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Volume 1, Issue
16
November -
December,
2004
In this Newsletter:
A Look at the Bright Side
The Prism Group focuses on several key issues and is pleased to
see that its efforts are causing “spectrums of awareness” in
many places. Our hope has always been to spread light and so in
our previous
newsletter, we focused on the many good things that are
happening, partnerships and joint efforts by small groups in
many countries, medical advancements, and more.
This month’s newsletter breaks with our normal focus on Middle
Eastern events to highlight the current wave of religious
intolerance throughout Europe, an intolerance sparking hate
crimes that appear to threaten the very fabric of Western
society. Although such crimes have been committed on European
soil, they are largely motivated by trends whose source lies in
the Middle East.
As we issue this newsletter, we can only hope that in the end,
peace-loving people from all nations and all religions will
choose light instead of darkness, peace instead of war, and
tolerance instead of ethnic, racial, or religious differences.
When Free Speech Proves
Fatal: Democracy under Fire
On November 2, Theo van Gogh, a controversial
champion of free speech, was murdered. He was slain two months
after his film 'Submission' was shown on national TV in
Holland. The film, whose script was written by Somali-born
Dutch politician Ayan Hirsi Ali, centres around
Muslim women. Beaten, raped, then
forced into marriage, these women are shown in transparent
gowns; their bare skin inscribed with verses from the Koran that
detail the permitted physical punishments
for women who "misbehave".
Subsequent to Submission's screening, both van Gogh and Ali
received death threats from Islamic groups. Ali is currently
under police protection, as is Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who holds
outspoken opinions about what should be done with radical Islam
and radical Islamic persons in the Netherlands.
Race relations in historically tolerant Holland are suffering; a
number of racially/religiously motivated crimes have been
committed including the bombing of an Islamic school and
retaliatory arson attacks against mosques and churches.
According to Justice minister Piet Hein Donner: "If this is what
has happened to this man, who did nothing but express his
opinion, then one can no longer live decently in this land."
Dutch Prime Minister Jan
Peter Balkenende told the Dutch Parliament that extremism was
undermining democracy.
"It is the joint task of
Muslims and non-Muslims to warn young people against
radicalisation," he said, according to the Associated Press news
agency.
The Dutch Immigration
Minister, Rita Verdonk, warns that EU countries are at risk, due
to increasing radicalism among young Muslims. She states that
member states must act immediately to better assimilate and
integrate foreigners. The minister, whose nation currently holds
the EU presidency, says that countries must ensure that
immigrants learn the local language and accept Western values,
but added that the EU also needed to develop, in her words, a
common vision of integration.
Tension in Europe has
risen markedly. In another instance, this time in Belgium,
Senator Mimount Bousakla of Moroccan origin is reportedly under
round-the-clock police protection and has gone into hiding. She
received threatening telephone calls following her appearance at
the Council of Europe on forced and child marriage.
In this context, the views of Helmut Schmidt, the former German
chancellor and embodiment of European pluralistic socialism
since World War Two, are controversial but interesting. He
summed up the dilemmas in an
article earlier this year.
“It needed the Age
of Enlightenment 250 years ago, to conceive of equal rights for
any human being under a rule of law and democracy. These
concepts evolved step-by-step in England, America, Holland,
France and elsewhere — and quite a bit later in my own country.
Yet, they did not
develop in Arab regions, the Middle East, in Iran, Indonesia,
India or China. Enlightenment has not as yet reached most Muslim
people. And it particularly has not reached the Islamic masses,
altogether about one-fifth of the global population.
I often wonder about
our Western attempts to proselyte the Muslim masses into
democrats. They will easily accept television, automobiles, Coca
Cola — and Western technologies that we export to them.
But to convert them
into democrats will take generations — and it will take
understanding and economic aid as well as tolerance.
I believe it would
already be an enormous success if we could bring all their
states and governments to acknowledge and obey the rule of
international law — and to obey the Charter of the United
Nations.
Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al- Arabiya news
channel, recently published the
following in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat
'It is a certain
fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally
certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists
are Muslims. The hostage-takers of children in Beslan, North
Ossetia, were Muslims. The other hostage-takers and subsequent
murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also
Muslims. Those involved in rape and murder in
Darfur, Sudan, are
Muslims, with other Muslims chosen to be their victims…Bin Laden
is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide
bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings,
all over the world, were Muslim.
…
An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the
felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls
murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if
you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has
been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war
cry…
We cannot tolerate
in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians,
explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever
the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These
are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image….
We cannot clear our
names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has
become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly,
implemented by Muslim men and women…We
cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous
crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling
to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending
other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while
sending their own children to European and American schools and
colleges.
In the Arab World:
Uniting against Extremists
Over
2,500 Muslim intellectuals are signatories to a petition to the
United Nations requesting an international treaty to ban the use
of religion for incitement to violence. The petition, addressed
to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the Security Council,
calls on the UN to set up a tribunal for “the theologians of
terror”, and to prevent its member states from broadcasting the
“mad musings of the theologians of terror.”
Among
those collecting signatures are Shakir Al-Nablusi, a Jordanian
writer, Jawad Hashem, a former Iraqi minister of planning, and
Alafif Al-Akdhar, a leading Tunisian writer and academic.
“There
are individuals in the Muslim world who pose as clerics and
issue death sentences against those they disagree with,” said
Al-Nablusi. “These individuals give Islam a bad name and foster
hatred among civilizations.”
The
petition describes those who use religion for inciting violence
as “the sheikhs of death”. Among those mentioned is Yusuf Al-Qaradawi,
an Egyptian cleric accused of “providing a religious cover for
terrorism.”
Al-
Qaradawi has issued fatwas that:
- Allow the killing of Israeli
pregnant women and their ‘fetuses’ on the grounds that the
babies would grow up to join the Israeli Army.
- State that killing “all Americans,
civilian or military” in Iraq was allowed.
Other
“sheikhs of death”, Ali bin Khudhair Al-Khudhair and Safar Al-Hawali
from Saudi Arabia have described the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks
against the United States as “retaliations”, and thus justified
under Islamic law.
Another fatwa issued by the Saudi Sheikh Ali
Bin Khodair Al-Khodhari approves Al-Qa'ida's 9/11 terrorist
attacks:
‘It is astonishing
to mourn the [American] victims as being innocents. Those
victims may be classified as infidel Americans which do not
deserve being mourned, because each American, as to his relation
to American government, is a warrior, or supporter, in money or
opinion. It is legitimate to kill all of them as combatant; or
non-combatant, such as the old, the blind, or non-Muslims’
“We
cannot let such dangerous nonsense to pass as Islam,” Al-Nablusi
says.
Excerpts from the original English translation of the petition
may be found at
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD81204#_edn1
Healing the Wounded
As catastrophic as the attack or the injury,
the wounded often experience another level of suffering after an
attack. Months of rehabilitation, treatments, and operations
follow until the days and weeks turn into an endless series of
doctors and hospitals. Few can argue that Israel has experienced
an unprecedented number of attacks in the last several years.
She has become expert in treating not only the physical wounds,
but also the psychological scars, which often last beyond the
wounds that can be seen.
On a bright note, eighteen children who were
injured and held hostage during the Beslan siege in Russia last
September were sent on a 3-week visit to Israel.
After the Beslan attack occurred, Ashkelon Mayor Roni Mahatzari
sent a letter of condolence to his fellow mayor in Beslan. He
then invited the children and their parents to visit Israel.
"As a nation that
has so much experience in dealing with terrorism, I believe we
have something to offer countries such as Russia regarding the
treatment of children who are victims of terror," Mahatzari
says. “We have so much experience in dealing with terror and
trauma, so we want to offer our help to the children to
enable them to speed their recovery."
The Prism Group Website
Please visit
our site and help direct others to the existing fact sheets. If
you have ideas for fact sheets that you believe we should
investigate and compile, please write to us at:
info@theprismgroup.org.
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