President Obama with King Salman at Erga Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday. Credit Stephen Crowleym/The New York Times
Quotations from the Times article reprinted below:
The official said the Saudis preferred to confront terror threats only with force while the United States was seeking an approach that also included diplomatic efforts in the region. . . .
It would help understanding if the Times or the official were to explain with whom the king refuses to negotiate concerning Terror and with whom the president is using diplomacy to confront Terror.
Both the king and the president use force. Saudi individuals have spent billions of dollars to finance Terror in Syria (e.g., Salafi Jihadists in Syria); and the United States is supporting armed opposition to Terror there (the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds).
. . . The sharpest exchange, the official said, came when Mr. Obama criticized the kingdom’s human rights record, raising the issues of harsh sentences and beheadings. The king repeatedly defended the Saudi justice system.
Apparently the Saudi and United States' genocide in Yemen wasn't addressed.
The president was right to criticize the king for blogging The punishment i s barbaric and in some cases the justification for he punishment cannot be sanctioned by any civilized nation. See below.
From an article published by
The Daily Dot
The victim is strapped to a vertical stake with his bare buttocks and back exposed. Then a member of the police or security services brings the lash down against the flesh. Typically five lashes breaks the skin and causes permanent tissue damage. It is possible to be flogged to death.
Often a rapist or a murder will be sentenced to a hundred or two hundred lashes in Saudi Arabia. Rape victims have also been flogged for adultery. This week, the Jeddah Criminal Court sentenced a political blogger to ten years in jail and 1,000 lashes.
Amnesty International has condemned the sentence given to Raif Badawi, co-founder of the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website, as “outrageous.”
“He is a prisoner of conscience who is guilty of nothing more than daring to create a public forum for discussion and peacefully exercising the right to freedom of expression,” Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
On May 7, 2012, Badawi’s site declared a “day of liberalism,” and criticised the dominance of religion in public life. He fled the country and returned when the charges were dropped, reports RT. But in June 2012, he was arrested and charged with “apostasy,” punishable by death.
Badawi was sentenced to seven years and 600 lashes for “ridiculing Islam” and “going beyond the realm of obedience,” in June 2012. But in December, the sentence was overturned and passed to a different court, which increased it to ten years, a $266,000 fine, and a thousand-whip beating.
Rather than having to endure all 1,000 lashes in one sitting, Saudi Arabia allows severe beatings to be doled out over a number of sessions, often in batches of fifty.
Although, as this highly distressing video of a Saudi Arabian flogging shows, any amount of lashes is a heinous punishment.
President Obama is on less solid ground when he critiqued beheadings because his country sanctions equally cruel state killing and ever worse punishment of life-long solitary confinement. A state killing by whatever means is hard for a little while and then it is over. Indefinite solitary confinement in a tiny concrete cell, sometimes for life, is worse then having one's head chopped off. The United States, which imprisons more men than any other nation on earth, holds many in indefinite solitary confinement. See Wahhabi and Christian punishment compared | Newspaper Spoon.
Obama and King Salman of Saudi Arabia Meet, but Deep Rifts Remain
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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Obama and King Salman of Saudi Arabia spent more than two hours in a closed-door meeting that American officials said was cordial but underscored deep differences with the kingdom over Iran, human rights and the best way to fight terror.
The two leaders met in Riyadh on Wednesday against the backdrop of a public debate in the United States Congress about a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held legally responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if it is established that any officials played a role — a charge Saudi officials have long denied.
Administration officials said the issue of the Sept. 11 attacks did not come up during the meeting with the king at Erga Palace, an opulent compound lined with palm trees and well-manicured royal grounds.
American officials said Mr. Obama pressed King Salman to be more open to engaging in diplomacy with Iran and to find alternatives to direct confrontation with Iranian leaders and other rivals in the region. They described the king as highly skeptical of efforts to work with Iran, the Saudis’ chief rival in the region and the backer of rebels in Yemen that the Saudis are fighting. [Demonstrably false and the Times must know the claim is false; yet it keeps publishing the false claim, for reasons not explained. See Iran's Game in Yemen | Foreign Affairs; Saud falsely blame Iran for Yemen | Newspaper Spoon.]
Mr. Obama also reiterated his view thatSaudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations needed to rely less on the United States for their security, officials said. Similar comments by Mr. Obama in a recent article in the magazine The Atlantic had increased the friction between the two governments, but American officials who attended the meeting with the king said the president did not apologize for them. [The president is not alone in urging a reduction in military support for Saudi Arabia, an the United States' Congress cravenly keeps on appropriating money for bombs for the Saudi. Pakistan's parliament is more courageous: it has forbidden military support for Saudi Arabia, after the Saudi appealed for help against a threat of an invasion by the Islamic State.]
In a statement released after the meeting, the White House stressed the areas of agreement between Mr. Obama and the king, saying that they “reaffirmed the historic friendship and deep strategic partnership” between their two nations. But the statement also noted that the two leaders merely “exchanged views” on several topics, suggesting a lack of agreement in those areas.
The meeting exposed what one senior administration official at the meeting said were tactical differences even as the two nations broadly have similar goals on fighting terror and maintaining stability in the Middle East. The official said the Saudis preferred to confront terror threats only with force while the United States was seeking an approach that also included diplomatic efforts in the region. The sharpest exchange, the official said, came when Mr. Obama criticized the kingdom’s human rights record, raising the issues of harsh sentences and beheadings. The king repeatedly defended the Saudi justice system.
The United States is complicit in Yemen genocide: that much is beyond dispute.
The United States cannot clean its hands of these crimes. It can do these things:
• stop helping Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates kill Yemeni.
• Repudiate the "president" of Yemen, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and support popular elections in that nation.
• Guarantee a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild Yemen, and FEED THE PEOPLE it is helping to starve.
• Recognize the Houthi's legitimate grievances, and accept their inevitable role in Yemen's governance.
• Accept the United Nations' peace initiative in Yemen.
• In Yemen and in Syria, side with Qaboos bin Said al Said, the Sultan of Oman, who is the only humane member of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Obama is on of the best presidents the United States has had since Roosevelt and his sycophantic subservient homage to Saudi Arabia is sickening. Saudi Arabia subservience isn't what Obama or the United States is about.
The dispassionate, undisputed Human RightsWatch report follows a New York Times report, below.
The New York Times
Questioning America’s Role in Yemen
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Boys looking through a hole made by a Saudi-led airstrike on a bridge in Sanaa, Yemen.Credit Hani Mohammed/Associated Press
Who is to blame when bombs kill civilians?
The conflict in Yemen has become an albatross for the United States, and maybe worse. Human Rights Watch, the research and advocacy group, says that America may be complicit in war crimes.
Technically, the United States is not a combatant in the air war launched one year ago by a Saudi-led Sunni Arab coalition in support of the Yemen government against Houthi rebels, members of a Shiite Muslim group. But America plays important, even indispensable, roles.
It is a major arms supplier to the Saudis, now the world’s number three arms purchaser. The United States also provides other critical support to the coalition in the form of intelligence from reconnaissance drones and air craft refueling via airborne fuel tankers. To coordinate the assistance, the Americans have deployed a 45-person military planning group with personnel in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
As the war drags on, Saudi Arabia has come under growing international criticism for indiscriminate airstrikes that have hit markets, hospitals, schools and homes. The United Nations says that coalition airstrikes have caused the vast majority of civilian deaths.
In a report released last week, Human Rights Watch said fragments of two American-made bombs were found in the wreckage of a coalition airstrike on crowded market in the northern district of Mastaba last month in which 97 civilians, including 25 children, were killed. It was one of the war’s deadliest attacks.The group’s researchers examined bomb fragments, as well as photographs and video footage provided by ITV, a British news channel, and concluded that the Saudis used two 2,000 pound bombs known as the MK-84, the largest of its class. American warplanes typically carry smaller bombs, in the range of 500 pounds, in part because they want to reduce property damage and dangers to civilians. If confirmed, the use of a 2,000-pound bomb would suggest the Saudis accepted the likelihood of significant damage to civilians.
International humanitarian law, which the United States helped establish, prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks, which do not distinguish between military targets and civilians. Belkis Wille, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who focuses on Yemen and researched the incident, told The Times that the Americans may not have known the Saudis would use the weapons against civilians when the bombs were sold. Washington has provided MK-84s bombs in previous arms sales, “but you can’t prove” the two used in the market attack were part of any recent sale, she said.
Rather, American culpability turns on whether the United States provided targeting assistance or aerial refueling to the coalition during these particular airstrikes. Various administration officials have acknowledged that the United States is providing targeting and refueling help to the Saudis but it is unclear whether the Americans are assisting with every airstrike or some portion of airstrikes, she added.
In an email to The Times, a spokesman for the United States Central Command said decisions on “final vetting of targets” are made by the coalition, not the United States. But does that absolve Washington of responsibility? In conversations with administration officials in recent months, I have discerned considerable discomfort with the way in which the Saudis are conducting and prolonging the war, as well as concerns about score-settling against Houthi rebels.
Americans deserve to know more clearly just what role their government is playing in the Yemen war. The United States and Saudi Arabia both have an obligation to investigate alleged war crimes by their armed forces, the rights group said. If the Saudi government cannot be more disciplined in its use of devastating weapons, the United States should consider halting arms sales to the government in Riyadh, as theEuropean Parliament has urged European governments to do.
The conflict has already killed more than 6,200 people and triggered a humanitarian crisis in one of the Arab world’s poorest countries. On Sunday night, rival sides began a tentative truce; they need to make it permanent.
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APRIL 7, 2016
Yemen: US Bombs Used in Deadliest Market Strike
Coalition Allies Should Stop Selling Weapons to Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia-led coalition airstrikes using US-made bombs killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children, in northwestern Yemen on March 15, 2016.
(Sanaa) – Saudi Arabia-led coalition airstrikes using United States-supplied bombs killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children, in northwestern Yemen on March 15, 2016, Human Rights Watch said today. The two strikes, on a crowded market in the village of Mastaba that may have also killed about 10 Houthi fighters, caused indiscriminate or foreseeably disproportionate loss of civilian life, in violation of the laws of war. Such unlawful attacks when carried out deliberately or recklessly are war crimes.
Human Rights Watch conducted on-site investigations on March 28, and found remnants at the market of a GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, which consists of a US-supplied MK-84 2,000-pound bomb mated with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also US-supplied. A team of journalists from ITV, a British news channel, visited the site on March 26, and found remnants of an MK-84 bomb paired with a Paveway laser guidance kit. Human Rights Watch reviewed the journalists’ photographs and footage of these fragments.
“One of the deadliest strikes against civilians in Yemen’s year-long war involved US-supplied weapons, illustrating tragically why countries should stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The US and other coalition allies should send a clear message to Saudi Arabia that they want no part in unlawful killings of civilians.”
Human Rights Watch has called on the United States, United Kingdom, France, and other countries to suspend all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia until it curtails its unlawful airstrikes in Yemen, credibly investigates alleged violations, and holds those responsible to account. Selling weapons to Saudi Arabia may make these countries complicit in violations, Human Rights Watch said.
On March 15 at about noon, two aerial bombs hit the market in Mastaba, in the northern Hajja governorate, approximately 45 kilometers from the Saudi border. The first bomb landed directly in front of a complex of shops and a restaurant. The second struck beside a covered area near the entrance to the market, killing and wounding people escaping, as well as others trying to help the wounded. Human Rights Watch interviewed 23 witnesses to the airstrikes, as well as medical workers at two area hospitals that received the wounded.
A United Nations human rights team visited the site the day after the attack and compiled the names of 97 civilians killed in the strike, including 25 children. The UN team said that another 10 bodies were burned beyond recognition, bringing the total number of victims to 107. Two Mastaba residents said that many members of their extended families had died. One lost 16 family members, and the other 17. A local clinic supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) received 45 wounded civilians from the market, three of whom died and were counted in the total death toll.
A witness who helped retrieve bodies said that he saw the bodies of about 10 Houthi fighters, whom he knew previously, among those killed. He said that some armed Houthi fighters regularly ate and slept in a restaurant about 60 meters from where one bomb detonated. The restaurant was not damaged. He said some residents objected to the Houthis’ presence but were powerless to remove them. Human Rights Watch was not able to confirm these claims with other witnesses. The only Houthi military presence identified by Human Rights Watch during its visit was a checkpoint manned by two or three fighters about 250 meters north of the market.
On March 16, the day after the attack, the Saudi military spokesman for the coalition, Gen. Ahmad al-Assiri, said that the strike targeted “a militia gathering.” He also noted that the area was a place for buying and selling qat, a plant widely chewed in Yemen as a mild stimulant, indicating that the coalition knew the strike hit a civilian commercial area. On March 18, al-Assiri told Reuters that the coalition used information from Yemeni military forces loyal to President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi when targeting the Mastaba site. He said the Houthis “deceived people by saying it was a market.” A graphic forwarded to Reuters prepared by Hadi’s government indicated that the target was a military area where Houthi forces had gathered but provided no further detail.
The laws of war prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks, which are attacks that strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. Attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective are considered indiscriminate. An attack is disproportionate if the anticipated loss of civilian life and property is greater than the expected military gain from the attack. The Houthis’ use of a building in the market as a barracks would have amounted to failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians under their control from the effects of attacks. However, this in itself would not have justified the coalition airstrikes as carried out.
Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent may be prosecuted for war crimes. Individuals may also be held criminally liable for assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime. All governments that are parties to an armed conflict are obligated to investigate alleged war crimes by members of their armed forces.
Hadi’s government announced on March 18 that it had formed a committee to look into the bombing. Human Rights Watch contacted the Yemeni human rights minister, who said that a Yemeni national investigative body created in September 2015 and based in Aden was charged with the investigation. Findings have not yet been reported.
Since March 26, 2015, a coalition of nine Arab countries has conducted military operations against the Houthi armed group and carried out numerous indiscriminate and disproportionate airstrikes. The airstrikes have continued since the announcement of a ceasefire, to begin on April 10. The coalition, whose targeting decisions are made in the Saudi Defense Ministry in Riyadh, has consistently failed to investigate alleged unlawful attacks or to hold anyone accountable.
On February 25, 2016, the European parliament passed a resolution calling on the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, “to launch an initiative aimed at imposing an EU arms embargo against Saudi Arabia.” On March 15, the Dutch parliamentvoted to impose the embargo and ban all arms exports to Saudi Arabia.
Human Rights Watch and other international and Yemeni groups have called for foreign governments to halt sales and transfers of all weapons and military-related equipment to parties to the conflict in Yemen if “there is a substantial risk of these arms being used…to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law.”
The US military has deployed dedicated personnel to the Saudi joint planning and operations cell to help “coordinate activities.” US participation in specific military operations, such as providing advice on targeting decisions and aerial refueling during bombing raids, may make US forces jointly responsible for laws-of-war violations by coalition forces. As a party to the conflict, the US is obligated to investigate allegedly unlawful attacks in which it took part.
“Even after dozens of airstrikes on markets, schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians, the coalition refuses to provide redress or change its practices,” Motaparthy said. “The US and others should pull the plug on arms to the Saudis or further share responsibility for civilian lives lost.”
Market Airstrike At about noon on March 15, 2016, an airstrike hit the crowded market in Mastaba, in northern Yemen. It detonated in front of a line of shops selling groceries and household items, and a restaurant on the floor above the shops. Ali Ahmad Nahan, a secretary working at his home nearby, said he heard the sound of planes and ran outside. He saw two planes circling the market area, then saw an explosion. Approximately five minutes later, he said, he saw a second explosion.
Yehia Ali, 70, said he was in a restaurant across the road from the market when he saw two planes overhead. “The first strike hit here [in the market], right next to the tomato seller,” he said. “It threw people everywhere. The planes went west, circled around to the south, then came back toward us. Then the second [bomb] struck, and people were just finished off.”
The second strike hit near the entrance to the market, approximately 12 meters north of a covered area containing several market stalls. Ali Abdullah Bakily, a 19-year-old high school student, was sitting in the covered market. “People ran out of the market to the north after the first strike,” he said. “But those who ran north were killed in the second strike.” Bakily himself ran east behind the line of stores, into the village.
Mohammed Yehia Muzayid, a cleaner at the market injured in the attack, said:
When the first strike came, the world was full of blood. People were all in pieces, their limbs were everywhere. People went flying. Most of the people, we collected in pieces, we had to put them in plastic bags. A leg, an arm, a head. There wasn’t more than five minutes between the first and second strike. The second strike was there, at the entrance to the market. People were taking the injured out, and it hit the wounded and killed them. A plane was circling overhead.
I was helping to remove the dead, trying to pick a man up to see who he was. Then the second strike hit. Shrapnel hit me in the face. After the second strike, I just ran away. The shrapnel cut my lip and inside my mouth, I lost these teeth.
Sixteen members of the extended Muzayid family died in the attack, he said. The airstrike also killed 17 members of the al-Obeid family, another witness told Human Rights Watch.
Abbas Mastabani, 35, said he had parked his car across the street from the market and was approaching it to buy some goods when the first bomb struck. He was thrown to the ground, but was able to crawl back to his car to check on his four-year-old son, Majid. He said he crawled past bodies, limbs, and livestock until he reached his car, and saw a leg was wedged under the front tire. He pulled himself up and looked through the shattered front window but his son was no longer in the car. He then fled the site, terrified that there might be another strike and panicking about the fate of his child. When he got home he found that a friend who had been standing by his car had grabbed his son when the first bomb hit and taken him home.
Hamid Muhammad Yahya, 25, pointed to a red scarf hanging on the remains of the roof covering the patio of the shops and restaurant: “That is Muhammad Hussein al-Aslami’s scarf. He was a qat seller at the market. We found his body on the other side of the street, about 60 meters away.”
Three witnesses gave Human Rights Watch the names of relatives whose bodies they had not been able find even weeks after the strike. Ahmed Bakeel Abdullah, 50, a local sheikh, said that local residents found 48 body parts that they could not identify, and buried them in a pit just outside the village.
Several witnesses said that the wounded could not receive medical treatment for at least an hour because bystanders and emergency medical services could not enter the site, fearing additional strikes.
Othman Saleh, a Health Ministry official at the MSF-supported clinic in Abs, said that the clinic’s staff received 45 wounded from the Mastaba attack, one of whom was dead upon arrival and two of whom died over the next five days. He and other medical staff estimated that about a quarter of the wounded had been women, a quarter children, and a quarter elderly. Saleh said his team sent medical kits to Mastaba’s healthcare center and that residents there had treated a number of the wounded.
Previous Airstrikes in the Area Coalition airstrikes have struck the area in and around the village of Mastaba at least six times over the last eight months. Between July 16 and 19, 2015, airstrikes hit an Agriculture Ministry office, a newly constructed municipal administration building that had yet to open, and a storage hangar in the building’s backyard. Three more strikes hit the road next to the buildings as well as the local courthouse, damaging its outer wall. These government building compounds are about 800 meters from the Mastaba marketplace. One witness said that Houthi fighters had been sleeping in all three buildings leading up to the airstrikes, but he did not know how many.
On August 3, at about 2 a.m., a bomb landed next to a small shop across from a hut being used by the Houthis as a checkpoint along the road into Mastaba village. It did not detonate or cause any casualties.
Across northern Yemen, Human Rights Watch has documented airstrikes on 11 other marketplaces. On May 12, 2015, a strike on the marketplace in the town of Zabid, along the western coast, killed at least 60 civilians. A July 4 strike on the marketplace in the town of Muthalith Ahim in the northwest, 20 kilometers from Mastaba, killed at least 65 civilians. In the northern Houthi stronghold city of Saada, the coalition has bombed at least five of the city’s main marketplaces.
Coalition Airstrikes Generally Since March 26, 2015, the UN and nongovernmental organizations have documented numerous airstrikes by coalition forces that violate the laws of war. The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, established under UN Security Council Resolution 2140 (2013), in a report made public on January 26, “documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations” of the laws of war.
Human Rights Watch has documented 36 unlawful airstrikes – some of which may amount to war crimes – which have killed at least 550 civilians. Human Rights Watch has also documented 15 attacks in which internationally banned cluster munitions were used in or near cities and villages, wounding or killing civilians. Cluster munitions have been used in multiple locations in at least five of Yemen’s 21 governorates: Amran, Hajja, Hodaida, Saada, and Sanaa. The coalition has used at least six types of cluster munitions, three delivered by air-dropped bombs and three by ground-launched rockets. Human Rights Watch has said there should be an immediate halt to all use of cluster munitions and that coalition members should join the Convention on Cluster Munitions
Monday, April 11, 2016
O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above your deep and dreamless sleep,
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light. . . .
The Light isn't as everlasting as we in the United States once imagined to be:
ISRAEL PULSEבעבריתישראל פולס
A Palestinian woman tries to bypass others as they make their way to attend the second Friday prayer of Ramadan in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, at an Israeli checkpoint in the West bank city of Bethlehem, June 26, 2015.(photo by REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma)
How this Israeli checkpoint turns morning commute into 5-hour ordeal
The scene each day at the Bethlehem checkpoint is horrifying. Lucky Palestinians who have managed to obtain authorization to work in Israel — the “ticket to life,” they call it — undergo an exhausting, agonizing wait that can last five hours, even when they arrive early in the morning to beat the crowds.
Author Shlomi EldarPosted March 30, 2016 TranslatorAviva Arad
This is the journey thousands must make to reach jobs that help them survive the economic distress in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
The inhumane overcrowding to get through the “lines” at the checkpoint forces many workers to climb the fences just to avoid suffocation. Some workers, many in their 40s and 50s who don’t have it in them to withstand the long hours of crowding, try to arrive at 2 a.m. to avoid the misery that will increase as more laborers arrive.
“The fight for a piece of railing is the hardest of all,” said Ahmed Darajah, a 42-year-old father of eight from Beit Sahour who works in a quarry. “Only the strong can climb the railing and hold tight to the barbwire fence for hours. Not everyone has the strength to keep hanging in the air all night, and only the strong survive [and keep their place in line]. The rest pray to God.”
The official name of the checkpoint at Bethlehem is the Rachel Checkpoint, but it is also called Checkpoint 300. Its location wasn’t chosen through any planning or forethought, and no one intended for thousands of people to pass through the crossing every day.
On Feb. 25, 1994 — the day settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs — Ilan Biran, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Central Command, ordered that a temporary checkpoint be built quickly in the Bethlehem area to prevent angry Palestinians from getting to the nearby Gilo settlement neighborhood. The deputy brigade commander, Shlomo Tzaban, marked off 300 steps from the Tomb of Rachel, on the outskirts of Bethlehem, and set up the first concrete structure that would become the Rachel Checkpoint. Over the years, it has become a central crossing for Palestinian workers entering Israel from the West Bank.
Palestinians must pass through concrete pathways along the separation barrier. At the crossing itself, military police operate carousels that allow only a small group of workers at a time to pass into the security-check area to verify their authorization to work.
According to data provided to Al-Monitor by the civil administration, 58,000 workers exit the West Bank to work in Israel each day. An additional 27,000 Palestinians are authorized to work in West Bank settlements. In February, to ease the burden of unemployment in the PA-controlled territories, the security Cabinet authorized 30,000 additional work permits for Palestinians. Since then, the Cabinet has authorized another 7,000 permits to be issued in the coming weeks.
Workers from the West Bank enter Israel through 15 checkpoints scattered along the Green Line. Checkpoint 300 is the busiest and most crowded. Civil administration data shows 7,000 workers passing through that checkpoint every day, but according to the Palestinians, the actual number is much higher. The West Bank Labor Association reports that 15,000 workers pass through the checkpoint daily, a figure an Israeli security source also believes to be closer to reality. Regardless of the precise number, the checkpoint was not built to handle today's massive flow.
“There’s a demand for workers from the Bethlehem area because it is considered a quieter and more moderate area than other areas in the West Bank,” the Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “Israeli employers prefer Bethlehem workers because they have a reputation as workers you can relatively depend on. They don’t present a security threat like workers from Jenin or Nablus. Hebron-area residents also prefer to cross into Israel through Checkpoint 300 because most of them work in the Jerusalem or Tel Aviv area, and not as much in the Beersheba area [in the south].”
The reason workers are unable to cross Checkpoint 300 in a humane and appropriate fashion lies in the way it is administered. The operation of the other crossings from the Palestinian territories into Israel, including the Erez crossing at the Gaza Strip, has been transferred from the IDF to the Defense Ministry, which hires corporate contractors that use advanced security methods. The crossings surrounding Jerusalem have remained the joint responsibility of the IDF, the military police and the civilian Israeli police. The IDF is not against transferring responsibility for Checkpoint 300 to the Defense Ministry and the Ports Authority, but the Israel Police oppose such a move. Giving up control of the crossing would cost the force millions of shekels in lost manpower and budgeting.
At the Eyal Checkpoint, operated by the Defense Ministry near the Israeli town of Rosh HaAyin, some 12,000 Palestinian workers pass through daily without crowding, thanks to advanced security methods like those used at airports. By contrast, Jamal Abu Warda, a resident of Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem, told Al-Monitor that almost every day Palestinian workers are sent to hospitals with injuries sustained at Checkpoint 300.
“This week I arrived at the checkpoint at 2:30 [a.m.] in order to be one of the first in line,” Abu Warda said. “When I arrived, there was already a long line, but I managed to push in. Suddenly, terrible crowding started. I and a few other workers fell to the ground as others fell on top of us. I felt that I was suffocating. I thought I was dying, but the workers couldn’t be stopped because everyone was pushing.
"I don’t know who thought of it, but then a row of workers formed a human chain and prevented others from falling on top of us. That’s how I was saved. Friends poured water on me and sat me to the side for 15 minutes until I could breathe again. I didn’t go to work that day; I went to the hospital. It’s a shame that [they] do this to us. What do we want, after all? To live with dignity and to provide food for our kids.”
Given Abu Warda’s testimony and that of many other workers, it seems safe to say that if Israel doesn’t improve conditions at Checkpoint 300, it is only a matter of time before disaster strikes there, with Palestinian workers suffocating or being trampled to death.
This report copied in this post from Foreign Affairs, is important
for understanding the historical failure of the various Muslim caliphates from the death of the Prophet Muhammad;
through the cavalier treatment of Muslims by Western Powers when they imposed their own, foreign, ideas of "nations" on Muslims' more fluid ways of organizing themselves;
to the present effort of some Muslims to re-create a caliphate and re-invigorate Muslim autonomy.
The way the West Powers (mostly English and French) treated their Muslim subject will strike a familiar chord in those of you who know Hawai'i's history, when triumphant Christian Missionaries imposed complex English rules of real property ownership on a population that had a radically different concept of the way land should be shard by the people (see e.g., Land and Power in Hawaii, Cooper and Daws (1985).
The imposition of English property rules on those to whom the concepts were foreign resulted in he transfer of land, and power from the Hawai'ians to the West. The baleful results of this imposition of a foreign property regime on a local population continues to this day.
The similarly baleful effect of the West's imposition of its concept of "nation" on Muslims, and its concatenate misuse of Muslim walth continued to reverberate throughout the world.
The Foreign Affairs article is highly recommended. Emphasis added.
REUTERS ISIS fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, June 11, 2014.
SNAPSHOT April 3, 2016
The Myth of the Islamic State The History of a Political Idea
By Mohammed Ayoob
ISIS’ declaration of an Islamic State begs a fundamental question: When and how did that concept become a part of the political vocabulary of Muslim societies? After all, the idea hasn’t been around forever, and its popularity has waxed and waned over time. In fact, its emergence and popularity are tied to the specific conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim societies responded to European colonial rule.
As long as Muslim rulers ruled over Muslim lands, no matter how arbitrarily, the notion of an Islamic state was dormant, if not nonexistent. Although the concept of sharia existed in Muslim political vocabulary, sharia law was normally confined to personal matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The corpus of criminal and civil law was viewed as rightfully created and administered by states. One of the greatest Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, was even given the title Qanuni (law-giver) as testament to the fact that much of the legal sphere naturally fell outside the purview of sharia.
The normal order of things broke down once non-Muslim powers came to rule over most Muslim societies in the age of colonialism. European governments set out to define hardened colonial boundaries where frontiers had previously been fluid, and they attached legal sanctity to the lines drawn on maps. In the premodern states, legitimacy had been based on conquest and ability to defend territory. The states were also minimalist in terms of their intrusion into the lives of their subjects. By contrast, the colonial state’s legitimacy rested not only on conquest and holding territory but also on its capacity, modeled on European nation-states, to weld diverse subjects into a homogenous mass through a common language, a common legal system, and the provision of basic services, in return for taxes and other resources.
Iraqi security forces arrest suspected militants of the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) during a raid and weapons search operation in Hawija, April 24, 2014. YAHYA AHMAD / REUTERS
The arrival of colonial rule kicked off the search in Muslim lands for the answer to what went wrong, that is, how the natural order of things—namely, Muslim rule over Muslim lands—was overturned. One of the most popular answers, and also the most simplistic, was that the natural order was crumbling because Muslims were no longer faithful to the fundamentals of Islam. The only way to remedy this situation, the thinking went, was to return to the pristine age of Islam, the period of the salaf-al-salih (righteous ancestors), covering the first four decades from the founding of the Muslim polity in 622, when the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors exercised power. This longing for a return to pristine Islam included the re-creation of that imagined golden age’s political system. These ideas were grafted onto the increasingly dominant European style nation-state, creating the hybrid notion of Islamic state, or rather the Islamic nation-state.
The urge to create an Islamic state gained further momentum in the second half of the twentieth century, as secular post-independence regimes in the Muslim world—politically authoritarian, economically inefficient, and morally bankrupt—failed to deliver power, wealth, or dignity to their peoples. The slogan “Islam is the solution” gained currency precisely because every other model of governance seemed to have failed. And so “golden age” and “caliphate” crept into the Muslim world’s political discourse.
STATE OF CONTRADICTION
In the process of building modern Islamic states, however, the idea’s proponents tended to gloss over the concept’s inherent problems and internal contradictions. The most important of these was, of course, the fact that the Islamic state is an idea borrowed from the experiences of the West and, therefore, had no basis in the historical experiences of the Muslim world. Further, they ignored the problem that the imagined golden age was fundamentally un-replicable because all revelation ended with the death of the prophet and so divine guidance in political and social affairs was no longer possible.
Perhaps even more troubling, the golden age wasn’t even particularly golden. Three of the first four caliphs (the Rashidun, or “rightly guided”) were assassinated, itself an index of high political instability. Political and social fissures between the natives of Medina and migrants from Mecca, and, more important, disputes among the Meccan elite—especially between the Banu Umayya and the Banu Hashim, the two powerful clans of the Qureish, the Prophet’s tribe—plagued the period, and civil wars soon became the order of the day. Eventually these conflicts ended up creating the theological divide between Sunni and Shia.
Meanwhile, rapid expansion of the Arab-Muslim empire created its own divisions and frailties, especially as the “Arab” empire under the Umayyads became the “Muslim” empire under the Abbasids with the induction of Persian and Turkic notables into the political and military elite. By the mid-tenth century, the caliph reigned only in name with local warlords, predominantly Turkic, holding most of the power.
Fighters from Islamic State ISIS hold their weapons as they stand on confiscated cigarettes before setting them on fire in the city of Raqqa, April 2, 2014. REUTERS
To be sure, the concept of the caliphate, which became important as a way to hold the community together after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, remained important at least in theory. But there is little to suggest that it was ever integral to the practice of Islam. Beyond being hard to justify as a Koranic concept, it has an extremely checkered history. Succession after the prophet’s death was a far more complicated affair than the popular hagiographic accounts indicate. There were at least three parties contesting for power in those days: the leaders of the Ansar (the tribes of Medina); leaders of the Meccan refugees, especially from the tribe of Qureish, from which Muhammad had hailed; and a splinter group of Meccans who, with support from some of the Medinites, argued that succession should remain within the family of the prophet and that Ali ibn Abi Talib, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, was the rightful heir.
This enmity became intertwined with a pre-Islamic rivalry between the Banu Hashim, the specific clan of the prophet, to which Ali belonged, and the Banu Umayya, who had held much of the power in pagan Mecca before being ousted by the victorious Muslims returning from Medina. Most leaders of the Banu Umayya converted to Islam after the Muslims’ conquest of Mecca, many possibly to save their skin. The politically astute Banu Umayya eventually got their way. Their power increased as they coopted other Muslim factions, largely through the use of state power and patronage. This coalition later emerged as the majority faction in Islam known as the Sunnis.
The institution of the caliphate, now arrogated to themselves by the Umayyads, was thus transformed into arbitrary hereditary rule. It would have possibly lost legitimacy in the eyes of the believers had it not been for the proposition propagated by the ulema, the religious scholars, that Umayyad rule was legitimate. The ulema’s aim in doing so was to prevent chaos in the yet fledgling Arab Muslim community. They used the Koranic verse “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” to justify even the most arbitrary and unjust rule. Justice, in other words, was sacrificed to preserve order, a proposition that became the hallmark of Sunni religio-political thought for a long time to come.
The Abbasid hereditary caliphate followed Umayyad rule. Its main contribution was that it saw the beginnings of a rational bureaucratic state, thanks to the influence of the newly inducted Persian elite; it was manned substantially by Persian dignitaries. However, it also introduced the Persian idea of kingship (zille-ilahi, the shadow of God on earth) thus further augmenting the arbitrary and authoritarian character of the state.
The institution of the caliphate, now based on the twin principles of force and heredity, was further degraded from the middle of the tenth century with the rise of Turko-Persian military fiefdoms. The fiction of the caliphate was maintained but real power lay with the predominantly Turkic sultans who ruled openly on the basis of the principle that might makes right, with the caliph investing in them post-facto with the right to rule over territory they already controlled by force.
It was only when Ottoman power waned in the second half of the nineteenth century (which coincided with the major European powers starting to divide up Ottoman territories) that Sultan Abdul Hamid II began to emphasize the role of the Ottoman sultan as the caliph of Islam. He used his role as the caliph to bolster his legitimacy among his Muslim subjects and to instigate rebellion among the Muslim subjects of the European powers that threatened the Ottoman Empire. In the end, the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, and Turkey’s new government, led by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the institution of caliph in 1924.
The sentiments that Abdul Hamid had helped unleash, though, endured. Anti-colonial movements, some of them described as jihads, raged in Algeria, Egypt, northwest India, Indonesia, Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere. These movements focused above all on challenging European rule and attaining independence within the distinct proto-states formed by colonial boundaries. However, they also borrowed heavily from Islamic terminology to mobilize their populations against European rule. This set the stage for the emergence of more explicitly Islamist movements bent on turning their societies into Islamic societies and their polities into Islamic states.
Several major political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan (originally India), specifically seeking to Islamize their societies and polities, emerged during the colonial period and continued to be active in the post-independence era in opposition to the relatively secular elites that took power after the departure of the colonial rulers. However, their notion of the Islamic state was largely circumscribed by the boundaries of the nation-state that had emerged following the end of colonial rule. The era of multiple Islamic states had now arrived, with the logic of the sovereign nation-state subsuming its Islamic content.
IN CONTEXT
Today, around the world, each purported model of the Islamic state is distinctive and is a product of specific contexts—and each advocates the implementation of an Islamic polity within discrete national borders. This has given short shrift to the idea of a universal and uniform Islamic state. No two states are as unlike each other as Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two leading self-proclaimed Islamic states. Saudi Arabia is based on the model of a hereditary monarchy that is well served by a subservient religious elite that is given free rein in the cultural and social spheres as a quid pro quo for preaching political docility and obedience to the House of Saud. The Islamic Republic of Iran finds the idea of hereditary monarchy anathema and fundamentally un-Islamic. It prefers to govern through a pseudo-Islamic version of Plato’s philosopher-king dressed up as the vilayet-i-faqih (rule by the supreme jurist), which, according to many senior Shia theologians, violates the basic tenets of Shia theology. The Iranian system’s arbitrariness is alleviated somewhat by representative institutions such as the Majlis and an elected presidency. However, this hybridity creates its own problems and opens the system to criticism from both traditionalists and modernists—the former finding it too Western and the latter too antediluvian.
What these historical and contemporary examples demonstrate is that there is no consensus over what an ideal Islamic state ought to look like, nor is there any convincing evidence that the “righteous ancestors” ever formulated such a vision. Rather, Islam was and is used and abused by rulers in order to shore up their legitimacy. Wherever and whenever a state calls itself Islamic, it is temporal power, not religion, that is in the driver’s seat. The lesson one draws from all this is that Islam needs to be saved from the state, not that the state should become the vehicle for the imposition of Islamic norms. Whenever and wherever the state becomes the solitary repository of Islamic wisdom, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, Islam becomes the handmaiden of the rulers, which threatens its essential role as the fount of societal morality and a constraint on temporal power. Historical evidence and contemporary experience thus demonstrate that the term “Islamic State” is an oxymoron that should be expunged from the political vocabulary of Muslim societies—something that ISIS’ latest incarnation of the Islamic State makes abundantly clear.
There follows information from the article about its author:
MOHAMMED AYOOB is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Founding Director (2006–2012) of the Muslim Studies Program, Michigan State University, and author of The Many Faces of Political Islam.
