal from office of Najran's former governor for alleged discrimination against the Shiite community. On April 26, 2008, al-Saab presented the petition personally to the king; al-Saab subsequently was summoned from Najran Province to the capital and detained on May 13, 2008.
On October 17, 2009, Rasid.com reported that Shiite religious scholar Tawfiq al-Amer would be tried before a court on charges of stirring sectarian conflicts in his Friday sermons when he called for an end to discrimination against the Shiite minority in the country. According to Al-Amer, he appeared in court on October 20, 2009 on charges of "stirring the system," but the judge postponed the trial indefinitely after his lawyer requested the right of legal access to the details of the case. Al-Amer was a known teacher of Qur'anic interpretations and was previously arrested three times. His most recent arrest was in September 2008 for announcing the call to prayer in accordance with Shiite practice.
On October 27, 2009, authorities reportedly arrested Shia Sayed Yusif al-Hashim for hosting Friday prayers in his house in Khobar. Al-Hashim was sentenced to one-week's imprisonment without trial, completed his sentence, and was released.
On November 2, 2009, Al-Heyad e-newspaper reported that authorities arrested 118 men and women in the Makkah Province and charged them with practicing sorcery. No additional information was available at the end of the reporting period.
On November 7, 2009, intelligence officers arrested Shiite activist Munir Jassas. Authorities had summoned him two months earlier and ordered him to provide a written pledge to stop blogging criticism about the government's poor treatment of Shiite Muslims. Reportedly he spent at least four months in solitary confinement. On August 28, 2010, he was asked to sign a "confession," which was a collection of statements he had made while being interrogated and, according to press reports, while under duress. Additionally, on September 1, 2010, he was taken to the lower court in Dammam where he was asked to read the same "confession" and sign it before a judge. Jassas remained in detention without charge at the end of the reporting period.
On November 9, 2009, Ali Hussain Sibat, a Lebanese presenter on a Beirut-based satellite television channel, was sentenced to death on charges related to sorcery. Sibat was arrested and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008 to perform Umra. On March 10, 2010, judges in Medina refused the sentence of the appeals court and upheld the original death sentence verdict. On November 12, 2010, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence, declaring that it was too severe since no one was harmed by Sibat's actions and he had no prior criminal record.
Between November 2009 and June 2010, authorities closed seven Shiite mosques or waqfs (religious foundations). However, there were no further developments during the reporting period.
From November 1 to 30, 2009, at least five Shiite men from al-Ahsa were reportedly arrested for taking part in the preparations for the remembrance day of Imam Al-Mahdi in August. Most of the men were sentenced to one week in jail and transferred to al-Ahsa General Prison. No further details were available at the end of the reporting period.
In February 2008 Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a public letter to the king requesting that he halt the execution of Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali for witchcraft. Arrested by the CPVPV in May 2005, she was sentenced to death in April 2006 for allegedly bewitching a man in Quraiyat. Court procedures were highly irregular. In September 2006 an appeals court reversed the trial court's ruling due to insufficient evidence and remanded the case to the trial court. According to HRW the trial court reinstituted the death sentence against her on a "discretionary" basis in the "public interest" to "protect the creed, souls, and property of this country." Her case was transferred to the royal court in January 2008. At the end of the reporting period, she remained imprisoned.
In April 2008 police imprisoned a group of 14 Indian Christians in Makkah Province for between 24 and 56 hours and issued deportation orders through their employment sponsors. By July 2010 all of them were deported.
Improvements and Positive Developments in Respect for Religious Freedom
During the reporting period, the government implemented policies that sought to address issues of religious freedom in the country. Moreover, the king and other government and religious leaders showed efforts that aimed to expand interfaith and national dialogues to promote tolerance and moderation through broadly targeted seminars and media campaigns.
Improvements included the implementation of a completely new curriculum in three grades and continued teacher training, better protection of the right to possess and use personal religious materials, augmented efforts to curb and investigate harassment by the CPVPV (particularly through specialized training to improve the performance of the CPVPV), increased media coverage and criticism of the CPVPV, greater authority and capacity for official human rights entities to operate, and measures to combat extremist ideology.
The king continued a national dialogue campaign to increase tolerance and encourage moderation and understanding. During the reporting period, the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue (KACND) had 2,000 certified trainers. Over the past five years, the KACND has trained over 500,000 men and women in over 17,000 training programs in 42 cities on "the culture and importance of open dialogue and communication skills." Beginning in June 2010, the KACND launched an eight-month awareness campaign using television advertisements and print media. The government-owned Saudi Channel One donated free airtime to the KACND for this campaign. All of the advertisements focused on spreading tolerance and dialogue, with some specifically focused on interaction with different cultures. During the reporting period, a mix of high-level government and religious officials openly supported this campaign. They advocated against religious extremism and intolerant language, especially in mosques and schools. The center continued to conclude memoranda of understanding with government ministries and institutions, including the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the CPVPV, universities, and charities. Training sessions with CPVPV members were ongoing. In October 2010 the KACND trained over 100 CPVPV members in communication skills to promote dialogue and help prevent conflicts.
The government continued to combat extremist ideology by scrutinizing religious clerics and teachers closely and dismissing those found to be promoting intolerant and extreme views. The MOIA supervised clerics through regular inspections, surprise inspections, receiving complaints from worshipers, and investigating accusations in the press. In July 2010 for example, 2,000 teachers reportedly were either fired or transferred to administrative positions due to fear that they were indoctrinating their young students with dangerous content. According to Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the MOI, his ministry assesses teachers' beliefs and viewpoints prior to hiring them to identify extremist ideologies.
Additionally some leading government and religious officials, including the king and crown prince, made strong public statements against extremism and instead advocated tolerance and moderation. For example, on September 26, during the symposium on "The Saudi Moderate Approach," Minister of Interior Prince Nayef said, "[T]errorism has harmed our country and because of it we lost many of our sons, we have approached it in a moderate way such as giving advice to those who have extremist thoughts to bring them back to their senses." Additionally according to press reports, on November 11, three days before the Hajj, the king called on citizens "to look at the common points of different religions, creeds, and cultures and to stress the shared principles in order that we sidestep our differences, narrow the distance between us, and build a world dominated by peace and understanding, enjoying progress and prosperity."
On August 12 King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz decreed that only members of the Council of Senior [Religious] Scholars, and those whom he permits, may issue public fatwas. The decree was in direct response to a spate of controversial and sometimes contradictory fatwas issued by scholars and imams outside the council. The decree exempted religious opinions given in private at the request of an individual. Individuals may continue to seek religious opinions on the day-to-day aspects of life or specific situations that may arise and are not otherwise addressed in the official public fatwas. Following the decree, the Saudi Communications and Information Technology Center blocked three Web sites and the sites' text messaging services. Several similar sites voluntarily stopped issuing fatwas.
There were fewer reports that government officials confiscated religious materials, and no reports that customs officials confiscated religious materials from travelers, whether Muslims or non-Muslims. Individuals reportedly were able to bring personal Bibles, crosses, DVDs of sermons, and other religious materials into the country without difficulty.
The MOIA confirmed that it continues to monitor educational materials used at religious summer camps to prevent the teaching of extremist ideologies to children.
Section III. Status of Societal Actions Affecting Enjoyment of Religious Freedom
There were reports of societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice. In addition to the religious basis on which the government claims its authority, and the significant role the country's religious leadership plays in the country, the culture also exerts intense pressure on the population to conform to socio-religious norms. As a result a majority of citizens supported a state based on Islamic law, although there were differing views as to how this should be realized in practice.
Discrimination based on religion was a factor in mistreatment of foreign workers by citizen employers and coworkers.
Religious vigilantes and/or volunteers, unaffiliated with the CPVPV and acting on their own, sometimes harassed and assaulted citizens and foreigners.
Media criticism of government educational materials continued during the reporting period.
Editorial cartoons occasionally exhibited anti-Semitism characterized by stereotypical images of Jews along with Jewish symbols and comparisons of Israeli government actions to those of Nazis, particularly at times of heightened political tensions with Israel. For example, on September 15 the daily newspaper Al-Madina showed a caricatured Jew whipping an Arab toward "concessions" in a new round of peace talks. Anti-Semitic editorial comments appeared in government and private print and electronic media in response to regional political events.
Section IV. U.S. Government Policy
U.S. policy is to press the government to respect religious freedom and honor its public commitment to permit private religious worship by non-Muslims, eliminate discrimination against minorities, promote respect for non-Muslim religious belief, and combat violent extremism. Senior U.S. government officials raised these issues at the highest levels within the MOIA, MOI, HRC, MOE, and Ministry of Culture and Information during the reporting period. U.S. government officials also continued to meet with minority religious groups to discuss religious freedom concerns, including Shia groups and non-Muslim expatriates.
Additionally, Saudi government officials regularly participate in U.S. government visitor programs to promote tolerance and interfaith dialogue. Previous participants in these programs continued to commend the openness and tolerance they witnessed on their trips to the United States in lectures and television and radio programs that reached a broad audience.
Abna.IR
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