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Rains Soak Pilgrims At Islam's Hajj (PHOTOS)

2009-11-25T12:30:16Z

(AP) JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- The heaviest rain to hit Islam's annual hajj pilgrimage in years soaked the faithful and flooded the road to Mecca, snarling traffic as millions of Muslims headed for the holy sites. The downpours add an extra hazard on top of intense concerns about the spread of swine flu.

Pilgrims in white robes holding umbrellas, some wearing face masks for fear of the flu, circled the black cube-shaped Kaaba in Mecca, the opening rite for the hajj.

But the shrine -- Islam's holiest site -- and the nearby, rain-soaked streets did not see the usual massive, pushing crowds, because many tried to stay inside nearby hotels or were caught in the traffic jams heading into the city.

Mecca and the nearby Red Sea coastal city of Jiddah often see heavy rains during the winter months, and Wednesday's were unusually strong, swamping Jiddah with 2.76 inches of rain, more than it gets in a year on average, according to weather officials.

They were the heaviest in years to coincide with the four-day hajj. Already jammed traffic was worsened -- with a jam of cars as long as 20 miles (35 kilometers) on the partially closed road from Jiddah to Mecca, and some pilgrims and journalists were trapped in Jiddah.

The rains could also exacerbate the hajj's perennial dangers. The rites -- a lifetime dream for Muslims, who come to cleanse their sins -- are always a logistical nightmare, as a population the size of a small city moves between Mecca and holy sites in the nearby desert over the course of four days.

In the past, the rites have been plagued by deadly crushes caused by congestion as the unimaginable crowds perform the rituals. In 2006, all it took was a piece of luggage dropped by one person to trip up others and cause a pile-up that killed more than 360 people.

A slippery, rain-slicked street could be equally deadly -- and with the main rites due to begin outside Mecca on Thursday, Saudi authorities urged those arriving at the holy sites to move cautiously and not to rush.

This year has brought the added worry that the massing of more than 3 million people from around the world could bring a swine flu outbreak. In the past months, the Saudi government has been working with the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to set up clinics and precautionary measures to stem any outbreak.

Shahul Ebrahim, a consultant from the Atlanta, Georgia-based CDC at the hajj, said it was too early to tell if the rains could exacerbate the spread of H1N1, which is transmitted in the air, not by water.

"Rain can lead to other waterborne diseases ... But we still don't know how it will effect H1N1. We can't predict," he told The Associated Press.

Hassan El Bushra, an epidemiologist in the Cairo office of the World Health Organization, said "there is no evidence that this will cause any kind of spread, including the spread of swine flu." It could even be beneficial if it means crowds are smaller, he said.

So far, four pilgrims have died from the H1N1 virus since arriving in Saudi Arabia in recent days, and 67 others have been diagnosed with the virus, Saudi Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabeeah told the Arab news network Al-Jazeera English.

Signs at the airport and around the holy sites urge the faithful to cover their faces when they cough, wash their hands often and wear a mask. The swine flu vaccine is given free at the airport for those who want it. More than 100 clinics have been set up at holy sites, and large supplies of Tamiflu and other anti-flu medications are on hand.

The crowds provide a perfect environment for swine flu's spread, said Ebrahim. "We are expecting there to be seven people standing in one square meter (square yard) at any given time during prayers, and this is very dangerous for airborne diseases like swine flu," he said.

"There is no personal space," he said. "Ideally you should be one meter (yard) away from someone to avoid catching the disease."

So far, traffic jams were the worst result from the rains, as pilgrims in convoys and on foot struggled to get to some of the sites, which are miles apart. In Mecca, they rushed around puddles for shelter under concrete overhangs.

During the rainy months of November through January, heavy downpours often swamp neighborhoods in Mecca and Jiddah because of poor drainage.

Moreover, Mecca is deep in a mountainous desert valley, so even a short, intense rain can cause dangerous flash flooding. Over the centuries, the Kaaba has had to be repaired several times because of damage from flooding.

The hajj occurs according to Islam's lunar calendar, so it rotates through the year. Since 2004, when it has taken place during the rainy winter months, it hasn't been hit by storms heavy enough to hamper the rites.

For about two decades before that, it took place in blazing summer months in which no rains fall. One Saudi in his 30s on Wednesday said he couldn't remember such hajj rains in his lifetime.

Civil Defense spokesman Maj. Abdullah al-Harthi said his organization has plans ready to deal with flooding, including 300 buses to evacuate people if necessary. He said no casualties have been reported from the rains, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

One lane of the main road into Mecca was closed by flooding, reducing it to one lane, said Amer al-Amer, an Interior Ministry spokesman. "It cannot handle the pressure of all the people coming from outside Mecca," he said, adding that it would cause delays of several hours for people trying to reach the sites.

The crowds are expected to exceed last year, when some 3 million attended, al-Amer told AP.

Streets were flooded in Jiddah, the entry point for many coming for the rites. They were making their way to Mecca to perform the circling of the Kaaba and to the nearby desert valley of Mina, where a sprawling tent city has been set up for them to live in.

Water covered the floors in many of the tents, said Suleiman Hamad, a 29-year-old pilgrim in Mina. He said the scene was "muddy, but manageable," with many throwing blankets over their heads when they walked outside.

Rain fell sporadically throughout the day, and stopped by late afternoon in many sites -- though it continued to fall in Mecca. Al-Amer and other authorities were optimistic that flooded areas would dry by evening.

On Thursday, the mass will flock to Mount Arafat, a plateau outside Mecca where the Prophet Muhammad delivered his farewell sermon. They then proceed to Mina, where over the next three days they perform a rite stoning three stone walls in a symbolic rejection of the devil.

Arctic Security: The New Great Game?

2009-11-22T15:00:21Z

Arctic Security: The New Great Game?

In 2007, Russia laid claim to parts of the Arctic seabeda historic first and an act that has been challenged by
Canada, the United States, and Norway. These littoral states as well as Denmark, Finland, and non-littorals such
as China and Japan, have looked at the Arctic as an area for possible new transit routes, energy supplies, and fishing
grounds. Growing fossil fuel needs and depleted national fisheries are forcing countries to look for new areas of resource wealth. Climate change and innovations in technology (including seabed mapping, GPS, and transportation) are making it easier for countries and private companies to explore the Arctic.

While many are looking at the Arctic as an area of opportunity (a "frozen Saudi Arabia" as some have dubbed it), the
littorals are concerned about the national security implications of a navigable sea lane or "Northwest Passage" through
the Arctic and northern Canada connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Increased military and commercial
shipping traffic, environmental damage, smuggling, and trafficking, and therefore increased national expenditures
of resources for monitoring and possibly reacting to such activities in the Arctic all come into play. Arctic security has been debated more and more in recent years. NATO, numerous governments, and nonprofit organizations have held discussions on the range of issues relating to the changing dynamics in the Arctic. The upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen will be yet another opportunity for nation states and parties to raise these concerns. And while all the littorals have officially declared their goal of maintaining the Arctic as a region of peace and cooperation, to date, no clear enforceable game plan or solution has been agreed to that will actually provide for such an end state. Meanwhile, Russian officials declared in October that they would begin undertaking a three-year extensive research effortusing Russias nuclear-powered icebreaking fleetto map the Arctic seabed in order to justify its territorial sovereignty claim, something that may well encourage other nations to do the same.
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Westin Nova Scotian,

Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/2009/11/21/Arctic_Security_New_Great_Gamer

Sabria Jawhar: Judicial Reform Puts Saudi Women Lawyers in a Position of All Show and No Play

2009-11-19T16:40:13Z

About 10 years ago Saudi women started returning home from abroad with fresh law degrees and were ready to take on the world. And they are still waiting. Last week, the Minister of Justice, Muhammad Al Eisa, announced that Saudi judicial system will "eventually" make way for female lawyers to represent women in the court.

Given the timeline on Saudi judicial reform, I peg the year that Saudi women will be practicing courtroom litigation to be around 2019. Don't misunderstand me. I applaud the Ministry of Justice's attempts to revamp the judicial system. But let's not fool ourselves that we are seeing great advances in Saudi women's rights.

If I sound skeptical, it's because even if Saudi women do find themselves practicing law it's no more than window-dressing. Sheikh Abdullah Al Guwair, director of the Department of Lawyers at the Saudi Ministry of Justice, said women will be issued a "restrictive form of license" that gives them access to some areas of the court.

Al Guwair said the move towards allowing female lawyers in the courtroom is due to the fact that many women give up their rights because they were too shy to divulge details of their case to a man. Further, Al Guwair said that women lawyers will not be working with men and be confined to different courtrooms.

I suppose I can get onboard with the "separate but equal" concept in Saudi society. That is, I accept it as long as it's really equal. But there is nothing remotely equal in dispensing justice under this proposed system. Male lawyers are given the advantage of having full access to the court and to the judge. Omitted from the Ministry's announcement is whether female lawyers will even appear before a judge. Essentially, the Saudi judicial system is planning to ghettoize women lawyers by sticking them in a room where they can be occasionally heard but never seen.

The plan allows the judicial system to proclaim it opened doors to female lawyers, but the end result will be that a woman's rights will continue to be subordinate to men.

A woman's role in the Saudi judiciary also will be diluted by Saudi Arabia's efforts to attract foreign lawyers. The Ministry of Justice is seeking to license more foreigners to practice law in Saudi Arabia as long as they have a degree from a Sharia university, three years experience in law and a valid visa. Seeking to beef up the available lawyers to the courts by recruiting from foreign countries only further marginalizes Saudi female lawyers.

Putting aside the discrimination against Saudi women, the larger issue is the judicial system continuing to dispense justice without codified laws, with judges making rulings applied directly from Sharia. The basics of criminal and civil law, such as the right to legal representation, established legal precedent, the basic notion of a common law system and impartial decisions, are thrown out the window.

This is a special problem for foreigners doing business in Saudi Arabia. It's significant that the World Bank ranks Saudi Arabia among the top 20 countries for being business-friendly, but it's also noteworthy that the Kingdom ranks 140th out of 181 countries in enforcing commercial contracts. The World Bank reported that it takes two years for business disputes to be solved in Saudi courts.

The problem should be laid at the feet of Saudi judges who are trained in Sharia, but have absolutely no clue in business law.

Yet civil court reform appears to be moving faster than criminal. The Saudi government spent SR 8.2 billion ($2.2 billion) to establish 13 additional commercial courts and the Ministry also plans to announce verdicts on its website. This is a far cry from the full transparency needed to instill confidence in a fair and impartial court, but it's a step in the right direction.

Saudi judges are also being sent to Western countries for civil law training. Another good step, but it doesn't solve the problem that there are only 1,200 judges serving the entire country.

Saudi lawyers and judges are kicking and screaming all the way into the 21st century. But overhauling the Saudi judicial system through piecemeal efforts dooms the promise of equitable justice for all Saudi and expats. The half-hearted attempt to bring female lawyers into the judicial fold will have little impact on women having their voice heard in the courtroom. The basic premise that a fair decision can be reached without established codified laws is flawed. It only brings uncertainty, insecurity and skepticism among Saudis who are forced to turn to the judicial system for help.

Qanta Ahmed, MD: Guests of God: 2.5 Million Muslims Worship in Makkah, Saudi Arabia in This Year's Hajj

2009-11-19T15:30:36Z

They will arrive from over 160 countries; many have already departed for their journey as I write. Some are old, some young, some unborn, some about to leave this life and go into the next. They will all come, however, just as the Qu’ran predicted: “on every kind of camel”.

This week, Thursday marks the eve of Hajj, centered on the ancient city of Makkah, located in the Hijaz area of southwestern Saudi Arabia. Today more than 1.4 million Muslims will arrive by air. Often at the rate of 50,000 per hour, columns of robed pilgrims will stream through Jeddah’s specially designed, gleaming Hajj terminals. Others will arrive by land and even sea. In recent years, annually, Hajj has hosted more than 2.5 million Muslims as they engage in the most sacred rituals in Islam.

Hajj involves a series of rites, timed over several days. The rituals involve entering a spiritual state of purity through prayer, bathing and dress and immediately, paying homage to God at the Ka’ba in the Al Haram Mosque located at the center of Makkah. In the days to come, millions at a time will circumambulate this extraordinary cuboid building (draped in a black embroidered veil), which has stood for four millennia in the center of what was, for so long, a caravan stop for nomadic merchants.

The Ka’aba is a 49 ft square cuboid “House of God” which Abraham himself built, with guidance from the Archangel Gabriel. After circulating this building which seems as if to emanate an electrifying charge in the atmosphere around it, Muslims move en masse to supplicate in the near by Mina environ, home to the semi-permanent ‘Tent City” where the entire gathering resides for several days. A number of other rituals follow, including standing in prayer on the plain of Arafat where the Prophet Mohammed (SAW) gave his final sermon to his followers and God is believed to be closest to his worshippers at this site. After the exhausting day, considered the pinnacle of Hajj, pilgrims spend a night in prayer in the plain of Muzdallifah, outdoors. At first dawn, the millions begin the march towards a dramatic denunciation of Iblis, the fallen angel -- Satan -- symbolized in the stoning of three pillars at Jamaraat. Finally, reborn, pilgrims again return to Makkah, simulating Hagar’s desperate searching for water for her crying child, and soon after, bid farewell to their Maker by circumambulating the Ka’aba once more. With a final glance at the Ka’aba, Muslims pray they may return to this celestial place once more before death and depart the city limits at once.

Much of Islam is based on orthopraxy and not orthodoxy. Hajj is perhaps most emblematic of this theme. Muslims do not go to Hajj for scholarship, rather they go to observe important rituals, which capture the actions of both the Prophet Mohammed (SAW) and the Prophet Abraham.

Islam’s most important rite has been unfolding for almost 1500 years since the Prophet Mohammed (SAW) first performed the Islamic Hajj. Preparations for the colossal event this year have been underway for months, especially fevered in the current climate of global H1N1 pandemic influenza. The King of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz Al Saud -- in his nation’s role as the Custodian for the Two Holy Cities in Islam (Makkah and Madinah) -- takes Hajj responsibilities very seriously. Safeguarding the pilgrims, the ‘Guests of God’, is an act of grace considered zakat (Islamic charity). It is within the Muslim world an unparalleled privilege to serve these Guests. Each year the Kingdom expends billions of riyals in preparation for every imaginable detail such a mass gathering presents, from healthcare, security, food, water, accommodations, emergency response services, immigration and even repatriation of those who faithful who pass away engaged in the rigors of Hajj.

Unlike Olympic Games, Hajj planners do not have a seven year period for languid preparations. Hajj is annual, allowing at most, a nine month lead-time until pilgrims begin to gather for each new subsequent Hajj season. Planners move fast, and must be agile to a world where SARS can appear one year and Avian Flu another. The degree of international collaboration involved in coordinating 160 nations and their preparations for sending pilgrims is in itself a mammoth undertaking, especially when new infections or emerging diseases threaten to impact Hajj travelers. This year, King Abdullah himself is intensely engaged in pandemic preparations, meeting with Hajj planners personally. He is deeply concerned about the impact of a global pandemic on Hajj travels and feels personally accountable for the welfare of Hajj visitors to his country. His concern is manifested in unprecedented investment and access to the world’s leading experts in mass gathering medicine, pandemic preparedness and crowd dynamics. Many of these experts are themselves Saudi nationals who have acquired extraordinary expertise in mass gatherings through their Hajj management experience and research. Nonetheless even though H1N1 is a serious concern, pandemic or not, Hajj must go on.

Hajj is eternally a place of dynamism, through time and space, and essentially has never come to a halt, since it first began. Hajj is the largest mass gathering in the world and the most culturally and geographically diverse. Representing an extraordinary congress of humanity, anyone who has experienced Hajj understands the diversity embodying Islam. My own Hajj would emerge to be an emphatically transformative experience, leading to a new area of academic interest, the kernel of my first nonfiction book and a growing spirituality which had eluded me despite years of ritualistic observation of Islam.

Hajj is costly and laborious and so Muslims must prepare and save before they can go. Muslims must be of adequate means, go on their own finances devoid of loans or debts and must be able-bodied, healthy and strong. Islam strongly discourages the weak, ill or frail to go or the poor, to avoid any additional affliction on already challenged lives. But those who have the financial and physical wherewithal are in fact expected to perform Hajj once in this lifetime, both men and women are equally accountable to perform Hajj.

It is said one can never go to Hajj until one receives an ‘invitation’ from God. If the invitation comes, Muslims must heed it. Each Muslim who makes Hajj usually has a story which captures the serendipity in which the remote possibility of an imagined Hajj becomes reality. Whatever the circumstances, in many cultures Hajj is pursued only when close to the end of life, in preparation for the hereafter and thus follows a lifetime of increasing piety. In cultures, including SE Asia’s Indonesia, for instance, and also Malaysia, many pilgrims are often of a younger age, reflecting perhaps more affluence but also the cultural preferences of marrying a woman who has already performed Hajj.

Until I had entered the forecourt of the Al Haram Mosque in Makkah, I had only ever been part of one mass gathering. It came to mind as I confronted the Ka’ba. I felt small in the crowds, remembering I had once watched U2 perform their ‘Pop’ concert in the now demolished Shea Stadium. As Bono moved through the crowd of 50,000, I grasped the meaning of celebrity. Several years later, as I approached the Ka’aba, I began to feel the edges of Divinity. I was walking on the ground floor of the three-level mosque, each floor of which has a capacity of 750,000. God was bigger than Bono.

Way bigger.

This introduction to the scale of humanity and the insignificance of my own dimensions was an important reminder of the fragility of life and the scale of creation. Understanding my ‘smallness’ was good for an overgrown ego. But even more so, Hajj was key for me feeling at home in Islam and finding my place. As a westernized British female Muslim of Pakistani heritage who had made a home in New York City, I finally felt at home at Hajj surrounded by Muslims who looked and spoke pretty much like I did and were ultimately just as hybrid as myself. Too often, when we are introduced to religion in our childhoods it is served alongside culture without distinction. Cultural mores often overwhelm spiritual ones. Allowing cultural expectations to fall away by observing Muslims from every culture helped me at last engage in Islam.

This week, as we watch the pilgrims engage in their rites on CNN with Wolf Blitzer or on Al Jazeera with Riz Khan, one theme will transcend all others: cooperation. And at a time when the world is so lacking in both the will and the opportunity for cooperation, this is a key time to be reminded of this basic human quality which preserves our societies, wherever and whatever they may be.

How do 2.5 million manage to perform all these complex steps and movements in confined spaces without the crowds disintegrating into utter and irretrievable chaos? The answer is that everyone is part of a smaller, informal group and these clutches of worshipers are very much enjoined to conduct their Hajj rites in the spirit of collaboration and concern for the weaker, less able: a wonderful metaphor for the world beyond Hajj.

Scholars have long discussed the innate meanings of Hajj in a number of metaphorical contexts. The best place I have read about that is in Robert Bianchi’s seminal academic work “Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World”. Bianchi helps us understand Hajj is a symbolic metaphor for how all Muslims can collaborate to contribute to peaceful, ordered and supportive society. We must do this whether we choose our homes in Manhattan County or Majma in the Najd.

Because Hajj ultimately subsumes all cultures and all races, its messages are universal and global. For the short few days that the millions gather, in the eyes of their Maker and one another, they are equal in clothing, status, vantage and rank. The crowd is uniform and cannot be distinguished. An Egyptian professor of English literature prays next to an African American nurse aide from Newark, New Jersey, an Arab prince prays abreast with a shepherd, a reformed Mumbai gangster prays, sobbing, comforted by a Lahori polo-player. For these short dynamic days, in the world of Hajj, they are equal. This after all, is how humanity was intended in the context of Divine ideals.

Never has there been a more important time for Muslims to engage in greater introspection, self-evaluation and insight. We face a Muslim world rife with conflicts, sectarian hatreds, misogyny and injustice. We face misunderstanding, Islamophobia and exploitation by nefarious elements who come from within our midst and pose as Muslims when their conduct and code could not be more alien.

As the millions move through the Hajj rituals this week, let us all aspire to greater humility, courage and engagement to improve and advance the constructive contributions Muslims can make around the world, while helping the less advantaged among us. Lets us aspire to being conduits for benevolent Islamic ideals and instruments of clarity in times of crisis and confusion. Let us do that wherever we may be, whomever we are, however we can. Let us serve our societies as Muslims are enjoined: through creative contribution and as Hajj teaches us, through cooperation and a deep sense of public service, service to our societies. Hajj reminds us that we have three duties as Muslims: duty to ourselves, duty to our Maker and duty to our society.

Society waits, Muslims.

Will we rise to the task and meet our duty to society?

Saudi Arabia and Iran fighting proxy war in northern Yemen

2009-11-18T14:15:04Z

A Yemeni government tank used against Houthi rebels in the north. Photo: Al Jazeera video

For the past 15 years, Dwight Bashir has worked on international conflict, human rights and religious freedom issues. He is a senior advisor for an independent U.S. commission focusing on international religious freedom. The views expressed here are his own personal views.

A war of words is heating up between Iran and Saudi Arabia over an ongoing armed conflict in northern Yemen between Shi'a Houthi rebels and Yemeni security forces. This week, Iran accused Saudi Arabia of state-sponsored “Wahhabi terrorism” in Yemen, while the most senior Saudi cleric accused Houthi rebels of being backed by Iran to spread Shi'a Islam in “Sunni Islam's heartland.”

Both Yemen and Saudi Arabia accuse Iran of providing financial and/or military support to the rebels. Iran denies any kind of support for the rebels.

The conflict in Yemen is complex — with numerous interlocking factors, such as underdevelopment, limited resources, tribal tensions, political exclusion and security concerns. Some have posited that the conflict is exacerbated by the fact that Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaging in a proxy war on Yemeni soil.

The truth is that for 30 years both Iran and Saudi Arabia have spent billions of dollars exporting competing religio-political ideologies in the region and globally, while committing egregious human rights violations at home to defend and bolster their respective ideologies.

Ever since Saudi Arabia entered the conflict two weeks ago after Houthi rebels crossed into Saudi territory from northern Yemen and allegedly killed two Saudi border guards, tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have risen almost daily.

UN officials have estimated that, since 2004, as many as 175,000 people have been displaced in northern Yemen. And at least 240 villages in Saudi Arabia have been evacuated in recent weeks.

To better understand the conflict, it is important to understand religious demographics in Yemen. Between 40-45% of the Yemeni population of 23 million are Shi'a Muslims, mostly from the Zaydi school of Shi'a Islam founded more than 1,000 years ago.

Although Yemen’s majority is Sunni, Zaydi Muslims make up a majority of the population in the north where the fighting is taking place. In general, there are few societal tensions between Yemen’s Shi'a and Sunni Muslims.

The Yemeni government claims that Houthi rebels — considered a Zaydi militant group — have sought to develop a political faction modeled on Hezbollah in Lebanon, in order to undermine the government and impose Shi'a Islamic law. This is similar to how the Iranian government's interpretation of Twelver Shi'a Islam is the law of the land in Iran.

The rebels follow the late Zaydi cleric, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi (hence “Houthi rebels”). Al-Houthi is a former Yemeni parliamentarian who was killed during a 10-week rebellion in 2004 against the Yemeni government in the northern province of Saada, where the fighting started more than five years ago. The rebels claim they are fighting against government repression, although they have never articulated clear objectives, political or otherwise.

Despite both the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels insisting that the conflict is not sectarian in nature, the Iranian government is doing everything it can to portray the conflict as two predominantly Sunni Muslim states, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, cooperating to massacre Shi'a civilians in Yemen. Despite the complexities, these Iranian claims are exaggerated, at best, and downright contrived at worst.

Some Zaydi Muslims in Yemen have been subject to discrimination and harassment for perceived or actual sympathy toward Houthi rebels. According to human rights groups in the region, some Zaydi Muslims not connected to the rebels have been inadvertently targeted by the Yemeni government.

Because Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been promoting competing religio-political ideologies, it is not surprising that both countries would fan the flames of sectarian warfare. Yemen is a fragile state with an active al-Qaeda presence that threatens regional security, and its government is fighting for economic and political stability.

To date, the international community has not played an active role in the conflict. With the spillover into Saudi Arabia, the international community must engage and help broker an end to the current crisis. If not, the conflict could quickly escalate and the region may be facing a new security reality that would likely have wider implications.

Dwight Bashir

Worldfocus contributing blogger Dwight Bashir writes about recent skirmishes between Saudi Arabia and Houthi rebels in northern Yemen. Iran and Saudi Arabia, have each spent billions of dollars exporting competing religio-political ideologies in the region.
http://worldfocus.org/files/2009/11/th_yemen_tank.jpg

Judy Platt: Congress: Protect American Writers and Publishers from Being Sued Overseas

2009-11-18T10:48:31Z

Picture this scenario: you're an American author who's written a well-researched, well-documented book on a topic of broad public interest. Your book's been published in the United States for an American audience. Someone who's mentioned in the book doesn't like what you've written and sues you for libel, but he doesn't sue you here, where the book has been published. He doesn't sue you where you live or where he lives. He sues in England, where the courts have been more than willing to allow foreigners to sue other foreigners over matters that don't involve English interests, and where he won't have to prove that what you've written is false or defamatory. In fact the burden of proof (not to mention the unimaginable financial burden of defending yourself) falls on you. If you think you've fallen down the rabbit hole, welcome to the world of "libel tourism."

A couple of years ago the phrase "libel tourism" would have had little meaning for anyone but a media lawyer. Today, however, there is a growing recognition that the robust public discourse and free speech we take for granted as our First Amendment rights are being seriously threatened by this cynical legal maneuver. The scenario outlined above is not hypothetical. This is exactly what happened to American author Rachel Ehrenfeld soon after her book "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It" was published. In 2004, Dr. Ehrenfeld, a New York-based author and researcher, was sued for libel by Saudi billionaire banker Khalid bin Mahfouz in a London court under England's notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws. (Bin Mahfouz made something of a second career as a libel tourist, successfully suing or intimidating more than 40 authors and publishers, including the venerable Cambridge University Press). The fact that Ehrenfeld's book was never published in England, that neither she nor bin Mahfouz resided there, and that a mere 23 copies of Funding Evil were purchased there over the Internet did not stop the English judge from issuing a ruling against her in absentia (she refused to appear), awarding the Saudi substantial monetary damages and court costs, demanding that Ehrenfeld issue a public apology, banning her book in England, and ordering the destruction of all unsold copies.

Ehrenfeld's response was to ask a federal court in New York to declare the ruling unenforceable in the United States as a blatant violation of her First Amendment rights. The New York court's inability to do so because of jurisdictional limitations in state law prompted swift passage by the New York legislature of a statute that allows New York courts to exercise personal jurisdiction over non-residents who obtain foreign libel judgments against New Yorkers, and prohibits New York courts from recognizing foreign judgments that do not conform to Constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press. Three other states, Illinois, Florida, and California, have followed suit with similar statutes. But this not a problem that can be addressed piecemeal on a state-by-state basis. What we need now is a federal law that will give American authors and publishers who have been hit with foreign libel judgments that could never stand up to First Amendment scrutiny a chance to remove the threat of enforcement and to recoup the often crippling expenses they've incurred. Although the U.S. House of Representatives passed a "libel tourism" bill last June, it is toothless and ineffectual. A bill now pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee--S. 449, The Free Speech Protection Act of 2009-- comes much closer to what's needed.

The use of foreign libel laws to "chill" speech in this country reaches far beyond Rachel Ehrenfeld and the English courts. Joe Sharkey is a New Jersey-based freelance business travel writer who frequently writes for the New York Times. In September 2006 Sharkey survived a mid-air collision between a Brazilian commercial airliner and a business jet on which he was traveling. All of those on the Brazilian plane were killed, but Sharkey and his fellow passengers survived an emergency landing in the Amazon jungle. Writing about the crash in the New York Times and on his blog, Sharkey defended the American pilots, whom he felt were being scapegoated by Brazilian authorities, and criticized the Brazilian air traffic control system (criticism later substantiated by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board). In September of this year he was served at his home in New Jersey with papers accusing him of libeling the country of Brazil, in a lawsuit filed by a woman whose husband died in the crash. The plaintiff, who was never mentioned in anything that Sharkey wrote, sued under a bizarre Brazilian law that allows any citizen to claim damages for an alleged insult to the country's honor.

Unless we are given the legal tools to fight back, American authors and publishers will find themselves increasingly in harm's way as a result of Internet book sales and Internet speech. Let's tell that to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy and ask him to get The Free Speech Protection Act moving.

Yvonne R. Davis: The Challenge of Arab Unemployment -- An Issue We Must Not Ignore!

2009-11-16T12:52:19Z

The 10.2% unemployment rate in the U.S. has the citizenry completely disillusioned and vexed with our government. Despite the “Average Joe/Jane” outrage, a slight fall in jobless claims this month, a number of the unemployed live in neighborhoods with foreclosure signs over their heads. They hang on by their fingernails praying for economic relief. Never perhaps returning to the days of “good and plenty,” fear runs rampant with an aging “Super Power” population. According to the U.S. Census by 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 years and older. Our Nation’s fastest growing population is 85 and above.

As the “Senior Citizen Hegemons” go through its most painful metamorphosis to facilitate in a Google Economy, another part of the world we are appendaged to due to our devoted dependency on its natural resources, foreign debt, Wall Street ownership, wars and terrorism, is facing perhaps its most solemn challenge in its entire existence -- massive unemployment in the Arab World. And while we in America might want to be NIMBYish (Not In My Back Yard) about it, we can’t. There is a link between violence, terrorism and Arab youth many educated not having the ability to have pride and self-esteem because they lack gainful and respectable employment to take care of their families. On the contrary to America's aging population, over 60% of the Arab population is 40 years of age and under; with a mean age of 27 or younger in some countries. Whether we like it or not, the issue of Arab unemployment is on our front step and maybe the very thing that ultimately turns the world upside down economically, socially and politically if we do not begin to face this reality.

Saeed Al Khabaz, a retired Human Resources professional and father of four is a successful business owner and communitarian from the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Al Khabaz lives in the economic fulcrum of the Kingdom. Beyond the black gold that flows from the oil refineries, the region heavies with industries of steel, glass, construction materials, foodstuffs, aluminum products, pipes, air-conditioners, electrical equipment, carpets, soap, and rubber products. With all of this stuff going on, unemployment in the Eastern Province is climbing and so is the crime. “Right now in Saudi Arabia and throughout the entire Middle East and North Africa region, we are weathering a typhoon of unemployment,” declares Al Khabaz. “With an average jobless rate in some regions of 25%, the huge numbers of unemployment in the Arab world is creating all kinds of social problems, and no community can continue to survive this way.”

Ten years ago, after doing a very successful “turn around” on a medical clinic that was barely treating 40 patients per day, to over 100,000 annually, Al Khabaz made sure all of the employees he hired in his Al Hadi Medical Clinic in Qatif, Saudi Arabia were women under the age of 40. All of the women who work for Al Khabaz never want to leave him; despite receiving bigger opportunities because he believed in them and gave them a chance when no one else would and they succeeded. He meets the needs of a demographic with the greatest hardship. “You are talking about millions of young people who have the energy and they are frustrated and they have to vent their frustration at something,” says Al Khabaz. “I don’t think any community in history has been challenged like this before.” By 2015, the Arab population will be over 435-million. The United Nations and the International Labor Organization predicts by 2020, 100-million will unemployed in the MENA region. “No society can sustain that level of unemployment without exploding,” declares Al Khabaz.

Although reported to having some of the lowest crime rates in the world, in areas where unemployment is high with Arabs living on less than $2 per day in penury, coupled with the growing problem of jobs, there is a direct correlation between economic disadvantage and higher crime rates; especially among youth.The Investigation and Prosecution Commission (IPC) in Saudi Arabia reported a jump in reported crimes in 2009. This dynamic of low crime may change rapidly if solutions are not in place quickly enough to buffer the population explosion and need.

While the problem of unemployment in the Arab world seems insurmountable, there are a number of initiatives being implemented and proffered in the region to begin to put a dent in the problem.

Her Royal Highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, the consort of the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, is the Educator in Chief in her country chairing the Qatar Foundation for Education. She is the first Royal in the Middle East to create an Education City initiative that brings together world class Universities under one roof to educate students in her country and the region.

Sheikha Mozah founded Silatech (Sila means 'Connection' in Arabic), to meet the urgent need to create jobs with a primary focus in the Arab World where the need is greatest. A social enterprise, her organization creates signature level East-West partnerships with the private sector to provide opportunities for the youth in diverse markets. Silatech works on several levels, policy (government participation), psychological (mindset), programmatic (training) and practical (partnerships for actual jobs). Thus far, Silatech has launched a number of initiatives that include intensive training programs in the areas of media, hospitality and tourism, and leadership for women. Partnerships include: Fortune 500 companies like Cisco and Manpower, senior academic institutions, research centers such as Gallup and sister countries i.e. United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Lebanon for various training, banking and financing initiatives for young entrepreneurs.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Ron Bruder wanted to make a huge difference by taking not taking an American isolationist approach to dealing with the tragedy. A powerful man on Wall Street, Bruder left his profession and founded the non-profit Education for Employment Foundation (EFE). EFE’s mission is combat chronic unemployment in the Arab World by providing young men and women professional and technical training. What makes his organization special is that it guarantees jobs for Arabs when they graduate from the program. Bruder believes his organization can contribute a great deal to promote peaceful environments by eliminating the despair, doubt and rage caused by not having a job. “In order to have world peace, the youth must have piece of the global pie,” said Bruder. “The key component of that is an education that enables one to be employable in the country’s labor market. Our mission is to train youth in cutting edge skills that will enable them to immediately enter the labor market.”

Located in Jordan, Gaza/West Bank, Egypt, Morocco and Yemen, the EFE has remarkably changed the lives of several thousand Arab Youths and their families. His latest initiative includes establishing a partnership Prince Sultan University in Riyadh. “We helped launch the "Prince Salman Education for Employment Initiative" and an accelerated a second Bachelor’s of Science nursing program for unemployed young Saudi women in association with Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts,” announced Bruder. Classes are expected to begin in January 2010.

While Al Khabaz clearly articulates the problem of youth unemployment in the Middle East, he believes Arabs in the region should first seek find their own solutions by forming strategic mentor/protégé partnerships that expands social capital by investing in human capital on a multi-community and multi-country level. He is not for any “token support” that foreign enterprise gives often times in the Middle East. “We want foreign expertise, but it is better when the local people come together,” states Al Khabaz. He strongly believes local level investment must always be the priority. He also feels any plans created must be cohesive and involve the people on the ground at all times. “We have to be self-determined.”

His thoughts are evidenced by establishing the Qatif Youth Achievement Award and launching a virtual world initiative entitled Arab Youth Supercomputer 2010 Project. In its second year, the Qatif Youth Achievement Award annually recognizes seven men and women who have demonstrated skills and talents in a most distinctive way. Judges select winners based upon creativity, leadership, ingenuity, invention and drive. This award encourages small and medium sized enterprises to take serious looks at youths involved in Qatif; hiring them for jobs.

The Arab Youth Supercomputer 2010 Project challenges Arabs 40 and under from all over the MENA region to build a Supercomputer by year end 2010. With nearly 300 members world wide supported by a sister organization of about 500, Al Khabaz is leading a worldwide movement for change for his people. Khabaz has garnered support for this program from business leaders, marketing professionals, academics, IT technology professionals, and security specialists from as far as Europe, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States. Those who support his initiative subscribes to the mission of building Arab economic sustainability -- “so that all that is being done benefits our community.”

Amb. Marc Ginsberg: "Qum" Buy Ya

2009-11-13T16:20:59Z

On October 25th, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were granted access to the secret and recently outed nuclear facility under construction in a secluded mountain inside an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base near the holy city of Qum.

We now have definitive confirmation from IAEA and European diplomats that the nuclear installation was too small for peaceful nuclear enrichment, but large enough to hold enough centrifuges to convert low grade enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade uranium needed to make nuclear warheads.

In other words, the Qum nuclear facility appears to be the smoking gun in Iran's secret nuclear weapons construction program. If the neutral IAEA has come to that conclusion, I can't wait to hear from those who would love to spin it as nothing more than an innocent doughnut factory.

So much for the value of the once vaunted November 2007 U.S. intelligence agencies' National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that proffered Iran was not engaged in any weapons-oriented uranium enrichment enterprise. Even before his inspectors finished their inspection of Qum, IAEA chief Mohamad ElBaradei directly accused Iran of violating its international legal obligations by failing to disclose the Qum facility to the IAEA.

Now what?

While the technical revelations regarding the Qum nuclear enrichment facility filter out as the IAEA prepares its final report to the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. is at a crossroads regarding Iran's nuclear program.

Cautious optimism that an Obama administration-orchestrated Geneva proposal whereby Iran would agree to ship 1200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium to a third country for further enrichment under international supervision has evaporated. Living up to everyone's worst expectations of Iranian negotiating duplicity, the deal is now so bogged down with Iranian preconditions and qualifications to make further Western concessions to revive the tentative deal pointless, unless of course, Iran reverses course.

To make matters worse, Obama's engagement entreaties to Iran keep getting a "return to sender" response. And just yesterday Iran's state prosecutor signaled his intent to bring espionage charges against three detained American hikers -- making them pawns in this high stakes showdown. Moreover, Ayatollah Khamenei has gone out of his way in recent days to make pointed accusations against President Obama.

Even in the face of these Iranian retorts engagement efforts remain justified. But Iran's continued rejection of the Geneva plan, coupled with the IAEA's revelations regarding the illicit Qum nuclear facility are severely narrowing the Obama Administration's engagement policy options. All this coming at the worst possible moment for an administration trying to cope with other major foreign policy challenges. The president has stated he would give Iran until December to abide by its international obligations. Then, there will an effort to increase economic sanctions on Iran.

The atomic ayatollahs appear indifferent to any carrot or stick. Let's hope that is another Iranian negotiating ploy. Perhaps with its hands caught red-handed in the nuclear cookie jar the Iranians may reconsider and seek a face-saving way to avoid a showdown with the West and Israel. Unfortunately, there is nothing on the horizon to suggest Iran's leaders wish to meet Obama's outstretched hand half way.

Jamal Dajani: The Saudi-Iranian Neo Cold War

2009-11-13T10:04:38Z

It's been four months since I described Yemen as a powder keg ready to explode. At the time the entire world was riveted to the television, watching the unfolding events of the "Velvet Revolution" in Iran. The Yemeni keg has since exploded. It is currently on the verge of causing regional conflict.

For more than a week now, Saudi Arabia has been carrying out military operations on its remote southern border to punish Houthi rebels from neighboring Yemen who crossed over and attacked one of its patrols. Both Yemen and Saudi Arabia have accused Iran of arming the rebels.

Accusations and counter accusations have been flying between the two rival regional powers. On Tuesday, Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned that, "those who pour oil on the fire must know that they will not be spared from the smoke that billows."

This is not the first time Saudis and Iranians have faced off in the region. The rivalry between the two countries has been out playing its course for years, extending from the Persian Gulf (where the name alone is a point of contention, Saudis refer to it as the Arabian Gulf) into Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Like the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been supporting their factions in all these countries, either militarily, financially, or both.

Both Tehran and Riyadh used Lebanon as their own battlefront to settle scores to the point of almost tipping the country into another civil war less than two years ago. Iran has been accused of pumping millions of dollars into Gaza and supplying Hamas with arms, while Saudi Arabia has been supporting the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Many Iraqi Shiites have accused Saudi Arabia of aiding the Sunni insurgency in the country.

Nowadays, even Hajj (Islamic pilgrimage) is not spared from being a subject of contention between the two rivals. The Saudi government has recently issued a warning against pilgrims staging demonstrations during this year's Hajj, which runs from November 25-29. Although Iran was not specifically mentioned in the Saudi statement, Tehran replied that it would take "appropriate measures" if Iranian pilgrims were interfered with in any way. The Islamic Republic of Iran has long complained about the mistreatment and harassment of its pilgrims to Mecca by Saudi authorities during the Hajj season.

Like the original Cold War, both countries have launched sophisticated misinformation campaigns against one another. A propaganda war has raged between Iranian and Saudi government controlled media. During the Iranian election, Saudi media and its proxies viciously attacked the Iranian regime, highlighting poll irregularities, and the brutality of the Iranian Basij security forces. The Iranian media has constantly questioned, and on many instances mocked, the House of Saud's role as the custodian of the Holy Islamic sites in the Kingdom.

Last week without warning, two satellite companies, the Egyptian-owned Nilesat and the Saudi-managed Arabsat pulled the plug on Iran's Arabic-speaking news channel, al-Alam, or the World. Nilesat's executive director, Ahmed Anis, announced that the broadcasting was cut due to contract violations; however, media sources throughout the Middle East suggest that al-Alam's support for the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen angered Saudi officials, who in turn used their influence to take it of the air.

So far, both countries have shied away from direct military contact. Iran and Saudi Arabia, like the US and the USSR of old, have been competing in a series of peripheral surrogate conflicts. Could their relations be strained enough to lead to direct confrontation? Everything seems to be possible these days in the Middle East.

Iranian Memoir By Freed Prisoner Haleh Esfandiari

2009-11-12T08:54:04Z

In Emin Prison

Claire Messud
The New York Review of Books

"My Prison, My Home:
One Woman's Story of
Captivity in Iran"
by Haleh Esfandiari.
Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest--a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother--she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. "My Prison, My Home" is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling--the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring--a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s--although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's "Shah of Shahs" (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" (2005)--and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside--and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October--Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini--who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France--gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime--many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution" (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game--destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly in-dependent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color--orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's '1984'") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....
Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....
I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"--all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like--in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books--not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications--such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance--"I knew I must not let them break me"--and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sinister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed--can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

Claire Messud's most recent novel is "The Emperor's Children." Her earlier novels include "When the World Was Steady."

Read more at The New York Review of Books.

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Sabria Jawhar: Saudis Try to Put an End to Crazy Fatwas

2009-11-11T12:14:14Z

Nearly a year after Saudi King Abdullah warned religious scholars that issuing careless fatwas gives extremists credibility as religious experts, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Call, Guidance and Endowment has finally said enough is enough.

Recently the Ministry issued a memo that fatwas were not to be issued to just anybody asking for one. The Ministry has ordered that Saudi imams refer people seeking fatwas to the Senior Board of Ulema. Apparently the Ulema got tired of having their own fatwas contradicted by some obscure rural cleric who thinks of himself as a religious scholar.

This new rule, although long overdue, thrills me to no end. If ever there was an aspect of Islam that has been so thoroughly abused by people who have no idea what they're doing it's the fatwa.

Fatwas, which are basically opinions or edicts, are supposed to be issued by Islamic scholars after careful and lengthy deliberation. The fatwa's source comes from the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Once upon a time each and every word of a fatwa was agonized over and issued only when necessary.

Somewhere down the line more than a few imams from Seattle to Somalia fancied themselves fatwa experts and abused the privilege. As a result, trousers have been deemed sinful, Mickey Mouse was discovered to be Satan's foot soldier, and Saudi guys were given permission to take non-Muslim Western girls as wives for a couple of months to, well - just take a guess.

Although I am not one to concern myself with the internal politics of Saudi clerics, it's long troubled me that there often seems to be no rhyme nor reason as to what qualifies as a fatwa and who should be responsible for issuing one. At the very least it presents am image of disorganization among the Islamic religious community. At worst, it presents a picture of ignorance that leads to mockery of Islam.

At last January's International Conference on Fatwa and its Regulations, the King stated in a speech that, "Issuing ill-considered fatwas without following any criterion offers biased, ignorant, extremist or careless individuals the opportunity to pose as religious experts qualified to issue fatwas. On the other hand, they have been abusing Islam and distorting its noble values besides offering its enemies the justification for attacking the Holy Qur'an and spreading lies about the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him)."

The Senior Board of Ulema's recent decision brings back order and the original intent of the fatwa. Now, a panel of scholars will carefully deliberate the issue before them, determine whether it deserves consideration, and if so, correctly interpret the source of the decision before a fatwa is issued.

We've seen in the last decade or so, wildly different interpretations of the Qur'an and the words of the Prophet. Some non-Muslims, either through an anti-Muslim agenda or just plain ignorance, mangle the verses without proper scholarly research. Worse are the extremists, who interpret the Qur'an to suit their own agenda of murder and terror. Lost in these political sideshows -- and believe me it's political, not religious - is that even the most learned Muslim scholar still struggles to correctly interpret the Qur'an. Scholars who spend a lifetime of study still engage in debates over the interpretation of even a single word.

Issuing half-baked fatwas trivializes the true meaning its intent and renders it a joke. And the sheer number of fatwas issued over the past year reduces the significance of important ones, those that are really helpful guides to making us more pious and better Muslims.

It's ridiculous, I know, but for the sake of argument let's consider that Mickey Mouse is indeed the devil's toady and Minnie Mouse his handmaiden. Just how does this information help me live my life? Instead, it's a distraction, a bit of nonsense that would not have survived scrutiny of serious religious scholars. It's about time the real experts handled these things.

Qanta Ahmed, MD: Cairo to Fort Hood: Broader Engagement at Home and Abroad

2009-11-11T06:01:13Z

Armistice Day, Atlanta, Georgia

The atrocious mass murder committed last week at Fort Hood has shaken the nation. Unusually, I didn’t learn of the news until many hours later, spared from the continuous news cycle in transit from the West Coast to New York. When I finally reconnected to CNN late that evening, like many others, I found it hard to absorb in its entirety. I am still having difficulty digesting the multidimensional implications.

Mass murders have become a depressingly familiar punctuation in the rhythm of modern day American despair. The death and destruction of our soldiers overseas has assumed a jarring place in the unending carnage of our foreign involvements. Remote deaths of unknown soldiers in lands far removed from the experience of most Americans are honored with private and largely invisible funerals. A public inured to eight years of warfare now seeping into a third administration is dangerously disconnected from the national costs exacted by bloody wars.

The loss of life at the hands of a psychiatrically disturbed individual is also one familiar to society here. We have survived Waco and the Unibomber, we are enmeshed in a protracted, anguished recovery from 9-11 and most weeks, even now, I see at least one stoic man, sometimes two, who served as first responder at Ground Zero and is finally able to articulate the edges of their psychological pain.

But the cumulative impact of Fort Hood is staggering. A Muslim American military officer who was a practicing military psychiatrist experiencing his own psychotic break from reality in America’s largest domestic military base has resulted in the slaying of 13 souls and the decimation of many more lives the departed have left behind in mourning. Even the most experienced physicians and military leaders are appropriately reeling. As a Muslim physician myself, I am experiencing these events in several dimensions.

As a physician I feel frustration at the lack of recognition of Major Hasan’s mental deterioration presumably within the ranks of his professional physician colleagues. Physicians are notoriously poor at recognizing psychological distress among their own ranks and even more recalcitrant towards seeking therapy or asking for help. As a sleep specialist who treats individuals with affective disorders and post traumatic stress disorder I feel a sense of futility at the inability for timely intervention. I wonder whether Major Hasan was experiencing insomnia before the events, a common companion of severe PTSD. As a civilian, I find it hard to understand the opaque and regimented world of the military and wonder what their procedures for identifying impaired colleagues may be. Yet it is as a British Muslim who makes her chosen home in America that I find my response is most troubled.

Until 9-11, being Muslim for me was an intensely private and little examined experience, one to which I rarely devoted serious introspection. For many reasons, the heinous event on that fateful Tuesday morning (events which I watched from a thunderstruck Saudi Arabia where I was working at the time) compelled me to confront my relationship and my own place within Islam. In the years since, people everywhere have begun identifying themselves strongly with religious or non-religious beliefs often above nationality or ethnicity. We have, whether we like it or not, become a much more divided and polarized global community. In the post 9-11 era, my search deep into my Islam has been rewarding and yet challenged, tested and stretched and you can read about that turbulent internal journey in my book, In the Land of Invisible Women.

Part of the struggle of being a thoughtful Muslim today comes with dispelling the persistently accumulating myths pertaining to Islam which pile up as quickly as one tries to dispel them. Actions like those of the deranged, deeply disturbed Major Hasan are ripe fodder for fueling dangerous and combustible Islamaphobia. How can I keep explaining Islam calls for peace, non violence and preservation of life at all costs, even above the rights of the Divine on mankind, when Muslims among us are driven to do the exact opposite and wreck devastating destruction in the name of Islam? This is my jihad: the jihad of the pen seeking to overcome the jihad of the sword.

Jihad has been one of the casualties of the schizophrenic, dichotomous rift which has magnified to separate moderate, intellectual sincere Islam from ritualistic, fanatical radicalism exercised in the name of Islam by nihilists who seek to extinguish all which is true about this great religion. Jihad captures a number of meanings. Foremost is the internal jihad each insightful Muslim must engage with his or her core: our struggle as creatures of free will who chose to rise against our baser desires. Belief in Islam is founded on the essential basis of free will. There can be no compulsion in Islamic belief. Belief must come as a choice and not mandate and like many aspects of being Muslim, we must not only choose once in life but constantly choose to follow our scriptured ideals. Islam is an orthopraxy much more than an orthodoxy. This effort, this conscious choice, this self discipline and awareness it demands is the result of introspection, sincerity and quiet resolve. This is the private jihad every living Muslim who truly understands the nature of Islam’s basis on free will must engage in daily. There is no external focus for this jihad.

Jihad can also mean the struggle to nurture improvement around ourselves in our external world, whether advancing our local communities through service, or collaborating with one another and indeed people of other faiths in the pursuit of development. Collaboration towards improving society at large, for example in the construction of libraries, universities, facilities for the ill or weak or disadvantaged are all forms of collective jihad, Again, such jihad is completely disarticulated from combat.

And finally there is the form of jihad which has been so removed from its original essence yet appears on an almost daily basis in a deviant, distorted form: jihad sanctioned by Islam when a Muslim’s right to observe Islamic practice has been emphatically prohibited. Note that this is extremely specific and in fact restrictive to a defensive response following an offensive threat which has been executed rather than merely articulated as a threat. Note also that such jihad is not what is considered a Holy War, for Islam sanctions no war as holy. Wars are seen as inherently undesirable and are widely discouraged in Islam. Instead, Muslims are enjoined to seek the path of peace and diplomacy whenever possible and whether jihad or a non holy war are ultimately undertaken having exhausted all options possible, the conduct of the Muslim at War comes under precise and highly specified codes of conduct which include carefully defined codes of non combatants: women, children, the sick, the disabled.

Unfortunately we are now almost at the end of ten years of ‘ jihad’ conducted in the name of Islam for the most appalling and offensive citations which do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Whether we examine the sectarian violence between sects of Muslims, the villainous actions of the Taliban and their attempts to extinguish thinking powerful womanhood, the nihilistic destruction of Muslims and non Muslims to sate the bloodthirsty Al Qaeda movement and its various nefarious derivatives or the extraordinarily distorted and psychotic practice of suicide bombings which my mentor Dr. Joan Kirschenbaum Cohn appropriately refers to as homicide bombings (since so many other people die in these acts along with the bomber)-none, NOT ONE of these conflicts is based on a defense of observing Islamic practices. None of this is jihad, yet we sadly see it as such when Anderson Cooper explains to us the latest heinous events. Such nuances are hard to enunciate in a 90 second network sound-byte and most often lost on an increasingly depleted, anxious and fearful America and the jaded newsmen and women who must report these events.

Fortunately, this and other such challenges have not been lost on the Obama administration who have been accumulating sound and incisive advice on exactly these issues. In his Cairo Speech on June 4th 2009, President Obama spoke about the need for ‘broader engagement’ with the Muslim world at large. His advisors had been preparing for this ‘broader engagement’ for sometime and the President made these recommendations with an informed perspective. We are already beginning to see some exciting changes which speak to new vehicles with which to have complex, sophisticated and peaceful dialogue.

A salient publication emerged quietly and without fanfare, first mentioned in the New York Times late last September. Published by a non governmental foundation without elected authority, the Changing Course: A New Direction for US Relations with the Muslim World document has been a valuable roadmap for the path this administration is taking towards what has become a truly Gordonian knot of cumulative losses, alienations and failures in America’s relationship with Muslims. Much of the report suggests specific areas where Americans can seek engagement with counterparts in the Muslim world and how such engagement might advance our relationships.

In Cairo the President reiterated some of the key points seemingly inspired from this valuable treatise on what has gone wrong and where we can improve. Only today, at the Forum for the Future in Marrakech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced new plans focusing on augmenting US collaboration in the realm of science and technology with international Muslim communities. Excited scientific Muslim friends from the Middle East were among the first to share this news with me in the middle of the East Coast night. Perhaps they care more about US engagement than many Muslim Americans?

The first three U.S. Science and Technology Envoys who are a pivotal part of the US Science Envoy Program, all heavy weight academics have already been appointed, reflecting the administration’s sentiment of nurturing international endeavors with actions and not only words. For the first time ever, around a week after the Cairo speech the President underlined his intent at engaging America in new ways internationally in the imaginative appointment of the first Special Representative at the State Department for Global Partnership, Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley.

The U.S. Science Envoy program is one of the components of the historic presidential speech in Cairo and one of the first physical manifestations of that powerful moment in the Middle East. Shepherded in by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senator Richard Lugar those of us who are Muslim and in the field of medicine and science understand the brilliance of this move. For centuries Islam has revered both the quest for knowledge and the application of its bounty. Sharing knowledge is considered a responsibility for Muslims. Science and medicine in particular, relate to solving universal problems such as health and environmental threats. Serving these needs, nurturing these fields benefits all of humanity, particularly the most challenged sectors of society and can be interpreted as an act of zakat or charity one of the five pillars of Islam. Muslim countries everywhere revere physicians in their society, much more so than we experience customarily in the West, and the basis for this likely rests partly in the spiritual place given to the pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination to ease suffering.

The US Science Envoy program therefore appeals at a number of levels while speaking deeply to the core of ancient Muslim sentiment. This program contains the potential for broader engagement at its best. But we need the same broader engagement here at home too and that has also been part of the administration's approach to Muslims at home. Fort Hood is perhaps the first and most immediate test of our President’s resolve to bridge the chasms and begin the probing and evaluation of a deep wound which has failed to heal since 9-11. Unlike his predecessor, Obama recognizes healing and dialogue are not one-way affairs but bilateral processes requiring willing participants on both sides.

Fort Hood requires all of us to respond, and respond with the same grace, wisdom and courage that the family of slain Physician Assistant Michael Cahill displayed. His articulate grieving daughter Ms. Kerry Cahill encapsulated precisely the courage and nobility required of all of us in these demanding times in her caution against reflexive, indiscriminate hate. Her grace and humanity soothed and ennobled a grieving nation. We must follow her thoughtful lead as we assess our own responses to this tragedy.

Whatever his diagnosis and motive, Major Hasan committed the irrevocable and the immoral act of destroying innocent lives. His distorted thinking and his relationships with shadowy forces and darkness will become clearer under military and judicial scrutiny. But what is clear is his actions represent no version of Islam that I can recognize or that which countless other Muslims do either. However as Muslims we must all engage in public, peaceful, proactive dialogue. While our President is creating opportunities for the US to engage with the Muslim world, Muslims must engage here at home with America.

As we remember those veterans on Armistice Day who gave their lives to safeguard the very nations were we as Muslims are free to explore our faith in its many variations, freely and at will, it seems enormously appropriate that we remember our responsibilities to society and our abilities to soothe those who are deeply wounded in our name. Muslims everywhere recognize the triumvirate of our responsibilities: our duty to ourselves, to our Maker and to society.

Right now, duty to society calls. We must rise to it. We must engage.

Raymond J. Learsy: The Price of Oil and the Massacre at Fort Hood

2009-11-08T12:40:16Z

The relationship between the price of oil and the slaughter that took place at Fort Hood is hardly as far-fetched as it would appear. In an instructive article that was reprinted as an Op-ed in the NY Post on Saturday Nov 7, one Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, Executive Director of the Center of Islamic Pluralism, talks about the influences that apparently formed Major Nidal Hassan's murderous hatred.

This in striking contrast to the New York Times' "see no evil" editorial of the same date, which pontificates, "But until investigations are complete, no one can begin to imagine what could possibly have motivated the latest appalling carnage." Really?! The Times, undeterred, continues with an article on today's front page, "A Military Therapist's World: Long Hours, Filled With Pain" replete with the sad song of twisted rationalizations, instructing us that this horrendous act was attributable to professional traumatic stress or, as brightly cited in the Times, "Thursday's rampage has put a spotlight on the srtains of their profession and the patients they treat."

Then, in an adjoining article on the same NY Times front page, "Preliminary Fort Hood Inquiry Turns Up No Link To Terrorist Plot," the NY Times is quick to advise us, "But, so far, investigators have unearthed no evidence that he was directed or steered into violence." Then, perhaps in some deference to journalistic objectivity, mentioned almost in passing, it says that findings were preliminary and that investigators viewed the investigation as fluid.

No such mealy mouthed hesitancy in the Schwartz Op-ed. Here we are informed that Hasan regularly attended prayer services at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, MD, where the main prayer leader, Iman Faizul Khan, was a friend of Hasan's as well as holding board membership on the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The ISNA, according to Schwartz, is the main Wahhabi lobby group in the United States and has a long and disgraceful record of promoting radical Islam. He goes on to advise that it is a group understood to have been established by Saudi Arabia to impose extremism on American Muslims.

He continues, telling us that "from a ghastly act, to a Saudi-backed fundamentalist Iman, to a Saudi run designated terror financing charity is not a long trail. That is but a small coil of associations that exist in too many US mosques." He rightfully concludes that American Muslims must drive these elements out of their community. "The problem is not traumatic stress, much less Islam. It's the ideology, the money and and the interests of the Saudi hardliners."

And almost needless to add, the funding comes from the avalanche of money flowing into the coffers of such as Saudi Arabia through the insidious and duplicitous manipulation of oil prices by the cartel producers, with Saudi Arabia as the dominant player and prime beneficiary. This at the cost of hundreds of billions to American consumers in dollars and cents alone, without even beginning to fathom the cost and danger to our society, safety and well-being impacted by the radicalization of a segment of our society through Wahhabi dogma while our government and its agencies look the other way, rarely if ever holding the Saudis to account.

Perhaps, just perhaps, in tribute and memory to those who were gunned down at Fort Hood, this could be a wake-up call to the nation.

Saudi Arabia Vows To Continue Airstrikes Against Yemen "Infiltrators"

2009-11-06T08:35:33Z

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia said Friday it carried out airstrikes against "infiltrators" from Yemen that were limited to areas inside Saudi territory, and vowed to press on with the military action until the border with its restive neighbor was secure.

The statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, did not identify the infiltrators or address claims by Arab diplomats on Thursday that the strikes hit across the boundary, targeting Shiite rebels who have been battling Yemeni government forces for the past few months in Yemen's northern Saada province.

Saudi Arabia Bombs Yemen Rebels

2009-11-05T10:45:57Z

SAN'A, Yemen — Saudi Arabia sent fighter jets and artillery bombardments across the border into northern Yemen Thursday in a military incursion apparently aimed at helping its troubled southern neighbor control an escalating Shiite rebellion, Arab diplomats and the rebels said.

The Saudis – owners of a sophisticated air force they rarely use – have been increasingly worried that extremism and instability in Yemen could spill over to their country, the world's largest oil exporter. The offensive came two days after the killing of a Saudi soldier, blamed on the rebels.

Hajj May Become Swine Flu Fiasco; Saudi Arabia Takes Precautions

2009-11-03T12:31:40Z

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- As millions of Muslims begin arriving in Mecca for this year's pilgrimage, Saudi officials face a unique challenge: how to prevent this sacred rite from becoming an inadvertent incubator and global transmitter of swine flu.

Bradley Burston: Why Do Israelis Dislike Barack Obama?

2009-11-03T11:10:53Z

There are many people, gifted with rare intelligence and tolerance for humankind, who, when addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, run off the rails.

This week, it was the turn of former American Jewish Congress national director Henry Siegman. Noting opinion polls showing that a bare six to eight percent of the Israeli public supports Barack Obama, Siegman concludes that the dislike for Obama is a reflection not of the president's policies, but of something essential -- and fundamentally defective -- in the Israeli people itself:

"The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological," Siegman writes in an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune, calling the response "the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people's reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood."

He concedes that polls show that a clear majority of Israelis favor a two-state solution, and thus, Palestinian statehood. But he argues that, while they insist that they much prefer peace, if put to the test, Israelis will prove to be liars, and opt for occupation. "Israel's public never tires of proclaiming to pollsters its aspiration for peace and its support of a two-state solution." Nonetheless, "the reason for this unprecedented Israeli hostility toward an American president is a fear that President Obama is serious about ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza."

Siegman's thesis makes no room for the possibility that the administration may have made more major mistakes in handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, than it has made in any other primary policy sphere.

There is no allowance for the sense that when Barack Obama made an early priority of his presidency a high profile visit to Cairo, its centerpiece an extended address to the Muslim world, a subsequent personal appeal to Israelis might have helped him advance his peacemaking goals.

There is no consideration of the possibility that the administration failed in doing requisite preparation with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak prior to dropping on Israel the bomb of a blanket settlement freeze demand -- which might have been well-received by the Israeli public, had it been accompanied by gestures on the Palestinian or wider Arab side. As it was, rumors of normalization moves were humiliatingly waved away by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who wrote in the New York Times that a settlement freeze, even if agreed to by Israel, fell far, far short of his key nation's minimum preconditions for any steps toward relations with Israel.

Demanding not a freeze but total removal of all existing settlements as a mere initial precondition, the prince states that any gestures will have to wait until the return to Arab hands of the West Bank, the Golan, and Shabaa Farms in Lebanon ...

But what should any of that matter to Henry Siegman? From the tone of his arguments, he belongs to the school of thought which suggests that hating Israelis is a form of working for peace.

So willing is Siegman to disavow any legitimate feelings on the part of Israelis, that he suggests that that their worst fears -- of Iran, of rocket attacks, of world isolation and abandonment -- not only are baseless, but are also a source of consolation:

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust -- a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone's Gaza fact-finding report is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis."

Siegman doesn't merely think that Israelis are mistaken. He loathes them. In his reading, they are venal, deceitful, the source of the conflict and the barrier to its solution. In Siegman's reading, the conflict continues because U.S. presidents " ... have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance.'

It may be argued that Israel has much more to fear from people who think like Henry Siegman, than from Richard Goldstone. A close reading of the Goldstone report, and an open hearing of his views, as in a recent interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner on Tikkun.org, shows that Justice Goldstone cares a great deal about Israelis and the direction in which their country is headed.

Meanwhile, given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's opaque, work-in-progress assessment of current Israeli policy as an unprecedented restriction on settlement, yet far short of what the administration would like, it should surprise no one in Washington if the White House has now managed simultaneously to alienate Israel's left, right, and center.

For Israel's sake, for the Palestinians' sake, and for the good of his presidency, the administration must radically reassess its approach to the Mideast conflict.

The fears of Israelis are real. The grievances of the Palestinians are just. If both peoples have one trait in common, it is that they cannot be bludgeoned, bribed, or sweet-talked into supporting a policy which favors only side.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are nothing if not good students. It is time to go back and hit the books. If they can broker a package deal which addresses the most critical needs of the Palestinians (including fostering Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, furthering PA security and solcial welfare responsibilities, easing the Gaza siege, and curbing settlement) as well as providing something Israelis can reasonably view as an advance over their current situation (such as making good on hopes for Muslim-world normalization measures), they have a chance of success.

If not, it is time to leave the people here who hate one another to themselves. And to Henry Siegman. In a place where dignity is everything, there is a certain honor to be gained in recognizing that you tried your best, but that peace will have to wait for a time when Israelis are less preoccupied with hating one another other, and Palestinians, the same.

For the full post, please see haaretz.com:

Magda Abu-Fadil: Lebanon's LBC TV Rides Layoffs Wave Ahead of Murdoch Buy-in, Arab Media Market Expansion

2009-11-01T03:01:24Z

Lebanese media group LBC recently sliced 140 jobs, is trimming fat, and repositioning itself for a mega deal involving Rupert Murdoch's purchase of shares in Rotana Media whose benefactor owns a major stake in LBC operations.

"It was long overdue. It was to have happened but was delayed by political events," explained LBC CEO Pierre El Daher of the decision to tighten the company's belt and lay off dozens of staffers, including well known news reporters and anchors.

LBC CEO Pierre El Daher (Abu-Fadil)

It's part of El Daher's belief that for Lebanese media to evolve and compete in a globalized world, their very culture has to change.

"Media are still in transition. Costs have been going up and revenues going down," he said. "If they (media) don't do the exercise (of changing), they don't stand a chance."

But El Daher said Lebanese broadcast outlets will not change in the foreseeable future, given their almost government media mentality. "Nobody is market-oriented, except LBC," he said.

Enter the heavyweights.

In 2007, LBCSAT (the LBC satellite channel mostly owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal) and Rotana, his other media baby, announced a merger that analysts said was a move signaling "the onset of a large scale media consolidation in the region and creation of a new Middle East media powerhouse."

The other regional powerhouse is the Saudi-owned MBC TV group of news and entertainment channels.

In 2003, El Daher started selling LBCSAT shares to Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of Saudi King Abdallah.

While Rotana enjoyed high market share with its bouquet of entertainment satellite channels, it's also been a financial drag of late.

The company has broken contracts with several Arab pop stars whose sales receipts haven't made the cut.

So, the interlaced News Corp, Rotana, LBC ties have invariably raised eyebrows.

The yet-to-be-announced complex arrangement, details of which have been leaked to various media, involves dumping unprofitable operations, synergy, and a strategy targeting growing markets in the Arab world.

The Wall Street Journal reported that magnate Rupert Murdoch was buying a 20% stake in Prince Alwaleed's Rotana Media that hosts Fox channels in Saudi Arabia and owns rights to 2,000 Arabic movies and a large music library.

In 1997, Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) plowed $400 million to acquire non-voting preferred shares, or 3% of Murdoch's News Corp's capital, and pumped an additional $200 million in 1999 to turn it into a 5.5% take in voting common stock to thwart a potential hostile bid from Liberty Media, according to KHC.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

"KHC is currently exploring the potential for media ventures with News Corporation in the Middle East to capitalize on continuing liberalization of the entertainment industry in the region," an undated announcement on the KHC website said.

In January, pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported that KHC was rebalancing and redirecting its investments after the company announced an $8.26 billion net loss in assets, including a large stake in Citigroup, for 2008's fourth quarter.

Industry insiders who declined to be identified said Alwaleed's overall losses had adversely affected Rotana Media and trickled down to his LBC holdings, where the pinch has been nasty.

"That's why he's been seeking another buyer for his LBC shares," the sources said, adding that any buyer would look at the bottom line and demand a return to profits.

The LBC boss is a sharp, American-educated visionary who introduced private TV to Lebanon in the 1980s, in line with international professional standards.

LBC's newscasts, while facing stiff competition from a plethora of local and regional TV channels, have sizeable audiences.

While wielding considerable power, El Daher said he stayed clear of the news, unless it's something major, adding that Lebanese journalists were not truly converged because the problem was at the leadership level.

LBC Newsroom (Abu-Fadil)

Lebanon boasts private TV channels that were launched during its 1975-90 civil war, mostly by militia leaders, politicians and religious groups. Only one station is state-owned and run.

The go-getter El-Daher is a tough negotiator, but deceptively laid-back when he receives guests in sweat suits and sneakers at his spacious company office north of Beirut.

The layoffs come at a bad time for Lebanese media, many of which have been going through major cutbacks attributed to slumping advertising revenues, the international recession, the ubiquitous Internet, and, arcane internal Lebanese politics.

"When you're doing internal restructuring, you don't sack experienced and competent people," said a statement by dismissed staffers, arguing that politics was behind their layoffs.

Denise Rahme Fakhri, a key news reporter at LBC, said she was targeted because of her political leanings - a reference to her support for the then outlawed Lebanese Forces (LF) militia that has since been mainstreamed and has members in Lebanon's parliament.

She's taken her case to court.

Denise Rahme Fakhri (Assafir)

Not so, according to El Daher. "The head count (of laid off workers) was based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We trimmed where there was fat."

Consulting firm Booz-Allen Hamilton (http://www.boozallen.com/about) was brought in this year to help advise LBC on the restructuring.

But the process had already begun in 2005, when LBC's internal strategy team developed rough guidelines on which the downsizing was based, El Daher said.

Critics claim the station was being used as a platform to promote LF (http://www.lebanese-forces.org/) politics. But staffers of different political leanings were also let go in the recent shakeup.

LBC TV logo

LBC, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation founded by the LF during Lebanon's 15-year civil war, is considered the country's leading TV group of terrestrial and satellite channels.

Its footprint covers the globe, catering to millions of Lebanese expatriates and Arabs with a mix of popular entertainment, public affairs and news shows.

It's a major draw for advertising revenue from the oil-rich Arab Gulf region.

But setbacks, including a tug-of-war fought in court between El Daher and LF leader Samir Geagea over control of the company, notably the terrestrial channel, have hurt.

Geagea, jailed on criminal charges and later released, has been trying to wrest the company back from El Daher, whose primary interest is running a profitable, non-partisan operation.

Geagea claims he handed control to El Daher after his incarceration in 1994 but that the latter veered it off its intended course. Their legal battle has been public and debilitating.

A more recent mishap was the airing of a controversial prime time show, Bold Red Line, featuring a Saudi man boasting on camera of his sexual escapades from his ultraconservative homeland where such public behavior is anathema.

Bold Red Line talk show host Malek Maktabi (Abu-Fadil)

The show's ratings skyrocketed but the man was dragged to court, LBC's offices in Saudi Arabia were shut, the show was suspended for four months, and ad revenues took a direct hit.

Asked about the resultant losses from Saudi Arabia and their impact on LBC finances, El Daher said: "During August and September, ad revenue did not come as expected. We're now talking again with advertisers."

Which means the road ahead is still rocky for all concerned.

On where he sees himself five years from now, El Daher said: "We don't know yet where the business model will stabilize."

Billionaire Saudis Feud Over Fraud Allegations

2009-10-30T14:06:13Z

CAIRO — It goes well beyond the average family squabble. For months, two billionaire families in Saudi Arabia, linked by marriage, have been locked in a bitter legal battle centered on an estimated $22 billion debt implosion and allegations of billions of dollars in fraud.

Saudi Riots Reveal Society's Fissures

2009-10-29T13:35:32Z

By Caryle Murphy

KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia -- Within a week, two events on the manicured corniche of this seaside town set tongues wagging and heads shaking while Saudis sought explanations.

The riot came first.

Al Khobar's double-lane, palm-fringed corniche was packed with families celebrating National Day on Sept. 23. The crowd was especially large this year because the holiday fell amid Eid vacation at the end of Ramadan. Music blared from cars, fireworks lit the sky. The humid air was full of energy.

Suddenly, scores of young men began smashing windows and breaking into the stylish shops nearby. They trashed inventories of sunglasses, crystal glass, clothes and ice cream. They stole cash from the tills, overturned furniture, ran off with copying machines. In all, about 30 shops and restaurants were badly vandalized before police arrived and managed to arrest about 80 of the looters.

The rare outbreak of hooliganism stunned Saudis.

"I cannot call actions such as looting, breaking glass and terrifying innocent shop keepers any less than juvenile and barbaric," said Ali Batarfi, a youth counselor who witnessed the mayhem.

Khobar is a major city in the Eastern Province, where much of the kingdom's oil riches are located. The province is also home to most of the country's Shiite minority, although Shiite community leaders said no Shiites were among the arrested rioters.

The second event on the corniche took place five days later when about 20 of the not-yet-convicted perpetrators were each given 30 lashes in public. About a dozen were flogged in Khobar and the rest in Dammam, a 20-minute ride away, according to Saudi newspapers.

The lashings were ordered by the Eastern Province's vice-governor Prince Jalawi bin Abdul Aziz bin Mossaed, the papers stated. Police officials told reporters that all the flogged youths, including four under age 18, had confessed to participating in the rampage.

No one has come up with definitive explanation for why the apparently spontaneous violence erupted. Some Khobar residents say the men got "carried away" by the celebrations.

Although some vandals were heard to cite U.S. support for Israel as a reason for attacking Pizza Hut and Starbucks, anti-Americanism does not appear to have been a motive.

Mutlaq Al-Anazi, managing editor of Al-Yaum newspaper, told the Arab News: "This has never happened here before. The Eastern Province is a quiet place. Our youngsters have always been known for their good behavior. Therefore, this is alarming. We have had street brawls before -- especially after soccer matches, but ... this was pretty violent and calls for a thorough investigation."

Student Abdullah Thafir Al Amri, 20, was caught up in the police sweep as he bought take-out food in a restaurant. Released days later, he told his family that most of "the actual perpetrators" were from Riyadh and had come to Khobar for vacation because of its "more free atmosphere," according to Al Amri's sister, Hajar.

Hajar, who declined to give her full name, said that the violence was unplanned. "As you know," she added, "the youth here have little space to express themselves, so they take every chance they have, which usually comes during public celebrations, and some abuse it."

Indeed, many Saudis agree. And they saw the Khobar violence as a harbinger of the demographic challenges facing Saudi Arabia. In a country where 38 percent of its 20 million citizens are under 24 years, the government will have to find jobs for this huge youth bulge, as well as provide recreational and entertainment activities.

Not easy in a country dominated by an austere strain of Islam. Saudi Arabia has no movie theaters and limited sports facilities for young men, who can only go to beaches reserved for single men and eat in "singles only" sections of restaurants. As dating is prohibited, most young single men have no opportunity to interact with the opposite sex.

Even innocent partying on the streets to celebrate National Day is taboo for some religious conservatives.

Saudi blogger Eman Al Nafjan described Riyadh on the recent holiday. "The streets were full of guys hanging out of their car windows with flags wrapped around their heads or waving them ... Some even stopped their cars at the side of the road, got out and danced!"

But later at a shopping mall, Al Najran noted that the religious police were "all out to squelch celebrations. They caught a bunch of teenage girls and took the flags that the girls had thrown over their abayas."

Writer Abdullah Al Alami believes that such constrictions on public fun contributed to the Khobar incident. "This terrible event reflects the need to allow more space for the youth in terms of sport clubs, movie theatres and recreation facilities," he told Arab News. There is, he added later in an interview, a "lack of other outlets for these youth."

Laila M. Bahammam, a writer at Al Yaom newspaper, disputed that notion. "There are plenty of beaches ... there are so many things for youngsters," she said. "Also, Bahrain is a one-hour drive away, where they can see movies."

The public flogging drew mixed reviews. Bahammam said most people in Khobar wanted a quick punishment and that "all the parents [of the detained youths] agreed to" the lashings.

Maher Al Bawardi, Al Yaum's circulation manager, said he would have preferred some type of community service for the looters, all of whom have been released from jail. About 20 of them will face civil claims for damages from shop owners, he said.

Al Bawardi added that floggings hurt more psychologically than physically. Under Islamic law, he explained, the lasher must keep his elbow next to his body to mitigate the force of each blow.
"No blood comes," Al Bawardi said. "It won't hurt that much, you won't die from it. But it's an insulting punishment. ... It hurts psychologically, so he knows he's done something wrong."

The National Society for Human Rights, a Saudi group, issued a statement condemning the looting but objecting to the lack of due process. "The execution of lashing ... [before] a lower level court issues a sentence" and all appeals are exhausted is "not coherent" with the country's basic law, it stated.

Marwan Al Zamil, a junior high student at Dhahran Ahliyaa, a private school, was hanging around outside Pizza Hut one night recently with his friends. He said they all approved of the floggings so that "the bullies" responsible for the rampage "can't do it again." 

His friend, Ahmed Bubshait, agreed: "They should learn a lesson," he said, adding that the flogging would make the perpetrators think twice about doing "anything like that on National Day again."

One of the looted shops, OPTICA, sustained more than $130,000 in damage, according to manager Ata Kanani. The eyeglass store's entire inventory, including hundreds of designer sunglasses, as well as fax and credit card machines, were stolen.

Kanani turned and showed a visitor a piece of paper in a brown frame, which he said was presented to him by members of a Khobar youth club a few days after the rampage. Across the top under "Apology," it said "on behalf of all Saudis, we deeply condemn the terrible 'or sorrowful' events that you had to witness."

The shop manager was pleased, but he's taking precautions nonetheless. "Actually, we have to make some shutters," he said. "And have them installed next year, close to National Day."

Read more from GlobalPost.com.

Sabria Jawhar: Lebanese News Station's Cowardice in Sex Braggart Scandal Makes Saudi Female Journalist the Scapegoat

2009-10-28T16:16:12Z

Something got lost in all the outrage last week over the conviction and lashing sentence of the 22-year-old Saudi woman journalist who worked for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp (LBC). What exactly is the LBC doing to support their journalist?

The answer is absolutely nothing.

According to a Reuters report this week, the young woman had nothing to do with the Bold Red Line broadcast segment in which a Saudi man bragged about his sexual conquests. The man was sentenced to five years in jail and lashings, but the woman journalist only worked as a "fixer," someone who arranges interviews for foreign media. She apparently had nothing to do with the segment involving the braggart. Her crime apparently is that she worked for the LBC, which was not licensed to operate in Saudi Arabia.

Let's set aside the idiocy that the Saudi government did not know that the LBC was not licensed. Let's focus on the conduct of the LBC. The Lebanese were kicked out of the country, so they suffered a bit for their actions. But they also couldn't get out of Saudi Arabia fast enough, leaving behind a vulnerable employee who proved to be the LBC's scapegoat for their poor behavior. King Abdullah this week pardoned the woman, but she still must face a tribunal before the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information.

A year ago the LBC approached me and offered a job that eventually went to this young Saudi journalist. I spoke over the phone with their producers and a presenter. It quickly became clear that the LBC was not interested in Saudi news, but creating tabloid headlines.

Among the topics the LBC was eager to cover were strange sexual practices, voodoo and black magic, especially black magic practiced on wayward husbands. Runaway girls, marriages of convenience and spinsterhood were other topics the LBC wanted to present. The LBC was clearly interested in the sensational aspects of Saudi culture, taboo subjects that are not topics of conversation. Yet the LBC seemed unmoved that these stories would perpetuate Saudi stereotypes in a period in which Saudis are under attack for their cultural and religious differences.

Part of my responsibility as a Saudi journalist is that if wrongdoing is exposed or taboo subjects are addressed, solutions must be provided in these stories. Perhaps more important is the safety and well-being of the people we interview. It's likely that Saudis who participate in media interviews on sensitive subjects will face consequences for their actions.

It's one thing to interview a Saudi woman who chooses to remain unmarried to pursue a career. It's another for a young woman forced into spinsterhood by her father who wants her income. If such a woman gave an interview, she would have to answer to her family. What kind of support would the LBC provide for the girl if she was thrown out of the house? I think none. No two better examples of abandonment can be found than the sex braggart and the Saudi journalist.

During our discussion about my role in their Bold Red Line series, the LBC producers were cavalier, if not dismissive, about my concerns over the consequences of these kinds of interviews. When the discussion turned to me being hired as a producer, I thought that I could control editorial content. But the answer was no. Editorial control came from Beirut.

It became apparent that if I were to arrange the interviews, it would become my responsibility to see that the interviewees did not suffer any consequences for their frank talk. But that is an extremely risky task without the support of the employer.

I recognized the LBC was not prepared to offer any support after a broadcast to its Saudi employees or the interview subjects. Their desire to present sensitive Saudi issues as tabloid fodder was not much different than Western media parachuting into Riyadh for two days to do a story on how the abaya and niqab are oppressive to women. It makes for interesting television and boosts ratings, but it leaves a lot of pain and humiliation in its wake.

I rejected the LBC's offer. Their attitude toward Saudi Arabia was insincere and cynical. I could not see how the Bold Red Line series would benefit or shed any light on Saudi culture other than presenting Saudis as parodies of themselves.

It didn't occur to me until this young Saudi female journalist stood trial for the LBC's negligence that the LBC's producers would prey on someone who is young, perhaps naïve, and eager to advance her journalism career.

Now this young woman is suffering for the sins of the LBC, which has stood by mute. They offered no lawyer and no statement of condemnation for her treatment by the Saudi courts. LBC should be an embarrassment to Middle East journalists. At a time when Arab journalists are seeking to be taken seriously as professionals and attempt to adhere to an ethical standard, the LBC's cowardice illustrates just how little progress we have made.

Mark Levine: A Sanctuary Attacked, and With it, Pakistan's Future Further Imperiled

2009-10-27T11:00:30Z

Of all the violence that has plagued Pakistan in the last few years perhaps none is more symptomatic of the larger war over the country's future than the double suicide bombing that occurred in the International Islamic University in Islamabad last week.

The Taliban confirmed it was behind the attacks. One of the movement's main trainers of suicide bombers explained that with the army's invasion of South Waziristan the Taliban "now considered all of Pakistan to now be a war zone." Even, it's now clear, a women's cafeteria and the country's leading religious university and the office of the Department of Sharia, or Islamic law.

As I watched video of the scene of the attacks my mind was flooded with memories of when I had lectured in the very building where the second bombing took place, and of how the many encounters I had there utterly changed my understanding not merely of Pakistan, but of the future of Islam as well.

I had only just landed in Islamabad a few hours before I was scheduled to give my first talk at the university, and whether it was the 13-hour time difference with Los Angeles, two nights flying in coach, or walking through an arrivals lounge that had recently been attacked by terrorists, I was more uneasy being in Pakistan than being in Baghdad or Gaza during their own periods of intense violence.

Matters weren't helped when I was introduced to a group of male religious studies students by my host as someone who'd lived in Israel and speaks Hebrew -- in fact, my stomach sank a bit -- especially as their long beards and traditional dress reminded me a lot more of the Taliban than the graduate students I normally spend time with. But as with most things in Pakistan, appearances were deceiving, and the situation was far more complex, in fact inspiring, than I'd imagined.

It turned out that the students with whom I was meeting weren't merely studying Islam, they were PhD students in comparative religion. That is, they were situating Islam, its history and religious dynamics, within the broader study of religious experience world-wide. Moreover, the recently established program in which they were studying was a model for the International Islamic University's drive to develop a new curriculum, one that would combine 1,000 years of Islamic learning with the latest developments in American and European humanities and social studies scholarship.

What's more, the students explained, they were all learning Hebrew, as well as biblical criticism and contemporary approaches to religious studies as part of their course work. As we began to talk it immediately became clear that neither students nor faculty had much time or desire to engage in spirited critiques of the United States or the West (the more secular intellectuals and activists with whom I met had covered that angle well enough).

They were much more interested in discussing how to better integrate "Western" and Islamic methodologies for studying history and religion, and more troubling, trying to figure out how to criticize the government "without disappearing" into the dark hole of the Pakistani prison system for five or ten years, or worse.

Colleagues in the history and political science departments were just as eager to develop the most up-to-date curricula possible, and in so doing lay a benchmark for the development of their fields, not just in Pakistan, but globally.

This is not to say that the members of the University community supported US policies in the Muslim world. Far from it. But as good social scientists (or social scientists in training), they understood the the importance of the interplay of local and global dynamics, and of the problems in their own societies that contributed to the violent relationship between the the US and many Muslims around the world.

Indeed, when I delivered my second lecture, on globalization early on a Saturday morning, the room was filled with students, more women than men (at least half the student body at the University are women), who grilled me about the assumptions underlying my research and methodologies. Would that most of my students back home were as interested in what I was teaching as were they.

As I walked around the campus, and met faculty and students who'd come from all over the Muslim world to study there, the role of the IIU in the larger context Islam globally became evident. The University was carving out a much-needed space in Muslim intellectual, and through it political, life through its bringing Muslim and Western traditions into dialog. Yet it was receiving and continues to receive far less attention from scholars, commentators or policy-makers than the fully American-style universities being opened across the Persian Gulf, as most recently evidenced by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, just established with great fanfare, and a $10 billion endowment, in Jeddah.

Such a venture is surely important, not just for having one of the world's fastest super computers or giving every newly hired professor $400,000 in research money -- I got $3,000 when I was hired at UC Irvine, and that was when the University of California was flush with cash. Most of the faculty I met at the IIU were using decade old computers with one dial-up modem available per office -- but for being a coed institution and barring the Saudi religious police from operating on campus.

Yet the singular focus of KAUST on hard sciences is ultimately myopic and will likely produce little in the way of larger societal change in Saudi Arabia predicted by the new university's boosters. Such changes come only with a robust public sphere where citizens who are educated broadly and humanistically are equipped with the social knowledge and skills to challenge the dominant political and social-religious discourses.

Building such an active Pakistani citizenry was, and I imagine despite the bombing remains, a major goal of the IIU. Sadly, it's just such a goal that made it a "legitimate" target for the Taliban, for whom a healthy public sphere populated by educated citizens willing and able to challenge, and potentially democratize and clean up their government, would pose at least as big threat to its position in the country as the army they are now fighting in the country's Northwest.

Not surprisingly, the core mission of the IIU would also not win it many friends among the country's corrupt economic and political elite, who, many of the senior education and religious officials I met confided to me, share the Taliban's desire to silence any kind of critical scholarship or societal debate more broadly.

With this attack, the Taliban have struck what what until now was a sanctuary, however fragile and inchoate, where the emerging generation of Pakistanis and Muslims more broadly could determine on their own terms how best to bring together their own and other cultures and traditions to grapple with the profound challenges faced by their societies. I suppose it was inevitable, but I hope it doesn't weaken the spirit and resolve of the thousands of students who've come to the IIU from across the Muslim world to help build a better future. They are not just the future of Pakistan, or of Islam; they are are future as well.

Rozanna al-Yami, Saudi Journalist Involved In Sex TV Show, Won't Be Flogged, Says King

2009-10-26T09:30:01Z

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia's king waived a flogging sentence on a female journalist charged for involvement in a risque TV show, the second such pardoning of such a high profile case by the monarch in recent years.

King Abdullah's decision to waive 22-year-old journalist Rozanna al-Yami's sentence of 60 lashes by a judge in Jiddah follows intense international media attention.

Female Journalist Sentenced To 60 Lashes For Sex Show On Saudi Arabia TV

2009-10-24T17:40:24Z

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A Saudi court on Saturday sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes after she had been charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex.

Rozanna al-Yami, 22, is believed to be the first Saudi woman journalist to be given such a punishment, but there were conflicting accounts about how the court issued its verdict.

Leon T. Hadar: Getting the Vietnam Analogy Right in Afghanistan

2009-10-21T15:20:51Z

The ghosts of the Vietnam War seem to be hanging around the White House Situation Room as President Barack Obama and his national security aides are debating a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and in particular whether to deploy more U.S. troops to that country. Indeed, if to judge by their required reading list, Vietnam is very much on the minds of President Obama and other officials, lawmakers and pundits in Washington.

The headline above a recent report in The Wall Street Journal,"Behind the War Debate, a Battle of Two Books Rages," seem to illustrate the way supporters and opponents of increasing U.S. troop level in Afghanistan have been making use of what they see as the lessons of Vietnam, and applying them to the debates over the process of presidential national security policymaking and civilian-military relationship.

Hence, political scientist Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster which depicts a President Lyndon Johnson being pressed to escalate the war in Vietnam by a somewhat narrow-minded military is being cited by those skeptical about the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, to increase the number of troops there.

At the same time, military analyst Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which describes the administration of President Richard Nixon under public and Congressional pressure to get out of Vietnam and rejecting what could have become an effective counter-insurgency strategy by the military, is being touted by those who leaning in the direction of General McChrystal's recommendations.

Applying historical analogies à la "the lessons of..." to contemporary foreign policy dilemmas could certainly be instructive. As President Obama prepares to make his decisions in Afghanistan, he should consider the pitfalls faced by U.S. presidents, starting with John Kennedy as they tried to calibrate U.S. strategic choices in Vietnam by drawing on the input of their military and civilian advisors and juggling conflicting political pressures from the public, Congress and the bureaucracy.

But the historical analogies of Vietnam could become confusing if not misleading when one shifts the focus from the decision making processes to ideological premises of U.S. involvement the Cold War. In fact, Obama and his advisors should recall that as President Johnson and the members of his national security team were deliberating whether to expand U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, it was the specter Munich 1938 that was haunting Washington then, and that the lessons of British attempts to appease Nazi Germany's dictator Adolph Hitler were being employed in a way that seemed to be leaving the White House with no other choice but to hang tough and stay the course in Vietnam lest U.S. policymakers would be perceived as lacking the resolve to stand-up to Hitler-like aggressors.

The reason that the lessons of Munich in the context of World War II seemed be so relevant to U.S. policymakers during the Vietnam War taking place at the height of the Cold War was that American intervention in the two wars were driven by grand Manichean narratives in which a U.S.-led Western alliance was confronting a powerful global aggressor representing a threatening and dynamic ideology.

Indeed, for the American foreign policy establishment as well as for the general public, North Vietnam was perceived to be an integral part of a monolithic Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, including its Eastern European satellites, China and Cuba. The only serious debate in Washington was over the kind of mix of diplomacy and military force that the U.S. needed to employ in defending South Vietnam and confronting North Vietnam. And in that context, it wasn't difficult for the "hawks" in Washington to suggest that just like Czechoslovakia in 1938, South Vietnam was being threatened by a regional satellite of an antagonistic global adversary and thus required forceful American military support.

Recognizing that nationalism and not adherence to communist ideology or solidarity with the Soviet Union and China was the main driving force behind North Vietnamese policy could have changed the strategic calculations of policymakers in Washington. Indeed, the growing realization that there was no Soviet-led global communist bloc led to the U.S. opening to China -- which ended-up going to war against Vietnam -- and to the use of the "China Card" in dealing with the Soviet Union. And it helped accelerate U.S. détente with the Soviet Union as well West German rapprochement with Eastern Europe or "Ostpolitik."

In the aftermath of 9/11 and in the period leading to the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seemed for a while as though President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors would be successful in constructing a new grand Manichean narrative that conceived of a U.S.-led West confronting a global Islamofascist threat or a Caliphate-in-the-making that allegedly included Al Qaeda, a radical Muslim-Sunni fundamentalist terrorist group; Taliban, an Afghani-Pashtun and Sunni-fundamentalist movement allied with U.S. partners, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; Iran, a Muslim-Shiite fundamentalist state and Hizbollah, a Lebanese-Arab Shiite movement as well as the secular Syrian Ba'ath regime and the Palestinian-Sunni Hamas movement, elected to power in a U.S.-sponsored election and a mish-mash of national and regional militant Muslim groups -- in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, and in places like Chechnya (Russia), Kashmir (India), and Xinjiang (China).

In a way, it was the costly and failed Iraq War that helped disprove the Islamofascist myth -- after all, the collapse of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban helped strengthen Iran -- and undermine the ideological premises of short-lived grand narrative that steered the U.S. into the war in Mesopotamia while preventing it from achieving its original and limited goals in Afghanistan (destroying Al Qaeda). Indeed, any serious discussion of the political realities in the Greater Middle East taking place in Washington today would have to assume that the U.S. has to deal today -- including in Afghanistan -- not with a unified and monolithic adversary or "axis" but with a hodgepodge of Muslim governments and movements that lack any shared ideology or common interests.

To apply the historical analogies here, the choices facing the U.S. in Afghanistan are unlike the dilemmas the U.S. confronted during the Vietnam War, in the same way that the "loss" of South Vietnam wasn't akin to the destruction of Czechoslovakia by Hitler's Germany. Even under a scenario under which the Taliban ends up controlling even more territory than it already does today, the impact on core U.S. national interest would be limited. Local and regional players (India, Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) would be forced to work together or separately to prevent the country from becoming a source of instability and a center of international terrorism. Hence, taking limited steps towards securing U.S. narrow goals of preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a military base should not be regarded as a new and dramatic chapter in a grand narrative but as a cost-effective exercise in fighting terrorism.