JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

The impetus for conservative Islam

By Uriel Heilman · December 24, 2008

How do Arab students rebel? They embrace conservative Islam. Thirst for political change and social justice are driving young people to conservative Islam, The New York Times finds in a piece from Jordan.

1 Comment | Share This | Arab world, Islam

All the conflicts fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · September 8, 2008

The New York Times has had several noteworthy pieces on Islamists and Israeli-Arab affairs over the last few days:

• Michael Kimmelman penned a piece on tension in the Gaza Strip between Palestinians’ secular orientation and life under Hamas Islamist rule: ”Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: A Culture Clash.”
• The Ethicist, Randy Cohen, answers two readers’ question about the ethical implications of Jews falsely identifying themselves as Christians on visa applications to Arab countries that are hostile to Jews and/or Jewish practice.
• Benjamin Weiser reports on the Palestinian Authority’s effort to fight a $192.7 million judgment against it for a terrorist attack at a bat mitzvah in the northern Israeli city of Hadera in 2002 that left six people dead.
• Isabel Kershner reports that the window for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be closing.
  
• And, finally, from a bit farther afield, the Times’ Sunday Magazine has a distressing but important feature by Dexter Filkins on the complexities of fighting the Taliban on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The upshot: It doesn’t look good for U.S. efforts against the Taliban.

0 Comments | Share This | Afghanistan, Gaza, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Palestinians

Ramadan Roundup

By Uriel Heilman · September 2, 2008

Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, began on Monday, coinciding this year with the Jewish month of repentance, Elul. Both the Jewish and Muslim calendars operate on the lunar cycle, but the Jewish calendar has a leap month every three years or so to keep pace with the solar calendar used the world over. The Muslim calendar does not; hence, Ramadan falls at a different time every year.

• The Associated Press reports on the clock confusion Ramadan is causing in the Middle East, with everyone resetting their clocks on different days to end the fast earlier – the Jews, too.
• Long Island Muslims celebrating Ramadan had a two-day Rosh Chodesh this year, New York Newsday reports.
• The Israeli army is easing restrictions on Palestinians during Ramadan and urging Israeli soldiers not to eat at West Bank checkpoints, JTA reports.
• During Ramadan, a city council in East London is requiring all council members – even Catholics and Jews – to observe Islamic law during council meetings: No eating, and a mandatory break for Muslim prayers.

2 Comments | Share This | Islam

Fears of an Al Qaida strike against Israel

By Ami Eden · June 13, 2008

Marc Perelman reports in the Forward that “a recent flurry of signals from Al Qaeda leaders has fueled concerns among terrorism experts that Al Qaeda could be setting up to launch an attack on Israel.”

The worries about an impending attack actually grow out of the apparent struggles of the terrorist network, visible in mounting criticism from former members and leading Muslim theologians.

In recent weeks, the CIA chief has claimed that Al Qaeda had suffered setbacks in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and lengthy exposés in The New Yorker and The New Republic have detailed the inner debates raging within Al Qaeda, especially due to resentment over its indiscriminate killing of Muslims.

This perceived weakening has some experts predicting that Al Qaeda leaders would seek to repair the group’s image — and prove the skeptics wrong — with a spectacular attack on Israel, the one target on which all Muslim extremists seem to be able to agree.

The New Republic and the New Yorker both have long articles about Al Qaida’s problems in the Muslim world.

1 Comment | Share This | Islam, Israel, Muslims, Terrorism

Memo to the next president

By Uriel Heilman · May 30, 2008

In his memo-to-the-next-president column in Friday’s New York Times, David Brooks offers candidates Barack Obama and John McCain some advice about how to deal with Iran. Because it’s unrealistic to expect that the White House has the power to neutralize the Iranian threat, Brooks writes, all the next president really can do is contain and wait for the radical regime in Tehran to fall:

Your job is to restrain Iran’s momentum until the fundamental correlation of forces can shift. For amid all the doleful news, there is a hopeful tide. Opinion is turning slowly against extremism. The über-analyst Dennis Ross says that he has noted it among the Palestinians. Michael Young writes that opinion is shifting against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Peter Bergen, Paul Cruickshank and Lawrence Wright have in their different ways written about the intellectual crisis afflicting Al Qaeda. It may not happen over the next four years, but as Ross has noted, where Islamists rule, they wear out their welcome.

Your job may be to wage rear-guard political battles until the ideological tide can turn. It’s not glamorous work, but governing isn’t campaigning. You volunteered for this.

Unfortunately, this optimism is misplaced. I’m not sure where Brooks or these analysts see Islamism wearing out its welcome. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s power and political support is growing. Whereas three years ago Gaza was ruled by the Israelis and two years ago by the Palestinian Authority, today it is ruled by an Islamic terrorist group, Hamas, that repeatedly has stymied Israeli and moderate Palestinian efforts to contain it (see: Hamas’ breach of Gaza-Egypt border, Israel’s inability to neutralize Gaza rocket threat, etc.). In Afghanistan, the Taliban is making a comeback. In Pakistan, the Islamists are gaining ground. And in the Middle East, every day sees Iran’s sphere of influence grow. Though Iran’s current president may be stumbling at home due to the country’s faltering economy, the unelected, fundamentalist Shiite clerics that really control things in Iran still have a stranglehold on the country.

Brooks’ analysis is more wishful thinking than “The Reality Situation,” as he calls his column. The Iranian regime may well fall on its own, but hoping that it will happen before Iran becomes a nuclear power is a callous gamble. Attacking Iran may not be the answer, but crossing one’s fingers and waiting for Islamism to recede, rather than actively confronting radical Islamists who seek to spread their brand of fundamentalism through the force of violence, is just plain foolhardy.

2 Comments | Share This | Islam, Politics

What I learned at mosque

By Ami Eden · April 15, 2008

Huffington Post columnist Leora Tannenbaum attends a pre-Shabbat lecture at the local mosque and concludes that “devout Muslims and Jews are not altogether that different, particularly in the worship department.”

Just as when I attend my own Orthodox synagogue, located a half-mile away from the mosque, I was separated from the men. After we placed our shoes in cubbyholes, we women filed up the staircase to the cramped balcony above while the men found places in the majestic sanctuary downstairs. There appeared to be nearly a thousand men and perhaps sixty women in attendance for the congregational prayer.

Imam Ali delivered his khutba (sermon). He told the worshippers that Muslims need to reach out and live harmoniously with other people because all people are servants of Allah. If someone chooses another path, he said, Muslims have a responsibility to show them the right way. However, one may not force others to follow the Islamic way. “We must show respect and dignity to all children of Adam,” he said. “Everyone is dignified by Allah.” It is human nature, he continued, that different people have different opinions, and Allah knows this. “But this difference of opinions does not make us hate each other. This diversity is seen in Islam as good,” Imam Ali declared, and all of us must “make an effort to get to know one another.”

Although I tried, I could not see the imam at all during his sermon. He spoke from a platform that was obscured from all but a few choice seats in the women’s section. So I ran my gaze across the women listening to him. Their hijabs reminded me of the tichels common in Borough Park and other Hasidic neighborhoods. I craned my head to check out the men below. The several men from JTS blended in with the crowd, the kippot on their heads closely resembling the kufis. After the sermon, it was time to pray. The bowing and prostrating was not altogether different from the shuckling (rhythmic swaying) commonly done during Jewish prayer.

2 Comments | Share This | Islam, Judaism, Religion

Film Fight

By Ami Eden · March 31, 2008

Here is the film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders in which he argues that Islam is a threat to the Western world (Muslims in Holland are suing him on the grounds that it falsely charges Islam with promoting violence)…

Wilders gave a lengthy interview to Fox News…

3 Comments | Share This | Islam, video

Boteach: Why won’t Muslims speak out?

By Ami Eden · March 10, 2008

Shmuley Boteach wonders in the Jerusalem Post why Muslims aren’t speaking out against last week’s shooting attack at a yeshiva in Jerusalem:

The sight of Gazans rejoicing at the cold-blooded murder of eight yeshiva students who had not hurt anyone was particularly jolting for me. I am a religious man and feel an immediate affinity with all who profess a love for God and strive to live a life of religious devotion. Meeting religious people of different faiths is always a great pleasure for me. I feel an immediate sense of kinship with them.

But what shakes me to my core is when some of my Muslim brothers and sisters rejoice at the deaths of innocent Jews, particularly those who are at prayer in their yeshiva. When Baruch Goldstein did the same thing, killing 29 innocent Arabs in a mosque, I told the press in England, where I was living at the time, that this religious Jew had committed an abomination before God and that this killer had betrayed his Jewish faith in the most horrible way imaginable. ...

I recognize that those who danced represent a small and extremist minority. The vast majority of Muslims are kind and God-fearing people. But why, then, do more Muslims not publicly condemn and repudiate these haters…

1 Comment | Share This | Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islam, Israel, Muslims, Religion, Terrorism

Bad Bunny

By Ami Eden · February 12, 2008

Hamas bunny vows to eat the Jews (watch out, Kibbutz Gezer)…

4 Comments | Share This | Islam, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, video

Beware: The Keffiyeh

By Ami Eden · February 11, 2008

The latest from the Arab-American bloggers behind KABOBFest, with Palestinian Canadian rapper Iron Sheik doing the voice-over…

0 Comments | Share This | Islam, video