Saudis appear to be using Canadian-made combat vehicles against Yemeni rebels

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is famous around the world for his humanity-loving & peace-loving stature & acts. But those are only words. When it comes to words, then this is Canada for you; selling weapons to those countries, which are proven to be habitual human-rights abusers. After all, what would you expect from selling $15 billions worth of weapons & Light-Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia; that they use those vehicles to help Syrians or Iraqis or Yemenis?

Saudi Arabia gets correctly blamed for its bombing of Yemeni civilians but what about the "drug-dealer" who provided those "drugs" to the "drug-addict" in the first place? Canada & other G7 countries are developing or substantially supporting their economies through sales of weapons to the world, & especially to those countries, which are embroiled in wars in hot zones. But they don't get blamed for selling arms & weapons; users of those weapons get blamed for using those weapons.

This is the media for you. Canadian media & social media shows the face of Liberals & Trudeau to the world that shows how peace-loving & humanitarian Canadian government is, & they don't show how that same government is causing so much pain in the world, too.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/saudi-arms-used-against-yemeni-rebels-seem-to-match-canadian-lavs/article28846678/

Canadian-made armoured vehicles appear to be embroiled in Saudi Arabia's war against Yemeni-based Houthi rebels – caught up in cross-border hostilities that critics say should force Ottawa to reconsider a $15-billion deal to sell Riyadh more of these weapons.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis – who are aligned with Iran – has already been accused by a United Nations panel of major human-rights violations for what its report called "widespread and systematic" air-strike attacks on civilian targets. Along the Saudi-Yemen border, constant skirmishes pit Houthi fighters against Saudi ground forces such as the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

The Saudi Arabian National Guard, a buyer of many Canadian-made light armoured vehicles (LAVs) in the past decade, has published photos on its official Twitter account showing how in late 2015 it moved columns of combat vehicles to Najran, a southwestern Saudi town near the border with Yemen that is in the thick of the conflict.

A significant number of vehicles in the photos have the triangular front corners, the eight wheels and the headlamps fixed above these triangles that are familiar features in earlier LAV models made in Canada.

Neither the Liberal government nor LAV-maker General Dynamics Land Systems in London, Ont., would confirm these are Canadian machines.

But a retired Canadian general consulted by The Globe and Mail, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the LAVs being transported to Najran as fighting vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems. Stephen Priestley, a researcher with the Canadian American Strategic Review, a think tank that tracks defence spending, also identified the LAVs as Canadian-made.

Critics say having Canadian-made arms enmeshed in a conflict that has claimed more than 2,800 civilian lives should prompt Ottawa to rethink the recent $15-billion deal to sell hundreds or thousands more to the Saudis.

Canada's export control rules for weapons shipments are supposed to require Ottawa to restrict arms exports to countries such as Saudi Arabia, that have "poor human-rights records." Saudi Arabia, regularly ranked among the "worst of the worst" on human rights by Freedom House, qualifies for special scrutiny.

The same federal weapons export controls also say Canada should "closely control," or be very discriminating, about shipments to countries "that are involved in or under imminent threat of hostilities."

Foreign Affairs ... department refused comment Monday when pressed on whether it is concerned about the armoured vehicle shipments, saying it's bound to secrecy on anything to do with arms sales to the Saudis.

"In regards to your request, please see our response: For reasons of commercial confidentiality, specific contractual details cannot be shared," Tania Assaly, a spokeswoman for Global Affairs said in a prepared statement.

The Trudeau Liberals keep trying to dissociate themselves from the increasingly controversial deal. Last week, Mr. Dion argued his government merely inherited the contract and that cancelling it would cost taxpayers huge penalties. Pressed on this, Mr. Dion's department refused to provide details to back up the Foreign Minister's assertion, citing the need to keep the commercial pact with Riyadh secret.

General Dynamics Land Systems Canada of London, Ont., which employs about 2,100 people, did not respond to a request for comment about whether it is concerned about the LAVs caught up in the Saudi-Yemen conflict.

Ken Epps with the anti-war group Project Ploughshares, which tracks arms sales, said the Liberal government should rethink the latest $15-billion contract with Saudi Arabia. Ottawa, not General Dynamics Land Systems, is the prime contractor in this deal, which was also brokered by the federal government.

The Trudeau government still has power over the deal. It can suspend exports of these combat vehicles.

"Given a UN report accused the Saudis of war crimes because of their bombing of civilians, then clearly our concern must be that since they are involved in war crimes there, it should give the Canadian government additional pause in shipping these kind of weapons to them," Mr. Epps said.

The $15-billion Saudi LAV deal will provide Riyadh with weaponized armoured vehicles in what is the largest manufacturing export contract in Canadian history – but one that doesn't garner significant public support. A recent Nanos Research poll found nearly six out of 10 Canadians surveyed feel it is more important to ensure arms exports go only to countries "that respect human rights" than it is to sustain some 3,000 jobs by selling combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

A new report says Saudi Arabia was the second-largest arms importer in the world between 2011 and 2015 after India as Mideast countries upped weapons purchases significantly. Shipments to Saudi Arabia rose 275% in those years, by value, compared with the earlier 2006-10 period, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said.

At least one wartime footage video posted on YouTube on the Houthi-Saudi conflict also shows what appears to be a disabled Canadian-made LAV, presumably abandoned by Saudi troops as their enemies approached.

Mr. Priestley said this December, 2015, video, purported to be shot near the southern Saudi town of Al Raboah, shows a National Guard LAV-AG model, made in London, Ont., being looted by combatants.

Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)

Great interview. This is only the first part of a three-part interview. There are Jews in the world, as you may know already, who are not Zionist & actively reject Israel's claim, & the resultant brutality & occupation, of Palestine. 

I loved the last part of the interview where it shows that the only way a human being discards or reduces the humanity of another human being is through ignoring that there IS that another person who is like me. This ignorance can happen at international level (America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia etc.) & it always happens wartime, e.g. the only way Saudis can bomb Yemenis & keep blockade on, is by thinking of Yemenis as something not human, or American soldiers bombing & firing at Iraqis, all the while laughing & enjoying, can only happen when those soldiers think of those Iraqis as not being living & breathing humans. This attitude of ignorance also takes place domestically when rich elites keep hoarding money & resources while their compatriots are dying of hunger, thirst, unavailability of medical facilities, no education etc., & this also takes place at individual level where a husband treats badly his wife because he thinks she is not a human but something less than a human.

We need to develop empathy & conscience to think & see as the other person as a human being with the similar needs & wants as ourselves. A Palestinian or Kashmiri or Chechen or a Yemeni or an Afghani needs & wants as an Israeli or an Indian or a Russia or a Saudi or an American; food, water, freedom, education, medical facilities, job, safety for his family & future etc.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbvJ0DfJSM

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: I was born in the Soviet Union, in the former Soviet Union, in Kiev. And then, when I was six, we moved to Israel. We moved to the heart of the West Bank, into a settlement called Ariel, the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. So, while the global community was getting involved in our conflict and trying to divide the two halves of the land into two states, we moved into the middle of what would become the Palestinian state, into a settlement that used the guise of all of these negotiations to double the numbers and then triple the numbers.

And that’s really the story of the failed peace process. While America was busy shuffling envoys back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, we were growing as a settlement movement, getting more and more empowered by the total impunity.
...

And the reason why we moved there is because my mother wanted to contribute back to Zionism, because my family is from the Soviet Union. As Jews, we’ve encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. Also, members of our family died in gulags. Most of the family was killed in the Holocaust in World War II fighting the Nazis. So all of this history is very prominent in our identity. And so we moved to Israel. And after 31 years of Soviet anti-Semitism, my mother is basically being told, it’s your turn to serve Zionism, to serve the Jewish national homeland. And so she says, what can I do? The settlements? Let’s do it. So we move to the settlements. And that’s where I grew up ...

... I was the only Jew in my kindergarten in the Soviet Union. That’s what to me is a Jew is my kindergarten teacher hated Jews. She made sure everybody knew that I was the Jew. And as the only Jew–and in Russia, it’s a visible minority. So, visibly, looking at me, they would know I’m not a Russian, I’m a Jew. ... And in Israel-Palestine, ... we are the powerful, but we identify ourselves as the not that, not the local.

And that’s particularly poignant when you look at the majority of Israelis, who are Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi meaning Orientals. But Mizrahi Jews are basically Jews that came from Spain in 1492 and settled in North Africa, as well as Jews that have been living in the Middle East and in Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. And so, for them, they moved to Israel in the first years of the state. They come from the Arab world. They speak Arabic. A lot of their traditions are inspired by Arabic culture. And within a few years, they’re Ashkenized, they’re Europeanized. And their kids don’t speak Arabic, their grandkids don’t speak Arabic, they don’t identify as Arabs, and they identify very strongly with Israel. All of a sudden, the falafel becomes the Israeli food, you know, hummus becomes houmous.
...

Yeah. That was amazing. But, I mean, I moved to Israel when I was six. I was more preoccupied with the fact that three months after we moved there, the first Gulf War started, and we spent the first months–my first memories of Israel are sitting under sirens in a gas mask waiting for Saddam to bomb us with gas. Like, these are the things I remember. I remember being–because in Israel, yes, I was now a Jew amongst Jews, but Israel is a very racist society. So, from being the stinking Jew in the Soviet Union, I became the stinking Russian in a Jewish state.

So these are my memories. I mean, as a child, you don’t have an analysis of your identity or of politics. So, for me, what I cared about is my relationship with people my age. And in Ariel, everybody was a Russian, or a lot of the people who lived there were Russians, so you immediately felt like you were part of something. Plus, being part of a closed, gated community in the middle of the Palestinian West Bank, it’s another layer of segregation and insularism. And being in a country that is a Jewish Europe style country in the middle of the Middle East, in the middle of Arab countries, is another layer of that. And so Israel is a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and inside of all of that is the settlement right-wing movement.

And so those years in the settlements were the happiest years of my life, because I finally felt like I belonged to something, I was a part of something. And I never thought in bigger terms.

And, in fact, the first time I was ever called a settler, I was in my 20s. I was studying in university in Canada, and a Middle East correspondent called Jon Elmer came to speak on my campus, and I thought that he was very biased, and I was going to teach him what it’s all about, and asked him some kind of really ignorant question, and he just said, I’m so sick of you settlers coming to my talks and telling me I’m wrong. You go to Gaza. And I said to myself, what do you mean I’m a settler? I’m not a settler. And that’s when I started digging what does the settler mean.

I’ll tell you, one thing that is characteristic of ethnocracies, and particularly colonial ethnocracies that we see a lot in Israel, is a number of very strong contradictions. So Israeli identity is a mixture of the strong, the invincible, the strongest among the nations, we are the strongest army in the region and one of the strongest armies in the world, coupled with we are persecuted, we are hated, we are victims. Now, both of those things are true, and both of them work off of each other, and both of them are absolutely necessary for the ethnocratic project.

And what’s more important to me is not the colonialism that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and in Gaza; what’s more important to me is the ethnocratic regime inside of Israel, because ethnocracies such as Israel, such as the former Balkan states, such as Sri Lanka and Macedonia used to be and South Africa used to be, are–this is the frontier of the global laboratory of how to deal with globalization. And this is why there is a rise of fascistic and extreme-right movements in the United States and in Europe and a lot of these Western places where they want globalized capital without globalized migration. And Israel is a laboratory for a lot of that, as well as weapons, but also a lot of those ideas. And that’s what I stay up at night worrying about.

And for that identity, for that national identity, you need a number of things. You need the justification for endless war. That’s where the victim identity comes from. You also need to inspire people. You need a story of success, of heroism. And this has been the story of Israeli military conquests throughout the last 67 years, to the point where if you ask an Israeli which war did Israel lose, they would say none. Maybe ’73, but none. No, we always win wars.

That’s complete bullshit. We have lost most of our wars, definitely in the last 20 years. We lost Lebanon I, we definitely lost Lebanon II, we lost the intifadas and these perpetual conflicts. Even this last summer attack–I was covering it for you, and I was out there on the ground every day covering what was happening all around us–Hamas didn’t just shock the Israeli military establishment in its ingenuous ways of combating this giant military machine with the tunnels, with the sneaking in through the sea, with rockets, with smuggling weapons from Libya after the 2011 civil war, and so on, and the number of things that they did that they pulled out of their hat of tricks that surprise us, but they forced us–and this nobody–nobody could have predicted this–they forced mighty Israeli into a negotiation with Hamas, a terrorist nothing group that was on its knees before the war started, was falling apart before the war started. And today, while everyone on the street was against Hamas before the war started, you won’t find a single person critical of Hamas. My point is we are perpetual war losers, and yet we have to perpetuate this identity that we are invincible.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: It may be that–I mean, it depends what you consider winning, because it wasn’t clear the objective was to get rid of Hamas, ’cause I think Israel feared what the alternative would be. But in terms of the relationship of Israel and the Israeli state to the Palestinians, right now they’re winners. I mean, the occupation looks like it’s endless.

TARACHANSKY: It’s true. Let me explain what I mean by win and lose. As I’m sure you know, since World War II, we haven’t had many wars where you have a clear winner and a clear loser. And Israel is not fighting an army. And so there isn’t never going to be a checkmark–you won and you lost. We’re fighting a civilian, largely civilian population.

I’m talking about Israeli public identity, this point at which you can get to the Israeli public, average Israeli thinks, we won that war. And the average Israeli today thinks, we’ve lost the last 12 years of war. And that’s incredibly important, because, yes, on the ground we have the West Bank, we can bomb Syria if we want to, we can bomb Lebanon if we want to, we can do anything we want.
...

... At this point, my intellectual identity was already very much questioning of the Zionist project. But to physically be there surrounded by these Palestinian villages is completely different than to understand something from watching the news and so on and so forth. And to physically be in that space and to realize that I had grown up here, I’d spent my happiest years here, and here comes “Allāhu Akbar”, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m hearing the sound that I had somehow–and the call to prayer happens five times a day. Israel is surrounded by villages whose names I didn’t even know, all around, each village, five times a day, the call to prayer, and I somehow didn’t even register hearing the sound. And when I turned around to point out to you what is a settlement and what’s a Palestinian village and what’s a settlement, what’s a Palestinian village, I was naming them to you, but in my mind I was thinking, I don’t even remember them being there.

You’re so busy constructing your identity, you’re not even paying attention to what’s right in front of you. And that is in essence the representation of collective denial. That is what Stanley Cohen, on whose work I did my documentary, exactly what he describes. What do two people looking at the same object, how can it be that they see two different things? And what do they do to that knowledge? And what does that knowledge do to them? For me, that changed my life, and I know that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to fight not just the Zionistic idea of Jewish exclusivity to the land, but I’m going to have to stand up against what’s going on in Israel-Palestine until there is justice for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life; it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my free time. This is my responsibility, just like it is the responsibility of every person in America to stop police brutality against the largely people of color minority. It is your responsibility. It’s not about right and wrong. You have to do this. You don’t have a choice.

And that’s what I realized in that moment is that implicated in my own guilt for having enjoyed colonialism on this land, this land that does not belong to just one group, it is now my responsibility to fight it forever. And this is the effect that this seeing and hearing for the first time had on me.

And I have to tell you the truth. Since have been the best years of my adult life, understanding that, having the clarity of thought to finally lay out not just the historical narrative, but also understand so many things that I was afraid to ask questions about, to finally look beyond my fear and go to the West Bank and have friends in Gaza and sit on the phone with them as they were being bombed by, supposedly, my army, and hear each other’s humanity, and have them tell me, Lia, I know this is not you, I know you’re in solidarity; I’m here with you, I’m sorry that there’s people sending rockets at you, it’s not my intention. My privilege to be able to see across these walls, it was a direct result of being able to have that moment.

And I wish for everyone in my country, I wish for all my people to have that moment, because it’s only once we look past these walls that we can see the humanity of the other and we can move out of this collective trauma.

Sisters In Law

A good piece on Saudi women learning about their rights, & laws related to women, in the kingdom. The article brings forth quite a few issues & I'll analyse 2 of them here:

1. Saudi women, with whom the author spoke, kept saying that there's nothing wrong with the Saudi legal system or Saudi legal system in regards to women's rights is among the best in the world. Saudi legal system is primarily based on Sharia, Islamic legal jurisprudence, which has its bases in Quran, Prophet Mohammad's (Peace Be Upon Him) Sunnah, & the 4 main schools of thoughts in Islam (Saudis follow the Hanbali school of thought). So, the question arises, how can anything be wrong with a legal system, which has been made by the Creator, itself?

Now, yes, the monarchy does have its hand in the molding of the law in the way it likes, but it can only do so to a certain extent, & cannot do too much changes in the legal system, regardless of how much it wants to make laws in its own favour.

Islam gave women their legal & social rights back in 600 AD. They are perfect in every sense. But, today's Muslim women see the West & want to emulate their form of feminism in their homes, in their relationships, in their social circles & in their society. First of all, Western form of feminism & women's rights are not feminism at all. Making a woman dance naked in the middle of street is not akin to giving her freedom to do anything. Absence of clothes does not make a woman more powerful in the eyes of the society. Muslim women who are trying to follow the Western form of feminism are essentially going against the orders of their Creator, God (Allah), who they claim to love a lot (if you love your Creator so much, then you may not want to disobey its orders). That's why, the Islamic countries are being destroyed socially, culturally, & religiously, because women are making the Western feminism as their ideal form of liberation.

2. Now, part of the reason Muslim women are emulating Western feminism is their cycle of thought that Muslim men are so abusive & have so much power, because Islam gives them so much power, & hence, there's something wrong with Islam that it is not moving forward with the changing society & has stayed backward in the 600 AD.

As we can see from the article that even Saudi women have no knowledge of their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabian legal system. Quran is primarily written in Arabic language. The same language Saudi women speak in their society. So, a religious book, which is written in their own language, should be easily understandable to women, when they are reading it. But, it's apparent, that they never bothered to dig deeper in Quran & its legal jurisprudence to learn about women's rights in Islam, in depth.

That's a huge problem with Muslims, nowadays. Be it men or women, Muslims are not reading & understanding their own religious book, Quran, & Sunnah, to understand it in depth & learning what their rights & obligations towards Allah, towards each other in different kinds of relationships, & towards their society are. After all, even in secular / non-religious areas, ignorance of a country's laws can never be used as a defense in committing a crime. It is obligatory for each & every Muslim to learn what the Quran, Sunnah, & jurisprudence says about issues in their lives. As we learn from the article that once these Saudi women came to learn what are their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabia, they are talking about the laws are good, but their application is not, which is due to sheer ignorance.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/sisters-in-law

In September, 2014, Mohra Ferak, 22 years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that men who had raped girls as young as 8 went unpunished, and might act again. And for some of the girls, the principal added, the secrecy only amplified the trauma. She asked Ferak if there was anything that she, as principal, could do to help them.

“I told her, ‘You can go to court and ask the judge to make the proceedings private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ” Ferak recalled one recent afternoon. ... The principal was amazed to learn that Saudi plaintiffs can request closed court proceedings. She began peppering Ferak with legal questions, many of them about how to advise teachers who were in abusive marriages, or whose ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their children to visit. The principal was in her early fifties, which meant that, as a school administrator, she was among the best-educated Saudi women of her generation. Well into the 1980s, according to UNESCO, fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of 6 and 11 had received any education outside the home. But, Ferak said, it quickly became clear that the woman knew little about the fundamental principles of Saudi law.

Ferak had been a middling student during her first 3 years at Dar Al-Hekma, an all-female university. A week after talking with the principal, she went to Olga Nartova, who chairs the law department, and described the conversation. Nartova, a 36 year old trade-law specialist from Moscow, had previously found Ferak to be bright but unmotivated, like many girls from well-off families. But Ferak spoke about women’s rights with a seriousness of purpose that Nartova had never seen in any student at Dar Al-Hekma.
...

With Nartova’s encouragement, Ferak began planning a series of free public lectures at the university, aimed at women and delivered by distinguished legal scholars and lawyers. The presentations were designed to provide basic information about Saudi women’s legal rights. “Since I was very young, and started noticing how women are treated in this country, I’ve had this feeling about women,” Ferak said. “I don’t like anyone to underestimate us.” But women’s rights aren’t a subject of mainstream public discussion in the kingdom, and she wondered whether anyone besides the principal would attend. She also worried about how the experts would react to being approached by a student.

Ferak compiled a list of topics that she felt were of particular importance to local women, and she began contacting lawyers. The first lecture in the series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version of the name Eve), was publicized on Twitter and took place on the evening of April 15th. Several dozen attendees learned about crimes perpetrated against women on social media, a topic of special concern in a country where single people of opposite sexes cannot spend time together without risking arrest, and where pressure on women to cover their faces in public can be so intense that the most innocent head shot can serve as a tool of blackmail.

The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, on April 26th, addressed personal-status law, the category of Saudi law that governs marriage, divorce, guardianship, and inheritance. The lecturer, Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a 30 year old Jeddah attorney who, in January, 2014, became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm—was scheduled to begin speaking at five o’clock, launching an evening of discussion that would run until nine. Late that afternoon, Ferak arrived at the university to find a long black line of abaya-clad women waiting to be seated.

Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded, so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing, and the only male employees of a Saudi girls’ school or women’s college are its security officers, who are stationed at the checkpoint outside, inspecting identification cards and keeping watch for male intruders. The security guards were overwhelmed by the turnout for the second Hawa’a’s Rights event. Ferak corralled several friends, and they spent the half hour beforehand rushing from classroom to classroom, looking for extra chairs to carry down to the space that had been reserved. They filled the aisles and the back of the room with additional seats, straining the hall’s intended capacity of 120.

“There were students, mothers, teachers, lots of workers in shops—really, every kind of woman, even doctors from the university,” Ferak told me. “All of us were just looking at each other, thinking, Is this even possible?” When Nartova came out of her office, a few minutes before Zahran’s talk, she saw women struggling to find standing room in the back and on the stairs, while others sat on the floor by the dais. Ferak texted a photo of the packed hall to her father, who had shared her initial doubts about interest in the lectures. He teasingly texted back, “Are you trying to make women fight with their husbands?” The third Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, a practical introduction to Saudi labor law for women just entering the workforce, attracted a still larger crowd. The university did not schedule a fourth event.

In 2004, Saudi Arabia introduced reforms allowing women’s colleges and universities to offer degree programs in law. The first female law students graduated in 2008, but, for several years after that, they were prohibited from appearing in court. In 2013, law licenses were granted to 4 women, including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran. Journalists and legal scholars in the West wondered if a fresh contingent of female attorneys would champion women’s rights. But, of the dozens of female lawyers and law graduates I spoke with on a visit to Saudi Arabia in early November, only two would admit to any interest in expanding rights for Saudi women. So far, the greatest effect of the reforms seems to be a growing awareness, among ordinary Saudi women, of the legal rights they do have, and an increasing willingness to claim these rights, even by seeking legal redress, if necessary.

The lawyers conceded that, by international standards, these rights might not look like much. According to Saudi law, which is based on Sharia, a Saudi woman’s testimony in court is, with few exceptions, valued at half that of a man. A homicide case, for example, normally requires testimony from two male witnesses; if only one is available, two female witnesses may be substituted for the other. The guardianship system—which requires an adult woman to get permission from her guardian before travelling overseas or seeking medical care—gives Saudi women a legal status that resembles that of a minor. In fact, the male relative with responsibility over a Saudi woman may be her own adolescent son.

A Saudi woman cannot leave her home without covering her hair and putting on a floor-length abaya. She cannot drive a car. Since 2013, women have been allowed to ride bicycles, but only in designated parks and recreation areas, chaperoned by a close male relative. The marriages of Saudi women are usually arranged, and it remains extremely difficult for women to obtain divorces. Husbands, in contrast, may marry up to three other women “on top of them,” as the Arabic expression goes, and in some cases may end a marriage in the time it takes to repeat “I divorce you” three times—or to type the so-called triple divorce formula into a text message.

In December, 2007, I arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first time. Although I had read thousands of pages about Saudi laws and cultural conventions, it was a shock to confront the system as a lived reality. Abundant resources go into maintaining the women-only bank branches, government offices, shops, and other businesses that make up the infrastructure of gender segregation in the kingdom. ...
...

Today, several thousand Saudi women hold law degrees, and 67 are licensed to practice, according to justice-ministry figures released at the end of November. ... Two of the Jeddah firms where Ferak has applied for jobs in recent months indicated interest, but then told her that they lacked the license from the kingdom’s labor ministry which authorizes a business to let women work in its office. The labor ministry requires firms that employ women to build separate areas for female workers, allowing them to communicate with male colleagues without the risk of being seen by them. In supermarkets, which have employed women since 2013, low partitions suffice, because semi-public spaces are easily monitored by members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police. But businesses that operate from enclosed workplaces, such as offices, face tougher regulations. One result of these restrictions, Ferak explained, is that, at present, only the largest Saudi law firms employ women.

Despite her frustrations, Ferak pointed out that women’s efforts to gain more respect and influence in Saudi public life have been progressing rather quickly, considering the country’s relative youth, and especially considering the Arabian Peninsula’s tribal, deeply traditional culture. Ferak appeared to be echoing the “baby steps” theory of social progress, often put forth by Saudi leaders as a way of excusing rights abuses or the rhetorical excesses of government-backed clerics. It wasn’t clear how sincerely she believed it. ...
...

Nevertheless, Ferak, like every other female law graduate I spoke with, wanted me to understand that individual Saudis and local traditions, not Saudi laws, were the source of her struggles. Saudi laws, she insisted, were “perfect” (a word that I heard at least half a dozen times, from other women her age, in reference to the Saudi legal system). Saudi women’s woes were merely the result of the laws’ misapplication. The fact that I’d sought her out seemed to surprise her, and to raise concerns that foreigners might misunderstand. Although Saudi men sometimes mistreated women, the solution lay not in changing the system but in educating women about their rights within the existing structure.

Perhaps surprisingly in a country notable for its strict rules, relatively little of Saudi law is written down. The legal system has been augmented, during the 83 years since the kingdom was founded, by royal decrees, many of which overlap, or even contradict one another. This body of law is interpreted by senior clerics, who serve as judges, largely following the Hanbali School, the strictest of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence. The notion of judicial precedent does not play a role in Saudi law, so judges enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation.

Yet the system’s ambiguities also preserve the need for a monarch with final authority, and this means that the personality, moods, and tastes of the head of state are felt in the lives of his subjects in ways that would be unimaginable to citizens of a modern democracy. Absolute power, Saudis say, has a way of trickling down, of turning ordinary policemen and public officials into petty tyrants. Justice is often situational; the law is what a person in a position of power decides it is. If devout Muslims openly question Islamic teaching, they are vulnerable to accusations of heresy, which is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. And the risks of questioning have grown in recent months. The current Saudi king, Salman, came to power following the death of King Abdullah. Since then, accusations of heresy and of apostasy—also a capital crime in Saudi Arabia—have increasingly been levelled against government critics. ...
...

... Across the kingdom, the atmosphere is newly cautious, and a young law graduate who wishes to speak of her growing awareness of injustice in Saudi institutions knows that she must express herself with enormous care.

Several days after my conversation with Ferak at the Lebanese restaurant, I set out to meet Bayan Mahmoud Zahran, whose law firm has made her the most famous female Saudi lawyer in the world. ...
...

Zahran’s firm is expanding, with a half-dozen employees and a fledgling corporate department ... . But women with personal-status cases make up the majority of her client base. The judicial system puts women at a disadvantage, she said. “Women generally are more emotional, and they can’t get their rights because they’re so emotional, and they just cry,” she told me. She seemed to suggest that the main obstacle was not the legal system but a tendency of women clients to become overwrought. Female lawyers can help, she said, because they can “understand the emotion and translate it into something valid for the court.”

Some of the lawyers I met said that women increasingly insist on being represented when inheritances are divided. In early October, at the end of the Islamic calendar year, the Saudi justice ministry announced that in the past twelve months there had been a 48% increase in cases of khula, divorces initiated by women. A Saudi newspaper reported that such divorces now make up a “staggering” 4.2% of the total. ...

Yet in this privacy-obsessed society, with its weak traditions of individual rights, many Saudi women still struggle to obtain legal information. As far as any of the lawyers I interviewed were aware, the Hawa’a’s Rights initiative has been the only organized attempt to educate Saudi women about the law. Eight months after the series ended, Ferak continues to receive messages suggesting new topics and asking when to expect another event. Sometimes, Ferak said, her correspondents plead with her not to give up, telling her that the lectures changed their outlook—even the arc of their lives. During her last year at Dar Al-Hekma, Ferak found a new purpose in her studies, and her grades rose sharply. She told Olga Nartova, “I realized why I was studying law.” She hopes to continue the Hawa’a’s Rights lectures, but has not found a venue. Intrigued by the Western understanding of human rights, she has begun to explore graduate programs abroad, where she might study the subject.

On the afternoon of the first Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, Salwa al-Khawari, a teacher at a girls’ school, was heading home when her friend Nour mentioned the event. On learning that the subject of discussion would be women’s rights within the Saudi judicial system, Khawari rearranged her evening in order to attend, and later rallied friends to go to the subsequent discussions. She told me that it had never occurred to her that Saudi women had any legal rights, and she had resented the way that the legal system treated women. “I always thought that the flaw lay in the laws,” she told me. Now, like Ferak and many other lawyers I spoke with, she expressed new confidence in the justice of Saudi law. “Our laws concerning women’s rights are among the best in the world,” she said.

The real problem, she added, was lack of access to information. After the lecture series, Khawari began reading all she could about women’s rights in Islam, and sharing what she learned with her 12 and 13 year old students. Last spring, she gave up her teaching job to study full time toward a master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in human rights. Since then, she said, some of her former students have initiated discussions of women’s legal rights with older women in their families and among their neighbors, and they have asked Khawari to help them assemble leaflets on the subject. Khawari said, “They tell me they want to do something for Saudi society.”

Katherine Zoepf is a fellow at New America. Her first book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” came out in 2016.

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire - Deepa Kumar on RAI (part 3 out of 5)

In this part of the interview with Deepa Kumar, a lot of the points are discussed, especially, how Islamophobia was born out of papacy. How Jews, Christians, & other pagans converted to Islam not on the basis of swords but after seeing how technologically & socially progressive Muslim society in Spain was, & how Middle East is in flames, right now, because Islamic countries were always being divided, controlled, & used by the Western imperial powers of UK, France, & US for their own purposes.

Islamophobia is no different from any other racial, religious and ethnic prejudice. It is based on ignorance that passes for common sense. It may be common but Islamophobia makes no sense from any point of view.

The spreading of Islamophobic fear and hatred is part of the fraud of the War on Terror. The "terrorist threat to the homeland" is an unreasonable fear. It has resulted in an over reaction that has cost Americans trillions of dollars, killed millions of people, disabled millions more & made yet millions more homeless, widows, widowers & orphans. The current War on Terror, inflaming the whole Middle East, is just the latest example where the US is illegally funding terrorists. Other recent examples are Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, DR Congo, Honduras and Rwanda just to name a few.

Islamic societies were never "barbaric hordes". They actually brought the culture to Europeans, who were actually living in Dark Ages. Europeans learned the administrative system of government, education (science, mathematics, arts), social justice etc. from Muslims & Islamic empire in the East (Ottoman empire) & the West (Spain & Portugal).

Now, the Islamophobia in the West comes from decades of subliminal messaging of the Western public through media (i.e. Hollywood). I am not discounting the fact here that Muslims, themselves, have also to blame for this Islamophobia. Muslims in general have walked right into the traps set by the Western government & media. Our public acts like how we are portrayed in the Western media. No doubt about it. But, the Western imperial powers have also always controlled our countries, through our own corrupt leaders, to get their hands on our resources.

Islamic countries are very rich in resources, from Morocco to Egypt, from Turkey to Pakistan, & from Maldives to Indonesia, & seeing this, Western empires have always divided our countries (Sykes-Picot treaty arbitrarily created so many little countries in Middle East after the defeat of Ottoman Empire), installed our leaders upon us (monarchy is not even allowed in Islam, & a whole family gets to rule & name a whole country after its own family name, i.e. Ibn Saud "owning" Saudi Arabia), & loot our countries from our own precious natural resources. These Western powers then become wealthy by using our resources, while keeping the corrupt leaders in place to keep these countries always in the developing mode. For instance, countries in the Middle East are spending billions upon billions in their purchasing of arms & ammunition from these same Western powers, & then using them on their own citizens or their own neighbours (Saudi Arabia killing thousands of Yemeni Muslims), instead of using those same dollars creating more jobs & more industries in their regions for millions of Muslims.

So, the Trudeaus, Trumps, Merkels, Mays, Macrons of the West happily sell their deadly weapons to Muslim leaders, while their public hates Muslims due to their media spreading Islamophobia, & all the while, their administrations broker deals to steal precious natural resources of Islamic & other non-Islamic, developing countries. That's the two-faced, hypocrite, stab-in-the-back developed Global West !!!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8e2xQwmWaw

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So we're going to talk about the history of Islam.

DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: The first 300 to 400 years of contact with the Muslim empire, with the Muslim armies, isn't seen as a specific threat to European interests. Norman Daniel, who's the most influential scholar on this, calls this the age of ignorance, which is people in Europe really didn't know anything about the religion Islam, & they didn't see them as being a particularly important threat. They just saw them as yet another barbarian horde like the others that they had to deal with. Even though the Muslim armies are making incursions into Europe in the eighth century & so forth, they see them as just another threat that must be vanquished.

JAY: But if they see them as barbarian hordes, is that the beginnings of thinking of Islam as barbarian hordes? 'Cause that's part of the Islamophobia now; that's the vision.

KUMAR: Absolutely. But the sharp focus on Muslims as being barbaric & as being particularly demonic actually only happens in the 11th century in the context of the Crusades. And even then, the very first holy war wasn't a holy war. It was about the papacy wanting to establish spiritual & political control over a united Christian Europe. And what better way to do it than to inflame a holy war & to extend its influence into the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Rome, right?

And so it's in that context that they start to commission studies of Islam in order to develop a propaganda. ...

... when they spread into the Persian Empire & into the Christian Byzantine Empire, very often, because of hundreds of years of conflicts between these two empires, people didn't put up a fight. Sometimes they just welcomed them in. And when the Muslim armies took over & established their rule, they gave people a choice: you convert to Islam or you practice your own religion & pay a tax.

JAY: ... Islam arises at a time of a great decline of the Persian Empire & a great decline of the Byzantine Empire. It's actually really filling a kind of void.

KUMAR: That's right. It's filling a void. And it comes in as a young, energized force that is able--that offers revitalization in the region. And this is, of course, why people would start to convert from Christianity to Islam and so on. And when the conversion--this happens over a course of 100, 200 years. And so when that starts to take place, that's when the European elite start to see Islam as an existential threat & they try to find ways to explain it. And so one of the explanations that's given is, oh, people are converting to Islam because Islam allows men to take four wives. And so it's because sexual indulgences are allowed; that's why they are converting. It's not about the religion. And the Prophet Muhammad is also seen as a cardinal of the Christian faith who tried to create his own branch, but because he couldn't come to power that way, created another religion.

JAY: Well, if it wasn't about having four wives, what was it about? Why was Islam so successful?

KUMAR: Well, because where they ruled, for the most part they ruled & brought prosperity. So if you look at the Iberian Peninsula, what's known as Al-Andalus, which is the name given to the 700 or 800 year rule of the Muslims in Portugal, in Spain, & so on, they brought massive development--technological development, development in medicine; the standard of living of people really greatly rose; & you had street lighting & all the rest of it. So that's why people, when they saw what these people could do, would convert.

JAY: And is it partly because Islam created a set of rules that gave more order to the society? What I've read both in decline of Persian & Byzantine empire, things had gotten very chaotic, like, in terms of there's almost no rule of law in some ways.

KUMAR: Yeah. Actually, the sharia law ... was developed, actually, in the context of trying to administer a huge empire. And you needed to have rules, you needed to figure out everything about how a society functions. And therefore it was invented, to actually create some order out of the chaos.

JAY: And when they talk about clash of civilizations & this being Europe versus the Islamic Empire & then the Ottoman Empire, it's not really about clash of civilizations so much. It's about clash of empires.

KUMAR: Absolutely right.

JAY: So it's about a class of economic interest.

KUMAR: That's right. It's completely about a clash of economic interests. It's about the leaders, the political leaders in Europe versus the political leaders in the Middle East & so forth duking it out for power.

And the fact of the matter is that these leaders were not always against each other as well, because even in the context of the Crusades, you see alliances being made between the Crusader kings & the Muslim kings & people betraying each other for political gain, for economic gain. So there's--the idea that somehow Muslims & Christians have always been at loggerheads with each other is simply not borne out.

JAY: ... actually when you're talking back in that period, you're comparing the Spanish Inquisition, which was burning nonbelievers at the stake, to the Ottomans, who actually were extremely tolerant, from my understanding. I was in Albania & got to know the place a little bit, & if you just called yourself a Muslim if anyone asked & you paid taxes, you could have any pagan practice you wanted. There was no enforcement of religious doctrine that mattered.

KUMAR: That's right. In fact, compared to the sort of climate of religious intolerance in Europe, right, at the end of the 15th century--Jews are expelled from Spain, as are the Muslims, & so on. And Jews actually traveled to live in the Ottoman Empire & ... they actually experience progress in the region because it was a far more tolerant attitude towards religious diversity than being burnt at the stake.

JAY: Yeah. And in Europe, Catholics & Protestants are slaughtering each other for hundreds of years.

KUMAR: Absolutely.

JAY: This is not great liberal values. So when does Islamophobia rear its head again in a serious way?

KUMAR: So the story that I tell in the book is that there isn't one long stream of hatred between East & West in the clash of civilizations. Even during the time of the Crusades, you found different attitudes among Christians & Jews who lived in Al-Andalus. And then you see a complete dying down of these attitudes around 13th, 14th century. The rise of nationalism creates different attitudes, different enemies, & so on. And, in fact, there's great admiration for the Ottomans, because the Ottomans, compared to Europe--& remember, Europe is just coming out of the Dark Ages, & they see this really advanced civilization, incredible political administrative system, & they want to be like them. They consider the Ottomans to be Europeans of a sort.

But what happens is that once the Ottomans are defeated, in Vienna, for instance, & once they start to go into decline economically & politically compared to Europe, where you see the rise of capitalism & technology & so on, that's when there is the reemergence of these ideas, because there's a sense in which Europeans are superior, & therefore the white man's burden is to go off & vanquish these barbaric people.

JAY: And start colonizing the areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire.

KUMAR: Exactly. And so Edward Said, whose book Orientalism really charts the process by which a systematic body of knowledge is created to justifying empire, to justify European colonialism--.

JAY: Yeah, you've got to dehumanize those who you will either colonize or enslave.

KUMAR: Absolutely.

JAY: ... In the First World War & in the Second World War, much of the Islamic countries do side with the enemies of the West.

KUMAR: Yes, that's true.

JAY: I mean, does this kind of more modern roots of Islamophobia connect with the politics of both wars?

KUMAR: With the politics? Well, I mean, the Ottoman Empire, of course, sides not with the Allies & gets defeated, & then that becomes the basis from which to divide up the Ottoman Empire & create these arbitrary countries with the Sykes-Picot treaty, the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty.

And so the entire map of the region is pretty much planned out by France & by Britain. And, of course, they establish the mandate system by which to control the particular territories that they have carved out.

JAY: And ... you've got Lawrence of Arabia, which was, like, the movie that sort of--most people's history of that period is because they saw Lawrence of Arabia.

KUMAR: Yes. And that's, of course, a different kind of white savior narrative, isn't it, is that the barbarians can't liberate themselves & you need the Lawrence of Arabias to go in and rescue them.

JAY: And everyone in that movie, I mean, all the Arabs in that movie, those characters keep reappearing. ... I think if you were to track all the various stereotype, you find every one in Lawrence of Arabia.

KUMAR: Absolutely. In fact, Hollywood actually inherits the cultural tropes that were developed in Europe in the 19th century in the context of colonialism, right? And so the kind of images that you see in the paintings of Gérôme or Delacroix and these incredible Orientalist painters, Hollywood develops that language so that, a Jack Shaheen refers to this as an "Ali Baba kit", which is you want to make a movie about the Middle East, you have a desert, you have a sheik or two, you have some camels & an oasis, & that's all you need to know. And he's quite right. Sex and the City 2 pretty much follows that stereotype down to the last letter.

JAY: And then, when you get to post-World War II, you have a reshaping of the Middle East, & it begins ... to a large extent on a boat on Great Bitter Lake. President Roosevelt meets with Ibn Saud, from the Saud family, & kind of make a deal.

KUMAR: Yes. ... if Britain & France were the key colonial powers in the Middle East & North Africa, the Second World War unshakes their control over the region, & now the U.S. must establish its hegemony.

And so this pact with Saudi Arabia really is about an oil pact. It's about how to ensure the smooth flow of oil from the Middle East to aid the reconstruction of Europe, the Marshall Plan & so forth, & how to prevent any challenge from occurring to that agenda ... essentially it's about how to have client dictators in the region, both who sit on top of oil, as well as those who rule countries through which oil must pass. And that's the context in which Mohammad Mosaddegh, of course, who wants to nationalize the oil in Iran, is overthrown by the CIA.

JAY: And Saudi Arabia & some of the other Arab countries, the deal is: you'll give us safe oil, we'll keep you in power, & you will--especially with the Sauds--you will spread the extreme forms of Wahabbism throughout the region. And there's this Eisenhower quote ... essentially: we'll use the Saudis to defeat Nasserism, nationalism, & socialism. And the consequences we're seeing today.

But what I think's interesting culturally, if you go back to Disney movies of the time, Arabs always have these great big noses, they have little whiskers coming out, & they look like fat, greedy Saudi monarchy. And then Aladdin is Western-looking, & whoever he's in love with looks Western-looking, ... speaks with an American accent. But the point that's never made is these fat, ugly-looking monarchy types are all in power because of American policy.

KUMAR: Absolutely right. In fact, the rhetoric that actually develops is this wonderful & great resource, oil, black gold, does not--the Arabs don't deserve it. It's our resource. They just happen to be sitting on it. And so these are fat, fetid, & corrupt people.

But at the same time, let us not have any kind of challenge to their rule, right? This is oil for security, which is not just about security against external threats, but security against internal threats. Any movement that would attempt to destabilize the rule of the monarchy, of the Saud family, the U.S., CIA in particular, played a part in destabilizing, as I said earlier, whether it was workers movements, whether it was a constitutional movement, or what have you.

And today we don't talk--we talk a lot about ISIS's beheading of the two American journalists ... , and of course that's horrible, but we don't talk about how there've been dozens of beheadings in Saudi Arabia since the start of this year. I mean, this is one of the most reactionary countries in the world, where a family, Saud, gets to name an entire nation after itself & considers the land its property.

JAY: As you trace the history of Islamophobia, especially in American culture, do you see a change? And if so, what would the establishment of the state of Israel & U.S., essentially, total support & one-sided support over the years for Israel--?

KUMAR: Yeah. Well, the U.S., the history of U.S. Islamophobia actually is sort of--the language of Orientalism gets borrowed by the U.S., not just in Hollywood, but even within the academy. So people like Bernard Lewis and a whole bunch of scholars who used to be in the U.K. would migrate over because they see the winds of power shifting across the Atlantic. And so they would set up their own schools and all the rest of it to produce this kind of knowledge right here.

But the particular context for how the U.S. would respond to the events of 9/11, whereby war is seen as the sort of legitimate response to a criminal act, right? I mean, there were people around 9/11 who said, okay, the people responsible for this should be taken to the World Court & brought to justice & all the rest of it, but by that point there had been four decades of work wherein an act of this sort automatically necessitated war as the legitimate response. And that's the work that was done in the cultural sphere in terms of Hollywood. It's the work that was done in the political sphere, particularly in the alliance between the neoconservatives in this country & the Likud Party in Israel. So there is that kind of collaboration, & on creating a terrorist threat & rationalizing that terrorist threat, from the PLO to the Islamists and so forth.

JAY: And when you try to unpack liberal Democrats who on many issues, even foreign-policy issues, can be liberal, like, even vote against giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus, and so on, but when it comes to Israel, like the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, not a pipsqueak, like, out of anybody in Congress ... But it seems to me--and maybe--I don't think there's been enough conversation about the Democratic Party pro-Israel stance in relationship to Islamophobia, because it seems to me what's at the core of it is Israel is an outpost of civilization surrounded by barbarians, and that no matter what they do, they're doing ... horrible things in Gaza, but they're keeping out the Islamic hordes. And so ... Liberal Democrats will support anything Israel does.

KUMAR: Absolutely, and that's because there's an affinity, isn't there, between Israel, the colonial settler state, and the United States, a colonial settler state. Let's not forget that it's liberal Democrats who would actually bring into being the national security state that we have in the post-World War II era. And they very consciously use the language of manifest destiny, which is that it is the role of the Anglo-Saxons to create, in their vision, a state across from one ocean--or from one ocean to the other, and so forth. That is very much the language of the liberal Democrats. And so you can see the connections. Both are colonial settler states with a certain vision of who the chosen people are. And there's a long history in this country of pushing back against Native Americans and so forth.

JAY: And just one other point, which is, again, completely ahistorical. There are some monsters that use Islam to create and conduct their monstrosities. But in almost every case, they are the product of U.S. policy, and that part gets left off, and all you do is focus on the monstrosity. And the same with Hitler. I mean, could Hitler have come to power without all the support he got from Henry Ford and all the General Motors and on and on? It's questionable whether there would have been a Hitler if American policy couldn't help create that. So we never talk about that. We just focus on the monster, Hitler.