Hamas has been accused of "betraying its own martyrs and God" during a recent statement issued by al-Qaeda.
A video made by al-Qaeda leader Yahya al-Libi, who is in Afghanistan, was released at the end of April. Ynetnews has obtained the full recording, one of a number of growing scathing verbal attacks on Hamas by al-Qaeda.
"I am sending this message to the people of Palestine, whose blood is being shed by the Jewish occupiers," al-Libi said.
"Hamas has abandoned jihad for politics. It has betrayed its youths. Its main activity is politics. Since its decision to go down the path of politics, Hamas has begun to descend on a downhill slope. They betrayed the dreams of their young fighters and they stabbed them in the back," al-Libi added.
"All of the pretexts Hamas gives for pondering the political path do not even convince Hamas," Libi said. "They don't believe their own rhetoric. They themselves know they are not pursuing the true path of Islam."
'Hamas not listening to us'
Libi complained that "al-Qaeda leaders tried to advise Hamas about its policy and told Hamas leaders that they are not going in right direction. But Hamas has been firm in maintaining that its path is different from that of al-Qaeda."
He bitterly lamented that "Hamas told al-Qaeda they don't need al-Qaeda's advice. Some of their most prominent leaders went as far as making public declarations during a recent visit to the atheist capital of Russia, Moscow, distancing themselves from al-Qaeda. They did so openly after the meeting with the murderous corrupt Russian leaders whose crimes are worse than those of Sharon" Libi said, referring to Hamas politburo head Khaled Mashaal's trip to Moscow.
"Is Putin and his corrupt and murderous regime more relevant to Hamas's political equation for Palestine than advice by our great leader Ayman al-Zawahiri?" the al-Qaeda leader asked.
'Hamas betrayed Chechen cause'
Al-Libi accused Hamas of "betraying the Chechnyan cause" by meeting with the Putin government, and added that Hamas was trying to promote secularism among Palestinians, declaring: "Al-Qaeda cannot remain silent over this, because what Hamas is doing amounts to betraying the martyrs of the Palestinian people and God."
"You call your movement resistance, and then you call it Islamic resistance. If you were really Islamic, you would call it jihad," al-Libi said.
"Can you tell us which Islam you are talking about, and which shariah you are going to implement?" he added.
"Your path has confused the Palestinians, and they can no longer differentiate between you and the secular leaders that you courting," he said.
After pledging that "al-Qaeda will stick to the path of true jihad," al-Libi addressed Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades, saying: "Where are your bombs, where is you fire, which should shine like the sun in the enemy's backyard? Your martyrs used to fight for al-Aqsa, and today you replaced the heavy sword with dialogue. Hamas is a part of the conspiracy against the Palestinians."
"Anyone who takes this path is bound to descend to hell because they are moving away from the true nature of their religion," al-Libi concluded.
Source
Monday, May 7, 2007
The torture of the grave Islam and the afterlife
By Leor Halevi
Friday, May 4, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas:
Hardly a week goes by without front-page news of Muslims dying somewhere in the world in a violent way. Despite all the media attention, there is little understanding among non-Muslims of Islamic views of death and the afterlife.
Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.
But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?
According to Islamic doctrine, between the moment of death and the burial ceremony, the spirit of a deceased Muslim takes a quick journey to Heaven and Hell, where it beholds visions of the bliss and torture awaiting humanity at the end of days.
By the time corpse handlers are ready to wash the body, the spirit returns to earth to observe the preparations for burial and to accompany the procession toward the cemetery. But then, before earth is piled upon the freshly dug grave, an unusual reunion takes place: The spirit returns to dwell within the body.
In the grave, the deceased Muslim - this composite of spirit and corpse - encounters two terrifying angels, Munkar and Nakir, recognized by their bluish faces, their huge teeth and their wild hair.
These angels carry out a trial to probe the soundness of a Muslim's faith. If the dead Muslim answers their questions convincingly and if he has no sin on record, then the grave is transformed into a luxurious space that makes bearable the long wait until the final judgment.
But if a Muslim's faith is imperfect or if he has sinned during life by, for example, failing repeatedly to undertake purity rituals before prayer, then the grave is transformed into an oppressive, constricting space.
The earth begins to weigh down heavily upon the sentient corpse, until the rib cage collapses; worms begin to nibble away at the flesh, causing horrible pain.
This torture does not continue indefinitely. It occurs intermittently and ends at the very latest with the resurrection - when God may well forgive Muslims who have endured the punishment.
Surely this violence sounds medieval. Belief in "the torture of the grave" indeed stretches way back in history. It appears in eighth-century epitaphs and in early Islamic traditions, which elevated this belief to the status of dogma.
But pious Muslims today continue to adhere to this belief. In invocations, funeral prayers, sermons, and popular literature, Muslims are frequently reminded to heed this punishment.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them take it seriously. The psychologist Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, who has studied anxieties about death among Arab youth, has found that preoccupation with the torture of the grave remains acute.
The Egyptians and Kuwaitis he polled worried about this torture more than they feared losing a dear relative or succumbing to a serious, fatal disease.
Recently, an Islamist Web site posted a picture of an 18-year-old man exhumed by the order of his father. Only three hours had passed since his burial, but already his corpse appeared aged and bruised. Scientists, according to the story, affirmed that this was caused by the torture of the grave; and the father explained that his son had been a sinner.
Many Muslims commenting on the picture took it as a sign from God to stop sinning and as a reminder to pray assiduously for relief from the punishment of the tomb. Several doubted the reality of the picture, prompting the author of the Web site to remove the posting and to apologize for it. But even a skeptic who challenged the "scientific" evidence professed in this public forum his belief in the reality of the torture of the grave.
Muslims can escape the torture of the grave by dying as martyrs. In Islam the category of martyr does not belong exclusively to those who die fighting in God's path. According to Islamic tradition, Muslims who die in a fire, by drowning, in the collapse of a building or in some other way involving great physical suffering merit the rank of martyrs in the afterlife.
This means that immediately after death, their spirits do not return to dwell within mutilated or burned corpses. Instead they enter the Garden of Eden, where they receive new bodies, perfectly reformed, so as to enjoy the rewards of martyrdom until the resurrection. Those who have lost a relative in a violent and shocking death - in the bombings in Baghdad, for instance - may find some consolation in this belief.
Leor Halevi, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, is the author of "Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society."
Source
Friday, May 4, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas:
Hardly a week goes by without front-page news of Muslims dying somewhere in the world in a violent way. Despite all the media attention, there is little understanding among non-Muslims of Islamic views of death and the afterlife.
Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.
But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?
According to Islamic doctrine, between the moment of death and the burial ceremony, the spirit of a deceased Muslim takes a quick journey to Heaven and Hell, where it beholds visions of the bliss and torture awaiting humanity at the end of days.
By the time corpse handlers are ready to wash the body, the spirit returns to earth to observe the preparations for burial and to accompany the procession toward the cemetery. But then, before earth is piled upon the freshly dug grave, an unusual reunion takes place: The spirit returns to dwell within the body.
In the grave, the deceased Muslim - this composite of spirit and corpse - encounters two terrifying angels, Munkar and Nakir, recognized by their bluish faces, their huge teeth and their wild hair.
These angels carry out a trial to probe the soundness of a Muslim's faith. If the dead Muslim answers their questions convincingly and if he has no sin on record, then the grave is transformed into a luxurious space that makes bearable the long wait until the final judgment.
But if a Muslim's faith is imperfect or if he has sinned during life by, for example, failing repeatedly to undertake purity rituals before prayer, then the grave is transformed into an oppressive, constricting space.
The earth begins to weigh down heavily upon the sentient corpse, until the rib cage collapses; worms begin to nibble away at the flesh, causing horrible pain.
This torture does not continue indefinitely. It occurs intermittently and ends at the very latest with the resurrection - when God may well forgive Muslims who have endured the punishment.
Surely this violence sounds medieval. Belief in "the torture of the grave" indeed stretches way back in history. It appears in eighth-century epitaphs and in early Islamic traditions, which elevated this belief to the status of dogma.
But pious Muslims today continue to adhere to this belief. In invocations, funeral prayers, sermons, and popular literature, Muslims are frequently reminded to heed this punishment.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them take it seriously. The psychologist Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, who has studied anxieties about death among Arab youth, has found that preoccupation with the torture of the grave remains acute.
The Egyptians and Kuwaitis he polled worried about this torture more than they feared losing a dear relative or succumbing to a serious, fatal disease.
Recently, an Islamist Web site posted a picture of an 18-year-old man exhumed by the order of his father. Only three hours had passed since his burial, but already his corpse appeared aged and bruised. Scientists, according to the story, affirmed that this was caused by the torture of the grave; and the father explained that his son had been a sinner.
Many Muslims commenting on the picture took it as a sign from God to stop sinning and as a reminder to pray assiduously for relief from the punishment of the tomb. Several doubted the reality of the picture, prompting the author of the Web site to remove the posting and to apologize for it. But even a skeptic who challenged the "scientific" evidence professed in this public forum his belief in the reality of the torture of the grave.
Muslims can escape the torture of the grave by dying as martyrs. In Islam the category of martyr does not belong exclusively to those who die fighting in God's path. According to Islamic tradition, Muslims who die in a fire, by drowning, in the collapse of a building or in some other way involving great physical suffering merit the rank of martyrs in the afterlife.
This means that immediately after death, their spirits do not return to dwell within mutilated or burned corpses. Instead they enter the Garden of Eden, where they receive new bodies, perfectly reformed, so as to enjoy the rewards of martyrdom until the resurrection. Those who have lost a relative in a violent and shocking death - in the bombings in Baghdad, for instance - may find some consolation in this belief.
Leor Halevi, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, is the author of "Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society."
Source
Are the Arabs already extinct?
By Spengler
"We [Arabs] have become extinct," said Syrian poet Adonis in a March 11 Dubai television interview transcribed by the Israeli media monitor MEMRI, [1] but ignored by the mainstream Western media. The prognosis by Adonis, the only Arabic writer on the Nobel Prize short list, for the Arab prospect has become more bleak over the years, and his latest pronouncement has a Spenglerian finality.
"We have become extinct ... We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world ... The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct," he said.
Poets are given to hyperbole, to be sure, but Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said) makes a deeper point in his writings on Arabic poetry. He argues that Islam destroys the creative capacity of the Arabs, who in turn do not have the capacity to become modern. What he calls the "hell of daily life" is the subject of his poetry, of which a representative sample is available in English translation. [2]
Adonis devoted a long career to creating a literary modernism in Arabic rooted in medieval Arab poetry, leaving a long trail of enemies both among Islamists and secular Arab nationalists. He is reasonably well known in the West. The Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami profiled him in the widely read Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Thomas Friedman gave him a brief mention in the January 27 New York Times. Evidently Western analysts do not quite know what to make of this most recent apocalyptic pronouncement and averted their eyes. It is easy, but misguided, to dismiss Adonis' doom-saying as an old man's exasperation, for Adonis sees the decisive issues with great clarity.
Nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to a personal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai television:
I oppose any external intervention in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that they cannot be democratic by themselves, they can never be democratic through the intervention of others. If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society, and cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a new and accurate way, and unless religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience, which must be respected.
The trouble, he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free. Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded as follows:
I believe it has to do with the concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in practical or political terms - in the concept of the hero, the savior, or the leader. This concept offers an inner sense of security to people who are afraid of freedom. Some human beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis: No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.
Interviewer: You've got to have a boss ...
Adonis: When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world's problems, with everything ...
Interviewer: With all the issues ...
Adonis: On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.
The fact that the Arab world's most distinguished man of letters has rejected the premise upon which US policy is founded - that traditional Islam and democracy are compatible - one would have expected from American critics a better response than silence. This is particularly true given how large Adonis looms in the Arab world, which translates only a fifth as many books per year as does Greece, with a 30th of the population. Arab writers of global stature are a tiny number, and their importance is disproportionately great.
I do not read Arabic, and have no idea whether Adonis' poetry merits the Nobel Prize (on earlier occasions I argued that a novelist from a Muslim country, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, well deserved the 2006 award). But I doubt that anyone in the West will make sense of the spiritual condition of the Arab world without Adonis' assistance, and not because what he has to say is difficult: on the contrary, he has the courage to say the obvious: the Arabs do not want freedom because their lives are intolerable. Islam not only suppresses the possibility of poetic expression, Adonis argues, but with it the capacity of the individual to have a personality. It is an astonishing, terrifying, and absolute indictment of his culture.
As a poet, Adonis does not describe the spiritual state of the Arabs, but rather evokes it existentially. The available literature on Islam consists mainly of a useless exchange of Koranic citations that show, depending on whether one is Karen Armstrong or Robert Spencer, that Islam is loving or hateful, tolerant or bigoted, peaceful or warlike, or whatever one cares to show. It is all so pointless and sophomoric; anyone can quote the Koran, or for that matter the Bible, to show whatever one wants. With Adonis one gains access to the inside of the Arab experience of modernity. It is a terrible and frightening one, not recommended for the faint-hearted, but indispensable to anyone who wishes to get beyond the pointless sloganeering of the pundits.
"The Arab poet," he writes, "speaks ever of freedom and democracy as illusions. I say 'illusion' because life itself comes before freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk about life when I am prevented from being myself, when I am not living, neither within myself nor for myself? [3]
"To be means to mean something," Adonis explains. "Meanings are only appreciated through words. I speak, therefore I am; my existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, ie, to write, to begin."
Life is not possible without meaning, and meaning does not exist outside of culture, especially for a people defined not by political circumstances or territory but by language, namely the Arabs. In his essay "Poetry and Apoetical Culture", Adonis makes the remarkable claim that the nature of Koranic revelation destroys the possibility of poetry, and with it the possibility of life. Before Islam, the Arabic language was rooted in poetry; after the advent of Islam, poetic language became impossible.
When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics - intuition and the power of revelation and made it into a media tool.
... Poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments. [4]
Adonis adds:
In part, this explains the dominance in the Arab mentality of what I call "pastism". In the context of this inquiry, pastism means the refusal and fear of the unusual. [5]
This is true, Adonis explains, because the Koran offers a revelation that is final and certain, excluding the possibility of doubt:
The political-religious institution exercised its power as a faithful guardian of the Koranic Revelation. It possessed the absolute certitude that the Revelation spoke and wrote Man and the universe clearly, definitively and without error or imperfection. This certitude, in turn, demanded that the Muslim individual be formed around a faith in an absolute text, one which allowed no interrogation that might give rise on any doubt whatsoever. Under such conditions, alienation is inevitable; the skeptical individual no longer has the right to be a member of the society.
Because Islam - the last message sent by God to mankind - has placed the final seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say everything, that it is imperfect. Therefore the human word must, on an emotional level, continually eulogize and celebrate that message; on an intellectual level, a fortiori it can only serve as an explication.
Poetry, the most elevated form of expression, will henceforth be valued only for its obviousness. [6]
With reference to literature rather than theology, Adonis states what amounts to the same thing that Pope Benedict XVI said last year about the finality of Islamic revelation. [7] Westerners will assimilate this view only with great effort, for poetry of devotion is among the most artful and most complex in the literature. One thinks of Dante in Italian, John Donne and John Milton in English, St John of the Cross in Spanish, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert in German, and Yehuda Halevi in Hebrew.
To Christians and Jews, God is not a monarch who presents a final and indisputable truth, but a lover whose face is hidden - perhaps the most fruitful subject for poetry in human history. In the tradition of the biblical Song of Songs, St John conveys love for God in distinctly erotic terms. It is inconceivable for a Muslim poet to address Allah with the intimacy of a lover in the language of human passion. If poetry holds a mirror to our inner life, then the inner life of Westerners is profoundly different from that of Muslims, as different as the concepts of a God of Love who exalts the humble, and Allah who loves the strong and rewards the victorious. I have addressed that subject on a dozen other occasions.
One finds counterparts to the mystical-religious poetry of the Western mainstream only in the Sufi fringe of Islam, but never in its central current. Adonis praises in his study of Arab poetics [8] three medieval poets of the Islamic era whose originality of expression inspires him: Abu Nuwas, al-Niffari, and al-Ma'arri. Abu Nuwas "adopts the mask of the clown and turns drunkenness, which frees bodies from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation", Adonis observes. [9] Al-Niffari speaks the language of transcendental bliss; it "eliminates the gap between the human and the sacred, humanizing the sacred and sanctifying this thinking, poeticizing reed: the human being".
But Adonis' greatest fascination is for the 11th-century Nihilist Abul Ala al-Ma'arri.
If poetry was, according to the "method of the Arabs", "the art of words", al-Ma'arri makes it into the art of meaning ... Al-Ma'arri establishes nothing, at the level of either language or meaning. On the contrary, all that he proposes only casts doubt on both of these: for him they are simply two ways of expressing futility and nothingness. He creates his world - if "create" is the right word - with death as his starting point. Death is the one elixir, the redeemer. Life itself is only a death running its course. A person's clothes are his shroud; his house is his grave, his life his death, and his death his true life ... the truth is that the most evil of trees if the one which has borne human beings. Life is a sickness whose cure is death. [10]
We hear the term "culture of death" often enough, but do not normally have a window into a culture truly dominated by death. That is what Adonis, channeling Ma'arri, provides. The English term "despondent" does not begin to characterize the poems of Adonis; they do not express sadness about life so much as the belief that life itself is an impossibility. I cannot fairly represent the author's translated poems in this venue, but a few examples give some of the flavor of his oeuvre:
Each day is a child/ who dies behind a wall/ turning its face to the wall's corners. [11]
When I saw death on a road/ I saw my face in his. My thoughts resembled locomotives/ straining out of fog/ and into fog. [12]
"We must make gods or die./ We must kill gods or die,"/ whisper the lost stones in their lost kingdom. [13]
Strangled mute/ with syllables/ voiceless,/ with no language/ but the moaning of the earth,/ my song discovers death/ in the sick joy/ of everything that is/ for anyone who listens./ Refusal is my melody./ Words are my life/ and life is my disease.
Readers may peruse Adonis' work for themselves to determine whether I am presenting only its dark side; in fact, it only has a dark side. Misery, self-pity and longing for death are the most common themes in Adonis' translated work, but rage figures as well, particularly when he writes of the United States. One of his longest and most frequently cited poems is titled "The Funeral [sometimes The Grave] of New York", and calls it (among many other unpleasant things) "a city on four legs/ heading for murder/ while the drowned already moan/ in the distance".
When Adonis wrote this poem in 1971, he wanted to see the city destroyed, and appealed to the poor people of Harlem, "You shall erase New York,/ you shall take it by storm/ and blow it like a leaf away."
In fairness to Adonis, he rather liked Walt Whitman, along with many other Western modernists (especially Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire) who, he concedes, helped him understand Arab medieval poetry to begin with. [14] Rhetorically, Adonis sounds a bit like a terrorist, but he harbors no such sentiments. Although he is a fierce anti-Zionist, he has met with Israeli poets and favors some kind of dialogue with Israel.
But as the bard of the Arabs, or at least the closest thing the Arabs currently have to a bard, he helps explain the remarkable willingness of Arabs to kill themselves to inflict harm on their enemies. Caught between a stifling traditional past and a threatening and unwished-for modernity, the Arabs in Adonis' judgment cannot properly form a personality and are susceptible to nihilism, just as the poems of al-Ma'arri evoked it during the 11th century, and Adonis' poems evoke it today.
The "hell of daily life", the Arabs' incapacity to digest the devil's sourdough, instills a wish for death that expresses itself in the horrible events we see in the news daily. Adonis' warning has become an epitaph for a tomb that is prepared, if not yet occupied: the Arabs are extinct.
Notes
1. The Middle East Media Research Institute.
2. For example, The Pages of Day and Night (translated by Samuel Hazo), The Marlboro Press 1994; and The Blood of Adonis, University of Pittsburgh Press 1971. Additional translations are in progress.
3. The Pages of Day and Night, Introduction, p 15.
4. Op cit, pp 101-102.
5. Loc cit.
6. Ibid, pp 102-103.
7. See When even the pope has to whisper, Asia Times Online, January 10, 2006.
8. An Introduction to Arab Poetics (translated by Catherine Cobham), Saqi Books: London 1990.
9. Poetics, p 60.
10. Op cit, p 65.
11. From "The Past", in The Pages of Day and Night.
12. Op cit, p 21.
13. Op cit, p 26.
14. Poetics, pp 80-81.
Source
"We [Arabs] have become extinct," said Syrian poet Adonis in a March 11 Dubai television interview transcribed by the Israeli media monitor MEMRI, [1] but ignored by the mainstream Western media. The prognosis by Adonis, the only Arabic writer on the Nobel Prize short list, for the Arab prospect has become more bleak over the years, and his latest pronouncement has a Spenglerian finality.
"We have become extinct ... We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world ... The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct," he said.
Poets are given to hyperbole, to be sure, but Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said) makes a deeper point in his writings on Arabic poetry. He argues that Islam destroys the creative capacity of the Arabs, who in turn do not have the capacity to become modern. What he calls the "hell of daily life" is the subject of his poetry, of which a representative sample is available in English translation. [2]
Adonis devoted a long career to creating a literary modernism in Arabic rooted in medieval Arab poetry, leaving a long trail of enemies both among Islamists and secular Arab nationalists. He is reasonably well known in the West. The Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami profiled him in the widely read Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Thomas Friedman gave him a brief mention in the January 27 New York Times. Evidently Western analysts do not quite know what to make of this most recent apocalyptic pronouncement and averted their eyes. It is easy, but misguided, to dismiss Adonis' doom-saying as an old man's exasperation, for Adonis sees the decisive issues with great clarity.
Nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to a personal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai television:
I oppose any external intervention in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that they cannot be democratic by themselves, they can never be democratic through the intervention of others. If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society, and cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a new and accurate way, and unless religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience, which must be respected.
The trouble, he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free. Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded as follows:
I believe it has to do with the concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in practical or political terms - in the concept of the hero, the savior, or the leader. This concept offers an inner sense of security to people who are afraid of freedom. Some human beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis: No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.
Interviewer: You've got to have a boss ...
Adonis: When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world's problems, with everything ...
Interviewer: With all the issues ...
Adonis: On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.
The fact that the Arab world's most distinguished man of letters has rejected the premise upon which US policy is founded - that traditional Islam and democracy are compatible - one would have expected from American critics a better response than silence. This is particularly true given how large Adonis looms in the Arab world, which translates only a fifth as many books per year as does Greece, with a 30th of the population. Arab writers of global stature are a tiny number, and their importance is disproportionately great.
I do not read Arabic, and have no idea whether Adonis' poetry merits the Nobel Prize (on earlier occasions I argued that a novelist from a Muslim country, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, well deserved the 2006 award). But I doubt that anyone in the West will make sense of the spiritual condition of the Arab world without Adonis' assistance, and not because what he has to say is difficult: on the contrary, he has the courage to say the obvious: the Arabs do not want freedom because their lives are intolerable. Islam not only suppresses the possibility of poetic expression, Adonis argues, but with it the capacity of the individual to have a personality. It is an astonishing, terrifying, and absolute indictment of his culture.
As a poet, Adonis does not describe the spiritual state of the Arabs, but rather evokes it existentially. The available literature on Islam consists mainly of a useless exchange of Koranic citations that show, depending on whether one is Karen Armstrong or Robert Spencer, that Islam is loving or hateful, tolerant or bigoted, peaceful or warlike, or whatever one cares to show. It is all so pointless and sophomoric; anyone can quote the Koran, or for that matter the Bible, to show whatever one wants. With Adonis one gains access to the inside of the Arab experience of modernity. It is a terrible and frightening one, not recommended for the faint-hearted, but indispensable to anyone who wishes to get beyond the pointless sloganeering of the pundits.
"The Arab poet," he writes, "speaks ever of freedom and democracy as illusions. I say 'illusion' because life itself comes before freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk about life when I am prevented from being myself, when I am not living, neither within myself nor for myself? [3]
"To be means to mean something," Adonis explains. "Meanings are only appreciated through words. I speak, therefore I am; my existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, ie, to write, to begin."
Life is not possible without meaning, and meaning does not exist outside of culture, especially for a people defined not by political circumstances or territory but by language, namely the Arabs. In his essay "Poetry and Apoetical Culture", Adonis makes the remarkable claim that the nature of Koranic revelation destroys the possibility of poetry, and with it the possibility of life. Before Islam, the Arabic language was rooted in poetry; after the advent of Islam, poetic language became impossible.
When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics - intuition and the power of revelation and made it into a media tool.
... Poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments. [4]
Adonis adds:
In part, this explains the dominance in the Arab mentality of what I call "pastism". In the context of this inquiry, pastism means the refusal and fear of the unusual. [5]
This is true, Adonis explains, because the Koran offers a revelation that is final and certain, excluding the possibility of doubt:
The political-religious institution exercised its power as a faithful guardian of the Koranic Revelation. It possessed the absolute certitude that the Revelation spoke and wrote Man and the universe clearly, definitively and without error or imperfection. This certitude, in turn, demanded that the Muslim individual be formed around a faith in an absolute text, one which allowed no interrogation that might give rise on any doubt whatsoever. Under such conditions, alienation is inevitable; the skeptical individual no longer has the right to be a member of the society.
Because Islam - the last message sent by God to mankind - has placed the final seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say everything, that it is imperfect. Therefore the human word must, on an emotional level, continually eulogize and celebrate that message; on an intellectual level, a fortiori it can only serve as an explication.
Poetry, the most elevated form of expression, will henceforth be valued only for its obviousness. [6]
With reference to literature rather than theology, Adonis states what amounts to the same thing that Pope Benedict XVI said last year about the finality of Islamic revelation. [7] Westerners will assimilate this view only with great effort, for poetry of devotion is among the most artful and most complex in the literature. One thinks of Dante in Italian, John Donne and John Milton in English, St John of the Cross in Spanish, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert in German, and Yehuda Halevi in Hebrew.
To Christians and Jews, God is not a monarch who presents a final and indisputable truth, but a lover whose face is hidden - perhaps the most fruitful subject for poetry in human history. In the tradition of the biblical Song of Songs, St John conveys love for God in distinctly erotic terms. It is inconceivable for a Muslim poet to address Allah with the intimacy of a lover in the language of human passion. If poetry holds a mirror to our inner life, then the inner life of Westerners is profoundly different from that of Muslims, as different as the concepts of a God of Love who exalts the humble, and Allah who loves the strong and rewards the victorious. I have addressed that subject on a dozen other occasions.
One finds counterparts to the mystical-religious poetry of the Western mainstream only in the Sufi fringe of Islam, but never in its central current. Adonis praises in his study of Arab poetics [8] three medieval poets of the Islamic era whose originality of expression inspires him: Abu Nuwas, al-Niffari, and al-Ma'arri. Abu Nuwas "adopts the mask of the clown and turns drunkenness, which frees bodies from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation", Adonis observes. [9] Al-Niffari speaks the language of transcendental bliss; it "eliminates the gap between the human and the sacred, humanizing the sacred and sanctifying this thinking, poeticizing reed: the human being".
But Adonis' greatest fascination is for the 11th-century Nihilist Abul Ala al-Ma'arri.
If poetry was, according to the "method of the Arabs", "the art of words", al-Ma'arri makes it into the art of meaning ... Al-Ma'arri establishes nothing, at the level of either language or meaning. On the contrary, all that he proposes only casts doubt on both of these: for him they are simply two ways of expressing futility and nothingness. He creates his world - if "create" is the right word - with death as his starting point. Death is the one elixir, the redeemer. Life itself is only a death running its course. A person's clothes are his shroud; his house is his grave, his life his death, and his death his true life ... the truth is that the most evil of trees if the one which has borne human beings. Life is a sickness whose cure is death. [10]
We hear the term "culture of death" often enough, but do not normally have a window into a culture truly dominated by death. That is what Adonis, channeling Ma'arri, provides. The English term "despondent" does not begin to characterize the poems of Adonis; they do not express sadness about life so much as the belief that life itself is an impossibility. I cannot fairly represent the author's translated poems in this venue, but a few examples give some of the flavor of his oeuvre:
Each day is a child/ who dies behind a wall/ turning its face to the wall's corners. [11]
When I saw death on a road/ I saw my face in his. My thoughts resembled locomotives/ straining out of fog/ and into fog. [12]
"We must make gods or die./ We must kill gods or die,"/ whisper the lost stones in their lost kingdom. [13]
Strangled mute/ with syllables/ voiceless,/ with no language/ but the moaning of the earth,/ my song discovers death/ in the sick joy/ of everything that is/ for anyone who listens./ Refusal is my melody./ Words are my life/ and life is my disease.
Readers may peruse Adonis' work for themselves to determine whether I am presenting only its dark side; in fact, it only has a dark side. Misery, self-pity and longing for death are the most common themes in Adonis' translated work, but rage figures as well, particularly when he writes of the United States. One of his longest and most frequently cited poems is titled "The Funeral [sometimes The Grave] of New York", and calls it (among many other unpleasant things) "a city on four legs/ heading for murder/ while the drowned already moan/ in the distance".
When Adonis wrote this poem in 1971, he wanted to see the city destroyed, and appealed to the poor people of Harlem, "You shall erase New York,/ you shall take it by storm/ and blow it like a leaf away."
In fairness to Adonis, he rather liked Walt Whitman, along with many other Western modernists (especially Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire) who, he concedes, helped him understand Arab medieval poetry to begin with. [14] Rhetorically, Adonis sounds a bit like a terrorist, but he harbors no such sentiments. Although he is a fierce anti-Zionist, he has met with Israeli poets and favors some kind of dialogue with Israel.
But as the bard of the Arabs, or at least the closest thing the Arabs currently have to a bard, he helps explain the remarkable willingness of Arabs to kill themselves to inflict harm on their enemies. Caught between a stifling traditional past and a threatening and unwished-for modernity, the Arabs in Adonis' judgment cannot properly form a personality and are susceptible to nihilism, just as the poems of al-Ma'arri evoked it during the 11th century, and Adonis' poems evoke it today.
The "hell of daily life", the Arabs' incapacity to digest the devil's sourdough, instills a wish for death that expresses itself in the horrible events we see in the news daily. Adonis' warning has become an epitaph for a tomb that is prepared, if not yet occupied: the Arabs are extinct.
Notes
1. The Middle East Media Research Institute.
2. For example, The Pages of Day and Night (translated by Samuel Hazo), The Marlboro Press 1994; and The Blood of Adonis, University of Pittsburgh Press 1971. Additional translations are in progress.
3. The Pages of Day and Night, Introduction, p 15.
4. Op cit, pp 101-102.
5. Loc cit.
6. Ibid, pp 102-103.
7. See When even the pope has to whisper, Asia Times Online, January 10, 2006.
8. An Introduction to Arab Poetics (translated by Catherine Cobham), Saqi Books: London 1990.
9. Poetics, p 60.
10. Op cit, p 65.
11. From "The Past", in The Pages of Day and Night.
12. Op cit, p 21.
13. Op cit, p 26.
14. Poetics, pp 80-81.
Source
Gilad Shalit—A Complex Problem
An Arab publicist says that the Arab world is enviously watching Israel’s determination to return Gilad Shalit safely. It contrasts with the contempt for Arab prisoners’ lives and shows up the contempt for human life in Arab society
Nezar Jaff (5/4/2007)
The author is editor of Payama-Kurd, a Kurdish cultural magazine published in Germany.
The item was published on the Elaph website (April 18 2007).
The story of captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, still resonates and captures people’s attention. What is most interesting is the perspective of the Arab media, whose coverage of the story gives it a wider, more profound dimension and shows something far larger, more important, and more sensitive than meets the eye.
A Hero With Backup
Shalit, who the Palestinians are using for a bargaining chip, has in fact become a hero in every sense. That is because of how his story is treated in the Arab media. The media have made Israel a shining example of a powerful country that has not caved to the traditional methods used against it, while the use of these methods shows the failure of the Arab regimes to deal with current needs.
Though the plight of Gilad Shalit is a top priority for Israel, which is doing its utmost to safeguard his life and rescue him from his enemies, it has not highlighted the problem and made as much of it as the Arab satellite channels through their focus on the simple question “Why doesn’t the world show as much interest in the Palestinian prisoners as it does in Gilad Shalit?” But the satellite stations haven’t tried to answer this question. Instead, they try to drum up support in the Arab street with their ridiculous shallow handling of the question, whose important and sensitive issues are not aired.
Arab Prisoners’ Lives are Worthless
When he was in the army, Gilad Shalit carried his gun with a strong sense of his own worth and his consequence because he knew very well that he was not alone on the battlefield, that he was backed by the best army and intelligence service and excellent political and media forces. But, when we look across the fence at the Arab armies, especially the divided Palestinian forces, there are questions. In the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iranian army overran an Iraqi army position and captured its soldiers, the Iraqis told their artillery to “hammer the position”. In other words, the Iraqi forces were ordered to pound the positions captured by the Iranians with the Iraqi prisoners still in them. What makes you angry and frightened about all this is that many of the Iraqi soldiers who were lucky enough to get back from the inferno had been targeted by the Iraqi artillery all along.
What happened to the Egyptian and Syrian soldiers in the war with Israel, their humiliation, and being sent like lambs to the slaughter, without anyone to save them or protect them from their unknown fate, is a story wrapped in a black cloud. This was one of the many tragedies which smote those countries. And, the dozens and hundreds of Egyptian soldiers who died in the Sinai Desert in the Six-Day-War after losing their way in the desert proves the value of the Arab citizen living under regimes that only care about subjugating their citizens to their will and blocking their ears to the citizens’ demands and rights, and even using artillery fire against them if they dare openly stand up for their rights like the city of Homs in Syria, when the Arab regimes had to silence them.
If we look at the Palestinian forces who belong to the imaginary and degenerate army, we see the value of a Palestinian fighter is less than the bullets in the gun he carries and that if he is captured “the right solutions will be found”.
Look at how the Israeli government and all its apparatus is dealing with the capture of Gilad Shalit. The humanity they show will inspire every Israeli soldier who knows that if anything happens to him, he will be treated like a hero, like Shalit, and released for a herd of Palestinian prisoners who will go back to the slaughterhouse and imaginary army which so far hasn’t been able to rid itself of the cancer of divided loyalties.
Source
English translation
Nezar Jaff (5/4/2007)
The author is editor of Payama-Kurd, a Kurdish cultural magazine published in Germany.
The item was published on the Elaph website (April 18 2007).
The story of captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, still resonates and captures people’s attention. What is most interesting is the perspective of the Arab media, whose coverage of the story gives it a wider, more profound dimension and shows something far larger, more important, and more sensitive than meets the eye.
A Hero With Backup
Shalit, who the Palestinians are using for a bargaining chip, has in fact become a hero in every sense. That is because of how his story is treated in the Arab media. The media have made Israel a shining example of a powerful country that has not caved to the traditional methods used against it, while the use of these methods shows the failure of the Arab regimes to deal with current needs.
Though the plight of Gilad Shalit is a top priority for Israel, which is doing its utmost to safeguard his life and rescue him from his enemies, it has not highlighted the problem and made as much of it as the Arab satellite channels through their focus on the simple question “Why doesn’t the world show as much interest in the Palestinian prisoners as it does in Gilad Shalit?” But the satellite stations haven’t tried to answer this question. Instead, they try to drum up support in the Arab street with their ridiculous shallow handling of the question, whose important and sensitive issues are not aired.
Arab Prisoners’ Lives are Worthless
When he was in the army, Gilad Shalit carried his gun with a strong sense of his own worth and his consequence because he knew very well that he was not alone on the battlefield, that he was backed by the best army and intelligence service and excellent political and media forces. But, when we look across the fence at the Arab armies, especially the divided Palestinian forces, there are questions. In the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iranian army overran an Iraqi army position and captured its soldiers, the Iraqis told their artillery to “hammer the position”. In other words, the Iraqi forces were ordered to pound the positions captured by the Iranians with the Iraqi prisoners still in them. What makes you angry and frightened about all this is that many of the Iraqi soldiers who were lucky enough to get back from the inferno had been targeted by the Iraqi artillery all along.
What happened to the Egyptian and Syrian soldiers in the war with Israel, their humiliation, and being sent like lambs to the slaughter, without anyone to save them or protect them from their unknown fate, is a story wrapped in a black cloud. This was one of the many tragedies which smote those countries. And, the dozens and hundreds of Egyptian soldiers who died in the Sinai Desert in the Six-Day-War after losing their way in the desert proves the value of the Arab citizen living under regimes that only care about subjugating their citizens to their will and blocking their ears to the citizens’ demands and rights, and even using artillery fire against them if they dare openly stand up for their rights like the city of Homs in Syria, when the Arab regimes had to silence them.
If we look at the Palestinian forces who belong to the imaginary and degenerate army, we see the value of a Palestinian fighter is less than the bullets in the gun he carries and that if he is captured “the right solutions will be found”.
Look at how the Israeli government and all its apparatus is dealing with the capture of Gilad Shalit. The humanity they show will inspire every Israeli soldier who knows that if anything happens to him, he will be treated like a hero, like Shalit, and released for a herd of Palestinian prisoners who will go back to the slaughterhouse and imaginary army which so far hasn’t been able to rid itself of the cancer of divided loyalties.
Source
English translation
Hezbollah: Rockets fired into Israel directed by Iran
JERUSALEM – All of Hezbollah's policies and activities are coordinated with the leadership of Iran, including the firing of rockets into Israeli population centers for which direct Iranian approval is required, said a senior Hezbollah official in a rare admission.
"Even when it comes to firing rockets on Israeli civilians, when they [Israel] bombed the civilians on our side, even that decision requires an in-principle permission from [the ruling jurisprudent]," said Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy chief of Hezbollah, in an Arabic language interview translated yesterday by the Information and Terrorism Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.
According to the Center, "the ruling jurisprudent," or "al-wali al-faqih" in Arabic, is the title of Supreme Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the interview, given last month to the Al-Kawthar, Iranian Arabic-language TV channel, Qassem says Khamenei's authority is crucial for all Hezbollah operations:
"Hezbollah relied and relies still in its Islamic religious position, which has to do with its activity in general and its jihadist activity in particular, on the decision of (Khamenei). The ruling jurisprudent is the one who allows and the one who prohibits."
He said Khamenei approves acts [of] suicide terror.
"We ask, receive answers, and then apply [them]. This is even true for acts of suicide for the sake of Allah – no one may kill himself without a jurisprudent permission (from Khamenei)."
Source
"Even when it comes to firing rockets on Israeli civilians, when they [Israel] bombed the civilians on our side, even that decision requires an in-principle permission from [the ruling jurisprudent]," said Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy chief of Hezbollah, in an Arabic language interview translated yesterday by the Information and Terrorism Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.
According to the Center, "the ruling jurisprudent," or "al-wali al-faqih" in Arabic, is the title of Supreme Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the interview, given last month to the Al-Kawthar, Iranian Arabic-language TV channel, Qassem says Khamenei's authority is crucial for all Hezbollah operations:
"Hezbollah relied and relies still in its Islamic religious position, which has to do with its activity in general and its jihadist activity in particular, on the decision of (Khamenei). The ruling jurisprudent is the one who allows and the one who prohibits."
He said Khamenei approves acts [of] suicide terror.
"We ask, receive answers, and then apply [them]. This is even true for acts of suicide for the sake of Allah – no one may kill himself without a jurisprudent permission (from Khamenei)."
Source
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Declare mohammed the superman of the world or we bomb you
Bangladesh railway blasts signed 'al Qaeda'
May 1, 2007
DHAKA, Bangladesh (Reuters) -- Three simultaneous bomb blasts rocked separate railway terminals in Bangladesh on Tuesday, with militant slogans claiming to be from al Qaeda found at two of the sites.
One man was hurt in the blasts, which triggered panic among commuters, who evacuated railway terminals.
Thin metal sheets scribbled with slogans were found at the bomb sites in Dhaka's Kamalapur and Sylhet terminals. The third blast was in the railway terminal of the southeastern city of Chittagong.
"... If Hazrat (Prophet) Mohammad is not declared the superman of the world by May 10, all non-governmental organizations will be blown up," the slogans on the metal sheets read in the Bengali language. They were signed "the al Qaeda network" in English.
"The bombs were kept in cotton sacks, along with the metal sheets. They exploded before anyone detected them," said police Inspector Abu Zafar Alam at Kamalapur, Bangladesh's biggest railway terminal.
"We are puzzled over the motives (of those who planted the bombs). But they dared to take the risk," said another police officer.
No one has been arrested, nor could police immediately confirm any al Qaeda link to the blasts.
Police said Munir Hossain, a rickshaw-puller, was injured at the Chittagong terminal when he tried to open one of the sacks before it exploded.
Outlawed Islamist groups
The outlawed Islamist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen, carried out a series of bomb blasts across Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, killing three people and injuring more than 100.
In more attacks through the rest of 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen and another outlawed group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, killed nearly 30 more people and wounded 150, including judges, lawyers, police and officials.
Six leaders from the two groups were executed on March 30 for their role in the blasts.
Many commuters fled the terminals, too scared to board trains.
"I am afraid to take on the journey. There may be more bombs around," said Didarul Alam, a bank official waiting to board a train to Chittagong. "They have spoiled my holiday."
Many Bangladeshis were traveling out of Dhaka taking advantage of a two-day public holiday for May Day and a Buddhist religious festival on Wednesday.
Security has been tightened across the country, police said.
Intelligence groups last month alerted the government that Islamist militants were regrouping after the execution of the militant leaders.
"This (Tuesday's blasts) proved they are still active and dared to show their teeth," said one security official who asked not to be named.
The army-backed interim government has imposed a state of emergency in January following deadly political violence that forced the authorities to suspend a scheduled national election.
Tuesday's blasts occurred almost simultaneously around 7:30 a.m. (0130 GMT), police said.
Source
May 1, 2007
DHAKA, Bangladesh (Reuters) -- Three simultaneous bomb blasts rocked separate railway terminals in Bangladesh on Tuesday, with militant slogans claiming to be from al Qaeda found at two of the sites.
One man was hurt in the blasts, which triggered panic among commuters, who evacuated railway terminals.
Thin metal sheets scribbled with slogans were found at the bomb sites in Dhaka's Kamalapur and Sylhet terminals. The third blast was in the railway terminal of the southeastern city of Chittagong.
"... If Hazrat (Prophet) Mohammad is not declared the superman of the world by May 10, all non-governmental organizations will be blown up," the slogans on the metal sheets read in the Bengali language. They were signed "the al Qaeda network" in English.
"The bombs were kept in cotton sacks, along with the metal sheets. They exploded before anyone detected them," said police Inspector Abu Zafar Alam at Kamalapur, Bangladesh's biggest railway terminal.
"We are puzzled over the motives (of those who planted the bombs). But they dared to take the risk," said another police officer.
No one has been arrested, nor could police immediately confirm any al Qaeda link to the blasts.
Police said Munir Hossain, a rickshaw-puller, was injured at the Chittagong terminal when he tried to open one of the sacks before it exploded.
Outlawed Islamist groups
The outlawed Islamist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen, carried out a series of bomb blasts across Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, killing three people and injuring more than 100.
In more attacks through the rest of 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen and another outlawed group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, killed nearly 30 more people and wounded 150, including judges, lawyers, police and officials.
Six leaders from the two groups were executed on March 30 for their role in the blasts.
Many commuters fled the terminals, too scared to board trains.
"I am afraid to take on the journey. There may be more bombs around," said Didarul Alam, a bank official waiting to board a train to Chittagong. "They have spoiled my holiday."
Many Bangladeshis were traveling out of Dhaka taking advantage of a two-day public holiday for May Day and a Buddhist religious festival on Wednesday.
Security has been tightened across the country, police said.
Intelligence groups last month alerted the government that Islamist militants were regrouping after the execution of the militant leaders.
"This (Tuesday's blasts) proved they are still active and dared to show their teeth," said one security official who asked not to be named.
The army-backed interim government has imposed a state of emergency in January following deadly political violence that forced the authorities to suspend a scheduled national election.
Tuesday's blasts occurred almost simultaneously around 7:30 a.m. (0130 GMT), police said.
Source
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Cease Process, Not Peace Process
Barry Rubin
April 29, 2007
The world's approach to the Middle East is largely based on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thousands of diplomatic hours, plane tickets, innocent reams of paper, and posh hotel rooms are being devoted to this effort. The pace of time, cost, and attention is accelerating.
But what if the problem cannot be fixed, at least for decades? Doesn't this require serious thought?
Instead, the actual, unpleasant, reality is denied. This approach, while ultimately unsatisfactory and even dangerous, makes some sense. Spending lots of time trying out various unworkable options might keep these issues from becoming worse. It also covers those who do so from being blamed for the inevitable failure and future crises we can expect.
Still, there should be a lot more people explaining the true situation. Here is what we are told about the range of current policy options:
- Talk a lot. A good dialogue never hurts and they might even serve food. So Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet Palestinian Authority (PA) nominal chief executive Mahmoud Abbas every couple of weeks. No harm. Let's both sides look cooperative and eager for peace. But nothing will come out of this either.
- Throw in lots of money. Estimates are that around $1.2 billion was given as aid to the PA last year. This is more than during several previous years before the declared sanctions against the Hamas-led regime, not including money smuggled in by Hamas itself. Palestinians are the biggest per capita aid recipients in the world, even in a period when aid has supposedly been reduced.
And yet, this does not mean that Palestinians are living well. The aid disappears into corruption or paid to PA employees who do nothing useful or as welfare payments to people prevented by bad regime policies and chaos from anything economically productive. At best, aid maintains the status quo, thus preventing material pressure for change (a more moderate government, peace with Israel, a crackdown on corruption and lawlessness). At worst, it subsidizes terrorist gunmen, schools that teach Jews are sub-humans who should be killed, and continued Hamas rule.
- Sanctions to put pressure for moderation, peace, and change. See previous item. If such sanctions have failed, it is partly because so much money is being provided any way. While there is an attempt to target the sanctions against Hamas itself, funds can simply be moved around too easily to really fulfill this goal. European governments seem to feel that aid originally provided on condition that the Palestinians achieve a full and lasting peace with Israel should continue after they have rejected this option.
- Build up "moderate" Fatah to counter radical Hamas. This is a clever strategy, which would be very appropriate except for one small problem--Fatah does not support it. Of course, in saying this I don't mean that Fatah opposes Western help to itself (in fact, it is largely waiting around for outsiders to solve its problems and put it back into power.)
The first problem is that Fatah is not doing anything to help itself. Since Hamas took power in January 2005, it is impossible to detect any effort by Fatah to reform itself, strengthen its leadership, fight corruption in its ranks, or develop its unity. All the shortcomings that led Fatah to defeat in the January 2005 elections are still present. Nobody can save an organization that acts as if it is so bent on its own destruction.
The second problem is that Fatah's main strategy in "combating" Hamas is to imitate it. Not that everyone in Fatah is radical and certainly not Islamist. But aside from the statements of a few, including Mahmoud himself, there is no big difference between them.
The third problem is that Fatah has accepted a role as Hamas' junior partner. The two groups are rivals. But at present, they are allies.
- Make Hamas moderate. Take one percent of Hamas leaders' statements in English. Discard the rest and everything said by them in Arabic. Throw in the belief that no one can really be radical. Ignore the fact that they think they are divinely directed and need not change since they are winning. Mix well with ignorance and voila, Hamas Moderation Stew, makes millions of portions.
So if the two-state solution won't work, what does one do? Here, too, there is a bad back-up plan: the one-state solution. Since the Palestinians have produced a failed state, this brilliant concept proposes that having wrecked Palestine, one might as well wreck Israel too. Sort of expand outward the corruption, hatred, violence, and chaos. No, thanks.
However, the good news is that since this is unsolvable, the Middle East, with whatever appropriate help from the world, could try to solve a few other problems like terrorism, dictatorship, economic and social backwardness, inequality for women, inadequate educational systems, and so on.
For now, however, we are out of space or I would tell you how the United States can simultaneously stabilize Iraq; win Iraqi Shia away from Iran; keep the Sunni happy; reconcile U.S with Iranian and Syrian interests; and defeat an insurgency by those happy to see the country leveled and millions murdered as long as they could claim to rule it.
The true proper option, though this isn't going to happen, is to "decertify" the Palestinian movement. Since it did not deliver on its peace process promises and has essentially reverted to the pre-1993 policies (Hamas, actually, is back beyond 1974), the world should return to its positions of that era. That was when people understood that the movement sought to destroy Israel and was using terrorism. One day, was the hope, the movement would become moderate and a compromise solution could be negotiated with it. Until that happened, it would receive neither aid nor recognition. We're still waiting.
Source
April 29, 2007
The world's approach to the Middle East is largely based on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thousands of diplomatic hours, plane tickets, innocent reams of paper, and posh hotel rooms are being devoted to this effort. The pace of time, cost, and attention is accelerating.
But what if the problem cannot be fixed, at least for decades? Doesn't this require serious thought?
Instead, the actual, unpleasant, reality is denied. This approach, while ultimately unsatisfactory and even dangerous, makes some sense. Spending lots of time trying out various unworkable options might keep these issues from becoming worse. It also covers those who do so from being blamed for the inevitable failure and future crises we can expect.
Still, there should be a lot more people explaining the true situation. Here is what we are told about the range of current policy options:
- Talk a lot. A good dialogue never hurts and they might even serve food. So Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet Palestinian Authority (PA) nominal chief executive Mahmoud Abbas every couple of weeks. No harm. Let's both sides look cooperative and eager for peace. But nothing will come out of this either.
- Throw in lots of money. Estimates are that around $1.2 billion was given as aid to the PA last year. This is more than during several previous years before the declared sanctions against the Hamas-led regime, not including money smuggled in by Hamas itself. Palestinians are the biggest per capita aid recipients in the world, even in a period when aid has supposedly been reduced.
And yet, this does not mean that Palestinians are living well. The aid disappears into corruption or paid to PA employees who do nothing useful or as welfare payments to people prevented by bad regime policies and chaos from anything economically productive. At best, aid maintains the status quo, thus preventing material pressure for change (a more moderate government, peace with Israel, a crackdown on corruption and lawlessness). At worst, it subsidizes terrorist gunmen, schools that teach Jews are sub-humans who should be killed, and continued Hamas rule.
- Sanctions to put pressure for moderation, peace, and change. See previous item. If such sanctions have failed, it is partly because so much money is being provided any way. While there is an attempt to target the sanctions against Hamas itself, funds can simply be moved around too easily to really fulfill this goal. European governments seem to feel that aid originally provided on condition that the Palestinians achieve a full and lasting peace with Israel should continue after they have rejected this option.
- Build up "moderate" Fatah to counter radical Hamas. This is a clever strategy, which would be very appropriate except for one small problem--Fatah does not support it. Of course, in saying this I don't mean that Fatah opposes Western help to itself (in fact, it is largely waiting around for outsiders to solve its problems and put it back into power.)
The first problem is that Fatah is not doing anything to help itself. Since Hamas took power in January 2005, it is impossible to detect any effort by Fatah to reform itself, strengthen its leadership, fight corruption in its ranks, or develop its unity. All the shortcomings that led Fatah to defeat in the January 2005 elections are still present. Nobody can save an organization that acts as if it is so bent on its own destruction.
The second problem is that Fatah's main strategy in "combating" Hamas is to imitate it. Not that everyone in Fatah is radical and certainly not Islamist. But aside from the statements of a few, including Mahmoud himself, there is no big difference between them.
The third problem is that Fatah has accepted a role as Hamas' junior partner. The two groups are rivals. But at present, they are allies.
- Make Hamas moderate. Take one percent of Hamas leaders' statements in English. Discard the rest and everything said by them in Arabic. Throw in the belief that no one can really be radical. Ignore the fact that they think they are divinely directed and need not change since they are winning. Mix well with ignorance and voila, Hamas Moderation Stew, makes millions of portions.
So if the two-state solution won't work, what does one do? Here, too, there is a bad back-up plan: the one-state solution. Since the Palestinians have produced a failed state, this brilliant concept proposes that having wrecked Palestine, one might as well wreck Israel too. Sort of expand outward the corruption, hatred, violence, and chaos. No, thanks.
However, the good news is that since this is unsolvable, the Middle East, with whatever appropriate help from the world, could try to solve a few other problems like terrorism, dictatorship, economic and social backwardness, inequality for women, inadequate educational systems, and so on.
For now, however, we are out of space or I would tell you how the United States can simultaneously stabilize Iraq; win Iraqi Shia away from Iran; keep the Sunni happy; reconcile U.S with Iranian and Syrian interests; and defeat an insurgency by those happy to see the country leveled and millions murdered as long as they could claim to rule it.
The true proper option, though this isn't going to happen, is to "decertify" the Palestinian movement. Since it did not deliver on its peace process promises and has essentially reverted to the pre-1993 policies (Hamas, actually, is back beyond 1974), the world should return to its positions of that era. That was when people understood that the movement sought to destroy Israel and was using terrorism. One day, was the hope, the movement would become moderate and a compromise solution could be negotiated with it. Until that happened, it would receive neither aid nor recognition. We're still waiting.
Source
Few news snipplets you probably missed
Gang caught attempting to kidnap schoolchildren for ransom in Gaza Strip
Khan Younis – Ma'an – The Palestinian Executive Force (EF), which is affiliated to the ministry of interior, announced on Sunday that they arrested a gang that planned to kidnap children and hold them hostage for ransom money.
The group was caught whilst attempting to kidnap a child in front of a school in Gaza City. The EF have been investigating and monitoring the suspects for 3 days.
The EF said in a statement "the group was caught whilst attempting to kidnap a boy near his school and they admitted during interrogation that they were planning to ask for $10,000 from his father."
Source
20 injured in clashes between Fatah and Hamas student blocs at Al Quds University
Bethlehem – Ma'an – More than 20 students were injured in clashes that erupted between Hamas and Fatah student blocs at Al-Quds university in Abu Dis, in the West Bank, on Sunday afternoon.
The clashes erupted during a debate between the students in preparation for the student senate elections to be held on Monday. Eight student blocs are meant to be competing in the elections.
Ma'an's correspondent reported that the injured students were transferred to the Arab medical centre in Abu Dis, some will then be sent on to Ramallah hospital for further treatment.
The clashes erupted when the students were debating in the campus. The students used rods, stones and chairs in the fight.
Source
Khan Younis – Ma'an – The Palestinian Executive Force (EF), which is affiliated to the ministry of interior, announced on Sunday that they arrested a gang that planned to kidnap children and hold them hostage for ransom money.
The group was caught whilst attempting to kidnap a child in front of a school in Gaza City. The EF have been investigating and monitoring the suspects for 3 days.
The EF said in a statement "the group was caught whilst attempting to kidnap a boy near his school and they admitted during interrogation that they were planning to ask for $10,000 from his father."
Source
20 injured in clashes between Fatah and Hamas student blocs at Al Quds University
Bethlehem – Ma'an – More than 20 students were injured in clashes that erupted between Hamas and Fatah student blocs at Al-Quds university in Abu Dis, in the West Bank, on Sunday afternoon.
The clashes erupted during a debate between the students in preparation for the student senate elections to be held on Monday. Eight student blocs are meant to be competing in the elections.
Ma'an's correspondent reported that the injured students were transferred to the Arab medical centre in Abu Dis, some will then be sent on to Ramallah hospital for further treatment.
The clashes erupted when the students were debating in the campus. The students used rods, stones and chairs in the fight.
Source
More than one million rally in Turkey for secularism, democracy
by Nicolas Cheviron Sun Apr 29, 9:42 AM ET
ISTANBUL (AFP) - More than one million people took part in a mass rally here Sunday in support of secularism and democracy amid a tense stand-off between the Islamist-rooted government and the army over presidential elections.
The crowd, carrying red-and-white Turkish flags and portraits of founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, filled Istanbul's sprawling Caglayan square in a demonstration organized by some 600 non-governmental organizations.
"Turkey is secular and will remain secular," "Neither Sharia, nor coup d'etat, democratic Turkey," they chanted.
Police at the scene told AFP that the number of demonstrators was well over one million. Organizers said the rally drew people from all over Turkey and abroad.
The Istanbul demonstration followed a similar one in Ankara on April 14 that attracted up to 1.5 million people, according to some estimates.
Tensions rose after Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), narrowly missed becoming the country's next president in a first round of voting in parliament on Friday.
The AKP dominates the 550-seat parliament, but does not have the required two-thirds majority to get Gul elected in the first two rounds of voting.
The opposition boycotted the vote because of Gul's Islamist past and because they were not consulted on his candiacy for the non-partisan post.
The army, which has carried out three coups in the past, issued a statement saying it was determined to protect Turkey's secular system and was ready to take action if the need arose, making it clear, according to many analysts, that Gul's candidacy was not welcome.
The government responded by calling the army to order and Gul on Sunday ruled out withdrawing his presidential bid.
"It is out of the question for me to withdraw my candidacy in any way," he told reporters in Ankara.
The prospect of Gul becoming head of state has alarmed secularists who fear the strict separation of state and religion will be eroded and Islam will creep into all fields of life if he is elected.
The main opposition Republican People's Party has asked the Constitutional Court to cancel Friday's presidential vote in parliament, arguing that the assembly did not have the necessary quorum to open the voting session.
If the court annuls the vote, general elections set for November 4 could be brought forward.
If does not, Gul could be elected president in a third round of voting on May 9, when an absolute majority of 276 votes would suffice, compared to the two-thirds majority of 367 required for the first two rounds.
"We all need to await the decision of the Constitutional Court," Gul said. "The court will undoubtedly make the best evaluation and reach the right decision."
Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan served in now-defunct Islamist parties before setting up the AKP in 2001.
They say they have disawoved their Islamist roots and are now committed to secular principles.
But secularists suspect the AKP of harbouring a secret Islamic agenda, citing its unsuccessful attempts to criminalise adultery, restrict alcohol sales and lift a ban on Islamic headscarves in government offices.
They fear the government will have a free hand to implement Islamist policies if the party controls the presidency.
The Turkish press on Sunday was unanimous in calling on the government and the army to resolve their differences democratically and said early elections were the only way to prevent the country from plunging into chaos.
"Turkey either giving up on secularism or suspending democracy are two doomsday scenarios impossible to choose between," the popular daily Vatan said.
The liberal daily Milliyet said the army's warning had "cast a shadow on the credibility and respectability of civilian institutions."
"The latest developments show that the current term of parliament has reached the end of its natural life. Elections should be held at once," it added.
Source
ISTANBUL (AFP) - More than one million people took part in a mass rally here Sunday in support of secularism and democracy amid a tense stand-off between the Islamist-rooted government and the army over presidential elections.
The crowd, carrying red-and-white Turkish flags and portraits of founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, filled Istanbul's sprawling Caglayan square in a demonstration organized by some 600 non-governmental organizations.
"Turkey is secular and will remain secular," "Neither Sharia, nor coup d'etat, democratic Turkey," they chanted.
Police at the scene told AFP that the number of demonstrators was well over one million. Organizers said the rally drew people from all over Turkey and abroad.
The Istanbul demonstration followed a similar one in Ankara on April 14 that attracted up to 1.5 million people, according to some estimates.
Tensions rose after Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), narrowly missed becoming the country's next president in a first round of voting in parliament on Friday.
The AKP dominates the 550-seat parliament, but does not have the required two-thirds majority to get Gul elected in the first two rounds of voting.
The opposition boycotted the vote because of Gul's Islamist past and because they were not consulted on his candiacy for the non-partisan post.
The army, which has carried out three coups in the past, issued a statement saying it was determined to protect Turkey's secular system and was ready to take action if the need arose, making it clear, according to many analysts, that Gul's candidacy was not welcome.
The government responded by calling the army to order and Gul on Sunday ruled out withdrawing his presidential bid.
"It is out of the question for me to withdraw my candidacy in any way," he told reporters in Ankara.
The prospect of Gul becoming head of state has alarmed secularists who fear the strict separation of state and religion will be eroded and Islam will creep into all fields of life if he is elected.
The main opposition Republican People's Party has asked the Constitutional Court to cancel Friday's presidential vote in parliament, arguing that the assembly did not have the necessary quorum to open the voting session.
If the court annuls the vote, general elections set for November 4 could be brought forward.
If does not, Gul could be elected president in a third round of voting on May 9, when an absolute majority of 276 votes would suffice, compared to the two-thirds majority of 367 required for the first two rounds.
"We all need to await the decision of the Constitutional Court," Gul said. "The court will undoubtedly make the best evaluation and reach the right decision."
Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan served in now-defunct Islamist parties before setting up the AKP in 2001.
They say they have disawoved their Islamist roots and are now committed to secular principles.
But secularists suspect the AKP of harbouring a secret Islamic agenda, citing its unsuccessful attempts to criminalise adultery, restrict alcohol sales and lift a ban on Islamic headscarves in government offices.
They fear the government will have a free hand to implement Islamist policies if the party controls the presidency.
The Turkish press on Sunday was unanimous in calling on the government and the army to resolve their differences democratically and said early elections were the only way to prevent the country from plunging into chaos.
"Turkey either giving up on secularism or suspending democracy are two doomsday scenarios impossible to choose between," the popular daily Vatan said.
The liberal daily Milliyet said the army's warning had "cast a shadow on the credibility and respectability of civilian institutions."
"The latest developments show that the current term of parliament has reached the end of its natural life. Elections should be held at once," it added.
Source
Turks protest Islamic-rooted government
BENJAMIN HARVEY, Associated Press Writer
ISTANBUL, Turkey - Some 700,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.
Like the protesters — who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks — Turkey's powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.
"They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages," said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.
More than 300,000 people took part in a similar rally in Ankara two weeks ago. Police, who said Sunday's demonstrators numbered around 700,000, cordoned off the area and conducted body searches at several entry points.
Sunday's demonstration was organized more than a week ago, but it came a day after Erdogan's government rejected the military's warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.
The ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court.
The military said Friday night that it was gravely concerned and indicated it was willing to become more openly involved in the process — a statement some interpreted as an ultimatum to the government to rein in officials who promote Islamic initiatives.
Sunday's crowd chanted that the presidential palace was "closed to imams."
Some said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be "pious."
In the 1920s, with the Ottoman Empire in ruins, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed Western laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic dress and granted women the right to vote.
The ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul's wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.
"We don't want a covered woman in Ataturk's presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."
The military, one of the most respected institutions in Turkey, regards itself as the guardian of the secular system and has staged three coups since 1960.
"Neither Sharia, nor coup but fully democratic Turkey," read a banner carried by a demonstrator on Sunday.
Source
ISTANBUL, Turkey - Some 700,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.
Like the protesters — who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks — Turkey's powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.
"They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages," said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.
More than 300,000 people took part in a similar rally in Ankara two weeks ago. Police, who said Sunday's demonstrators numbered around 700,000, cordoned off the area and conducted body searches at several entry points.
Sunday's demonstration was organized more than a week ago, but it came a day after Erdogan's government rejected the military's warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.
The ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court.
The military said Friday night that it was gravely concerned and indicated it was willing to become more openly involved in the process — a statement some interpreted as an ultimatum to the government to rein in officials who promote Islamic initiatives.
Sunday's crowd chanted that the presidential palace was "closed to imams."
Some said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be "pious."
In the 1920s, with the Ottoman Empire in ruins, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed Western laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic dress and granted women the right to vote.
The ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul's wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.
"We don't want a covered woman in Ataturk's presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."
The military, one of the most respected institutions in Turkey, regards itself as the guardian of the secular system and has staged three coups since 1960.
"Neither Sharia, nor coup but fully democratic Turkey," read a banner carried by a demonstrator on Sunday.
Source
‘You Marry My Daughter and I’ll Marry Yours!’
Arab News
RIYADH, 7 January 2007 — With the aim of strengthening business ties, two Riyadh business partners in their 70s have married their teenage daughters (17-19) to each other, reported Sayidaty magazine, a sister publication of Arab News.
“A man has the right to marry. When it comes to marriage, there is no stopping point,” said Al-Dossary, a man in his 70s with silver hair, a gray beard and gray eyebrows. “We have followed Islamic principles in the way we conducted our marriages and we are both happy with our wives,” he added.
Al-Dossary married his teenage daughter to his business partner and in turn married his partner’s teenage daughter. His partner, Saif Al-Qahtani, said: “It is true that our arranged marriages are strange, yet this does not mean that we are the only people to have married in this way, either in the past or the present. Anyhow, the main purpose of marriage is to protect men and women and we have both achieved this through our marriages.”
He added: “It took us only two months to decide and then arrange our marriages. It all began when my friend, Al-Dossary, continuously expressed the desire to marry.”
Al-Dossary added: “It is true that I wanted to marry. I proposed to several girls but all refused. One day I decided to ask Al-Qahtani to give me one of his daughters. He agreed immediately, but in return he asked me for my daughter. I was surprised because he already had three wives; however, I agreed since I had a young daughter who was of marriageable age.”
Al-Qahtani commented: “Yes, I asked him to give me his daughter in return. When he asked for one of my daughters, I thought I couldn’t refuse him because of our friendship. I knew that if I did refuse his request, our business would be affected. I didn’t have any other choice. I agreed to give him my daughter and take his daughter in return. At the time, I remember telling him to give me his daughter and that I would give him mine.”
He added that the two old men then set a date, not more than two months away during which time the marriages would be finalized. “We met our deadline and we have now been married for a year and a half,” he said.
When asked if they had consulted their daughters, Al-Qahtani said: “I did not ask my daughter. I don’t have to. I know what is beneficial for her. When I told her what I had planned, she was happy. If she hadn’t been, she would have told her mother.”
Al-Dossary said: “In bedouin culture, a girl does not have the right to express her opinion about marriage, especially if her father and brothers have decided on a particular man. In both our cases, we have been married for a long time and have had no problems with our wives. Although we are much older than our wives, the fact that we are together proves that we are right for each other.”
He added: “Saudi girls, especially bedouins, prefer to marry old men. This is what my third and fourth wives have both told me. They keep telling me they are glad that they did not marry young men.”
As for the wedding ceremony, Al-Dossary said: “Indeed, we had a wedding ceremony. We were not stealing, so there was no need to hide things. We had a party for women. However, the men’s party was only for me, my brothers, Al-Qahtani, his brothers and the marriage official. We provided our wives with huge dowries and valuable gifts, far more than anything any young men could have given them.”
When asked if they have had children by their young brides, Al-Qahtani said with enthusiasm: “I have already had a daughter and my wife is now pregnant again. Al-Dossary has not had any yet but he has many from previous wives.”
Reacting to allegations of misbehavior, Al-Dossary said: “We do not think of our daughters as entities to profit from. If I were of such a mind, then I would have married my daughter to men who asked for her and offered me lots of money; however, I refused them because of their unacceptable manners and behavior.”
Al-Qahtani agreed: “To tell you the truth, when I asked Al-Dossary to give me his daughter in return for mine, I had a couple of things in mind. I told him that we were not just friends and partners but we would also be relatives. We did not think of our daughters as business entities.”
He added: “Some of my cousins have refused to accept the marriages, not because of the idea but because one of them wanted to marry my daughter. However, he couldn’t provide the dowry I asked for and, therefore, I didn’t give him my daughter. I have forgotten about him.”
When asked if they plan to use this strategy to marry again, Al-Qahtani said: “I cannot marry again as I already have four wives, but no one knows what will happen in the future. However, if I were to remarry, I would marry one of my cousins and would have no problem in offering one of my daughters in return.”
Al-Dossary said: “I am satisfied with my three wives but as Al-Qahtani said, no one knows the future. If I am to marry and the father of the girl or her brother asks me to give him one of my daughters, then I would agree. I would even agree if he asked for one of my granddaughters.”
Commenting on the story, Ali Nasir, a social researcher at the Education Ministry, said: “The problems that are currently present in Saudi and Arab society in general are due to easy-going attitudes toward marriages. Although there are rules and laws in some Arab countries that demand respect between men and women, in Saudi Arabia customs and traditions still remain in control. How could two old men treat their daughters as objects? How can they ignore the basic age differences?”
He added that having read a transcript of the men’s interviews, he could clearly see that they had no respect for women. “They did not even consult their daughters. They also said that they were ready to marry again in a similar fashion.”
Sheikh Muhammad Al-Wahbi, a researcher in Islamic jurisprudence, said that there was no legal problem with such marriages as long as the women involved agreed. He warned that people must, however, be clear about their intentions. “It is abominable to turn a marriage into a business in which a woman is no more than an object or business commodity,” he said.
Source
RIYADH, 7 January 2007 — With the aim of strengthening business ties, two Riyadh business partners in their 70s have married their teenage daughters (17-19) to each other, reported Sayidaty magazine, a sister publication of Arab News.
“A man has the right to marry. When it comes to marriage, there is no stopping point,” said Al-Dossary, a man in his 70s with silver hair, a gray beard and gray eyebrows. “We have followed Islamic principles in the way we conducted our marriages and we are both happy with our wives,” he added.
Al-Dossary married his teenage daughter to his business partner and in turn married his partner’s teenage daughter. His partner, Saif Al-Qahtani, said: “It is true that our arranged marriages are strange, yet this does not mean that we are the only people to have married in this way, either in the past or the present. Anyhow, the main purpose of marriage is to protect men and women and we have both achieved this through our marriages.”
He added: “It took us only two months to decide and then arrange our marriages. It all began when my friend, Al-Dossary, continuously expressed the desire to marry.”
Al-Dossary added: “It is true that I wanted to marry. I proposed to several girls but all refused. One day I decided to ask Al-Qahtani to give me one of his daughters. He agreed immediately, but in return he asked me for my daughter. I was surprised because he already had three wives; however, I agreed since I had a young daughter who was of marriageable age.”
Al-Qahtani commented: “Yes, I asked him to give me his daughter in return. When he asked for one of my daughters, I thought I couldn’t refuse him because of our friendship. I knew that if I did refuse his request, our business would be affected. I didn’t have any other choice. I agreed to give him my daughter and take his daughter in return. At the time, I remember telling him to give me his daughter and that I would give him mine.”
He added that the two old men then set a date, not more than two months away during which time the marriages would be finalized. “We met our deadline and we have now been married for a year and a half,” he said.
When asked if they had consulted their daughters, Al-Qahtani said: “I did not ask my daughter. I don’t have to. I know what is beneficial for her. When I told her what I had planned, she was happy. If she hadn’t been, she would have told her mother.”
Al-Dossary said: “In bedouin culture, a girl does not have the right to express her opinion about marriage, especially if her father and brothers have decided on a particular man. In both our cases, we have been married for a long time and have had no problems with our wives. Although we are much older than our wives, the fact that we are together proves that we are right for each other.”
He added: “Saudi girls, especially bedouins, prefer to marry old men. This is what my third and fourth wives have both told me. They keep telling me they are glad that they did not marry young men.”
As for the wedding ceremony, Al-Dossary said: “Indeed, we had a wedding ceremony. We were not stealing, so there was no need to hide things. We had a party for women. However, the men’s party was only for me, my brothers, Al-Qahtani, his brothers and the marriage official. We provided our wives with huge dowries and valuable gifts, far more than anything any young men could have given them.”
When asked if they have had children by their young brides, Al-Qahtani said with enthusiasm: “I have already had a daughter and my wife is now pregnant again. Al-Dossary has not had any yet but he has many from previous wives.”
Reacting to allegations of misbehavior, Al-Dossary said: “We do not think of our daughters as entities to profit from. If I were of such a mind, then I would have married my daughter to men who asked for her and offered me lots of money; however, I refused them because of their unacceptable manners and behavior.”
Al-Qahtani agreed: “To tell you the truth, when I asked Al-Dossary to give me his daughter in return for mine, I had a couple of things in mind. I told him that we were not just friends and partners but we would also be relatives. We did not think of our daughters as business entities.”
He added: “Some of my cousins have refused to accept the marriages, not because of the idea but because one of them wanted to marry my daughter. However, he couldn’t provide the dowry I asked for and, therefore, I didn’t give him my daughter. I have forgotten about him.”
When asked if they plan to use this strategy to marry again, Al-Qahtani said: “I cannot marry again as I already have four wives, but no one knows what will happen in the future. However, if I were to remarry, I would marry one of my cousins and would have no problem in offering one of my daughters in return.”
Al-Dossary said: “I am satisfied with my three wives but as Al-Qahtani said, no one knows the future. If I am to marry and the father of the girl or her brother asks me to give him one of my daughters, then I would agree. I would even agree if he asked for one of my granddaughters.”
Commenting on the story, Ali Nasir, a social researcher at the Education Ministry, said: “The problems that are currently present in Saudi and Arab society in general are due to easy-going attitudes toward marriages. Although there are rules and laws in some Arab countries that demand respect between men and women, in Saudi Arabia customs and traditions still remain in control. How could two old men treat their daughters as objects? How can they ignore the basic age differences?”
He added that having read a transcript of the men’s interviews, he could clearly see that they had no respect for women. “They did not even consult their daughters. They also said that they were ready to marry again in a similar fashion.”
Sheikh Muhammad Al-Wahbi, a researcher in Islamic jurisprudence, said that there was no legal problem with such marriages as long as the women involved agreed. He warned that people must, however, be clear about their intentions. “It is abominable to turn a marriage into a business in which a woman is no more than an object or business commodity,” he said.
Source
Supreme Fatwa Council of Palestine issues fatwa on hairdressers
Bethlehem - Ma'an – The Supreme Fatwa Council of Palestine has issued a fatwa permitting men's and women's hairdressers to operate on condition that they do not break Islamic law.
The fatwa stated that women can be employed as hairdressers as long as they only cut the hair of women that want to look attractive for their husbands and not other men or foreigners; this would be Haram (forbidden).
It also stated that if a foreign man is present in the hairdressers, women must be prohibited from entering it.
The council urged the Palestinian Muslims to avoid "suspicion" and to follow the religious rules and rituals according to Islamic law.
The fatwa also said that men can work as barbers and activity in the barber shops is not prohibited in any way, as long as it is not against Islam.
Source
Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
The fatwa stated that women can be employed as hairdressers as long as they only cut the hair of women that want to look attractive for their husbands and not other men or foreigners; this would be Haram (forbidden).
It also stated that if a foreign man is present in the hairdressers, women must be prohibited from entering it.
The council urged the Palestinian Muslims to avoid "suspicion" and to follow the religious rules and rituals according to Islamic law.
The fatwa also said that men can work as barbers and activity in the barber shops is not prohibited in any way, as long as it is not against Islam.
Source
Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
Iran bans Western haircuts, eyebrow plucking for men
TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) -- Iranian police have warned barbers against offering Western-style hair cuts or plucking the eyebrows of their male customers, Iranian media said Sunday.
The report by a reformist daily, later confirmed by an Iranian news agency, appeared to be another sign of authorities cracking down on clothing and other fashion deemed to be against Islamic values.
"Western hairstyles ... have been banned," the newspaper Etemad said in a front-page headline.
It came a week after police launched a crackdown against the growing number of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing ahead of the summer months.
Under Iran's Islamic Sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obligated to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures.
Violators can receive lashes, fines and imprisonment.
The student news agency ISNA quoted a police statement as saying: "In an official order to barbershops, they have been warned to avoid using Western hair styles and doing men's eyebrows."
Iranian young men have in recent years started paying more attention to the way they look and dress, especially in affluent parts of the capital Tehran. Spiked up hair, by using gel, is known as the Khorusi (Rooster) style and some also use make-up.
Several hairdressers for men in Tehran offer cuts in the style of Hollywood movie stars and other Western celebrities. Clients can also have their eyebrows plucked.
The head of the barbers' union, Mohammad Eftekharifard, said police had instructed it to "exercise specific regulations in barbershops that work under its supervision."
Barbers who do not follow these rules might be closed down for a month and even lose their permits to operate, Etemad quoted him as saying.
"Currently some barbershops apply make-up and use (hair) styles that are in line with those in European countries and America," Eftekharifard said.
He added: "An official order has been sent to the union ... not to apply make-up on men's faces (or) do eyebrows ... and hence the barbers are not allowed to do these things."
Since hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 on a promise of returning to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on what they consider immoral behavior.
Source
Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
The report by a reformist daily, later confirmed by an Iranian news agency, appeared to be another sign of authorities cracking down on clothing and other fashion deemed to be against Islamic values.
"Western hairstyles ... have been banned," the newspaper Etemad said in a front-page headline.
It came a week after police launched a crackdown against the growing number of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing ahead of the summer months.
Under Iran's Islamic Sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obligated to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures.
Violators can receive lashes, fines and imprisonment.
The student news agency ISNA quoted a police statement as saying: "In an official order to barbershops, they have been warned to avoid using Western hair styles and doing men's eyebrows."
Iranian young men have in recent years started paying more attention to the way they look and dress, especially in affluent parts of the capital Tehran. Spiked up hair, by using gel, is known as the Khorusi (Rooster) style and some also use make-up.
Several hairdressers for men in Tehran offer cuts in the style of Hollywood movie stars and other Western celebrities. Clients can also have their eyebrows plucked.
The head of the barbers' union, Mohammad Eftekharifard, said police had instructed it to "exercise specific regulations in barbershops that work under its supervision."
Barbers who do not follow these rules might be closed down for a month and even lose their permits to operate, Etemad quoted him as saying.
"Currently some barbershops apply make-up and use (hair) styles that are in line with those in European countries and America," Eftekharifard said.
He added: "An official order has been sent to the union ... not to apply make-up on men's faces (or) do eyebrows ... and hence the barbers are not allowed to do these things."
Since hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 on a promise of returning to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on what they consider immoral behavior.
Source
Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code
(Reuters)
24 April 2007
TEHERAN - Women in Teheran who repeatedly flout the Islamic dress code in defiance of a police crackdown may be banned from the Iranian capital for up to five years, Teheran’s prosecutor said in comments published on Tuesday.
‘Those women who appear in public like decadent models endanger the security and dignity of young men,’ prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi was quoted as saying by the Etemad newspaper.
In what has become a regular occurrence ahead of the warm summer months, police on Saturday launched a campaign against the growing numbers of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing.
Under sharia, Islamic law, imposed after Iran’s 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures and protect their modesty.
Violators can be given lashes, fines and imprisonment.
‘If primary punishments are not effective, repeat violators may receive up to five years exile from Teheran,’ Mortazavi said.
Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, promising a return to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on ‘immoral behaviour’.
A Teheran police spokesman said that since Saturday 3,242 people had received a warning for breaching the dress code in the capital, the semi-official Fars news agency said. The code also covers men who are not allowed to wear shorts.
Police have also stopped foreign tourists, who have to respect the dress code, Iranian media reported.
Iran’s judiciary chief criticised the crackdown.
‘Dragging young men and women to police stations will only have negative social impacts,’ daily Etemad-e Melli quoted Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi as saying.
Source
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
24 April 2007
TEHERAN - Women in Teheran who repeatedly flout the Islamic dress code in defiance of a police crackdown may be banned from the Iranian capital for up to five years, Teheran’s prosecutor said in comments published on Tuesday.
‘Those women who appear in public like decadent models endanger the security and dignity of young men,’ prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi was quoted as saying by the Etemad newspaper.
In what has become a regular occurrence ahead of the warm summer months, police on Saturday launched a campaign against the growing numbers of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing.
Under sharia, Islamic law, imposed after Iran’s 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures and protect their modesty.
Violators can be given lashes, fines and imprisonment.
‘If primary punishments are not effective, repeat violators may receive up to five years exile from Teheran,’ Mortazavi said.
Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, promising a return to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on ‘immoral behaviour’.
A Teheran police spokesman said that since Saturday 3,242 people had received a warning for breaching the dress code in the capital, the semi-official Fars news agency said. The code also covers men who are not allowed to wear shorts.
Police have also stopped foreign tourists, who have to respect the dress code, Iranian media reported.
Iran’s judiciary chief criticised the crackdown.
‘Dragging young men and women to police stations will only have negative social impacts,’ daily Etemad-e Melli quoted Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi as saying.
Source
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing
Friday, April 27, 2007
Beauty pageant, arab style
Saudi tribe holds camel beauty pageant
By Andrew Hammond Thu Apr 26, 12:25 PM ET
GUWEI'IYYA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The legs are long, the eyes are big, the bodies curvaceous.
Contestants in this Saudi-style beauty pageant have all the features you might expect anywhere else in the world, but with one crucial difference -- the competitors are camels.
This week, the Qahtani tribe of western Saudi Arabia has been welcoming entrants to its Mazayen al-Ibl competition, a parade of the "most beautiful camels" in the desolate desert region of Guwei'iyya, 120 km (75 miles) west of Riyadh.
"In Lebanon they have Miss Lebanon," jokes Walid, moderator of the competition's Web site. "Here we have Miss Camel."
While tremendous oil wealth has brought rapid modernisation to the desert state of Saudi Arabia, the camel remains celebrated as a symbol of the traditional nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin Arabs.
Throughout history camels have served multiple purposes as food, friend, transport and war machine. They were key to the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa nearly 1,400 years ago that brought Islam to the world.
Camels are also big business in a country where strict Islamic laws and tribal customs would make it impossible for women to take part in their own beauty contest.
Delicate females or strapping males who attract the right attention during this week's show could sell for a million or more riyals. Sponsors have provided 10 million riyals (1.36 million pounds) for the contest, cash that also covers the 72 sports utility vehicles to be will be awarded as prizes.
"Bedouin Arabs are intimately connected to camels and they want to preserve this heritage. The importance of this competition is that it helps preserve the pure-breds," said Sheikh Omair, one of the tribe's leaders,
"We have more than 250 owners taking part and more than 1,500 camels," he said inside a huge tent where the final awards ceremony takes place.
RESTLESS BEAUTY QUEENS
Over at the camel pen, the contestants are getting restless as the desert wind howls and whips up swirls of sand in the hot afternoon sun.
Amid a large crowd of Bedouin who have gathered to watch, the head of the judging committee emerges to venture into an enclosure with some two dozen angry braying camels.
Camel-drivers sing songs of praise to their prized possessions as they try to calm the animals down.
"Beautiful, beautiful!" the judge mutters quietly to himself, inspecting the group. Finalists have been decorated with silver bands and body covers.
"The nose should be long and droop down, that's more beautiful," explains Sultan al-Qahtani, one of the organisers. "The ears should stand back, and the neck should be long. The hump should be high, but slightly to the back."
The camels are divided into four categories according to breed -- the black majaheem, white maghateer, dark brown shi'l and the sufur, which are beige with black shoulders. Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel.
Some females have harnesses strapped around their genitalia to thwart any efforts by the males to mount them. One repeat offender called Marjaa has been moved away.
"This one would fetch a million!" says Hamad al-Sudani, a camel-driver, admiring the heavy stud, or fahl.
Source
By Andrew Hammond Thu Apr 26, 12:25 PM ET
GUWEI'IYYA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The legs are long, the eyes are big, the bodies curvaceous.
Contestants in this Saudi-style beauty pageant have all the features you might expect anywhere else in the world, but with one crucial difference -- the competitors are camels.
This week, the Qahtani tribe of western Saudi Arabia has been welcoming entrants to its Mazayen al-Ibl competition, a parade of the "most beautiful camels" in the desolate desert region of Guwei'iyya, 120 km (75 miles) west of Riyadh.
"In Lebanon they have Miss Lebanon," jokes Walid, moderator of the competition's Web site. "Here we have Miss Camel."
While tremendous oil wealth has brought rapid modernisation to the desert state of Saudi Arabia, the camel remains celebrated as a symbol of the traditional nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin Arabs.
Throughout history camels have served multiple purposes as food, friend, transport and war machine. They were key to the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa nearly 1,400 years ago that brought Islam to the world.
Camels are also big business in a country where strict Islamic laws and tribal customs would make it impossible for women to take part in their own beauty contest.
Delicate females or strapping males who attract the right attention during this week's show could sell for a million or more riyals. Sponsors have provided 10 million riyals (1.36 million pounds) for the contest, cash that also covers the 72 sports utility vehicles to be will be awarded as prizes.
"Bedouin Arabs are intimately connected to camels and they want to preserve this heritage. The importance of this competition is that it helps preserve the pure-breds," said Sheikh Omair, one of the tribe's leaders,
"We have more than 250 owners taking part and more than 1,500 camels," he said inside a huge tent where the final awards ceremony takes place.
RESTLESS BEAUTY QUEENS
Over at the camel pen, the contestants are getting restless as the desert wind howls and whips up swirls of sand in the hot afternoon sun.
Amid a large crowd of Bedouin who have gathered to watch, the head of the judging committee emerges to venture into an enclosure with some two dozen angry braying camels.
Camel-drivers sing songs of praise to their prized possessions as they try to calm the animals down.
"Beautiful, beautiful!" the judge mutters quietly to himself, inspecting the group. Finalists have been decorated with silver bands and body covers.
"The nose should be long and droop down, that's more beautiful," explains Sultan al-Qahtani, one of the organisers. "The ears should stand back, and the neck should be long. The hump should be high, but slightly to the back."
The camels are divided into four categories according to breed -- the black majaheem, white maghateer, dark brown shi'l and the sufur, which are beige with black shoulders. Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel.
Some females have harnesses strapped around their genitalia to thwart any efforts by the males to mount them. One repeat offender called Marjaa has been moved away.
"This one would fetch a million!" says Hamad al-Sudani, a camel-driver, admiring the heavy stud, or fahl.
Source
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
SYRIA READY WITH BIO-TERROR IF U.S. HITS IRAN
Dr. Jerome Corsi is available for immediate radio Talk Show interviews to discuss the following breaking news story from WorldNetDaily.com
WorldNetDaily.com/ Monday, March 5, 2007
BIOLOGICAL WAR-FEAR
Syria ready with bio-terror if U.S. hits Iran
Damascus reportedly hiding WMD among commercial pharmaceuticals
By Jerome R. Corsi
Photo of Jill Bellamy-Dekker of European Homeland Security Association
An American biodefense analyst living in Europe says if the U.S. invades Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions, Syria is ready to respond with weapons of mass destruction – specifically biological weapons.
"Syria is positioned to launch a biological attack on Israel or Europe should the U.S. attack Iran," Jill Bellamy-Dekker told WND. "The Syrians are embedding their biological weapons program into their commercial pharmaceuticals business and their veterinary vaccine-research facilities. The intelligence service oversees Syria's 'bio-farm' program and the Ministry of Defense is well interfaced into the effort."
Bellamy-Decker currently directs the Public Health Preparedness program for the European Homeland Security Association under the French High Committee for Civil Defense.
She anticipates a variation of smallpox is the biological agent Syria would utilize.
"The Syrians are also working on orthopox viruses that are related to smallpox," Bellamy-Decker said, "and it's a good way to get around international treaties against offensive biological weapons development. They work on camelpox as a cover for smallpox."
According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, camelpox is a virus closely related to smallpox, that causes a "severe and economically important disease in camels," but rarely, if ever, causes the disease in humans.
Bellamy-Decker also told WND the North Koreans were working closely with the Syrians on their biological weapons program.
"The Syrians have made some recent acquisitions in regard to their smallpox program from the DPRK," she explained. "Right before the recent Lebanon war, the Syrians had a crash program in cryptosporidium."
According to the Washington State Department of Health, cryptosporidium is a one-celled parasite that causes a gastrointestinal illness with symptoms of diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and a low-grade fever. The symptoms can last for weeks and may result in weight loss and dehydration.
"Because cryptosporidium is impervious to chlorine," Bellamy-Decker continued, "you could infect the water supply by the bucket full of cryptosporidium, if you know where to get it. The resulting illness would put down a lot of civilians and military who might oppose you going into their country."
"The Syrians have a modus operandi of covert operations and deniability," she stressed, "so biological weapons are absolutely perfect for them."
WND asked Bellamy-Decker if the Syrians have any history of having used biological weapons.
"I believe they are testing biological weapons right now, in Sudan, in the conflict in Darfur," she answered. "There is credible information about flyover activity in Darfur, where little parachutes have been dropped down on the population. This is consistent with dispersal methods in bioweapons attacks. I've also seen evidence of bodies that have been recovered from Darfur that look as if they had been exposed to biological weapons."
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran met with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum Feb. 28 to exchange expressions of support and solidarity.
"The Syrians now consider biological weapons as part of their arsenal," Bellamy-Decker said. "The Syrian military is also beginning to plan the eventual integration of biological weapons in its tactical and strategic arsenals."
She referenced an April 2000 article published by Syrian defense minister General Mustafa Talas, titled "Biological (Germ) Warfare: A New and Effective Method in Modern Warfare." The article was republished in a Farsi translation in Tehran.
"All indications suggest that Syria's ultimate objective is to mount biological warheads on all varieties of the long-range surface-to-surface missiles in its possession," Bellamy-Decker maintained. "This is a goal that can probably be achieved within a few years, and it may already have been realized in part."
She argued that instead of producing large quantities of bioweapons agents, Syria is seeking to develop a smaller, but high-quality arsenal, which it can deliver accurately against military and civilian targets.
When asked how Syria might be expected to retaliate against Israel or Europe if the U.S. attacked Iran, she responded, "Syria has most likely forward-deployed some of their covert operatives. Smallpox does not need to be weaponized. Aerosol release is the way to go."
Bellamy-Decker explained the methodology of a terrorist bio-attack:
So with a good primary aerosol release in an airport in Israel or Europe and you could get 100 index cases. If you've made the strain sufficiently virulent, you could have a ratio of 1 to 13 for infectivity, where the normal ratio is 1 to 3. If every index case infects 13 other people, you unfortunately have a great first hit.
"A terrorist bio-attack could go global," she noted. "A good biological hit will spread rapidly with international travel. Smallpox is a better weapon than anthrax. Smallpox has been field-tested, it is highly stable, and highly communicable, especially if you look at some of the strains the Russians manipulated. Syria probably retained some of [its] smallpox strains from the last outbreak back in 1972."
Another risk is the possibility Syria's military might give bioweapons to terrorists.
"We are close to seeing a breakthrough where Syria could provide biological weapons to some of the terrorist groups they work with, like Hezbollah in Lebanon," Bellamy-Decker argued. "The Syrians believe they can vaccinate themselves and they are working within the Syrian military. They're certainly not worried about releasing these biological weapons in a military setting, or even if civilians were infected as well, as long as they are vaccinated. I think it is a real threat."
Bellamy-Decker is presenting a paper at this week's Intelligence Summit in St. Petersburg, Fla. It is expected to focus on the sophisticated state of development of the Syrian bioweapons program.
"The Syrians have developed a rather remarkable bioweapons capability that has gone under the radar of U.S. intelligence," she said. "U.S. intelligence continues to insist that the Syrian capability is not highly developed. The Syrian program mirrors how the Russians have developed their program, as well as Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Iran. The emphasis in the Syrian program is on latent potential and outbreak capability."
Bellamy-Decker explained we should not expect to find stockpiles of biological weapons.
"Stockpiles are just not how biological weapons are done," she said. "With biological weapons, it is not the quantity, but the quality that counts. If you can produce a virulent, communicable strain, then you have a great biological weapon and it doesn't matter how much of it you have, it depends on what the weapon looks like."
Bellamy-Decker also referenced a paper she had co-authored for the European Homeland Security Association (EHSA) titled, "Public Health Security and Preparedness."
This paper is intended to be used as part of a new initiative EHSA is launching in Brussels to hold a quarterly bioterrorism forum bringing together national and international experts with high-level decision-makers "to discuss the threat posed by deliberate disease and the appropriate preparedness and response mechanisms vitally needed to address this threat."
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
This copyright article is reprinted here for information purposes only. It may not be reprinted elsewhere without express written permission of WorldNetDaily.com Inc.
Source
WorldNetDaily.com/ Monday, March 5, 2007
BIOLOGICAL WAR-FEAR
Syria ready with bio-terror if U.S. hits Iran
Damascus reportedly hiding WMD among commercial pharmaceuticals
By Jerome R. Corsi
Photo of Jill Bellamy-Dekker of European Homeland Security Association
An American biodefense analyst living in Europe says if the U.S. invades Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions, Syria is ready to respond with weapons of mass destruction – specifically biological weapons.
"Syria is positioned to launch a biological attack on Israel or Europe should the U.S. attack Iran," Jill Bellamy-Dekker told WND. "The Syrians are embedding their biological weapons program into their commercial pharmaceuticals business and their veterinary vaccine-research facilities. The intelligence service oversees Syria's 'bio-farm' program and the Ministry of Defense is well interfaced into the effort."
Bellamy-Decker currently directs the Public Health Preparedness program for the European Homeland Security Association under the French High Committee for Civil Defense.
She anticipates a variation of smallpox is the biological agent Syria would utilize.
"The Syrians are also working on orthopox viruses that are related to smallpox," Bellamy-Decker said, "and it's a good way to get around international treaties against offensive biological weapons development. They work on camelpox as a cover for smallpox."
According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, camelpox is a virus closely related to smallpox, that causes a "severe and economically important disease in camels," but rarely, if ever, causes the disease in humans.
Bellamy-Decker also told WND the North Koreans were working closely with the Syrians on their biological weapons program.
"The Syrians have made some recent acquisitions in regard to their smallpox program from the DPRK," she explained. "Right before the recent Lebanon war, the Syrians had a crash program in cryptosporidium."
According to the Washington State Department of Health, cryptosporidium is a one-celled parasite that causes a gastrointestinal illness with symptoms of diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and a low-grade fever. The symptoms can last for weeks and may result in weight loss and dehydration.
"Because cryptosporidium is impervious to chlorine," Bellamy-Decker continued, "you could infect the water supply by the bucket full of cryptosporidium, if you know where to get it. The resulting illness would put down a lot of civilians and military who might oppose you going into their country."
"The Syrians have a modus operandi of covert operations and deniability," she stressed, "so biological weapons are absolutely perfect for them."
WND asked Bellamy-Decker if the Syrians have any history of having used biological weapons.
"I believe they are testing biological weapons right now, in Sudan, in the conflict in Darfur," she answered. "There is credible information about flyover activity in Darfur, where little parachutes have been dropped down on the population. This is consistent with dispersal methods in bioweapons attacks. I've also seen evidence of bodies that have been recovered from Darfur that look as if they had been exposed to biological weapons."
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran met with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum Feb. 28 to exchange expressions of support and solidarity.
"The Syrians now consider biological weapons as part of their arsenal," Bellamy-Decker said. "The Syrian military is also beginning to plan the eventual integration of biological weapons in its tactical and strategic arsenals."
She referenced an April 2000 article published by Syrian defense minister General Mustafa Talas, titled "Biological (Germ) Warfare: A New and Effective Method in Modern Warfare." The article was republished in a Farsi translation in Tehran.
"All indications suggest that Syria's ultimate objective is to mount biological warheads on all varieties of the long-range surface-to-surface missiles in its possession," Bellamy-Decker maintained. "This is a goal that can probably be achieved within a few years, and it may already have been realized in part."
She argued that instead of producing large quantities of bioweapons agents, Syria is seeking to develop a smaller, but high-quality arsenal, which it can deliver accurately against military and civilian targets.
When asked how Syria might be expected to retaliate against Israel or Europe if the U.S. attacked Iran, she responded, "Syria has most likely forward-deployed some of their covert operatives. Smallpox does not need to be weaponized. Aerosol release is the way to go."
Bellamy-Decker explained the methodology of a terrorist bio-attack:
So with a good primary aerosol release in an airport in Israel or Europe and you could get 100 index cases. If you've made the strain sufficiently virulent, you could have a ratio of 1 to 13 for infectivity, where the normal ratio is 1 to 3. If every index case infects 13 other people, you unfortunately have a great first hit.
"A terrorist bio-attack could go global," she noted. "A good biological hit will spread rapidly with international travel. Smallpox is a better weapon than anthrax. Smallpox has been field-tested, it is highly stable, and highly communicable, especially if you look at some of the strains the Russians manipulated. Syria probably retained some of [its] smallpox strains from the last outbreak back in 1972."
Another risk is the possibility Syria's military might give bioweapons to terrorists.
"We are close to seeing a breakthrough where Syria could provide biological weapons to some of the terrorist groups they work with, like Hezbollah in Lebanon," Bellamy-Decker argued. "The Syrians believe they can vaccinate themselves and they are working within the Syrian military. They're certainly not worried about releasing these biological weapons in a military setting, or even if civilians were infected as well, as long as they are vaccinated. I think it is a real threat."
Bellamy-Decker is presenting a paper at this week's Intelligence Summit in St. Petersburg, Fla. It is expected to focus on the sophisticated state of development of the Syrian bioweapons program.
"The Syrians have developed a rather remarkable bioweapons capability that has gone under the radar of U.S. intelligence," she said. "U.S. intelligence continues to insist that the Syrian capability is not highly developed. The Syrian program mirrors how the Russians have developed their program, as well as Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Iran. The emphasis in the Syrian program is on latent potential and outbreak capability."
Bellamy-Decker explained we should not expect to find stockpiles of biological weapons.
"Stockpiles are just not how biological weapons are done," she said. "With biological weapons, it is not the quantity, but the quality that counts. If you can produce a virulent, communicable strain, then you have a great biological weapon and it doesn't matter how much of it you have, it depends on what the weapon looks like."
Bellamy-Decker also referenced a paper she had co-authored for the European Homeland Security Association (EHSA) titled, "Public Health Security and Preparedness."
This paper is intended to be used as part of a new initiative EHSA is launching in Brussels to hold a quarterly bioterrorism forum bringing together national and international experts with high-level decision-makers "to discuss the threat posed by deliberate disease and the appropriate preparedness and response mechanisms vitally needed to address this threat."
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
This copyright article is reprinted here for information purposes only. It may not be reprinted elsewhere without express written permission of WorldNetDaily.com Inc.
Source
Italy asks Muslim groups to join 'values charter'
AFP
April 24, 2007
ROME -- Italy's interior ministry has published a "values charter" for religious minorities that promotes integration while shunning polygamy and the wearing of face-concealing veils.
The charter, presented late Monday by Interior Minister Giuliano Amato, enshrines "the right to religious freedom and equality between man and woman," according to the ministry's Web site.
The charter advocates the "monogamous family and wants to prevent women from experiencing humiliation and polygamy," said Carlo Cardia, the head of the committee that drafted the accord, according to the ANSA news agency.
The seven-page document refers to European values and those of the Italian constitution, and condemns terrorism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia.
Regarding the veil, it says that while "no restrictions on clothing exist in Italy ... [veils that] cover the face are not acceptable because they prevent the recognition of the person and are an obstacle for establishing relationships with others."
Amato said the document would serve as a guide for relations between the ministry and Italy's various religious communities, and should help "consolidate Italian Islam."
The non-binding charter "cannot be imposed on anyone," Amato said, adding that it was just the start of a process.
More than a million Muslims make up the second-largest religious community in Italy, after Roman Catholicism.
The largest Muslim organization, UCOII, was critical of the charter even though it took part in its drafting.
"The veil has never been humiliating to women," said UCOII president Mohamed Nour Dachan, adding that he felt the charter should mention "the positive role of Islam in the history of Europe."
Source
April 24, 2007
ROME -- Italy's interior ministry has published a "values charter" for religious minorities that promotes integration while shunning polygamy and the wearing of face-concealing veils.
The charter, presented late Monday by Interior Minister Giuliano Amato, enshrines "the right to religious freedom and equality between man and woman," according to the ministry's Web site.
The charter advocates the "monogamous family and wants to prevent women from experiencing humiliation and polygamy," said Carlo Cardia, the head of the committee that drafted the accord, according to the ANSA news agency.
The seven-page document refers to European values and those of the Italian constitution, and condemns terrorism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia.
Regarding the veil, it says that while "no restrictions on clothing exist in Italy ... [veils that] cover the face are not acceptable because they prevent the recognition of the person and are an obstacle for establishing relationships with others."
Amato said the document would serve as a guide for relations between the ministry and Italy's various religious communities, and should help "consolidate Italian Islam."
The non-binding charter "cannot be imposed on anyone," Amato said, adding that it was just the start of a process.
More than a million Muslims make up the second-largest religious community in Italy, after Roman Catholicism.
The largest Muslim organization, UCOII, was critical of the charter even though it took part in its drafting.
"The veil has never been humiliating to women," said UCOII president Mohamed Nour Dachan, adding that he felt the charter should mention "the positive role of Islam in the history of Europe."
Source
How arabs left Tiberias: Articles from 1948
Haganah has upper hand, arabs are relieved when truce is declared:
Arabs break the truce and Haganah fights back:
Arab leaders order arabs out not to be in the way of "advancing arab armies", or so they hope:
Arab property guarded by Hagannah:
Opinion piece on why arabs fled from Palestine Post:
Arabs break the truce and Haganah fights back:
Arab leaders order arabs out not to be in the way of "advancing arab armies", or so they hope:
Arab property guarded by Hagannah:
Opinion piece on why arabs fled from Palestine Post:
Reuters caption
Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA)
Monday, April 23, 2007
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran
Two thousand young men in Iran have protested against new clothing curbs, reports say, amid growing discontent about a crackdown on un-Islamic dress.
Shiraz university students were angry about new rules banning sleeveless T-shirts, even inside all-male dorms.
The protest came as the judiciary head warned police that an excessively ferocious campaign could backfire.
Police say they stopped more than 1,300 women for dressing immodestly on the first day of the campaign in Tehran.
More than 100 women were arrested on Saturday; half of them had to sign statements promising to improve their clothing, the other half are being referred to court.
The focus of the new campaign is to stop women wearing tight overcoats that reveal the shape of their bodies or showing too much hair from beneath their headscarves.
However, young men have also been arrested for sporting wild hair styles or T-shirts considered immodest.
Local news agency reports say the protesting Shiraz students on Sunday night were calling for the resignation of the university chancellor.
Serious crackdown
There is always a crackdown at the start of summer as women start wearing more skimpy clothes because of the hot weather.
In past years the pressure quickly relaxed - headscarves become perched on the back of heads, while fashionable women in affluent north Tehran wear open-toed sandals, three-quarter length trousers and short skin-hugging overcoats.
The police complain that some young women strut the streets looking like fashion models - and it is not a bad description.
But this year the crackdown seems more serious.
Iranian television has broadcast nightly programmes warning women and young men with sleeveless T-shirts and spiky hair to be more careful about their dress.
The newspapers are full of pictures of women being arrested for their un-Islamic clothing, but foreign journalists have been prevented from filming it.
Backlash
The head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, has warned that a severe crackdown on un-Islamic dress could have the reverse effect.
Meanwhile, an MP has asked why the police should spend so much time arresting young people and filing court cases against them instead of fighting drug addiction and poverty.
Already taxi drivers say there are fewer women on the streets and it is clear most are dressing more conservatively.
It is not just the young and very fashionable who are being harassed this year, middle aged women and even foreign tourists are being cautioned.
One foreign journalist was stopped and the police complained the photograph in her press card was indecent, even though it was taken by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance.
Source
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing117
BBC News, Tehran
Two thousand young men in Iran have protested against new clothing curbs, reports say, amid growing discontent about a crackdown on un-Islamic dress.
Shiraz university students were angry about new rules banning sleeveless T-shirts, even inside all-male dorms.
The protest came as the judiciary head warned police that an excessively ferocious campaign could backfire.
Police say they stopped more than 1,300 women for dressing immodestly on the first day of the campaign in Tehran.
More than 100 women were arrested on Saturday; half of them had to sign statements promising to improve their clothing, the other half are being referred to court.
The focus of the new campaign is to stop women wearing tight overcoats that reveal the shape of their bodies or showing too much hair from beneath their headscarves.
However, young men have also been arrested for sporting wild hair styles or T-shirts considered immodest.
Local news agency reports say the protesting Shiraz students on Sunday night were calling for the resignation of the university chancellor.
Serious crackdown
There is always a crackdown at the start of summer as women start wearing more skimpy clothes because of the hot weather.
In past years the pressure quickly relaxed - headscarves become perched on the back of heads, while fashionable women in affluent north Tehran wear open-toed sandals, three-quarter length trousers and short skin-hugging overcoats.
The police complain that some young women strut the streets looking like fashion models - and it is not a bad description.
But this year the crackdown seems more serious.
Iranian television has broadcast nightly programmes warning women and young men with sleeveless T-shirts and spiky hair to be more careful about their dress.
The newspapers are full of pictures of women being arrested for their un-Islamic clothing, but foreign journalists have been prevented from filming it.
Backlash
The head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, has warned that a severe crackdown on un-Islamic dress could have the reverse effect.
Meanwhile, an MP has asked why the police should spend so much time arresting young people and filing court cases against them instead of fighting drug addiction and poverty.
Already taxi drivers say there are fewer women on the streets and it is clear most are dressing more conservatively.
It is not just the young and very fashionable who are being harassed this year, middle aged women and even foreign tourists are being cautioned.
One foreign journalist was stopped and the police complained the photograph in her press card was indecent, even though it was taken by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance.
Source
Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
Iran warns women over slack dressing117
U.S. had emergency plan for attacking Israel in 1967
By Amir Oren, Haaretz Correspondent
For some time, the United States had had an emergency plan to attack Israel, a plan updated just prior to the 1967 war, aimed at preventing Israel from expanding westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.
In May 1967, one of the U.S. commands was charged with the task of removing the plan from the safe, refreshing it and preparing for an order to go into action.
This unknown aspect of the war was revealed in what was originally a top-secret study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington. The full story is detailed in Haaretz' Independence Day Supplement.
In February 1968, an institute expert, L. Weinstein, wrote an article called "Critical Incident No. 14," about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East crisis of May-June 1967.Only 30 copies of his study were printed for distribution. Years later the material was declassified and can now be read by everyone, although details that are liable to give away sources' identities and operational ideas have remained censored.
Strike Command, the entity that was to have launched the attack on Israel, no longer exists. It was annulled in 1971 for domestic American reasons and superseded by Readiness Command, which was abolished in the 1980s in favor of Central Command (CENTCOM) which today includes forces in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan; and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The general who oversaw the planning in 1967 was Theodore John ("Ted") Conway, then 56 and a four-star general, the head of Strike Command.
On May 20, 1967, according to L. Weinstein's confidential study for the Institute for Defense Analyses, cable No. 5886 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was sent to EUCOM and STRICOM. STRICOM was asked to refresh the emergency plans for intervention in an Israeli-Arab war: one plan on behalf of Israel and the other, on behalf of the Arabs.
The basis for the directive was Washington's policy of support for the existence, independence and territorial integrity of all the states of the region. This translated into adherence to the Israeli-Arab armistice lines of 1949. The policy was not to allow Egypt, or any combination of Arab states, to destroy Israel, but also not to allow Israel to expand westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.
The American pressure in this regard brought the IDF back from El Arish in Operation Horev in 1949 and from Sinai in 1956. A version of it would appear in Henry Kissinger's directives after the IDF encircled Egypt's Third Army at the end of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Conway replied to the Joint Chiefs cable four days after it was sent. He was doubtful about combat intervention, and preferred an operation to evacuate American civilians from Israel and from Arab states.
The next day, the Joint Chiefs asked Conway for his opinion about how the United States should act if the war were to be launched by an Arab action or, alternatively, by an Israeli strike.
"The ultimate objective would be to stop aggression and insure the territorial integrity of all the Middle Eastern states," he was informed in cable No. 6365 of the Joint Chiefs, with a copy to EUCOM.
Conway's reply to this, dated May 28, is described in the top-secret study as "a strong plea for complete impartiality." The United States was liable to lose its influence to the Soviets, the general warned, and therefore it must demonstrate "strict neutrality" and avoid open support for Israel.
The true importance of the Middle East lay in the American-Soviet context of the Cold War, Conway argued, and the American stance must derive from those considerations, not from "local issues."
Only as a last resort should the United States take unilateral action - and then only to put an end to the fighting. In the estimation of the STRICOM commander, the Egyptian forces were deployed defensively, whereas the Israelis were deployed in rapid-strike offensive capability.
On May 29, Conway recommended that any U.S. intervention be launched early in order to ensure the territorial integrity of all the countries involved; restoring the status quo ante would become more complicated as the attacking army captured more territory.
It might be difficult to determine which side had launched the hostilities, he noted, but the American response should be identical in both cases: a display of force, warnings to both sides, and if that should prove insufficient, "air and naval action to stabilize the situation, enforce grounding of aviation of both sides plus attacks on all moving armor or active artillery."
Following the cease-fire, U.S. ground forces would be moved in for peacekeeping missions. The return of territories would be achieved primarily by diplomatic means, with military force to be used only if "absolutely necessary."
General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barred the distribution of the planning concept to subordinate levels. A preliminary paper was prepared by June 5, the day the war erupted, and became outdated even before it could be used.
On June 6, when the success of the Israel Air Force was known, and as the divisions under IDF Generals Israel Tal, Ariel Sharon and Avraham Yoffe advanced into Sinai, the Joint Chiefs sent McNamara top-secret memorandum No. 315-67, recommending that the United States not intervene militarily, that it continue to work through the United Nations and bilateral diplomatic channels, including consultation with the Soviets, to stop the war, and that logistical support for all sides be suspended.
The American sigh of relief at the demise of the worst-case scenario - the danger that Israel would be destroyed - was replaced by the fear that the Arab defeat had been so crushing that the Soviets would intervene on their behalf, or at least would reap a diplomatic profit.
Because the United States did not know what Israel was aiming at, despite declarations by Eshkol and by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that Israel had no territorial ambitions, the administration "now felt that it was necessary to limit [the Israeli] success to reasonable bounds."
Two retired IDF major generals, Israel Tal and Shlomo Gazit, who was then head of research in Military Intelligence, said recently, upon hearing the secret plan of the U.S. military, that Israel had no knowledge of this.
The IDF fought the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians without imagining that it might find itself confronting the Americans as well, in their desert camouflage fatigues.
Source
For some time, the United States had had an emergency plan to attack Israel, a plan updated just prior to the 1967 war, aimed at preventing Israel from expanding westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.
In May 1967, one of the U.S. commands was charged with the task of removing the plan from the safe, refreshing it and preparing for an order to go into action.
This unknown aspect of the war was revealed in what was originally a top-secret study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington. The full story is detailed in Haaretz' Independence Day Supplement.
In February 1968, an institute expert, L. Weinstein, wrote an article called "Critical Incident No. 14," about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East crisis of May-June 1967.Only 30 copies of his study were printed for distribution. Years later the material was declassified and can now be read by everyone, although details that are liable to give away sources' identities and operational ideas have remained censored.
Strike Command, the entity that was to have launched the attack on Israel, no longer exists. It was annulled in 1971 for domestic American reasons and superseded by Readiness Command, which was abolished in the 1980s in favor of Central Command (CENTCOM) which today includes forces in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan; and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The general who oversaw the planning in 1967 was Theodore John ("Ted") Conway, then 56 and a four-star general, the head of Strike Command.
On May 20, 1967, according to L. Weinstein's confidential study for the Institute for Defense Analyses, cable No. 5886 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was sent to EUCOM and STRICOM. STRICOM was asked to refresh the emergency plans for intervention in an Israeli-Arab war: one plan on behalf of Israel and the other, on behalf of the Arabs.
The basis for the directive was Washington's policy of support for the existence, independence and territorial integrity of all the states of the region. This translated into adherence to the Israeli-Arab armistice lines of 1949. The policy was not to allow Egypt, or any combination of Arab states, to destroy Israel, but also not to allow Israel to expand westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.
The American pressure in this regard brought the IDF back from El Arish in Operation Horev in 1949 and from Sinai in 1956. A version of it would appear in Henry Kissinger's directives after the IDF encircled Egypt's Third Army at the end of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Conway replied to the Joint Chiefs cable four days after it was sent. He was doubtful about combat intervention, and preferred an operation to evacuate American civilians from Israel and from Arab states.
The next day, the Joint Chiefs asked Conway for his opinion about how the United States should act if the war were to be launched by an Arab action or, alternatively, by an Israeli strike.
"The ultimate objective would be to stop aggression and insure the territorial integrity of all the Middle Eastern states," he was informed in cable No. 6365 of the Joint Chiefs, with a copy to EUCOM.
Conway's reply to this, dated May 28, is described in the top-secret study as "a strong plea for complete impartiality." The United States was liable to lose its influence to the Soviets, the general warned, and therefore it must demonstrate "strict neutrality" and avoid open support for Israel.
The true importance of the Middle East lay in the American-Soviet context of the Cold War, Conway argued, and the American stance must derive from those considerations, not from "local issues."
Only as a last resort should the United States take unilateral action - and then only to put an end to the fighting. In the estimation of the STRICOM commander, the Egyptian forces were deployed defensively, whereas the Israelis were deployed in rapid-strike offensive capability.
On May 29, Conway recommended that any U.S. intervention be launched early in order to ensure the territorial integrity of all the countries involved; restoring the status quo ante would become more complicated as the attacking army captured more territory.
It might be difficult to determine which side had launched the hostilities, he noted, but the American response should be identical in both cases: a display of force, warnings to both sides, and if that should prove insufficient, "air and naval action to stabilize the situation, enforce grounding of aviation of both sides plus attacks on all moving armor or active artillery."
Following the cease-fire, U.S. ground forces would be moved in for peacekeeping missions. The return of territories would be achieved primarily by diplomatic means, with military force to be used only if "absolutely necessary."
General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barred the distribution of the planning concept to subordinate levels. A preliminary paper was prepared by June 5, the day the war erupted, and became outdated even before it could be used.
On June 6, when the success of the Israel Air Force was known, and as the divisions under IDF Generals Israel Tal, Ariel Sharon and Avraham Yoffe advanced into Sinai, the Joint Chiefs sent McNamara top-secret memorandum No. 315-67, recommending that the United States not intervene militarily, that it continue to work through the United Nations and bilateral diplomatic channels, including consultation with the Soviets, to stop the war, and that logistical support for all sides be suspended.
The American sigh of relief at the demise of the worst-case scenario - the danger that Israel would be destroyed - was replaced by the fear that the Arab defeat had been so crushing that the Soviets would intervene on their behalf, or at least would reap a diplomatic profit.
Because the United States did not know what Israel was aiming at, despite declarations by Eshkol and by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that Israel had no territorial ambitions, the administration "now felt that it was necessary to limit [the Israeli] success to reasonable bounds."
Two retired IDF major generals, Israel Tal and Shlomo Gazit, who was then head of research in Military Intelligence, said recently, upon hearing the secret plan of the U.S. military, that Israel had no knowledge of this.
The IDF fought the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians without imagining that it might find itself confronting the Americans as well, in their desert camouflage fatigues.
Source
The Iranian Parliament vs. Ahmadinejad, Round Two
In a bold move last year, Iranian legislative body, known as the Majles, made a failed attempt to cut their President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s term in office. Now they are trying to do it again — and this time they just might have a shot.
by Meir Javendafar
Even in as secretive a government as Iran, it is anything but confidential that the members of the country’s parliament are not big fans of President Ahmadinejad.
If anyone had doubts, they were removed last year when the Iranian legislative body, known as the Majles, voted to reduce the president’s term by eighteen months. They failed that first time, but now, still determined, they are making another attempt. (link in Farsi)
The official reason given at the time of their first try was that because parliamentary elections usually take place one year before the presidential elections. This, the Majiles argued, creates unnecessary expenses for the country - if both elections were held on the same day, time and money could be saved.
Furthermore, the Majles elections usually cause plans and policies under consideration to be suspended for six months before the elections, due to campaigning needs, and the usual uncertainty which surround upcoming elections. This also happens six months before the presidential polling.
Despite the validity of its arguments, and the approval of the bill by majority of parliamentarians, the Majles failed in its attempt to move the presidential elections forward — because the Guardian Council, did not approve the bill. The Guardian Council, composed of 12 powerful members, has the authority to review all bills passed by the Majles, and approve or reject them on the basis of whether they are in accordance to Islamic law and the Iranian constitution.
Most observers thought that after the Council issued the veto the first time, the parliamentarians would abandon their attempt to cut Ahmadinejad’s term short. They were wrong.
The reason – the Majles’s considerations aren’t really practical or budgetary — they’re personal. I
t’s no coincidence that they decided to try to make this change during Ahmadinejad’s term. After all, he is not the first president whose elections take place one year after theirs. The Iranian election system was the same when Khamenei, Rafsanjani and Khatami were president, but the Majles had no incentive to make the changes with presidents who made an effort to work with them.
Ahmadinejad on the other hand, soon after being elected, started to turn his back on them. In one notable case, involving the funding of the Emam Reza Love Fund (An Ahmadinejad-created fund which provides cheap loans to poor newly married couples), he completely ignored the Majles, and carried on as if the parliament did not exist after the Majles did not pass the full $1.3 billion budget allocated for it.
Instead of reducing the figure, or trying to come to some sort of a deal, Ahmadinejad circumvented the parliament in order to get what he wanted, fully funding his pet project using executive power given to his office that is only supposed to be exercised under exceptional circumstances.
Behavior of this sort, in addition to the president’s decision to ignore the repeated parliamentary calls to tackle the problem of inflation, have created considerable personal animosity against him; the results of which can be seen in this second attempt to reduce his term, this time by four months.
If the Guardian Council disapproves again, Iranian law dictates that the matter must be referred to the Expediency Council, whose job is it to resolve outstanding issues between the Guardian Council and the Majles.
What makes the situation particularly worrisome for Ahmadinejad is the fact that the Expediency Council is headed by his arch rival, and political nemesis, Ayatollah Rafsanjani — Ahmadinejad’s most powerful foe with a number of scores to settle with him. The first offense was the firing of Rafsanjani’s firing of his son from the Tehran Municipality in 2005, by Ahmadinejad (who was then Mayor), because he took a two week vacation from work in order to assist in his father’s campaign.
Then, obviously was the surprise defeat of Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential elections. This left Rafsanjani absolutely furious, and he charged that there was electoral fraud in Ahmadinejad’s favor.
Since then, he has been waiting to get even with Ahmadinejad, and this could be the chance he has been waiting for.
But all is not lost for the Iranian president. It is very possible that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei might step in to save Ahmadinejad. Still, this move by the parliament his isolation should be taken as a clear sign by the West — among other recent signs — that they are dealing with a weakening politician, and not the nuclear champion of Iran, as he would like the world to think.
Meir Javedanfar is a Middle East analyst at the Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company (Meepas). Together with Yossi Melman, he is also the coauthor of the upcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran.
Source
by Meir Javendafar
Even in as secretive a government as Iran, it is anything but confidential that the members of the country’s parliament are not big fans of President Ahmadinejad.
If anyone had doubts, they were removed last year when the Iranian legislative body, known as the Majles, voted to reduce the president’s term by eighteen months. They failed that first time, but now, still determined, they are making another attempt. (link in Farsi)
The official reason given at the time of their first try was that because parliamentary elections usually take place one year before the presidential elections. This, the Majiles argued, creates unnecessary expenses for the country - if both elections were held on the same day, time and money could be saved.
Furthermore, the Majles elections usually cause plans and policies under consideration to be suspended for six months before the elections, due to campaigning needs, and the usual uncertainty which surround upcoming elections. This also happens six months before the presidential polling.
Despite the validity of its arguments, and the approval of the bill by majority of parliamentarians, the Majles failed in its attempt to move the presidential elections forward — because the Guardian Council, did not approve the bill. The Guardian Council, composed of 12 powerful members, has the authority to review all bills passed by the Majles, and approve or reject them on the basis of whether they are in accordance to Islamic law and the Iranian constitution.
Most observers thought that after the Council issued the veto the first time, the parliamentarians would abandon their attempt to cut Ahmadinejad’s term short. They were wrong.
The reason – the Majles’s considerations aren’t really practical or budgetary — they’re personal. I
t’s no coincidence that they decided to try to make this change during Ahmadinejad’s term. After all, he is not the first president whose elections take place one year after theirs. The Iranian election system was the same when Khamenei, Rafsanjani and Khatami were president, but the Majles had no incentive to make the changes with presidents who made an effort to work with them.
Ahmadinejad on the other hand, soon after being elected, started to turn his back on them. In one notable case, involving the funding of the Emam Reza Love Fund (An Ahmadinejad-created fund which provides cheap loans to poor newly married couples), he completely ignored the Majles, and carried on as if the parliament did not exist after the Majles did not pass the full $1.3 billion budget allocated for it.
Instead of reducing the figure, or trying to come to some sort of a deal, Ahmadinejad circumvented the parliament in order to get what he wanted, fully funding his pet project using executive power given to his office that is only supposed to be exercised under exceptional circumstances.
Behavior of this sort, in addition to the president’s decision to ignore the repeated parliamentary calls to tackle the problem of inflation, have created considerable personal animosity against him; the results of which can be seen in this second attempt to reduce his term, this time by four months.
If the Guardian Council disapproves again, Iranian law dictates that the matter must be referred to the Expediency Council, whose job is it to resolve outstanding issues between the Guardian Council and the Majles.
What makes the situation particularly worrisome for Ahmadinejad is the fact that the Expediency Council is headed by his arch rival, and political nemesis, Ayatollah Rafsanjani — Ahmadinejad’s most powerful foe with a number of scores to settle with him. The first offense was the firing of Rafsanjani’s firing of his son from the Tehran Municipality in 2005, by Ahmadinejad (who was then Mayor), because he took a two week vacation from work in order to assist in his father’s campaign.
Then, obviously was the surprise defeat of Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential elections. This left Rafsanjani absolutely furious, and he charged that there was electoral fraud in Ahmadinejad’s favor.
Since then, he has been waiting to get even with Ahmadinejad, and this could be the chance he has been waiting for.
But all is not lost for the Iranian president. It is very possible that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei might step in to save Ahmadinejad. Still, this move by the parliament his isolation should be taken as a clear sign by the West — among other recent signs — that they are dealing with a weakening politician, and not the nuclear champion of Iran, as he would like the world to think.
Meir Javedanfar is a Middle East analyst at the Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company (Meepas). Together with Yossi Melman, he is also the coauthor of the upcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran.
Source
117 Women Arrested in Tehran Islamic Dress Code Enforcement Campaign
On the first day of a Tehran campaign for enforcement of the Islamic dress code, 117 women were arrested, and 59 of them stood trial.
Prior to the campaign, Chief Police Commander Brig.-Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam expressed statements by religious authorities such as Ayatollah Makram Shirazi, and support for editorials in the leading papers Kayhan and Jomhouri-ye Eslami stressing the need for dealing with the violations of the Islamic dress code, and for "increasing the moral security in Iran."
Sources: Rooz, Iran, April 23, 2007
Iran warns women over slack dressing
Prior to the campaign, Chief Police Commander Brig.-Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam expressed statements by religious authorities such as Ayatollah Makram Shirazi, and support for editorials in the leading papers Kayhan and Jomhouri-ye Eslami stressing the need for dealing with the violations of the Islamic dress code, and for "increasing the moral security in Iran."
Sources: Rooz, Iran, April 23, 2007
Iran warns women over slack dressing
Saudi Royals Mask A Jihad Agenda
BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
April 23, 2007
Keeping Saudi Arabia's royal family safe from radical Islamists is the West's strategic concern and delusion.
The only intelligent question for America about Saudi Arabia is: Should we deal with the royals of the house of Saud or go directly to their bearded, Kalashnikov-toting Osama bin Laden-loving followers?
For half a century, the West has preferred to believe that its choice in Saudi Arabia is the moderate, friendly Saudi royal family or the wild-eyed, sandal-clad zombies of jihad, disregarding the seamless relationship between the two.
We have blithely ignored that Mr. bin Laden was a product and a protégé — even a full-fledged member — of the ruling establishment in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, his 52 brothers and other members of his family have intermarried widely with the royal family.
Since Abdulaziz Al-Saud founded his kingdom in 1932, power in Saudi Arabia has rested in the hands of one rabid group of Muslim jihadists: the 40,000 perfumed princes and princesses of the Saud tribal dynasty. They are the public face of Saudi Arabia, the folks who show up in the White House as ambassadors to America.
In Saudi Arabia, these royals nurture a vast entourage and infrastructure of palaces, attached mosques, religious schools, and charitable networks at home and, more important, abroad. These institutions are tied to elegant public princes, but also to many more we never see overseas. They dole out the money and in return demand blind obedience and a steady stream of Wahhabite devotees.
Saudi royal wealth has funded not only hundreds of religious schools inside the kingdom, but also hundreds more in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Britain, America, and Asia. The network stretches far and wide, and Wahhabi recruits create the fodder that supplies suicide bombers for Hamas, the Taliban, Iraqi jihadis, and Pakistani-British transit bombers.
There is little difference between the royals and their infrastructure. The idea of two camps is a fiction brilliantly spun by American public relations artists aided by legions of purchased lobbyists and American politicians.
So the question, again, is whether we want to deal with the royals or the nuts. I propose the latter. For starters, it serves transparency.
Why allow an enemy to hide behind seductive royals when most of the family consists of die-hard jihadists who fund Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic terror groups worldwide? The game allows "royals" to pose as friends as they supply our former presidents and politicians — President George H.W. Bush, President Clinton, President Carter, and our current commander in chief, among others — with hefty business deals and promises of more to, in effect, give cover to a jihad agenda.
Dealing directly with the bearded and the sandaled also makes America far more secure.
Thanks to the current system of bribery, the Saudis have gotten away with murder. In the 48 hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the White House — under pressure from the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar — permitted more than 50 members of the bin Laden family to leave America secretly when almost every other flight in and out of the country was grounded.
Detaining and questioning some of this group would have landed a few of them in Guantanamo and yielded crucial information, but they purchased a White House pass to escape. And had it not been for the "special relationship" between America and Saudi Arabia, 15 of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into buildings that day would not have been allowed to live and train here in the first place.
Most of all, the ability to call a spade a spade would increase America's credibility in the Muslim world immensely. This royal family, so beloved by the Bush administration and other White Houses, carries out beheadings, cuts off legs and hands, orders women stoned for adultery, and has reduced half of its society to the status of concubine.
Dumping it will give a considerable boost to any noble American project in the Arab world.
Source
April 23, 2007
Keeping Saudi Arabia's royal family safe from radical Islamists is the West's strategic concern and delusion.
The only intelligent question for America about Saudi Arabia is: Should we deal with the royals of the house of Saud or go directly to their bearded, Kalashnikov-toting Osama bin Laden-loving followers?
For half a century, the West has preferred to believe that its choice in Saudi Arabia is the moderate, friendly Saudi royal family or the wild-eyed, sandal-clad zombies of jihad, disregarding the seamless relationship between the two.
We have blithely ignored that Mr. bin Laden was a product and a protégé — even a full-fledged member — of the ruling establishment in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, his 52 brothers and other members of his family have intermarried widely with the royal family.
Since Abdulaziz Al-Saud founded his kingdom in 1932, power in Saudi Arabia has rested in the hands of one rabid group of Muslim jihadists: the 40,000 perfumed princes and princesses of the Saud tribal dynasty. They are the public face of Saudi Arabia, the folks who show up in the White House as ambassadors to America.
In Saudi Arabia, these royals nurture a vast entourage and infrastructure of palaces, attached mosques, religious schools, and charitable networks at home and, more important, abroad. These institutions are tied to elegant public princes, but also to many more we never see overseas. They dole out the money and in return demand blind obedience and a steady stream of Wahhabite devotees.
Saudi royal wealth has funded not only hundreds of religious schools inside the kingdom, but also hundreds more in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Britain, America, and Asia. The network stretches far and wide, and Wahhabi recruits create the fodder that supplies suicide bombers for Hamas, the Taliban, Iraqi jihadis, and Pakistani-British transit bombers.
There is little difference between the royals and their infrastructure. The idea of two camps is a fiction brilliantly spun by American public relations artists aided by legions of purchased lobbyists and American politicians.
So the question, again, is whether we want to deal with the royals or the nuts. I propose the latter. For starters, it serves transparency.
Why allow an enemy to hide behind seductive royals when most of the family consists of die-hard jihadists who fund Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic terror groups worldwide? The game allows "royals" to pose as friends as they supply our former presidents and politicians — President George H.W. Bush, President Clinton, President Carter, and our current commander in chief, among others — with hefty business deals and promises of more to, in effect, give cover to a jihad agenda.
Dealing directly with the bearded and the sandaled also makes America far more secure.
Thanks to the current system of bribery, the Saudis have gotten away with murder. In the 48 hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the White House — under pressure from the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar — permitted more than 50 members of the bin Laden family to leave America secretly when almost every other flight in and out of the country was grounded.
Detaining and questioning some of this group would have landed a few of them in Guantanamo and yielded crucial information, but they purchased a White House pass to escape. And had it not been for the "special relationship" between America and Saudi Arabia, 15 of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into buildings that day would not have been allowed to live and train here in the first place.
Most of all, the ability to call a spade a spade would increase America's credibility in the Muslim world immensely. This royal family, so beloved by the Bush administration and other White Houses, carries out beheadings, cuts off legs and hands, orders women stoned for adultery, and has reduced half of its society to the status of concubine.
Dumping it will give a considerable boost to any noble American project in the Arab world.
Source
Al-Ahram Editor: Wearing The Veil Is Wrong – And Unhealthy In Hot Climates
At a symposium organized by the Catholic church St. Joseph, the editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, Osama Saraya, criticized the "infuriating spread" of the veil.
Saraya attacked those who encourage girls to wear the veil, saying that wearing the veil wasn't right, particularly in a country with such a hot climate. This, he said, was bad for the health.
Source: Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, April 21, 2007
Saraya attacked those who encourage girls to wear the veil, saying that wearing the veil wasn't right, particularly in a country with such a hot climate. This, he said, was bad for the health.
Source: Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, April 21, 2007
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