Israel is contributing significantly to worldwide efforts to counter climate change:
- Israel's solar energy sector is pioneering, and having an increasing international impact
- Israel is at the forefront of the international drive to combat so-called 'desertification' - the steady spread of deserts and the destruction of farmland and forests
- The UN General Assembly recently adopted a milestone resolution on agricultural development which was sponsored by Israel, and which promotes environmentally friendly agricultural practices internationally, including many devised in Israel
- Israel's university research labs are leading the way in clean energy research and innovation
- Israeli companies are deeply involved in introducing energy-efficient technologies for powering vehicles, factories and other infrastructure
- Israeli start-up companies such as Water Sheer as well as the national water carrier Mekorot are championing new methods of recycling waste water. They are helping to spread the know how to provide clean drinking water for the world's poor and vulnerable, again with major environmental and human benefits
- There are many grass-roots, citizens' initiatives in Israel (including joint Israeli-Palestinian projects) which promote environmental awareness and changes of lifestyle
There's plenty more which Israel is doing to help the green revolution on its way.
That's the country which the Greens have just voted to boycott.....
For Israel and the 21st century world, including its role in the global environmental challenge, visit the Israel21c website: www.israel21c.org
Monday, February 25, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Save the second Durban Conference. (Ami Isseroff, ZNN)
The first UN conference in Durban in 2001 was supposed to be about eliminating racism, sexism and other discriminations around the world. Instead it degenarated into a "hate-fest" against the Jewish people and Israel. The "hate" agenda so dominated the entire NGO Forum, that there was no time to discuss any other pressing issues which other groups were anxious to have aired. The Government Conference was more controlled and the final communique was not allowed to be hijacked by the predominantly anti-Western, mainly Dictatorship nations lined up against the free world. Should another conference take place, it may not have an NGO Forum as such, but the activist NGOs will no doubt be there in force. No sensible body should have to suffer another repetition of the racist, anti-Semitic and Israelo-phobic hate groups' antics! Funding for it is already denied by many Western nations, including Australia.MM
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Save the Second Durban Conference
14.02. 2008
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000494.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
The oppressed minorities of the world have fought a long war against racism, colonialism and intolerance, a war that began long before the Gauls tried to stand up to the Romans, a world war, whose bloody battles were fought and mostly lost on the slave ships of Arab traders off the Barbary coast, in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz and Vilna, in the colonial battlefields in India and China, a war that is still being fought today in India, Tibet, Australia, the Sudan, North Africa, Iran and countless other places where powerless peoples from "Aborigines" and Amazigh to Zulus may suffer discrimination because of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs or their ethnic or tribal origins.
Not long ago that battle seemed nearly hopeless in the United States and in South Africa. Within the living memory of many of our readers, there were signs on drinking fountains and cafes that said "whites" and "colored," and within the living memory of most adults, there was a "whites only" government in South Africa.
Less than fifty years ago, Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." That simple wish was very far from reality in 1963. Today, when an African American may become the next president of the United States, we can almost touch the dream. In South Africa, the barriers came down even more dramatically, enabling a new birth of freedom.
The war against racism is far from won however. Those who really want to end racism received a new and powerful potential ally at the end of World War II, with the formation of the United Nations. The UN should be the number one force fighting against racism.
In this long war, there have always been war profiteers and false friends, carpetbaggers and Stalinists, who sought to divert the struggle against racism from its legitimate goals to their own private benefit. These quacks and cads lined their own pockets and furthered their own political agendas at the expense of a holy cause.
The first World Conference Against Racism sponsored by the United Nations in 2001, was an opportunity to rally and unite the forces fighting oppression and discrimination, to form alliances to advance rights of women, ethnic groups and other oppressed peoples, and to build organizational frameworks that could give voice to the cries of those who have no political voice, and enfranchise the disenfranchised. The first World Conference against Racism, tragically, was diverted from its noble and legitimate purpose. Whatever positive achievements it did attain, and whatever it could have attained, were totally drowned in a tidal of wave of ugly racist invective against one small people, itself the historical victim of racism, and against one small state, involved in one small conflict that touches a tiny fraction of the oppressed people of the earth. The World Conference Against Racism should have created a forum for redressing all the open wounds of all the hurt peoples that cried for the healing touch of rationalism and brotherly love. Instead, it opened more wounds. This conference adopted resolutions against slavery, discrimination and many other evils. But much of the world remembers only the few one sided resolutions that were adopted to condemn the legitimate national liberation movement of one people without giving it a hearing, thereby sowing the seeds of further hatred and extremism. Much of the world remembers and knows, not the lofty spirit that characterized much of the work of the congress, but only the ugly manifestations of racism that caught headlines in the world press, mocking the purpose and the spirit of the gathering.
Another World Conference Against Racism is scheduled to be held in 2009 in Durban. It is not too late to save this conference from the fate of the first. Let this conference provide a beacon of light and hope rather than adding to the darkness of strige and hate. Our resources are too limited, and the task is too great, to allow for waste and diversion. If you care about combating racism and oppression, don't let partisans waste the wonderful opportunity provided by this conference.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2008.
For accurate info. about Zionism see the following websites.
Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log,
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000494.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Save the Second Durban Conference
14.02. 2008
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000494.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
The oppressed minorities of the world have fought a long war against racism, colonialism and intolerance, a war that began long before the Gauls tried to stand up to the Romans, a world war, whose bloody battles were fought and mostly lost on the slave ships of Arab traders off the Barbary coast, in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz and Vilna, in the colonial battlefields in India and China, a war that is still being fought today in India, Tibet, Australia, the Sudan, North Africa, Iran and countless other places where powerless peoples from "Aborigines" and Amazigh to Zulus may suffer discrimination because of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs or their ethnic or tribal origins.
Not long ago that battle seemed nearly hopeless in the United States and in South Africa. Within the living memory of many of our readers, there were signs on drinking fountains and cafes that said "whites" and "colored," and within the living memory of most adults, there was a "whites only" government in South Africa.
Less than fifty years ago, Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." That simple wish was very far from reality in 1963. Today, when an African American may become the next president of the United States, we can almost touch the dream. In South Africa, the barriers came down even more dramatically, enabling a new birth of freedom.
The war against racism is far from won however. Those who really want to end racism received a new and powerful potential ally at the end of World War II, with the formation of the United Nations. The UN should be the number one force fighting against racism.
In this long war, there have always been war profiteers and false friends, carpetbaggers and Stalinists, who sought to divert the struggle against racism from its legitimate goals to their own private benefit. These quacks and cads lined their own pockets and furthered their own political agendas at the expense of a holy cause.
The first World Conference Against Racism sponsored by the United Nations in 2001, was an opportunity to rally and unite the forces fighting oppression and discrimination, to form alliances to advance rights of women, ethnic groups and other oppressed peoples, and to build organizational frameworks that could give voice to the cries of those who have no political voice, and enfranchise the disenfranchised. The first World Conference against Racism, tragically, was diverted from its noble and legitimate purpose. Whatever positive achievements it did attain, and whatever it could have attained, were totally drowned in a tidal of wave of ugly racist invective against one small people, itself the historical victim of racism, and against one small state, involved in one small conflict that touches a tiny fraction of the oppressed people of the earth. The World Conference Against Racism should have created a forum for redressing all the open wounds of all the hurt peoples that cried for the healing touch of rationalism and brotherly love. Instead, it opened more wounds. This conference adopted resolutions against slavery, discrimination and many other evils. But much of the world remembers only the few one sided resolutions that were adopted to condemn the legitimate national liberation movement of one people without giving it a hearing, thereby sowing the seeds of further hatred and extremism. Much of the world remembers and knows, not the lofty spirit that characterized much of the work of the congress, but only the ugly manifestations of racism that caught headlines in the world press, mocking the purpose and the spirit of the gathering.
Another World Conference Against Racism is scheduled to be held in 2009 in Durban. It is not too late to save this conference from the fate of the first. Let this conference provide a beacon of light and hope rather than adding to the darkness of strige and hate. Our resources are too limited, and the task is too great, to allow for waste and diversion. If you care about combating racism and oppression, don't let partisans waste the wonderful opportunity provided by this conference.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2008.
For accurate info. about Zionism see the following websites.
Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log,
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000494.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Jews in Australia & Aboriginal reconciliation.
Jews key to Aboriginal reconciliation
The unprecedented apology to Aborigines by Australia's
prime minister, which marked a national Yom Kippur of
sorts, was the culmination of a decades-long
reconciliation effort led in large part by Jews.
By Dan Goldberg
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
February 02, 2008
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/200802132008021
3aborigines.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/3xjhh3
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- In what could be described as
Australia's Yom Kippur, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed
Wednesday the one word his predecessors refused to utter to
indigenous Australians: Sorry.
Rudd's Labor Party wrested power from John Howard's Liberals
last November on a platform that included apologizing to the
"Stolen Generations" -- up to 100,000 mostly mixed-blood
Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their
families between 1910 and 1970.
The text of the motion on the Stolen Generations, which won
bipartisan support, acknowledged the "profound grief,
suffering and loss" inflicted on Aborigines.
Australian Jews, some of whom have been at the forefront of
the decades-long reconciliation effort, applauded the
apology.
"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the
sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we
say sorry," Rudd said. "And for the indignity and
degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud
culture, we say sorry."
In a historic speech that drew cheers and tears, Rudd said
he hoped the apology would remove "a great stain from the
nation's soul."
Mark Leibler, the co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, a
national organization that promotes reconciliation, said
Rudd's apology marked a "watershed" in Australian history
but that this should be just the beginning of the
reconciliation process.
"The shame as far as this country is concerned will not be
cleared up until we bridge the 17-year gap in the life
expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians," said Leibler, who attended the apology
ceremony in Canberra on Wednesday.
Leibler is also the chairman of the world board of trustees
of Keren Hayesod/United Israel Appeal and national chairman
of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
"We've suffered 2,000 years of persecution, and we
understand what it is to be the underdog and to suffer from
disadvantage," he said.
Jews have been at the forefront of pushing for civil rights
in Australia.
In 1965, Jim Spigelman, a cousin of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and now chief
justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, led 30
students on the first Australian Freedom Ride -- a journey
into Outback Australia to protest racial discrimination
against Aborigines, who were not entitled to vote and were
prohibited from swimming pools, pubs and other public
places.
In the country town of Moree, a racist mob attacked the
students and, according to newspaper reports at the time,
Spigelman was smacked to the ground.
The man most Jews and Aborigines hail as having made the
greatest contribution to the cause of Aboriginal rights is
Ron Castan, a Jewish Australian dubbed by Aboriginal leaders
as the "great white warrior."
Castan, who died in 1999, was the lead counsel in the
landmark 1992 Australian High Court "Mabo judgment" -- named
for plaintiff Eddie Mabo -- which overturned the legal
fiction that Australia was "terra nullius," or an
uninhabited land, when white settlers first arrived in 1788.
Aborigines now own more than 10 percent of Australia's land
mass.
In a 1998 speech, Castan implored the government to say it
was sorry, citing Holocaust denial in his argument.
"The refusal to apologize for dispossession, for massacres
and for the theft of children is the Australian equivalent
of the Holocaust deniers -- those who say it never really
happened," Castan charged.
In 1999, Howard proposed a motion expressing "deep and
sincere regret" for the injustices suffered by Aborigines,
but the then-prime minister said Australians "should not be
required to accept guilt and blame" for the policies of
previous governments.
Aborigines number about 450,000 in an Australian population
of 21 million. They are the most disadvantaged group in
Australia, suffering high rates of infant mortality,
unemployment, alcohol abuse and domestic violence.
More than 100 members of the Stolen Generations were present
at Wednesday's ceremony, which was broadcast live on
national television and on giant screens across the country.
"Our faith teaches and emphasizes the universal principles
of coexistence and respect for human dignity and rights,"
Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick, the president of the Organization
of Rabbis of Australia, said in a statement. "It teaches the
need to recognize and rectify any failings we may display in
our interaction between our fellow man. To say 'sorry' in a
meaningful manner goes a long way in ensuring that mistakes
and discrimination will not be repeated."
In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews
were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White
Australia Policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that
restricted non-white immigration to Australia.
The president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry,
Robert Goot, said he is proud of the Jewish community's
ongoing commitment to reconciliation.
Rudd's apology marked "the beginning in a new chapter in the
quest by indigenous Australians for complete equality with
their fellow Australians," Goot observed.
Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence of the Great Synagogue in Sydney said
in a speech on reconciliation last week that Jews must not
"deny nor stand by nor stand silent in the face of the pain
of the Stolen Generations. It is incumbent on us to
acknowledge the wrong, to apologize for the damage caused."
Noting the importance to Jews of the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial in Jerusalem, the British-born rabbi said Australia
should have a similar institution for Aborigines.
"There ought to be a national place where people who have
suffered can come and identify with their past and
understand that the incursion of their culture and heritage
has been recognized and an apology has been made," he said.
Rudd's apology comes more than a decade after a 1997 inquiry
in Australia's parliament, called the "Bringing Them Home"
report, concluded that the Aborigines suffered "an act of
genocide aimed at wiping out indigenous families,
communities and cultures." The report urged the government
to apologize and offer compensation to the victims and their
families.
The apology offers no recourse to compensation, although the
issue is now being hotly debated. It also reignited the
so-called "history wars" between those who believe the
Stolen Generations were kidnapped in a sinister attempt to
breed out their Aboriginality and others who say it was a
benevolent attempt to save half-caste children from the ills
of Aboriginal society.
The unprecedented apology to Aborigines by Australia's
prime minister, which marked a national Yom Kippur of
sorts, was the culmination of a decades-long
reconciliation effort led in large part by Jews.
By Dan Goldberg
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
February 02, 2008
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/200802132008021
3aborigines.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/3xjhh3
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- In what could be described as
Australia's Yom Kippur, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed
Wednesday the one word his predecessors refused to utter to
indigenous Australians: Sorry.
Rudd's Labor Party wrested power from John Howard's Liberals
last November on a platform that included apologizing to the
"Stolen Generations" -- up to 100,000 mostly mixed-blood
Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their
families between 1910 and 1970.
The text of the motion on the Stolen Generations, which won
bipartisan support, acknowledged the "profound grief,
suffering and loss" inflicted on Aborigines.
Australian Jews, some of whom have been at the forefront of
the decades-long reconciliation effort, applauded the
apology.
"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the
sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we
say sorry," Rudd said. "And for the indignity and
degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud
culture, we say sorry."
In a historic speech that drew cheers and tears, Rudd said
he hoped the apology would remove "a great stain from the
nation's soul."
Mark Leibler, the co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, a
national organization that promotes reconciliation, said
Rudd's apology marked a "watershed" in Australian history
but that this should be just the beginning of the
reconciliation process.
"The shame as far as this country is concerned will not be
cleared up until we bridge the 17-year gap in the life
expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians," said Leibler, who attended the apology
ceremony in Canberra on Wednesday.
Leibler is also the chairman of the world board of trustees
of Keren Hayesod/United Israel Appeal and national chairman
of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
"We've suffered 2,000 years of persecution, and we
understand what it is to be the underdog and to suffer from
disadvantage," he said.
Jews have been at the forefront of pushing for civil rights
in Australia.
In 1965, Jim Spigelman, a cousin of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and now chief
justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, led 30
students on the first Australian Freedom Ride -- a journey
into Outback Australia to protest racial discrimination
against Aborigines, who were not entitled to vote and were
prohibited from swimming pools, pubs and other public
places.
In the country town of Moree, a racist mob attacked the
students and, according to newspaper reports at the time,
Spigelman was smacked to the ground.
The man most Jews and Aborigines hail as having made the
greatest contribution to the cause of Aboriginal rights is
Ron Castan, a Jewish Australian dubbed by Aboriginal leaders
as the "great white warrior."
Castan, who died in 1999, was the lead counsel in the
landmark 1992 Australian High Court "Mabo judgment" -- named
for plaintiff Eddie Mabo -- which overturned the legal
fiction that Australia was "terra nullius," or an
uninhabited land, when white settlers first arrived in 1788.
Aborigines now own more than 10 percent of Australia's land
mass.
In a 1998 speech, Castan implored the government to say it
was sorry, citing Holocaust denial in his argument.
"The refusal to apologize for dispossession, for massacres
and for the theft of children is the Australian equivalent
of the Holocaust deniers -- those who say it never really
happened," Castan charged.
In 1999, Howard proposed a motion expressing "deep and
sincere regret" for the injustices suffered by Aborigines,
but the then-prime minister said Australians "should not be
required to accept guilt and blame" for the policies of
previous governments.
Aborigines number about 450,000 in an Australian population
of 21 million. They are the most disadvantaged group in
Australia, suffering high rates of infant mortality,
unemployment, alcohol abuse and domestic violence.
More than 100 members of the Stolen Generations were present
at Wednesday's ceremony, which was broadcast live on
national television and on giant screens across the country.
"Our faith teaches and emphasizes the universal principles
of coexistence and respect for human dignity and rights,"
Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick, the president of the Organization
of Rabbis of Australia, said in a statement. "It teaches the
need to recognize and rectify any failings we may display in
our interaction between our fellow man. To say 'sorry' in a
meaningful manner goes a long way in ensuring that mistakes
and discrimination will not be repeated."
In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews
were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White
Australia Policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that
restricted non-white immigration to Australia.
The president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry,
Robert Goot, said he is proud of the Jewish community's
ongoing commitment to reconciliation.
Rudd's apology marked "the beginning in a new chapter in the
quest by indigenous Australians for complete equality with
their fellow Australians," Goot observed.
Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence of the Great Synagogue in Sydney said
in a speech on reconciliation last week that Jews must not
"deny nor stand by nor stand silent in the face of the pain
of the Stolen Generations. It is incumbent on us to
acknowledge the wrong, to apologize for the damage caused."
Noting the importance to Jews of the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial in Jerusalem, the British-born rabbi said Australia
should have a similar institution for Aborigines.
"There ought to be a national place where people who have
suffered can come and identify with their past and
understand that the incursion of their culture and heritage
has been recognized and an apology has been made," he said.
Rudd's apology comes more than a decade after a 1997 inquiry
in Australia's parliament, called the "Bringing Them Home"
report, concluded that the Aborigines suffered "an act of
genocide aimed at wiping out indigenous families,
communities and cultures." The report urged the government
to apologize and offer compensation to the victims and their
families.
The apology offers no recourse to compensation, although the
issue is now being hotly debated. It also reignited the
so-called "history wars" between those who believe the
Stolen Generations were kidnapped in a sinister attempt to
breed out their Aboriginality and others who say it was a
benevolent attempt to save half-caste children from the ills
of Aboriginal society.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Britain's Encounter with Sharia Law. (Daniel Pipes).
The danger for women's rights in promoting religious laws over or alongside secular ones, must not be under-estimated. Nor should pressures from minority communities and their religious leaderships be under-estimated! Turkey is well aware of the problems and their modern middle-classes are fighting hard to keep the country from descending into an Islamic rather than the secular State which Ataturk fought to establish in the1920s. No wonder Turkey and Israel are on good terms.
Daniel Pipes outlines all the steps in the appeasement of European countries and the UK towards Sharia laws . "Eurabia" may be lost already!
MM.
Britain's Encounter with Islamic Law
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
February 13, 2008
Beneath the deceptively placid surface of everyday life, the British population is engaged in a momentous encounter with Islam. Three developments of the past week, each of them culminating years' long trends – and not just some odd occurrence – exemplify changes now underway.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith describes terrorism as "anti-Islamic."
First, the UK government has decided that terrorism by Muslims in the name of Islam is actually unrelated to Islam, or is even anti-Islamic. This notion took root in 2006 when the Foreign Office, afraid that the term "war on terror" would inflame British Muslims, sought language that upholds "shared values as a means to counter terrorists." By early 2007, the European Union issued a classified handbook that banned jihad, Islamic, and fundamentalist in reference to terrorism, offering instead some "non-offensive" phrases. Last summer, Prime Minister Gordon Brown prohibited his ministers from using the word Muslim in connection with terrorism. In January, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith went further, actually describing terrorism as "anti-Islamic." And last week the Home Office completed the obfuscation by issuing a counter-terrorism phrasebook that instructs civil servants to refer only to violent extremism and criminal murderers, not Islamist extremism and jihadi-fundamentalists.
Second, and again culminating several years of evolution, the British government now recognizes polygamous marriages. It changed the rules in the "Tax Credits (Polygamous Marriages) Regulations 2003": previously, only one wife could inherit assets tax-free from a deceased husband; this legislation permits multiple wives to inherit tax-free, so long as the marriage had been contracted where polygamy is legal, as in Nigeria, Pakistan, or India. In a related matter, the Department for Work and Pensions began issuing extra payments to harems for such benefits as jobseeker allowances, housing subventions, and council tax relief. Last week came news that, after a year-long review, four government departments (Work and Pensions, Treasury, Revenue and Customs, Home Office) concluded that formal recognition of polygamy is "the best possible" option for Her Majesty's Government.
Third, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, endorsed applying portions of the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) in Great Britain. Adopting its civil elements, he explained, "seems unavoidable" because not all British Muslims relate to the existing legal system and applying the Shari‘a would help with their social cohesion. When Muslims can go to an Islamic civil court, they need not face "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty." Continuing to insist on the "legal monopoly" of British common law rather than permit Shari'a, Williams warned, would bring on "a bit of a danger" for the country.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says that Islamic law in Great Britain "seems unavoidable."
Prime Minister Brown immediately slammed Williams' suggestion: Shari‘a law, his office declared, "cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor can the principle of Shari‘a law be used in a civilian court. … the Prime Minister believes British law should apply in this country, based on British values." Criticism of Williams came additionally from all sides of the political spectrum – from Sayeeda Warsi, the Tory (Muslim) shadow minister for community cohesion and social action; Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats; and Gerald Batten of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Secular and Christian groups opposed Williams. So did Trevor Phillips, head of the equality commission. The Anglican church in Australia denounced his proposal, along with leading members of his own church, including his predecessor, Lord Carey. Melanie Phillips called his argument "quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong." The Sun newspaper editorialized that "It's easy to dismiss Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as a silly old goat. In fact he's a dangerous threat to our nation." It concluded acerbically that "The Archbishop of Canterbury is in the wrong church."
Although widely denounced (and in danger of losing his job), Williams may be right about the Shari‘a being unavoidable, for it is already getting entrenched in the West. A Dutch justice minister announced that "if two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Shari‘a tomorrow, then the possibility should exist." A German judge referred to the Koran in a routine divorce case. A parallel Somali gar courts system already exists in Britain.
These developments suggest that British appeasement concerning the war on terror, the nature of the family, and the rule of law are part of a larger pattern. Even more than the security threat posed by Islamist violence, these trends are challenging and perhaps will change the very nature of Western life.
Other items in category Dhimmitude
Other items in category Islamic law (Shari‘a)
Other items in category Muslims in the United Kingdom
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You may freely post or forward this text, but on condition that you send it as an integral whole, along with complete information about its author, date, publication, and original URL.
Daniel Pipes outlines all the steps in the appeasement of European countries and the UK towards Sharia laws . "Eurabia" may be lost already!
MM.
Britain's Encounter with Islamic Law
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
February 13, 2008
Beneath the deceptively placid surface of everyday life, the British population is engaged in a momentous encounter with Islam. Three developments of the past week, each of them culminating years' long trends – and not just some odd occurrence – exemplify changes now underway.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith describes terrorism as "anti-Islamic."
First, the UK government has decided that terrorism by Muslims in the name of Islam is actually unrelated to Islam, or is even anti-Islamic. This notion took root in 2006 when the Foreign Office, afraid that the term "war on terror" would inflame British Muslims, sought language that upholds "shared values as a means to counter terrorists." By early 2007, the European Union issued a classified handbook that banned jihad, Islamic, and fundamentalist in reference to terrorism, offering instead some "non-offensive" phrases. Last summer, Prime Minister Gordon Brown prohibited his ministers from using the word Muslim in connection with terrorism. In January, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith went further, actually describing terrorism as "anti-Islamic." And last week the Home Office completed the obfuscation by issuing a counter-terrorism phrasebook that instructs civil servants to refer only to violent extremism and criminal murderers, not Islamist extremism and jihadi-fundamentalists.
Second, and again culminating several years of evolution, the British government now recognizes polygamous marriages. It changed the rules in the "Tax Credits (Polygamous Marriages) Regulations 2003": previously, only one wife could inherit assets tax-free from a deceased husband; this legislation permits multiple wives to inherit tax-free, so long as the marriage had been contracted where polygamy is legal, as in Nigeria, Pakistan, or India. In a related matter, the Department for Work and Pensions began issuing extra payments to harems for such benefits as jobseeker allowances, housing subventions, and council tax relief. Last week came news that, after a year-long review, four government departments (Work and Pensions, Treasury, Revenue and Customs, Home Office) concluded that formal recognition of polygamy is "the best possible" option for Her Majesty's Government.
Third, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, endorsed applying portions of the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) in Great Britain. Adopting its civil elements, he explained, "seems unavoidable" because not all British Muslims relate to the existing legal system and applying the Shari‘a would help with their social cohesion. When Muslims can go to an Islamic civil court, they need not face "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty." Continuing to insist on the "legal monopoly" of British common law rather than permit Shari'a, Williams warned, would bring on "a bit of a danger" for the country.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says that Islamic law in Great Britain "seems unavoidable."
Prime Minister Brown immediately slammed Williams' suggestion: Shari‘a law, his office declared, "cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor can the principle of Shari‘a law be used in a civilian court. … the Prime Minister believes British law should apply in this country, based on British values." Criticism of Williams came additionally from all sides of the political spectrum – from Sayeeda Warsi, the Tory (Muslim) shadow minister for community cohesion and social action; Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats; and Gerald Batten of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Secular and Christian groups opposed Williams. So did Trevor Phillips, head of the equality commission. The Anglican church in Australia denounced his proposal, along with leading members of his own church, including his predecessor, Lord Carey. Melanie Phillips called his argument "quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong." The Sun newspaper editorialized that "It's easy to dismiss Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as a silly old goat. In fact he's a dangerous threat to our nation." It concluded acerbically that "The Archbishop of Canterbury is in the wrong church."
Although widely denounced (and in danger of losing his job), Williams may be right about the Shari‘a being unavoidable, for it is already getting entrenched in the West. A Dutch justice minister announced that "if two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Shari‘a tomorrow, then the possibility should exist." A German judge referred to the Koran in a routine divorce case. A parallel Somali gar courts system already exists in Britain.
These developments suggest that British appeasement concerning the war on terror, the nature of the family, and the rule of law are part of a larger pattern. Even more than the security threat posed by Islamist violence, these trends are challenging and perhaps will change the very nature of Western life.
Other items in category Dhimmitude
Other items in category Islamic law (Shari‘a)
Other items in category Muslims in the United Kingdom
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Sharia Laws in Europe? (Asia Times)
Europe in the House of war
by Spengler
Tuesday February 12, 2008
from the Asia Times Online
Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.
Not since World War II has British opinion been provoked to the present level of outrage. Writing in the Times of London, the editor of the London Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of England. Times columnist Minette Marin accuses the archbishop of treason.
Coercion in the Muslim communities of Europe is so commonplace that duly-constituted governments there no longer wield a monopoly of violence. Behind the law there stands the right of the state to inflict violence, and the legitimacy of states rests on what German political economist and sociologist Max Weber once called "the monopoly of violence". Once this right is conceded to private groups, the legitimacy of government crumbles. No one appreciates this more than the British, whose tradition of protecting individual rights under law is the oldest and strongest in the West, excepting the United States, which inherited English Common Law.
By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it, they understand that a limit has been reached.
Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence.
The erring spiritual leader of the Church of England persuades me that Europe's Man of Destiny is the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for two years has lived in hiding under constant police protection for the crime of criticizing Islam. It is a measure of the degradation of Europe's body politic that is only one means to expose the motives of Williams and his ilk, namely to draw fire from Muslims who overtly threaten violence against any public figure who questions the authority of Islam.
Contrary to his critics, Wilders is not provoking violence. The violence is already there, a matter of workaday fact in Muslim enclaves throughout Europe. In an act of great personal courage, Wilders is enticing violent elements out of the tall grass in order to expose them to public opprobrium.
It is triply hypocritical when Williams, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, speaks of sharia law as if it were a private matter of conscience between consenting parties, rather like the use of rabbinical courts by Orthodox Jews. First, he admits outright that Muslim communities combine to coerce women but pretends that this is not relevant to sharia. Secondly, he offers concessions to sharia in the first place to appease the threat of social violence on the part of Muslims. As a final insult to conscience, he cites as his authority on sharia Professor Tariq Ramadan, who notoriously refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery, precisely because Muslim legal rulings specifically endorse such violence.
There is overwhelming documentation that Muslim entities in Britain wield the threat and fact of violence against dissenters, particularly the most vulnerable, namely young women. The fact is so scandalous that in his February 7 address, Williams felt compelled to address it directly, in order to insist that the subject fell entirely outside the issue of law - a conclusion he must know to be false.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester, warned on January 7 of the spread of "no-go" zones in England that non-Muslims dare not enter. As a result, Nazir-Ali has received death threats against himself and his family and requires protection.
The British authorities will take measures to protect bishops from the threat of violence, but they leave to their own devices thousands of Muslim women. According to a February 2008 report by the Center for Social Cohesion, Islamist groups and individuals frequently link ideas of honor with the welfare of the Muslim world. By using words such as Ird and Namus in a political context, they imply that by protecting the chastity of Muslim women, the security and collective honor of Islam and Muslim states and individuals can also be defended. This politicization of women's bodies helps create an environment where the abuse and control of women is tolerated.
Muslim communities, the report documents, terrorize women who refuse arranged marriages or otherwise break with social norms:
Almost all refuges dealing with Asian women report on the existence of informal networks which exist to track down and punish - with death if necessary - women who are perceived as bringing shame on their family and community. In many cases, women fleeing domestic violence or forced marriages have been deliberately returned to their homes or betrayed to their families by policemen, councilors and civil servants of immigrant origin. Muslim coercion against women extends to psychiatric hospitals, the Times of London's religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill reported on February 7 (cited in Rod Dreher's indispensable Crunchy Con blog, .) Glenhill quoted a women's rights advocate as follows:
The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing Western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for assessment to a hospital. The GP [general practitioner] referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned (committed to a psychiatric ward). She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?
That brings us back to the archbishop of Canterbury, who acknowledged the fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to change the subject:
Recognition of "supplementary jurisdiction" in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women. The "forced marriage" question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue.
That makes a lurid lie out of Williams' bland assertion that adherence to sharia "assumes the voluntary consent or submission of the believer":
Sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God ... while such universal claims are not open for re-negotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the umma. Williams was lying. His authority in matters of sharia is Ramadan, whom the Department of Homeland Security prevented from accepting an American university appointment. Ramadan set off a scandal In 2003 when he refused to condemn violence against women (calling instead for a "moratorium," that is, a temporary cessation) precisely because Islamic law sanctions such violence. The Westernized Ramadan will twist himself into a pretzel rather than disagree with Islamic jurisprudence.
Six million Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister. As quoted by Paul Berman in The New Republic of June 4, 2007, the transcript reads as follows, Ramadan refuses outright to say that he is against stoning adulteresses:
Sarkozy: A moratorium ... Mr Ramadan, are you serious?
Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.
Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?
Ramadan: No, no, wait ... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community ... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand ...
Sarkozy: But, Mr Ramadan ...
Ramadan: Let me finish.
Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good ... But that's monstrous - to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!
Ramadan: Mr Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable - that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world ... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."
Sarkozy: Mr Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.
"You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things" such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to Muslim communities.
That is Williams' source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any meaning at all.
Unlike his Church of England colleague, Bishop Nazir-Ali, Williams does not require a security detail. But it appears that every European journalist and politician who attacks Islam requires personal protection, starting with the stout-hearted Dutchman Wilders. In the cited New Republic report on Tariq Ramadan, Paul Berman reported:
When I met Hirsi Ali at a conference in Sweden last year, she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. Buruma himself mentions in Murder in Amsterdam that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination.
I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in Il Corriere della Sera - and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding ...
So Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of the European intelligentsia - its Muslim wing especially - who survive only because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe during the last 60 years.
Postscript: I had not intended to mention James J Sheehan's silly book on Europe's postwar conversion to pacifism, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, the object of many glowing reviews by soft-headed liberals, most recently by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the February 8 New York Times. Sheehan admires modern Europe for abandoning war; it does not occur to him that Europe also has abandoned being European. Abysmal non-immigrant fertility rates condemn most of Europe's peoples to effective extinction during the next century or two. It deserves a one-word review by Homer Simpson, namely, "Doh." If there are to be no future generations, what soldier will lay down his life for them? The word "demographics" does not appear once in Sheehan's plodding account, which liberal reviewers praised as if it were a roadmap to the millennium.
Sheehan is woefully misguided. Europe may not have war, but it already has violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.
# reads: 125
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original piece is http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB12Aa02.html
I think you'll find that the article loads faster (and all on one page) if you use the ICJS Link to Europe in the house of War.
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=3828&ICJS=139&article=1442
by Spengler
Tuesday February 12, 2008
from the Asia Times Online
Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.
Not since World War II has British opinion been provoked to the present level of outrage. Writing in the Times of London, the editor of the London Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of England. Times columnist Minette Marin accuses the archbishop of treason.
Coercion in the Muslim communities of Europe is so commonplace that duly-constituted governments there no longer wield a monopoly of violence. Behind the law there stands the right of the state to inflict violence, and the legitimacy of states rests on what German political economist and sociologist Max Weber once called "the monopoly of violence". Once this right is conceded to private groups, the legitimacy of government crumbles. No one appreciates this more than the British, whose tradition of protecting individual rights under law is the oldest and strongest in the West, excepting the United States, which inherited English Common Law.
By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it, they understand that a limit has been reached.
Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence.
The erring spiritual leader of the Church of England persuades me that Europe's Man of Destiny is the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for two years has lived in hiding under constant police protection for the crime of criticizing Islam. It is a measure of the degradation of Europe's body politic that is only one means to expose the motives of Williams and his ilk, namely to draw fire from Muslims who overtly threaten violence against any public figure who questions the authority of Islam.
Contrary to his critics, Wilders is not provoking violence. The violence is already there, a matter of workaday fact in Muslim enclaves throughout Europe. In an act of great personal courage, Wilders is enticing violent elements out of the tall grass in order to expose them to public opprobrium.
It is triply hypocritical when Williams, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, speaks of sharia law as if it were a private matter of conscience between consenting parties, rather like the use of rabbinical courts by Orthodox Jews. First, he admits outright that Muslim communities combine to coerce women but pretends that this is not relevant to sharia. Secondly, he offers concessions to sharia in the first place to appease the threat of social violence on the part of Muslims. As a final insult to conscience, he cites as his authority on sharia Professor Tariq Ramadan, who notoriously refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery, precisely because Muslim legal rulings specifically endorse such violence.
There is overwhelming documentation that Muslim entities in Britain wield the threat and fact of violence against dissenters, particularly the most vulnerable, namely young women. The fact is so scandalous that in his February 7 address, Williams felt compelled to address it directly, in order to insist that the subject fell entirely outside the issue of law - a conclusion he must know to be false.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester, warned on January 7 of the spread of "no-go" zones in England that non-Muslims dare not enter. As a result, Nazir-Ali has received death threats against himself and his family and requires protection.
The British authorities will take measures to protect bishops from the threat of violence, but they leave to their own devices thousands of Muslim women. According to a February 2008 report by the Center for Social Cohesion, Islamist groups and individuals frequently link ideas of honor with the welfare of the Muslim world. By using words such as Ird and Namus in a political context, they imply that by protecting the chastity of Muslim women, the security and collective honor of Islam and Muslim states and individuals can also be defended. This politicization of women's bodies helps create an environment where the abuse and control of women is tolerated.
Muslim communities, the report documents, terrorize women who refuse arranged marriages or otherwise break with social norms:
Almost all refuges dealing with Asian women report on the existence of informal networks which exist to track down and punish - with death if necessary - women who are perceived as bringing shame on their family and community. In many cases, women fleeing domestic violence or forced marriages have been deliberately returned to their homes or betrayed to their families by policemen, councilors and civil servants of immigrant origin. Muslim coercion against women extends to psychiatric hospitals, the Times of London's religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill reported on February 7 (cited in Rod Dreher's indispensable Crunchy Con blog, .) Glenhill quoted a women's rights advocate as follows:
The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing Western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for assessment to a hospital. The GP [general practitioner] referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned (committed to a psychiatric ward). She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?
That brings us back to the archbishop of Canterbury, who acknowledged the fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to change the subject:
Recognition of "supplementary jurisdiction" in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women. The "forced marriage" question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue.
That makes a lurid lie out of Williams' bland assertion that adherence to sharia "assumes the voluntary consent or submission of the believer":
Sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God ... while such universal claims are not open for re-negotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the umma. Williams was lying. His authority in matters of sharia is Ramadan, whom the Department of Homeland Security prevented from accepting an American university appointment. Ramadan set off a scandal In 2003 when he refused to condemn violence against women (calling instead for a "moratorium," that is, a temporary cessation) precisely because Islamic law sanctions such violence. The Westernized Ramadan will twist himself into a pretzel rather than disagree with Islamic jurisprudence.
Six million Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister. As quoted by Paul Berman in The New Republic of June 4, 2007, the transcript reads as follows, Ramadan refuses outright to say that he is against stoning adulteresses:
Sarkozy: A moratorium ... Mr Ramadan, are you serious?
Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.
Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?
Ramadan: No, no, wait ... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community ... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand ...
Sarkozy: But, Mr Ramadan ...
Ramadan: Let me finish.
Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good ... But that's monstrous - to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!
Ramadan: Mr Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable - that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world ... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."
Sarkozy: Mr Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.
"You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things" such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to Muslim communities.
That is Williams' source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any meaning at all.
Unlike his Church of England colleague, Bishop Nazir-Ali, Williams does not require a security detail. But it appears that every European journalist and politician who attacks Islam requires personal protection, starting with the stout-hearted Dutchman Wilders. In the cited New Republic report on Tariq Ramadan, Paul Berman reported:
When I met Hirsi Ali at a conference in Sweden last year, she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. Buruma himself mentions in Murder in Amsterdam that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination.
I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in Il Corriere della Sera - and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding ...
So Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of the European intelligentsia - its Muslim wing especially - who survive only because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe during the last 60 years.
Postscript: I had not intended to mention James J Sheehan's silly book on Europe's postwar conversion to pacifism, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, the object of many glowing reviews by soft-headed liberals, most recently by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the February 8 New York Times. Sheehan admires modern Europe for abandoning war; it does not occur to him that Europe also has abandoned being European. Abysmal non-immigrant fertility rates condemn most of Europe's peoples to effective extinction during the next century or two. It deserves a one-word review by Homer Simpson, namely, "Doh." If there are to be no future generations, what soldier will lay down his life for them? The word "demographics" does not appear once in Sheehan's plodding account, which liberal reviewers praised as if it were a roadmap to the millennium.
Sheehan is woefully misguided. Europe may not have war, but it already has violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.
# reads: 125
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original piece is http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB12Aa02.html
I think you'll find that the article loads faster (and all on one page) if you use the ICJS Link to Europe in the house of War.
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=3828&ICJS=139&article=1442
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Sharia Law and the Anglican Archbishop
Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 7:29 am
The Archbishop's speech - (explained) by Melanie Phillips --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most bizarre aspect of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s extraordinary declaration today of abject religious and cultural surrender to Islam was the extreme lengths to which he went to avoid precisely the furore which has now erupted — and then proceeded dramatically to depart from his own strategy.
In a major lecture this evening, which I attended, he argued for an accommodation between English law and Islamic sharia law: an end to the ‘legal monopoly’ of English law, in order to allow people to choose between Islamic and English law for the resolution of disputes and the administration of marriage, divorce, inheritance and other matters. This incendiary proposition was nevertheless expressed in the lecture in language so convoluted and ambiguous — ‘nuanced’ is, I think, the current expression of choice — that many in the audience admitted they didn’t have a clue what on earth he was actually saying. So nervous was Lambeth Palace, however, that the press would sensationalise his remarks, it tried to control the reaction by restricting embargoed copies of the text so that few papers would be able to report the lecture — and instead giving an exclusive interview with Dr Williams to BBC Radio Four’s World at One.
Boy, was that ever a mistake. For in that interview, Dr Williams for some reason abandoned nuance altogether and left no room for doubt about what he was saying. Which was, in short, that although the
sensational reporting of opinion polls recording large numbers of British Muslims who want to live in the UK under Islamic sharia law clouds the issue, the adoption of sharia law in the UK seems
unavoidable and indeed desirable, since Muslims should not have to choose between the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty. So although nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that's sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states,
Muslims should be able to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a sharia court. Such courts should therefore be incorporated into the British legal system as a constructive accommodation with Islam.
The result of this pre-emptive interview was that, hours before he stood up to deliver his lecture to a packed audience of more than 1000 people in the Royal Courts of Justice, he had achieved the remarkable feat of uniting the leadership of the entire political class and more — even the leader of the LibDems! — in a firestorm of condemnation of his astonishing abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of a democratic nation state: equality before the law.
His argument was quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong. The European Court of Human Rights has said that sharia law is not compatible with democracy. Dr Williams himself accepts its principles are pre-modern and oppressive. Yet, arguing disingenuously that there is no single code that can be identified as ‘the’ sharia but ignoring what inevitably follows — that one cannot therefore tell whether one will end up with the death-to-apostates code or one that is relatively benign (whatever that might mean in this context) — he nevertheless argued that the British state should recognise sharia law as of equal status to English law. On World at One, he said: An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.
The implications of this are simply staggering. One law for all is the very basis of legal and social justice and is the glue that binds a society together. Law is the expression of a society’s cultural identity. If there is no one law, there is no one national identity and therefore no society but instead a set of warring fiefdoms with their own separate jurisdictions. To enable people to chop and choose between two jurisdictions would destroy the unitary nature of British society and fragment the country. But does Dr Williams even understand what he himself has said? For after his lecture, he insisted that he was
not talking about parallel systems but how the law accommodates Muslim practice.
Yet he had specifically said people should be able to choose which system they wanted. Hello? Maybe Dr Williams himself gets lost in the impenetrable thicket of his own verbiage.
Either way, his proposal would also mean that Britain would simply abandon its female Muslim citizens whose parlous position in respect of forced marriages, honour killings and all the other horrors that follow from their second-class religious status would be institutionalised by giving sharia law official recognition. Dr Williams says such women should still retain the right of appeal to the English courts if their human rights were breached under sharia. What absurdity is this? It is the cultural assumptions which flow from sharia which lead to the oppression of Muslim women. How is the right of appeal to human rights law going to help women who are beaten and killed by men who do it in the name of religion? In order to protect our female Muslim citizens, we need to remove from them the yoke of sharia law, not institutionalise it with the seal of official approval.
Dr Williams appears to believe that English law would somehow absorb sharia. In fact, it would be absorbed by it for the simple reason that sharia brooks no alternative authority. But the yet more fundamental question is why he thinks we need to find any accommodation with sharia at all. He said
there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.
Well no, actually there isn’t any uncertainty at all. The rules of our society have always been entirely clear: one law for all. The only challenge to that has come from those Muslims who want to destroy that foundational precept and along with it British culture and western society. And now the head of the Anglican church has joined them in wanting to tear up the rules governing the position of minorities which have been perfectly clear ever since the Enlightenment. These rules hold that religious minorities can practise their faith and religious precepts but under the over-arching umbrella of the law of the land. That means where there is a conflict between minority precepts and the law, the minority gives way. While minorities should be given the freedom to practise their religion, they must not seek to impose their own laws and customs on the majority. That is how overlapping identities can be accommodated; it is how a majority culture can acknowledge the value of other cultures without destroying itself and a nation’s identity; it is the very essence of a tolerant, decent, liberal pluralist society.
Every minority until now has lived perfectly happily under that formulation. What we are now facing is a push by certain British Muslims, backed up by Islamist violence and intimidation, to change the rules of the national cultural game. There is only one proper response to that: to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to sharia law, that British society will not dilute the legal principles which govern all its citizens, and that Muslims must observe the same rules that govern every other minority in this country.
But then, Dr Williams purports not to understand that this indeed the case. For he used Britain’s Jewish community to underpin his claim that there was nothing particularly untoward about multiple jurisdictions — but in the process significantly misrepresented Jewish practice to imply, entirely falsely, that British Jews aren't bound by the law of the land but get an exemption. He drew an analogy between Islamic sharia courts and Jewish religious courts. But there is an absolutely crucial difference between them.
Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and they are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law; for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else. If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law — and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged — that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.
After the lecture, I challenged Dr Williams on this point, and said he was wrong to claim that the state had delegated legal authority to Jewish religious courts. Jewish religious law was not recognised by or incorporated into English law, and so I wondered why he thought that Islam alone should be able to gain special status in opposition to the legal and cultural norms of this country. He replied:
I didn’t say that Jewish law had been incorporated; I know very well that it is not. But it has established recognised practices with regard to marriage and divorce which the law doesn’t seek to override or displace. I used the analogy not to claim privileged access for Islam but to show where a parallel system of religious law was embedded in our social practice.
But in his lecture he had in fact spoken of whether there should be …a delegation [from the law of the land] of certain functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice’. On the contrary: it is not relevant to orthodox Jewish practice, because the state does not delegate any legal functions to Jewish law at all.
What Dr Williams has effectively said is that a majority culture has no right to exist and hold the ring for equal citizenship among inhabitants from different cultures:
The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities. If therefore we really don’t have the right to uphold the primacy of our own western liberal and Christian laws and traditions, the way is open for fragmentation and eventual rule by the religious culture which exercises the strongest muscle. Which is Islam.
People often say the church is now irrelevant. On the contrary — without a strong religious core providing the moral, ethical and cultural ballast, the society it has been instrumental in forming becomes intensely vulnerable to collapse and colonisation. The defence mounted by politicians becomes an empty shell — particularly when we can see they are already running scared and selling the cultural pass with measures such as sharia finance or welfare benefits for polygamous wives.
Is this really the way the history of a nation, which has for the last thousand years fought off invasion and defended its independence and the liberty it created for the world, finally ends — with the head of its established church on his knees before terror?
The Archbishop's speech - (explained) by Melanie Phillips --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most bizarre aspect of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s extraordinary declaration today of abject religious and cultural surrender to Islam was the extreme lengths to which he went to avoid precisely the furore which has now erupted — and then proceeded dramatically to depart from his own strategy.
In a major lecture this evening, which I attended, he argued for an accommodation between English law and Islamic sharia law: an end to the ‘legal monopoly’ of English law, in order to allow people to choose between Islamic and English law for the resolution of disputes and the administration of marriage, divorce, inheritance and other matters. This incendiary proposition was nevertheless expressed in the lecture in language so convoluted and ambiguous — ‘nuanced’ is, I think, the current expression of choice — that many in the audience admitted they didn’t have a clue what on earth he was actually saying. So nervous was Lambeth Palace, however, that the press would sensationalise his remarks, it tried to control the reaction by restricting embargoed copies of the text so that few papers would be able to report the lecture — and instead giving an exclusive interview with Dr Williams to BBC Radio Four’s World at One.
Boy, was that ever a mistake. For in that interview, Dr Williams for some reason abandoned nuance altogether and left no room for doubt about what he was saying. Which was, in short, that although the
sensational reporting of opinion polls recording large numbers of British Muslims who want to live in the UK under Islamic sharia law clouds the issue, the adoption of sharia law in the UK seems
unavoidable and indeed desirable, since Muslims should not have to choose between the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty. So although nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that's sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states,
Muslims should be able to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a sharia court. Such courts should therefore be incorporated into the British legal system as a constructive accommodation with Islam.
The result of this pre-emptive interview was that, hours before he stood up to deliver his lecture to a packed audience of more than 1000 people in the Royal Courts of Justice, he had achieved the remarkable feat of uniting the leadership of the entire political class and more — even the leader of the LibDems! — in a firestorm of condemnation of his astonishing abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of a democratic nation state: equality before the law.
His argument was quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong. The European Court of Human Rights has said that sharia law is not compatible with democracy. Dr Williams himself accepts its principles are pre-modern and oppressive. Yet, arguing disingenuously that there is no single code that can be identified as ‘the’ sharia but ignoring what inevitably follows — that one cannot therefore tell whether one will end up with the death-to-apostates code or one that is relatively benign (whatever that might mean in this context) — he nevertheless argued that the British state should recognise sharia law as of equal status to English law. On World at One, he said: An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.
The implications of this are simply staggering. One law for all is the very basis of legal and social justice and is the glue that binds a society together. Law is the expression of a society’s cultural identity. If there is no one law, there is no one national identity and therefore no society but instead a set of warring fiefdoms with their own separate jurisdictions. To enable people to chop and choose between two jurisdictions would destroy the unitary nature of British society and fragment the country. But does Dr Williams even understand what he himself has said? For after his lecture, he insisted that he was
not talking about parallel systems but how the law accommodates Muslim practice.
Yet he had specifically said people should be able to choose which system they wanted. Hello? Maybe Dr Williams himself gets lost in the impenetrable thicket of his own verbiage.
Either way, his proposal would also mean that Britain would simply abandon its female Muslim citizens whose parlous position in respect of forced marriages, honour killings and all the other horrors that follow from their second-class religious status would be institutionalised by giving sharia law official recognition. Dr Williams says such women should still retain the right of appeal to the English courts if their human rights were breached under sharia. What absurdity is this? It is the cultural assumptions which flow from sharia which lead to the oppression of Muslim women. How is the right of appeal to human rights law going to help women who are beaten and killed by men who do it in the name of religion? In order to protect our female Muslim citizens, we need to remove from them the yoke of sharia law, not institutionalise it with the seal of official approval.
Dr Williams appears to believe that English law would somehow absorb sharia. In fact, it would be absorbed by it for the simple reason that sharia brooks no alternative authority. But the yet more fundamental question is why he thinks we need to find any accommodation with sharia at all. He said
there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.
Well no, actually there isn’t any uncertainty at all. The rules of our society have always been entirely clear: one law for all. The only challenge to that has come from those Muslims who want to destroy that foundational precept and along with it British culture and western society. And now the head of the Anglican church has joined them in wanting to tear up the rules governing the position of minorities which have been perfectly clear ever since the Enlightenment. These rules hold that religious minorities can practise their faith and religious precepts but under the over-arching umbrella of the law of the land. That means where there is a conflict between minority precepts and the law, the minority gives way. While minorities should be given the freedom to practise their religion, they must not seek to impose their own laws and customs on the majority. That is how overlapping identities can be accommodated; it is how a majority culture can acknowledge the value of other cultures without destroying itself and a nation’s identity; it is the very essence of a tolerant, decent, liberal pluralist society.
Every minority until now has lived perfectly happily under that formulation. What we are now facing is a push by certain British Muslims, backed up by Islamist violence and intimidation, to change the rules of the national cultural game. There is only one proper response to that: to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to sharia law, that British society will not dilute the legal principles which govern all its citizens, and that Muslims must observe the same rules that govern every other minority in this country.
But then, Dr Williams purports not to understand that this indeed the case. For he used Britain’s Jewish community to underpin his claim that there was nothing particularly untoward about multiple jurisdictions — but in the process significantly misrepresented Jewish practice to imply, entirely falsely, that British Jews aren't bound by the law of the land but get an exemption. He drew an analogy between Islamic sharia courts and Jewish religious courts. But there is an absolutely crucial difference between them.
Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and they are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law; for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else. If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law — and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged — that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.
After the lecture, I challenged Dr Williams on this point, and said he was wrong to claim that the state had delegated legal authority to Jewish religious courts. Jewish religious law was not recognised by or incorporated into English law, and so I wondered why he thought that Islam alone should be able to gain special status in opposition to the legal and cultural norms of this country. He replied:
I didn’t say that Jewish law had been incorporated; I know very well that it is not. But it has established recognised practices with regard to marriage and divorce which the law doesn’t seek to override or displace. I used the analogy not to claim privileged access for Islam but to show where a parallel system of religious law was embedded in our social practice.
But in his lecture he had in fact spoken of whether there should be …a delegation [from the law of the land] of certain functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice’. On the contrary: it is not relevant to orthodox Jewish practice, because the state does not delegate any legal functions to Jewish law at all.
What Dr Williams has effectively said is that a majority culture has no right to exist and hold the ring for equal citizenship among inhabitants from different cultures:
The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities. If therefore we really don’t have the right to uphold the primacy of our own western liberal and Christian laws and traditions, the way is open for fragmentation and eventual rule by the religious culture which exercises the strongest muscle. Which is Islam.
People often say the church is now irrelevant. On the contrary — without a strong religious core providing the moral, ethical and cultural ballast, the society it has been instrumental in forming becomes intensely vulnerable to collapse and colonisation. The defence mounted by politicians becomes an empty shell — particularly when we can see they are already running scared and selling the cultural pass with measures such as sharia finance or welfare benefits for polygamous wives.
Is this really the way the history of a nation, which has for the last thousand years fought off invasion and defended its independence and the liberty it created for the world, finally ends — with the head of its established church on his knees before terror?
Myths and facts about the Palestinian Arabs who fled from Palestine,- 1948.
WHY MOST ARABS FLED PALESTINE IN 1948
Myth: Arabs were expelled from Palestine in 1948.
Fact: Arab and independent sources document that Arab leaders urged Palestinians to leave.
Here are some relevant quotes and their sources:
n "The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem."
Source: Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph September 6, 1948. (same appeared in The London Telegraph, August 1948)
n "The most potent factor [in the flight of Palestinians] was the announcements made over the air by the Arab-Palestinian Higher Executive, urging all Haifa Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
Source: London Economist October 2, 1948
n "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."
Source: Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949
n "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."
Source: Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948, (quoted in Battleground by Samuel Katz).
n "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."
Source: Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, page 25
n "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war."
Source: General John Glubb "Pasha," The London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948
n "The Arabs of Haifa fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel."
Source: Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949
n Sir John Troutbeck, British Middle East Office in Cairo, noted in cables to superiors (1948-49) that the refugees (in Gaza) have no bitterness against Jews, but harbor intense hatred toward Egyptians: "They say 'we know who our enemies are (referring to the Egyptians)', declaring that their Arab brethren persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over." "The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees."
Source: The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, February 19, 1949.
n "The 15th May, 1948, arrived ... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead."
Source: The Cairo daily Akhbar el Yom, October 12, 1963
n "Israelis argue that the Arab states encouraged the Palestinians to flee. And, in fact, Arabs still living in Israel recall being urged to evacuate Haifa by Arab military commanders who wanted to bomb the city."
Source: Newsweek, January 20, 1963
n "Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor nor conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their honor? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it."
Source: The Beirut Muslim weekly Kul-Shay, August 19, 1951
n "The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."
Source: The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.
n "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."
Source: A refugee quoted in Al Difaa (Jordan) September 6, 1954
n In listing the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948, Khaled al-Azm (Syrian Prime Minister) notes that "Since 1948, it is we who have demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging...we have participated in lowering their morale and social level...Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson and throwing stones upon men, women and children...all this in the service of political purposes..."
Source: Khaled el-Azm, Syrian prime minister after the 1948 War, in his 1972 memoirs, published in 1973.
n "The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable."
Source: Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra ("What We Have Learned and What We Should Do"), Beirut, March 1976.
n "Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003):
Source: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe."
Source of the above: BIG LIES: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, by David MEIR-LEVI
SZC NSW Hasbara Service
It's over a year since Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were taken hostage. Please keep them in your thoughts.
Celebrating 60 years of Israeli statehood
Myth: Arabs were expelled from Palestine in 1948.
Fact: Arab and independent sources document that Arab leaders urged Palestinians to leave.
Here are some relevant quotes and their sources:
n "The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem."
Source: Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph September 6, 1948. (same appeared in The London Telegraph, August 1948)
n "The most potent factor [in the flight of Palestinians] was the announcements made over the air by the Arab-Palestinian Higher Executive, urging all Haifa Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
Source: London Economist October 2, 1948
n "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."
Source: Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949
n "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."
Source: Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948, (quoted in Battleground by Samuel Katz).
n "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."
Source: Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, page 25
n "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war."
Source: General John Glubb "Pasha," The London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948
n "The Arabs of Haifa fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel."
Source: Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949
n Sir John Troutbeck, British Middle East Office in Cairo, noted in cables to superiors (1948-49) that the refugees (in Gaza) have no bitterness against Jews, but harbor intense hatred toward Egyptians: "They say 'we know who our enemies are (referring to the Egyptians)', declaring that their Arab brethren persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over." "The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees."
Source: The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, February 19, 1949.
n "The 15th May, 1948, arrived ... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead."
Source: The Cairo daily Akhbar el Yom, October 12, 1963
n "Israelis argue that the Arab states encouraged the Palestinians to flee. And, in fact, Arabs still living in Israel recall being urged to evacuate Haifa by Arab military commanders who wanted to bomb the city."
Source: Newsweek, January 20, 1963
n "Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor nor conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their honor? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it."
Source: The Beirut Muslim weekly Kul-Shay, August 19, 1951
n "The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."
Source: The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.
n "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."
Source: A refugee quoted in Al Difaa (Jordan) September 6, 1954
n In listing the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948, Khaled al-Azm (Syrian Prime Minister) notes that "Since 1948, it is we who have demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging...we have participated in lowering their morale and social level...Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson and throwing stones upon men, women and children...all this in the service of political purposes..."
Source: Khaled el-Azm, Syrian prime minister after the 1948 War, in his 1972 memoirs, published in 1973.
n "The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable."
Source: Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra ("What We Have Learned and What We Should Do"), Beirut, March 1976.
n "Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003):
Source: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe."
Source of the above: BIG LIES: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, by David MEIR-LEVI
SZC NSW Hasbara Service
It's over a year since Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were taken hostage. Please keep them in your thoughts.
Celebrating 60 years of Israeli statehood
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