In this mailing:
- Hisham Jarallah: The Future Leaders of Palestinians: Terrorists
- Irfan Al-Alawi: Campaign Against FGM in Iraq and Middle East
The Future Leaders of Palestinians: Terrorists
by Hisham Jarallah
June 29, 2012 at 5:00 am
June 29, 2012 at 5:00 am
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In
Palestinian society, it is much more important if one graduates from an Israeli
prison than from a university in the U.S. or Europe. Economic prosperity and
the peace process with Israel are not going to convince most Palestinians to
vote for people like Fayyad or Abbas.
The most recent public
opinion poll in the Palestinian territories shows that Marwan Barghouti,
the dominant Fatah leader who is serving five life terms in Israeli prison for
his role in several terror attacks during the second intifada, would win the
presidential election.
The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center
for Policy and Survey Research also shows clear improvement in the standing of
Hamas, while its rival secular Fatah faction has declined in popularity.
Palestinians prefer someone like Barghouti to
lead them because he launched terror attacks on Israelis and is sitting in
Israeli prison.
The fact that Barghouti's attacks resulted in
the death of a number of Jews gives him leadership credentials. He is popular
among Palestinians because he has Jewish blood on his hands and was involved in
"armed resistance."
Barghouti, according to the poll, would even
defeat Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister
Ismail Haniyeh if they ran against him in a presidential election.
Abbas and Haniyeh are no longer popular: they
are not actively involved in terror attacks against Israel.
Even worse, as far as many Palestinians are
concerned, Abbas is "preventing" terror attacks against Israel from
the West Bank, while Haniyeh has betrayed his movement's ideology by agreeing
to a temporary cease-fire with the Jews.
In Palestinian society, it is much more
important if one graduates from an Israeli prison than from a university in the
US or Europe.
People like Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are
almost entirely unacceptable to most Palestinians: they were not involved in
"resistance attacks" against Jews or did not send their children to
carry out suicide bombings.
Fayyad never spent a day in Israel prison and
that is enough -- as far as many Palestinians are concerned -- to disqualify
him as a future leader. The U.S.-educated Fayyad, in other words, is too
moderate and too peaceful and too educated.
Palestinians adored Yasser Arafat mainly
because he was a symbol of the armed struggle against Israel. They loved his
military uniform and pistol because they were viewed as a symbol of the armed
struggle against Israel. Arafat was loved because he was personally responsible
for dozens, if not hundreds, of terror attacks against Israel.
When Barghouti contests the next presidential
election, if and when it ever takes place, he would be able to boast of his
direct responsibility for terror attacks that killed Israelis. Abbas and Fayyad
would have nothing in this regard to tell their people.
Economic prosperity and the peace process with
Israel are not going to convince most Palestinians to vote for people like
Fayyad or Abbas.
The future leaders of the Palestinians are
currently sitting in Israeli prisons. They include dispatchers of suicide
bombers, heads of terror cells, ordinary terrorists and political leaders of
various terror groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Moderate Palestinians who are opposed to
violence and terror will have no say in the future decision-making process. All
this bodes ill for the peace process and stability in the region. If anything,
the results of the poll show that the Palestinians are headed toward further
radicalization.
Hisham Jarallah is a journalist and
commentator based in the West Bank.
Related Topics: Hisham Jarallah
Campaign Against FGM in Iraq and Middle East
by Irfan Al-Alawi
June 29, 2012 at 4:30 am
June 29, 2012 at 4:30 am
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Among Iraqi
Arabs in a recent sample, it is common for the fathers of prospective husbands
to demand assurance that a bride has been genitally mutilated before approving
of a marriage. The female coordinator of WADI's project in Iraqi Kurdistan
noted that two local villages have declared themselves "FGM-free"
after educational intervention by opponents of the practise.
A campaign against FGM in Iraq, focusing on
Iraqi Kurdistan, has benefited from activism by human rights and women's
groups, but the main responsibility for ending this atrocity belongs with
religious leaders. FGM is not a general requirement in the faith of Islam,
although some clerics have adopted the pre-Islamic local custom and approve of
it. The well-known radical preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has stated that its
infliction is grounded in unreliable reports of hadith, the oral
commentaries delivered by Muhammad. Nevertheless, Al-Qaradawi has opined that
it is acceptable if a girl's parents so desire.
By contrast, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG) health minister, Taher Hawrami, in appealing for condemnation
of FGM, emphasized last year that "Clerics should take on the main role.
People need to have better understanding of religion for them to abandon these
phenomena."
The cruel and un-Islamic practice of female
genital mutilation (FGM), involving the cutting of women's sexual organs, has
been recognized internationally as a violation of the rights of girls as well
as grown women and an extreme form of discrimination against women. Carried out
typically by "traditional" practitioners, FGM includes any procedures
that remove partially or totally the external female genitalia, or inflict
other injury to women's sexual organs for non-medical reasons. FGM may be
effected by midwives or other supposed FGM "specialists" using broken
glass or metal can lids, as well as razors, knives, and scissors, in unhygienic
conditions.
FGM is not limited to Muslim countries; it is
widespread in non-Muslim areas of Black Africa and has been introduced into
Europe by immigrants. WADI, a German-Iraqi non-governmental organization, has
identified Iraq as an FGM "hot spot." While previously believed to be
found mainly among Iraqi Kurds, a study released in June by WADI and Pana, a
local Iraqi women's rights organization, indicated that nearly 40% of the women
living in the contested Iraqi city and surrounding district of Kirkuk had
undergone FGM. Kirkuk, an oil-producing center south of the KRG, claimed both
by Kurds and by Arabs, is home to Arabs settled there by the former dictator
Saddam Hussein.
A sample of 1,212 women 14 years of age and
above disclosed, according to WADI and Pana, that in Kirkuk, 65.4% of Kurdish
women were victims of FGM; 25.7% of Arab women, and 12.3% of Turkmen women. The
researchers emphasized that these are minimum numbers, given that they were
based only on self-reported cases in which the identities of interviewees were
kept anonymous.
The WADI survey also included statistics on the
three kinds of FGM imposed on Iraqi women. Type I, amputation of the clitoris,
is the most common in urban areas and among Kurds, but types II (elimination of
the clitoris and inner labia) and III (excision of the clitoris and both inner
and outer labia) rise in frequency in rural areas, where the incidence of FGM
increases as well in the Arab and Turkmen communities.
The study concluded that FGM is mostly forced
on girls at ages five to ten. In addition, it found that FGM occurs among Shia
as well as Sunni women, with 21.4% of Arab Shia women in the Kirkuk sample
saying they underwent genital cutting, compared with 26.6% of Arab Sunni women.
More Kurds justified FGM as a "traditional" function, while Arabs and
Turkmen (misguidedly) claimed it as a religious obligation.
Researchers found that the active agent in
forcing FGM on girls was overwhelmingly the mother, followed by a grandmother,
a male relative, or a cleric. In addition, among Arabs included in the sample,
it is common for the fathers of prospective husbands to demand assurance that a
bride had been genitally mutilated before approving of a marriage. Consequences
of FGM may include pain during urination and during sexual relations.
WADI has treated its study of Kirkuk as
evidence that FGM, often believed to be limited to Kurdish communities, may
occur frequently throughout Iraq. Further, the group charges that FGM is
"present everywhere in the Middle East," and is cooperating with a
Dutch humanitarian group, HIVOS, to raise awareness of the problem across the
region.
Gola Ahmed Hama, the female coordinator of
WADI's project for the area of Pishder, in the KRG governorate of Suleymaniyah,
noted that two local villages have declared themselves "FGM-free"
after educational interventions by opponents of the practise. Pishder had been
called "a hell for women," where some 95% of girls and women had been
mutilated, compared to an average rate of 50-60% among Iraqi Kurdish women.
Pishder, where nearly all marriages are
arranged by families without the right of free choice by couples, saw, in the
first three months of 2012, five so-called "honor" murders and eight
attempted suicides by girls. According to Hama, "The suicides, the cases
of self-immolation, are a form of protest… That usually happens when girls are
supposed to marry a man they do not want to marry or even, as in recent times,
when they are in love with somebody and they want to marry him but their
families forbid the marriage."
Last year, the KRG legally prohibited FGM. In
May 2012, Kirkuk governor Najmiddin Karim expressed his support for effort to
eradicate FGM. A press announcement by WADI of its Kirkuk study elicited
support from Dr. Ashwaq Najemeldeen al-Jaff, the female head of the pharmacy
department at the University of Suleymaniyah, and a member of the human rights
committee of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, representing the Kurdish
Alliance. The Alliance brings together representatives of both of Iraqi
Kurdistan's main political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan under the
leadership of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic
Party headed by Massoud Barzani.
Women's rights groups have demanded that the
KRG's legal ban on FGM be extended throughout Iraq. WADI states that the
national Iraqi authorities may introduce a ban on FGM into the legal code,
pending parliamentary approval.
Related Topics: Irfan Al-Alawi
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