18-Jun-15: Saudi advice on showing love and compassion and dealing with others nicely

The political figure bending forward from the waist
(the White House is very definite that he was not bowing) before
the Saudi Arabian king in 2009 is President Barack Obama [Image Source]

What you think of Saudi Arabia – an entity that resembles a family business as much as it does a sovereign state - seems to depend, as with many things in life, on who you are and what you do in life.

How its owners think of their property and the people living in it can be gauged from a somewhat bizarre article that appears in a news report published a few hours ago by Arab News [“Saudi Arabia's first English-language newspaper... the daily's website gets hundreds of thousands of hits every day from Web surfers worldwide…”]. It’s headed “Shun violence, terror! King reiterates rejection of sectarianism”:

JEDDAH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman on Wednesday urged Saudis and other Muslims to uphold the values of tolerance, love, unity and mercifulness, and reject violence and terrorism. In a message on the occasion of Ramadan, he reiterated Saudi Arabia’s total rejection of sectarianism based on different schools of religious thought, saying sectarianism would weaken the country’s unity and solidarity. “We have unlimited confidence in Saudi citizens and we’ll not show any leniency toward those who try to weaken the unity of Saudis and undermine the Kingdom’s security,” he said. The message, which was read out on Saudi Television by Culture and Information Minister Adel Al-Toraifi, the king described Ramadan as a month of goodness and blessings when God forgives sins of believers and saves them from Hell. “Islam is a religion of love, compassion and tolerance, and its message was sent by the Almighty as a mercy to the whole humanity,” the king said… The king stressed that Saudi Arabia’s humanitarian activities were not aimed at achieving any mundane benefits but to win the pleasure and reward of God. “We are happy to serve Muslims all over the world.” The king added: “Islam works for goodness and reform and promotes constructive activities. It follows moderation, backs dialogue and brings people together.” King Salman continued, “The holy month generates in our minds the feelings of empathy and compassion toward the fellow human beings. It also teaches us great lessons.” He called upon Muslims to make use of the great blessings of Ramadan through fasting, prayers and righteous deeds. “Muslims should do their duties in the best form and deal with others nicely.”

While those exhortations about moderation, goodness, reform, constructive activities, righteous deeds are still ringing in our ears:

A man was beheaded in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, with the convicted murderer's execution becoming the 89th case this year, according to an AFP count. The death toll has already overtaken the total for all of 2014. [RT, May 27, 2015]

For our part, we have written about Saudi Arabia here several times. We wonder whether Saudi Arabia’s actions exemplify (as its Custodian says above) Muslims dealing with each other nicely. We think not so much, but sometimes it’s better not to be judgmental. 

Here are some randomly selected slices of what we see when we look at the Saudis from our terror-centric standpoint:

• 25-Jan-15: Summing up the life of an absolute monarch in the mainstream media: “The Saudi political system, a blend of absolute monarchy and Islamic extremism, has one of the world's worst human rights records. There is no democracy and basic freedoms are limited… It punishes dissidents, including currently with multiple rounds of publicly lashing a blogger, amputates hands and legs for robbery, and enforces a system of gender restrictions that make women not just second-class citizens, but in many ways the property of men…”
• 19-Oct-14: Saudi Arabia's sense of where it fits in the war against the terrorists: “…All in all, the notion that the Saudi government claims to be at the "forefront of combating terrorism" raises some questions about what the word forefront could possibly mean when they use it.”
• 2-Apr-14: Charm, offense and antagonism-avoidance: “The country most closely identified with the 9/11 terrorists gets a flying visit from the world's most powerful political figure because America's policy makers see themselves in a charm offensive directed at a regime that calls its atheists terrorists. We're not sure about how much charm it generated. But offensive? Surely.”
• 11-Mar-13: Know the neighbours: Saudi Arabia: “A recent report about the jailing of human rights activists in Saudi Arabia got us thinking about what sort of country it really is. So allow us to share some of what we found in a brief hunt on the web…”

British prime minister David Cameron being invested with
the Saudi Order of King Abdul Aziz from King Abdullah in 2012. It's given
to foreigners for "meritorious service" to the Saudis [Image Source]

Then there’s the matter of how Saudi Arabia looks to its powerful customers, competing with each other for Saudi business and especially for Saudi investment.

The paragraphs below come from the official report of a debate in the UK Parliament’s House of Lords about the fate of (believe it or not) a blogger who has incurred the wrath of the Saudi insiders and may pay for this with his life. Lord Avebury, speaking last Thursday, asked

Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the government of Saudi Arabia about the confirmation of a sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison against Raif Badawi.

And got this answer from the UK’s Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Baroness Anelay of St Johns:

My Lords, we are extremely concerned about Raif Badawi’s case and have discussed it at the most senior levels in the Government of Saudi Arabia... The case is under active consideration and we will continue to watch it closely.

Not so reassured, another peer, the Lord Bishop of St Albans, pressed on with a pretty sharp question:

My Lords, your Lordships’ House will not be unaware of the discrepancy between the attitude to human rights displayed in Saudi Arabia’s public condemnation of the Charlie Hebdo atrocities and this case, where somebody is being punished on the basis of religion. Does the Minister agree that there is a considerable dissonance between the public image that Saudi Arabia is seeking to present and the country’s internal affairs?

Not a bad enquiry.  But the reply from the Baroness is a stunner:

My Lords, I think we have to recognise that the actions of the Saudi Government in these respects have the support of the vast majority of the Saudi population. Against that background blah blah blah

HRH Prince Charles, the prince of Wales, in Saudi
Arabia 2013 [Image Source]

and on she droned. 

Now think about her observation for a moment. One of the UK government’s most senior makers and executors of foreign policy says yes, we are watching, yes, we know as well as you what the Saudis do, but let’s not forget most Saudis support their leaders’ views.

Really? How she, or anyone, can know this is a puzzle. We tend towards the view, exemplified in an article by someone who studies such matters at the Washington Institute: 

What issues are of concern to ordinary Saudis? How does the average citizen view the state of the domestic economy? What are the prevailing public attitudes toward religious extremism? …Even in the short term, the Saudi government, while far from democratic, is no doubt sensitive to social crosscurrents and diverse reactions to its initiatives. As a result, understanding Saudi public opinion is an important part of gauging the country's likely future direction. Opinion polls, however, are almost unknown in the kingdom, and anecdotal or indirect measures of these very delicate subjects are notoriously unreliable.

A British commentator, writing about this two days ago in The Independent UK, asks what every Brit ought to consider shouting into their TVs or at their MPs:

How medieval does a regime have to be before ministers pause to consider the relationship? Three years ago today, Saudi Arabian police arrested Raif Badawi for the crime of running a website “that propagates liberal thought”. His blog had put the case for secularism in observations such as this: “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear.” As if to prove his point, a Sharia court hauled Badawi back into the fearful circle, sentencing him to 600 lashes and seven years in jail for “going beyond the realm of obedience”. Last year, deciding that he had been let off too lightly, a judge upped the punishment to 1,000 lashes and 10 years’ imprisonment plus a fine of one million riyal (about £170,000). What does our government think of this? …No answer has yet been forthcoming. Perhaps the “vast majority” of Saudis are indeed fanatical sadists who rejoice to see liberal bloggers whipped. Or, then again, perhaps they aren’t. No one knows: this is an absolute monarchy, not a marginal in the West Midlands being polled by Lord Ashcroft. Even if you were a Saudi who deplored the flogging, you wouldn’t say so publicly… It’s almost as if the House of Saud is showing off to Isis, the new kid on the block: “Publicly beheading apostates? Pah. We were doing that when you were in nappies…” How medieval does a regime have to be before British ministers pause to consider whether it is one with which we can do business? So long as the regime in question remains our most lucrative export market for arms, the answer is: “My Lords, I think we have to recognise…”

Now keep in mind what it means when Her Majesty's British government supports policies that have the support of the vast majority of this foreign population or another. For instance, more than 70% of Palestinian Arabs, according to scientific and respected Arab-run opinion polls, support Hamas' blood-drenched approach to violence against Israelis. And more concretely, fully 80% support (and 20% oppose) attempts by individual Palestinians to stab or run over Israelis in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank as of December 2014. On any serious view, the Mahmoud Abbas PA regime honours those acts of terror and their perpetrators. So is Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office OK with those acts of murder-by-car too? 

(We have had some recent personal experience of trying to extract a rational response to terror-related questions from the British foreign policy establishment. We want to write about this in the next few days.)

Finally, a brief comment on how Saudi views are projected outside its own borders, in particular its views on terror. A senior figure at a serious-sounding Washington/London think-tank in a published January 2015 article sums that up for us:

[F]or decades the Saudis have also lavishly financed its propagation abroad. Exact numbers are not known, but it is thought that more than $100 billion have been spent on exporting fanatical Wahhabism to various much poorer Muslim nations worldwide over the past three decades. It might well be twice that number. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991... [A] Wikileaks cable clearly quotes then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." ...Other cables released by Wikileaks outline how Saudi front companies are also used to fund terrorism abroad.

Might be interesting to know Baroness Anelay of St Johns' view of that. 

31-May-15: Lights, camera, action, terror

Abdullah Barghouti: Poster child for those
lusting for the murder of still more
Jewish children [Image Source]

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Światła, kamera, akcja, terror") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the listyznaszegosadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

It might not come as the greatest of surprises that we follow from a distance the public appearances of two of the central actors in the killing of our fifteen year old child.

Malki, the oldest of our daughters, was one of the innocents murdered in a savage Hamas terror attack on central Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. Fifteen people were killed there that day. A sixteenth has been unconscious through all the years since the bombing. 130 more, most of them pedestrians passing through the busy central Jerusalem intersection outside the store, were maimed and terribly injured.

The explosion was achieved by the sending of a human bomb into the center of Jerusalem with what looked to be a guitar case slung across his back. The explosive device (for that is what it was) had been assembled by a bomb-maker, Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti, who during a brief career produced a series of civilian-seeking explosives that blew 66 people to pieces.

In 2004, he was convicted in an Israeli court and sentenced - having pleaded guilty - to one term of life imprisonment for each of the deaths he was instrumental in causing. Plus one additional life term for all those he injured and who survived: a total of 67 life terms in all.

Barghouti's satanic handicraft took innocent lives in some of the most horrific terror attacks of the period:

• The August 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria
• The December 2001 triple-bomb outrage on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall
• The March 2002 mass-victim bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Moment
• The July 2002 bombing inside the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus on Mt Scopus.

And naturally, he is now the idol of untold millions. 

Some of the evidence for that statement is in a tour we did two years ago of his widespread fan base: see "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

If anyone feels upset by that gross and unfair generalization, then we want you to know about our standing offer. For years, we have undertaken to re-publish and/or link to any published condemnation of this man's actions and values. There's just one condition: it must have been published in Arabic. We have been waiting years for someone to challenge us on this. Apparently it's tougher than it looks.

Barghouti had a deep impact on some other people: the panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

The bomb-making sociopath has been confined to an Israeli prison since his 2004 trial. From inside, he has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world by CBS television's '60 Minutes' program, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

It's a point he emphasized when he appeared in a different Israeli court in 2010. At that time, he took the opportunity to reiterate his dedication to killing more if (when?) he is freed again.

We are going over all these matters here now not because we expect to arouse sympathy for the victims of this depraved individual (we certainly know better than that). The issue is that it enrages us to see how easily and cheaply he and his message succeed - from deep inside a high security jail within the vaunted Israeli justice system - to project a message out to the masses hungering, salivating, for the inspiration and message he embodies. It's almost as if the good people on our side don't comprehend how the triumphalism of the Islamist jihadists feeds, grows and thrives on exposure of this sort.

We are speaking of this news item published this afternoon:

Hamas inmate smuggles phone into cell, holds radio interview | Prison Service officials say Abdullah Barghouti will face disciplinary action | Times of Israel | May 31, 2015 | Hamas prisoner Abdullah Barghouti will face disciplinary action after he conducted an illegal telephone interview from his prison cell on Sunday. Barghouti, who is incarcerated in the Ramon Prison in southern Israel, used a cellphone smuggled into his prison cell to conduct an interview with the Al-Rai radio station in Gaza. The call was in violation of prison regulations, which prohibits him from speaking on the telephone or holding interviews. During the conversation, which lasted roughly four minutes, Barghouti urged Hamas and Izz al-Din al-Qassam, its military wing, to reach a deal with Israel on prisoner releases, the Ynet news website reported. “We are steadfast and waiting patiently, according to your promise to us,” he said. “We will continue adhering to it whether we are released today or in another thousand years.” He also called on Hamas’s military wing to have no mercy on “the Israeli enemy.”
Israel Prison Service officials said in response that "disciplinary measures will be taken against him for that interview, and the issue of the smuggling will be investigated"... 

A short while after this report went up, Israel National News, quoting a spokesperson from the Israel Prisons Service, said Barghouti was punished this afternoon by being sent to solitary confinement. For how long? A reasonable question - but they're not saying. (And it's not for the first time. Back in 2010, when he gave the interview published here, we were told by officials in the prison service that he paid a price in terms of solitary confinement then.)

Barghouti, evidently photographed last week
inside an Israeli prison, sending a message
to Moslem Brotherhood buddies in Egypt: How
allows this kind of thing in prisons?

We didn't hear the Al-Rai interview given by Barghouti. But during last week, via some of the Arab websites and social media we occasionally review, we encountered this photograph. That's Barghouti over on the right.

From the context, it's clearly a fresh photo. We're guessing it was taken with the same phone as the one used to conduct the interview. We have not seen any news report which mentions that photos of the murderer were also taken and disseminated. Perhaps we're the only non-Arabs who know or care. We think people ought to know this, because something is is wrong if this can happen.

How wrong? If you click here, you can see via Google that it has been copied and republished on close to two hundred sites across the Arab world in the past few days. The number might be larger by the time you read this. There's a huge appetite for what emanates from this person.

We will leave for a different occasion an explanation of the four finger salute on his shirt and right hand. In brief, it's called the Rabia, or sometimes the R4BIA. And the woman in the photo below is doing it too, along with her buddies in the snapshot:

Happy, happy Islamists, 2013. Second from right in the
Islamist party dress is the confessed engineer of
the 2001 Sbarro massacre

We first reproduced this 2013 photo on the right - a woman in black, three goofy men, fingers splayed - four months ago, here.

Like the still-imprisoned murderer Barghouti, the fingers tell us that all four are Islamists. The woman with the relaxed smile and the black robes is the self-confessed planner of the terrorist outrage at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria - the woman who murdered our daughter.

Back in August 2001, dressed in skimpy clothes and aged 21, she brought a bomb (a human bomb) through the IDF security checkpoints and right into the center of Jerusalem. She then slipped away, according to plan, before it exploded, and went right back to Ramallah to her evening job. She presented the news on a Palestinian Arab TV station. There in front of the cameras, she exulted in reading the first item - about a "resistance activity" in "occupied Al Quds". Many dead "Zionists". She did not mention that she was the killer in chief.

Our child's killer reads the news on a Palestinian Arab
TV station a few hours after engineering the massacre
herself, August 9, 2001

That confession came later when she stood trial in an Israeli court, and was convicted of the murder of 15 people including our Malki.

The photo above (the one captioned "Happy Islamists, 2013") is evidence of what became of the multiple life terms in prison to which she was sentenced. It's a photograph taken in 2013, in an Arab capital. She has been completely free since October 2011. The background is recounted here. Nine months after walking out of prison, triumphant, she was married in front of television cameras from all over the Arab world. The radiant groom was (is) another convicted, unrepentant, unjustly freed terrorist/murderer. As the picture suggests, she appears to be a contented woman on a mission, using her undoubted celebrity in the Arab world (and her Facebook and Twitter accounts) to encourage more people to kill more Jewish children.

From experience, a certain part of our readership is going to be sitting there, sadly shaking their heads, wondering how any of these horrible things could have happened.

The killer, now free as a bird, on her globally-beamed
weekly television show, marketing Islamist terror to
an enthusiastic international market

Another part is aching, just aching, for the day when the man in the yellow shirt can walk free from his cell, take his rightful place in open Arab society, and be hailed for his courage, heroism, leadership, achievement, vision and greatness.

The woman, meanwhile, can be seen on live television, every Friday night and via YouTube, on the pro-terror program she hosts from Amman, Jordan, beamed throughout the world on a Hamas satellite TV network. (Details are here.)

As parents of one of the many children killed by these insatiable monsters, we are left to get on with our constructive lives, to focus on our families, our careers, our communities, and to try not to be knocked off balance by the befuddling phenomenon of a prison system that permits itself to serve as a propaganda platform for hatred-driven jihadists.

We thought we had enough of that in 2007 when a film crew was ushered in to the Israeli prison where we had been encouraged to believe our daughter's killer would spend the rest of her days. We have never ascertained who approved the entry of the film people or why. The production that resulted, called Hot House, got her prominent coverage in the New York Times (to our fury) and eventually contributed, we think, to her unjustifiable and totally unjust release from that prison a few short years later.

A final thought to ponder, if we're dealing with perplexing matters.

Barghouti is paid each and every month a Palestinian Authority salary that is multiples of what senior civil servants in the Abbas-dominated PA government are paid. When he goes free, as we fear he may, he stands to be handed a huge lump sum. It's PA policy.

Tamimi, who served less time in Israeli prison for her crimes, earned less each month, but has already cashed in her massive walk-free bonus. Both happen to be aligned with the PA's rivals, Hamas. But that doesn't matter. The PA's funding/terror-reward scheme applies to all. It's not whom you support but whom you murdered that counts.

And to those of our readers who pay taxes to a European state: Who do you imagine funds those payments?

You might want to start your enquiry here: "Dutch, British and German MPs condemn PA deception, antisemitism, and terror glorification" [PMW, May 25, 2015]. And there's some detailed and disturbing background here for readers from the United Kingdom.

29-Dec-12: How did Israel fight back against Hamas with such painstaking accuracy and still get so beaten up?

From the Fox News website - click to view

Paul Alster, writing on the Fox News website, asks a question that - had it been asked - would have done credit to the news teams of the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and/or the New York Times who, though they have their people scattered all over the Middle East, somehow are unable to formulate things quite this way:

A single Syrian missile strike on a bakery near Hama killed more than 60 innocent civilians last week, so how did Israel manage to fire more than 1,500 high powered missiles into densely-populated Gaza in November, with the total loss of 161 lives, of which 90 have been acknowledged by Hamas itself as active combatants?

About that bakery attack, and numerous other bakery attacks, we posted our thoughts just four days ago [see "25-Dec-12: Know your barbarians"]

Alster's answer, certainly worth your click, starts this way:

The numbers speak for themselves, but very little credit has so far been given by foreign governments, NGOs, and the international media for the care taken by the Israeli military to avoid collateral damage during its recent vicious engagement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. [more]

Framing an article this way does not mean Israel should be compared in any way to the loathsome, blood-soaked Syrian armed forces. Most thinking people aware of the realities of the Middle East know that. On the other hand, individuals with an ideological predisposition to kicking out at Israel at every opportunity will see things differently; the facts tend to be less urgent for them.

Case in point #1: the faded rock singer Roger Waters whose glory days included his being a lead member of the Pink Floyd band. He plays a different style of gig these days, including an appearance last month at the UN's annual Israel-bashing "observance" of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People [pictures here]. In his own words, Waters appeared there "representing global civil society" (no less); called for greater understanding of the Hamas side of the argument; demanded action against Israel's "illegal apartheid regime"; and warned his audience never to assume that "I support the launching of missiles into Israel". The video below captures some of the highlights of Waters' November 29 performance:



Case in point #2: Colonel Richard Kemp, a thinking person's senior soldier, served in the British military from 1977 to 2005 rising to the role of Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and completing 14 operational tours of duty around the globe. When asked about Israel's conduct vis a vis civilians in Gaza in 2008, he famously said

"based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: during operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in the combat zones than any other army in the history of warfare". [Wikipedia] 

A little less famously, he explained:

"of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes..." [Wikipedia] 

And this explanation by Kemp after the November 2012 Pillar of Defence battle conducted by Israel against the Hamas forces. Concerning the bias of certain media outlets when it comes to reporting on Israel and its military, he said:

"It was clear to me that there was a great deal of propaganda that was being generated against Israel, and then being exploited by people who didn't understand military matters and didn't want to question it, it suited their agenda to vilify Israel... People ask me why I have a pro-IDF point of view. I consider myself as having an objective view of what's happening over here. The IDF does not need me to defend them; they have proven it over the years... It's the dispassionate military perspective that I bring." [more]

The British Parliament

Case in point #3: certain political figures in the British parliament. This snippet comes from a report published Thursday:

According to the online [UK] parliamentary archive, 21 EDMs (formal motions submitted for debate in the House of Commons, although not necessarily discussed) relating to Israel have been put forward since the 2012-2013 session began. In contrast, just two refer to the situation in Syria... [more]

In other words, the situation in Syria where the mass killing of tens of thousands of Syrians during 2011 and 2012 by the forces of the vicious second-generation dictator fighting for his political and personal survival against a mass revolt continues unabated right up to this very minute, gets less then ten percent of the attention that these British parliamentarians devote to kicking at Israel.

We can think of several kinds of reason why politicians might engage in such egregiously partisan conduct. But then so can most of our readers, so we'll end the post here.