Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

MEMRI: Latest News, Jan. 6, 2009

Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi on Hamas TV: Dispatch Those Sons of Apes and Pigs to the Hellfire – On the Wings of Qassam Rockets

Following are excerpts from a speech by Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on December 31, 2008.

Safwat Higazi: “Being killed is nothing new to us. It is what we desire and hope for. It is martyrdom, by Allah. This is Allah’s victory coming to us. It is Paradise with the first drop of blood of the martyr.[...]

“Allah is with us, and there is nobody with them. Allah is our God, and there is nobody with them. We say to them: We are not equal. Our dead go to Paradise, while your dead go to the Hellfire.” [...]

“The [Jews], who are as smooth as a viper, and who lick their lips as [does] a speckled snake, will never live with us in peace and harmony. They deserve to be killed. They deserve to die. They are the ones at whom the Qassam rockets should be fired. You should not care if you hit a man, a woman, or a child. Just like they killed your children – kill their children. Just like they killed your women – kill their women. Just like they destroyed your mosques – destroy their places of worship. Destroy… everything over there.”

Bernard Avishai Dot Com: Hebron Agonistes: Too Much For Israel, Dec. 22, 2008

It has been common for educated Israelis to think, and Israeli diplomats and American Jewish leaders to present, the settler community of Hebron as a kind of radical nuisance. Presumably, the settlers are a side-show of a defensive strategic policy, a touch of hubris gone wrong, a little understandible selfishness after centuries of self-effacement-anyway, a line that can be moved when the time is right, certainly not a country within a country that has grown, SimCity-like, into something the size of the Jewish colony in Palestine in 1946.

In this view-not entirely wrong-the settlers were post-1967 Israelis only more so: people who took classical Zionist ideas about settling the Land of Israel a little too seriously, or took the Jews’ election a little too literally, or accepted cheap mortgages from the Jewish Agency a little too opportunistically; people who have randomly scattered themselves in the occupied territory in a now obviously failed effort to annex the holy land, or just to show that Jews can live everywhere in it.

The settlers, presumably, have settled under the nose of a forbearing, once vaguely sympathetic Israeli government, otherwise preoccupied by encirclement and terror. But they are people whom the Israeli government-if it ever had a real peace partner in the Palestinians, and not jihadist terrorists firing missiles, or sending in suicide bombers-would clear out in a great show of sovereign will. The recent clearing of the “House of Contention” by the Israeli Army is proof, so the argument goes, of the Israeli army’s residual power. The more recent breakdown of the cease fire with Hamas is proof of how Israel faces an existential threat, and dares not be distracted by the settlers.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s picked up the scent of power, is defining a new centrism by triangulating these poles. He knows that Israelis have lost patience with Judeans, or at least the disquieting ones. He’s made a show of purging one of the most fanatic of the settlers, Moshe Feiglin, from the 20th. position in the Likud list for the Knesset (though many more remain in the top 30); and he is simultaneously telling us that both the peace talks Olmert conducted with the Palestinian Authority, and the “time of retreat” in Gaza, are over. No two-state solution will compromise the existence of Kiryat Arba (no more than the unity of Jerusalem), he says. But neither settler zealots nor Palestinian terrorists, presumably, will be allowed to challenge the existence of the state. Each side-some now, some later-will be forced to change their behavior by Israeli state force.

I WENT TO Hebron a couple of weeks ago, as part of a delegation of Israelis hoping to show a measure of solidarity with an Arab family who’s patriarch, Abed el-Hai, had been shot at point blank range defending his home from one Kiryat Arba settler as the House of Contention was being cleared. There is no need to sentimentalize this gruff, stolid man-whose many barefooted grandchildren, sticky from holiday candy and twittering over our cell phones, will be run over by global forces if peace should ever come. But let’s just say that a day in Hebron focuses the mind.

You think out from Hebron, and the holes in the common wisdom become obvious, well, certainly less abstract. A different pattern takes shape, and virtually every premise of the common wisdom falls away.

1. Kiryat Arba, with surrounding settlements, is a solid town of about 10,000 people and growing. Many of its youth were born there, marinating in a peculiar and vicious righteousness. But there can be no Palestinian state if Kiryat Arba remains; to keep its residents under Israeli sovereignty, you would have to cut the southern West Bank in half, and keep checkpoints all along the route from Gush Etzion. Kiryat Arba’s residents would never accept Palestinian citizenship, even if this were offered. Imagine offering Klansmen rule by Stokely Carmichael, or Martin Luther King, for that matter.

2. According to army intelligence, and demonstrated precedent, a substantial number of Kiryat Arba residents would be willing to violently resist the Israeli army. Reserve army units-young men from Herzliya or Netanya-will tell you the settlers are out of their minds. But this is not the only army. An increasing number of junior officers conducting the occupation come from the movements and homes of the settlers. The army is there, soldiers say, to keep the peace. But in any case, this means enforcing the status quo, in which settlements naturally expand.

3. There is nothing random about what the settlers are doing. In Hebron, the idea is to create a land bridge from Kiryat Arab to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. It is Abed el-Hai’s bad luck that is home is in the way, in the wadi below Kiryat Arba, which the settlers want to turn “Jewish.” Most nights, Kiryat Arba residents throw rocks, garbage, and bags of urine into his yard.

In the area known as H-2, where the settlers have rights under the Wye Agreement (you know, the agreement then-prime minster Netanyahu negotiated in 1998), the Arab population has declined from about 35,000 to 18,000.

The road from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb has a yellow (that’s right, yellow) line on it, indicating that no Arab is allowed to walk on it; the settlers push their baby-strollers freely, while army jeeps patrol up and down, and Arab kids watch from third floor windows, many of them with iron screens to protect them from rocks, etc.

The settlers have set up a synagogue on the land of Ja’abri family-another family in the way-which the Israeli High Court has declared illegal, and the army has taken down over 30 times, only to have the “minyan” rebuild it. During prayers, their children often throw rocks, etc., onto the homes of the Ja’abris. A stone’s throw in the other direction is the grave of, and monument to, Baruch Goldstein.

4. Multiply the Hebron problem by twenty, and you have the real, grotesque problem that occupation has engendered. Jerusalem is the radioactive core of it. Try to evacuate Kiryat Arba by force and tens of thousands will stream down from yeshivot in Jerusalem to stand with them.

No Israeli leader wants to deal with facing down the new Judeans-or can, without destroying Israeli social solidarity. I have written here before about how all fanatics live within concentric circles of support. No matter who wins a majority in the next election, about half of Israeli Knesset members will be from circles which the settlers count on-National Orthodox, Shas, Leiberman’s Russians, Haredi-people concentrated in and around Jerusalem, whom the settlers will tell you would be in settlements themselves if they had the guts; people who will nevertheless apply the “values” the settlers stand for to Jerusalem.

Again, Netanyahu has demoted Feiglin. But the government he will form will rest on this Judean coalition. And if Livni-Barak win, they will face an opposition nearly the size of their own, with many sympathetic members, and a fear of resting their coalition (as they will have to) on the Arab parties.

5. Hamas is growing in power-in the West Bank, too-directly as a result of this grotesquery. It is absurd to think of Gaza as a separate matter. Nor will the Hamas leadership be intimidated by shows of force. Actually, they thrive on it-precisely because eruptions of violence allow them to be seen as the steadfast opposition to the inertial expansion of Israeli occupation. An Israeli attack on Gaza, which must be bloody, will be play right into Hamas’s hands.

6. True, Israelis on the coastal plain are increasingly appalled by the settlers, and will tell you so. Livni’s biggest applause line at the Globes business conference last week was her insistence that, under her leadership, peace talks with the Palestinians will continue. But taking on the settlers is another matter. It is more politic to talk about smashing Hamas, whose missile attacks on Shderot truly are insufferable.

7. Netanyahu speaks of “economic peace” as alternative to the peace process. This is also absurd. Palestinians cannot build businesses with 500 checkpoints across the West Bank. Those checkpoints are mainly to protect the settlers.

WHERE DOES THIS leave us? The simple fact is, this problem is too big for Israel. We will need the world’s involvement; anyone who tells you different is either covering for the settlers, or afraid for electoral reasons to appear squishy about Israeli autonomy, or arrogant, or ignorant, or thick, or all of these at once. This post is not the place to describe what involvement means, though the contours of a two-state deal have been obvious for many years. The point is, what Hebron represents cannot be solved by this deal in a few decisive months, like the evacuation of the Sinai was. New changes to the landscape will take years. Or the landscape will look like Bosnia.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that first patriarch of Hebron, Abraham, never turned promised land holy. When faced with contention, as his herdsmen quarreled with Lot, he said something unforgettable but forgotten: “Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.”

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS, February 22, 2008

BILL MOYERS: So what happens if the American ambassador there, who’s a big advocate of aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields. What happens if he succeeds? What happens if the United States government sprays all the poppy plants and kills them, as happened in Colombia. What do the farmers do?

SARAH CHAYES: They join the Taliban. I mean, it’s the biggest gift we could possibly do for the insurgency. What else would they do? They’re furious. Their livelihood is taken away. Their children might be poisoned. Or they might think their children are poisoned. They join the Taliban. They take revenge.

BILL MOYERS: So if people were not growing poppies, what would they be growing?

SARAH CHAYES: What exists down there is very valuable crops. Almonds, apricots. It’s fruit crops mostly. To me, the way to attack opium is to compete with it. Like let’s make it possible to make a living and not– you don’t have to import some exotic new plant. They’ve got almonds, they’ve got apricots, they’ve got pomegranates. They’ve got cumin, they’ve got anise seed. Wild pistachios. We’re putting all this stuff in our soap.

Why isn’t there a fruit juice factory in Kandahar? It’s the pomegranate capital of the world. You know, everyone’s talking about the antioxidant qualities of pomegranates. That it’s the Garden of Eden of pomegranates down there. And what’s amazing is, with all this money that you mentioned being spent over there, you can’t get any money to do stuff like that.

BILL MOYERS: We’ve also given a lot of money to Pakistan, across the border.

SARAH CHAYES: Right. Correct.

BILL MOYERS: To help fight the insurgents, right? What’s happening to that money?

SARAH CHAYES: Well, we’re paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it’s actually US-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops.

The Other Front, WP, Sunday, December 14, 2008

By Sarah Chayes

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan

Nurallah strode into our workshop shaking with rage. His mood shattered ours. “This is no government,” he stormed. “The police are like animals.”

The story gushed out of him: There’d been a fender-bender in the Kandahar bazaar, a taxi and a bicycle among wooden-wheeled vegetable carts. Wrenching around to avoid the knot, another cart touched one of the green open-backed trucks the police drive. In seconds, the officers were dragging the man to the chalky dust, beating him — blow after blow to the head, neck, hips, kidneys. Shopkeepers in the nearby stalls began shouting, “What do you want to do, kill him?” The police slung the man into the back of their truck and roared away.

“So he made a mistake,” concluded Nurallah, one of the 13 Afghan men and women who make up my cooperative. “We don’t have a traffic court? They had to beat him?”

In the seven years I’ve lived in this stronghold of the Afghan south — the erstwhile capital of the Taliban and the focus of their renewed assault on the country — most of my conversations with locals about what’s going wrong have centered on corruption and abuse of power. “More than roads, more than schools or wells or electricity, we need good governance,” said Nurallah during yet another discussion a couple of weeks ago.

He had put his finger on the heart of the problem. We and our friends in Kandahar are thunderstruck at recent suggestions that the solution to the hair-raising situation in this country must include a political settlement with “relevant parties” — read, the Taliban. Negotiating with them wouldn’t solve Afghanistan’s problems; it would only exacerbate them. Ask any Afghan what’s really needed, what would render the Taliban irrelevant, and they’ll tell you: improving the behavior of the officials whom the United States and its allies ushered into power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

I write this by flickering light, a fat candle at my right elbow and a kerosene lamp on my left. We get only three or four hours of electricity every couple of days, often from 1 to 5 a.m. Still, the bill has to be paid. To do that, you must wait in a total of eight lines in two different buildings. You almost never get through the whole process without hearing an uncouth bark as your turn comes up: “This desk is closing; come back tomorrow.” Due to the electricity shortage, the power department won’t open new accounts. Officially. But for $600 — 15 times the normal fee and a fortune to Afghans — you can get a meter installed anyway.

A friend recently visited the jail in Urozgan Province, north of Kandahar, where he found 54 prisoners. All but six were untried and uncharged and had been languishing there for months or years. A Kandahar public prosecutor told him how a defendant had once offered him the key to a Lexus if he would just refrain from interfering in a case the man had fixed.

Sally Sara, Schoolgirls sprayed with acid in Afghanistan, ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Nov. 13, 2008

Attackers have sprayed acid in the faces of up to 15 schoolgirls in Afghanistan.

The teenagers were walking to their all-girls high school in the southern city of Kandahar when they were attacked by two men on a motorbike.

The men used a toy gun to spray acid in the girls’ faces.

Some of the victims were wearing Islamic burqas, which gave them some protection, but several received serious acid burns.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Local officials believe it may be an attempt to stop local girls from attending school.

NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have condemned the act as cowardly.

Hamas: Jewish Lobby in U.S. to blame for global financial crisis – Haaretz, October 7, 2008
By News Agencies and Haaretz Services

The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday accused a “Jewish Lobby” in the United States of fomenting the global financial crisis.

The crisis was the result of “bad administrative and financial management and a bad banking system put into place and controlled by the Jewish lobby,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement.

Barhum said that despite approving a bailout plan of $700 billion dollars, the U.S. government was ignoring the role of “the Jewish lobby that put the U.S. banking and financial sector into place.”

This lobby, said Barhum, “controls the U.S. elections and defines the foreign policy of any new administration in a manner that allows it to retain control of the American government and economy.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported last week a major upsurge in the number of anti-Semitic postings on the Internet relating to the financial crisis engulfing the United States.

The Jewish-American organization cited hundreds of posts regarding the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers and other institutions affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

The messages railed against Jews in general, with some charging that Jews control the U.S. government and finance as part of a “Jew world order” and therefore are to blame for the economic turmoil.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said: “We know from modern history that whenever there is a downturn in the global economy, there will be an upturn in the level of anti-Semitism and bigotry, and that is what we are seeing now.”

BBC survey, September 28, 2008, AlQaeda_Sep08_rpt.pdf (application/pdf Object)

US ‘War on Terror’ Has Not Weakened al Qaeda, Says Global Poll, September 28, 2008

The US‘s `war on terror’ has failed to weaken its prime target al Qaeda, according to people in 22 out of 23 countries surveyed in a new poll for the BBC World Service.

On average only 22 per cent believe that al Qaeda has been weakened, while three in five believe that it has either had no effect (29%) or made al Qaeda stronger (30%). And while negative views of al Qaeda are most common in nearly all of the countries surveyed, this is not the case in Egypt and Pakistan – both pivotal nations in the conflict with al Qaeda. In both of these countries far more have either mixed or positive feelings towards al Qaeda (Egypt 40% mixed and 20% positive, Pakistan 22% mixed and 19% positive) than have negative feelings (Egypt 35%, Pakistan 19%).

Asked who is winning the conflict between al Qaeda and the United States, the predominant view of those polled is that neither the US nor al Qaeda is winning, with 15 countries holding this view. In three countries – Kenya, Nigeria and Turkey – the dominant view is that the US is winning. In no country does more than one in five – 21 per cent in Pakistan – believe that al Qaeda is winning. Views are divided in other countries. On average across all 23 countries just 10 per cent think al Qaeda is winning, 22 per cent think the US is winning, and 47 per cent think neither side is winning.

Even in the United States only 34 per cent believe al Qaeda has been weakened. Fifty-nine per cent believe the `war on terror’ has either had no effect (26%) or has made al Qaeda stronger (33%). Meanwhile, 56 per cent believe neither side is winning the conflict; 31 per cent believe that the United States is winning; 8 per cent believe al Qaeda is winning.

Saudi judge condemns ‘immoral TV’, BBC, September 12, 2008

The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.

Sheikh Salih Ibn al-Luhaydan said some “evil” entertainment programmes aired by the channels promoted debauchery.

Dozens of satellite television channels broadcast across the Middle East, where they are watched by millions of Arabs every day.

The judge made the comments on a state radio programme.

He was speaking in response to a listener who asked his opinion on the airing of programmes featuring scantily-dressed women during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“There is no doubt that these programmes are a great evil, and the owners of these channels are as guilty as those who watch them,” said the sheikh.

“It is legitimate to kill those who call for corruption if their evil can not be stopped by other penalties.”

Political suicide, Palestinian style, The Daily Star, August 2008

It is painful watching events in Gaza and the West Bank unfold, as Fatah and Hamas battle it out like a bunch of armed neighborhood gangs. The mood among Palestinians throughout the world is one of despair and gloom, tinged with embarrassment and occasional shame.

Arab and others supporters of the Palestinian cause throw their hands up in the air in bewilderment. It will not be surprising to see some friends of Palestine quietly walk away, mumbling that if the Palestinians wish to kill each other and destroy their own society, they are free to do so. The world will easily forget about them.

These are grim days for the Palestinians, but not unusual ones for the Arab world as a whole. The sight of clan-based political groups in Gaza killing each other is familiar in many parts of the Middle East, sadly. That does not make it any better. It simply is a sign that national dysfunctionality expressed in internecine political violence is a regional Arab ailment, not a peculiarly Palestinian one.

The Palestinians, especially their political leaders, must assume most of the blame for this round of fighting, which is absolutely incomprehensible at a time when economic pressures and sanctions have reduced Gaza not just to a prison-like encampment, but to a ward of paupers. Israel and other enemies of the Palestinians will be pleased to see them fighting each other. We will hear another chorus from the skinheads and racists in the world who will point to this round of fighting as proof that Israel withdrew from Gaza and all it got in return were rockets fired at it and hooligans running the show inside. They will be right, but superficially.

The rockets fired at Gaza are to be seen in the context of a war that still rages between Israelis and Palestinians, now more or less quiet due to a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The fighting among the Palestinians is not so easy to understand. It is also not the first time that Palestinians have quarreled or fought each other. They did it in the 1940s, in the 1980s in refugee camps in Lebanon, and now they are doing it again in their squeezed little landscape in Gaza.

This is the latest and most troubling example of how a once grand and noble Palestinian national liberation movement has allowed itself to degenerate into ineptitude. The consequences of the fighting are unlikely to increase the chance of liberating Palestine, forcing Israel to negotiate an honorable and fair peace, or providing Palestinians opportunities to live more secure, stable and prosperous lives. All that will emerge from this is the functional equivalent of a child taking over a tree house, and claiming that as a great victory.

Report: Ex-Mossad chief says strike on Iran could ‘affect us for 100 years’ – Haaretz, July 28, 2008

Former Mossad Chief Ephraim Halevy told Time magazine in an interview published Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran “could have an impact on us for the next 100 years” and should only be considered as a last resort.

Halevy, who currently heads the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, added that an Iranian attack on Israel would probably have little impact, because Iranian missiles would largely be intercepted by Israel’s advanced anti-missile defense system.

Another former senior Mossad official, who reportedly served during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s administration, told the American magazine that “Iran’s achievement is creating an image of itself as a scary superpower when it’s really a paper tiger.”

An additional Israeli source told Time that Israel sees the period between the U.S. elections in November and the president’s inauguration in January as the “window of opportunity” for a possible attack on Iran. The source explained that any military move against Iran would not be carried out before the elections, because it would negatively impact the presidential candidates, especially Republican candidate John McCain and “No Israel leader wants to be blamed for destroying the Republican chances,” Time cited the source as saying.

However, the magazine quoted intelligence sources as saying that an Israeli attack on Iran would likely stall the Islamic republic’s nuclear aspirations only by “a year or two.”

Launching a long-range strike against a multitude of hidden targets in Iran entails huge risks and uncertain rewards, which makes the cost-benefit analysis weigh against an air strike on Iran, according to some senior Israeli officials who urge caution.

Dick Norton posted a good piece on Samir Kuntar (al-Quntar) on his blog on July 15, 2008. Israel is releasing Kuntar as part of its deal with Hezbollah. In return for Israel’s release of Kuntar and four other Lebanese prisoners–as well as the bodies of eight members of Hezbollah and those of four Palestinians–, Hezbollah is giving Israel what remains of the bodies of Israeli army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev–as well as the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah provoked by the latter’s abduction of Rosenwasser and Regev. Smadar Haran Kaiser describes Kuntar’s role in slaughtering her family on April 22, 1979 in the following article published in the Washington Post on May 18, 2003:

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

At his trial in 1980, Kuntar claimed that Israeli gunfire killed Danny Haran as soldiers burst in the Haran home and that he did not smash Einat Haran’s head with his rifle butt as her mother claims. Kuntar obviously wanted to minimize his own guilt in this case and his testimony does not seem credible.

According to Haaretz, the government of Lebanon has declared Wednesday a national holiday to celebrate the “liberation of prisoners from the jails of the Israeli enemy and the return of the remains of martyrs.” Also according to Haaretz, Kuntar and the other prisoners are to be welcomed at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, President Michel Suleiman, and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.

Such a welcome for a man involved in the murder of a four-year-old girl is obscene. It is sickening. Such a welcome for a man involved in an attack that forced a mother to cover her little daughter’s mouth so she would not scream and reveal her presence is obscene. It is sickening.

Haaretz also describes people in Gaza celebrating Kuntar’s release. This too is obscene. This too is sickening.

Jaber Weshah, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, used to be Samir Kuntar’s cellmate. Haaretz quotes him as saying: “Today is a true day of joy for all Palestinians and all freedom lovers across the world.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. By celebrating Kuntar’s release, Palestinians simply reinforce right-wing Israeli attempts to deflect the world’s attention from what Israel does to the Palestinians every day.

According to Haaretz, “Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called Kantar an ‘Arab nationalist hero’ and said his release was a great day for the Arab nation.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. The fact that Kuntar’s release is being celebrated by Palestinians is a great victory for all those determined to deflect attention away from the everyday agony of the Palestinians. It is a great victory for those who seek to make the world forget what Palestinians endure at checkpoints. It is a great victory for all those who seek to portray Palestinian resistance to occupation as mere barbarism.

All of us who condemn what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem must also condemn the murder of little Israeli girls by men like Samir Kuntar. And we must condemn all portrayals of such men as great heroes.

Turkish ruling party put on trial, BBC, July 1, 2008

Turkey’s chief prosecutor has appeared before the country’s Constitutional Court calling for the governing party to be closed down.

Founded by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, won a landslide victory in the last election.

But its critics say it is trying to impose Sharia law on the secular state.

The party’s attempt to ease a ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf is expected to be central to the evidence.

Prosecutor Abdurraham Yalcinkaya, who has argued that the party has become the focal point of anti-secular activities in Turkey, is appearing before judges in a closed-door session.

“This risk has been increasing every day” reads the 162-page petition submitted to the Constitutional Court by Mr Yalcinkaya.

Pew Global Attitudes Project: Overview, June 12, 2008

U.S. Favorability Edges Up

…positive views of the United States have risen sharply in Tanzania (by 19 points) and South Korea (12 points), and by smaller but significant margins in Indonesia, China, India and Poland. Overall, opinions of the United States are most positive in South Korea, Poland, India and in the three African countries surveyed this year – Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa.

However, positive opinions of the United States have declined by 11 points in Japan – a traditional U.S. ally – and in neighboring Mexico (by nine points). The image of the United States also remains overwhelmingly negative in most of the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, though no more so than in recent years.

Fewer than a quarter of respondents express positive opinions of the United States in Egypt (22%), Jordan (19%), Pakistan (19%) and Turkey (12%). Large majorities in Turkey and Pakistan say they think of the United States as “more of an enemy” rather than as “more of a friend” (70% in Turkey; 60% in Pakistan). In Lebanon, 80% of Shia Muslims consider the United States to be more of an enemy.

As in recent years, favorable views of the United States remain fairly low among the publics of a number of its traditional Western European allies. Solid majorities continue to express unfavorable opinions of the U.S. in France, Germany and Spain. Great Britain is the only country – of four Western European nations surveyed – where a majority (53%) expresses a positive view of the U.S.

Riazat Butt, Mecca talks stress religious tolerance, The Guardian, June 5, 2008

More than 500 delegates from around the world gathered in the Islamic holy city of Mecca yesterday with the aim of fostering better relations between Muslims and followers of other faiths. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia opened the three-day conference in Al-Safah Palace, a stones throw from the Grand Mosque, by stressing the need for better understanding and cooperation between monotheistic religions.

The king urged his audience to promote the true message of Islam and said the Islamic world faced great difficulties in the form of extremists whose “aggressions and excessiveness” targeted the tolerance of the religion.

The event, the biannual meeting of the Muslim World League, a non-governmental organisation engaged in the propagation of Islam, has been described as an interfaith conference, although its location makes it strictly off-limits to non-Muslims. It is understood that Abdullah seeks greater unity among different Islamic schools of thought, so that summits with other religions can take place more easily. The king held talks in November with Pope Benedict XVI and in March announced plans to host a meeting between the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – an initiative welcomed by the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder.

Mariage annulé: pour Dati, «un moyen de protéger la personne», Libération, 30 mai 2008

Alors que la polémique enfle autour de l’annulation par la justice du mariage d’une jeune femme qui avait menti sur sa virginité, la garde des Sceaux Rachida Dati a défendu vendredi cette décision au motif qu’il s’agissait aussi de «protéger la personne».

«La justice est là pour protéger. Le fait d’annuler un mariage est aussi un moyen de protéger la personne qui souhaite peut-être se défaire du mariage, parce que je pense que cette jeune fille (…) a souhaité également, sans doute, se séparer assez rapidement», a déclaré la ministre de la Justice. «L’annulation de mariage est un moyen de se séparer rapidement», a-t-elle ajouté.

Depuis la médiatisation hier de cette affaire, les réactions indignées venant du monde associatif et politique se multiplient, y compris dans les rangs de l’UMP. L’un des porte-parole de l’UMP Frédéric Lefèbvre a ainsi souhaité vendredi que la chancellerie «déclenche un recours dans l’intérêt de la loi pour dire le droit».

«Si c’est la question de la virginité qui a motivé l’annulation du mariage, je demande à la chancellerie de déclencher un recours dans l’intérêt de la loi pour dire le droit», a-t-il déclaré dans un communiqué.