Gracen Intelligence

Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law

2009-01-21T00:15:00.004Z

Morgaan Sinclair will be commenting for Gracen Intelligence in the coming weeks on wins and losses in the Islamic world since the appearance of this book, which we still feel is must reading for everyone interested in the future of Western freedoms and fate of the world's Muslims, always the first and most beleaguered of the targets of radical Islamism.

Radical Islam's Rules
The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law
Edited by Paul Marshall
Rowman & Littlefield, 226 pp., $27.95

A Review for The Weekly Standard, December 7, 2005

ITS IMAGES ARE ETCHED INTO our memory. In Bali, 202 people are incinerated in Kutu Beach nightclubs, punished for their "decadence." In Pakistan, Zafran Bibi, pregnant by rape, is sentenced to death by stoning, her pregnancy taken as proof of adultery. In Saudi Arabia, 15 girls, fleeing a burning dormitory in their nightdresses, are forced back into the flames by the mutawwiyya (religious militia) and die in the inferno for violating "Islamic" standards of dress.

This, we are told, is sharia, Islamic law. But as the authors here explain, there is a crucial distinction to be made between traditional and extreme sharia, and at the outset they provide two essential insights. First, Paul Marshall defines radical Islamism as "a program for the restoration of a unified Muslim ummah, ruled by a new Caliphate, governed by reactionary Islamic sharia law, and organized to wage jihad on the rest of the world."

Second, extreme sharia is shown to be a radical departure from traditional sharia, the body of guidance for Muslims, organized in varied schools. These formulated a legal consensus based on the Koran, the hadith, the lives of the Prophet and his original companions, and precedents from early Muslim jurists. Traditional sharia--"the path" or "the way"--incorporates guidelines for marriage, economics, and criminal law that exemplify justice, "the right," and "the good."

By contrast, extreme sharia claims to manifest divine will. Because extreme sharia, says Nina Shea in her essay, "is maintained as God's direct reign on earth--and not simply a fallible human interpretation of sacred law--it precludes checks and balances, a separation of powers, real legislative power, the rule of law, and free elections."
The first Western glimpse of extreme sharia came with the Iranian revolution of 1979. Abolishing the rights granted by the 1906 Persian constitution and extended during the Pahlavi era, the revolutions forced women to cover themselves and accept complete personal control by men. The Baha'i and other dissenters from Shia Islamic orthodoxy were viciously suppressed, and personal freedoms all but vanished.

A doctrine of "bloodshed with impunity" created what Mehrangiz Kar, another contributor, calls "a vacuum that generates terror." Possessed of absolute governing power, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa ordering the killing for blasphemy of Salman Rushdie, a British subject. Arrogating ever-increasing power to themselves, the nonelected Iranian Council of Guardians has vetoed every piece of reform legislation brought before it, and, in 2004, disqualified the candidacies of thousands of liberals standing for national election.

In Pakistan, extreme sharia arose in a legal environment made vulnerable to extremism by an unstable constitution. Its implementation has generated social havoc and near-total economic chaos. The country's powerful use terrifying blasphemy laws and gruesome hudud punishments--only rarely employed since the earliest Ottoman times--as coercive devices to intimidate dissenters. Pakistan stands in violation of virtually all international human rights agreements, including conventions against the use of torture and the inhumane treatment of children.

But the most brutal form of extreme sharia is the original one: Wahhabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia, which spawned al Qaeda. It arose just 250 years ago in the desolate Nejd region of Arabia. "It is not conservative," writes Stephen Schwartz, in the opening essay, "but radical. . . . It is not based on sharia as understood during more than 1,000 years of Islamic jurisprudence but on a crude and ultrasimplistic interpretation that rejects the sharia embodied in the four established Sunni legal schools." Women are beaten in the streets for the slightest dress code violation, denied the vote, prohibited from driving, and have no rights even to the children they bear.
Wahhabi extremism did not remain within Saudi borders.

Shocked by the Iranian Revolution, and fearful of rising Shia power in the region, the House of Saud launched a campaign for worldwide export of the Wahhabi version of sharia in 1980, funded by their oil wealth. Saudis appeared with Alhaji Ahmed Sani, the governor of Nigeria's Zamfara state, just days before he announced plans to implement sharia in his jurisdiction. Nigerian Islamists hope to institute extreme sharia in 19 of Nigeria's 36 states, and then to use the majority to force it on the rest of the country. The Saudi cultural attaché in Lagos, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz, reports that his government has followed developments in Nigeria closely and has noted the results "with delight."

In Sudan, the Saudis bankrolled the National Islamic Front (NIF), founded by the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus far, the NIF has starved or slaughtered as many as two million Christians, Muslims, and animists. In the case of the Nuba, an indigenous south Sudanese community, the NIF attempted an authentic genocide. As Hamouda Fathelrahman Bella relates here, Sudan today is a stark example of Islamic pluralism destroyed. The Sufi Islamic funj state in Sudan (1504-1821) was characterized by simple, flexible worship and a lenient "white sharia" that fostered harmony between peoples of different beliefs, races, and cultures. Today, Sudan could not be more different from its historical example.

In contrast to these atrocities, developments in Malaysia and Indonesia, as described by Peter G. Riddell, offer some hope. In the 2004 elections in both countries, the Muslim majority reinforced protection of previously established safeguards of religious pluralism. Politicians supporting Indonesia's Pancasila philosophy--defining God as a principle shared by all five of Indonesia's major religions (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism)--triumphed over those supporting the so-called Jakarta Charter, rejected in the constitution, which would institutionalize sharia for all Muslims in Indonesia.

After years of slow Islamization under Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, Malaysians returned to the vision of Tunku Abdul Rahman, the country's first prime minister: "There is no way we should have an Islamic state here," Rahman said. "We cannot force the non-Malays and non-Muslims to follow our way of life." Malays elected Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who holds a vision of Islam equated with progress, not a backward-looking vision of extreme sharia. His decisive victory, says Riddell, "has given a shot in the arm to Muslim governments elsewhere that are faced by conservative Islamist opponents who dream of creating sharia states."

Radical Islam's Rules concludes with a Rand Corporation assessment of the Afghan constitution and Nina Shea's recommendations for American responses to pressure to institute extreme sharia. A picture of an uninformed U.S. foreign policy emerges from both. A top State Department policy coordinator suggested that the Afghan bill of rights need not assert the right of individual religious freedom because "99.9 percent of the population is Muslim." The constitution was drafted without this safeguard, and thereafter, two journalists and a cabinet member in the interim government of Hamid Karzai have faced blasphemy charges. The "repugnancy" clause of the constitution provides that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam."

Then there is America. In the confusion following 9/11, Washington sought ways to prevent radical Islamism from spreading here, only to discover it already had. Slipping in under the radar, Wahhabis had already gained control of 80 percent of all American mosques (and countless schools and charities) and now distribute anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-American jihadist literature. The Armed Forces' Muslim chaplain program was established and run by Abdurahman Alamoudi, now serving a 23-year prison sentence for supporting terrorism.
Proponents of extreme sharia, Shea says, "outflank moderate Muslims in resources, institutions, infrastructure, and opportunities to influence American foreign policy makers." Among Shea's recommendations: that the United States stop the propagation by Saudi Arabia of all Wahhabi ideology on American soil--in mosques, schools, prisons, and the military--and that America urge other countries to do the same.

R. James Woolsey adds another: "In combating this reactionary force, we must make common cause with the hundreds of millions of decent and reasonable Muslims in the world who want peace and prosperity for themselves and their families. . . . In supporting their struggle for democracy and against . . . extreme sharia, we are helping secure our own interest in a peaceful and prosperous world."

Rich with concise histories and a wealth of viable information on Islam, Radical Islam's Rules provides real clarity about sharia, both as the traditional body of guidance it has always been, and as the politicized, virulently oppressive control mechanism it has been deliberately manipulated to become.

Morgaan Sinclair is a book editor, writer, and author of the forthcoming SACRIFICE: Women as the Currency of Appeasement in the War on Terror. She is a Senior Fellow of Gracen Intelligence.

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Where is Obama’s “Hindu Outreach Advisor”? After All, He’s Got a Muslim One. Why?

2008-10-30T19:20:00.005Z

by Morgaan Sinclair, for Gracen Intelligence

Where is Obama’s Hindu Outreach Advisor? How about his Jewish Outreach Advisor? How about his Native American Medicine Outreach Advisor? How about one for the Baha’i? the Jains? the Buddhists? the Sufis? the Ahmadiyya? the Christians?

What’s that, you say? Isn’t a Muslim advisor also a Sufi advisor?

No, not in this county. Obama’s Muslim Outreach Advisor has purely Wahhabi (conservative, if not radical, Sunni) connections, and they consider the peaceful and mystical Sufis apostates on whom there is a standing death sentence. They also openly attack and threaten the Ahmadiyya and the Baha’I, so they are, in fact, very quick to slap an “Infidel” label on any Muslim that doesn’t agree with them.

But Obama does have Muslim advisors to the exclusion of all other minority religious groups. Obviously, with Christians making up 78% of the American population, we’d have to concede they probably don’t need “outreach.” But have a look at the demographics of religious minorities in the United States (from the CIA’s The World Factbook):

Jewish: 1.6%
Buddhist: .7%
Muslim: .6%
All others, including Native American, Pacifica Islander, animists, etc.: 2.4%
Unaffiliated or No Religion: 16.1%

How many Muslims is that, exactly? Well, because it’s illegal to ask that on census records, there’s a good deal of guessing – and propaganda – going on. The ever-suspect unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing – CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, originally known as Hamas in the United States – gets almost all of its funding from Saudi sources. Muslims have fled this pariah in droves since 9/11, but CAIR still falsely touts itself as the premier Muslim “civil rights” organization in America. Its major thrust seems to be the hysterical screaming of “Discrimination!” and “Racism!” whenever pundits expose overt and covert jihadist activities in the United States. It is particularly fond of the harassment lawsuit tactic on the probably theory that they have more money, so they can outlast soothsayers in court. That’s true: They have grants from Saudi Prince Alwaleed (always in the list of the world’s 10 richest people) in excess of $50 million.

At any rate, CAIR’s propaganda says that nearly 7 million Americans are Muslims. The City University of New York, however, did a non-census religious survey, and they have placed the number at 1.1 million Muslim adults plus .7 million children, or 1.8 million. As of 2007, the CIA agrees: It’s 1.8 million including children, or .6% of the population.

All right. If one is going to have outreach programs for subgroups that claim to be misunderstood and beleaguered minorities, that’s fine. But do it for all, not just one group.
In fact, Muslims, who are not the most beleaguered of all the minority groups in America. Always the greatest victims of hate crimes are blacks. Of all hate crimes, violence against blacks tops the list with 51% or more.

But of religious hate crimes, it’s always the Jews getting kicked the hardest. According to the FBI’s hate crimes figures for 2007, there were 1,628 victims of anti-religious hate crime. Some 69.2% of them were Jews, attacked on an anti-Semitic basis. Only 8.7% of them were victims of anti-Islamic bias.

All hate crime is despicable, and any Muslim who is attacked on the basis of religious orientation should absolutely scream bloody murder. And call me up. I’ll scream bloody murder, too.

But that Obama has a Muslim Outreach Advisor but not a Jewish one, when Jews are overwhelmingly the most attacked religious group in America, or a Hindu one – given the fact that Hindus are on a demographic par with Muslims – is indication of political pandering, if not fear. It elevates American Muslims to the state of a privileged province of the American population landscape.

And more worrying still is the pool of radical Islamists from which he has chosen his “advisor.”

In fact, he’s had two, both bad apples:

• The first was Mazen Asbahi, whose radical Islamist connections were exposed by the Wall Street Journal, which discovered his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and imams involved in terrorist funding. The WSJ submitted a list of questions to the Obama’s campaign. But they didn’t get answers: Instead, Asbahi instantaneously resigned and was replaced by:

• Minha Huseini, who then promptly met, on September 15th, in Virginia, with several Islamic organizations with ties to Hamas. Mazen Asbahi was also at the meeting. Then she had din-din with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arguably the worst women’s right offender on the planet with the possible exception of the religious police in Saudi Arabia.

So, Obama is not choosing from the truly moderate Muslims in America – had he done so, he would have gone to the Sufis or the Shia’s, not to the very enclaves of Sunni radicalism that brought us 9/11.
And, as Amir Taheri pointed out earlier this week in Forbes, Obama, widely touted by the radical imams in Iran who claim his ascendency in the West heralds the coming of the 12th imam and the triumph of Islam all over the earth, is the worst news for the majority of Iranians – intensely pro-American – who fear his election and the impact that his pandering will have on their hopes for freedom.

It is no accident that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood have all endorsed Barack Obama. And even though an unsubstantiated allegation that Al Qaeda had endorsed McCain, such is only a use of reverse psychology. Al Qaeda tried to play it straight in endorsing John Kerry, and it backfired with Bush’s re-election. They learned. This time, if they did it at all, which any dispassionate observer must doubt, they used reverse psychology: If they tell us to vote for McCain, obviously we’ll think we should vote for Obama. Hopefully, America is now shaking off this mesmerism, this trick of light and mirrors.

The bottom line is that we have a Presidential candidate passing over the Muslims in America proffering real solutions and in deep with exactly the minority that is a problem for both Muslims and non-Muslims who cherish values of free speech, freedom of religion, and equal rights under the law. We have a Presidential candidate refusing to turn over his birth certificate and his records from Columbia and Harvard and Kenya. We have a Presidential candidate taking instructions from Muslims of the worst sort – Muslims NOT representative of the American Muslim community. And we have a Presidential candidate who makes comments at a Muslim rally, the video of which the Los Angeles Times will not release.

There is too much wrong here, too much hidden, too many vicious associations – from the violent Bill Ayers to the racist Jeremiah Wright to the terrorist-associated Muslim advisors -- to allow this man at the helm.

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Obama: Fork over the Birth Certificate Right Now … or Get Out of the Race

2008-10-30T15:10:00.006Z

Also, release ALL your records from Columbia, Harvard, and Kenya. And do it now. You have NO RIGHT to stand for election in this country if you are not willing to be honest with us about who you are, what you really believe, and where you were born. Somehow having your grandmother on tape saying quite definitively that you were born in a hospital in Mombassa has a great deal of gravitas. So either you prove that your grandmother is a liar, or you get out of the race. Because …

The only possible reason for your stonewalling is that you were born in Kenya. That being said, stand aside and let Hillary Clinton run.

Otherwise, you’re going to be found out AFTER the fact and cause the whole country an extreme crisis.

That’s it. World’s shortest article.

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Our Brothers Keepers? from Chesler Chronicles

2008-10-29T18:13:00.004Z

by Phyllis Chesler

29 October 2008

~

Listen carefully to what they are telling us.

In their countries, if they speak out for women’s rights, they will be imprisoned for twenty years–something that just happened to a young male journalism student in Afghanistan. The Afghan mullahs have accused the judge of being “anti-Islam.” They wanted the young man, Parwez Kambakhsh, hung.

Those Muslim and Arab dissidents who live in exile in the West do not understand why their western counterparts refuse to respect the freedom they enjoy in their own western countries but, on the contrary, blame the West for the crimes of Egypt and Syria. Muslim tyrants usually imprison and torture their dissidents. In Iran, the country that once held Americans hostage for 444 days and which is now threatening to visit a nuclear holocaust upon Israel, peaceful student activists, feminists, and dissidents are arrested and, if they’re lucky, are not hung or shot but are “only” raped, flogged, put into solitary confinement and eventually released. Some souls flee and apply for political asylum in the West.

In 2006, the American State Department protested the horrendous treatment of Iranian student activists, especially that of Akbar Mohammadi who died in captivity.

In 2008, 22 year-old Hana Abdi was sentenced to five long years in prison. Her crime? Working on a campaign to gather one million signatures on behalf of Iranian women’s’ rights. In September of 2008, four Iranian women were sentenced to six months in jail for cyber-feminist activism. Their crime? Writing online articles on behalf of women’s’ rights in Iran.

Arab and Muslim intellectuals are forever asking me why progressives in the West do not stand against tyranny but instead seek to appease or make common cause with it. In a recent interview in the New York Times, formerly tortured Iranian student protestor Ahmad Batebi carefully said: “If people could stand up and have the right to challenge their government, and not be put down by the government, and know that they have the international community behind them, then they would change their government’s policy and behavior.” (Italics mine).

So, to our new American President I say: On your watch, will we stand with the tyrants or with the dissidents? Do we have a responsibility to advance the cause of liberty internationally—or have the American people decided that the cost of doing so is too high, that it is now time to take care of our own first? This is certainly a valid, although heartbreaking position.

But, Mr. New President: What if the forces of Al-Qaeda rush into Iraq, just as Iran and its proxy army Hezbollah de-stabilize the Middle East and openly take over Lebanon? What if our departure means that the Sunni- Shiia fratricide heats up even further and the Muslim Brotherhood openly takes over Egypt–just as Hamas took over Gaza: via the ballot? What if this means that more and more women will all be wearing the face-veil and put in purdah instead of entering the professions or leading dissident struggles? What if this means that more and more Christians will be persecuted, murdered, and forced to flee Muslim lands?

Alright, you say: What’s that got to do with us? Well, what if similar (or the same) forces of repression are already here in our own country and using our laws of tolerance to advance the cause of intolerance? What about the imposition of Sharia law right here in America–a possibility that my dear friend, the writer and dissident, Nonie Darwish, fears might happen? Her important new book on the subject, Cruel and Usual Punishment. The Terrifying Implications of Global Sharia Law will be out in early 2009.

Many Muslim women in the Muslim world are bravely speaking out against the veil and against other features of Islamic gender apartheid. Rania al-Baz was a successful television news announcer in Saudi Arabia. One day, in 2005, her husband, jealous of her success, beat her so badly she sustained thirteen face fractures and was in a coma for four days. Rania bravely published the photos of how she looked. This caused a sensation. It inspired the first study of domestic violence in The Kingdom. Rania required twelve operations to restore her facial appearance. Rania says: “In the end, I may lose my fight. But at least I did not accept the way things are.”

In 2007, in Afghanistan, within the same week, two female journalists, Zakia Zaki, head of a local radio station and, Sanga Amach, a 22-year-old news presenter with a private television station were shot dead for their criticism of warlords.

Activists are being censored, warned, arrested, and tortured. In 2007, the Egyptian government began a massive crackdown on journalists and human rights activists. They are paying a huge price for doing so.

Yet, right here in America, as Darwish points out, more and more young and educated Muslim-American women are proudly and aggressively veiling themselves as a way of supporting jihad, protesting alleged “Islamophobia,” and expressing solidarity with their religious community. They, too are cutting their dissident and trapped Muslim sisters and brothers loose.

Mr. New President: Are you prepared to join them?

From Chesler Chronicles, http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2008/10/29/our-brothers-keepers/
Chesler Chronicles offers a wealth of excellent writing on womens' issues, and we heartily recommend the site.

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Fighting for Muslim women's rights

2008-10-28T22:32:00.003Z

Some of the world's leading Islamic feminists have been gathered in Barcelona for the third International Congress on Islamic Feminism, to discuss the issues women face in the Muslim world.

Some of the women taking part in the conference explained the problems in their home countries, and where they hoped to make progress.

ASMA BARLAS, Author, Pakistan

Religions always come into cultures, they don't come into abstract and pure spaces. Islam came into a very patriarchal, tribal and misogynistic culture. One of the deepest damages to Islam has been its reduction to "Arabisation".

Islam is influenced by the culture of the country it enters

I'm not going to say that the Arabs are particularly misogynistic in a way that nobody else is, but I do think there are very particular traits and attitudes towards women that have crept into Islam.

I have a friend who has been studying the interface between what he calls the Persian models and the Arabist models of Islam in the subcontinent and surprise, surprise: the Arabist models are misogynistic, authoritarian, unitarian and the Persian models are much more plural and tolerant.

This is a fight on two fronts - on the one hand we are struggling against the kinds of oppression dominant in Muslim patriarch societies and, on the other, Western perceptions of Islam as necessarily monolithic, and confusing the ideals of Islam with the reality of Muslim lives.

If we read the Koran as a totality rather than pulling out random verses or half a line, that opens all kinds of possibilities for sexual equality.

RAFIAH AL-TALEI, journalist, Oman

Oman is relatively liberal, women are free to choose what to wear, and can choose their jobs and education. And the law does not require us to wear any particular form of clothing. But there are strong social and cultural factors - coming from the fact that we are in Arabia - that limit women.

Sharia is fair, but it is the wrong interpretations that are the problem. Male judges often don't understand the principal goals of sharia

As a journalist, it has not been hard for me to work among men, but it has been hard for some of my colleagues whose families told them this was not "appropriate" work for them.

The biggest difficulties are the social and cultural factors, and some aspects of law. For example, women who marry a foreigner cannot pass on their nationality to their children, whereas men in that situation can.

Religion is not an issue in our struggle, although there are problems with family law about divorce and marriage status. Omani laws are based on sharia law. Sharia is fair, but it is the wrong interpretations that are the problem. Male judges often don't understand the principal goals of sharia. We feel the law is fair, but ends up being unfair for women because of how judges interpret it.

Cultural and social factors often get mixed up with religion. Educated women can be more empowered and separate the two, but many don't dare challenge the conventions.

NORANI OTHMAN, Scholar-activist, Malaysia

I don't think it is any more difficult to be an Islamic feminist than a non-Muslim, or secular feminist.

Asian Muslim states have very different traditions to Middle Eastern countries

Feminists in general have to face up to political and cultural obstacles, to achieve our objectives of women's rights. Even Western feminists have had a similar history - having to engage with certain religious beliefs not conducive to gender equality.

Perhaps the only distinctive difference peculiar to Muslim feminists is that we are caught in the cross-currents of modernisation and a changing society, due to a modern economy on the one hand and the global resurgence of political Islam on the other.

Political Islam wants to impose a world view about the gender order that is not consistent with the realities and the lived experiences of Muslim men and women in contemporary society.

Our detractors would hurl empty accusations at us - calling us Western, secular or anti-Islamic

There is a difference between South East Asian Muslim countries and the ones in the Middle East - culturally we are less patriarchal, we can always respond to our detractors by pointing out we don't have the cultural practices that they do.

Our detractors would hurl empty accusations at us - calling us Western, secular or anti-Islamic.

Our arguments are rooted within Islam - we want renewal and transformation within the Islamic framework. They don't like that.

We have a holistic approach, seeking gender equality within the Islamic framework, supported by constitutional guarantees. We see that these are not inconsistent with the message of the Koran, particularly during its formative stages. We have to understand the history and cultural context and extract the principle that will be applicable in modern times.

SITI MUSDAH MULIA, Academic, Indonesia

In my experience, I find that it is very difficult to make Indonesian Muslim women aware that politics is their right.

In Indonesian society, politics is always conceived as cruel and dirty, so not many women want to get involved, they think it is just for men.

According to the [radicalist] Islamic understanding, women should be confined to the home, and the domestic sphere alone

We try to make women understand that politics is one of our duties and rights and they can become involved without losing their femininity.

Personally, I'm non-partisan, I'm not linked to one political party because, in Indonesia, the political parties often discriminate against women.

I struggle from outside the political sphere to make it women-friendly, to reform political parties and the political system.

One day, I hope to be involved more directly, if the system becomes more women-friendly. We have passed a law about affirmative action and achieving 30% female representation, but we won't see if it is implemented until after 2009 elections. We are waiting.

In Indonesia, some groups support us, but some radical groups oppose what we are trying to achieve. They accuse me, accuse feminist Muslims, of being infidels, of wanting to damage Islamic affairs.

According to their Islamic understanding, women should be confined to the home, and the domestic sphere alone.

AMINA WADUD, Academic, United States

There are many more conversations going on today between different interpretations of Islam. Some interpretations are very narrow, some are more broad, principled, ethically-based.

Unless we have sufficient knowledge about Islam, we cannot bring about reform of Islam. I am not talking about re-interpretation, I am talking more about gender-inclusive interpretation.

Islam and feminism are not mutually exclusive

We have a lot of information about men's interpretations of Islam, and of what it means to be a woman in Islam. We don't have equal amounts of information about what women say it means to be a good woman in Islam.

Now it's time for men to be active listeners, and after listening, to be active participants in bringing about reform.

There is a tendency to say that it is Islam that prohibits women from driving a car, for example, when women drive cars all over the world except in one country. So then you know it is not Islam. Islam has much more flexibility, but patriarchy tends to have the same objective, and that is to limit our ability to understand ourselves as Muslims.

I have always defined myself as pro-faith and pro-feminism.

I do not wish to sacrifice my faith for anybody's conception of feminism, nor do I sacrifice the struggle and actions for full equality of women, Muslim and non-Muslim women, for any religion. Islamic feminism is not an either/or, you can be Muslim and feminist and strive for women's rights and not call yourself a feminist.

FATIMA KHAFAJI, Consultant, Egypt

In Egypt, Islamic feminism is a way for women activists to reach a large number of ordinary women in the villages and in urban low-income areas, using a framework of Islam. So there would be a reference to Islam when talking about women's rights. Experience has shown that that is an easy way to get women to accept what you're saying.

Not many women get information about women's rights easily, so you have to counter what has been fed to them, to both men and women, from the strict, conventional, religious people who have more access to women.

They have their own idea of women's rights in Islam - that is, patriarchal, still limiting opportunities for women. But women have been receiving this concept for ages, through the radio, TV, mosques, so the challenge is how to give them another view, of enlightened Islam, that talks about changing gender roles. It's not an easy job.

Sexual harassment is happening because men think the control of women's bodies is a matter for them

Historically, in Egypt in the feminist movement, there have been both Muslim and Christian women. It has never been a problem. Unfortunately nowadays, it has become a problem. Religious discrimination has been dividing people very much. We have to think carefully about how to supersede the differences.

With family law, we're aiming to change the philosophy of the law itself. Traditional family law puts women down. I can see this whole notion of "women do not have control over their bodies" in so many laws, in the penal code and family law. For example, sexual harassment is happening because men think the control of women's bodies is a matter for them. Even the decision whether to have children is the decision of men. This whole notion has to be changed in a dramatic way if we are really going to talk about women's rights in Egypt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7689897.stm

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Using Reverse Psychology, Al Qaeda Endorses Obama

2008-10-28T22:13:00.005Z

Morgaan Sinclair

First published in Blogger Network News at http://www.bloggernews.net/118331

It’s a bit shocking, really, that the Washington Post rushed to print an alleged endorsement of John McCain by Al Qaeda. Missing was any verification by authorities that it was penned by anyone in command of any of the brigade’s tawdry, misanthropic, holier-than-thou, spiritually moronic band of woman-beating, bombing and beheading throwbacks. One wonders what the motive of the Washington Post could have been to act (again) as the mouthpiece for terrorists without any fact-checking, a term that has apparently been erased from its editors’ lexicon.

Meanwhile, the purpose of these Al Qaeda poseurs in attempting to tamper with U.S. Presidential elections – given that they do not get a vote – represents several things:

1. The Memo. Just another little missive from your blood-lusting Islamofascist superiors that they are the ones to be in charge, lest you forget, so they expect you to follow their instructions. The veiled threat of violence will be legitimately assumed.

2. Egoistic Arrogance. Of course we must be interested in their opinion.

3. The use of the most transparent form of reverse psychology. What Al Qaeda wants – since it wants our destruction – must be what we don’t want. So if they say they want McCain, we will, like lemmings, rush to Obama. Or, they hope so.

Now, let’s flesh that out a little bit, as whether Americans get it or not, the media obviously doesn’t.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda makes attempt to smear McCain with ‘endorsement’”? Nope, but they should have.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda throws support behind Obama with phony McCain endorsement”? Nope, but they should have.

Did the headlines say, “Al Qaeda plays same game as last election with manipulative ‘endorsement’”? Nope, but they should have.

What every single headline said is: “Al Qaeda Endorses McCain.”

Of course Al Qaeda doesn’t endorse McCain. Al Qaeda – like Hizbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas – endorses Obama. And that is not because he is a Muslim, for he is not. He has belonged for 20 years to a virulently racist, anti-white Black Liberation Theology church in Chicago. He converted from Islam to Christianity before puberty, so imams have no authority to issue fatawa against him charging apostasy. Obama was registered as a Muslim at an Indonesian school. He does have Islamic training. But he is no longer a Muslim. Obama is radical Leftist, not radical Islamist. No, it’s none of that.

What thrills Islamofascists – a term coined by Matthias Ruthven and perhaps used as early as the 1970s by Olivier Roy – is that they are looking for a Presidential candidate whose thinking and policy they can infiltrate. And that man is Barack Obama. After all, the express wish of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing, the group that used to called itself “Hamas in the United States” – is to see shari’a law implemented in America. ICNA and ISNA, both also unindicted co-conspirators in terrorist financing, have similarly gravitated to Obama, and in the case of ISNA it’s a real problem. These are the guys that made hay over the Headscarf Photo Flap – widely used to paint Muslims as victims in Obama’s campaign. Rep. Keith Ellison went after Obama, and he got everything he wanted and then some. Here’s how it went.

Two Muslim women in headscarves positioned themselves behind Obama at a photo shoot. One of them was a member of the deeply suspect MSA, about which volumes have been written in the last two years recounting their indoctrination to radical Islam of Muslim students by this largest Muslim campus organization. Also coming to light were accounts of Muslim women being forced into cover as a kind of religious testimony to the faith. Of course, Muslim men never put up with the inconvenience of wearing hot robes in the Dog Days of Summer to “testify for their faith.” No, it’s the women who have to do that. One woman recounts being called by the head of an MSA chapter, a man who then put his wife on the phone with the girl so the wife could scream at her for not complying with stated dress norms. This echoes, of course, the virulent Saudi Princess Haifa, wife of former Saudi Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan (who had the habit of strolling into Cabinet meetings uninvited, so powerful was he), who frequently called embassy wives together for verbally violent punishment soirees for the slightest infractions of dress or “morals.” Yeah, right. The tactic here is to have a woman discipline another woman at the behest of a male, who will then have to bear no responsibility for being the male chauvinist pig he is. Any questions?

Anyhow, these two Muslim women positioned themselves for an Obama photo shoot that I can promise you would have been distributed all over the Middle East as fund-raising poster for ISNA. Meanwhile, back in the United States, CAIR and other Muslim propaganda groups screamed “Discrimination!” (which it was not) and then “Racism!” Now that last one is interesting given that Islam is not a race: It is a lift from the Civil Rights Movement, where it was legitimate, but the propagandists are aware that Americans are very sensitive to accusations of racism and too afraid of appearing racist to fight it when they are smeared with the term. There should be a class action lawsuit brought against CAIR, ISNA, ICNA and every other group that uses this false epithet to silence everybody who doesn’t agree with them.

At any rate, it is with the Headscarf Flap that I really began to feel for Obama. He is not an anti-Muslim person. Far from it. And it is likely his staff would have had the same reaction to anybody brandishing a sign that read “Zionists for Obama” in Trajan font or somebody waving a massive crucifix with “Stop Abortion” carved on it. No sane Presidential candidate is going to allow his or her campaign to be appropriated for religious advertising. In this case it was a simple case of Islamic Billboarding, the presence of a headscarf to visually claim space to make a silent representation of a connection with or control of a political or social unit. OK, I confess to having invented the term. But that’s what it is in some cases.

How powerful is it? It makes it appear that Obama is Muslim, which most in the Muslim world already believe he is (and that will be a problem for him if he is elected), and it also makes it appear that MSA and ISNA and CAIR are very powerful in American politics in general and in Obama’s campaign in particular.

And the upshot is that Obama got creamed, in three specific ways.

First he was rapped for “racism” and the women in headscarves were quickly fashioned into victims of so-called Islamophobia by CAIR.

Second, he got Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, all over him publicly. But after a few weeks, Ellison and others had strong-armed Obama into total submission.

Third, part of that “submission” (there’s that word again) is that Obama has a new “Muslim advisor” who has radical connections thoroughly discussed in several articles in the last two weeks, the best of which is Daniel Pipes’ “Would Obama Pass a Security Clearance?” Answer: No.

So, faced with bad press and intimidation by the bad guys most likely to behead you if they don’t like you, what does Obama do? He fronts a headscarf in the form of Ingrid Mattson, president of the Wahhabi-founded and –funded ISNA – the self-same unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing named above! – for a precious little “Interfaith Moment” at the Democratic National Convention.

Watch this closely, for it is staggering indeed. In a country in which MOST Muslim women do NOT wear cover, Ingrid Mattson is one of the few high-ranking Muslim women who does. So what Muslim woman does Obama choose for his token? One of the many U.S. Muslim women who is moderate? No. Ingrid Mattson is a Saudi Wahhabi apologist and a radical.

And she’s for our consumption only. It’s worth asking: What would happen to Ingrid if she appeared on Saudi TV without a face veil? She’d be stoned to death. What would happen if she showed up at the Grand Mosque dressed as she was on American national TV? She would have been beaten to death on the streets by the religious police.

Ingrid Mattson, like Al Arabiya’s Nadia Bilbassy-Charters – who interviewed Laura Bush at the White House dressed in a skirt halfway up her thigh and appeared at the National Press Club in a skin-tight, white satin sheath with a hemline higher than that! – is one of the Spin Sisters, one of the women fronted by radical Islamist men to make them appear to be gender egalitarian when they are not. The Spin Sisters could care less what happens to the rest of the oppressed Muslim women of this world so long as they get theirs. Look at Mattson’s position? Fame. Power. A little more fame.

The headscarf means many things. Mostly it means ignorance of the fact that it was NEVER mandated by Muhammad and did not appear in Islamic culture until three centuries after the advent of Islam. Therefore many women who wear it do it because they think it is mandated and want to do the right thing. But in the West it is often holier-than-thou competition for men’s attention both with other Muslim women and with Western women they call “sluts” whether they have evidence for it or not. It is Islamic Billboarding at the behest of men. And overwhelmingly worldwide it is male oppression of the female that prevents men from having to experience any anxiety that one of “their” women will be found a tempting little plumb by some other man, and it is an act of criminalization of the female form as sexual organ from toes to crown. In Saudi Arabia, the abaya swamps women in billows of shapeless, hot, black fabric, leaving exposed only the hands and the eyes. Well, make that one eye. Last week Wahhabi imams in Saudi Arabia said that one eye must be covered, because two eyes are just too much of an evil trap for a man’s sexual purity. This is an apparent attempt to control those lurid glances at the market, where women are already under the control of a male chaperone! But I digress. The point is that while Muslim women in Iran endure torture in Evin Prison to escape this veiling oppression, it bothers Ingrid Mattson not at all to support oppression of Muslim women by sporting one herself in the name of faith.

Anyhow, here comes Ingrid Mattson in her head scarf – a payback from the alleged affront to the Muslim community for Obama’s refusal to have his campaign used for Islamic Billboarding. Ellison was pleased.

But look more closely. Who else appeared? A Christian priest and a Jewish rabbi. Where were the Hindus, whose numbers in the USA are larger than those of the Muslims, who claim they are over 6 million when likely the most accurate number is 1.3 million? Where are the Buddhists? Where are the Jains? Where are the Native American medicine men? Where are the Baha’i and Amadiyyah, whom the Sunnis punish and persecute worldwide with charges of apostasy? Where are the Orthodox? Where are the Taoists and the Confucians? Where are the Sufis, so vilified by the Wahhabis and the Taleban? Where are the New Agers, who in this country vastly outnumber the Muslims and are the fastest-growing spiritual orientation in American (no, you were mislead, it is not the Muslims)?

You will not find any of those faiths appearing with a radical-learning, Wahhabi-oriented, headscarf-flaunting Muslima Ingrid Mattson! Why? Because only the People of the book – Jews and Christians – are even marginally acceptable to these 7th-century-styled Muslims and all the rest are considered to be practitioners of illegitimate, if not Satanic, religions and faiths. Obama would not have made the mistake of including them when a Muslim speaks. He wouldn’t have dared. Especially since the entire purpose of this tawdry exercise was to front a headscarf in capitulation to invented Muslim grievance.

Is Obama a Muslim? No.
Is Obama pandering to a Muslim minority? Yes.
Is he accepting advisors who have radical links? Yes?
Is he a coward? Yes. And that is the problem with Obama: He is a coward.

Obama, despite his terrible associations, has only one real problem: He doesn’t know when he needs to stand up and refuse to cow to such pressures, and he doesn’t have the spine to do it when he does realize it.

So, does Al Qaeda really want McCain to win? Of course not. They want Obama to win, because if he does, the whole problem of establishing shari’a law for Muslims (read: women, since shari’a is most concerned with keeping control of women) gets a lot easier. And that’s just the first step. It’s Muslims first, then everybody else. And they’ll do it with non-Muslims by using the tactic that the free speech, free choice, and free women of this culture are an insult to their faith. Problematically, the vast majority of Muslims in America, moderates to the core, have caved to Saudi pressure for radical imams – Tabeban-trained in Pakistan or Wahhabi-trained in Saudi Arabia – to run American mosques. Now they run 80% of them, and the American Muslim community has not had the spine to correct the problem and doesn’t have it now.

But make no mistake: Al Qaeda endorsed Obama because they already know, by everything he has done and all he has not done, that he is the best bet for entering American power centers by the back door. And Americans should be highly suspect of a media that helped them run this little piece of reverse psychology on the American public.
And Americans should also realize that the evidence of Obama’s capitulation to what Stephen Schwartz calls “The Wahhabi Lobby” in the United States is incontrovertible and crystal clear: When a candidate for the Presidency of the United States fronts a headscarf worn by a radical in a pandering and obsequious attempt to prevent bad press, he is too spineless and self-serving to be President of the United States.

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Ruth Rendell Writes about FGM

2008-07-07T22:35:00.005+01:00

Comment: It is the usual to blame this on African culture, and in truth probably the best understanding of this (from Dr. James DeMeo) is that it began in the Nile littoral as a part of the Arab slave-trading that was rampant in preclassical times. FGM, particularly infibulation, was to assure purity for breeding purposes. Then along came Islam. The Prophet is asked if it is permissible. He says yes, but "do not take too much." This is the origin of Islamic sanction of female circumcision, which is virtually unknown in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but rampant in Africa — particularly in Egypt, where 99% of women are circumcised — as well as Ethiopia, Somalia, and large parts of mostly Christian Kenya, as well as Mali to the west. But what most people don't realize is that in Shafi'i Sunni Islam, circumcision of women is mandatory. It is extraordinarily brave of Ruth Rendell to write a book about it. We haven't read it yet, so we don't know if she says anything about Islam. But in Turkey, where it's been rare in the past, it's now being spread by the Turkish Taleban (not related to the Pakistani version). And when lawmakers in Egypt tried to ban it several months ago, Islamic imams flatly told them it was against shari'a to leave a woman with a clitoris intact. People should probably just stop having the debate about whether it's culture or Islam, as Islam was laid atop the harrowing desert tribalist mores that were the talk of early 19th century English newspapers, where details of cruel amputations and debased violence against women captured the terrified attention of Londoners. In the years following the Prophet's death, one hadith after another pulled the carpet from under what few, fragile rights women had and made them, without question, the world's most beleaguered human beings. We hope everyone will buy this book.
— Eleanor Quincy for Gracen Intelligence

Ruth Rendell speaks out against female genital mutilation

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 07/07/2008

The novelist is campaigning to stop up to 20,000 girls in Britain being mutilated each year, reports Victoria Lambert

When Chief Inspector Wexford, one of Britain's most beloved fictional policemen, is called to investigate his latest case - a body discovered in a trench - he finds his attention diverted by a crime yet to be committed, but one that he knows he is powerless to prevent. It creates a terrible dilemma for the old-fashioned, peaceable, claret-drinking detective.

On the case: Ruth Rendell addresses the issue of female circumcision in her latest novel

Wexford learns that a five-year-old girl is due to be brutally mutilated and left permanently disfigured - and that the suspects are the child's parents. It is as horrifying to him as the murder he has to solve. No one understands that conundrum better than Ruth Rendell, the author who created Wexford, and who has placed her hero in this torturous position in Not in the Flesh, due to be published in paperback later this month. For once, this haunting scenario has not been taken from her own imagination but from a real-life situation that happens thousands of times a year in Britain.

''Female genital mutilation (FGM) - or female circumcision - is a dreadful, iniquitous, illegal business - and it is happening here," says Rendell, 78. "As soon as I heard of it, I thought, this must be stopped, but I didn't realise then quite how difficult that would be."

FGM has been practised for centuries, principally in the Horn of Africa; the UN estimates 6,000 young girls are subjected to it every day, in 28 countries. Those under the age of 15 are ''cut", their genitalia maimed or even removed, and the wound sewn up. The practice is believed to encourage chastity and prevent sexual pleasure, and many parents still believe it is the only way their daughters will be able to find good husbands.

After marriage, the damaged area may be cut open by the husband just enough to allow intercourse but, when a baby is due to be born, it will have to be opened fully. Women who have been circumcised are at greater risk of cysts, fistulas - holes in the bladder, urinary tract and bowel caused during labour that can lead to incontinence - and even death in childbirth.

"The 'circumcision' is done mostly by elderly women who have no medical qualifications," says Rendell, who sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Rendell of Babergh. "They perform this operation on girls aged around seven or eight, without anaesthetic, getting other women to hold them down. A knife is used, or a sharp stone; the business is awful."

With emigration from Africa, the practice has been taken abroad and is now carried out in America, Australia, most of Europe and, of course, Britain. But just who does it, when and even how are difficult questions to answer as the practice is shrouded in secrecy - as Inspector Wexford himself finds out.

In real life, too, there have been few prepared to speak out against it. One is Somalian supermodel Waris Dirie, who has admitted that she was cut; she has since been appointed a UN Special Ambassador. But the practice continues in many ordinary families behind closed doors.

This secrecy has been the major stumbling block in Rendell's campaign to end FGM in the UK. A recent study produced by the Department of Midwifery, City University, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in October 2007 estimated that more than 20,000 girls are at risk in Britain every year - and although doctors and midwives know it goes on, they are powerless to prevent it happening.

"We believe things have improved since 1985, when the Female Circumcision Act was passed which made it a criminal offence in this country," says Rendell, who is patron of the FGM National Clinical Group, based at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital (part of the University College London Hospital NHS Trust). "But over time, that has been thought inadequate. So we secured the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, which makes it a criminal offence to take a child out of the country to have it done abroad. The penalty is a maximum 14 years' imprisonment."

But there have been no prosecutions - even though health professionals and the police are aware the practice continues. "What campaigners need is a girl who turns up at a doctor's surgery with a fresh wound. If she has only just arrived from Somalia, nothing can be done. But if she has been living here for two years, and she tells them that, and the doctors can tell [the cut] was done in that time, then there would be grounds for a prosecution. Until then, we are tied - yet we know it goes on in pretty much all the major cities in the UK."

It is not just the secrecy that perpetuates the practice; it is also a desire for conformity, explains Rendell. "Girls in the community here will ask each other, 'Have you been cut?'?" She also points out that the language barrier can be part of the problem: "A lot of the older women and the mothers don't speak English, so they simply don't understand how FGM is viewed in this country - they won't know it is against the law. One thing we have done is to encourage older women who do speak English to do missionary work among their community, instructing women in what the penalties are and why it is illegal."

When Rendell was writing Not in the Flesh, she strived to get into the mind of a young female officer who has to confront the family involved: "She's very PC - and torn in this situation. She is always being nice and fair?minded towards immigrants and yet, as a woman, is horrified by this particular act." Tradition is one of the most difficult aspects to counter: "FGM is an inexcusable, monstrous thing - but, of course, it is cultural, and I suppose the family think it is their duty."

Rendell thinks it would help if more immigrant families learnt English. "I feel strongly that people should - not as a condition of coming here, but as a requirement after they are here." She also advocates classes in British citizenship, to teach immigrants the law, what you may do, and what you may not.

"This is complex; one wants to respect traditions and customs, but how can you if they are grossly damaging and cruel to women? Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights. I don't think people should bring such a dreadful custom here and expect it to be respected. What we should respect are the people themselves, their feelings, their emotions."

When Inspector Wexford reviews his feelings about the case, he realises he was naïve to think he could bring a prosecution and so protect young girls against this kind of mutilation. He resolves to examine the legislation more closely to see if it contains provision for ''intent".

His creator, however, doesn't see this as the answer. "A lot of people - and I used to be among them - think all we need is one prosecution," says Rendell. "But do we really even want one? We want prevention; we want to stop it happening ever."
authority

UK Judge Throws Muslim Women under the Bus

2008-07-07T20:06:00.006+01:00

It is becoming clearer all the time that the "plan" in Western countries is to appease violent Muslim radicals with what they most want (other than world domination): the control of every aspect of a woman's life, particularly access to sex anytime they want it and the ability to beat her to a bloody pulp if she doesn't comply. Anyone who doubts this has NOT read Sayyed Qutb, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood after a trip to a church social in the United States where he witnessed a couple dancing. There was no more salacious or misogynist piece of writing in the 20th century; somehow it is more pornographic than the worst that comes out of the sleaze parlors of the West.

This UK judge is playing the game that will cost every woman on this planet her freedom eventually: let them have shari'a, the MOST SERIOUS AND DESIRED PIECE OF WHICH IS THE CONTROL IT GIVES ME OVER WOMEN. That's why the Canadian women appealed to McGuinty to block shari'a "mediation" in Canada — they knew they would be socially punished or subjected to "honor" crimes from beatings to murder if the Canadian government, the last line of their defense, suddenly stamped shari'a with the government's imprimatur.

This goes doubly for England, whose men show no resemblance to the men of World War II who held back the entire Nazi machine alone until everybody could get it together.

We hope this judge is made aware of every drop of blood this costs Muslim women, because he is about to take equal protection under the law away from Muslim women, who will be socially and culturally FORCED, by violence and threats of violence, into shari'a, when so many of them are trying desperately to escape families in which the control mechanisms of shari'a, for all intents and purposes, were brought with male immigrants who took the freedoms England gave them, but made sure they had a way to keep the women from getting them. That this judge could do this KNOWING that all over England Muslim women are struggling with domestic abuse, denied education, and even FGM, is a travesty the order of which England has not seen in a thousand years.

Ainen Gracen, Morgaan Sinclair, Robert Gracen, Alastair Fellows, Eleanor Quincy for Gracen Intelligence

UK Judge Sparks Fresh Debate Over Shari'a

Patrick Goodenough

International Editor

(CNSNews.com) - Britain's top judge has set off a storm after saying that aspects of Islamic law (shari'a) could be employed to deal with family and marital disputes among British Muslims.

"There is no reason why principles of shari'a law, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution," Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said in a speech in a London mosque last week.

Phillips made it clear that both parties to a dispute should agree to the rules and that English law should continue to take precedence.

Any punishments or rulings would have to comply with the law of the land. There was no question, he said, that punishments imposed in some Islamic countries under shari'a, such as stoning or amputation of limbs, would be "applied to or by any Muslim who lives within this jurisdiction."

The judge said there was a lot of misunderstanding about Islamic law.

"The view of many of shari'a law is colored by violent extremists who invoke it, perversely, to justify terrorist atrocities such as suicide bombing, which I understand to be in conflict with Islamic principles," he said.

Phillips is the most senior judge in England and Wales, and he has been named the inaugural president of the new United Kingdom Supreme Court when it begins operating late next year.

His comments reignited a controversy over comments made by England's top church leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, early this year. Williams, the titular head of the world's Anglican (Episcopalian) churches, sparked calls to resign when he said there was a case to be made for finding "a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law."

In his speech, Phillips defended Williams' comments, saying it was not "very radical to advocate embracing shari'a in the context of family disputes, for example."

He noted that the English system "already goes a long way towards accommodating the archbishop's suggestion."

Last year, a body called the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal was established to provide a viable alternative for Muslims seeking to resolve family, marriage, inheritance and commercial disputes in line with Islamic law.

Operating with the English legal framework, the tribunal seeks to make determinations that are both in accordance with one of the recognized schools of Islamic law and also "can be enforced through existing means of enforcement open to normal litigants."

Proponents of allowing aspects of shari'a law to operate in a Western but multicultural society argue that to deny Muslims that right is to deny them "equality."

Critics counter that in a culture which, for example, holds different views about the place of women, allowing religious officials to preside over family and marriage disputes could lead to rulings that are in conflict with Western norms and treat women as second-class citizens.

Lawyers, rights groups, politicians and editorialists responded to Phillips' comments, with many voicing concern about the potential implications for community cohesion and inter-communal relations.

In the Muslim community itself, reaction was mixed.

The Muslim Council of Britain, the country's leading umbrella body for Muslim organizations, said it welcomed Phillips' "call for Muslims to be allowed to apply elements of Islamic law to the governance of personal relationships where this does not conflict with the laws of the land."

The council's secretary-general, Dr. Abdul Bari, appealed for a thoughtful debate on the issue, devoid of what the organization called "hysterical overreaction and misrepresentation."

But British Muslims for Secular Democracy, a group launched earlier this year as a platform for diverse, alternative Muslim views, said a move in the direction suggested by Phillips "would be detrimental to Muslims and to society as a whole."

The organization pointed out that there are major differences over interpreting and implementing shari'a among various Islamic schools of thought, and said British Muslims also hold diverse views based on factors including their geographic and ethnic backgrounds

Unlike western legal systems, the group said, some Islamic legal experts promote shari'a rules that contravene civil liberties and differ in matters such as freedom of expression, the rights of women in divorce cases, inheritance and testimony in court.

"Incorporation of aspects of shari'a law within the English legal system will further segregate Muslim communities from the mainstream," said BMSD Vice-Chairman Dr. Shaaz Mahboob.

"We think that British law should be based on British values and determined by the British Parliament," said the official spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Make media inquiries or request an interview about this article.

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76% of Iraqi Girls Forbidden Basic Schooling

2008-03-12T15:49:00.002Z

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=46612&sectionid=351020201
Iraqi women demand rights in rally
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:25:50

International Women's Day rallies

Scores of Iraqi women have rallied outside a Baghdad hotel demanding an end to violence and equal social status with men.

"Stop neglecting women. Stop killing women. Stop creating widows," read a large banner that the women, from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, held at the Babylon Hotel on Saturday in Baghdad's central Karada neighborhood.

The rally was held on the International Women's Day, March 8.

After the rally, the protesters joined a much larger group that included men and children at a hotel conference room to hear from various speakers.

One of the speakers was Maisoon al-Damloji, a female member of Iraq's parliament from the Iraqia Party.

"We are united today in our desire to spread the peace in our country," she said. "We reject murder, torture and revenge."

Women in Iraq "suffered during Saddam's time and during the embargo, and now are suffering because of sectarian violence," she said.

Iraq's constitution reserves 25 percent of the country's 275 seats of parliament for women, though not all are currently filled because in some cases female candidates were unavailable.

A recent report by US-based Women for Women International said the situation of Iraqi women since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has become a "national crisis".

According to the report, released Thursday, 64 percent of the women surveyed said violence against them had increased since the US occupation.

"When asked why, respondents most commonly said that there is less respect for women's rights than before, that women are thought of as possessions and that the economy has gotten worse," it said.

The report also found that 76 percent of the women interviewed said that girls in their families were forbidden from attending school.

2008-03-12T15:00:00.000Z

Why Is This Girl Dead??? Aqsa Parvez and Islamic Double-Speak

Originally Published at Blogger News Network on December 14th, 2007

by Morgaan Sinclair in All News, Canada News, Religious News, Society and Culture

Read 4,850 times.

The Murder of Aqsa Parvez and Islamic Double-Speak

Aqsa Parvez, 16, murdered by her father over an ISLAMIC head scarf.

Sadly, it’s all too typical. Another Muslim woman — this one very young — is dead at the hands of a father, brother, uncle, gang or Islamic government, with the typical in-your-face double-speak that we are not allowed to believe this is a problem with Islam.

Yes, it is. That’s not a Bolivian head scarf or a Japanese head scarf or a Prada head scarf or a Chanel head scarf, it’s an ISLAMIC head scarf. That’s what it’s called. That’s what it’s called by the imams who preach it for girls as young as ten from mosques that hold a woman without one a source of shame for her family. That’s what it’s called by imams that preach that Allah made a woman deficient.

They preach this violent screed — with all its dangerous implications for the safety of young woman — to not the slightest cultural protest, and then some young woman dies. And then they can’t get their faces on TV fast enough to tell us just how wrong and bigoted we are to think it could possibly be Islam.

It’s Islam. It wasn’t to begin with. The headscarf was originally worn by the prostitutes in Sumerian temples as a sign of their profession. But it’s Islamic now. It’s the Islam these people are preaching every Friday in mosques all over the world. And the double-speak around it is right out of 1984.

A case in point, from Canada, where this murder occurred, features Sheik Alaa El-Sayyed, imam and head of Mississauga’s Islamic Society of North America — that’s the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that has been declared an unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing, a small point left out of every single account of this event.

Speaking at a press conference, as reported by CTV, El Sayyed said that Islam teaches that women have the right to choose hijab or not. The double-speak came in the next sentence when he said, however, that a child who doesn’t wear it brings shame to the family, and that the parents could be viewed as failures in the community.

So what’s the real message inside this double-speak? Is it that it’s really quite OK if you don’t wear your ISLAMIC head scarf? or that your family will be vilified in the community until you do?

Obviously, the REAL message is that you ARE to wear your ISLAMIC head scarf, and that if you don’t you are shaming your family. Read on, this gets worse.

If it’s not an ISLAMIC head scarf, then why is there any preaching whatsoever about it in any mosque?

If it’s not an ISLAMIC head scarf, why does ISLAMIC shari’a law in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan demand that you wear it? Why have more than 300,00 women in Iran been detained since May for breaking Islamic law by not having strict enough dress? Why are women in Basra being beaten into cover by religious police, and why have more than 40 of them been murdered for it in recent months for breaking dress codes?

No, it is Islamic. Yet every time some woman dies over a head scarf, over choosing her own mate or boyfriend, over alleged sexuality outside marriage, we get the hordes of Islamic representatives coming forward in a deliberate attempt to deflect any and all responsibility — and therefore block any and all change. We get a deliberate attempt to prevent the an end to the violence and insane control of women issuing straight from the misogynist imams preaching from half the mosques in the United States and Canada by denying that it has any source in the religion at all. There was never blacker lie told.
What we get instead is the Islamic double-speak that a girl is dead because it’s just “domestic violence” — with the point endlessly being made that if we even allow ourselves to think otherwise we’re being bigoted — that if we point out that there have been more than 11,000 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 by people who say they are Islamic attacks, we are being culturally or spiritually intolerant. [Apparently they can say it, advertise it, put out recruiting videos about it, but if we say it, we’re Islamophobic. Oh, yeah, right.]

No, we’re not being bigoted. The bigotry here is happening in Islamic mosques where an exoneration of control of every aspect of a woman’s life, thought, freedom and sexuality is preached every day — backed up by hadith that have overtaken any initial impulse within Islam that would have given women equality — an impetus lost, Bernard Lewis says, within 50 years of the Prophet’s death. Whatever was there effectively died as abrogation destroyed more and more of the spiritual side of Islam, replacing it with spurious hadith that pleased the Muslim male, to whose pleasure and control the entire religion has now been bent.

Now the religion operates on hadith (90% of shari’a law is from the hadith) that exonerate violence towards women and entrench desert tribalist customs that strip a woman of every sense of autonomy and dignity, implying on the way that Allah must have erred in high cosmic fashion in giving a woman a clitoris, hair and a face. I hope the men who preach this evil have a handy explanation at the ready when the come to face to face with the Creator, because they’re going to need it.

No, that head scarf on that 7-year-old kid is not a fashion statement, it’s an ISLAMIC head cover. And a free choice is one that bears no punishment. It may have consequences; it may imply responsibilities. But not punishment. To say a woman may choose not to wear jihab — but that her family will be vilified and driven from the community if she does not — is not a choice. It is a veiled threat, pun intended. To say a woman may decline cover — but that she risks being being to death by her father if she does — is not a choice. It’s a direct threat.

Muslims in Canada need to heed the words of Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in Canada’s National Post today:

“The hijab in particular has become a thorny issue among Muslim families. It has been elevated as a sort of ’sixth pillar of Islam’ among militant sects.

“Young teenage girls are often lectured over the virtues of the hijab by their family members. Once they hit puberty, compliance is deemed a non-negotiable religious requirement. …

“There is much discussion in Canadian society about the religious freedoms of those who choose to wear the hijab. We hear relatively little about the oppression of young girls who make the opposite choice. Seldom is their oppression from within their own community, or even their own family, cast as a human rights issue. …

“Consider, as an example, the Montreal mosque that recently posted on its Web site a warning to the effect that if young girls took off their hijab, they could end up getting raped and having ‘illegitimate children.’ Other proffered risks included ’stresses, insecurity and suspicion in the minds of husbands’ and ‘instigating young people to deviate towards the path of lust.’ … As if the threat of rape and the fear of illegitimate children were not enough, these pre-teen girls were told that if they took off their hijab, they would cease to be Muslims: ‘By removing your hijab, you have destroyed your faith. Islam means submission to Allah in all our actions.’”

So, to the Sheik Alaa El-Sayyed and others — brilliantly and bravely exposed by Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan, Muslims whose lives are constantly threatened for speaking out — NO SALE.

“Muslims need to stand up to this sort of emotional and religious blackmail by imams who spread the competing agendas of Saudi Arabia and Iran into Canada,” says Fatah.

And so do Canadian and American non-Muslims to whom the protection of these girls now falls. Such protection will not come from the mosques that should be defending them, nor from the fathers and brothers who should stand up for them. And it never comes from the Muslim-advocacy organizations that routinely get up and whine whenever this happens that they are ever-so “misunderstood” or that we “discriminatory” or “bigoted” toward their communities. No, most assuredly, such protections will not come from them, because the double-speak you just heard from head of Mississauga’s ISNA about how free that woman was not to wear her head scarf is coming from the organization that is, according to Stephen Schwartz of the Center of Islamic Pluralism, “the main front organization … for the Wahhabi Islamic sect,” the Saudi sect that doesn’t allow women to drive, to leave the house without a male chaperone, to leave the country, to become a field geologist, to appear without her face fully veiled.

Aqsa Parvez is dead. She joins Banaz Mahmoud, the 20-year-old Briton who was tortured, raped and strangled to death earlier this year by her father, brother and uncle — after begging for help — and Hatin Surucu, 23, who was killed by her family in Germany after they called her a “whore who wanted to live like a German.”

And to the extent these people can get away with transplanting that control of women to foreign shores and creating extra-judicial enclaves and systems of punishment in which women do not enjoy the civil protections guaranteed them by Canadian and American constitutions, they will do it.

And that makes it up to us non-Muslims to be sure that these retain their rights and that aggressions towards them to do not go unpunished.

You’ll know things have changed when you hear imams preaching against male aggression, not female freedom, from every mosque in our lands. Don’t hold your breath.

Until then, it is our responsibility to jeer at this double-speak and to stop playing sanctimonious cultural relativism games with the lives of young Muslim women, because we — not the spiritually supremacist and sanctimonious authors of the next suck-up “What my hijab means to me” puff pieces for the local newspapers — are mostly all these women have, because the Fatahs and Hassans of our cultures are few and far between and under constant pressure and death threat.

And just to set the record straight here, the shame is on the Muslim men who will not take action against those among them who preach and do these things, who cannot be man enough to relate to a free woman, and who take the manipulative and cowardly way out every time — the sleazy public manipulations, the tawdry false accusations that critics of barbaric mind-sets and actions are somehow bigoted, culturally intolerant, and discriminatory.

No, actually, it is these men who are bigoted, culturally intolerant, and discriminatory both of women and of free, rights-based culture. Things will change only when these men grow both a conscience and a spine.

Until then, NONE of us should back down in demanding that this despicable screed cease being preached in the mosques, and we should bring legal action against imams, organizations and mosques that continue the practice, because if there were ever hate speech and incitement to violence, that is it.

Aqsa Parvez’s father should be jailed for life. And Canada should have a very close look at the ISNA and the mosque websites Fatah and Hassan reference above.

We failed another young Muslim girl this week. Let’s not fail another.

Morgaan Sinclair is a book editor and a writer whose works have appeared in The Weekly Standard and the New York Post.

About Hugh Fitzgerald: What Mustafa Akyol ACTUALLY Said

2007-10-12T13:44:00.000+01:00

We have, in fact, let many grievous assaults on good people pass without comment. Most of them have been made on one of our Senior Fellows, who has taken the position that personal attacks on her should not meet with response, as any response might be a distraction to those doing, admittedly, other good work. Thus, many bloggers, and the administrators of web pages that host their screed (and do nothing about it and do some of the execrating themselves), have escaped the public scrutiny and protest which they have richly deserved. I do not promise that in the future I will be honoring my commitment to let these aggressions rest. Why the change in policy? In just one thread on one of these websites, Jihad Watch, both our analyst and a young Turkish journalist and Islamic theorist were subjected to what I certainly consider overtly dishonest dealings, and not for the first time for either: Opinions which our analyst does not hold were attributed to her by a poster using the handle Great Comet of 1577, necessitating (again, unfortunately, not for the first time) a long, detailed response. But it is a post by "Hugh Fitzgerald" (likely a pseudonym), a manager of and frequent author on the Jihad Watch website, that is the subject of this column. In this post, Mr. Fitzgerald admits that he is pretending to be Mr. Akyol and writes a post in Akyol's name of what he surmises Mr. Akyol would say. Of course, Mustafa Akyol has never said and never shall say anything of the sort that Hugh Fitzgerald wrote. We consider such "putting words into the mouths of others" an act of intellectual dishonesty—and a dangerous one, as Mr. Akyol can be falsely quoted from this post. As many writers on the Jihad Watch website — among them Robert Spencer himself and Serbian writer Srdja Trifkovic — should know, having the writings of others falsely attributed to oneself is at the very least distressing; it can be costly and threatening. Morgaan Sinclair tells us that when a Montenegrin newspaper attributed to Srdja Trifkovic something he had not said — something so inflammatory he could have been killed for it — the brave lad made an appearance in Montenegro to refute the claim. Good for him. And recently, CAIR representative and incorrigible liar Ibrahim Hooper attributed a statement to Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer that he had not made — a scandalous statement that had actually appeared on Mr. Spencer's own site but had been made by an anonymous blogger. This statement can likely never be expunged, even after the extraordinary efforts made by Mr. Spencer's friends, including Gracen Fellow Morgaan Sinclair, who wrote a lengthy piece for BNN in an effort to help. One would think then, the management of Jihad Watch would know better than this. However, in deference to the fact these people apparently want this post to be viewed as "humor" (oh, yes, very funny), I will let them make the rules on this one — but they will have to live by the rules they have publicly forced on others. Therefore, I shall soon be publishing a "response in kind" on this web page — and on all three of the Gracen Intelligence private sites — and I shall expect, if not demand, that my comedic roast of Hugh Fitzgerald be met with the peals of gay laughter and knee-slapping paroxyms of warm camaraderie with which Mr. Fitzgerald apparently expects us to respond to the ridicule of a friend and colleague. Stay tuned to your digital telly, for my boomerang of Hugh Fitzgerald's razzing of Mustafa Akyol at the expense of the truth is forthcoming.

Mr. Akyol's English-language Website may be found at www.thewhitepath.org
Mr. Akyol is Op-Ed Editor of Turkish Daily News, Turkey's largest English-language daily.

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January 30, 2007

The Hrant Dink Murder and Its Meaning

[Originally published in First Things website]

On January 19, 2007, a journalist named Hrant Dink was shot dead by a seventeen-year-old militant on one of Istanbul’s busiest avenues. In just thirty-two hours, the Turkish police caught the reckless killer, who confessed his crime quite proudly. “I shot the Armenian,” he said smugly, “because he had insulted Turkishness.”

Hrant Dink was a member of Turkey’s seventy-thousand-strong Armenian community. But he was not just any member. As the founder and editor of the weekly Agos, the bilingual Turkish/Armenian newspaper, he was certainly the most prominent Armenian public intellectual in the country. He was, like many Turkish democrats, critical of the authoritarian measures of the state, with a particular emphasis on the taboos about the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Mr. Dink, like many others, believed that the tragedy was indeed a planned genocide. (The Turkish view, on the other hand, is that hundreds of thousands Armenians did indeed perish in 1915, but so did many Turks and Kurds, and what happened should be defined as intercommunal violence, not as a campaign of extermination.)

Yet, while Mr. Dink continued to make his case in the face of reaction from Turkish authorities and nationalist groups, he also criticized the anti-Turkish stance in some circles of the Armenian Diaspora. Turks were not bad people who deserve to be seen as the enemy, he insisted; they just needed to be informed about the other side of the story.

Mr. Dink’s principled stance placed him right in the center of the ideological war between those who strive to create an open and democratic Turkey and those who want to avoid it. The dividing line between these two camps is not religion, as some would presume, but nationalism. The proponents of the latter ideology, which is strong both in the state bureaucracy and in society at large, are particularly against the democratic reforms inspired by the European Union accession process. They want their good old Turkey, in which the all-powerful state oversees society, and civil liberties are sacrificed for its narrow definition of “Turkishness.”

Mr. Dink’s killer, Ogun Samast, is just one of the many chauvinistic young militants inspired by the most radical version of the cult of Turkishness. One of his predecessors is Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope Jean Paul II in 1979. Another one is the sixteen-year-old militant from Trabzon–which is also Samast’s hometown–who killed Father Andrea Santoro last year. And of course these young apparatchiks have their elder “brothers,” who indoctrinate, train, and arm them.

The relationship between this hysterical type of Turkish nationalism–or, to use a more appropriate term, Turkish fascism–and Islam is worth clarifying. There are of course many militant Islamists in the world today, but Turkish fascists are not among them. In fact, they are clearly distinguished from and often at odds with Turkey’s Islamic circles, some of which are strong proponents of democratization and the EU bid. The fascists defend Islam and use it in some of their slogans, to be sure, but this is because they see religion as an important component of the Turkish identity. They hate the “infidel” Jews, Armenians, or Americans, but they detest Muslim Kurds and Arabs, too. Indeed, some of their most extreme factions don’t like Islam because of its trans-nationalism; instead they yearn for the pagan faiths of the pre-Islamic Turks.

Threats and violence have been the traditional tools these fascist cadres use to silence the intellectuals they hate–including liberal novelists such as the recent Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and the Sufi-inspired Elif Safak. With the murder of Hrant Dink, they probably wanted to give a warning to them all. But the reaction of Turkish society to this political assassination suggests that their plan has backfired. Right after Dink’s murder, thousands of people gathered in front of his office to protest the crime. Their maxim was dramatic: “We are all Hrant Dink.” And the Turkish media, save for a few extremist dailies that support the fascist line, published heartfelt praise for Dink and grave condemnation of his murder.

Moreover, Hrant Dink’s funeral turned into an unprecedented rally against fascism in Turkish society. About one hundred thousand people from all walks of life and faiths marched in the wide avenues of Istanbul, creating a scenic river of bodies. The motto of the day was “We are all Armenians.”

In the following days, this motto was criticized by some nationalist figures as “going too far.” To gauge public opinion, the mainstream daily Hurriyet launched an online poll to which more than 450,000 people replied. To the question “Is it rightful to say ‘We are all Armenians’ to protest the Dink murder,” nearly half the respondents said yes.

All this implies that there is an important trend in Turkish society toward embracing its historical “others.” The “others” note this, too. In his piece published in the Turkish Daily News, the former prime minister of Armenia, Armen Darbinyan, wrote, “Armenians in Armenia did not anticipate such a sincere manifestation of solidarity” in Turkey for Hrant Dink. “This leaves no doubt that a core transformation in the worldview of today’s Turkey has occurred,” added Mr. Darbinyan, “[which] should become a turning point in the relations between Turkish and Armenian nations.”

He is right. These two great nations, which lived peacefully side by side for centuries until the curse of modern nationalism, should seek reconciliation. An Islamic principle reads, “From every evil, there emerges a good.” Perhaps the good emerging from the evil murder of Hrant Dink might be the chance to build that mutual understanding. Had he lived, that would have been his advice to us all.

Ahmed al-Shayea Teaches a Hard Lesson ... and We Thank Him for That

2007-07-30T14:16:00.000+01:00

Typical of radical imams, they send others—not themselves—to die. Though he had committed to becoming a shahid (martyr), this young Sau'di didn't know the truck he drove was rigged to explode and it wasn't he who punched the detonator. He survived the attack, maimed for life.

"Today, he says, he has changed his mind about waging jihad, or holy war, and wants other young Muslims to know it. He wants them to see his disfigured face and fingerless hands, to hear how he was tricked into driving the truck on a fatal mission, to believe his contrition over having put his family through the agony of believing he was dead."

http://patdollard.com/2007/07/28/there-is-no-jihad-we-are-just-instruments-of-death/

There is No Jihad. We Are Just Instruments of Death.

The last time Ahmed al-Shayea was in the news, he was in the hospital at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, being treated for severe burns from the truck bomb he had driven into the Iraqi capital on Christmas Day, 2004.

Today, he says, he has changed his mind about waging jihad, or holy war, and wants other young Muslims to know it. He wants them to see his disfigured face and fingerless hands, to hear how he was tricked into driving the truck on a fatal mission, to believe his contrition over having put his family through the agony of believing he was dead.

At 22, the new Ahmed Al-Shayea is the product of a concerted Saudi government effort to counter the ideology that nurtured the 9/11 hijackers and that has lured Saudis in droves to the Iraq insurgency. The deprogramming, similar to efforts carried out in Egypt and Yemen, is built on reason, enticements and lengthy talks with psychiatrists, Muslim clerics and sociologists.

The kingdom still has a way to go in cracking the jihadist mind-set. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and Saudis make up nearly half of the foreign detainees held in Iraq, according to Mouwaffak al- Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser. They number hundreds, he said this month following a visit to Saudi Arabia. Dozens more are fighting alongside al-Qaida-inspired militants at a Palestinian camp in Lebanon.

Several hundred prisoners, as well as returnees from Guantanamo, are thought to have passed through the rehabilitation program.

Al-Shayea says his change of heart began when he was visited by a cleric at al-Ha’ir Prison in Riyadh following his repatriation from Iraq.

He says he put two questions to the cleric: Was the jihad for which he traveled to Iraq religiously sanctioned? And were the edicts inciting such action correct in saying the militants should not inform their parents or government of their intentions?

No and no, came the reply.

“I realized that all along I was wrong,” al-Shayea told The Associated Press in a two-hour interview at a Riyadh hotel before returning to an Interior Ministry compound that serves as a sort of halfway house for ex-jihadists rejoining Saudi society.

“There is no jihad. We are just instruments of death,” he said.

Saudi Arabia’s campaign against terrorism began in earnest after al- Qaida-linked militants struck three residential expatriate compounds in Riyadh in May 2003, killing 26 people.

The government says it cracked down on charities suspected of using donations to finance terrorism, banned mosques from holding unlicensed religious sessions and warned preachers against inciting youths to jihad. Officials as well as the government-guided media began to clearly and unequivocally refer to suicide bombings as terrorism.

The Interior Ministry sponsored programs on government-run TV stations showing repentant jihadists warning youths against joining al-Qaida and clergymen trying to correct misconceptions about jihad and dealing with non-Muslims. Al-Shayea has appeared on Al-Majd, a Saudi religious TV channel.

Three years ago it set up the prison program.

“The aim is to reform the youths, to listen to them and talk to them,” said Ahmed Jailan, one of the clerics. “We also try to instill a sense of hope in them by telling them they still have the chance to make up for what they lost if they follow true Islam.”

The prisoners later appear before a panel of judges who decide whether they can move from prison to the Interior Ministry compound, where activities include reading, civic and religious courses, sports and family visits. They get help finding jobs and wives, and after release they get free medical care, monthly stipends and sometimes cars.

At the time he was first approached to join the insurgency, al-Shayea was already becoming a devout Muslim in his ultraconservative town of Buraida. He grew a beard, prayed five times a day and stopped listening to Arabic love songs he used to enjoy. He was 19 and jobless.

Then he was contacted by a school friend whom he doesn’t identify.

“My friend started telling me about Iraq, how Muslims are getting killed there and how we should go there for jihad,” said al-Shayea. “He told me there were fatwas (edicts) and DVDs issued by Saudi and Iraqi clergymen that called for jihad.”

“We didn’t think of jihad as something that would lead to our death. It was a fight against occupiers,” said al-Shayea.

Finally the friend told him he was going to Iraq, and invited al- Shayea to join him.

He was told to shave his beard and pack Western clothes to avoid looking like a would-be jihadist. He got a passport and an airline ticket to Syria. And he managed to save $1,600—travel fees, he was told, that would go to smugglers, weapons training and al-Qaida’s coffers.

On a cool November night toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan, he donned a black T-shirt and jeans and told his parents he was going camping in the desert with his friends.

He and his friend flew to Syria, a favored transit point for Iraq- bound fighters because Syria doesn’t ask visiting Arabs for visas, and its 360-mile border with Iraq is thinly policed. A network of al-Qaida operatives sheltered him in Damascus, Aleppo and the border town of Abu-Kamal, and about two weeks later he and 23 other men were smuggled into Iraq.

Four Iraqi teenagers guided them to the Iraqi border town of al-Qaim. They saw Syrian border guards in the distance who fired in the air. “They didn’t try to stop us. We were already in Iraq,” al-Shayea said.

At al-Qaim, the men were split into two groups. Al-Shayea said his group of 12 met an al-Qaida leader who had direct links with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida chief in Iraq who was later killed by a U.S. airstrike. He took the men’s money and gave each $100.

“Then he asked us a question: ‘Those who want to carry out martyrdom (suicide) attacks, raise your hands,’” said al-Shayea. “No one did.”

Al-Shayea’s group then spent a week at the Sunni fundamentalist stronghold of Rawa before al-Shayea and another Saudi man were taken to Ramadi and finally Baghdad.

Al-Shayea met his new “emir,” or leader, an Iraqi who told him his first assignment was to take a fuel tanker to a Baghdad neighborhood to be collected by others.

“I felt scared. I didn’t know Baghdad at all, and I also didn’t know how to drive heavy vehicles,” he said.

Also, he says, he was never told that the truck would contain 26 tons of butane gas, rigged to explode outside the Jordanian Embassy.

“That evening, we performed the last prayer of the day and had dinner—a dish of chicken and aubergines,” said al-Shayea. “The emir gave me a crude map of my route.”

Two al-Qaida militants drove with al-Shayea, but then jumped out 1,000 yards from where he was supposed to park the truck and fled in a waiting car.

“I felt something bad was about to happen,” he said.

The farther he drove, the more nervous he got until, 60 feet from the embassy, an explosion—believed triggered from afar—turned the back of the tanker into a fireball.

“I saw the fire and I started to scream and pray,” he said.

“I looked around me and I saw everything had melted. My hands had turned black. I jumped from the window and started running without thinking of what I was doing.”

The blast killed nine people.

Thinking he was an innocent victim and a Shiite by his fake ID card, passers-by took al-Shayea to a Shiite-run hospital. There he kept silent for several days until he finally told his doctors the truth.

The world’s first encounter with al-Shayea was on footage of his interrogation which was sent to Arab TV stations. Back in Buraida, his parents saw their son, face charred, head heavily bandaged, but alive. They were stunned. They had been notified he was dead and had held a wake for him.

Al-Shayea said he told his interrogators where to find a senior al- Zarqawi aide in Baghdad, revealed all he knew about al-Qaida, and denounced al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden as killers of innocents.

He says he hasn’t seen nor heard from the friend who accompanied him since they parted soon after entering Iraq.

Today his hair has grown back, he sports a thick black beard and he can move without difficulty. He credits the medical care he received, including 30 operations, at the hospital of U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison.

He says that when he was handed over to the Americans a couple of days after his interrogation at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, he was scared because he had heard about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

“But the care with which the American officers carried me down to the car when they came to take me made me relax,” said al-Shayea. “One spoke Arabic and tried to put me at ease.”

After almost six months of medical care and interrogations during which al-Shayea said he was treated well, he was visited by three Saudi officers.

“They told me they were there for my sake,” said al-Shayea. “They allowed me to write a letter to my parents.”

They also asked him if he would tell his story publicly. He says he replied that he would have volunteered to do so even if they hadn’t asked.

A couple of weeks later, in mid-2005, al-Shayea was flown home. His parents were at the airport. “I took my dad in my arms, crying, and kept asking for forgiveness,” he said.

He spent a couple of months in the hospital and then was moved to al- Ha’ir Jail where he says he was given a TV set, newspapers and plenty of food. He also read a lot of books. One of them—which he says he would never have imagined he would read—is the Arabic classic “One Thousand and One Nights.”

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Karzai Pardons a Child and Sends a Message

2007-07-15T14:43:00.000+01:00

Gracen Commentary: It's likely Karzai will be widely criticized for this move, but we applaud it. It sends just the right message about a phenomenon that is all too common: Muslim parents send their children to a madrassah hoping they learn the tenets of a faith and the following occurs: (1) The child is isolated from the parents and all women (see forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jerrold Post on the impact of removing male children from female contact at an early age). (2) The madrassah refused the parents access to their own child, effectively kidnapping the boy. (3) An attempt was made to indoctrinate the boy, and when that failed he was threatened with death. (4) Typical of radicals, they used a child rather than being willing to die themselves (total cowards). Children are increasing used as proxies for adults in terrorist attacks or as human shields. (5) Karzai calls these people the enemies of Islam, and that is perfectly true. (6) Karzai nails Waziri tribesmen and Taliban for two crimes here: child abuse and making war on Afghanistan. And (7) Karzai forgives him, probably a controversial pardon, but because this kid is out front and apologizing, he deserves a pardon. It's also a message to the other children who might want to bail out of radical Islam—and a powerful message to parents to either get more involved in their children's education or get them out of madrassahs altogether. And then there is the matter of one child's redeemed life, in itself of inestimable value. So Gracen Intelligence applauds Hamid Karzai, and hopes he will start arresting radical Islamist imams and closing bad madrassash. However, with the mullahs controlling the Afghan judiciary (thanks to a repugnancy clause we allowed to happen), that's not likely to happen. Hint: Islamists always target the judiciary. It's the fastest, easiest way to control the population. — Morgaan Sinclair for Gracen Intelligence

Karzai pardons 'suicide bomb' boy

President Karzai said that Rafiqullah was not to blame

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has pardoned a 14-year-old boy caught wearing a suicide vest on his way to assassinate a provincial governor.

Rafiqullah had crossed the border from Pakistan and intended to kill Arsala Jamal, governor of Khost province.

Mr Karzai said Rafiqullah had been deceived by the "enemy of Islam" while attending a religious school.

Pardoning him at the presidential palace, Mr Karzai said: "I forgive him and I wish him the best of luck."

Suicide videos

The president said: "Today we are faced with a fearful and terrifying truth, and that truth is the sending of a Muslim child to carry out a suicide attack.

"[His parents] sent him to study at a madrassa (religious school). The enemy of Islam deceived him."

You are now free and forgiven by the people of Afghanistan

Hamid Karzai

Rafiqullah's father, Matiullah, said he had been unaware of his son's actions and agreed the boy had been deceived by teachers.

He said when he had asked about his son he was not given an answer.

"I am very happy to have my son back," said Mr Matiullah, who is from South Waziristan.

Rafiqullah said: "I am very happy that I am pardoned and released."

Rafiqullah said he was trained to drive a car and shown suicide attack videos at the madrassa in Pakistan.

He crossed the border and was met by a man who gave him a suicide vest. Rafiqullah said he did not want to carry out the attack but the man threatened to kill him.

He was caught last month wearing the vest on a motorbike in the city of Khost.

Militants have launched a number of suicide attacks against Afghan, Nato and US-led forces over the past two years.

A number of would-be attackers held in recent weeks have been teenagers.

Afghanistan has urged Pakistan to do more to prevent militants from crossing the border to carry out attacks.

In a message to Pakistan, Mr Karzai called for "better relationships, not cheating the children and encouraging them into terrorism and suicide".

With thanks to the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6899608.stm

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The Muttawa Take Another Hit (Yes!)

2007-07-11T21:55:00.000+01:00

The Crisis of the Wahhabi Regime

Surprising developments in Saudi Arabia.
by Stephen Schwartz and Irfan al-Alawi
07/16/2007, Volume 012, Issue 41
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/854vamro.asp

Long accustomed to abusing their power with impunity, the Saudi mutawiyin or "religious police" (more on that misleading translation in a moment) suddenly find themselves on the defensive. Increasingly challenged by critics, they felt compelled early this year to go through the motions of announcing a "modernization": Warrants would be required for searches, the use of force for moral violations would be banned. In practice, however, nothing changed. And when, this spring, two Saudi men died in custody, events took an unprecedented turn: Controversy erupted in the Saudi media; several mutawiyin members were dragged into court; and the boldest reformers called for dismantling altogether this hated institution.

But to make the story intelligible, it is necessary to begin at the beginning--with the uniqueness of Saudi Arabia. In addition to being the only state named after its rulers, and having no constitution except the Koran, this is the homeland of the radical Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam. Wahhabism, the official sect of the kingdom, is a patched-together, relatively recent expression of the faith of Muhammad, and the Wahhabi institutions that support the Saudi order often seem amorphous and opaque. Given the general absence of transparency in the kingdom, this should come as no surprise.

But there is no Wahhabi institution more difficult to define than the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Founded in the 1920s, when the Saudi state came into being, as an enforcer of collective morals, this body of at least 10,000 individuals is known to Saudi and other Muslims as the mutawiyin, or "devotees." Although often described in Western media as the "religious police," the mutawiyin have little in common with a police force--they wear no uniform and receive no salary--and are better described as an Islamofascist militia, something akin to the Nazi and Communist rank-and-file party members in lands ruled by those movements. Their mission includes ideological indoctrination in the dangers of "imitating the West" (such as watching television), but they mainly enforce Wahhabi standards of behavior in public. Their constant and degrading interference with ordinary people has brought about growing discontent. If judicial scrutiny is imposed on the mutawiyin, Saudi Arabia will undergo a profound change in its social life.

A kind of adjunct to the tens of thousands of state-subsidized clerics, the mutawiyin are a pillar of Wahhabism in the kingdom. They prowl the streets of the main Saudi cities day and night. Jeddah, the commercial capital on the Red Sea, is the notable exception: Local residents claim to have run the mutawiyin out of town. Elsewhere, however, they seek out people they suspect of violating the Wahhabi code of conduct. If a woman walks outside her home in the full body covering known as the abaya but allows a fold of cloth to slip, exposing her ankle or face, the mutawiyin may scold her or strike her. If they suspect that an unrelated man and woman are meeting in public places, the patrollers may detain and harass them, insulting the female for alleged lewdness, and beating the male. If people keep walking when the call to prayer is heard and do not rush into the nearest mosque, the mutawiyin may swarm and assault them for impiety. Given the Islamic ban on intoxication, if the militia are informed that alcoholic drinks or drugs are being used in a private home, they may raid the house and beat and even kill people. If Muslim pilgrims violate the Wahhabi understanding of monotheism by praying at the shrine of Muhammad in Medina, they are likely to be taken aside and roughed up and, if they are foreign, deported.

Until now, the mutawiyin have not been called to account for their sometimes drastic deeds. They have no professional standards or training. They are free to assault people and then shove them on their way, making no record of the encounter, having carried out no official arrest, and making no provision for any hearing or further punishment, although offenses deemed particularly grave--alleged adultery, say--may land the suspect before a sharia court.

Members enter the mutawiyin from the kingdom's strictest schools and mosques. They are not paid, but are assigned to regular patrols. They wear no identifying uniform except a red-checkered headscarf. They travel in unmarked cars. Instead of a firearm, they carry an asaa, a long stick resembling a riding crop. But they have offices and detention centers, and both the chief Islamic cleric in the kingdom, grand mufti Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheik, and interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz (notorious for asserting that 9/11 was the handiwork of Israel), say the mutawiyin are supported by the state. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has a chief, Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, and has lately appointed public-relations representatives, still unpaid.

The mutawiyin have benefited from the secrecy surrounding their internal functioning, and their "surprise" tactics help them maintain an atmosphere of intimidation. Their defenders claim the mutawiyin follow a prece dent in the strictest school of Sunni sharia, identified with the 9th-century jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal, whose followers organized patrols for "prevention of sin." But such patrols remained a marginal phenomenon in Islamic history, often condemned, until the emergence of the Saudi state in the 20th century.

The Mutawiyin in Court

On July 1, three Saudi judges began a court inquiry into the death last month of a Saudi citizen, Ahmed Al-Bulawi, 50, who had been detained by the mutawiyin in the northwestern town of Tabuk. On July 2, however, four members of the religious militia accused of responsibility for the death, and whose trial had already been postponed once, were released on bail; the previous Friday, mosques in Tabuk had broadcast sermons calling on local Muslims to defend the accused.

Al-Bulawi's case represents a microcosm of the mutawiyin's history. His alleged crime consisted of inviting a Moroccan woman who was not his relative and was unchaperoned by another male into his car. His relatives demand that those who caused his death be executed. Local authorities claim that Al-Bulawi died of natural causes, although the lawyer for his family told the media that the victim's remains showed he had been beaten in the face and head. The official medical report has not been released. For what it's worth, the unnamed Moroccan woman has revealed that Al-Bulawi formerly worked as her driver.

A little before Al-Bulawi's death, in May, Salman Al-Huraisi, aged 28, died in mutawiyin hands in Riyadh. His home had been raided by militia members looking for alcohol and drugs. The Saudi daily al-Watan (The Nation) reported on June 28 that a lawyer for Al-Huraisi's family had been denied access to a medical report on the fatality, but that Al-Huraisi had died after blows to the eye and head.

Some 18 mutawiyin participated in the raid on Al-Huraisi's home, and one of them is now due for trial. Local authorities initially sought to absolve the mutawiyin in the case by throwing a blanket of equivocation over them. Representatives of the governor of Riyadh claimed that the as-yet-unidentified individual accused of the killing was not on patrol when the victim died. The pro-al-Qaeda media enterprise Al-Sahat (The Battlefields) praised this attempt to deflect blame from the mutawiyin as appropriately protecting the militia's status. But some Arabic media insist Al-Huraisi's assailant was a leader of the mutawiyin. As in the past, vagueness about how the mutawiyin operate enables their alleged misconduct.

Finally, a 50-year-old Saudi woman known as Umm Faisal ("mother of Faisal"--her full name is undisclosed) has filed suit against the mutawiyin for an incident in 2003 when she, her daughter, and a foreign maid were verbally and physically harassed while waiting in a car for her two sons. The three women were charged with public immorality, in line with Wahhabi teaching that the presence of women in cars amounts to solicitation of prostitution. On July 3, the complaint of Umm Faisal became the first ever civil action in which a representative of the mutawiyin was summoned to court, although, again, the trial was postponed, this time until September.

With all this, the kingdom is atwitter about the mutawiyin. It is proof of the entrenched totalitarianism of Saudi society that such small steps as the charging of four militia members for Al-Bulawi's death and the court appearance of a militia member in the Umm Faisal matter are seen by ordinary Saudis as significant developments, potentially heralding a new epoch in the kingdom's life.

Naturally, the defenders of the Wahhabi order are intent on the mutawiyin's survival. Prince Nayef has publicly reaffirmed his support, though not loudly enough for Al-Sahat, which complains that the all-male Shura Council appointed by the king has failed to open more mutawiyin centers and authorize payment of members. The Shura Council seems to walk a fine line between popular disaffection with the mutawiyin and extremist pressure; it also rejected reform proposals that the mutawiyin wear uniforms and include female personnel.

Predictably protective of the institution is the Wahhabi establishment. On June 21, the newspaper Al-Madina reported that the grand mufti had denounced "unfair" media criticism of the religious militia and called for repression of the critics. The grand mufti is a descendant of Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab (1703-1792), originator of the Wahhabi sect. His position has been hereditary since the Al-Wahhab family contracted a permanent alliance with the Saud clan, who leave religious affairs to the Wahhabi offspring while keeping the reins of state power for themselves.

Amid these investigations and declamations, other sporadic and confusing measures have been proposed to ameliorate public dissatisfaction with the mutawiyin. When the case of Al-Bulawi first came to light, it was announced that 380 members of the militia would be trained in "interpersonal skills," surely one of the most bizarre statements yet from the Saudi authorities. The mutawiyin further promised to create a review process for their members' practices. At the same time, however, they rejected questions about their activities put forward by Saudi human rights activists.

Moreover, recent examples of outrageous behavior by the mutawiyin abound. At the beginning of June, a certain Fahd Al-Bishi of Riyadh complained to the media that the militia had crashed their vehicle into his family car and harassed him on his daughter's wedding day because they suspected his son of drinking or traveling in the company of women unrelated to him. In March, the mutawiyin burst into Prince Salman Hospital in Riyadh and fought with security personnel while ostensibly chasing a drug dealer. A few days before that, the mutawiyin had been taught a lesson in the restive Eastern Province, whose large Shia Muslim population is subject to continual discrimination. A patrol detained a man who was listening to music, a prime offense in Wahhabi eyes. After the individual was released, he returned with several friends and beat up the mutawiyin.

Indeed, by early this year, criticism of the institution had become so frequent that the militia refrained from its usual practice of violently interrupting the Riyadh International Book Fair, which opened in February, to search for banned literature. Many Saudis saw this as another small, positive step by the circle around King Abdullah, who is at odds with Prince Nayef, and is widely believed to seek a break with the past.

Throughout this chronicle one sees the contradictory symptoms of a deepening, as yet hidden crisis of the Saudi regime. The state defends the mutawiyin while promising change, but not too much change. People speak out more candidly, but a primitive institution like the mutawiyin continues to get away with shocking acts. Trials are promised, and begin, and then are put off, under the sinister gaze of Nayef. Precisely how events will unfold is impossible to foretell, but it is not too much to say that if the mutawiyin are ever finally held to answer for their long career of oppression, the entire Wahhabi establishment may begin to crumble.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Irfan al-Alawi is a close observer of Saudi affairs based in the United Kingdom.

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Australia Sounds Terrorism Alert for Indonesia

2007-07-08T23:38:00.001+01:00

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22039852-661,00.html

Australia Sees Imminent Attack in Bali & Indonesia from Increased Chatter on Abu Dujana Arrest

Ian McPhedran

July 09, 2007 12:00am

AUSTRALIANS have been told to stay away from Indonesia because of an imminent terrorist attack against Western interests in Bali or Jakarta.

Security agencies detected a sudden rise in "chatter" between known terrorist groups late on Saturday night.

The chatter, picked up by Australian electronic intercepts, indicated an attack - linked to the recent arrest of Jemaah Islamiah leader Abu Dujana - was to take place.

Howard warning: Visa system overhaul

Holiday snap: Terror suspect's Sydney link

Britain: 15-year war on radicals

"These attacks could take place at any time and could be imminent," the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warned.

"Australians should consider this information carefully when considering travel to Indonesia."

Australia's electronic spying agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, closely monitors phone calls and radio traffic inside Indonesia.

Australian Federal Police agents in Indonesia have access to the intercepts and other material.

It is understood Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer was shocked when he saw the latest intelligence material and decided to go public, despite potential damage to relations with Indonesia.

Indonesia always complains when Australians are warned to avoid their country, but after the two Bali bombings and attacks in Jakarta the Government is taking no chances.

Mr Downer chose his words carefully to avoid upsetting Jakarta, but the material intercepted on Saturday was so specific that he announced the warning himself.

"We . . . remain very concerned about the possibility of terrorist attacks and that those terrorist attacks could be imminent," he said.

"I think there is a bit of a sense in the community, as we look at this issue of terrorism more broadly, that in the case of Indonesia it's gone away.

"I don't want Australians to be complacent because there hasn't been an attack for a while."

The latest intercepts supported intelligence gathered by AFP working closely with Indonesian counter-terrorist police, and Australian spies from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service working there as diplomats.

Likely targets are the dozens of Western hotels, bars, nightclubs or tourist spots in Bali or Jakarta.

Major hotels in Bali said late yesterday they had yet to be informed by police of any increased security threat or of any need to upgrade security.

But most say that since the 2002 bombing, they have upgraded their general security to meet international standards.

While the travel advice has technically not been upgraded, the Government wants people to cancel travel plans.

And it has warned Australians in Indonesia to exercise extreme caution and avoid places frequented by Westerners.

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Serbia Sidelines Roma Rights Campaign

2007-07-03T16:13:00.000+01:00

Commentary: We didn't expect Serbia's so-called new emphasis on human rights of all its minorities to last. We are still waiting for Serbia to deal with the vicious anti-Semitism in the actions and on the websites of the so-called Serbian Defense League. And we iterate that under no circumstances should Serbia be allowed to control the people of Kosovo, whom they tried to exterminate. -- Morgaan Sinclair for Gracen Intelligence
__________________________________________________________________

Serbia Sidelines Roma Rights Campaign
http://www.birn.eu.com/en/91/10/3478/

03 07 2007 ‘Decade of Roma Inclusion’ inspires much talk but little action.

By Daliborka Mucibabic in Belgrade

In a Roma settlement on the outskirts of Belgrade, yards from the luxurious Hyatt Hotel, a cardboard shack of about 10 square metres, housing three beds and a stove, is home to a Roma family of four.

One-year-old Zorica Azemovic sleeps in an improvised hammock that stretches across the flea-infested room.

Her father, Miroslav, has barely slept for months, fearing a repetition of the drama when a rat almost bit off his daughter’s ear.

“It was about 10.30pm and Zorica started crying,” he said. “I jumped out of my bed and saw her bloodied ear. She was in hospital for a week and I’ve been awake ever since.”

Rat attacks on children are a routine ordeal for the 200 or so families living in the settlement, close to Belgrade’s main motorway.

Most of the Roma living there have moved to Belgrade from the impoverished southern town of Leskovac and other areas in the south.

“A day’s work in Leskovac is enough to buy you a sack of potatoes or beans, while you can earn up to 2,000 dinars [25 euro] in Belgrade by collecting and selling scrap cardboard; that’s quite an income,” Miroslav said.

The grim living conditions that the Azemovic family puts up with are the norm for many Roma families in Serbia.

Two years ago, Serbia’s Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, signed Serbia up to a regional programme aimed at improving the position of Roma throughout Central and South-east Europe.

The other countries involved in the programme are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia and Montenegro.

However, governments have taken only token steps so far to live up to the words contained in the declaration, “A Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015.”

Most Roma in Serbia have never heard of the document and know nothing about how they might benefit from it.

“I don’t know what my rights are nor who to talk to,” Azemovic said.

Poor living conditions, a lack of health care and no education are the main problems the declaration is supposed to tackle.

In 2006, the Serbian government duly passed action plans aimed at improving Roma education, health care, housing and employment, allocating special funds for their implementation. The Health Ministry allocated 60 million dinars or 750,000 euros, to Roma health care, for example.

Ljuan Koka, head of the government’s secretariat for implementing the Roma Strategy plan within the Department for Human and Minority Rights, said they had made most progress over education, while efforts to lower unemployment within the community had fallen well short of the target.

“We have been able to set up working groups in various ministries and what we want to do now is to get a clear picture of who’s spending the money and how,” Koka said.

“We don’t have a political agenda, as our project is mainly financed by the OSCE mission in Serbia, while the government has given us the premises to work in,” Koka went on.

Koka admitted the position of Serbia’s Roma community remained far worse than that of the general population. Child mortality among Roma was four times higher the rate among the majority population.

Average life expectancy is only 47, compared to an average of 75 in Serbia as a whole.

Very few Serbs grow up totally illiterate, while among Roma, Koka said, “More than 75 per cent are essentially illiterate; a meagre 0.3 per cent have degrees of any kind”.

These disadvantages impact on their project prospects. Only around 27 per cent of adult Roma are economically active as opposed to almost 70 per cent of the mainstream population.

Apart from illiteracy, lack of documents is a major problem, as this prevents Roma from gaining access to local services.

Many Roma are not even registered as legal residents and have no identification cards, health records and passports.

It also means no one has a clear idea of the size of their community. While the Roma population in Serbia officially stands at 108,000 it is widely believed the real number ranges from 450,000 to 800,000.

In spite of their size, politically, they remain a marginal force. It was only at this January’s elections that candidates representing Serbia’s biggest ethnic minority won two seats in parliament for the first time. These were Rajko Djuric, head of Serbia’s Roma Union, and Srdjan Sajn, leader of the Roma Party.

Djuric said the prevalent anti-Roma sentiment in Serbia reflected the general climate of racism in the country. He blamed the community’s plight on a lack of political will for and said the government still treated Roma problems as a second-class issue.

“The future is bleak for all of us unless Serbia becomes a more democratic society and takes a decisive step to curb right-wing extremism,” Djuric said.

Sajn maintains that if progress is to be made towards meeting goals by the 2015 target date, an effort needs to be made in setting up an institutional framework for the campaign, assembling competent staff and building a non-government sector capable of addressing the problem

“The current funds are being misspent as many people have joined the Roma integration project for their own personal benefit,” Sajn complained.

During the run-up to the January elections, Sajn’s Roma Party promised to provide 500 apartments for the neediest families, find jobs for 10,000 people and allocate 50 million dinars from the state budget to aid Roma students and teachers.

“We have to see concrete results this year and we will only support the government if it clearly defines the measures it intends to take in that direction,” Sajn said.

Koka said the election of two Roma deputies was a step forward but would not resolve their problems alone. “One or two deputies can’t change anything, while they can easily cancel each other out if they end up supporting rival camps in parliament,” he pointed out.

Bozidar Jaksic, a sociologist, said the position of the Roma community was made more difficult by the fact that, like other ethnic groups in Serbia, they tended to rally only behind narrowly defined “ethnic” issues.

“Their diverse culture is their greatest wealth and not a handicap,” Jaksic said.

Jaksic said he saw the integration formula as a cliché, bearing in mind that Roma had lived in the region for centuries; what they needed was not “integration” but emancipation.

“The sole purpose of the integration story is to turn the Roma into something they are not,” he went on.

As the legal successor of the former Serbia-Montenegro state union, Serbia has inherited the old state’s international human rights commitments, which include its obligations to the Roma community.

Serbia is also a member of the European Human Rights and Civil Liberties Convention on protecting national minorities and the European Charter on minority and regional languages.

While in theory these commitments and Serbia’s constitution guarantee Roma rights, in practice, according to Roma journalist Dragoljub Ackovic, discrimination is alive and well and even getting worse.

In some ways, he went on, the position of Roma had markedly deteriorated.

“We even had our own newspaper until 1935 while now we no longer have our own media outlet,” he noted.

The Serbian broadcasting agency had recently banned the Roma Amaro Dom television and Krlo e Romego radio stations, he went on.

Although Roma groups protested to the justice minister, the broadcasting agency insisted the stations did not fulfill basic technical and staffing criteria for the renewal of their licenses.

“All our effort to get air time on Belgrade state television have also been fruitless,” Ackovic continued.

Now the community’s hopes are increasingly pinned on the EU, which Serbia hopes eventually to join.

Countries aspiring to join the European club have to incorporate an anti-discrimination law into their constitutions.

Late last year, a draft bill was presented to the Serbian parliament though it still has not been passed.

Daliborka Mucibanic is a freelance reporter from Belgrade. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.

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Finally (Hopefully) the Muttawiyyah Get Some Grief

2007-07-01T19:47:00.001+01:00

Saudi Religious Police Face Backlash


Jul 1 01:58 PM US/Eastern By DONNA ABU-NASR Associated Press Writer

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - As the car stopped outside a Riyadh amusement park, two bearded men dragged the driver from the wheel and took the three women on a wild ride of more than an hour, bouncing over sidewalks and finally abandoning them on a darkened street.

The women at first thought they had been kidnapped by terrorists. The two men however, said they were religious police.

It might have gone down as just one more excess of zealousness by the forces charged with upholding Islamic modesty, except that Umm Faisal, the senior of three women, did something that is believed unprecedented in Saudi Arabia: She went to court.

On Monday, four years after the incident, the latest chapter of the legal battle being waged by this 50-year-old mother of five reopens before Riyadh's Grievances Court, which handles damages suits for abuses by government and public figures.

The unusual publicity surrounding Umm Faisal's story comes on top of two cases involving the death in religious police custody of two Saudi men—one arrested for allegedly consuming alcohol, another for being alone with a woman not of his family.

A trial opened Monday against three religious police officers and a fourth man in the death of Ahmed al-Bulaiwi, the man detained for being alone with a woman. Relatives demanded the death penalty against the defendants.

Taken together, the cases threaten to undermine the authority of the force's employer, the powerful, independent body called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

Since the commission's creation more than six decades ago, there has been no known public legal action taken against its members despite complaints they occasionally overstep their boundaries. The public view has tended to be that whatever their faults, they are acting in Islam's name to defend morality.

But things may be changing.

The National Society for Human Rights, a nongovernment body, has issued a report which, according to the daily Arab News, levels a string of allegations at the religious police: abusive language, unsubstantiated accusations, humiliation of people during interrogation, beatings, unnecessary body searches, forced entry into private homes and coerced confessions.

The report, as well as the extensive coverage the cases have received and editorials calling for the commission's reform, suggest the government may act to regulate the force.

Another setback for the commission came in the appointed Consultative Council, the nearest thing to a parliament in Saudi Arabia. It rejected proposals to build more commission centers and give its members a 20 percent salary raise. While the council's actions are not binding, they reflect a general desire to curb the religious police's power.

"Society has developed and the relationship of other governmental bodies with the people has developed and become more human," said Dawood al-Shirian, a Saudi journalist. "Yet the commission has not changed."

"Society in principle doesn't reject the commission," he added. "But the commission's problem is that it doesn't have a proper job description."

Several media outlets have conducted informal surveys asking Saudis whether the commission should be dissolved. Some have said yes. While the polls may be unscientific, simply asking the question is significant.

Ibrahim al-Ghaith, the commission's head, dismissed the polls, saying the commission is "one of the oldest governmental agencies ... and not a cooperative that can be eliminated because of individual mistakes," according to the Al-Jazira newspaper.

The Saudi government is reluctant to tamper with its religious establishments for fear of angering conservatives and weakening its credentials as custodian of Islam's two holiest shrines. The conservative impulse has lately been illustrated by a request from 14 faculty members of King Saud University's medical school to ban male students from treating women and vice versa, on the grounds that handling bodies of the other sex is un-Islamic.

But there are signs the commission is acting to limit the damage to the religious police's reputation. It now has a spokesman and a legal department to guide its members.

Umm Faisal—her full name is withheld in reports on the case—says she, her 21-year-old daughter and her Indonesian maid went to pick up her two teenage sons from the amusement park in the family's new Chevrolet Caprice.

"I kept asking the men, 'Are you terrorists?' They finally said they were members of the commission," she said. "When I asked what they wanted, they called me names, including adulteress."

Umm Faisal said the men drove so fast and badly that smoke came out of the car.

The men stopped the car, called their friends and asked them to pick them up. The women, who don't know how to drive (and can't anyway, under Saudi law), were left to the mercies of passers-by.

Umm Faisal headed to the police to lodge a complaint. "When questioned, the commission members claimed we were indecently covered," because her daughter's veil didn't cover her eyes, she said.

In early 2004 she filed suit at Riyadh's General Court, but says several judges pressed her to drop it and late last year the case was dismissed.

She then turned to the Grievances Court, which fined one official $540 for mistreating the women and acquitted the other.

Umm Faisal isn't satisfied, and her appeal opens before the court on Monday.

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Prayer Vigil for Lina Joy

2007-06-15T13:28:00.000+01:00

Gracen Intelligence Commentary:
Either there's "no compulsion in religion" or there's not. It is indicative of the turmoil surrounding this apostasy case that while the story has lost impetus in the Western press it is still daily front page news in Malaysia. This prayer service was attended by the Malaysian Consultative Council on Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism (MCCBCHST), the women’s rights group Women's Action Society (AWAM), and, most poignantly, Sisters in Islam (SIS), whose courage in standing up is incredibly inspiring. The "re-education" in question here is a form of incarceration involving "Manchurian Candidate"—style psychological pressure and mind control, and should thus be considered a form of torture. It is the position of Gracen Intelligence that it violates absolutely every extant human rights convention on this planet as the cruel and unusual punishment it is — and that the government of Malaysia should be sanctioned by the United Nations for crimes against humanity in allowing religious authorities to punish people out of the freedoms of conscience and religion that are their inalienable rights. — Morgaan Sinclair for Gracen Intelligence

06/15/2007 12:55
MALAYSIA

A Hindu Lina Joy, subjected to Islamic “re-education”
Source: http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=9564&size=A

Some civil groups in Malaysia have organised a prayer vigil Revathi: and Indian Hindu who January last was condemned to 180 days of “rehabilitation” in a centre lead by Muslim authorities.

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews) – Malaysian civil society is rising against the continued interference of Islamic law in the lives of non Muslim citizens. On June 9 in Kuala Lumpur a night time prayer vigil will be held to draw public attention to the case of Ravathi, a woman of Indian origins who is currently being held in a detention centre after the state refused to recognise her religious status as a Hindu.

Organizers include the Malaysian Consultative Council on Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism (MCCBCHST) women’s rights groups Women's Action Society (AWAM) and Sisters in Islam (SIS).

Revathi was born to Indian parents who had converted to Islam before her birth. She claims she was raised by her grandmother as a Hindu. She and Suresh were married according to Hindu rites in March 2004. Revathi was advised by the Malacca Islamic Religious Department to make an application at the Malacca Syariah High Court to confirm her status as a Hindu. She did as she was told. However, the Syariah Court ordered her detained in a rehabilitation centre in Ulu Yam, Selangor under Melaka's Syariah criminal laws for 100 days. This detention was extended in Revathi's absence for a further 80 days supposedly because she had not "repented". In the meanwhile, Revathi's Muslim mother obtained a Syariah Court order granting her custody of Revathi and Suresh's 15 month old baby. That order was enforced on Suresh's Hindu family with the assistance of the police. The family is now torn apart - with the mother in detention, the child with the grandparents and the father in limbo without his family.

After the Lina Joy case – the Malay women whose conversion to Christianity was not recognised by the Federal Court, who judged it to be an issue for the “Islamic tribunal” – increasing doubts about the existence of freedom of belief and faith in the country. In fact in multi-racial Malaysia two legislations exist: Islamic and Constitutional, and they are often conflicting. For example Constitutional law grants freedom of religion, while Islamic law prohibits conversion from Islam. Organizers of the prayer vigil Revathi, seek to underline that “Federal law supremacy over Sharia needs to be reaffirmed”.
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Ebadi Can't See Iranian-American Client

2007-06-14T18:23:00.000+01:00

Iran censorship 'getting worse'

Ms Ebadi says she has not been allowed to see her client

Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi has said censorship in her country is getting much worse.
_____________________________________

Ms Ebadi, a human rights lawyer, said the government was trying to prevent information about what is happening there reaching the outside world.

The recent arrest of four Iranian-Americans for spying was part of that trend, she told the BBC.

Ms Ebadi said she was being prevented from representing one of those detained, academic Haleh Esfandiari.

She said Mrs Esfandiari had requested representation in a phone call, but Iran's judiciary denied it.

She said has not been allowed to see her client, who is being held in solitary confinement, and has not been given details of the case.

"On the basis of Iranian law, none can accuse anyone else before he or she appears in court," Ms Ebadi told the BBC.

She added that the ministry of intelligence's repeated description of her client as a spy was "absolutely illegal".

National sovereignty

Ms Ebadi said the government's attitude to foreigners was also deteriorating.

"Censorship has got much worse recently... Iran's government doesn't like its domestic affairs and events inside the country to be reflected in the outside world," Ms Ebadi said.

When governments are threatened... they suppress freedom-loving figures

Shirin Ebadi

Ms Ebadi also criticised the West, saying talk of military strikes on Iran had given Teheran an excuse to suppress its people on the grounds of national defence.

"Usually when governments are threatened by foreign forces, they suppress freedom-loving figures by pretending to defend national sovereignty," she said.

"And this is true in Iran now."

Ms Esfandiari is director of the Middle East programme at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Also being detained are Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Open Society Institute and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California in Irvine.

Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the US-funded Radio Farda, has been released but prevented from leaving the country.

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Gaza Lurches to Islamic State

2007-06-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

From The Times Online

June 14, 2007

Gaza lurches towards Islamist mini-state

Paul Martin in Rafah and James Hider in Jerusalem

A new, Islamist mini-state was emerging in the Gaza Strip yesterday, as victorious Hamas forces surrounded and blew up their secular rivals’ last strongholds in bitter fighting that threw the entire future of the Middle East peace process into doubt.

Supporters of the Fatah movement fled to Egypt or surrendered as Hamas leaders predicted that they would control the entire coastal strip by the end of the week.

European Union chiefs said that the deployment of an international force should be urgently considered to curb the bloodshed.

In Gaza, Hamas strengthened its grip as its fighters surrounded die-hard Fatah supporters in isolated, last-stand strongholds. In Khan Younis in the south, Hamas guerrillas tunnelled under a Fatah security base and blew it up with its defenders still inside. Those refusing to give up in other besieged bastions were given two days to surrender.

”This is a victory for Islam and I hope we will build our Islamic state,” said Abu Qatada, a masked 22-year-old Hamas fighter, standing outside the smouldering ruin of the Fatah security base. “We must now complete the job,” he said.

In a symbolic moment, a large crowd of Gaza civilians demonstrating for an end to the internecine fighting came under fire from unidentified attackers who killed at least two marchers.

Political leaders of Fatah were also being hunted, and several hundred members of a Fatah-affiliated clan gave themselves up to Hamas militiamen after a deadly ambush. Fifty Fatah policemen crossed the border with Egypt and gave up their weapons to Egyptian troops after their positions came under Hamas rocket attacks.

“The situation is very, very bad,” Maher Mekhdad, a high-ranking Fatah official in Gaza, told The Times by mobile phone after his well-defended house was overrun by Hamas gunmen. “Hamas is going for total control of all the Gaza Strip. They want to push us into oblivion.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and leader of Fatah, lamented the “madness” that was unfolding. At least 33 people were killed yesterday, bringing the toll since Saturday to 81 as the violence escalates into what many Palestinians see as all-out civil war in Gaza.

The United Nations said that it would scale back its operations in Gaza after two of its Palestinian employees were killed and two others seriously wounded in crossfire.

Benni Eilon, an extreme right-wing member of the Israeli parliament, said that the fighting would put paid to Palestinian plans for an independent state. “The Fatah is diminishing in front of our eyes, and a group of gangsters is taking over. ”

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Taliban Militants Drain Life from Pakistani City

2007-06-14T16:08:00.001+01:00

Pro-Taliban militants gain ground, drain life from once prosperous Pakistani city

The Associated Press.
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/13/asia/AS-GEN-Pakistan-Talibanization.php

TANK, Pakistan: Pro-Taliban militants have transformed a once-bustling community in northwestern Pakistan into a desolate city under siege.

After militant raids on government buildings, businesses and a school, Tank's dusty streets and bazaars are largely empty and gunfire rings out at night. A tribal elder and opposition politician estimates that one-third of residents have fled to other areas.

"The government has lost its writ in Tank," said Sardar Ahmed Gul, who keeps a loaded Chinese-made pistol at hand. "Every evening there is shooting and people cannot go out."

The government's crumbling authority over towns like Tank in the North West Frontier Province suggests that President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is failing to rein in extremism as Islamic militants broaden their influence beyond the lawless regions that border Afghanistan.

It also raises questions about the prospects of success for Washington's anti-terrorism efforts in the region, where al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri are believed to be hiding.

Observers blame the uptick in violence in Tank, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) from the Afghan border, on fighters filtering in from South Waziristan, a militant stronghold on the frontier where the government has little control.

On March 28, scores of militants attacked government buildings and businesses for several hours, killing one soldier and kidnapping a high school principal who had tried to stop them from recruiting students. He was freed, but the violence persisted — last month, about 100 militants attacked a government official's house, killing 13 people.

Pakistan's army also has come under attack; three bombings since January have killed at least six soldiers.

Now, Tank is becoming a virtual no-go zone, even for its 150,000 residents, and the fear is that it and other nearby districts are slipping into the orbit of Islamic fundamentalists who have issued Taliban-style social edicts and set up their own courts in the tribal areas.

Extremists have warned barbers not to shave customers' beards and bombed shops selling Western music or films.

At a meeting of his National Security Council last week, Musharraf told authorities that "the militants must be taken head on, security of vital places be beefed up and activities of suspected elements be strictly monitored."

He pledged to provide the provincial government with more police, vehicles and equipment. But there are doubts about both his willingness and ability to clamp down on the militants.

Musharraf relies heavily on Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a religious party that leads the provincial government and helped secure the release of the abducted principal, to mediate with militant groups in the region.

Samina Ahmed, a South Asia expert at the International Crisis Group think tank, views Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam as a "political front" for the militants. The party shies away from criticizing the militants' activities in Tank, Ahmed said, blaming the government instead for stirring up a hornets' nest by launching counter-terrorist operations in the area at Washington's behest.

"'Talibanization' is a term created by the U.S. and the West to blame and defame Muslims and Pashtuns," said Maulana Saleh Shah, a Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam lawmaker in Tank. "Anywhere something happens against their agenda they label it as Taliban."

However, others suspect that the party is losing control of hardcore extremists.

"There is a serious rift between these militants and the JUI," said Rahimullah Yousafzai, a Pakistani reporter and expert on the region. "Some of them had links with the JUI in the past, then they were radicalized and they want the JUI to be more radical, too."

Asfandyar Wali, head of the secular Awami National Party which competes with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam for the loyalty of ethnic Pashtuns, accused Musharraf of deliberately allowing the violence. That way, he said, Musharraf can send a message to his foreign backers that "if I am not here, these are the sort of people who will rule nuclear-armed Pakistan."

Shopkeepers in Tank are merely worried about their safety.

"No one wants put his life at risk in such an uncertain situation," said Qibla Khan, who supports a family of 10 by selling fruit and vegetables. "We all are worried about our and our kids future. We cannot live in such a constant state of fear and worry."

___

Stephen Graham reported on this story from Islamabad, Riaz Khan from Tank.

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Iranian Rapist / Murderer Executed

2007-06-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

Gracen Intelligence Commentary:
In a country that routinely exonerates murderers who claim their religion or their honor has been offended — that frees perpetrators of crimes against women on trumped-up charges of adultery — that turns a blind eye to abuses of the Baha'i, Jews, Christians and all others of non-Muslim faith, this is an encouraging, if extremely odd, turn of events. Ebadi, who is anti-death penalty under normal circumstances, has either changed position, or there is something about this family of such importance that the general Iranian population is being warned not to mess with their property. It is on behalf of the woman's family — not the woman's personhood — that this sentence was handed down and carried out. The victim is still, on balance, property, despite being dead. At the same time, there's perhaps another reason: if the culture of Iran invokes the death penalty by stoning on grounds of unproved adultery, extra-judicial (and then absolved) murders of non-Muslims, and so-called "honor" killings based on the bruised psychosexual pride of a man who thinks he owns a woman, we can only applaud this execution on the grounds of equal protection under the law. Until Iran rids itself of its egregious abuses of human rights, particular those of the most vulnerable — the women, the children, the Baha'i and other non-Muslims — it can at least apply equally laws against the taking of human life. It is the position of Gracen Intelligence that it opposes the death penalty, but only under the condition that a nation opposes the death penalty for all — not selectively applying it to women and minorities in judicial and extrajudicial fashion, and then writing laws and installing judges that give a privileged sector of the society (in this case the Mullahs and Muslim men) the right to kill out of ego or bigotry and then go free. Given Ebadi's record on this issue, our supposition is that this may be the point that she, as a lawyer and judge, is actually making. — Morgaan Sinclair for Gracen Intelligence

IRAN: Death Penalty Request by Nobel Laureate Attorney Sparks Criticism

Source: http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.425347667&par=0

Tehran, 13 June (AKI) - The news that a young man has been executed in Tehran for raping and killing a woman has been met with surprise and criticism by progressive Iranians not because of the sentence - Iran ranks second after China for the number of executions carried out - but because the attorney who reportedly demanded capital punishment on behalf of the victim's family is Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, an anti-death penalty campaigner. Mohammed Safar was hanged a few days ago at Tehran's Evin prison.

Iranian blogs, mostly those of women's rights activists, have harshly condemned Ebadi.

"Someone like her who is a campaigner for peace and justice cannot support the request for the death penalty asked by the family's victim," wrote on her blog women's rights activist Assieh Amini.

Ebadi's office in Tehran contacted by Adnkronos International (AKI) refused to comment the reports.

A graduate of Tehran University, Shirin Ebadi, 60, was the first female judge in her country, serving as president of the Tehran city court, from 1975.

However, after the 1979 Islamic revolution she was forced to resign when it was decided that women were not suitable for such posts.

Ebadi then established a law practice, taking on politically sensitive cases many Iranian lawyers were afraid to touch.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to stop among other things political imprisonment, gender discrimination and the death penalty in Iran.

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UN Addresses Serbia on Roma Women's Rights

2007-06-14T13:48:00.000+01:00

__________________________________________

UN Women’s Rights Committee Calls on Serbia to Address Discrimination against Romani Women

13 June 2007, Budapest, Belgrade: The European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), in partnership with the Serbian non-governmental organisations Bibija, Eureka, and Women’s Space, today welcomed the concluding comments of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in their review of Serbia’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. CEDAW’s comments address Serbia’s initial report on its progress in eliminating sex and gender discrimination since becoming party to the Convention in 2006. The ERRC, Bibija, Eureka and Women’s Space had previously submitted a report to the Committee bringing attention to the critical situation for Romani women in Serbia.

CEDAW’s comments highlighted the particularly vulnerable position of Romani women in Serbian society, who face multifarious barriers to education, political representation, and legal justice due to the combination of sexual and racial discrimination. The Committee requested that Serbia take immediate action in a number of areas:

Domestic violence
The Committee cautioned that admission criteria for safe houses may represent “de facto discrimination against Roma women threatened by domestic violence.” It urged Serbia to “review and monitor the application of admission criteria used by safe houses for victims of domestic violence in order to ensure that these do not exclude Roma women.”

Education
Questioning the “lack of current sex-disaggregated data and information in regard to education,” the Committee showed particular concern in regards to “Roma women and girls and other marginalized groups,” amongst whom rates of literacy and education are alarmingly high. It recommended that “special attention be paid to achieving equal access [to education] for marginalized groups of women and girl, in particular of the Roma minority…the Committee also recommends that literacy and vocation programmes be provided to Roma women, in particular those who are elderly and illiterate.”

Health care

The Committee noted concern about “the limited access to adequate health-care services for women, especially for women in rural areas and Roma women,” and called on Serbia to “increase its efforts to improve the availability of sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning.” It extended this concern to the area of early marriage, “particularly within the Roma population,” due to the “negative effects of early marriage on women’s enjoyment of their human rights, especially their rights to health and education,” and as such urged Serbia “to enforce the legal minimum age of marriage, which is set at 18.”

ERRC, Bibija, Eureka, and Women’s Space are pleased that the Committee included such detailed recommendations to the Serbian government to improve the dire situation of Romani women, and they urge Serbia to take immediate, strong action to implement the Committee’s recommendations.

Wahhabism Spreading in Russia

2007-06-14T12:04:00.001+01:00

14 June 2007, 10:01

Prominent Islamic researcher warns against Wahhabism replacing traditional Islam throughout Russia

Moscow, June 13, Interfax - Ideas of Islamist extremism and intolerance towards other faiths are spreading today in many Russian regions, Islamic researcher Roman Silantyev maintains.

'There is a process of substituting Islam 'modernized' in the spirit Wahhabism for traditional Islam underway in Russia today. People often follow the Wahhabi ideology in the belief that what they confess is traditional Islam', Silantyev said in an interview with the Nashe Vremya weekly.

In the researcher's estimation, if before there were large Wahhabi enclaves in Dagestan, Chechnya and Karachayevo-Cherkessia, now 'there is an apparent spread of the Wahhabi infection from Chechnya to the whole of North Caucasus and even to the Russian population in the Stavropol region'.

Besides, he added, 'Wahhabi pestholes' have gradually appeared in cities and areas with a traditional Islamic minorities, such as Sakhalin, Orenburg region, Yamalo-Nenets cities, St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Omsk, Chita and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

'Whole Wahhabi villages have appeared in Mordovia and the Penza region. In the Olonets region in Karelia they (Wahhabis - IF) tried to lay Orthodox parishes under tribute', the expert maintains.

The present Islamic community in Russia, in his view, is 'in a state of the gravest crisis' and the ways out of it have not yet been found. The Russian umma 'has begun mutating' towards a gradual erosion of the dividing line between traditional and non-traditional Muslims.

'The Wahhabis tried to use arms to impose their views but failed. Then they changed their tactics and established control over most of the Islamic mass media and a considerable number of publishing houses', Silantyev has reported.

According to his data, the bulk of the Islamic literature existing in Russia, especially cheap leaflets on the rudiments of Islam, is translated into Russian and 'circulated by Saudi and Kuwait foundations', and 'the most innocent quotations from them are calls not to obey the laws of non-Islamic states'.

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Tirumala Bans All Religions except Hinduism

2007-06-14T03:50:00.001+01:00

INDIA

Only one religion allowed in Tirumala: Hinduism
by Nirmala Carvalho
The government of Andhra Pradesh issued a ban last Friday against religions other than Hinduism in Tirumala. Violators risk three years in jail, fines of up to 5,000 rupees, or both.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) – In Tirumala only Hinduism is allowed and political activities are banned. In a decision taken last Friday by Rameshwar Thakur, governor of Andhra Pradesh, the state government has banned all religions other than the one traditionally associated with local places of worship or prayer. The state’s chief minister, Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy, told AsiaNews that a bill to that effect will be presented in the next session to the state assembly.

Missionary activities by Christians in Tirumala and surrounding areas are blamed for the government’s new policy which includes punitive measures against violators including three years in jail, fines of up to 5,000 rupees or both.

Mgr Marampudi Joji, archbishop of Hyderabad, told AsiaNews that “in the face of persecution, we stand by our faith and our conviction. No political power can prevent us from spreading the Good News of the Lord.”

In his opinion, “this ordinance is essentially political and our Christian chief minister is buckling under pressure. We believe that the Indian constitution guarantees us the right to spread our faith. It is a matter of urgent concern that Andhra Pradesh should introduce such an ordinance. The government should be sensitive to the sentiments of the Christian community which has so tirelessly served all classes of society, irrespective of caste and creed. As archbishop of Hyderabad I say that no Christian has ever entered a place of worship of another religious community to proselytise. The Church has been involved and spearheaded dialogue between religions and within civil society. We are not afraid. In spite of laws Christians’ faith is stronger than ever. People are more united and closer to the Church. We live our faith and in the face of persecution we stand with courage and unity in Christ.”

Fr Anthoniraj Thumma, executive secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Federation of Churches and deputy secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Bishops’ Council, told AsiaNews that the Council “strongly opposes the ban. Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy yielded to the will of Hindu extremist groups who took advantage of the fact that he was Christian to blackmail him. This ordinance runs against many fundamental rights protected by our constitution and discriminates against non-Hindus. The Andhra Pradesh Bishops’ Council will take up its opposition when the issue comes before the state assembly.”

For John Dayal, chairman of the All Indian Catholic Union, “the ordinance violates the constitution of India and may go against the Supreme Court ruling in the Hindutva case which held that Hinduism was a way of life.”

The fact of the matter according to Dayal is that “the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and is affiliated organisations have targeted Reddy for his religion.” For instance, “RSS papers usually refer him by his Christian name, Samuel, rather than Rajshekhara.” But “no religion in the world claims a place exclusively as its own, where no one else can enter.”

“According to its constitution India is a secular state,” he explained. “So what is problem with religious freedom in a Tirumala? What happens to article 30 of the constitution [which recognises the right of minorities to establish and administer their own educational institutions]? What about Hindus’ right to choose where they want to get medical assistance and education? What happens to religious freedom for Dalits, Christians and other groups who live in the area?”

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Darwish Calls on US Feminists for Help

2007-06-10T22:32:00.000+01:00

U.S. women can help Arab feminists

By NONIE DARWISH
GUEST COLUMNIST

Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/317680_arabfems30.html

As a teenager in Cairo in the mid-1960s, I watched with admiration those Americans who stood up for progress, minority rights, civil rights and women's rights, and who fought against extreme and archaic values. You became role models for me. I passionately followed your causes.

Now I need your help and support in a different cause: the struggle of Arab feminists, progressives and reformers for equal rights and individual freedom in Muslim countries, especially for women.

American women TV reporters have taken to wearing head covers in moderate Arab countries that do not enforce Islamic attire. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wore a scarf in secular, Baathist Syria. By complying with the practices that radical Muslims force on women even in secular Muslim countries, those American women unknowingly undermine the cause of Arab feminists and can even be seen as lending tacit support to radicals. They need to understand better the culture in which they are operating.

Many Muslim women refuse to wear the Islamic head cover because they never did so in the majority of Muslim countries, where this practice was never enforced. But the radical Muslims are trying to intimidate Muslim women to cover themselves. Incidents of acid thrown in the faces of girls who do not wear head covers have been documented. All the women in my family in Egypt, myself included, have never worn the Islamic head cover.

I lived for 30 years in oppressive dictatorships and police states where most of the women around me had undergone the horrific procedure of clitoridectomy. Many more had to make peace with their inferior status.

Like most immigrants, I came to America, in 1978, to escape tyranny and enjoy freedom. I anguished as I looked the other way when I saw the suffering of my people on TV. I heard of death threats and intimidation against Arab feminists and reformers, including Ghada Jamsheer from Bahrain, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt and even the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who was stabbed in Cairo in 1994 by a radical Muslim. I was thankful to be living in America.

But I can no longer look the other way. A group of moderate Muslim women has decided, from the relative safety of America, to stand up for change in the Muslim world. Our goals are:

To achieve equal rights for Muslim women and minorities living in Muslim countries.
To assure freedom of religion, speech and the press.
To establish separation of mosque and state.
To end hate speech in the schools, mosques and government-sponsored media.
To realize peace with Israel.
To see the creation of Arab democracies under constitutions that protect freedoms.

It saddens me deeply to realize that even in America, we moderate Muslims are threatened and our views are misrepresented. Americans do not know whom to believe. The few moderates who openly criticize radical Islam, or the terror apologists who call terrorists freedom fighters? Muslims and former Muslims who demand equality for Muslim women, or those who say that Muslim women are happy just the way they are? Muslims who expose radical Islam's threat, or those who blame America for Arab failures that existed long before there was an America?

As a reformist of Arab-Muslim origin, it hurts me to see some well-meaning Americans sympathize with and appease the oppressive radicals of my culture. Islamists do not represent the hope and future of the Middle East, but the oppressive past.

We modern-day Arab-American moderate women now turn to the type of Americans I admired as a teenager in Cairo for experience, help and support. We are this decade's freedom fighters.

It would be easier for us to ignore the old country; to blame conditions in our homeland on outside factors, historical injustices or last century's imperialism. But those who want real change don't look away or blame others; they take on the challenge and responsibility of implementing change.

Though the Middle East is a complex region with many ancient variables, customs, differences and animosities, we must apply a universal concept of human rights, women's rights and minority rights to all countries on the globe -- with no exceptions for any religion or ideology.

Those Americans who stood up for these rights in the '60s -- and still do today -- are the natural allies of moderate Muslims in our struggle against Middle East religious and political tyranny. Stand with us now.

HRW (Finally) Deplores Treatment of US Soldiers

2007-06-08T23:11:00.000+01:00

Human Rights Watch has been substantially silent on radical Islamist abuses of women and children in Iraq, as well as inter-Islamic violence, market bombings, and the continued existence of Muqtedar al Sadr (who murdered another imam in the doorway to a mosque) in a position of power. They have also resounding ignored the abuses of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards its women, more than half of the country's population, as well as the oppression of the Bah'ai, the inequality of the justice system, and the employment of vicious hudud punishments under shari'a law. Finally, we hear a tiny peep for them that an American life is worth something. Better late than never, we suppose.

Source: http://www.upi.com/Security_Terrorism/Briefing/2007/06/08/human_rights_group_slams_terror_atrocities/7005/

Security & Terrorism - Briefing

Published: June 8, 2007 at 5:33 PM

Human rights group slams terror atrocities

WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- A U.S. human rights organization Friday demanded that Islamist extremists treat captured U.S. soldiers humanely.

Human Rights Watch said it was responding to a claim by the Islamic State of Iraq insurgent group, which claims ties to al-Qaida, that it killed two captive American soldiers.

"If confirmed, this act would constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law and those responsible would be guilty of war crimes," Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

"Those claiming to hold the U.S. soldiers captive must treat the men humanely," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "If they have done otherwise , they have committed war crimes."

The two soldiers -- Spec. Alex Jimenez, 25, and Pvt. Byron Fouty, 19 -- went missing on May 12 when insurgents attacked their patrol near Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad. U.S. troops later discovered the body of Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., who had disappeared at the same time.

"Customary international law requires that all captured belligerents be treated humanely and provides that the murder or willful killing of a captured belligerent is a war crime," HRW said.

"No matter what the cause, killing captives violates international humanitarian law," said Whitson. "Every party to a conflict is subject to the laws of war, and the requirement to treat captive soldiers humanely is one of the most basic provisions."

The human rights group noted that killing a captive soldier "also violates basic precepts of Islamic law governing the conduct of war, according to most scholars of Islamic law."

FEATURED ARTICLE: Heritage.org BG: UN Rights Councils

2007-06-03T18:26:00.000+01:00

The United Nations Human Rights Council: A Disastrous First Year

by Brett D. Schaefer

http://www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/bg2038.cfm
June 1, 2007
Backgrounder #2038

The United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) was established in 2006 to replace the discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights (CHR). Despite minimal safeguards against capture of the HRC by human rights abusers—the source of the commission's ineffectiveness—HRC supporters, including U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, were quick to declare that the new body represented the "dawn of a new era" in promoting human rights in the United Nations.[1] U.N. General Assembly President Jan Eliasson, who oversaw the reform negotiations, called the council "a new beginning for the promotion and protection of human rights" and declared that the council would be "principled, effective and fair."[2] After nearly a year in existence and four regular sessions and four special sessions, the HRC has clearly been none of these.

The United States was one of only four countries that voted against the U.N. General Assembly resolution that created the council.[3] The U.S. cast its vote out of concern that the new council would lack safeguards against the problems that afflicted the CHR. Regrettably, this concern has proved to be well founded:

The council has mirrored the commission's obsessive focus on Israel to the detriment of other, more severe human rights situations.

It has become a platform for human rights abusers to deflect criticism rather than being held to account.

The abusive states are leading an effort to undermine the few effective aspects of the council, such as the special procedures dedicated to examining human rights abuses in specific countries, and are supporting efforts to weaken the universal periodic review of the human rights practices of all U.N. member states.

The U.S. chose not to run for a seat on the HRC in 2006 and 2007. This was the right decision. Until the council proves effective, the U.S. should not lend its credibility to the flawed body by participating.

However, the U.S. should use its influence to make the body effective by encouraging states with good human rights records to run for seats on the council and by speaking up on situations before the council. The U.S. should encourage the council to maintain procedures that have proven effective and strive to block efforts by human rights abusers to weaken those procedures. It should also seek to make the universal periodic review of council member states as frequent and objective as possible.

The council will make many of these decisions in the upcoming June session. Success in these areas should lead the U.S. to continue its engagement with the council. Failure would demonstrate that the council is simply incapable of effectively advancing fundamental human rights, in which case the U.S. should publicly wash its hands of the council and withhold its portion of the council's budget from its contributions to the U.N.

Human Rights Failure at the U.N.
Since the birth of the United Nations, protecting and advancing fundamental human rights has been one of the organization's primary objectives. The drafters of the U.N. Charter included a pledge by member states "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women."[4] U.N. treaties, such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which the General Assembly passed in 1948, form the core of international standards for human rights.

Yet the U.N.'s recent record in promoting fundamental human rights is riddled with failure and inaction. For nearly six decades, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights epitomized this failure as the premier U.N. human rights body charged with reviewing the human rights performance of states and promoting human rights around the world.[5] Sadly, the commission devolved into a feckless organization that human rights abusers used to block criticism and into a forum for attacks on Israel. [6]The disrepute of the CHR grew so great that even former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged, "We have reached a point at which the commission's declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole, and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough."[7]

After lengthy deliberations and negotiations, the U.N. General Assembly voted to replace the commission with a new Human Rights Council in March 2006.[8] Regrettably, during the negotiations, the General Assembly rejected many of the reforms and standards that had been proposed to ensure that the council would not repeat the mistakes of the commission.[9] For instance, the U.S. wanted a much smaller body than the 53-member commission to enable it to act more easily; a high threshold for election to the council (a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly); and a prohibition on electing nations to the council that are under U.N. Security Council sanction for human rights abuses. Extensive negotiations in the General Assembly produced a 47-member council that is only marginally smaller than the commission, approved a simple majority vote for election rather than the two-thirds requirement, and did not ban human rights violators from sitting on the council.

Because the resolution creating the HRC lacked serious membership criteria, the U.S. voted against it. "Absent stronger mechanisms for maintaining credible membership, the United States could not join consensus on this resolution," explained then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton. "We did not have sufficient confidence in this text to be able to say that the HRC would be better than its predecessor."[10] Well-known human rights abusers Burma, China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe voted in favor of the new council.

After the resolution passed over U.S. objection, the U.S. announced that it would not run for a seat on the council in 2006 but would consider running in the future if the council proved effective. [11]Thus, the U.S. reserved judgment until the council had a chance to prove its merit. As Ambassador Bolton noted, "The real test will be the quality of membership that emerges on this council and whether it takes effective action to address serious human rights abuse cases like Sudan, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and Burma."[12] The council has failed on both counts.

Many Human Rights Abusers Elected to the Council
The resolution that created the HRC established no hard criteria for membership other than quotas for each of the regional groups in the U.N. and a requirement that council members be elected by a simple majority of the General Assembly (currently 97 of 192 votes). No state, no matter how poor its human rights record, is barred from membership. Even states under Security Council sanction for human rights abuses are not excluded.

The resolution instructs U.N. member states that "when electing members of the council, Member States shall take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights."[13] Candidates are also asked to submit "voluntary pledges and commitments" on their qualifications for the council based on their past and future adherence to and observance of human rights standards.The toothlessness of this instruction quickly became evident when notorious human rights abusers Algeria, Cuba, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia ran for election, asserting their strong commitment to human rights and pledging their commitment to such standards in the future.[14]

The May 2006 election showed that simply creating a new council had not convinced the General Assembly to spurn the candidacies of human rights abusers. Despite their poor human rights records and disingenuous pledges, the General Assembly elected Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to the council.[15]

Contrary to the bold predictions that the new council would be a significant improvement over the commission, the council's membership in 2006 was only marginally better than the commission's membership in 2005. The highly touted requirement for a majority vote was undermined by the secret ballot voting process that shielded governments from accountability for their votes and facilitated horse trading and negotiations. This yielded only minimal improvement in the ratio of "free" to "partially free" to "not free" countries.(See Table 1.) Less than half of the commission's members in 2005 were considered "free" by Freedom House. China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—some of the world's worst human rights abusers—routinely used their positions on the commission to block scrutiny of their own practices and to launch spurious attacks on other countries for political reasons (e.g., Israel) or for speaking openly about their human rights violations (e.g., the U.S.).

As Ambassador Bolton noted, for the council to perform better than the commission, it must start with better membership. The first council election produced a council in which 25 countries out of 47 members (53 percent) were ranked "free" by Freedom House—a marginal improvement over the commission. Some of the more disreputable human rights abusers—Burma, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—did not run for seats. Iran and Venezuela ran for seats but were unsuccessful, although Venezuela received enough votes (101) to have won a seat if other states had not won more support.[16] Despite these minor successes, a number of states with dismal human rights records won seats, including Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Cuba, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Russia.

The second council election, held on May 17, 2007, marked a regression from 2006.[17] The number of "free" countries on the council declined, and the number of "not free" countries increased. The only significant victory was blocking Belarus from winning a seat. Yet until about a week before the election, Belarus and Slovenia were the only two candidates for the two open Eastern European seats. Only enormous pressure from human rights groups and the U.S. persuaded Bosnia and Herzegovina to run, denying Belarus a seat on the council.[18] However, Angola, Egypt, Qatar, and Bolivia—states with dismal human rights records—were elected easily.[19]

An additional concern is that, unlike the robust competition for seats in the 2006 election, only two regions—Eastern European States and the Western Europe and Other States—offered more candidates than available seats in the 2007 election.[20] The decision of the African, Asian, and Latin American and Caribbean regions to offer only enough candidates to fill their open seats marked a disturbing return to the practices of the commission and defeated the purpose of competitive elections in the General Assembly, which were supposed to offer a larger choice of possible candidates in order to select the best possible members for the council.

The HRC's Disappointing Record
During its first year, the Human Rights Council has proven just as feckless in confronting human rights abuses and just as vulnerable to politically motivated attacks on Israel as its predecessor. Council decisions reveal that the bulk of its membership has declined to scrutinize major violators of human rights and has instead focused disproportionately on censuring Israel.[21]

Specifically, according to UN Watch, a Geneva-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) focused on the work of the Human Rights Council, "To date, there have been 12 country-specific HRC resolutions: nine censures of Israel and three non-condemnatory resolutions on Sudan." Even the commission had a better record. Over a 40-year period, only 30 percent of its resolutions condemning specific states for human rights violations focused on Israel.[22]

In its first four regular sessions and four special sessions, the council failed to address ongoing repression in Belarus, China, Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe and many other dire human rights situations around the world. Nor did the HRC censure the government of Sudan for its role in the genocide in Darfur. Instead, it adopted three mild decisions expressing "concern" regarding the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur and dispatched a "High-Level Mission to assess the human rights situation in Darfur and the needs of the Sudan in this regard."[23] However, the council did find the time to hold three special sessions on Israel and pass nine strong resolutions condemning Israel.

During more than 10 weeks worth of meetings in its first year, the council:

Passed 12 resolutions on the human rights situations in only two countries. Nine were one-sided condemnations of Israel. Three were soft, non-condemnatory resolutions on Sudan.

Did not adopt a single resolution or decision condemning human rights abuses in 19 of the 20 "worst of the worst" repressive human rights situations as identified by Freedom House in 2007. The 19 other situations—which do not include Sudan—are Belarus, Burma, China, Tibet (China), Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Laos, Libya, Western Sahara (Morocco), North Korea, Chechnya (Russia), Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.[24]

Convened its first three special sessions on Israel. In the first special session, it adopted a one-sided resolution condemning Israel but ignoring the provocations of Palestinian armed groups.[25] In a second special session on August 11, 2006, it adopted a resolution that strongly condemned Israel for "violations of human rights and breaches of international humanitarian law in Lebanon" but ignored provocations by Hezbollah.[26] The council convened its third special session on November 15, again on Israel.[27]

Convened its fourth special session in mid-December 2006 on the human rights situation in the Darfur region of Sudan. The tone and conclusions of the session were markedly different from those of previous special sessions in that the council took pains not to ascribe any wrongdoing to the Sudanese government. The resulting resolution was non-condemnatory, merely expressing "concern regarding the seriousness of the human rights and humanitarian situation." The resolution did not even mention the word "violations," and a European alternative expressing "grave concern" was rejected. [28]

Requested a report during the fourth special session on the situation in Darfur. The investigatory mission was led by Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams. The Sudanese government denied the mission entry to Darfur, forcing it to investigate from Ethiopia and Chad. As expected, the mission's report strongly condemned the Sudanese government for orchestrating and participating in "large-scale international crimes in Darfur."[29] Allies of Sudan on the council subsequently rejected the report as invalid because the investigatory team had not gone to Darfur. The council finally adopted a weak resolution that "took note" of the Williams report but did not adopt its recommendations or condemn the Sudanese government for its actions in Darfur.[30]

Decided in its fourth regular session to discontinue consideration of the human rights situations in Iran and Uzbekistan under the 1503 procedure,[31] which involves confidential proceedings to encourage government cooperation. The confidential nature of the proceedings makes it difficult to determine the reasoning for discontinuing consideration of the human rights situations in Iran and Uzbekistan.[32] This decision is an appalling abdication by the council of its responsibilities, considering that many human rights organizations and the U.S. Department of State have argued convincingly that severe human rights abuses and government-sanctioned oppression and mistreatment demand scrutiny by the council. Despite evidence of extensive human rights abuse, 25 of the council's 47 members voted to end scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan.[33]

Adopted two resolutions that condemn "defamation of religions" but specifically mention only Islam. After a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) led an effort to persuade the commission and then the council to adopt a resolution against the defamation of Islam. In June 2006, the council responded by passing a resolution merely requiring expert reports. However, it passed a second resolution in March 2007 that expressed "deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations" and urged states to "to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and their value systems and to complement legal systems with intellectual and moral strategies to combat religious hatred and intolerance."[34] Worryingly, the resolution asserts that the right to freedom of expression may be limited out of "respect for religions and beliefs."

All council members pledge their commitment to human rights standards when they run for election. As a council member, a country is supposed to "uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights."[35] Yet the council's actions reveal a profound lack of commitment to either human rights or freedom.

Some of this disappointing performance can be blamed on the negligible difference in quality between the council's membership and the commission's membership. The situation is aggravated by the shift in proportional representation of regions from the commission, which had greater representation of Western democracies, to the council, in which Africa and Asia control a majority. This has dramatically increased the influence of groups like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the OIC. Members of the NAM also held a majority of seats in the council's first year. The OIC held 17 seats, more than the one-third (16 seats) required to call a special session. Unsurprisingly, both groups have repeatedly used their influence to attack Israel and to protect abusive states from council scrutiny.

However, the most frustrating aspect of the council's first year has been the reluctance of free, democratic states, including South Africa and India, to support human rights efforts on the council. As UN Watch noted:

[A]lthough slightly more than half of the council's 47 members are free democracies, only a minority of these countries—about a dozen—have consistently voted in defense of the values and principles that the council is supposed to promote. Instead, the body has been dominated by an increasingly brazen alliance of repressive regimes seeking not only to spoil needed reforms but to undermine the few meaningful mechanisms of UN human rights protection that already exist. Their goal is impunity for systematic abuses. Unfortunately, too many democracies have thus far gone along with the spoilers, out of loyalty to regional groups and other political alliances.[36]

A UN Watch analysis of significant actions taken by the council during its first year concluded that only 13 of the council's 47 members were net positive contributors to its human rights agenda. Four free democracies—Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, and South Africa—were among the 17 receiving the worst score of –16 points out of a possible –20 points. India did minimally better, receiving a score of –15 points.[37]

The Case Against Participation
The council's disappointing record led the U.S. to decline to seek election to the council for the second year in a row in 2007. As State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack explained:

We believe that the Human Rights Council has thus far not proved itself to be a credible body in the mission that it has been charged with. There has been a nearly singular focus on issues related to Israel, for example, to the exclusion of examining issues of real concern to the international system, whether that's in Cuba or Burma or in North Korea.

So we are going to remain as observers to the Human Rights Council and we hope that over time, that this body will expand its focus and become a more credible institution representative of the important mission with which it is charged. But nonetheless, the United States will remain actively engaged not only in the UN system but also outside of the UN system in promoting human rights.[38]

The U.S. decision not to run for a seat on the Human Rights Council drew sharp criticism from human rights groups, U.N. advocates, and political opponents. These groups claim that the U.S. is undermining the council's credibility and that it would be a stronger, more effective advocate for human rights if the U.S. were on it. For instance, Representative Tom Lantos (D–CA), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, strongly criticized the Administration's decision:

[I]n an act of unparalleled defeatism, the Administration announced that for a second year in a row, the United States will step aside to allow a cabal of military juntas, single-party states and tin-pot dictators to retain their death grip on the world's human rights machinery.[39]

There is little evidence to support Representative Lantos's claim, which incorrectly assumes that simply having the U.S. on the council would have changed its decisions. Because council membership is based on geographic representation, the U.S. would simply displace one of the seven countries representing the Western Europe and Other States region, which already vote largely as the U.S. would vote. Thus, any gain from a U.S. vote on the council would be marginal.

Nor would winning a seat on the council necessarily give the U.S. greater voice or influence. Any U.N. member state can comment on and speak to issues before the council, and the U.S. has frequently expressed its support of or opposition to various resolutions and decisions.

What the U.S. Should Do
Any hope that the Human Rights Council would rectify the poor record of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in holding human rights abusers to account has proven illusory. The council does not incorporate the protections and standards that would lead to a more effective body. It has the potential to become a stronger body than its discredited predecessor, but this depends entirely on the actions of its members.

To help to achieve this goal, the U.S. should:

Refuse to run for a seat on the council until it proves worthy of U.S. membership. Human rights activists' argument that U.S. membership could make the council more effective is doubtful. The U.S. has been a close observer and active contributor to council deliberations and proceedings, even though it is not a member. Yet, despite the best efforts of the U.S. and other countries, the council has fallen far short of expectations. U.S. participation would undoubtedly increase the council's prestige but is unlikely to increase its effectiveness.

The U.S. should not lend its legitimacy to such a flawed body until the council begins to take its responsibilities seriously. A premature decision to run for a seat would only mask the deplorable state of the current council. As State Department spokesman Sean McCormack noted, "We would hope that if we do come to the day when we decide to run for the Human Rights Council, it will have gotten to the point where it is a credible institution and that we could, in fact, lend our diplomatic weight to the council as a participant."[40]

Press for positive actions in the council, particularly regarding its special procedures, the universal periodic review, and interactions with NGOs. During the upcoming June session, the council is scheduled to decide a number of key issues, including clarifying rules for NGO participation; deciding whether or not to maintain some or all of the "Special Procedures" (the special rapporteurs and representatives, independent experts, and working groups) inherited from the commission; and determining the specific details for the universal periodic review of all U.N. member countries' human rights practices.

Even though the council has proven generally ineffective in advancing fundamental human rights, some U.N. human rights activities are useful, particularly the independent experts who investigate human rights issues in specific countries. The council is currently reviewing the special procedures system to decide how to change the system, if at all. Predictably, the human rights abusers on the council are trying to use a code of conduct to limit the independence of country-specific experts and trying to minimize or eliminate their ability to criticize individual countries for human rights problems,[] as well as to eliminate country mandates for special rapporteurs to investigate human rights in countries like Belarus, Burma, Cuba, and North Korea. These same states are trying to limit NGO input into council deliberations. The council is also discussing the details of how the universal periodic review of human rights in all U.N. member states will work. Unsurprisingly, the abuser states are trying to weaken the reviews.

The U.S. should oppose these efforts to weaken the council's special procedures, institutions, and other activities that help to advance fundamental human rights and hold abusive regimes to account.

Weigh the human rights records of aid recipients more heavily when allocating U.S. development assistance. The U.S. spends billions of dollars in development assistance each year, but this assistance has a dismal record in catalyzing economic growth. Despite the poor record of development assistance and the mounting evidence that financial assistance is far less important to development than sound economic policy and a strong rule of law, support for development assistance remains strong in the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. should focus development assistance on countries with good policies and use it to support U.S. policy priorities.[42] Advancing fundamental human rights is and should be a U.S. priority. The U.S. should try to change the dynamics of the HRC by focusing development assistance on countries with demonstrable records of improving human rights practices and supporting human rights on the council.

Clearly state that unless the HRC demonstrates improvement in confronting and advancing fundamental human rights, the U.S. will cease to interact with the council and will withhold its portion of HRC funding. The U.S. should not wait indefinitely for the council to improve. Instead, it should disengage from the council if the council fails to demonstrate greater willingness to confront human rights abusers or to adopt a meaningful universal periodic review process, if the council eliminates the practice of assigning experts to assess the human rights situations in individual countries, or if the General Assembly continues to elect human rights abusers to the council. Such failures would clearly indicate that the human rights abusers are running the council agenda and that further U.S. engagement, as a member or as an observer, could not repair the damage. Rather than continuing to interact with a fatally flawed body, the U.S. should refuse to participate in council processes and withhold U.S. contributions to the body.[43]

Conclusion
Advancing fundamental human rights is and should be a U.S. priority. However, in its inaugural year, the Human Rights Council has proven itself to be ineffective in addressing and advancing human rights. The Bush Administration correctly decided not to seek a seat on the council.

U.S. participation in international bodies should not be automatic; rather, the U.S. should base its participation on the effectiveness and relevance of the body to U.S. policy priorities. On this basis, the Human Rights Council is a grave disappointment that is unlikely to be greatly improved by U.S. membership. The May 17 election of council membership does not inspire confidence that the council will improve its performance in the coming year.

The U.S. should continue its efforts to improve the HRC's membership, special procedures, and institutions, but it should refuse to lend the council the credibility of U.S. membership until the council takes its responsibilities seriously by censuring major human rights abusers, exposing their reprehensible actions to public scrutiny, and eschewing its disproportionate focus on Israel. The U.S. should use its influence to oppose efforts to weaken the council's special procedures, universal periodic review, and other activities that contribute to the promotion of fundamental human rights. The U.S. should also use its foreign assistance to encourage improved human rights practices among council members and aid recipients more broadly.

However, the U.S. should not wait indefinitely for the council to improve. If the council does not significantly improve its performance in the coming year or if abusive states succeed in gutting the council of its effective elements, the U.S. should sever ties with the council and withhold financial support for the body.

Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. Maria Verbanac, an assistant in the Thatcher Center, helped with the research for this paper.

[1] UN Watch, "Dawn of a New Era? Assessment of the United Nations Human Rights Council and Its Year of Reform," May 7, 2007, at www.unwatch.org/atf/cf/%7b6deb65da-be5b-4cae-
8056-8bf0bedf4d17%7d/dawn_of_a_new_era_
hrc%20report_final.pdf (May 24, 2007).

[2] U.N. General Assembly, Department of Public Information, "General Assembly Establishes New Human Rights Council by Vote of 170 in Favour to 4 Against, with 3 Abstentions," GA/10449, March 15, 2006, at www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/ga10449.doc.htm (May 24, 2007).

[3]Ibid.

[4] Charter of the United Nations, preamble, at www.un.org/aboutun/charter/index.html (May 24, 2007).

[5] United Nations, "UN in Brief," chap. 3, at www.un.org/Overview/uninbrief/chapter3_humanrights.html (May 24, 2007).

[6] See Brett D. Schaefer, "The United Nations Human Rights Council: Repeating Past Mistakes," Heritage Foundation Lecture No. 964, September 19, 2006, at www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/upload/hl_964.pdf (May 24, 2007).

[7] Kofi Annan, "Secretary-General's Address to the Commission on Human Rights," Office of the Spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, April 7, 2005, at www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=1388 (May 24, 2007). See also Mark P. Lagon, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, U.S. Department of State, "The UN Commission on Human Rights: Protector or Accomplice?" testimony before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives, April 19, 2005, at www.state.gov/p/io/rls/rm/44983.htm (May 24, 2007).

[8] Press release, "Explanation of Vote by Ambassador John R. Bolton, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, on the Human Rights Council Draft Resolution, in the General Assembly," U.S. Mission to the United Nations, March 15, 2006, at www.un.int/usa/06_051.htm (May 24, 2007).

[9] See Schaefer, "The United Nations Human Rights Council."

[10] U.N. General Assembly, "General Assembly Establishes New Human Rights Council."

[11] Press statement, "The United States Will Not Seek Election to the UN Human Rights Council," U.S. Department of State, April 6, 2006, at www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2006/64182.htm (May 24, 2007).

[12] Press release, "Explanation of Vote by Ambassador John R. Bolton."

[13] U.N. General Assembly, "Human Rights Council," Resolution A/RES/60/251, 60th Sess., April 3, 2006, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/
A.RES.60.251_En.pdf (May 24, 2007).

[14] For pledges and candidates for election to the Human Rights Council in 2006, see U.N. General Assembly, "Human Rights Council," at www.un.org/ga/60/elect/hrc (May 24, 2007). For pledges and candidates for election to the Human Rights Council in 2007, see U.N. General Assembly, "Human Rights Council Election," May 17, 2007, at www.un.org/ga/61/elect/hrc (May 24, 2007). See also Brett D. Schaefer, "Human Rights Relativism Redux: UN Human Rights Council Mirrors Discredited Human Rights Commission," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 1069, May 10, 2006, at www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/wm1069.cfm.

[15] Schaefer, "Human Rights Relativism Redux" and "The United Nations Human Rights Council."

[16] See Human Rights Watch, "Human Rights Council: Latin America & Caribbean States: 8 seats, 11 Declared Candidates," at www.hrw.org/un/elections/lac/lac.htm (May 24, 2007).

[17] The resolution calls for one-third of the HRC to be elected annually. The 47 members elected in 2006 were randomly assigned terms of one, two, or three years to set the stage for this process. Each member elected in 2007 will hold its term for the full three years. For a list of members and their terms, see U.N. Human Rights Council, "Membership of the Human Rights Council," at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/membership.htm (May 24, 2007).

[18] According to one news report, Bosnia and Herzegovina decided to run only after the U.S. strongly implied to other European countries that the U.S. would run for a council seat next year if Belarus did not win a seat. If true, this is a perverse and shortsighted strategy that would undermine America's principled position not to run for a seat until the council proves its merit in return for only a one-time defeat of Belarus. Maggie Farley, "U.S. Appears Willing to Join U.N. Human Rights Panel," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2007, at www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/
la-fg-rights18may18,1,2886241.story (May 24, 2007).

[19] See Anne Bayefsky, "The Oppressors' Club," National Review, May 18, 2007, at http://article.nationalreview.com/?
q=NDM2NTQ2ODZmNDU3MTA2ZTBiNDFiNGExZWRjMWM2YjQ (May 24, 2007).

[20] For a list of the candidates for the Human Rights Council in 2007, see U.N. General Assembly, "Human Rights Council Election."

[21] For instance, the July resolution on Israel and Palestine was passed by a vote of 29 to 11 with five abstentions, the August decision on the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon was passed by a vote of 27 to 11 with 8 abstentions, and the November decision on Darfur involved a vote of 25 to 11 with 10 abstentions. Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom voted against these resolutions. Switzerland and Japan voted for at least one. Press release, "Human Rights Council Decides to Dispatch Urgent Fact-Finding Mission to the Occupied Palestinian Territories," U.N. Human Rights Council, July 6, 2006, at www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/
(httpNewsByYear_en)/6382E27860145DA7C12571A3004D1F19 (May 24, 2007); press release, "Second Special Session of Human Rights Council Decides to Establish High-Level Inquiry Commission for Lebanon," U.N. Human Rights Council, August 11, 2006, at www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/(httpNewsByYear_en)/F16C6E9AE98880A0C12571C700379F8C (May 24, 2007); and press release, "Human Rights Council Notes with Concern Serious Human Rights and Humanitarian Situation in Darfur," November 28, 2006, at www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/
(httpNewsByYear_en)/62C6B3F928618CCEC12572340046C4BB (May 24, 2007).

[22] This figure increased over time. In 2005, the commission adopted four resolutions against Israel and four resolutions against all other countries. UN Watch, "Dawn of a New Era?"

[23] U.N. Human Rights Council, "Decision 2/115: Darfur," November 28, 2006, at http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/E/HRC/
decisions/A-HRC-DEC-2-115.doc (May 24, 2007), and "Decision S-4/101: Situation of Human Rights in Darfur," December 13, 2006, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/
specialsession/4/docs/Dec_S_4_101_en.doc (May 24, 2007).

[24] Freedom House, The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies, 2007 (New York: Freedom House, 2007), at www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/press_release
/worstofworst_07.pdf (May 24, 2007).

[25] U.N. Human Rights Council, "Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," Special Session Resolution S-1/1, July 6, 2006, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/
specialsession/A.HRC.RES.S-1.1_en.pdf (May 25, 2007).

[26] U.N. General Assembly, "Report of the Human Rights Council on Its Second Special Session," August 17, 2006, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/
docs/specialsession/A.HRC.S-2.2_en.pdf (May 24, 2007).

[27] See U.N. General Assembly, "3rd Special Session on Israeli Military Incursions in Occupied Palestinian Territory," Web site, November 15, 2006, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/
specialsession/3/index.htm (May 25, 2007).

[28] UN Watch, "Dawn of a New Era?" p. 12.

[29] U.N. Human Rights Council, "Report of the High-Level Mission on the Situation of Human Rights in Darfur Pursuant to Human Rights Council Decision S-4/101," A/HRC/4/80, March 9, 2007, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/4session/reports.htm (May 25, 2007).

[3] U.N. Human Rights Council, "Report to the General Assembly on the Fourth Session of the Human Rights Council," A/HRC/4/ L.11/Add.1, March 30, 2007, at www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/
docs/4session/A_HRC_4_L.11_Add1.doc (May 25, 2007).

[31] The Working Group on Situations (WGS) examines the particular situations referred to it by the Working Group on Communications under the 1503 procedure. The WGS then makes recommendations to the council on how to proceed. In these cases, it recommended that the council discontinue consideration of the situations in Iran and Uzbekistan. The WGS is composed of representatives from five countries, including Zimbabwe, despite that country's own massive abuses that merit council consideration. See Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Working Group on Situations," at www.ohchr.org/english/issues/situations/index.htm (May 25, 2007).

[32] Press release, "Human Rights Council Concludes Fourth Session," U.N. Human Rights Council, March 30, 2007, at www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/
21184A0A02055F5BC12572AE005D09C6 (May 25, 2007).

[33] Human Rights Watch, "UN: Rights Council Fails Victims in Iran, Uzbekistan," March 27, 2007, at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/03/27/uzbeki15577.htm (May 25, 2007).

[34] U.N. Human Rights Council, "Report to the General Assembly on the Fourth Session of the Human Rights Council."

[35] U.N. General Assembly, "Human Rights Council."

[36] UN Watch, "Dawn of a New Era?" p. 1.

[37] U.N. Watch scored 20 "key actions" of the council in its first year. The positions taken by countries on these key actions were assigned a value: 1 point for taking a positive position for human rights in the council, 0 points for taking a neutral position, and –1 point for taking a negative position. Ibid., pp. 5–8 and 26–27.

[38] Sean McCormack, "Daily Press Briefing," U.S. Department of State, March 6, 2007, at www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2007/mar/81471.htm (May 25, 2007).

[39] Press release, "Lantos Blasts Administration Decision Not to Take Part in United Nations Human Rights Council," Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, March 6, 2007, at www.internationalrelations.house.gov/
press_display.asp?id=313 (May 25, 2007).

[40] Press statement, "The United States Will Not Seek Election to the UN Human Rights Council."

[41] UN Watch, "Dawn of a New Era?" pp. 16–17.

[42] See by Brett D. Schaefer and Anthony B. Kim, "U.S. Aid Does Not Build Support at the U.N.," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2018, March 26, 2007, at www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/upload/bg_2018.pdf.

[43] The HRC is funded through the U.N. regular budget, so the U.S. cannot directly withhold funding. Instead, it could withhold an amount equal to the U.S. portion of the council's budget (about $3 million annually) from the U.N. regular budget. This withholding would have little direct effect on the council's budget because the withholding would be spread across all U.N. activities funded through the regular budget, but it would clearly signal U.S. displeasure with the council. Congress should also take this as a lesson to move toward more direct funding of U.N. activities, ideally through voluntary budgets, so that the U.S. can tailor its financial support to bolster U.N. activities that perform well or support U.S. interests and to lessen support for activities that perform poorly or do not support U.S. interests.

Maldives Police: Human Rights Monitoring Illegal

2007-06-03T16:52:00.001+01:00

Police Say Human Rights Scrutiny Is Illegal
http://www.minivannews.com/news/news.php?id=3316
By Ajay Makan
June 3, 2007

The Maldives police force has said a report by the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) into police handling of protests on Kibidhoo, “is contrary to the constitution of the Maldives and legal norms.”

The HRCM report published last week found the police had deliberately used violence against protestors outside the Kibidhoo island office on 28 and 29 April.

The Human Rights Commission is empowered by legislation passed in the People’s Majlis in 2005 to “investigate any complaint received about a government authority violating human rights and advise the government on the steps to be taken, based on the findings.”

Given HRCM’s statutory powers, it is unclear why the police deem the Kibidhoo report unconstitutional. Police Commissioner Adam Zahir refused to give an explanation to Minivan News and no one was available in the police public affairs department to comment further.

An official police press release says three officers who were dispatched to Kibidhoo on the request of the island office on April 28 were “taken hostage." The deployment of eighty officers later that day was “to retrieve these men.”

But the statement does not respond to the specific findings of the report that police were “wearing iron finger rings,” and “went after and attacked people even after the crowd had dispersed,” inflicting “physical abuse” and “psychological effects” on women and children.

Instead it hits out at the HRCM for “degrading the honour, dignity and reputation of people in the police force,” who are “working night and day to conduct national duty.”

The HRCM report also criticised Television Maldives (TVM) for misinforming the public by claiming in a broadcast on 29 April that no confrontation was taking place on Kibidhoo. And the Kibidhoo island and Thaa atoll offices are found to have ignored long term grievances of the islanders.

Mohamed Jawad, a spokesman for the Atolls Ministry said, “we have not received the report from HRCM officially yet. If they send it to us we will study it and respond.” No one from TVM was available for comment.

So far there has been no formal response from the government as a whole, despite the fact that the police force, island and atoll administrations and the state media have all been heavily criticised in the report.

Related Articles:
Human Rights Commission Slams Police Over Kibidhoo Protests
Zahir And Thasmeen “Let Kibidhoo Happen”
Kibidhoo: Photos Of ‘Human Rights Abuses’
‘Police Chief Must Quit:’ MDP

Pakistan: Radicals target girls' education

2007-06-03T16:18:00.000+01:00

Pakistani girls' schools in radicals' sights

By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0531/p06s02-wosc.htm

PESHAWAR, Pakistan

All throughout the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan's impoverished western border with Afghanistan, lie the ruins of barbershops and music and video stores – symbols of Western-oriented life that religious extremists have destroyed in a growing wave of violence.

Now Islamist militants have a new target, and if they are successful, observers say their campaign could be disastrous for Pakistan's future.

In what appears to be an escalating spree over the last year, extremists have bombed at least four girls' schools and circulated violent threats warning girls to stay at home. While no girls or school staff have been killed, girls in some areas have stopped attending classes – marking a direct blow to Pakistan's national enterprise of "enlightened moderation," which posits female education as a central pillar.

Pakistan finds itself at a precarious tipping point: Tremendous gains have been made in female education in recent years, but a considerable gender gap remains. Extremists' efforts to undermine education for women, who are historically one of Pakistan's most potent forces of moderation, could further empower Pakistan's growing ranks of Islamist militants.

"Because girls are the ones suffering from these oppressive ideas, if they are educated they will be a better ally in the promotion of liberal ideas and secularism," says Farzana Bari, who heads the gender studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

The continuing wave of attacks could tilt Pakistan's sensitive political balance, observers say, and hurt crucial economic development efforts. As female education improves, infant mortality rates tend to decrease, family health improves, national incomes rise, and female citizens become more politically active and aware of their rights, say development experts.

"You'll be keeping half the population of Pakistan idle [if the bombings continue]," says Syed Fayyaz Ahmad, the joint education adviser of the Ministry of Education in Islamabad. "[Girls] would not add to the economic development of NWFP. If your female children are not educated, your next generation of boys and girls are affected."

Entrenched tribal, religious, and economic imperatives in conservative areas regard the schooling of girls as either improper, since girls should not venture outside the purview of the family home, or unnecessary, since girls are often needed for work.

As a result, Pakistan has one of the highest rates of female illiteracy in South Asia, at about 60 percent, and the lowest rate of primary school enrollment for girls, at somewhere between 42 and 48 percent. Those shortcomings are particularly pronounced in the NWFP, which, as of 2004, had the lowest ratio of female enrollment of any province in Pakistan, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG). In areas like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the government's presence has historically been weakest, only 1 percent of women and girls are literate.

The issue has become even more of a battleground in recent years, as resurgent Islamic extremism bumps heads with the government's recent efforts to expand girls' education. In 2002, the NWFP provincial government allocated 70 percent of its entire education development budget to girls' schools and created more than 300 primary and middle schools for girls in the NWFP between 2002 and 2005, according to government figures. Local authorities also gave parents small stipends and free clothing to encourage them to enroll their girls.

It is these new schools that extremists like Maulana Fazlullah, a powerful preacher in Swat valley, tend to target. For months, using a pirated radio channel, Mr. Fazlullah had warned locals against sending their girls to school, calling it un-Islamic and a violation of purdah, the religiously mandated confinement of women away from public scrutiny.

"A woman has been asked to remain behind the four walls of the house. Men have been given preference by God," Fazlullah explains in an interview on the banks of the Swat River, where he is building a madrassah, or religious school. In a recent peace treaty signed with the government, Fazlullah agreed to stop preaching against girls' education in return for keeping his illegal radio station.

Others have delivered the same message through force. In March, police in Orakzai agency, part of FATA, defused a bomb planted on the grounds of a girls' school, and other schools in the NWFP, including the provincial capital of Peshawar, have received written threats saying girls and female teachers should wear full veils or face dire consequences. Many worry that the violence is spreading.

'"Everywhere these girls are going, the teachers are threatened," says Fazilla Gulrez, the manager of communications for the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) in Islamabad.

There could be little to stop it. Ms. Gulrez adds that the voices of extremists, particularly when conveyed through bombs, are often much stronger than those of concerned parents or civil society. "The parents are poor. They don't have a voice. The situation is so volatile, but civil society cannot take a stand."

Officials have publicly condemned the attacks, and say privately that a citizen-led countercampaign should be mustered.

"If you want to break a tradition, naturally there will be a backlash," says Mr. Ahmad. "When you create an awareness program, the chances of success are 50/50. For NWFP, even if it's 50 percent, that's a good start."

Indeed, if Fazlullah and others are against female education, it is probably because girls are pouring into schools. In Swat valley alone, primary school enrollment for girls has increased by nearly 31,000 since 2002, or 77 percent.

And even though Fazlullah started preaching two years ago, girls' enrollment in Swat last year grew by more than 12,000, according to government statistics. As a result, female illiteracy has gone down by 9 percentage points in less than a decade. And national statistics suggest that female enrollment at the primary level has climbed by 12 percentage points between 1998 and 2005, according to the World Bank.

"We have no problem," says Ghulam Akbar, the executive district officer of education in Swat. "The girls are still going. Very [few] have stopped."

Britain's Brown: Stonger Antit-Terrorism Laws

2007-06-03T15:00:00.000+01:00

U.K.'s Brown Plans to Strengthen Anti-Terrorism Laws, Aide Says

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aVDqYRfF58eY&refer=uk

By Gonzalo Vina

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister-designate Gordon Brown wants to strengthen anti-terrorism laws, including extending the time suspects can be held without trial and allowing wire taps to be used as evidence in court.

Brown, unopposed to succeed Tony Blair on June 27, will press this week for an extension to the 28 days suspects can be held without charge, said an aide, who declined to be named in line with government policy. Brown will also seek the views of the Privy Council, an advisory body, on whether the law should be changed on telephone taps, the aide added.

``Anti-terror methods must be more sophisticated, with earlier intervention,'' Brown told a party meeting yesterday in Glasgow, Scotland.

Blair and Brown suffered a parliamentary defeat in 2005 to extend the detention time for terror suspects to 90 days, their first defeat since they formed a government in 1997.

Under the plans proposed by Brown, police would also be allowed to continue questioning suspects after they have been charged and would give judges tougher sentencing powers, the aide said. Brown will seek backing for the changes by pledging better judicial oversight of any new powers and stronger parliamentary monitoring of the intelligence services, his aide added.

Brown has already taken a tougher stance against terrorism while heading the Treasury. In October, he said his department would use covert intelligence to curb the financing of terrorism.

The Treasury also plans to freeze suspects' assets without disclosing evidence to defense lawyers, partly to protect the source of the information. Since September 2001, Britain has frozen almost 200 bank accounts because of suspicions they were being used by terrorists.

To contact the reporters on this story: Gonzalo Vina in London at gvina@bloomberg.net

Asean Holds Back on Rights Abuses

2007-06-03T13:55:00.000+01:00

Human rights body not ready to castigate ruler

Source: http://www.gulfnews.com/world/Philippines/10129623.html

By Barbara Mae Dacanay, Bureau Chief

Manila: The human rights body being set up by the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian nations (Asean) is not yet ready to castigate rulers that spawn political killings and the indefinite incarceration of democracy fighters, senior Philippine diplomats told Gulf News.

The proposed human rights body is not yet geared to pressure the military rulers of Myanmar to release Aung San Suu Kyi, said a foreign affairs official who requested anonymity.

It will also not pressure the Philippine government to stop ongoing political killings, now estimated at more than 830 since President Gloria Arroyo came to power in 2001, the official added.

"Leaders of the 10 Asean countries have ratified only two human rights issues that the proposed body could handle," said Ambassador Rosario Manalo, head of the task force that is drafting the Asean Charter, which will be the guideline in establishing Asean's human rights body.

Treaties

The 10 Asean countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Cedaw) and the United Nations International Convention on the Rights of the Child, said Manalo.

"The two UN rights treaties would be used as a term of reference in formulating the Asean Charter," said Manalo, adding this will help pave the way for establishment of the Asean human rights body.

Manalo's draft will be presented to the meeting of Asean foreign ministers in Manila next month.

"By August, we will do some legal scrubbing," said Manalo, when asked if censures on erring Asean countries would be aired in the proposed Asean charter.

"Asean is expected to go forward and beyond its initial commitment to the two UN human rights treaties," explained Manalo.

"Asean's efforts in creating a body to uphold human rights would be a laughing stock if it does not tackle relevant political issues that are happening in the region," Manalo added.

- With inputs by Estrella Terroes, Correspondent

Fatah al-Islam Planned 9/11-Style Attack

2007-06-03T13:07:00.000+01:00

Source: http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2007/06/fatah_alislam_p_1.php

Fatah al-Islam planned 9/11 style Lebanon attack

Sunday, 3 June, 2007 @ 2:40 PM

Beirut - An-Nahar newspaper has reported that Fatah al-Islam, whose fighters are under siege at a refugee camp in the north of the country, had planned a September 11-style attack on Lebanon.

"This information was obtained by questioning arrested Fatah al-Islam members,'' An-Nahar said, without identifying its sources.

The paper also said that explosives seized in the country's second largest city Tripoli, south of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp where militants were being besieged by the army for the 15th day, came from Syria.

"Fatah al-Islam planned to attack a large hotel in the capital using four suicide truck bombs at the same time as launching suicide attacks on embassies in east and west Beirut,'' the paper said.

An-Nahar also said the Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist group "planned to launch attacks on the old and new Shekka tunnels linking Beirut to Tripoli with the aim of cutting off the north and proclaiming an Islamic state there.''

Fighting continued on Sunday around Nahr al-Bared as the deadly standoff between Lebanese troops and the militants entered its third week.

In all 97 people have been killed since May 20, including 44 soldiers and 41 Islamist gunmen, in the bloodiest internal fighting in Lebanon since the 1975-1990 civil war.

Picture: Smoke rises from the Palestinian Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon June 2. The militants were warned yesterday to "either surrender or be crushed" and told they will have a fair trial if they surrender.

Sources: Naharnet, Ya Libnan

Announcement: Light Fellows Teleconference

2007-06-03T12:59:00.000+01:00

For all Light Fellows:
Teleconference is schedule for 1700 hours, GMT, today.
Regards, Alastair Fellows.

Climate Change Threatens South Ocean CO2 Sink,

2007-06-03T11:54:00.001+01:00

An Alert of the National Academy for the Advancement of Science

Climate change affects Southern Ocean carbon sink

The first evidence that recent climate change has weakened one the Earth's natural carbon 'sinks' is published this week in the journal Science.

A four-year study by scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA), British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry reveals that an increase in winds over the Southern Ocean, caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion, has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere and is preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas.

Lead author Dr Corinne Le Quéré of UEA and BAS said,

"This is the first time that we've been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink. This is serious. All climate models predict that this kind of 'feedback' will continue and intensify during this century. The Earth's carbon sinks – of which the Southern Ocean accounts for 15% – absorb about half of all human carbon emissions. With the Southern Ocean reaching its saturation point more CO2 will stay in our atmosphere."

This new research suggests that stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 is even more difficult to achieve than previously thought. Additionally, acidification in the Southern Ocean is likely to reach dangerous levels earlier than the projected date of 2050.

Professor Chris Rapley, Director of British Antarctic Survey said,

"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world's oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean – the strongest ocean sink - is weakening is a cause for concern."

The saturation of the Southern Ocean was revealed by scrutinising observations of atmospheric CO2 from 40 stations around the world. Since 1981 the Southern Ocean sink ceased to increase, whereas CO2 emissions increased by 40%.

Contact: Simon Dunford
s.dunford@uea.ac.uk
44-016-035-92203
University of East Anglia

Malaysia: Violation of Human, Women's Rights

2007-06-03T11:44:00.000+01:00

Malaysia's sad retreat

Jun 03, 2007 04:30 AM

Source: http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/220674 [Editorial Staff]

For decades, Malaysia has been regarded as a tolerant Muslim nation that treats its Buddhist, Christian and Hindu minorities fairly. But its image as a moderate, multicultural democracy was dealt a blow last week when the nation's highest court refused to recognize the conversion of a Muslim-born woman to Christianity.

In a deplorable 2 to 1 vote, split on religious lines, the Federal Court decreed that Lina Joy, who was baptized a Roman Catholic in 1998, must get an Islamic sharia court to certify she has renounced Islam before she can legally be deemed a convert and the word "Islam" be removed from her identity card. Until then, she cannot marry her Catholic fiancé because in Malaysia Muslims can only wed within the faith. She has been shunned, has lost her job and may have to leave Malaysia.

"She cannot at her own whim simply enter or leave her religion," says Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Abdul Halim. "She must follow rules." Yet the rule is a Catch-22 in that a Muslim-turned-Christian must appeal to an Islamic court more likely to punish her than to approve apostasy.

This is not what Malaysia's constitution seems to promise. "Islam is the religion of the federation," it says, "but other religions may be practised in peace and harmony." And "every person has the right to profess and practice his religion." For 50 years since independence, that professed respect for religion has helped preserve stability in a nation of 25 million, of whom 15 million are Muslims.

Malaysia's constitution also appeared to reflect a basic tenet of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief." But the Joy ruling marks a disturbing retreat from these principles. If religion can trump freedom of conscience, what other rights can it trump?

"It is a major blow and a grievous setback to Malaysia as a secular nation," said Lim Kit Siang, who heads the Democratic Action party, the main opposition group in the country.

Rather than punt the Joy case over to sharia court, the Federal Court should have appealed to the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion and ruled that as a baptized Christian she had removed herself from Islamic jurisdiction. The court should have ordered the Malaysian bureaucracy to amend her identity papers accordingly.

Malaysia is not the only Muslim country to subordinate freedom of conscience to religion. Many do. Saudi Arabia prohibits conversion from Islam. In Afghanistan, a Muslim was threatened with the death penalty for renouncing the faith. And a few years ago, Jordan convicted a Muslim for converting.

Typically, those who impose such draconian measures claim to be defending the "dignity" of Islam. But what dignity is there in coercing people to proclaim what their hearts and minds do not believe?

That is something Malaysia's high court might have pondered.

Tropical Cyclones Cool the Climate

2007-06-03T01:44:00.000+01:00

Research finds evidence tropical cyclones have climate-control role

Source: Perdue University at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070531HuberNature.html

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -

**Average cyclone-induced surface cooling** Download graphic
caption below

Purdue University researchers have found evidence that tropical cyclones and hurricanes play an important role in the ocean circulation patterns that transport heat and maintain the climate of North America and Europe.

These findings support a 2001 theory by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and suggest that there is an additional factor to be included in climate models that may change predictions of future climate scenarios.

"It was thought that hurricanes occurred over too short of a time period and over too small of an area to affect the global system," said Matthew Huber, the Purdue University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who led the research group. "This research provides evidence that hurricanes play an important role and may be one of the missing pieces in the climate modeling puzzle."

The research also showed that hurricanes cool the tropics, forming in response to higher temperatures and acting as a thermostat for the area, Huber said.

"Warm water fuels hurricanes, which have been shown to leave cold water in their wake," said Huber, who also is a member of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center at Discovery Park.

"I like to say the good news is that hurricanes function like a thermostat for the tropics, and the bad news is that hurricanes function like a thermostat for the tropics. The logical conclusion of this finding, taking into account past research into the impact of rising temperatures on cyclone and hurricane intensity, is that as the world and the tropics warm, there will be an increase in the integrated intensity of hurricanes."

Movies such as "The Day After Tomorrow" brought into the spotlight information about the ocean conveyer belt and its impact on climate. The upper part of the conveyer belt travels from the south to the north, passing through the Pacific Ocean and Indian oceans and past warmer latitudes warming the water brought to North America and Europe, Huber said.

In the tropical oceans, this pattern must be reversed; warm, buoyant water must be mixed downward, and cold, dense water must be mixed upward. This process, called vertical mixing, plays an important role in the conveyer belt's circulation. It was known that this mixing occurred, but the cause was not well-understood, said Ryan Sriver, the paper's lead author and a Purdue graduate student.

"Climate models today use what is called 'background mixing' to solve this problem," he said. "They represent the mixing as an average of the total amount that is needed and apply it over these regions consistently. However, we believe this mixing is not consistent; it is not everywhere all of the time. It is sporadic and happens over a small area for a limited amount of time."

In some areas of the world, such as the equator, there are no cyclones, and no mixing occurs.

"If cyclones were added to models in place of the background mixing, there would be zero mixing at the equator," Huber said. "This is very important because it is well-known that to get El Niño right in a climate model, the background mixing at the equator must be greatly reduced. Our data has a beautiful no-mixing zone right where there should be no mixing."

This explains some of the mystery of the observed temperatures from the distant past during a greenhouse climate. The poles were much warmer than today, about 82 degrees Fahrenheit, but the tropics were not much warmer than the present, he said.

"Using the best, most comprehensive models in existence, we could not obtain results that matched this past climate that we know existed," Huber said. "We knew a basic, fundamental process that cooled the tropics was missing from the models."

The results of the study, being published in the May 31 issue of Nature, are consistent with providing all of the mixing necessary to match what is needed in climate models.

"Our results suggest that this is the missing mixing and it is a vital part of ocean circulation," Huber said.

Steven Jayne, an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said Huber and Sriver present strong evidence for a cyclone-driven heat pump.

"It is remarkable how closely the amount of mixing generated by the cyclones and the location of this mixing matches what appears to be needed to improve climate models," Jayne said. "People suspected these connections, but no one had done the necessary detailed calculations. It means there may be another feedback loop in the climate system, and that is significant."

Huber and Sriver studied the cooling effects of hurricanes from 1981 to the present using the cold wakes that follow a hurricane.

"These cold wakes can be easily observed," Sriver said. "The typical size is about 200 kilometers across and about 1,000 kilometers long, or about as big as the Eastern Seaboard."

The researchers used surface temperature data during the cold wakes to obtain an estimate of the cooling in the tropics due to cyclones and hurricanes. The data analyzed was provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The team then examined the process that leads to this cooling and evaluated the ocean water mixing.

"Multiple studies have shown that tropical cyclones are an excellent source of inertial oscillations, or internal waves that cause mixing in the upper layer of the ocean," Huber said. "It is like putting sugar in a cup of coffee. The sweetened coffee is more dense and will form a layer at the bottom of the cup. It needs to be stirred or agitated somehow to bring the sweet layer up to mix with the rest. The same thing is needed to mix ocean water. Dense water hangs out at bottom unless something stirs it up. Cyclones stir it up in addition to other processes."

Tropical cyclones cause waves below the surface of the ocean that break, just like what can be seen on the beach shore. When the waves break, the top layer of water curls into the bottom layer and water of different densities and temperatures mix, Huber said.

"Warm, fresh water is less dense than cold, salty water, so the cold water sinks, and this drives the conveyer belt," Huber said. "However, cold, salty water rises in the Pacific, and there has been no complete explanation for this. Cyclones and hurricanes appear to pump warm water down and bring cold water to the surface. Mixing down buoyant, warm water lessens the density of the cold water and allows it to rise "

The study did not examine deep ocean mixing, but it is reasonable to speculate that warm water pumped down joins the ocean circulation and becomes a part of the upper limb of the conveyer belt where dense water makes it up to the surface, Huber said.

Huber and Sriver plan to incorporate their findings into a climate model for further testing.

"Current predictions are based on tropical ocean mixing remaining constant or decreasing with warmer temps," Huber said. "This evidence suggests the opposite is true, and upper ocean tropical mixing increases with warmer temperatures. This has major implications for oceanography and climate as a new factor that had not been included in previous predictions."

The National Science Foundation and the Purdue Research Foundation funded this research. The Purdue Cyber Center and the Office of Information Technology at Purdue provided computational resources and support.

Writer: Elizabeth K. Gardner, (765) 494-2081, ekgardner@purdue.edu

Source: Matthew Huber, (765) 494-9531, huberm@purdue.edu

Ryan Sriver, rsriver@purdue.edu

Steven Jayne, (508) 289-3520, sjayne@whoi.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

GRAPHIC CAPTION:
This map illustrates the average cyclone-induced surface cooling of the upper ocean. Matthew Huber, a Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Ryan Sriver, a Purdue graduate student, found evidence that tropical cyclones play an important role in ocean circulation that transports heat and maintains the climate of North America and Europe. Their research suggests that tropical cyclones and hurricanes cool the tropics and act as a thermostat for the area. (Purdue graphic/Huber laboratory)

To the News Service home page

Union of Concerned Scientists: Climate Change Primer

2007-06-03T01:18:00.001+01:00

The Science of Global Warming

Union of Concerned Scientists: Climate Change Primer
from http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/science-of-global-warming.html

A Note from the Editor: Every link here leads to incredible amounts of new information, written by some of the best. We suggest that you bookmark this website for study.

As a result of an enormous scientific effort over the past 10-15 years to better understand the climate system and its relationship to human activities, there now is a growing consensus among mainstream scientists about the reality of global warming. As Dr. Robert Watson, then Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in 2001,

" The overwhelming majority of scientific experts, whilst recognizing that scientific uncertainties exist, nonetheless believe that human-induced climate change is already occurring and that future change is inevitable."

This captures the conclusions of the most recent comprehensive assessment of the state of climate change science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UN-sponsored, international body of scientists is charged with synthesizing every five years what the scientific community has learned about our changing climate and its impacts on people and the environment.



		offsite "Climate Change 2001" AGU position statement (1998) AGU supporting document (1999) National Academies of Science 2001:"Climate Change Science" International National Academies of Science Statement (2001)

The findings of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report ("Climate Change 2001") unequivocally paint a collective picture of a warming world. The report forms the authoritative new benchmark of what is known about climate change science and represents an unprecedented consensus among hundreds of climate change scientists from all over the world.

UCS agrees with the world's leading climate scientists that the Earth's temperature is rising and that its climate has changed over the last century. The scientific consensus is clear that the rise in temperature and change in climate are being caused in part by human activities. (See Related Links.)

Mainstream media are beginning to reflect this scientific consensus. But after a decade of controversial reporting and public debate, some skepticism lingers in the public at large and is still rampant among industry groups and their proponents who fear adverse economic impacts from taking action on global warming. While their main tactic now is to dismiss potential solutions to the problem -- in particular the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change -- climate skeptics continue to attack the science in order to undermine an essential and rational basis for cost-effective, sustainable action on this global problem.

But what does it mean to have scientific consensus about a future that is never certain in a world so utterly complex?

Read the rest at: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/science-of-global-warming.html

Gaza: Beheading Journalists for "Immodesty"

2007-06-03T01:02:00.000+01:00

Islamist group threatens to behead 'immodest' women broadcasters

Published Date: June 03, 2007

Source: http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=NDY5NjM4OTcz

GAZA CITY: A Muslim extremist group threatened to behead female TV broadcasters if they don't don strict Islamic dress, leaving the women terrified and marking a further downward spiral in Gaza's anarchy. The threat to "cut throats from vein to vein" was delivered by the Swords of Truth, a fanatical group that has previously claimed responsibility for bombing Internet cafes and music shops.

The new threat was the first time the organization targeted a specific group of people, and adds to a growing climate of extremism, fear and suspicion in Gaza. In many parts of the Muslim world, religious conservative policies keep women out of TV anchoring positions or only let them take the jobs if they wear headscarves. But in some countries scarves are uncommon, like Lebanon and Jordan, and Egypt even keeps newscasters who wear them off its TV stations.
Most of the 15 women broadcasters on government-run Palestine TV wear headscarves. But they also wear makeup and Western clothing, which is not considered strictly observant by the extremists. The Swords of Truth issued the statement Friday in an e-mail sent to news organizations.

"We will cut throats, and from vein to vein, if needed to protect the spirit and moral of this nation." The group accused the women broadcasters of being "without any ... shame or morals." The group said it knew where to find the women. Prior to the statement, some women broadcasters said they received personal threats through their mobile phones. It was not clear if those threats were from the same group. One anchorwoman who does not wear a headscarf said she was too frightened by the threat to go to work yesterday. "It's a dangerous precedent in our society. It will target all working women," said the broadcaster, who declined to give her name out of fear.

"The statement frightened us." Another presenter who wears a headscarf, on Palestine TV, said she couldn't understand why they were targeted. "I hope they take it back. I hope not a bullet will be fired at us," she said. Basem Abu Sumaya, head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, which runs Palestine TV, said that the PBC already had security measures in place, but could not protect people on the way to work.

The PBC is bankrolled by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, and is accused of openly exhibiting support for the movement, which is a bitter rival of the Islamic militant group Hamas. A senior security official, who requested anonymity owing to the issue's sensitivity, said The Swords of Truth had less than 100 members, and was formed last year. The group claimed responsibility for the bombings since October of about three dozen Internet cafes, music shops and pool halls, which are considered places of vice by some in deeply conservative Gaza. Assailants detonated small bombs outside businesses at night, causing damage but no injuries.

The security official said his forces were taking the threat seriously. He said Hamas members funded the group, wanting to impose a hardline version of Islam in Gaza. Hamas won parliamentary elections last year and has a unity government with Fatah. Hamas spokesman Ismail Ridwan said his faction had "no relation" to the group. Other hardline groups have grown in Gaza, plagued by the rise of Islamic extremism, alongside Hamas-Fatah fighting, anarchy and grueling poverty. The Army of Islam claimed responsibility for kidnapping British Broadcasting Corp reporter Alan Johnston in March. Muslim hardliners lobbed a bomb at a UN-run school in May, accusing the world body of "turning schools into nightclubs" for holding a display of traditional Palestinian dancing. - AP

Hamas' Al-Aksa TV : "A" for Jihad

2007-06-03T00:01:00.000+01:00

Gaza Kindergarten Kids Get 'A" for Jihad

by Hana Levi Julian

_______________________________________________________________________________

PLEASE CLICK THIS LINK TO SEE THE MEMRI FILM OF THIS RITUAL
http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1468#

_______________________________________________________________________________

The little boys in the video march in formation and then drop to the floor, crawl on their bellies and vow to become terrorists when they grow up.

The little girls, dressed in white dresses and some in butterfly wings, dance.

“Allah Hu Akbar!” (Allah is great!) shout the boys in the televised ceremony.

“Who is your role model?” they are asked. “The Prophet,” they chant.

“What is your path?” demands the adult. “Jihad!” they cry, in their little camouflage uniforms and black masks, brandishing toy guns and waving green Hamas flags.

“What is your most lofty aspiration?”

“Death for the sake of Allah!” [tzvi1]

The kindergarten is run by the same group that spawned the Hamas terrorist organization – the Islamic Association in Gaza.

This is not the first time – nor will it be the last – that the Hamas terrorist entity has used little children as bait, brainwashing them to hate Israel, Israelis and Jews while training them from infancy to become suicide bombers.

The children soon make good on their vows in their teenage years, sent out by terrorist groups to kill themselves and Israeli children, women and men. A significant number of suicide bombings have been carried out by PA adolescents and young adults.

Hamas recently used a look-alike of the Disney character, Mickey Mouse, in a television program promoting Islamic conquest of the world.

Known as a benevolent social services organization among the PA’s poor, Hamas continues to call for the destruction of the State of Israel.

Teaching the children to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel is a direct violation of the the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement in 2005. The Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to halt incitement against Israel.

Hamas has said it is not bound by the pact, but the European Union (EU) and United States have declared it will not recognize the new Hamas-Fatah unity agreement if both factions do not accept previous agreements.

Women Nobel Laureates Slam Mideast on Rights

2007-06-02T21:44:00.000+01:00

Editor's Note: There are seven living female Nobel laureates, and this article reflects the opinions of six of them. The seventh, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains imprisoned in Burma. This continued detention should be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity. — Robert Gracen.

Nobel winners decry lack of women's rights in Middle East

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent

Published: 02 June 2007

Individually they are impressive; together they are formidable. Six Nobel Peace laureates from around the world - all women - gathered in Dublin yesterday to take part in a major conference on the issue of female empowerment and the advancement of peace in the Middle East.

The group, two of whom are Irish, represent six of the seven living female Nobel laureates. The seventh, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains imprisoned in Burma.

Describing the conference, one of the six, Professor Jody Williams, said: "We looked at the violence against women resulting from the war in Iraq, which has its roots in the oil industry's lust for the reserves in the Middle East and the resulting interests at stake."

Last year, the laureates established the Nobel Women's Initiative, which they described as a collective voice on issues of peace and women's rights. Its purpose is "to address and work to prevent the root causes of violence by spotlighting and promoting the efforts of women's rights activists, researchers and organisations working to advance peace, justice and equality".

Those attending the conference included 80 women's rights activists from 30 different countries, as well as ex-political prisoners, founders of international rights organisations, disarmament experts, journalists and emerging activists.

One of its stated aims was "deepening our understanding of how the private and public dynamics of violence against women, particularly in the Middle East, intersect and therefore how solutions must reflect a more integrated approach." The conference concluded that the root causes of violence were inequalities, including those of power, control of resources, racism, intolerance and the denial of rights for women. One of the laureates, Shirin Ebadi, noted: "It is our sadness that our sister laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has yet again had her detention extended. We look forward to a day when she can be amongst us." She added: "We discussed the role of the media in dismissing and sometimes trivialising the voices of women, saving our environment, equal access to resources of all types, equal access to justice, stopping the madness of the proliferation of weapons around the world that fuel the wars, killing us, our children and our husbands."

Leading a movement against violence

* JODY WILLIAMS, a professor, won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize along with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she headed and which grew to encompass more than 1,000 separate organisations.Forbes magazine included her in its list of the world's 100 most powerful women.

* BETTY WILLIAMS was co-leader of the Peace People with Mairead Corrigan, the two women sharing the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. As the Peace People went into decline she became estranged from Ms Corrigan. She has since been active in various international peace projects.

* SHIRIN EBADI won the 2003 Peace Prize for promoting the rights of women and children in Iran. She became the country's first female judge in 1975 but retired after the Islamic revolution. Her Nobel citation said: "She has stood up as ... a courageous person who has never heeded threats to her safety."

* MAIREAD CORRIGAN came to prominence in Belfast in 1976 when three of her sister's children were killed after troops killed an IRA militant whose car crashed into them. The incident led to the formation of the Peace People. It attracted widespread support but faded due to internal differences.

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2606452.ece

Terror Attack Plot on JFK

2007-06-02T20:31:00.001+01:00

4 Men Charged in Plot to Bomb Kennedy Airport

Cary Conover for The New York Times

New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly discussed the foiled plot at Kennedy Airport during a news conference

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: June 2, 2007

Federal law enforcement officials and New York City police said today that four people have been charged with conspiring to bomb Kennedy International Airport.

The New York Times

The plan, which was described by United States Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf as “one of the most chilling plots imaginable,” involved a former airport worker who is a United States citizen of Guyanese descent and a former member of the Guyanese parliament, who is also an imam.

“Once again would-be terrorists have put New York City in their crosshairs and once again the F.B.I., New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies have joined forces to stop them,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.

The former airport worker, Russell Defreitas, was in custody in Brooklyn and was expected to be arraigned this afternoon. The former Guyanese parliament member, Abdul Kadir, and Kareem Ibrahim of Trinidad, were in custody in Trinidad. A fourth man, Abdel Nur, of Guyana, was still being sought, law enforcement officials said.

If convicted, the men could face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Two senior law enforcement officials said that there was no imminent threat to the airport and that the men had yet to obtain any explosives. They had conducted surveillance and the former airport worker had made several trips to Guyana and one trip to Trinidad and Tobago to try to get support for the plot.

But if the plan had become operational, it could have been calamitous. “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” Ms. Mauskopf said in a news conference today.

Law enforcement officials said the men’s ambition had been to detonate fuel tanks at the airport, thereby exploding fuel pipes running beneath the terminals.

“Not only were we concerned about the fuel farm,” Commissioner Kelly said, “we were concerned about the 40-mile fuel line that runs from Linden, New Jersey, through Staten Island, through Brooklyn and Queens.

“It is indeed the feeding tube that nourishes national and international commerce at J.F.K. and La Guardia airports.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg issued a statement saying: “The fact that plotters conspired to plan an attack on John F. Kennedy Airport is another reminder that in today’s world we face constant threats from people who want to take away our freedoms and destroy our way of life. Working together, NYPD and other local and federal law enforcement agencies have been on top of this unfolding plot for months, and they deserve our thanks and praise. This plot was only in its planning stages and at no point was anyone in imminent danger. New Yorkers should be comforted that the layers of safety provided by counterterrorism officials stopped these individuals before they could do any harm to our way of life.”

Jerrold Post: Collective Identity: Hatred Bred in the Bone

2007-06-02T17:55:00.000+01:00

Collective Identity:
Hatred Bred in the Bone

Jerrold Post

Source: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0507/ijpe/post.htm

Pakistani boys hold a toy gun and an Osama bin Laden poster at a rally organized by Jamat-e-Islami (Party of Islam) in Karachi, Pakistan. ©AP Images/Athat HussainIn

Jerrold Post, MD, is a professor of psychiatry, political psychology, and international affairs and director of the Political Psychology Program at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

There is a widespread assumption that the ranks of terrorists are filled with seriously psychologically disturbed individuals. Who, after all, but a crazed fanatic, would kill innocent victims in the name of a cause, would willingly become a human bomb?

In fact, the consensus view of the committee on the psychological roots of terrorism, which I organized for the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, and Security held in Madrid in March 2005,¹ was that the search for individual psychopathology in understanding why people become involved in terrorism was doomed to failure, that explanations at the level of individual psychology were insufficient.

Indeed, we concluded, it is not going too far to assert that terrorists are psychologically "normal" in the sense of not being clinically psychotic. They are neither depressed nor severely emotionally disturbed, nor are they crazed fanatics. In fact, terrorist groups and organizations screen out emotionally unstable individuals—who represent, after all, a security risk.

There is a multiplicity of individual motivations. For some, it is to give a sense of power to the powerless; for others, revenge is a primary motivation; for still others, to gain a sense of significance.

Rather than individual psychology, then, what emerges as the most powerful lens through which to understand terrorist behavior is that of group, organizational, and social psychology, with a particular emphasis on "collective identity."

Collective Identity

For some groups, especially nationalist/terrorist groups, collective identity is established extremely early, so that hatred is bred in the bone. The importance of collective identities and the processes of forming and transforming them cannot be overemphasized. Terrorists have subordinated their individual identity to the collective identity, so that what serves the group, organization, or network is of primary importance.

Now, how is that collective identity shaped? Interviews with incarcerated Middle East terrorists² suggest that it begins very early, as evidenced by representative quotes from nationalist-separatist terrorists in Fatah and the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine:

I came from a religious family which used to observe all the Islamic traditions. My initial political awareness came during the prayers at the mosque. That's where I was also asked to join religious classes. In the context of these studies, the sheik used to inject some historical background in which he would tell us how we were effectively evicted from Palestine.

And:

The sheik used to explain to us the significance of the fact that there was an IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military outpost in the heart of the camp. He compared it to a cancer in the human body, which was threatening its very existence.

Nor was joining the group an unusual experience. In fact, when we asked why they joined, we were told that everyone was joining, that anyone who didn't enlist during that period (intifada) would have been ostracized.

The cause was passed on early in childhood. There was a generational transmission of hatred between "us" and "them." The children had heard from their parents, whether in the pubs of Northern Ireland or the coffeehouses of Beirut and the occupied territories, what "they" had done to "us," how "they" had stolen our lands, had humiliated "us." Loyal to their parents, who had been damaged by the regime, they were carrying out acts of revenge against "them."

How did these terrorists justify the extremity of their actions in pursuit of their cause? One answer was especially telling:

April 2006, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams speaks at a ceremony marking the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the uprising of the Irish rebels against the British in Northern Ireland.
©AP Images

One year later, on May 8, 2007, Northern Ireland's First Minister Ian Paisley (left) and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein were sworn in as power-sharing executive ministers of the Northern Ireland Assembly at the Stormont Parliamentary Building in Belfast. ©AP Images/Niall Carson

An armed action proclaims that I am here, I exist, I am strong, I am in control, I am in the field, I am on the map.

So it is power for the powerless, significance for the insignificant. This helps explain why it is so difficult to leave the path of terrorism.

Religious Fundamentalism and Suicide Terrorism

The above represents understandings of nationalist-separatist terrorist psychology. What of religious fundamentalist terrorist psychology? Here we have individuals who are "killing in the name of God." Their acts have been given sacred significance by the radical cleric, be he an ayatollah, rabbi, minister, or priest. And because they are "true believers" who accept uncritically the radical cleric's interpretation of scripture, they do not have the same ambivalence about the extent of violence that the nationalist-separatists do.

One of the questions we posed to the militant Islamist terrorists from Hezbollah and Hamas whom we interviewed concerned their justification for their acts of suicide terrorism, since the Quran specifically proscribes suicide. One respondent became quite angry:

This is not suicide. Suicide is weak, it is selfish, it is mentally disturbed. This is istishad [martyrdom or self-sacrifice in the name of Allah.]

Portraits of Palestinian suicide bombers on a wall above pictures of Israeli victims and destroyed Israeli buses at an exhibit at the Birzeit University on the outskirts of the West Bank town of Ramallah. Some Palestinian children collect photos of the bombers. ©AP Images/Muhammed Muheisen

Noted terrorism scholar Ariel Merari made a remarkable observation in the fall of 2004, indicating just how "normal" suicide terrorism was. He indicated that, as he walked around Harvard Square (in Massachusetts), he was struck that teenagers are teenagers the world around. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that:

When I walked into a pizza parlor in Cambridge, the teenagers would be gossiping about their favorite [football] team, the New England Patriots (this was during their run-up to the Super Bowl), about their heroes on the team such as the quarterback, Tom Brady, and how some day, when they grew up, they wanted to be a professional football star like their heroes. Same thing in the refugee camps in the occupied territories; only their favorite team was Hamas, their heroes were the shahids (martyrs), and someday, when they grew up, they wanted to be a shahid like their heroes. It was chillingly normal.

Hassan Salame, a prolific Palestinian suicide bomb commander, has stated:

A martyrdom operation is the highest level of jihad, and highlights the depth of our faith. The bombers are holy fighters who carry out one of the more important articles of faith.

There is not a mono-causal explanation for the psychology of suicide terrorism. Mohammad Hafez, in his Manufacturing Human Bombs,³ identifies three conditions as prerequisites: a culture of martyrdom, strategic deacons to employ this tactic, and a supply of willing volunteers. In fact, for two of the groups that were most prolific in employing this technique, the Tamil Tigers and the PKK (the Kurdish separatist group), there was no relation to Islamist fundamentalism.

Israeli social scientists developed biographical postmortems of a sample of 93 Palestinian suicide bombers. Seventeen-to-22-year-old young men, they were uneducated, unemployed, unmarried. In fact, they were unformed youth who were told by the suicide bomb commanders when they entered the safe house: "You have a worthless life ahead of you (the unemployment statistics in the camps were 40 to 70 percent, especially for those who had not completed high school), you can do something significant with your life, you will be enrolled in the hall of martyrs, your family will gain prestige, they will be proud of you, and they will get financial benefits." From the time they entered the safe house, they were not alone, with someone sleeping in the same room with them the night before the action to ensure that they did not backslide, and being physically escorted to the site of the "martyrdom operation."

In contrast, the suicide hijackers of September11, 2001, were older (28 to 33 years of age); the ringleader, Mohammad Atta, who was 33, and two of his colleagues were in graduate school in the Technological University in Hamburg. They came from comfortable middle-class Saudi and Egyptian families. They were fully formed adults who had subordinated their individuality to the destructive charismatic leadership of Osama bin Laden. His cause became the primary mission for his followers. Interestingly, unlike the Palestinian suicide bombers, they had been on their own for upwards of seven years in the West, subjected to the opportunities and temptations of Western democracy, and they simulated blending in while keeping an internal laser-beam focus on their mission to die while taking thousands of innocent casualties.

New Challenges

A particularly alarming development in terms of the social psychology of terrorism, especially intense in Western Europe, is the radicalization of second-generation Muslim immigrants. Their parents had come to Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain to find a better life, but remained culturally separate, and the second generation became secondarily radicalized, as exemplified by the Madrid train station bombing of March 11, 2004, and the London transit bombings of July 7, 2005.

A particularly daunting challenge is posed by the "new media," both the continuous cable news channels like Al Jazeera, and especially the Internet. Gabriel Weimann estimated in Terror on the Internet⁴ that in 2006 there were some 4,800 radical Islamist Web sites spinning out their message of anti-Western hatred, contributing to the collective identities of tomorrow's terrorists.

What are the implications for counterterrorism? If one accepts the premise that terrorism is a vicious species of psychological warfare, waged through the media, one doesn't counter it with smart bombs and missiles but with counter-psychological warfare.⁵ This suggests four elements of an information operations program:

Inhibit potential terrorists from joining the group
Produce dissension in the group
Facilitate exit from the group
Reduce support for the group and delegitimate its leaders

But, as noted in one of the conclusions of the Madrid summit working group: "It will require decades to change the culture of hatred and violence. In this struggle, the moral high ground needs to be maintained, for example, by strengthening the rule of law and exemplifying good governance and social justice. To depart from these standards is to lower ourselves to the level of the terrorists and to damage liberal democracy."⁶

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Endnotes

(¹) Jerrold Post, "The Psychological Roots of Terrorism," in Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Club de Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, vol. 1 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005).
(²) Jerrold Post, E. Sprinzak, and L. Denny, "The Terrorists in Their Own Words: Interviews With 35 Incarcerated Middle Eastern Terrorists," Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003): pp. 171-184.
(³) Mohammed Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2006).
(⁴) Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2006).
(⁵) For an expansion of the manner in which psychological operations should play a central role in countering terrorism, see Jerrold Post, "Psychological Operations and Counter-terrorism," Joint Force Quarterly, issue 37 (Spring 2005): pp. 105-110.
(⁶) Jerrold Post, "The Psychological Roots of Terrorism," in Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Club de Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, vol. 1 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005), p. 11.

Welcome ... And a Caveat about "Erich" at JWW Blog

2007-06-02T17:03:00.000+01:00

Our Dear Friends,

While the GracenIntelligence.org website is being developed on our British side of The Pond [s], we are putting a temporary blog here so that we can publish the articles you send us, our most recent thoughts, and your comments. Thanks to Miriam for the suggestion. For our American friends, please excuse the Brit spellings!

First, a note on the "Infostream" section above. This function is scanning the internet on ALL articles which pertain to issues such as human rights, the rights of women and children — which will be a major focus of our endeavours here — Islam, global security, climate and the like. Caveat emptor! Our purpose here is to give you instant access, and this function is not edited by us (as you'll realise right off!).

To those of you who have written Robert and me about the character assassination of Morgaan Sinclair — one of our principal writers — by "Erich" on the JWW website: Yes, we are, sadly, aware of it and will be commenting on it after the LightFellows Research Group finish their various analyses. As you all know, this phenomenon is imperiling the free speech of many people now, and we are following it very closely as it seems the latest subject of assault is one of our own.

Those of you wishing access to the LightFellows Research website, which is privately investigating this specific incidence, can call me at my home phone number in Cambridge (England), as I believe all members of GracenIntelligence.org have it now. Robert sent it to you all this morning by e-mail. Contact him if you did not get it. We have temporary access passwords to LightFellows for all of you, and we encourage you to participate with them on this investigation.

At this point Morgaan prefers that you do not engage Erich at JWW as she doesn't wish to do to him what he's just done to her. Robert and I would like to ask that all of you respect her wishes about that. Also, please do not make separate complaints to the FBI, Google, or the State of California. All the forms have already been filed by legal counsel, and Robert and I think it will just confuse the situation if multiple complaints are filed. We know how you feel, but we want to leave it to Morgaan and Jake, Alastair and Blake, and Aiden and Eleanor to handle this as they see fit.

Also, thanks to Morgaan for the initial set-up of the site in America. It is now fully transferred over to me, and all communications will come to Robert and me here in Cambridge.

Finally, thanks to Amanda for her spectacular work on archiving our writings of the past 10 years and converting them to transferable form. Robert, particularly, would like to express his gratitude, because his "creative" method of archiving his own material approaches the level of Medieval cryptographic insanity. He said this himself, so it is not breaking my marriage vows to divulge this information. He now feels you have a gift for organization of very high honour indeed, but that you are also possibly psychic.

We'll be adding all kinds of articles in the coming days and weeks. Please send articles you'd like us to publish to AinenGracen@GracenIntelligence.org. Feel free also to make specific requests. We will make every effort to find what you are looking for.

Again, we're happy to welcome you and are deighted to be able to begin our discussions earlier than expected. It is wonderful to live in a time where friends from so many countries can talk to each other as a group, and we are thrilled to share our thoughts and to be a part of your discussions.

Sincerely,
Ainen-Asalen Gracen

A Journey to, and from, the Heart of Radical Islam in Britain: A Courageous British Muslim Speaks Out

2007-06-02T16:50:00.000+01:00

The Saturday Profile

A Journey to, and From, the Heart of Radical Islam in Britain

LONDON

Hazel Thompson for The New York Times

Ed Husain's memoir chronicles his journey into the world of British Islamic radicalism.

ED HUSAIN remembers the man as a kindly soul, not the sort you would suspect of recruiting for a radical Islamic group. As a teenager already in rebellion against his upstanding middle-class parents, who had raised him as a sort of Muslim choirboy, young Mohamed — his original first name — was an easy target.

They met in the early 1990s at the elaborate Muslim wedding of a distant relative. “He was a medic at Royal London Hospital, and he invited me to lunch,” said Mr. Husain, whose recently published memoir, “The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left,” has caused a ruckus in the newspapers, on television, on talks shows and in blogs.

“He was asking me questions and then saying, ‘White Muslims are being killed in Bosnia,’ ” he recalled in an interview. “What chances do we have as brown people in England?’ He was creating doubts.” He said his new friend had “black and white” answers to the world’s problems, and gave him books by Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge who, dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, set up his own Islamic party, called Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation.

Thus began Mr. Husain’s journey into the world of British Islamic radicalism. He joined a university campus branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir. He said he had been hooked on an ideology that calls for a caliphate in Muslim countries and the end of Israel, though in nonviolent ways. Membership made him feel important, even though he was only a cog in a larger movement. “You feel a few cuts above an ordinary Muslim,” he said.

He left the group in 1995 after two years, dismayed after a fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir member stabbed a Christian student, killing him.

NOW, with his book, Mr. Husain’s personal story has become fodder for the percolating debate in Britain about how to combat terror, and about how to narrow the divide between white non-Muslim Britons and Muslims from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

With the zeal of a true believer, Mr. Husain, 32, has denounced Hizb ut-Tahrir, and called for it to be banned. With almost equal fervor he has upbraided the British government for being too soft on issues of Islamic extremism.

Some Muslims have called Mr. Husain, who is of Indian heritage, a traitor. Some non-Muslims on the left have questioned his get-tough approach. Others, mostly on the right, have hailed him as brave. Mr. Husain has also been challenged by some who argue that his experiences do not deal with the most pressing problem, the very small minority of British Muslims who end up being recruited as terrorists.

For its part, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which runs a sophisticated Web site and is no slouch at joining the fray, has assailed Mr. Husain, calling his attacks unfair and outmoded. A spokesman, Taji Mustafa, said that Mr. Husain was never a formal member who took a pledge, but rather attended the group’s circles like thousands of others.

On the other side, Mr. Husain says he has been approached by British government officials, asking whether he wants to join their antiextremist efforts, a move that would almost certainly cast him in parts of Britain’s diverse Muslim community as a government stooge.

“The Islamist blogs are apologists,” Mr. Husain said of his Muslim critics. Of the critics on the left, he said: “The left shouldn’t be getting into bed with the Islamists. We’ve got a political correctness gone mad in Britain that says, ‘How dare we white British tell them what to do?’ ”

Mr. Husain argues that radical Muslim groups prey on the anger and confusion of young British Muslim men of South Asian heritage, who grow up in segregated neighborhoods and peer from the outside into a society that promises equality but does not deliver.

In his case, he said, feverish internal politicking, religious arguments and leafleting on the streets, in the campus library and around pool halls in East London quickly took the place of what had seemed to be a dead-end life as a Muslim who tried to fit into British society. He had left an all-boys high school of mostly Asians — where he started out in a tie, blazer and polished shoes — feeling an outsider.

In contrast, being part of Hizb ut-Tahrir was an all-consuming business as he aspired to be one of the intellectual leaders of the new dawn of a Muslim caliphate. “I lost my smile,” he said.

DanielPipes.org: Overall Rating A+

2007-06-02T16:35:00.000+01:00

www.DanielPipes.org
_________________________________________

Commentary Blog Type: Monitored

Quality of Content: 100% (A+)
Relevance of Content: 100% (A+)
Tolerance of Dissent: 100% (A+)
Blogger Safety: 100% (A+)
_________________________________________

One member of Gracen Intelligence called Daniel Pipes "the sanest man on this planet, and possibly any other" ... and Robert and I agree.

www.DanielPipes.org features some of the best writing on radical Islam in the world. Its entire staff is superb. Its blog is completely moderated and fantastic, and we hope you will spend time reading and commenting there. Also, for those many of you overseas — and particularly for those of you in Arabic-speaking countries without decent access whatsoever to valid information — the site's articles and blogs are all superb. We think you will enjoy the comments of their posters as well. All are excellent and thought-provoking, and all have passed through an eminently fair process of review.

One of the things we most appreciate about the point of view of Daniel Pipes is that he is, perhaps, the fairest commentator we have ever known. A long-time supporter of moderate Islam — and a brave supporter of those Muslims who stand up against a tide of abuse and intimidation to speak out — Daniel Pipes has distinguished himself as a fair, calm, intelligent and honest broker in a time when nearly everybody's blood is up. And despite the tendency of anti-jihadist writers to vilify all Muslims, which we would say they do despite their constant denials, Pipes does not, nor has ever done so.

The comments area of DanielPipes.org often prevents alternative viewspoints, and this fully moderated site is completely safe: there is not (happily) unanimity of opinion, so not all will agree with each other. But the debate is fair and respectful. So its site rating for blogger safety is 100%.

For overseas members of Gracen Intelligence, the good news is that articles on this site are translated into multiple languages — not all of the following languages for every article, but there is a great deal to read here in your native tongue.

Arabic	العربية	185 articles
Bulgarian	Български	1 articles
Chinese (Simpl.)	简体中文	67 articles
Chinese (Trad.)	繁體中文	1 articles
Croation	Hrvatski	1 articles
Czech	Čeština	4 articles
Danish	Dansk	152 articles
Dutch	Nederlands	29 articles
Esperanto	Esperanto	1 articles
Finnish	Suomi	50 articles
French	Français	353 articles
German	Deutsch	307 articles
Greek	Ελληνικά	1 articles
Hebrew	עברית	148 articles
Hindi	हिंदी	217 articles
Hungarian	Magyar	2 articles
Italian	Italiano	432 articles
Japanese	日本語	4 articles
Norwegian	Norsk	3 articles
Persian	فارسی	13 articles
Polish	Polski	110 articles
Portuguese	Português	136 articles
Romanian	Românâ	39 articles
Russian	Pyccĸий	190 articles
Serbian	Српски	4 articles
Slovak	Slovenčina	127 articles
Spanish	Español	404 articles
Swedish	Svensk	128 articles
Turkish	Tϋrkçe	8 articles
Urdu	اردو	1 articles

We would like to call your attention to the following recent articles, which we particularly recommend (for starters).

MPAC, CAIR, and Praising Osama bin Laden, at http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4603
The Travails of Brooklyn's Arabic Academy, at http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4581
The Islamic Society of Boston & the Politicians' Red Faces, at http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/115

We are happy to give an unqualified recommendation to this website.
— Robert Gracen

Gracen Intelligence

Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law

Where is Obama’s “Hindu Outreach Advisor”? After All, He’s Got a Muslim One. Why?

Obama: Fork over the Birth Certificate Right Now … or Get Out of the Race

Our Brothers Keepers? from Chesler Chronicles

Fighting for Muslim women's rights

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7689897.stm

Using Reverse Psychology, Al Qaeda Endorses Obama

Ruth Rendell Writes about FGM

Ruth Rendell speaks out against female genital mutilation

UK Judge Throws Muslim Women under the Bus

UK Judge Sparks Fresh Debate Over Shari'a

Patrick Goodenough

International Editor

76% of Iraqi Girls Forbidden Basic Schooling

Why Is This Girl Dead??? Aqsa Parvez and Islamic Double-Speak

About Hugh Fitzgerald: What Mustafa Akyol **ACTUALLY** Said

January 30, 2007

The Hrant Dink Murder and Its Meaning

Ahmed al-Shayea Teaches a Hard Lesson ... and We Thank Him for That

Karzai Pardons a Child and Sends a Message

The Muttawa Take Another Hit (Yes!)

Australia Sounds Terrorism Alert for Indonesia

Serbia Sidelines Roma Rights Campaign

Finally (Hopefully) the Muttawiyyah Get Some Grief

Prayer Vigil for Lina Joy

Ebadi Can't See Iranian-American Client

Gaza Lurches to Islamic State

Gaza lurches towards Islamist mini-state

Taliban Militants Drain Life from Pakistani City

Iranian Rapist / Murderer Executed

UN Addresses Serbia on Roma Women's Rights

Wahhabism Spreading in Russia

Tirumala Bans All Religions except Hinduism

Darwish Calls on US Feminists for Help

U.S. women can help Arab feminists

HRW (Finally) Deplores Treatment of US Soldiers

FEATURED ARTICLE: Heritage.org BG: UN Rights Councils

Maldives Police: Human Rights Monitoring Illegal

Pakistan: Radicals target girls' education

Pakistani girls' schools in radicals' sights

Britain's Brown: Stonger Antit-Terrorism Laws

Asean Holds Back on Rights Abuses

Human rights body not ready to castigate ruler

Fatah al-Islam Planned 9/11-Style Attack

Announcement: Light Fellows Teleconference

Climate Change Threatens South Ocean CO2 Sink,

Climate change affects Southern Ocean carbon sink

Malaysia: Violation of Human, Women's Rights

Tropical Cyclones Cool the Climate

Research finds evidence tropical cyclones have climate-control role

Union of Concerned Scientists: Climate Change Primer

Gaza: Beheading Journalists for "Immodesty"

Hamas' Al-Aksa TV : "A" for Jihad

Gaza Kindergarten Kids Get 'A" for Jihad

Women Nobel Laureates Slam Mideast on Rights

Editor's Note: There are seven living female Nobel laureates, and this article reflects the opinions of six of them. The seventh, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains imprisoned in Burma. This continued detention should be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity. — Robert Gracen.

Nobel winners decry lack of women's rights in Middle East

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent

Published: 02 June 2007

Terror Attack Plot on JFK

4 Men Charged in Plot to Bomb Kennedy Airport

Jerrold Post: Collective Identity: Hatred Bred in the Bone

Collective Identity:Hatred Bred in the Bone

Welcome ... And a Caveat about "Erich" at JWW Blog

A Journey to, and from, the Heart of Radical Islam in Britain: A Courageous British Muslim Speaks Out

A Journey to, and From, the Heart of Radical Islam in Britain

DanielPipes.org: Overall Rating A+

About Hugh Fitzgerald: What Mustafa Akyol ACTUALLY Said

Collective Identity:
Hatred Bred in the Bone