“WE PROCLAIM OUR ALLEGIANCE TO THE NEW HAMAS REGIME”

Anti-Israel rabbis vow Hamas support
Al Jazeera (AFP)
March 22, 2006

english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/02CF0481-6991-49AD-9F47-9E386EB320A1.htm

A group of anti-Zionist rabbis has visited the Palestinian parliament to pledge their support for the prospective Hamas-led government.

The rabbis from the small ultra-Orthodox movement Neturei Karta, which this month sent a delegation to Iran, travelled to the West Bank town of Ram Allah to express their support for the Islamic group.

The group rejects the existence of the state of Israel as contrary to Jewish law and believes the land should be returned to Palestinians.

Neturei Karta believe that no Jewish state should be created before the coming of the messiah.

“We are true Jews who have come to the Palestinian Legislative Council today to proclaim our allegiance to the new Hamas regime,” said a spokesman for the group.

“We came to express our complete support for the Palestinian people. We consider ourselves Palestinians and, like them, we regard ourselves as under Zionist occupation.”

Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik called an adjournment of parliament, controlled by Hamas since its January election victory, so that the 14 rabbis, led by spiritual leader Moshe Hirsh, could be welcomed by legislators.

The anti-Zionist movement once represented a stronger current within ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but its membership has dropped to about 400 families in Israel, with supporters in Britain and the US.

Hirsh, proclaiming himself a Palestinian Jew, served as Jewish affairs adviser to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

LONDON MAYOR IN FRESH JEWISH CONTROVERSY

Mayor in fresh Jewish controversy
BBC News online
March 21, 2006

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4830878.stm

London’s mayor has become embroiled in a new row after criticising two Jewish businessmen involved in building a key facility for the 2012 Olympics.

Ken Livingstone attacked David and Simon Reuben for their role in an ongoing dispute about the Stratford City development in east London.

He suggested the brothers “go back (to their own country) and see if they can do better under the ayatollahs”.

The mayor made the comments during a speech at City Hall. The mayor’s office said there was nothing further to add.

The mayor is understood to think the consortium behind the project, of which the Reuben brothers hold a 50% stake, is not progressing quickly enough and could be in danger.

Conservative members of the London Assembly said the brothers were not Iranian, but had been born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents.

Brian Coleman, assembly Member for Barnet and Camden, said: “This is the latest anti-Semitic remark by Livingstone, he clearly has a major problem with the Jewish business community.”

The brothers released a statement saying the mayor’s comments were “totally inaccurate”.

“The Reuben brothers remain completely committed to the Stratford City project in its entirety as well as the Olympic opportunity,” the statement added.

“They are working extremely hard to deliver the development for the long-term benefit of London and Londoners. That is what they shall continue to do.

“Mr Livingstone’s comments on the Reuben brothers’ role in the Paddington and White City developments are also unsubstantiated.”

The row follows the mayor’s four-week suspension for comparing Evening Standard journalist Oliver Finegold to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Mr Livingstone, however, won a last-minute attempt to remain London’s mayor pending an appeal against the verdict, which was handed down by the Adjudication Panel for England.

“GO BACK TO IRAN AND TRY THEIR LUCK WITH THE AYATOLLAHS”

Livingstone caught up in new row
Evening Standard (London)
March 22, 2006

www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/PA_NEWA17364881142960578A0000?source=PA%20Feed

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has become embroiled in a new row after apparently suggesting that billionaire businessmen brothers involved with building a key facility for the 2012 Olympics should “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”.

Mr Livingstone was reported to have said of David and Simon Reuben, who are backing the £4 billion “Olympic City” in Stratford, east London: “Perhaps if they’re not happy they can always go back (to their own country) and see if they can do better under the ayatollahs.”

Conservatives on the London Assembly said the brothers were not Iranian, but born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents.

Brian Coleman, assembly Member for Barnet and Camden, said: “This is the latest anti-Semitic remark by Livingstone, he clearly has a major problem with the Jewish business community. To suggest that these men should go to Iran is shocking, outrageous and grossly offensive to the entire Jewish community.”

The remarks come as Mr Livingstone is preparing for his appeal against a four-week suspension from the office of Mayor over comments to a Jewish reporter.

Last month, the Adjudication Panel for England unanimously found him guilty of being “unnecessarily insensitive and offensive” in comparing Evening Standard journalist Oliver Finegold to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

The three-man tribunal decided that he brought his office into disrepute and breached the Greater London Authority code of conduct. He won a last ditch legal bid to remain as Mayor, just hours before his suspension was due to begin, pending the appeal.

The latest alleged comments come against the background of a reported crisis affecting the Stratford City development. The Evening Standard reported that the Reubens control half the consortium, with the two remaining stakes held by the Westfield and Stanhope groups.

At his weekly press conference, Mr Livingstone apparently said a “poisonous state of relations” now existed within the consortium. He blamed the Reuben brothers for the collapse of plans for a new hospital at Paddington and of having a “divisive” role in a shopping centre being built at White City.

He said: “Perhaps if they’re not happy they can always go back (to their own country) and see if they can do better under the ayatollahs.”

A spokesman for Mr Livingstone’s office said they were aware of the story in the Evening Standard and aware of the comments by the Conservatives.

“RED KEN” IN NEW ROW OVER GAMES FACILITY

‘Red Ken’ in new row over Games facility
Gulf Daily News
March 22, 2006

www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=138781&Sn=WORL&IssueID=29002

London Mayor Ken Livingstone was at the centre of a fresh political row yesterday, as a possible sanction for comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi still hung over his head. The 60-year-old was reported to have said two wealthy brothers should “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs” because of alleged wranglings over a key facility for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The remarks, directed at David and Simon Reuben, were slammed by opposition members of the Greater London Assembly. The Reubens were not Iranian but born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents, said Conservative Party assembly member Brian Coleman.

“BEFORE THE BARRIER, THERE WAS THE BOMBER”

How I Learned to Love the Wall
By Irshad Manji
The New York Times
March 18, 2006

www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/opinion/18manji.html?ex=1300338000&en=5bcee9d86aa4e6c5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

On March 28, Israelis will elect a new prime minister to replace the ailing Ariel Sharon. But I’d bet my last shekel that I’ll continue to hear the phrase “Ariel Sharon’s apartheid wall.” It’s a phrase spoken – make that spewed – on almost every university campus I visit in North America and Europe.

Among a new generation of Muslims, this is what Mr. Sharon will be known for long after he leaves office: unilaterally erecting a barrier, most of it a fence, some of it a wall, that cuts Arab villages in half, chokes the movement of ordinary Palestinians, cripples local economies and, ultimately, separates human beings.

The critics have a point – up to a point.

They’re right that Palestinians are virtually wailing at “the wall.” When I went to see its towering cement slabs in the West Bank town of Abu Dis last year, an Arab man approached me to unload his sadness. “It’s no good,” he said. “It’s hard.”

“Why do you think they built it?” I asked.

The man shook his head and repeated, “It’s hard.” After some silence, he added, “We are not two people. We are one.”

“How do you explain that to suicide bombers?” I wondered aloud.

The man smiled. “No understand,” he replied. “No English. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Was it something I said? Maybe my impolite mention of Palestinian martyrs? Then again, how could I not mention them?

After all, this barrier, although built by Mr. Sharon, was birthed by “shaheeds,” suicide bombers whom Palestinian leaders have glorified as martyrs. Qassam missiles can kill two or three people at a time. Suicide bombers lay waste to many more. Since the barrier went up, suicide attacks have plunged, which means innocent Arab lives have been spared along with Jewish ones. Does a concrete effort to save civilian lives justify the hardship posed by this structure? The humanitarian in me bristles, but ultimately answers yes.

That’s not to deny or even diminish Arab pain. I had to twist myself like an amateur gymnast when I helped a Palestinian woman carry her grocery bags through a gap in the wall (such gaps, closely watched by Israeli soldiers, do exist). It made me wonder how much more difficult the obstacle course must be for people twice my age, who must travel to one of the wider official checkpoints nearby.

I appreciate that Israel’s intent is not to keep Palestinians “in” so much as to keep suicide bombers “out.” But in the minds of many Palestinians, Ariel Sharon never adequately acknowledged the humiliation felt by a 60-year-old Arab whose family has harvested the Holy Land for generations when she has to show her identity card to an 18-year-old Ethiopian immigrant in an Israeli Army uniform who’s been in the country for eight months. In that context, fences and walls come off as cruelly gratuitous.

For all the closings, however, Israel is open enough to tolerate lawsuits by civil society groups who despise every mile of the barrier. Mr. Sharon himself agreed to reroute sections of it when the Israel High Court ruled in favor of the complainants. Where else in the Middle East can Arabs and Jews work together so visibly to contest, and change, state policies?

I reflected on this question as I observed an Israeli Army jeep patrol the gap in Abu Dis. The vehicle was crammed with soldiers who, in turn, observed me filming the anti-Israel graffiti scrawled by Western activists – “Scotland hates the blood-sucking Zionists!” I turned my video camera on the soldiers. Nobody ordered me to shut it off or show the tape. My Arab taxi driver stood by, unprotected by a diplomatic license plate or press banner.

Like all Muslims, I look forward to the day when neither the jeep nor the wall is in Abu Dis. So will we tell the self-appointed martyrs of Islam that the people – not just Arabs, but Arabs and Jews – “are one”? That before the barrier, there was the bomber? And that the barrier can be dismantled, but the bomber’s victims are gone forever?

Young Muslims, especially those privileged with a good education, cannot walk away from these questions as my interlocutor in Abu Dis did. If we follow in his footsteps, we are only conspiring against ourselves. After all, once the election is over, we won’t have Ariel Sharon to kick around anymore.

“I BELIEVE THE TIME HAS COME AND THE TRUTH SHOULD BE SPOKEN”

Women at war with the mullahs: What drives a woman to risk a fatwa by attacking Islam
By Christopher Goodwin
The Sunday Times (of London)
March 19, 2006

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2092167,00.html

It would be hard to imagine a place more remote from the violence and turmoil of the Middle East than this quiet cul-de-sac in the southern suburbs of Los Angeles. But as David Sultan opens the front door of his home he glances up and down the street anxiously.

He has good reason to be nervous: ever since Dr Wafa Sultan, his wife, appeared on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network, last summer she has been receiving death threats. During that and a second broadcast in February Dr Sultan, who was brought up as a Muslim in Syria, denounced the teachings and practice of Islam as “barbaric” and “medieval”.

“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilisations,” the impassioned 47-year-old told Al-Jazeera’s stunned audience across the Arab world. “It is a clash between civilisation and backwardness, between the civilised and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between human rights on the one hand and the violation of these rights on the other, between those who treat women like beasts and those who treat them like human beings.”

The broadcasts have caused an unholy stir in the Muslim world and virtually overnight have turned Sultan, previously known only to a few for her writings on www.annaqed.com, a small Arab-American website, into one of the most controversial figures in the international debate about Islam. The broadcasts have been downloaded more than 1m times from the internet and she has been interviewed on CNN and profiled by The New York Times and Le Monde.

While some acclaim her as “a voice of reason” others have denounced her as a “heretic” and insist that she deserves to die. What seems to have most infuriated many Muslims were Sultan’s comparisons between how Jews and Muslims have coped with the tragedies that have befallen them.

“The Jews have come from tragedy and forced the world to respect them,” she said, “with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.

“We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Sitting in the airy living room of the spacious modern home where Sultan and her husband live, it is hard to believe this small, neatly dressed woman could be at the centre of an international firestorm. Just as improbable is that the most important and controversial critics of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intolerance are, like Sultan, women, mostly from Islamic countries.

They include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician, who has strongly criticised Islamic attitudes towards women and the widespread practice of female circumcision in Muslim north Africa; Irshad Manji, a Canadian lesbian of Pakistani descent, whose book The Trouble with Islam Today chastises Islam for its aggression towards women and for its anti-semitism; Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam and Muslim academic and author, who has infuriated traditional Muslims by leading Friday prayer for Muslims in New York, a role traditionally taken only by male imams.

Other Muslim women in the front lines of the clash with Islamic governments are as diverse as Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani village woman who was brutally gang-raped in 2002 as reprisal for an alleged transgression by her 14-year-old brother, and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her defence of the rights of women and children in fundamentalist Muslim Iran.

Death threats against these women are commonplace. Irshad Manji has had to install bullet-proof windows in her home. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has to travel everywhere with bodyguards after the threats against her and the death the film maker Theo van Gogh, her friend and collaborator.

Sultan never imagined her life would take this path. She was born to a large middle-class family in the Syrian port city of Banias. Her father was a grain trader, her mother a housewife. She has nine brothers and sisters. The family was devoutly Muslim and Sultan, who studied medicine at the University of Aleppo in Damascus, says she never had any reason to doubt her faith. But in 1979, when she was a student, she witnessed a horrifying crime. As she stood chatting with some other students on the university courtyard, armed members of the Muslim Brotherhood began shooting at one of her teachers, killing him on the spot.

“They filled his body with bullets as they shouted ‘Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! (God is greatest!)’,” she recalls. She says they killed him because he was an Alawite, a member of the same Muslim sect as the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, whom they wanted to overthrow, even though he had nothing to do with politics.

“This was the turning point of my life,” says Sultan. She began to reread the Koran closely, gradually coming to the conclusion that the violence and oppression of most Muslim governments and some of those fighting against them stemmed directly from the teachings of Islam. “I began to question every single teaching,” she says. She noticed that “there are too many verses in the Koran which say you must kill those who are non-Muslim; you must kill those who don’t believe in Allah and his messenger. I started to ask: is this right? Is this human? All our problems in the Islamic world, I strongly believe, are the natural outcome of these teachings. Go open any book in any class in any school in any Islamic country and read it. You will see what kind of teachings we have: Islam tells its followers that every non-Muslim is your enemy.”

Sultan, who worked as a family practitioner in Syria after qualifying as a doctor, also speaks about the virulent anti-semitism that was inculcated in her and all Syrian children. This made her so terrified of Jews that she refused to act the part of the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a school play.

“Until I came to United States I used to believe that Jewish people are not human creatures,” she says. “Unfortunately this is the way I was brought up, to believe that Jews don’t have our human features, they don’t have our human voices.”

In the first week she was in the United States she and her husband went to a shoe shop in Hollywood. Her husband asked the clerk where he was from and when he said that he was an Israeli Jew, “you can’t believe what I did”, she says. “I ran away without shoes, barefoot. My husband followed me. He said, ‘How stupid you are.’ But I said, ‘I cannot tolerate him.’ I was scared to death because he was from Israel; I reacted in a very bad, negative way, because of the way I had been raised, for the past 30 years of my life.”

Sultan and her husband, who met when they were at university, moved to the United States in 1989 with two of their children. They have since had a third. As they struggled to establish themselves – for four years she worked as a cashier in convenience stores until his small business began to prosper – she started writing about Islam, at first for local Arab newspapers, until her writings brought threats against them. Three weeks before September 11 she helped set up the Annaqed (The Critic) website where she and other writers from the Muslim Middle East have been able to put forward their critical views of Islam.

Sultan, who is now close to completing her US medical qualifications – she plans to practise psychiatry – has written two books that can be read in Arabic and is finishing a third – The Escaped Prisoner: When God is a Monster – which she hopes will also be published in English.

Sultan has no intention of stopping her attacks on Islam even though she and her family in Syria have been threatened. Two of her brothers have been interrogated by the Syrian secret police, she says, since the Al-Jazeera broadcasts. In fact, Sultan’s long intellectual journey has brought her to a radical conclusion: that reform of Islam is impossible.

“Muslims have been hostages of their beliefs and their teachings for 14 centuries,” she says. “I believe the time has come and the truth should be spoken. I know that I am waging a very difficult war. It is going to take years. I might not be able to see it in my life, but I am strongly sure that the next generation will see the fruits of my writing and my message.”

“TIME WE STARTED TO STICK UP FOR ISRAEL”

Time we started to stick up for Israel
By Virginia Blackburn
Daily Express (London)
March 16, 2006

Just what has the world got against Israel? Possibly the most maligned country on the planet is in the news again: this time round it’s being castigated for the capture of Ahmed Saadat. Saadat, a Palestinian terrorist who is accused of ordering the assassination of the Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi in 2001, was being held in a Palestinian prison in Jericho.

Even before the election of the Hamas government, concerns were being voiced over the security of the jail. Under the new government and the new president, Mahmoud Abbas, it looked almost certain that he would be set free. So Israel was forced to storm the prison and capture Saadat, who will now face trial.

But does the world thank Israel for capturing a known terrorist and bringing him to justice? No, it does not. Instead, you’d have thought Israel itself was in the wrong.

There’s the usual tutting about heavy handedness and upsetting the rest of the Middle East, much of which, if truth be told, wants to see not only Israel but also the West smashed to smithereens.

Not that you would gather that listening to some people, especially those on the Left: in their eyes, nothing Israel does can ever be right. In a moment of ever greater than usual stupidity, [senior British politician] Clare Short once compared Israel to Saudi Arabia on human rights grounds. As a woman, in which of the two countries do you think she’d prefer to live?

Why do people think like this? Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and the only true friend of the West. Some of the Arab states may present themselves as Western allies but that is only because they want Western money for their oil.

Saudi Arabia may have strong trading links with the UK and the US but it’s an open secret that massively anti-Western propaganda is rife in that country. If you doubt this, remember that the majority of the September 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama Bin Laden. Some friends to the west.

Yet Saudi Arabia doesn’t get an ounce of the vitriol directed towards it that Israel has to take. Israel has had to deal with suicide bombers for years now and has been routinely denounced for its reaction – yet look what happens on the one and only occasion Britain has had to deal with suicide bombers to date: an innocent man is shot dead.

The police have rightly been castigated for this but can you imagine living in a country where suicide bombers are a part of the fabric of daily life? Can you imagine the fear and mistrust this must breed among people who, every day, must mingle with potential murderers in the street?

This is what Israel has had to deal with and have we been sympathetic? Have we hell. The left even sided with the bombers until they got active on these shores, too.

The reason for this appalling attitude, alas, is because Israel is a Jewish state. Anti-Semitism is as strong as it ever has been: it’s just that, after the events of 60 years ago, most anti-Semites have been shamed into shutting up. So they take out their disgusting little prejudices by blaming Israel for all the world’s problems instead.

They should wise up. Israel has, more than once, saved our ungrateful necks. It is Israel that stopped Iraq from becoming a nuclear power by bombing its armaments factories, and the way things are going, it looks as if it may do the same to Iran, too.

And will it be praised by a world it has made safer? You guess.

“WE ARE ALL GUILTY – BUT SOME ARE MORE GUILTY THAN OTHERS”

Orwell Meets Israel
By Daniel Johnson
The New York Sun
March 16, 2006

“We are all guilty!” This was the perennial cry of a fictional comic character, the sociologist Dr. Heinz Kiosk, in the long-running Peter Simple column of the London Daily Telegraph written by the great humorist Michael Wharton, who died last month. Well, the Heinz Kiosks have been in overdrive since Tuesday’s dramatic events in Jericho.

The capture there of Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and five other PFLP terrorists will go down in history as one of Israel’s most remarkable military operations, comparable to the Entebbe raid or the abduction of Eichmann.

The jail in Jericho where the terrorists were being held had become a fortress in the 15 minutes that elapsed between the departure of British and American monitors and the arrival of Israeli forces to besiege the compound. In the absence of a Joshua, the walls of Jericho did not come tumbling down. They had to be blasted, not with trumpets, but with tanks. In fact, it took another 12 hours before Saadat and his men, who had been armed by their jailers, surrendered. Under the circumstances, it is astonishing that only one prisoner and one guard were killed – proof that Israel wanted their quarries alive, to stand trial.

To judge from the Heinz Kiosks at the BBC, however, you would think that Israel, the United States, and Britain were entirely to blame for the violence that erupted across the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday. Palestinians burned down offices of the British and US cultural missions, as well as the European Commission, in Gaza City and Ramallah, kidnapped Westerners at random, and threatened further reprisals.

The British network’s leading anchorman, Jeremy Paxman, interviewing the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, in his usual aggressive style, was visibly astonished that a leftist Israeli in the midst of an election campaign would offer warm support to a right-of-center government. Mr. Paxman apparently couldn’t get his head round the idea that Israel had acted within its rights, because the Palestinians had never kept to their side of the agreement, and could not sit idly by while the assassins of their cabinet minister were set free to strike again.

But surely the British and Americans were to blame for withdrawing their monitors from the prison? That, after all, was the view of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who rushed back from a European trip to deal with the crisis, blaming everyone except himself. He accused the British and Americans of keeping him in the dark and of “colluding” with the Israelis, and insisted that there had been no question of Saadat’s imminent release.

Yet, as quickly emerged, Mr. Abbas (usually known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen) had been given numerous warnings that conditions at the jail in Jericho would force an Anglo-American pullout, with the wholly predictable consequence that Israeli forces would speedily move in to snatch Saadat.

The BBC decided to believe Mr. Abbas, the man who had overall responsibility for security in the Palestinian territories, rather than their own foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who told the House of Commons that Britain had not colluded with Israel, but had pulled out its monitors because their safety could not be guaranteed under a Hamas regime. He released a March 8 letter received from the British consul-general in Jerusalem, which stated: “The pending handover of governmental power to a political party [Hamas] that has repeatedly called for the release of the Jericho detainees also calls into question the political sustainability of the monitoring mission.”

The former leader of the Conservative Party in the European Parliament, Edward Macmillan-Scott, blamed Britain, the U.S., and Israel on the BBC’s flagship “Today” program yesterday, declaring that it was a scandal that the Palestinian president had been prevented from addressing the European Parliament. Not a word of condemnation from Mr. Macmillan-Scott for the terrorists or rioters, let alone the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority It did not seem to occur to this Tory Eurocrat that Mr. Abbas ought never to have been joining the Brussels gravy train at all, while a crisis was brewing in his own back yard.

But of course it is no surprise that Mr. Abbas was on his way to Brussels: The European Union, whose flag and offices were burned on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank this week, is the biggest paymaster of the Palestinian Authority. It contributes well over $500 million a year. The election of Hamas has brought no cessation of that income stream, much of which ends up in the pockets either of corrupt officials or of terrorist organizations. Yet it is clear from this week’s riots that the Palestinian “street” is as hostile to Europe as it is to the United States. Nor does Mr. Abbas seem very grateful, either.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Israel is not treated as an ally in the war on terror by the British media, when even the United States is depicted so badly. This week I heard a Foreign Office minister, Kim Howell, on a visit to Iraq denouncing the “swivel-eyed right-wing American intellectuals” who had caused all the trouble in the Middle East. He had in mind George Will, but I am proud to think that most of my American friends would fit that description. Maybe “swivel-eyed” will become a badge of honor for trans-Atlantic neoconservatives, rather as the British Expeditionary Force in France adopted the German Kaiser’s insult and called themselves the “Old Contemptibles.”

Actually, the Israelis do give the British plenty of help in fighting terrorists. Over recent years, for example, they have trained police officers from Scotland Yard in dealing with suicide bombers. The trouble was that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, chose to ignore the Israeli experts, whose policy is never to shoot a suspect unless they have first-hand evidence that he or she is carrying explosives or weapons.

Immediately after the London bombings last July, the London police shot dead a man on the subway whom they had identified as a suspect, but who was not carrying anything suspicious. He turned out to be an innocent Brazilian plumber. Sir Ian’s decision to ignore the Israeli advice caused a huge scandal that may yet cost him his job. Yet, funnily enough, it is the Israelis who are always depicted as trigger-happy. We pay the Palestinians a fortune, and they repay us with violence. But it is always Israel that is guilty. As Orwell might have put it: We are all guilty – but some are more guilty than others.

“I BELIEVE OUR PEOPLE ARE HOSTAGES TO OUR OWN BELIEFS AND TEACHINGS”

For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
By John M. Broder
The New York Times
March 11, 2006

Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

“I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings,” she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: “Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs.”

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, “The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.”

She went on, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.”

She concluded, “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. “We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders,” said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

Dr. Sultan is “working on a book that – if it is published – it’s going to turn the Islamic world upside down.”

“I have reached the point that doesn’t allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book.”

The working title is, “The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster.”

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith’s strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

“They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great! ’” she said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god.”

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.

But even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan’s anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. “Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?” she asked. “In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched.”

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations,” Dr. Sultan said. “It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.”

She said she no longer practiced Islam. “I am a secular human being,” she said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, “Are you a heretic?” He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: “Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see.” She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, “If someone were to kill you, it would be me.”

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

“I have no fear,” she said. “I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles.”

“I AM NOT AGAINST MUSLIM PEOPLE… I AM JUST TRYING TO CHANGE THEIR MENTALITY AND BEHAVIOUR”

Islam Fatally Flawed, Says Voice From Corona Via Al Jazeera
Wafa Sultan, who tells a tale of terror from Syria, draws lots of Western media attention but not as much from Muslims
By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 12, 2006

www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sultan13mar13,0,2410999.story?coll=la-home-headlines

She’s no longer a Muslim, has never connected with progressive Islamic groups and does not know the writings of Islam’s most respected voices of reform.

So why is Wafa Sultan, a 47-year-old Southern California woman, suddenly in the news as a fresh voice of reason and reform about Islam?

In a blunt interview on Al Jazeera television last month, Sultan harshly criticized Islam as violent and unfavorably compared Muslims to Jews. In remarks Sunday at her Corona home, Sultan, who said she left the faith after witnessing an act of religious extremism, went even further, saying Islam was beyond repair with teachings that exhorted Muslims to kill non-Muslims, subjugate women and disregard human rights.

“I don’t believe you can reform Islam,” Sultan said. Saying Islamic scriptures are riddled with violence, misogyny and other extremist ideas, she declared, “Once you try to fix it, you’re going to break it.”

Sultan’s Al Jazeera remarks have been widely circulated by such groups as the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a Washington-based translation service founded by a former Israeli colonel, and the American Jewish Congress. She made the New York Times front page and is being plied with interview requests from CNN, FOX, “Good Morning America” and public radio. Her e-mail in-box is filled with messages from well-wishers around the world – mostly non-Muslims – praising her “courage,” offering donations and pitching proposals to make a documentary about her life.

“This woman, at great personal risk, has decided to come forward not only in English but also in Arabic to discuss what’s wrong with Islam and the Muslim world, ” said Allyson Rowen Taylor of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to visit Israel. “She blames the mullahs and clerics for distorting the teachings of the Koran for 14 centuries and speaks about the anger and despair of fellow Muslims.”

But the flurry of interest among non-Muslims contrasts oddly with the near silence among Muslims themselves, many of whom say she is a largely unknown figure not causing any particular stir.

“I haven’t come across any indication that people are discussing her,” said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a University of Virginia Islamic studies professor who was blacklisted eight years ago by Iraqi Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his reformist ideas that women were equal to men and all Abrahamic faiths were equally respectable. “Cyberspace is almost silent.”

He said he first heard of her a few weeks ago, when the American Jewish Congress sent him an e-mail with a link to her Al Jazeera interview, which was translated from Arabic into English by MEMRI. Sachedina said he agreed with some of her remarks, including her criticism that too many Muslim rulers fail to protect human rights. But he objected to what he called her “vilification” of the entire tradition.

Other Muslims questioned why groups outside the faith were so avidly promoting a non-Muslim to criticize Islam, a practice that has occurred before and is a sore spot in the Islamic community, particularly since many respected Muslims also advocate change.

“Reform is alive and well within Islam, but it will only happen by those from within Islam and not those who hate Islam,” said Hussam Ayloush, who heads the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Some Muslims, however, have embraced at least part of Sultan’s message. Ani Zonneveld of the Progressive Muslim Union in Los Angeles, who has been fighting to gain wider acceptance of female musicians in Islam, said she put the link to Sultan’s Al Jazeera interview on her personal website, under the title, “Wafa Sultan Rocks!” But Zonneveld said Sultan’s critiques were not new. Plenty of practicing Muslims, including Zonneveld, have been outspoken in criticizing the way some Muslims interpret their tradition’s teachings on women, human rights and interfaith relations, she said.

Sultan herself says she’s making a difference. In her interview Sunday, she said growing numbers of Muslims were getting in touch with her to discuss her views. That’s a sign, she believes, that she is causing them to rethink their tradition.

“I am trying to push them to doubt their teachings,” she said. “My message is effective, and it’s doing the job I want it to.”

A Syrian native, Sultan said she walked away from the faith of her family 27 years ago, when she witnessed the murder of her professor by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization then battling the Syrian government. She said the men burst into her classroom at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, where she was a medical student, and gunned him down, screaming, “Allah is great!”

“That was the turning point of my life,” she said. “I was traumatized. I lost faith in God – or their God – and started to question every single teaching of ours.”

She said that, a decade later, after practicing medicine in Syria, she and her husband moved to the United States, where she initially worked as a cashier and studied English at Cal State Long Beach. Today, the couple have three children. Her husband, David, runs an automotive smog-check station. She said she is waiting for acceptance into a residency program before she can be fully certified to practice psychiatry here.

But Sultan said her prime passion has always been speaking out about Islam, something she finally had the freedom to do after arriving in the United States. She began writing regular columns for a local Arabic-language newspaper. Five years ago, she began contributing to a website, www.annaqed.com, after the Arabic reference to “the critic.”

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought her critiques new audiences. Last year, she began appearing on Al Jazeera, the world’s most popular Arabic-language television network. Her appearance last month, however, attracted particular attention because she praised Jews for working hard to rebuild their community after the Holocaust, favorably comparing it to violent reactions by Muslims to their plights, whether in response to satirical Danish cartoons or subjugation in the Palestinian territories.

She said she has received death threats and been accused by Muslims of pandering to Christians and Jews with her critiques of Islam.

But Sultan insists that her motives are pure.

“I am not against Muslim people,” she said. “They are my people. I am just trying to change their mentality and their behavior.”

“ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT, APPARENTLY, DOESN’T INCLUDE THE HEART OF THE MATTER”

The media and Islam
By Diana West
The Washington Times
March 10, 2006

www.washtimes.com/op-ed/dwest.htm

Way back when I was a cub reporter at this newspaper, I got hold of a book about the “art” of interviewing. It was a thin book. There was no use spending thousands of words to tell a reporter, cub or old Grizzly, to bone up on a subject and let natural curiosity take its course.

That thin book came to mind on reading a three-part series in the New York Times about an imam named Reda Shata who presides over the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, N.Y. As far as the art of interviewing goes, the reporter got it exactly backward: Thousands of words; negligible expertise; and no curiosity.

Both the New York Post and the New York Sun have already pounced on the most egregious flaw of omission: not a mention, in 11,000-plus words, of the day in March 1994 when a man walked out of that same Bay Ridge mosque and, inspired by the anti-Jewish sermon of the day (delivered by a different, unidentified imam), armed himself and opened fire on a van carrying Hasidic Jewish children. Ari Halberstam, 16, was killed. The Times series, as it happened, concluded on the 12th anniversary of his death.

Such journalistic jaw-droppers abound: gaping holes, like the one above, but also dead ends that leave countless questions that the female reporter, it seems, never thought to ask. For example, she notes, over six months of interviews, the Egyptian-born imam refused to shake her hand. “He offers women only a nod,” she writes. Why is shaking hands with a woman “improper”? What does the imam think about sexual equality? She doesn’t tell us. In Belgium last year, she doesn’t mention, the female president of the parliament made headlines for canceling a meeting with an Iranian delegation over this same refusal to shake a woman’s hand (the parliamentarian’s own), while in Holland, the English-language blog Zacht Ei reported, a Muslim man lost a month’s worth of welfare benefits for not only refusing to shake hands with female municipal employees, but also refusing to acknowledge their presence. This is supposed to be “the story of Mr. Shata’s journey west,” but the story bypasses such landmark issues.

Instead, we get a load of happy talk: “Married life in Islam is an act of worship,” Mr. Shata says. So impressed were the editors of the New York Times by this load that they ran the quotation, not just above the fold, but across the very top of the front page over a gold-bathed family photo four columns wide. Does Miss Reporter ask the imam to reconcile this ecstatic notion with the Islamic custom of arranged and forced marriages, the spate of spousal abuse and “honor killings” within European Muslim communities – as recounted in clarifying detail in Bruce Bawer’s important new book, “While Europe Slept” – or the tradition of polygamy which exists to this day in portions of Islamic society?

No, no and no. She writes: “One Brooklyn imam reportedly urged his wealthier male congregants during a Ramadan sermon last year to take two wives. When a woman complained about the sermon to Mr. Shata, he laughed. ‘You know that preacher who said Hugo Chavez should be shot?’ he asked,” referring to a comment by Pat Robertson about the Venezuelan leader. “‘We have our idiots, too.’ “One clumsy feint and presto – the New York Times loses all interest in polygamy, from Mohammed’s Mecca to Bloomberg’s New York.

Then there was the series’ look at terrorism. “What I may see as terrorism, you may not see that way,” Mr. Shata says. What does he mean by that? The reporter doesn’t tell us. Hamas is a powerful symbol of resistance, he says; the assassinated Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin was the “martyred” “lion of Palestine,” he sermonizes; and yet the imam says he condemns all violence. How does he square that? She doesn’t tell us. And when he sanctions violence against soldiers, not civilians, how does he define “soldier” and “civilian”? She doesn’t tell us that, either.

When asked about a 2004 sermon that “exalted” a female suicide bomber as a “martyr,” Mr. Shata seems “unusually conflicted,” the reporter writes. He declines to comment for fear of “[inviting] controversy,” and alienating New York rabbis he has “forged friendships with.” And there the question lies: She just lets him slip away. All the news that’s fit to print, apparently, doesn’t include the heart of the matter.