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The searing hypocrisy of the West

Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing.

Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.

Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention.

At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized.

Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.

This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks.

And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, "There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words."

Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel�s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama�s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.

In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel's reign of terror over Palestine as a "manhunt" and "military sweep." Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.

President Obama said, "As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth."

Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.

Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.

There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured.

This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.

None of that seemingly matters.

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International media ignore Israel�s abduction of Palestinian teens

In the first ten days of June, seventeen teenage boys were abducted in the occupied West Bank. The youngest was thirteen, the oldest seventeen.

Some were dragged at gunpoint from their homes and family in the middle of the night; others were seized from the streets in broad daylight.

All of the abductions were documented by the Palestinian Monitoring Group. None were reported by the international media. No Western politicians called for the release of the boys.

On 12 June, three more teenage boys went missing in the West Bank. Their disappearance sparked worldwide media coverage, cries of terrorism and demands for their release by the US Secretary of State and the UK Foreign Secretary.

Those three are Israeli. The seventeen others are Palestinian.

And, if the case of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, taken by Palestinian forces in Gaza in 2006 and released in 2011, is any indication, Western interest in the case of these three Israelis will not wane until they are found.

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Whose Sharia Is It? by Kecia Ali

It has been a lousy month for Islamic law.

First, there was the kidnapping and threatened sale of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram, which claimed religious acceptability for their acts. As Muslim theologian Jerusha Lamptey opined, this is not my sharia.

Then, the Sultan of Brunei�s horrific new penal code came into effect. Unlike the Nigerian girls, where a social media campaign garnered White House attention, the Brunei law gained visibility because the Sultan�who is dictating law that his track record suggests he does not observe�indirectly owns the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. Hollywood figures have objected to the rules, due to come into effect next year, which would punish proven male-male anal sex with death. (As far as I know, the code does not prescribe any particular punishment for lesbian acts, though the rhetoric has become that the new law prescribes �stoning gays and lesbians.�)

Claims like that of the Sultan or Boko Haram that �Islam� demands implementation of �sharia� ignore the complex reality in which there is not now nor has there ever been a uniform set of identifiable rules that Muslim scholars have agreed on much less that governments in Muslim majority countries have implemented over the centuries. As I wrote elsewhere, so-called sharia laws on the books in Brunei, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Morocco are not directly revealed by God. They are human products with human histories negotiated in human contexts. The pretense that these laws are straightforward implementations of God�s will not only serves to justify these otherwise unjustifiable rules but also feeds the demonization and dehumanization of Muslims. Though happening on two continents and perpetrated by two quite distinct sorts of actors � a multibillionaire monarch enmeshed in global capitalism and a militant anti-Western, anti-government insurgency � the Nigerian kidnapping and the Brunei law became exhibits A and B for the vilification of sharia.

And then I heard an NPR story about Sudan�s intended flogging and execution of Meriam Ibrahim for apostasy and illicit sex. My first response, as someone who writes and teaches about Islamic law and is committed to understanding it in all its historical complexity: how barbaric.

That was followed by resignation. Why bother to advocate for more sophisticated understandings of Islamic law? What is the use in pointing out that the claims of timelessness authenticity are groundless? So what if these versions of Islamic law are selective, partial, implemented by dictators with populist pretensions and monarchs with captive constituencies? They still apply it. And yes, it�s true that Americans generally aren�t interested in threats to Muslim lives or well-being or African lives or well-being except when there is a sensational story to be made (drone attacks don�t cut it). Doesn�t matter; this is still happening, and it�s wrong.

My �what�s the use?� phase shifted into the simmering anger phase once I began to think about why exactly this version of Islamic law holds sway. It�s patriarchy straight down the line.

The charge of apostasy is based on the claim that Ibrahim was born Muslim: her religion follows that of her (Muslim) father, who left her (Christian) mother when Ibrahim was young. She was apparently raised Christian. Patriarchy allows interreligious marriage between a Muslim man and a Christian woman, but not the reverse, and supports the presumption that the child�s religion follows that of its father.

The charge of illicit sex for which Ibrahim has been sentenced to lashes results from the court deeming her marriage to a Christian man void. Since she is considered Muslim (because of her father�s religion), and since, unlike the situation in her parents� marriage, marriage between a Muslim woman and a Christian man cannot be valid, the court determined that she had sex outside of marriage. Her toddler, and the child growing in her belly, prove her offense. Score another one for patriarchy.

According to reports, Ibrahim�s case was brought to the attention of the authorities by some relatives (presumably Muslim ones) who objected to her marriage to a Christian. As far as the charge of illicit sex goes, a premodern court would almost certainly have applied the doubt rule: essentially, if there are anygrounds for exoneration � such as the fact that the woman thought her marriage was valid � avert the punishment. Apostasy, too, seems to have been seldom punished in practice, however strongly the rule was upheld in theory. One can make a case that as with Brunei�s new penal code or the Boko Haram kidnapping, the Sudanese verdict represents a modern and profoundly problematic view of Islamic law.

At the moment, though, I am less interested in insisting on the nuance and variability of traditional Islamic law and more on critiquing its powerful patriarchal presuppositions. However tempered they were in past practice by judicial clemency, they lay the ground for the charges against Ibrahim. Of course we need to remember that context matters: we will not understand these developments in Nigeria or Brunei or the Sudan without reference to national and global politics, economics, and � in the last case � individual family dynamics; Islamic law is only part of the picture. And yet it is a key piece of the picture. Rethinking Islamic law without questioning its basic presumptions about male dominance will not take us nearly far enough.

Whose sharia is this? It is certainly not mine. I cannot believe that it is God�s.

Kecia Ali, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University where she teaches a range of classes related to Islam. She writes on early Islamic law, women, ethics, and biography. Her books include Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur�an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (2006), Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010), Imam Shafi�i: Scholar and Saint (2011) and The Lives of Muhammad (due out this fall). She lives in the Boston area with her family.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Double-Bind of Muslim Women�s Rights

 Great artice by Rochelle Terman.

To be clear: There are plenty of great reasons to reject Hirsi Ali for an honorary degree besides the fact that she represents one extreme of the double-bind. Contrary to the claims by right-wing pundits, Hirsi Ali was rejected for an honorary degree at Brandeis University because she espouses deplorable positions, not because she�s a �critic of Islam.� And we need not invalidate or belittle her personal experience with gender violence to find her political positions and actions deplorable.

Take, for instance, her bigotry (She calls Islam �a destructive, nihilistic cult of death� and called Islamophobia a �myth�); or her militarism (�we are at war with Islam� and must �crush� the enemy with force); of course, her paranoia and fear-mongering (�there is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West�) is also illustrate of her unworthiness.  There is also her hypocrisy (she�s a self-purported advocate for free speech but advocates the abolition of Muslim schools, saying �All Muslim schools. Close them down.�) And her apologetic stance towards right-wing terrorism, extremism, and fascism (she said Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik�s views were �censored� and that  �he had no other choice but to use violence�) is yet another indicator of her views and politics.

These are the legitimate grounds upholding the reversal of Hirsi Ali�s honorary degree, not airing our dirty laundry. The real issue in the Brandeis debate is (or should be) her and not how people might interpret her.

Full article.

Nouman Ali Khan - Signs of a Hypocrite