JUST IN;: HAMAS TERROR GROUP GETTING DUMPED BY PALESTINE- women, girl and gays matter- Middle East and Africas sick of the butchering and plundering of innocent Muslims by Hamas, BOKO, ISIS, Hexbollah, Taliban etc. trash.... JUST IN NEWS Sept 8 2014-

IN BRIEF: NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK

Abbas threatens to dissolve unity gover nment

The new Palestinian unity government faced a new crisis on Sunday after President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to dissolve his alliance with Hamas if the Islamic militant group does not give up power in the Gaza Strip.

The dispute erupted just over two weeks after Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza ended in a ceasefire. Abbas is looking to regain a foothold in Gaza, which suffered heavy losses during the fighting, and expects to play a leading role in internationally backed reconstruction efforts. His comments, which also included harsh criticism of Hamas’ conduct in the war, appeared to be part of a brewing power struggle over who will control post-war Gaza.

Hamas has controlled Gaza since overrunning Abbas’ forces in 2007. Facing international isolation and a deep financial crisis, the Islamic militant group agreed to the formation of a new unity government with Abbas’ Fatah movement in June, in which it would restore governing power to Abbas in the territory. But it has yet to yield power — even after the devastating war against Israel, which killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and caused billions of dollars of damage.

“We will not accept having a partnership if their status in Gaza remains this way," Abbas said late Saturday. (AP)

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Soldiers of Suicide Canada

SOLDIERS OF SUICIDE MEMORIAL- CANADA September 2013 Opened

ONE BILLION RISING- BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ABUSE- no excuses

SEPTEMBER 3-4 Just in

UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 2014- just in- Canada Troops and Peacekeepers Africa- EBOLA ?? Ukraine?? Muslim Nations???

War, Famine, Disease, women, Muslim children innocents being slaughtered by Muslim butchers… Nato trying 2 start a WHITEMAN’S WAR IN UKRAINE???.. and now u want UN Peacekeepers…. 2 go in2 diseased poor uneducated abused Africa society…. 2 fix ur EBOLA mess which u ignored like the 3.2 Million women and girls and boys raped in the CONGO??? – Remember Dallaire’s RWANDA???- when u did nothing??? Sweet Jesus, Mother Mary and Joseph… OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF OUR FLAGS OF NATO NATIONS WHICH U THROW IN THE TRASHBARREL WHEN THEY COME HOME??? … THOSE TROOPS…?

Ebola outbreak: call to send in military to west Africa to help curb epidemic

Head of Médecins sans Frontières says the world is ‘losing the battle’ as cases and deaths continue to surge

Medical workers of the John F Kennedy hospital

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/02/ebola-outbreak-call-send-military-curb-epidemic?CMP=twt_gu

COMMENT:

Well NATO GET’S THEIR WHITE MANS WAR IN THE UKRAINE…. pray our troops are safe…. not one thing about this should have happened…. and there’s our sons and daughters…. it breaks my heart – a democratic elected president was hijacked out of office… A DEMOCRATIC ELECTED PRESIDENT MIND U… and our Civilized nations are preparing 4 Nato’s WhiteMans War…. with Russia who has helped in so many ways over the years… Uncle Harold said we never would have won WWI or WWII without Russia- against… the Germans!!! Sweet Jesus, Mother Mary and Joseph… we love our UK troops and have supported u then, now and 4ever…. it just breaks my heart…O Canada why? 4 one million voters??? come on…

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Sept 1 2014-THE BITING FACE OF POVERTY- UN SPONSORS NATO WARS AND WHATS LEFT GOES 2 WORLD POOR AND HUMANITY-Poverty hurts us Canada/Helping Street kids without giving money/ What about Civilized nations- helping civilized nations/Ukraine White Mans War/Muslim Countries own ½ of world’s money- need 2 help Muslim on Muslim hate- Civilized nations need 2 go home and fix ourselves imho/ NOTE PALESTINE'S MAP B4 UN- No Israel- seriously? We stand with Israel

THIS MAP PRESENTED 2 UNITED NATIONS- NOTICE NO ISRAEL???

Map printed by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities with a special grant provided by the United Nations through their "UNDP" office in Jerusalem, as stated. Israel does not exist on this map. A UN Agency has obliterated a UN member.

Hamas Charter, article 13 (Palestine Center website, Aug 9. 2003): “[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith … There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility. The Palestinian people are too noble to have their future, their right and their destiny submitted to a vain game.”

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10 ways you can help street children without giving money
BY MICHAELA LOLA
JULY 8, 2008

How can travelers help when money is clearly not the answer? Here’s 10 alternative ideas for helping street children.

Photo by carf
A TRAVELER WALKS down the red-light district of Manila City, Philippines. Carrying a backpack, a distressed expression and a pack of eager street children at his heels, he is left at a crossroads — to give or not to give?
Some yield to the desperate pleas, guilt ridden for the clean beds they know are waiting for them; others stare into space, hoping that their polite dismissal really is for the best.
This is not an uncommon sight in countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil and India, wherein the divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is extreme. Though poverty is a global issue, the evidence of such despair is most blatantly displayed in developing nations.
There is no avoiding a child’s eyes looking up at you, an amputee holding out an empty McDonald’s cup or a mother and infant sitting in the blazing heat hoping to look “pathetic” enough to warrant the charity of a few coins.
It is an anxiety-ridden dilemma.
Knowing that these kids have not only been damaged by their homeless state, but also by the constant sexual, physical and emotional abuse, makes saying “no” a tortuous task. However, handing out a few coins results in sense of helplessness as this donation often goes to their “beggar masters,” drugs or to parents who often spend it on alcohol or illegal substances.
Therefore, how can travelers help when money is clearly not the answer? Here’s 10 things you can do:
1. Volunteer
There is no avoiding a child’s eyes looking up at you, an amputee holding out an empty McDonald’s cup.
Even if you’re not part of the Peace Corps or United Planet Quest, does not mean that you can’t reach out.
Aside from volunteer vacation programs such as Global Volunteers, you can do your part, even for just a day, with a legitimate agency. There are several directories of international outreach opportunities online, such as Idealist.org, Eyesong.org and Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum on volunteerism.
If you are interested in a more direct method, then head over to the local church, mosque, temple and ask if they need any help or know any local programs or schools where you can take part.
You can also peruse the internet and search for community organizations such as Hands on Manila in the Philippines, Asha.org in India or Streetfriends.org in Cambodia.
2. Give A Moment
The simplest and the most valuable thing you can give to a child is time. Rather than brushing them off to make your way to the next tourist site, spend some time to ask them their names, what they like to do, or their favorite games.
Traveler, writer and co-founder of the Ethical Traveler, Jeff Greenwald stated in an interview with the Globe and Mail that “Generosity doesn’t have to mean giving away things. Sharing a bit of yourself, opening a window into your own world, is a good place to begin.”
3. Eat Together

Photo by carf
If you’ve made a connection with a particular child, dining together is a great way to spend time with someone whilst letting them enjoy a warm meal. Try to eat together in one of the local eateries rather than a fast food chain.
Not only will it be healthier but it will also let the child feel more secure knowing that you are interested in his or her country and culture. However, remain cautious when extending the invitiation, as one may end up meaning that you’re taking the entire community out for a treat.
4. Share Your World
Giving things such as pens, candies or clothes may seem like a great alternative, but it often leads to a whole slew of problems.
Not only does it breed materialism, it also promotes unhealthy competition and makes them view begging as a “fun” possibility. Rather than learning anything from travelers, children come to view foreigners as gift dispensers.
Author and vagabonder Jeff Greenwald states in Straight.com that it becomes like “trick-or-treating” for the kids. Louis, a traveler from Ottawa says on the Journeywoman.com board that handing out pens and balloons often causes fights, pollution and “gets children used to systematically ask for things.”
In Jeff Greenwald’s article “A Fistful of Rupees: Coping with Begging on Third World Trails” he recounts an experience with some kids from Delhi and the power of an inflatable globe:
“Cornered by a troupe of 10-year-old beggars in Delhi, I pulled out a small, inflatable world globe. What started as a feeding frenzy quickly became a geography lesson. The kids immediately began matching bits of news they’d heard on the radio – about Russia, Japan and the U.S. – to the appropriate countries, and argued heatedly about why India was pink and Pakistan blue.”
5. Play With Pictures
Another great tool is your digital camera. Kids love to ham it up and in my experience, they will often burst into excited shrieks and start making funny faces, flashing “peace signs” or doing group photo ops. If you can, show them the results, and guaranteed you’ll have a ton of kids squealing with excitement and eager to do another round of wacky poses.
6. Feel the Music
If you’re musically inclined (or in denial of being tone-deaf), try singing a few lines of a global pop song like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” More often than not, you’ll have kid’s belting out the lyrics with an accompanying “moonwalk.”
7. Create a Picture
If you want to leave a part of yourself behind, then how about a postcard of your hometown or a drawing of cities you’ve visited? Not only will you be sharing a part of where you’re from or where you’ve been, but it also provides a great image of the world beyond the slums. You can make it even more personal by writing a few words or do a group drawing session on the postcard.
8. Teach Each Other
Even if you’re not the artistic type, getting the kids involved in a spontaneous ‘arts and crafts’ session is a great way to get their creative juices flowing.
Small projects such as showing them some cool Origami techniques (or paper airplanes) or making simple bracelets with some string will be a mutually inspiring activity. If you’d like to do something more in-depth, you can also check out an charity organizations that specialize in this field.
9. Learn Local Slang
Have the children teach you some of the local lingo. In turn, share some funny phrases in your language. This method beats any phrase book you can buy, as you’ll be learning the key phrases to getting around the city. In turn you’ll gain a few friends and make them feel like they’ve done something special.
10. Donate To Local Orgs
Just because the jingling coins in your pocket are rendered useless on the street, remember that there are still ways to shell out those pennies without the guilt.
You can head over to the local schools or organizations and donate books, coloring materials and other learning paraphernalia.
Do some internet sleuthing and find out how you can help out when you return home. A great read is Emma Jacobs article on helping the locals you leave behind.
Though there aren’t any clear cut answers, recognizing that poverty is a global issue and that children all over the world deserve a future is the first step in the right direction. As Dr. Loretta Scott famously said: “We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”
http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/10-ways-you-can-help-street-children-without-giving-money/

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Wed Aug 27, 2014 at 10:50 AM PDT
Islamic State is a threat, so let the neighbors deal with it

Royal Saudi Air Force jets fly in formation during a graduation ceremony for air force officers at King Faisal Air Academy in Riyadh. Now let them fight their country's own wars.
This is obnoxious.
As Mr. Obama considered new strikes, the White House began its diplomatic campaign to enlist allies and neighbors in the region to increase their support for Syria’s moderate opposition and, in some cases, to provide support for possible American military operations. The countries likely to be enlisted include Australia, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, officials said.
The officials, who asked not to be named discussing sensitive internal deliberations, said they expected that Britain and Australia would be willing to join the United States in an air campaign. The officials said they also wanted help from Turkey, which has military bases that could be used to support an effort in Syria.
Wait, why does the US, Britain and Australia have to shoulder the military burden of taking on a foe threatening multiple nations in the Middle East? Sure, Turkey has airbases. They also have airplanes—240 F-16s and F4s. Turkey also has one of the larger armies in the region, nearly 300,000 strong. Islamic State a threat to them? Let them handle it.
And why has the US been arming the Gulf emirates to the teeth? Islamic State has no love for them, and wants their land for their "caliphate," so maybe they can deploy some of that hardware? The United Arab Emirates has 80 F-16s, 60 Mirage 2000, and an actual army. Oman has a smaller air force, but it has one. And an army. As does Qatar. And Bahrain. And Kuwait.
Then there is Saudi Arabia, with over 300 F-15s and over 100 Tornados. And with an army that is 150,000-strong, the ability to provide serious manpower to any anti-IS effort. For comparison's sake, Australia has 95 combat aircraft, total.
How about Jordan? With nearly 80 F-16s and over 100,000 soldiers in its well-regarded army, they'd be a serious force. And heck, Iran has a real problem with IS as well, so why not? Invite them to the party as well.
Point is, there are plenty of actors in the region with the capability to take care of the threat to their stability. Let the US provide drone and satellite surveillance. If some of these countries need help ferrying troops into Iraq, then sure, lug them around in our transport aircraft. Heck, chip in with some additional combat aircraft.
But the time to shoulder the weight of fighting other people's wars is over. Let someone else pay for these wars, and bleed for them, and suffer blowback for them. We've spent the last several decades arming these countries. Now let them take care of their own problems.
We can cheer them on from the sidelines.
Update: Egypt and UAE conducted air strikes in Libya a couple of days ago, so there you have it. Precedent. And here you have Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority declaring IS "enemy number one of Islam". So they should do something about that. They. Not us.
Originally posted to kos on Wed Aug 27, 2014 at 10:50 AM PDT.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/27/1325008/-Islamic-State-is-a-threat-so-let-the-neighbors-deal-with-it

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Ukraine: why are we trying to start a new cold war with Russia?
By Tim Stanley World Last updated: February 25th, 2014

Do we really understand what's happening in Kiev? (Photo: Reuters)
A lot of things don't make sense about the Ukrainian uprising. For instance, we were constantly told that Russia basically ran the country – that Viktor Yanukovych was a puppet president. In which case, why did Yanukovych fall so easily and why did Russia do nothing to protect him? Also, why has Britain pledged to offer aid to whatever government replaces him? Apparently, our foreign policy has become to hand out cash to anyone who sets themselves up in opposition to Vladimir Putin. Perhaps it would be quicker to throw bundles of fifty pound notes out of an airplane over Kiev.
If we did that, into whose hands would the cash fall? Uncertainty over the answer reflects how complicated this conflict is. Last week I wrote about Svboda, the far-Right opposition group that is popular in Western Ukraine and whose members think the Holocaust was a moment of joy that still brings hope to millions. Since then readers have been suggesting I take a look at another organisation called the Right Sector. They are typically the people your see on TV waving red and black flags, a flag used by Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.
Right Sector is so Right-wing that it thinks Svboda is run by pansy poet liberals. Recently, Time snagged an interview with its leader and he boasted that he has amassed "a lethal arsenal of weapons", including guns. Indeed, its role in the protests is substantial, frightening:
The group serves some of the uprising’s most essential functions. Its fighters control the barricades around the protest camp in the center of Ukraine’s capital, and when riot police have tried to tear it down, they have been on the front lines beating them back with clubs, rocks, Molotov cocktails and even a few catapults, in the mold of siege engines of the Middle Ages. Around the country, its fighters have helped seize government headquarters in more than a dozen cities.
They have also taken the lead in beating up policemen. It's not unreasonable to speculate that they were involved in the removal of a statue celebrating the Soviet-led liberation of Ukraine from the Nazis – a liberation that elements of the Ukrainian far-Right regard as a huge mistake. You can see some photos of their engagement in the protests here. One that stands out is the use of a shield with "88" daubed on it – shorthand for Heil Hitler. This collage, from Independence Square, also tells its own story.

The Right Sector thug is on the bottom right (Photo: Reuters).
None of these details should imply that the Ukrainian opposition is racist or undemocratic. On the contrary. The crisis has occurred because a democratically elected government first surrendered its foreign policy to Russia and then used violence to quell protest. The righteous opposition includes democrats, clergy, communists, nationalists and apolotical Ukrainians who simply want their country to achieve fuller independence.
But the situation is complex. A significant portion of the country regards itself as Russian for the very good reason that the country was part of Russia for centuries. Its current form bears comparison with the former Yugoslavia, right down to the toxic mix of ethnicities. And in the same way that the story of Yugoslavia's break-up is one of victims becoming murderers and murderers becoming victims – we shouldn't presume that the Western Ukrainians won't prove every bit as brutal as the state they are busily overthrowing. The presence of Right Sector thugs with clubs is a worrying prophecy.
So what should the UK do? The smart answer might be "as little as possible". Partly because we could be injecting ourselves into a future civil war. But also because when we a) declare an interest in a foreign crisis but b) don't actually do anything because the last thing we want is direct confrontation with Russia, then we don't look strong – we look foolish and weak. That's what happened in Syria, where we talked tough but pulled back from military action – and handed Putin a win.
Not that we should see British foreign policy entirely through the prism of point-scoring against Vladimir Putin. The West's attempt to revive the Cold War is irrational and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both Russia's ambitions and its capacity to see them through. Russia seems to simply be interested in defending its old alliances, much as the US did when it supported the Contras or invaded Grenada. It is the West, not the East, that has projected its military power by invading countries miles away (Iraq, Afghanistan, the airspace of Pakistan), while Russia simply tries to keep its own limited sphere of influence in check. As my first question at the top of this post indicates, it's not even very good at doing that.
Yes, the government of Vladimir Putin falls short on Western human rights standards and its influence on its neighbours is baleful. But there is worse in the world. We would do better to confront China, which genuinely is a dictatorship (Russia is not, no matter how many British TV personalities say it is) and which is currently threatening war with Japan – a country with considerably greater strategic and economic importance to the West.
Russia is a paper tiger. Why we're wasting time hunting it, I cannot imagine.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100261083/ukraine-why-are-we-trying-to-start-a-new-cold-war-with-russia/

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Middle East
• The Region and its History
• Legal Practices and Institutions
• Seclusion of Women / Purdaht
• Family in the Region (Marriage, Dowry and brideprice, Divorce, Polygyny, Custody of children, Inheritance/ Land Rights)
• References

Links to legal datasheets for countries in this region.
Bahrain | Iran | Iraq | Israel | Jordan | Kuwait | Lebanon | Oman I Palestine I Qatar | Saudi Arabia | Syria | United Arab Emirates | Yemen

The Region and Its History
�� The Middle East lies at the junction of Africa, Asia, and Europe.� The world's oldest civilizations were born there, as were three of the world's great religions:� Judaism, Christianity and Islam.� From the point of view of most Muslims, the rise of Islam is the most significant event in the region's long and complex history. Muslims make up the majority of the population in every Middle Eastern country except Israel, and Islamic values and institutions and values permeate every aspect of Middle Eastern society.
�� The Prophet Mohammed first heard what Muslims believe to be the word of God around 610, outside of Mecca in what is today Saudi Arabia. After an interval without visions, he communicated a steady stream of divine commands to his followers until his death in 632.� These revelations were collected into the Quran.� The sayings of the Prophet, or the hadith, form a second source of knowledge about the Prophet's life and teaching.
�� The religion the Prophet Mohammed founded contained the design for a political as well as social system.� In pre-Islamic Arabia, tribal affiliation was the major social bond. However, as the Middle Eastern scholar John L. Esposito argues, �Islam replaced this with a community whose membership was based upon a common faith rather than male blood ties; religious rather than tribal affiliation become the basis of Islamic society� (Esposito 1998:5).� For the� community of new Muslims, Mohammed was a leader with multiple roles.� He was a religious authority as well as the head of state. He was a judge as well as commander of the military. He was the head of a family as well as a people.� The way he handled his responsibilities in all these realms remains a social ideal for Muslims to this today:� the sunna, or "fine example" of the Prophet.
� At the crux of the new Islamic way of life were the Prophet's teachings on family law.� The basic social and political unit in pre-Islamic Arabian society was the kin-based patriarchal clan. However, in Mohammed's youth, the Arabs agreed upon no single form of marriage, much less on rules for the guardianship of children, the protection of women or the distribution of property.� In such conditions of confusion, the effect of the Quran's guidelines was to strengthen the patriarchal clan.�� Women could no longer marry more than one man at a time. Rules such as those laying down the iddat period in which a woman may not remarry were provided to assure knowledge of paternity. At the same time, the Quran set a new moral tone for family life.� Women and children were no longer considered chattels, but individuals with rights and needs of their own. (Lapidus 1988: 29-31.)
�� As Mohammed's followers went on to conquer all of the Middle East as well as much of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the idea of the Islamic family as the basic building block of Islamic society remained at the heart of the Muslim concept of the umma, the community of believers.�� The four great schools of Islamic law that grew up in the Middle Ages each interpreted the Quranic regulations in slightly different ways, and in every place and time, local custom subtly or not so subtly altered the weight given to different parts of Muslim family law. Nevertheless, the basic rules laid out in the Quran regarding the rights and obligations of family members to each other remained basically unchallenged until the advent of European colonialism in the 19th century. As the Egyptian writer Leila Ahmed has noted, "For the first time since the establishment of Islam, the treatment of women in Islamic custom and law - the license of polygamy, easy male access to divorce, and segregation - were openly discussed in Middle Eastern societies" (Ahmed 1992: 128).
�� Family law became a topic for discussion because the colonial officials used the treatment of Muslim women both as an explanation for the "backwardness" of Middle Eastern societies and as a justification for European domination of those societies.� In the early 20th century, Middle Eastern intellectuals concerned with the need for the Islamic world to "catch up" with Europe took up the issue of women as part of a broader nationalist program of political, social and cultural reform.� The nationalists wanted to secularize Muslim societies, separate state and religion, reduce the domain of Islamic law and repudiate the authority of the Ottoman empire.� As countries such as Iraq, Syria, Iran, Jordan, and Lebanon gained independence, the nationalists were able to put many parts of their program into action. But attempts to change family law remained politically sensitive. In the second half of the twentieth century, public disappointment with the results of the nationalist project fostered the growth of Islamist movements who have sought to set up governments based on their understanding of sharia.� Since oil was discovered in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf states have used their oil revenues to help finance schools, charities and political associations that promote their conservative interpretation of Islam and sharia.� In 1979, Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the Shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic theocracy.� Islamist intellectuals and organizations with roots in the Middle East have continued to gain influence throughout the region and beyond.
�� For the Islamists, as for their secular antagonists, women and family law are a key battleground.� As Yvonne Haddad and Jane I. Smith have put it, "Absolutely basic to the Islamist discourse is the rejection of the West and the conviction that "freedoms" enjoyed by the Western women are among the key factors in the moral and ethical disintegration of the West" (Haddad and Smith 1996:138).� The Islamists tend to see the role of women as divinely prescribed in Islamic family law, and they have resisted reforms based on non-religious arguments. On the other hand, the Islamic revival they have helped provoke has sparked debate over whether a deeper understanding of Islam itself might lend itself to changes in the way family law historically has been understood in the Middle East. Iran, in particular, has been the scene of paradox.� The enforcement of Islamic dress and other measures that initially seemed likely to push women back into the home have instead had the effect of legitimizing women's public presence.� Meanwhile, the incorporation of sharia into the apparatus of a modern nation state has forced Iran's clerics to reexamine the law to deal with new social realities (Mir-Hosseini 1999:� 7).��
�� The kingdom of Saudi Arabia exercises a greater influence over the Islamic world than its population of about 22 million might suggest. Each year, millions of Muslims make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. The Saudi monarchy came to power in the 18th century by championing the cause of the Islamic reformer, Ibn Abd al-Wahab, who wanted to return to what he considered the fundamental principles of the Quaran.� In recent decades, the Saudis have also spent their vast oil wealth to promote the strict interpretation of Islamic law favored by their Wahabi sect�� The Saudi monarchy is committed to upholding� shari�a.�� The country has a relatively high birth rate, and about 40 percent of the population is younger than 15 years of age. More than 75% of the total population is urban; large sections of the country are empty deserts.�� The Saudi population is almost entirely Sunni.� Shi'ites, who are adherents of Shi'ism, the second major branch of Islam,make up about 4 percent of the population and are found mostly in the oases of Al-Hasa and Al-Qatif. The only Christians are foreign industrial employees and businessmen. Public worship and display of non-Muslim faiths is prohibited.�
�� The kingdom of Kuwait has been an important Gulf state for centuries.� In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kuwait flourished economically as one of the most important trading ports in the Middle East (al-Mughni 1993).� For many years, the ports of Zubara and Kuwait City operated as intermediaries between the Persian empire and the British East India Company (al-Mughni 1993).�� With the discovery of oil in Kuwait, the small kingdom became even more crucial in the Gulf trade.� Three other small oil-rich Gulf states are Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.�
�� Like its neighbors, the wealthy country of Oman has become increasingly urban.� About 50% of Oman's some 2 million people live in Muscat and the Batinah coastal plain northwest of the capital.� Muscat and Oman was converted to Islam in the seventh century Ce, during the lifetime of Mohammed.� The� Sultan of Muscat and Oman played a major role in extending Islam to East Africa by conquering the island of Zanzibar.�� Sultan Qaboos bin Sa'id assumed power on July 24, 1970, in a palace coup directed against his father, Sa'id bin Taymur.� One of the new sultan's first measures was to abolish many of his father's harsh restrictions, which had caused thousands of Omanis to leave the country, and offer amnesty to opponents of the previous regime, many of whom returned to Oman. He also established a modern government structure; and launched a major development program to upgrade educational and health facilities, build a modern infrastructure, and develop the country's resources.
�� Yemen has a generally homogeneous, ethnically Arab population of about 17 million.� The northern parts of Yemen are primarily Sunni, while the southern Yemeni are predominantly Shi�ia.�� Yemen is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the Near East.� In the 7th century, Islamic caliphs began to exert control over the area. After this caliphate broke up, the former north Yemen came under control of Imams of various dynasties usually of the Zaidi sect, who established a theocratic political structure that survived until modern times.
�� Syria's 16 million inhabitants are almost all Muslim.� Most are Sunni, though large minority belong to�� sects such as the Alawis, the Druse, the Ismaili, the Yezdis, or the Shiites. Syria has been ruled by a military regime under the control of the Baath party. Islam is not mentioned in the constitution. However, it is acknowledged that the head of the state must be a Muslim and the sharia is embodied in the 1953 Syrian law of personal status (Lapidus 1988).� The Muslim Brotherhood opposed the Syrian government in the 1960s and 1970s, but its revolts were crushed.
�� Jordan's conservative monarchy bases its rule over a Jordanian-Palestinian population of about 6 million on upholding a relatively relaxed interpretation of sharia.� Lebanon only emerged from years of civil war in the 1990s.� The fragile division of power between its Muslim majority and Christian minority is still unstable.� In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims form a majority of Palestinians.� Although secular nationalists have historically dominated the Palestinian movement, Hamas and other Islamist groups have gained influence in recent years.
�� Iraq's population of 23 million, which is overwhelmingly Muslim, consists of three main groups: Arab Shi'ites, Arab Sunnites, and Kurdish Sunnites. The Arab Shi'ites make up about three-fifths of the total population and live mainly in the south and southeastern parts of the country. Arab Sunnites account for about one-third of the population and are concentrated in the central area of eastern Iraq, around Baghdad. The Kurds, who are Sunnite Muslims and speak a language related to Farsi or Persian, live in the north and northeast and make up almost one-fifth of the population.� Iraq is the only Arab country in the Middle East with a Shi'ite majority, but Arab Sunnites dominate its government.� Iraq's Baathist government is officially secular, although sharia is recognized as one source of Iraqi law.
�� Iran is a multilingual and diverse cultural society, but most of� its 67 million people are Shii'a Muslims. Nearly one-half of the people speak Farsi, and another fourth speak some other Indo-European language ordialect.� The Kurds are also a small but significant percentage of Iran's population. They have resisted the Iranian government's efforts, both before and after the revolution of 1979, to assimilate them into the mainstream of national life.� Iran's 'ulama' of religious teachers, students and politicians dominated its revolution and have maintained authority over its Islamic republic. Shortly after the revolution, the Islamic republic sought to overturn a number of the Pahlavi monarchy's reforms, particularly in the area of family law.� As time has passed, Iran has reintroduced many of these reforms, as well as passing new laws revising interpretation of sharia in cases of divorce, family planning, and segregation of the sexes.
Legal Practices and Institutions
�� The central institution of Saudi Arabian Government is the monarchy. No formal constitution exists. A system of Islamic courts administers justice according to the Shari'a. The king appoints the judges on the recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council.� The independence of the judiciary is protected by law. The king acts as the highest court of appeal and has the power to pardon.�
�� All Saudi political and religious positions are reserved for men; laws maintaining the segregation of men and women make it impossible for women exercise overt political power over men. Two women are equal to one man in the country's legal proceedings. In court, a Saudi woman may witness a legal document if another woman agrees to witness it with her.�� In a trial, it takes the testimony of two women to match that of one man.� However, women have the right of access to a sharia court in civil matters concerning her own property.
�� Oman's sultanate has no constitution, Western-style legislature, or legal political parties. Oman's judicial system traditionally has been based on the Islamic law. The Shari'a courts fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, Awqaf, and Islamic Affairs. Oman's first criminal code was not enacted until 1974. The current structure of the criminal court system was established in 1984 and consists of a magistrate court in the capital and four additional magistrate courts.� In the less- populated rural areas among the nomadic Bedouin, tribal custom often is the law.
�� The two parts of the new state of Yemen had markedly contrasting legal traditions. In the north, both Islamic law and tribal law were in operation.�� In the south, family and personal status laws were based onshari�a, but there was a long history of applying British commercial law, and common law in many civil and criminal disputes. The unified state of Yemen has attempted to integrate all three systems into its legal and judicial systems.� In 1974, several family law reforms liberalized the codes.� Polygyny was restricted, but not banned.� Further, the reforms required consent for marriage, limited the mahr, gave women equal rights to initiate divorce and explicitly stated favor for mothers in custody disputes (Moghadam 1993).� .
� Qatar is ruled by a hereditary emir who presides over a fairly homogeneous native Qatari population. The ruling family, the Al Thani make up as much as 40 percent of the native Qatari population.� Qatar introduced civil and criminal codes� in 1971, and all civil and criminal cases fall within the purview of a system of secular courts.� Islamic law is now essentially confined to personal and family matters.�� It follows very closely the lead of Saudi Arabia on most issues, in part because, like Qatar, Saudi Arabia adheres to the conservative Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence.
�� Before the 1979 revolution, Iran was one of the most liberal Muslim states, with a legal system comparable to those of Tunisia and Turkey.� In 1962, Iranian women were given the right to vote.� Further, the 1967 Family Protection Act protected women on many issues:� women were given the right to initiate divorce, child custody rights were increased and polygamy was limited.� After the revolution, the Islamic Republic suspended the Family Protection law as un-Islamic. It later reintroduced many parts of the law, such as the use of special courts for family law.� Iran opened the first theological college for female Shi'i scholars in 1986. Among the all-male seminaries and colleges that produce Iran's clerical leaders, women's issues are taken more seriously than before the revolution. Women, who lost the right to practice law after the revolution, can now serve as lawyers and assistant or "research" judges (Poya 1999:� 102).� In the 1990s, all major political parties included women in their slates for election. In 1997, eight women nominated themselves for president, although the Council of Guardians did not approve any of them. The women's vote played a critical role in the 1997 elections and the thirteen female deputies serving in Iran's parliament have become extremely vocal on women's issues (Mir-Hosseini 1999)�
�� Over the last twenty years, Syrian women have held a number of high government and private offices.� However, the Syrian writer Bouthaina Sha'aban complains that women are still not adequately represented in Syria's legal and justice systems.� "Although women graduating from law colleges constitute one-eighth of the graduates, and women graduating from sharia college constitute one-fourth of the graduates, female representaton in both the legal and the justice systems in Syria is very low indeed. This reflects badly on the legislation and implementation of laws concerning marriage child custody, divorce, benefits, etc." (Sha'aban 1996:56).
�� Kuwait operates under a constitutional monarchy.� Its legal system draws heavily on Egypt's French-inspired system. ��Most of Kuwait�s commercial laws are based on Western secular codes; but in personal status and family laws, Kuwait�s laws are based on the Maliki version of shari�a (Longva 1997).� Women do not have the right to vote.
�� Women have voted in Jordan since 1974.� In 1989 they constituted about half of voters. However, they have seldom won political office. Islamist groups have campaigned against women running for office.
� Women occupy many high offices in Iraq, but the Iraqi legal code is subject to the will of� President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who once told his nation on television that "a law is a piece of paper on which we write one or two lines, and then sign it underneath:� Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq."
� Several years ago Yemen appointed a woman to its 15-member Supreme Court, despite the opposition of conservative sharia scholars. (Carapico 1996)
Seclusion of Women / Purdah
�� Traditionally, Middle Eastern societies made a relatively sharp division between the roles of men and women.� The public sphere was almost always reserved for men;� women had domain over the family and the household. Face veiling has been recorded in the Middle East as far back as 1500 BC.� Long before Islam, the movements of� Middle Eastern women were more circumscribed than that of men. Most of the social restrictions on women appear to originate in cultural notions of patriarchy and honor.� The idea that a man's honor depends on the sexual behavior of his daughters and his sisters, the women for whom he has responsibility, is particularly widespread.�� Until the early 20th century, families who could afford it kept their women isolated from the marketplace, politics and social life with men (Lapidus 1988). In many countries, virginity until marriage is not just a cultural expectation, but also a legal one.� Most countries in the Middle East have criminal sanctions against sexual intercourse outside of marriage (al-Mughni 1993).
�� Veiling and conservative Islamic dress had been declining such countries as Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, but recent decades have seen a resurgence. In many cases, it is not seclusion that prompts women to wear Islamic dress, but their emergence in the public sphere. As record numbers of Muslim women have entered schools, universities and the labor force, they have used Islamic dress to signify their adherence to the Islamic moral code and to protect themselves from male harassment. As Leila Ahmed writes, "The adoption of the dress does not declare women's place to be in the home, but, on the contrary, legitimizes their presence outside it" (Ahmed 1996: 224)
�� To veil or not is not an option in Saudi Arabia or Iran.� The governments of both countries enforce a dress code for women as part of the legal segregation of the sexes.� Religious police may stop a Saudi women who leaves her house without being fully veiled.� All Saudi public facilities are segregated.� Women may only work in occupations where they will not come in contact with unrelated men.� They are barred from praying in mosques. They need the permission of a male guardian to obtain a passport or travel outside the kingdom (Altorki 1986).�� Women are not allowed to drive, further confining them to the private domain (Altorki and Cole 1997).
�� After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Islamist regime began to enforce women�s seclusion.� In 1980, veiling or "hejab" was made complusory by law.� The Ministry of Education banned sex-integrated schools.� Further, child care centers were closed down, effectively eliminating women�s public employment. The new government also made a woman's right to work conditional on gaining the permission of her husband. Finally, many tourist beaches were segregated by sex (Moghadam 1993).� However, throughout the past 20 years, these restrictions have been increasingly loosened. Although married women must have their husband's permission to work outside the home, more women do so today in Iran than before the revolution� (Esfandari 1997) and more women than men are enrolled in institutions of higher learning (Poya 199).� The government has expanded employment opportunities, so that most families have come to depend at least partly on the earnings of their female members.�� Although almost all women still veil, styles of cloth and wear vary greatly (Moghadam 1993). Adultery is is strictly outlawed and men have the legal right to kill their wives if they are unfaithful.
�� Iraq and Syria have facilitated the movement of women into the workplace by subsidizing childcare. On the other hand,� Iraq issued a regulation in 1982 that married women were not allowed to travel without their husbands.� Further, unmarried women must have written permission from their fathers or guardians (Moghadam 1993).� At the same time, the Iraqi government instructed women to fill the vacant jobs of men in the army, sending contradictory messages on women�s place in Iraqi society (Moghadam 1993).
�� Islamist movements in the region have had significant effects on women�s access to public space.� In Gaza in the 1980s, an Islamist group called Mujama proposed a return to stricter Islamic social codes among Palestinians.� Women were pressured to veil.� In May 1988, Mujama youth broke into classrooms and demanded that schoolgirls wear hejab (Moghadam 1993).
�� Historically, women from wealthy families in Kuwait have been strictly secluded, although women in the middle and lower classes were not under such strict seclusion, as most of these families could not afford servants to perform duties outside the household (al-Mughni 1993).�� However, women who left the household were still required to follow strict dress codes; women dressed in a long black cloak called an abbaya and veiled with a similar black cloth called a boshiya (al-Mughni 1993).� Longva argues that veiling in Kuwait intensified in the mid-1980s with the increase in immigration.� Veiling has been used a way to distinguish Kuwaiti women from non-Kuwaiti women (Longva 1997).� Women in Kuwait have also been exluded from political activities.� Although the question of suffrage has been debated in Kuwait, women still do not have the right to vote.� In 1982, a bill was introduced into the National Assembly to allow women to vote but not to hold office.� The bill was debated only a few hours, and lost by a vote of 27 to 7 with 16 abstentions.� Many members of the Assembly who had been in favor of granting women the vote abstained in fear of a backlash by Islamists in Kuwait (al-Mughni 1993).� After the war with Iraq, many Kuwaiti women argued that denying women the right to vote and participate in the political process was a violation of the country�s 1961 constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender (Prusher 2000).� The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Sabah issued a royal decree in June 1999 to allow women to vote and run for public office. However a bill to put his decree into effect was defeated in the National Assembly by a vote of 32-30 in November 1999 (Prusher 2000).� Between 1986 and 1988, 42 women in Kuwait were arrested for giving birth outside of marriage.� Of these, 11 were jailed for more than 2 years, 17 were forced to marry the father of the child and 14 were put under guardianship of male family members (al-Mughni 1993).
�� Female circumcision, usually in the form of excision of the clitoris, is common in many Arab states such as Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (Hosken 1982).
Family in the Region
In the Middle East, kinship remains the principle unit of social and economic organization. The family into which an individual is born is the most important social group to which he or she will ever belong, providing protection, food, shelter, income, reputation and honor. Patrilineal family units continue to live in close proximity and marry endogenously; cross-cousin marriage is predominant.� Young people are taught to respect and defer to their older kin, who in turn take responsibility for younger relatives.� Females are taught to respect and defer to their fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles and cousin, who are taught to protect and care for them.� A married man is often not called by his own name, but as a reference as a father to his first-born son.� Women are almost exclusively identified as daughter, wife or mother of a man.� Unmarried women are pitied and considered social and familial failures in many communities (Joseph 1996).
Marriage
�� Courtship, engagement and marriage customs vary widely according to the location, education, and social class.� The women of the two families involved usually play a large role in arranging the match, while the older males of families determine the bride wealth or mahr,as well as the clothes, jewelry and other gifts to be given by both sides.� Among Muslims, there are three different forms of payment given at marriage:� 1) jahaz (gifts to the bride by her father) or mahr (gifts from her in-laws);� 2)� shirbaha (cash provided by the groom to the bride�s father to purchase the jahaz); a practice common in Iran;� 3) traditional Islamic mahr (Moghadam 1993).� This amount is stipulated in the marriage contract, and consists of a direct mahr, given at the time of the marriage, and often a deferred mahr, given in some situations of divorce (Moors 1995).� Women are entitled to claim the deferred mahr in cases where the husband repudiates the wife or where the wife has a valid reason to ask the court to dissolve the marriage (Moors 1995).
�� Economic and political crises in the Middle East have caused changes in the mahr.� For example, in 1988, the first year of the intifada, the average price of the mahr among Palestinians decreased by 10-25% (Moors 1995).� Further, the effects of the intifada have also been linked to decreased marriage ages for both boys and girls, as well as decreased registration of marriages, making women�s potential claims to maintenance vulnerable (Moors 1995). The country of Oman has placed limits of the amount of the mahr, although these limitations are routinely ignored (Eickleman 1997).
�� When the family arranges a marriage, it usually accepts some responsibility for the outcome.� In Syria, Sha'aban writes that the parents of woman whose marriage is failing will see to it that she and her children are provided for if she went into the marriage on their recommendation (Sha'aban 1996:� 55)
�� Most Middle Eastern countries have introduced a minimum age for marriage.� Jordan's 1951 Law of Family Rights, raised the minimum age for marriage to 15 for both boys and girls (Moors 1995).�� In Syria, the legal marriage age for girls is 17, although parents may petition the court to marry off a girl who is 15 or 16;� while in Iraq girls must 18 to marry (Moghadam 1993)
�� The age at which girls can marry has shifted back and forth in Iran.� Tthe Pahlavi regime had raised the marriage age for girls to 18 (Hoodfar 1995). The post-1979 regime under Khomeini lowered the this to 9 years of age.� However, as of August 2000, the reformist Parliament in Iran was considering a new bill to raise the minimum marriage age for girls to either 15 or 16 (The New York Times 2000). Iran's Islamic Republic is also unique in sanctioning temporary marriages, or muta, as a legal form of union (Hoodfar 1995).
�� In several Arab countries, women who marry men from another country lose some of their civil rights.� A Syrian woman married to a foreigner cannot pass on her nationality to her children (Sha'aban 1996). In Kuwait, non-Kuwaiti men who marry Kuwaiti women are not given residence based on marriage; instead they are required to leave the country if they cannot find employment and secure a residence permit.� Even when such a permit is granted, the couple may still be forced apart.� Permits are issued for only one year at a time, and upon renewal, are reviewed by the Interior Minister, who has unequivocal power to renew or terminate the permit.� Likewise, children of such unions are also required to obtain residence permits to remain in Kuwait and are not entitled to free health care available to all Kuwaiti citizens (al-Mughni 1993).
Divorce
�� Divorce is fairly common in the Middle East. Several Arab countries have modified their family codes to require men who divorce their wives to give them maintenance beyond the three-month idda period. Article 17 of the 1953 Syrian Law of Personal Status provided that if the qadi judges that a husband has repudiated his wife without reasonable cause, the qadi can require the husband to pay compensation up to the equivalent of one year�s maintenance (Pearl and Menski 1998).� In Iraq, the Personal Status Act of 1959 required either a declaration from the court for a divorce or registration of repudiation during the wife�s iddat for the divorce to be valid.�� The 1976 Jordanian Law of Personal Status stipulates that in cases where the husband has arbitrarily repudiated his wife, she is entitled to ask for a maximum of one year�s maintenance (Moors 1995).
�� Although Syrian women are entitled to register a right to divorce in their marriage contracts, few women know it and it is considered socially unacceptable for brides to ask to preserve their right to divorce their husbands. Meanwhile Syrian men in some cases have the right to divorce their wives without the women attending court. Courts rarely enforce the payment of compensation to divorced women. In most cases, the husband owns the house and can force a divorced wife to leave (Sha'aban:� 1996).
�� In Iran, the government has made a model marriage contract available to marrying couples that gives the divorced wife a right to half the property acquired during the marriage, provided she does not seek the divorce herself� and is not at fault.� Another article of the contract consists of a power of attorney from the husband to the wife, permitting her to divorce herself on twelve different grounds (Esfandiari 1997:43) Regardless of the marriage contract, an Iranian man must secure the court's permission to divorce his wife. In 1994, the Iranian parliament enacted a law giving a divorced woman the right to monetary compensation for the years she worked in her husband's home as a mother and housewife.� In 1997, a law was passed requiring courts to calculate the mahr payments husbands must pay divorced wives according to an index updated for inflation (Poya 1999:� 101-102).
Polygyny
�� Polygyny has declined throughout the Middle East (Soffan, 1980:42). Several states officially have restricted the practice.�� In Syria, as early as1953, the Law of Personal Status attempted to limit polygyny.� Article 17 of the Law gave the qadi power to refuse permission to marry a second wife if a man cannot prove he is financially capable of supporting both women (Pearl and Menski 1998).� The 1959 Iraqi law of Personal Status restricted polygyny even further.� Not only did a man have to convince a judge that he could financially support two wives, he also had to show �lawful interest� in the second marriage and convincing evidence that both women will be treated equally (Pearl and Menski 1998:243).� Second marriages without approval were declared invalid, although in 1963, this invalidity was amended.�
�� In Iran, second marriages still require the consent of the first wife, who has the right to initiate divorce if she does not consent (Hoodfar 1995).� However, this right is not often used, as women are often better off economically in a polygynous marriage than as a divorced woman.
Children��
�� Children of both sexes are valued in the Middle East, but a woman traditionally gains more status when she gives birth to a male child.� The mother-son tie is often the closest relationship a woman has with a male; while daughters leave the home, boys stay and take care of their parents in old age. The ties between brothers and sisters are also close.� Ideally a brother defends his sister, while a sister serves as a kind of second mother to her brother (Bowen and Early 1993). Although Middle Eastern countries have established compulsory education for girls and boys, girls still lag behind men in literacy (Lapidus 1988).�
�� As in any social system, children represent a variety of social and religious values. In one context, children are seen as a solidifying factor in a marriage; childless couples are not viewed as stable as those with children (Shami and Taminian 1997). Perhaps partly for this reason, the Middle East has maintained one of the highest regional birthrates in the world.
� Bearing children is sometimes viewed as nationalist duty.� For example, in the Iraq-Iran war, the Iraqi government instructed women that there national duty required them to bear five or more children to narrow the gap between the vastly disparate populations (at the time, Iraq�s population was approximately 15 million and Iran�s was 47 million).� In 1986, all forms of birth control disappeared from Iraqi� pharmacies (Moghadam 1993). The population of Oman is growing the fastest, at an estimated 3.8% per year (Eickleman 1997).� Based on regional growth rates, demographers estimate that the population of the Arabian peninsula to double from the early 1990s to the early years of the new century (Eickleman 1997).�
�� After Iran's birthrates jumped in the post-revolutionary period, the Islamic Republic launched a full-fledged birth control program promoting the benefits of small families. Iran also has adopted the International Labor Organization's Convention No. 3, which applied to all employed women and provides for 12 weeks of maternity leave including a required leave after childbirth (Moghamdam 1993).�
�� Family planning is also a current discussion in the Middle East.� A recent study in Jordan found that 80% of men, 86% of women, 82% of male religious leaders and 98% of female religious leaders believe that family planning and contraceptive use is consistent with Islamic tenets on family and sexuality (Underwood 2000).� Less than 1% of those interviewed considered family planning to be prohibited by Islamic law.
IX.� Custody of Children
�� In case of divorce, Saudi boys remain with their mothers until the age of seven or nine and girls until the time of marriage (unless she remarries, in which case she forfeits custody of her children.) Usually a divorced Saudi woman will bring her children with her to her father's house (Altorki 1986: 81).��
�� If a divorced Syrian woman has a home and does not remarry, she will be allowed to retain of her boys until the age of nine and her girls until the age of 11.� But since husbands usually own the marriage home, they often persuade courts to give them custody on the grounds that the woman has no proper home for them (Sha'aban 1996).��
�� Iran's Islamic republic at first gave guardianship of girls over the age of seven and boys over the age of two to fathers, and in the case of their death, to their male kin.� During the Iran-Iraq war, however, war widows were granted the right to raise their children and to keep their husband's salary, pension or other living expenses without the interference of his male kin. Subsequently other widows gained the same rights (Poya 1999: 101).
Inheritance / Land Rights
�� In pre-Islamic Arabia, inheritance was the exclusive right of male relatives, primarily sons, fathers and brothers.� Women were excluded from inheritance rights based on their lack of participation in tribal disputes.� One of the major Islamic reforms to inheritance in the area was the Quranic requirement of inheritance for both widows and daughters (Esposito 1998). Although women�s inheritance under Islamic law is generally half that of men, it represents radical change from previous systems which completely excluded women (Fluehr-Lobban 1993).� However, despite these protective sanctions, Joseph argues that women often forego their inheritance in preference of their brothers; this practice is seen as a form of insurance or security for the protection provided by the brother for the woman and her children (Joseph 1997).
�� In areas under the Ottoman Empire, two forms of inheritance were common. Property held in full owernship--buildings, orchards, vineyards and moveable property -- was inherited under Islamic codes of succession. �This type of property is called mulk.� Agricultural land, known as miri, was often land for which individuals could obtain user rights, but ownership rested with the state.� This type of land was usually inherited under the secular law of succession under the Ottoman Empire (Moors 1995).
�� In Kuwait, inheritance oftens follows tradition over Islamic decrees, particularly for women married young.� Often fathers leave their property, both mobile and immobile assets, exclusively to sons (al-Mughni 1993). �Among Palestinians, women in situations with no or few contending heirs fare much better than other women.� Daughters without brothers and widows without sons often stand the best chance of inheriting their due shares (Moors 1995).
�� Saudi women inherit exactly according Quranic rules, but only a few women actually manage their own property (Altorki 1986).�

References:
al-Mughni, Haya.� 1993.� Women in Kuwait:� The Politics of Gender. �London:� Saqi Books.
Ahmed, Leila.� 1992.� Women and Gender in Islam.� New Haven:� Yale University Press.
Altorki, Soraya.� 1986.� Women in Saudi Arabia:� Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite. New York:� Columbia University Press.
Altorki, Soraya and Donald P. Cole.� 1997.� �Change in Saudi Arabia:� A View from �Paris of Najd�.�� Arab Society:� Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim. �Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
Bowen, Donna Lee and Evelyn A. Early. 1993.� Everyday Life in the Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Carapico, Sheila.� 1996. "Women and Public Participation in Yemen."� Arab Women:� Between Defiance and Restraint. editor Suha Sabbagh. New York: Olive Branch Press.
Eickleman, Christine.� 1997.� �Fertility and Social Change in Oman: �Women�s Perspectives.�� Arab Society:� Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
Esfandiari, Haleh. 1997.� Reconstructed Lives:� Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution.� Washington, D.C.:� The Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Esposito, John.� 1998.� Islam and Politics.� Fourth Edition.� Syracuse (NY):� Syracuse University Press.
Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn.� 1993.� �Toward a Theory of Arab-Muslim Women as Activists and Scholars in Secular and Religious Movements.�� Arab Studies Quarterly.� 15:87-107.
Goldberg, Ellis, Resat Kasaba and Joel Migdal (editors).� 1993.� Rules and Rights in the Middle East:� Democracy, Law and Society.� Seattle: �University of Washinton Press.
Harik, Iliya.� 1997.� �Pluralism in the Arab World.�� Arab Society: �Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.� Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
Hoodfar, Homa.� 1995.� �Population Policy and Gender Equity in Post-Revolutionary Iran.�� Family, Gender and Population in the Middle East.� editor Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer.� Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
�Iran Assembly Pushes on Women�s Rights.�� 2000.� The New York Times. �August 10.� A8.
Joseph, Suad.� 1997.� �Brother-Sister Relationships:� Connectivity, Love, and Power in the Reproduction of Patriarchy in Lebanon.�� Arab Society: Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.� Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
-- "Gender and Family in the Arab World." Arab Women:� Between Defiance and Restraint. editor Suha Sabbagh. New York: Olive Branch Press.
Lapidus, Ira.� 1988. A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Longva, Anh Nga.� 1997.� �Kuwaiti Women at a Crossroads:� Privileged Development and the Constraints of Ethnic Stratification.�� Arab Society:� Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.� Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. 1999. Islam and Gender:� The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran.� Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moghadam, Valentine M.� 1993.� Modernizing Women:� Gender and Social Change in the Middle East.� Boulder (CO):� Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Moors, Annelies.� 1995.� Women, Property and Islam:� Palestinian Experiences, 1920-1990.� Cambridge:� Cambridge University Press.
Pearl, David and Werner Menski.� 1998.� Muslim Family Law.� Third Edition. London:� Sweet and Maxwell, Ltd.
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Prusher, Ilene.� 2000.� �Kuwaiti Women Seek Right to Vote.�� Christian Science Monitor.� 92:180.
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Shami, Seteney and Lucine Taminian.� 1997. ��Children of Amman:� Childhood and Child Care in Squatter Areas of Amman, Jordan.� Arab Society: �Class, Gender, Power, and Development.� editors Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.� Cairo:� The American University in Cairo Press.
Underwood, Carol.� 2000.� �Islamic Precepts and Family Planning:� The Perceptions of Jordanian Religious Leaders and Their Constituents.� �International Family Planning Perspectives.� 26:110.
�United Arab Emirates:� raped woman sentenced to death by stoning.�� 2000. Off Our Backs.� 30:4.
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http://aannaim.law.emory.edu/ifl/region/mideast.html

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Russia's War On Ukraine
Victor Rud — March 5, 2014

Which of the following are statements by Vladimir Putin, his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or other Kremlin spokesmen, and which are by Western media, academics, politicians and commentators: “Ukraine and Russia share deep historical and cultural roots,” “Russia traces its 1,000 year history to its beginnings in Kiev,” “Ukraine is really ‘Little Russia,’” “the Russian Orthodox Church originated in Kiev,” “thousand years of Russian Christianity,” “Ukraine is a part of Russia,” “Russia and Ukraine are not separate countries,” “Russia is a thousand-year-old state,” “Kievan Russia was the beginning of the modern Russia,” and “Ukrainians and Russians are brotherly nations?”
There is no distinction between who said any of the above. Each statement has been repeated, for a century in the United States and longer by the Kremlin. Such remarkable unanimity reflects either recognition of the same historical record, or the recognition of the same historical mythology. If the latter, how and why in American academe and politics is that mythology declared with such certitude by those who should know better, thereby facilitating a historical hologram?
The question, and answer, are central to conceptualizing not just an informed American “response,” but a policy, addressing Russia’s drive to completely suborn—and possibly annex—Ukraine, thereby directly and materially affecting American security and foreign policy interests.
What is Ukraine?
On the periphery of most peoples’ awareness, Ukraine is the largest country in Europe by territory, located in the geographic center of the European subcontinent. It is the land, wrote English historian Norman Davies, through which most peoples passed on their way to settle the rest of Europe, and to become the nations and countries that we know today.
In the Middle Ages, the Kyivan Rus’ (not Kyivan “Russia”—more below) Imperial Dynasty was the largest political entity in Europe. Following Kyiv’s adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, the precursor of modern Ukraine became a powerhouse of intellectual discourse, religion, and cultural life. In its size, grandeur and advancement of education (mandatory for women), in its equal rights for women, in the arts and the sciences, Kyiv eclipsed other European cities such as Paris and London. European kings and the English monarchy married into the Kyivan Dynasty. Among them, King Henry I of France married Princess Anna of Kyiv; she signed her name to the marriage document, he used an “X.” The Gospel she brought from Kyiv was used in the coronation of French kings for centuries. The French historian Levesques wrote about the marriage, quoting Bishop Gautier Saveraux who was King Henry’s envoy to Kyiv: “This land is more unified, happier, stronger and more civilized than France itself.” The trident was the official state insignia of Kyivan Rus,’ stamped on its coins, and continued as the national symbol of modern Ukraine through the intervening 1,000 years (the significance of this appears below).
“Russia” at that time did not exist, and had as its antecedents Finno-Ugric tribes that separately evolved into scattered principalities in the north that rejected Kyiv’s dominion. Most telling was their sacking and rejection of Kyiv in 1169 that was not matched until the city’s destruction by the Mongol Horde a hundred years later. The Kyivan Rus’ Empire collapsed with the latter onslaught, but in the process shielded the rest of Europe from the same fate.
The Kyivan center of power refused Mongol domination and relocated to the western part of the realm. However, the territories on its northern periphery, now Russia, reconciled themselves to Mongol rule and collaborated intimately with it. For almost half a millennium thereafter, the two existed in separate religious, cultural and political worlds. The imperial core and its northerly possessions went their separate, entirely opposite ways.
For 400 years, “Moscovy” (and then a newly constituted “Russia”) expanded its own burgeoning empire at the rate of 50 square miles per day. Ukraine was eventually conquered and occupied. Its religious and cultural treasures were pillaged and ensconced in Russian museums, to be marketed to a breathless, star-dazed world as Russia’s own. The parallel would have been England, France, Germany, Spain, or Israel (all territories of the Roman Empire) later building their own empire, conquering Italy, carting off to their museums Italian (and, previously, ancient Roman) treasures and cultural works, and then simply producing them as examples of English, French, Germany, Spanish or Israeli (take your pick) cultural achievements. In exchange, Italians would be anointed as “Little Englishmen,” “Little Frenchmen,” and the like. Under such a contorted construct, this would then serve as the kind of “common history” between England, France, Germany, Spain, Israel, etc., on the one hand, and today’s Italy on the other, that today is affirmed with such sophomoric abandon vis a vis Ukraine and Russia.
In 1608, a Ukrainian, Ivan Bohdan, helped John Smith found Jamestown, the first English settlement in the New World. A few years earlier, Smith was fighting the Turks, was captured but then escaped and was given refuge in Ukraine. Later in the 17th century, Ukrainian Kozaks were pivotal to breaking the Turkish siege of Vienna, thereby halting the Ottoman Empire’s advance into Europe. In 1710, Ukraine offered the world a constitution that established a democratically ordered system of checks and balances among three branches of government, drawing on principles of natural law. This was 77 years before the adoption of the U.S. Constitution incorporating the same principles.
Ukraine’s Struggle
After WWI, Ukraine declared independence from the Russian Empire, and warned the West about Moscow’s threat to all it held dear, to no avail. No humanitarian aid, no surplus blankets or medicines from what for the rest of Europe and the U.S. was a recently completed war. Ukraine fought, alone, against four invaders, as Europe and the U.S. looked on. Kyiv changed hands 14 times in two years.
There was no room for Ukraine in Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.’’ (Point Six, dealing with “Russia,” was prepared in consultation with Russia’s U.S. Ambassador Bakhmetieff.) Instead Ukraine was quartered, with the lion’s share reserved for Moscow. Reconquered by now a Communist Russia, Ukraine was pivotal to the formation of the reconstituted Russian Empire, now the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Ukraine served as the economic and industrial locomotive, the agricultural cornucopia, and the geopolitical linchpin of that “union.”
In the process, Ukraine was savaged by mass murder, war crimes, recreational torture, atrocities, arson, rapacious plunder, kidnapping, massacres, homicidal russification, experimental assassinations, ethnocide, pillage, rape, ethnic cleansing, mass executions, death ships, murder quotas, stupefying terror, thought crime, and man-made starvation killing countless millions of innocents in 1932-33, in what Ukrainians call the “Holodomor.” On May 31, 1933, Gradenigo, the Italian consul in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv during the height of the man-made famine, reported to the Royal Italian Embassy in Moscow his discussion with a senior OGPU secret police officer who advised that 10-15 million starvation murders were required to tame, in the OGPU’s words, Ukraine’s “ethnographic material.” Not a nation. Not people. Not human beings. Just “ethnographic material.” Hitler’s term was untermenchen.
Reporting further, Gradenigo said the government strived to ensure that “Russians would constitute the majority of the population” in certain regions of Ukraine, and thus assure that potential political difficulties would be removed. The Italian consul concluded: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well underway…The current disaster will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.” It is the offal of that tectonic ethnic cleansing that underlies the “split” in Ukraine, mouthed with such obliviousness as to its cause.
The murder rate was 25,000 civilians a day, or some 20% of Ukraine’s population. By comparison, the U.S. suffered 297 military deaths per day during WWII, accounting for 0.3% of its population.
Moscow was ecstatic: “We have annihilated the nationalist counter-revolution during the past year we have exposed and destroyed nationalist deviationalism…1933 was the year of the overthrow of the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution.” More: “Acknowledging the great amount of work put…into the fight against Ukrainian nationalist and other counter-revolutionary elements, work which has not ceased and which shall not cease, we must say that of course we gave the nationalists a beating, a good one, as the saying goes, we hit the spot.” Is this the “common history” between the Kremlin and Kyiv that today the media and others put forth as underpinning Russia’s claims to Ukraine?
Shockingly, as the Holodomor was interring its millions, on November 16, 1933, the United States extended diplomatic recognition to Stalin, granting him his most coveted prize, and in the eyes of the world legitimizing and abetting his tyranny. Speaking in New York on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Holodomor, Rafael Lemkin, author and father of the UN Genocide Convention, condemned Russia’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine as reaching beyond the “mere” extermination of beings, and targeting the erasure of the nation’s very ethos, its culture and core sense of identity and very existence. Nine years after the Holodomor, Nazi Germany turned on its joint-venture partner, Stalin, as 3,200,000 German, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian, Finnish, Spanish and Slovakian troops invaded the USSR, with Ukraine as simultaneously the prize and the crucible. (By comparison, on D Day, the Allies’ invasion of Normandy involved 132,000 troops.)
Russia itself was barely touched by the invasion. However, the entirety of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic nations were overrun. Ukrainians defied Hitler to his face, declaring independence upon its invasion by the Nazis. The consequences were predictable. Ukraine was one of the few countries in all of Nazi occupied Europe to be ruled directly from Berlin, as it had no puppet government as did Quisling’s Norway or Petain’s Vichy France, nor did it have a fascist party like those not only in Norway and Hungary, but also the tiny countries of Holland, Belgium and Denmark.
The Saturday Evening Post’s Edgar Snow wrote: “The whole titanic struggle, which some are so apt to dismiss as ‘the Russian glory,’ was first of all a Ukrainian war. No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry and its humanity.” Ukraine lost more than nine million of its population, the greatest human loss of any country in WWII, wrote English historian Norman Davies; more losses than the combined military losses of the United States, the British Commonwealth, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy. This was even more horrific than the comparison suggests, since more than half of Ukraine’s losses were civilians. An additional more than two million Ukrainians were deported as slave laborers to Germany.
Toward the end and after WWII, U.S. and British troops, in an unholy alliance with Stalin’s NKVD, hunted down Holodomor survivors in Europe, forcibly returning them to Stalin. “Without regard to their personal wishes and by force if necessary” was the repatriation order of January 4, 1946, of the Headquarters, U.S. Armed Forces, European Theatre. Having survived two tyrants, the Ukrainians found themselves the prey of a country they had worshipped. Preceded by countless suicides among the refugees, untold numbers that were captured and returned, then murdered outright or in the GULAG by Moscow. In the meantime, in reoccupied Ukraine, after battling first the Nazis the Ukrainian underground fought reinvading Soviet interior security forces numbering more troops than the U.S. fielded in Vietnam, many armed and equipped by the U.S.
The hopeless struggle continued into the 1950s, with the sabotage by the Ukrainian resistance of Soviet troop transports carrying Soviet troops to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956. In 1986, without a say about the placement of nuclear energy facilities or any control over their design, construction or operation, Ukraine suffered the Chernobyl explosion—one hundred times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—that has deformed the genetic makeup of its victims. Forever.
In the face of U.S. opposition, in 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from Moscow, with over 90% public ratification. Predictably, but weeks later the USSR disintegrated, and the U.S. ironically declared victory. The Cold War was “over,” we were told. Upon gaining its independence, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world but, induced by assurances from Great Britain, the U.S.—and Russia!—concerning its sovereignty and territorial integrity, surrendered its arsenal. This was a phenomenon never to be repeated. Nor are those assurances today honored.
“…and Why Didn’t I Know That?”
The origin of perceptions about Ukraine and Russia that are repeated like a litany in equal measure by Russia and the U.S., and the question and answer above, are pivotal to assessing the situation in Ukraine today and Russia’s relentless dezinformatsia. Whether articulated or not, these concepts have become so embedded in Western thinking that they lead to the notion that Ukraine is not a nation separate from Russia, that somehow the two are the same (that they share a “common history”), that Ukraine simply splintered off from the larger Russia and is off on a frolic of its own, that it is not a “regular” country such as Poland, France or Italy, and therefore that it is not a full-fledged subject of international law, discourse or relations.
Has anyone thought to ask how it is that Kyiv, hyped with such vigor as the “beginning of the Russian state,” is and always was the capital of Ukraine, whereas the capital of Russia was, at different times, either St. Petersburg or Moscow? If Kyivan Rus’ was the beginning of “Russia,” where and when was the beginning of Ukraine? The trident, for example, was never appropriated by Russia as its own (a rare oversight), but has continued uninterrupted for a thousand years as the national symbol of Ukraine. Anyone who mentioned or displayed it during the Soviet era was sentenced to death.
Worse than being embedded in any actual thought process, the distortions embedded in the suggestions of a “common history” between the two nations—or worse, the larcenous history of Kyivan Rus’ that Moscow shrills over—have also embedded themselves into the general consciousness. That makes them infinitely more pernicious. The unavoidable consequence is that the distortions necessarily subsume any Moscow assertion that it has “some” claim, any claim, to Ukraine, that it has “legitimate interests” in it. Absorb that imagery, and what otherwise would be judged as the bald Russian aggression that it is, flows more palatably—indeed, inexorably—in its wake.
In 1935, English journalist Lancelot Lawton clarified the matter in the House of Commons, saying:
“The deliberate policy of Russia was to avoid and discourage mention of Ukraine abroad. From the Middle Ages down to the eighteenth century Ukraine figured largely in European literature. But after the first half of the nineteenth century the West was made to forget that there was or had been such a nation…That so little has been heard of it is not surprising, for suppression of the Ukrainian nationality has been persistently accompanied by obliteration of the very word Ukraine, and concealment of the very existence of Ukrainians.”
Why this would be so can be gathered from the accounts of Europeans and other travelers and scholars at the time and earlier, who drew a sharp distinction between Ukraine and the lands to the north, which only in the 18th century coalesced as “Russia,” but also then known as “Moscovy”
The famous Arab scholar, Paul of Aleppo, visited the two countries and wrote:
“Although a stranger I felt myself at home in Ukraine. But in Muscovy my heart felt heavy, for wherever I went no one was even a little free…Those who want to shorten their life by fifteen years must go to the land of Muscovy. In Ukraine I found joy in life, freedom and civilization. The Ukrainians are learned. They like science and study the law. They know rhetoric, logic and philosophy. Practically all the inhabitants can read and write. Their wives and daughters know the liturgy and religious singing. And their children, even orphans, learn to read and write.”
Charles Louis Lesure, another Frenchman, wrote: “The Ukrainians are more magnanimous, more sincere, more polite and hospitable, more industrious than the Russians. They offer a living proof of the superiority which civil liberty gives to men over people born in slavery.”
Tasked with creating a respectable pedigree for the Tsarist Empire, Russian historians such as Nikolai Karamzin Sergei Solov’ev leapfrogged more than half a millennium to the Kyivan Rus’ Empire to rewrite Russia’s own origins as a nation and a state. For the Russian Tsars, it offered a convenient link between the prior “Two Romes” and their hallucinations of Russia now as the “Third Rome.” Never mind that this required a 180-degree reversal of historical chronology and logical sequencing that has no parallel anywhere in world history. This coincided with the pronouncement in 1870 by Russian Interior Minister Dmitriy Tolstoy (the writer’s brother): “The ultimate goal in the education of the non-Russians must be their Russification and assimilation within the Russian nation.” Shortly afterward, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: “All people should become Russian and Russian above all else, because the Russian national idea is universal.” The idea of “Ukraine” as “Little Russia” was birthed. And “brotherhood” was achieved—but only where the first-born became the younger sibling.
Russian Disinformation
Moscow invented a time machine that not only went back in time, but actually reversed the chronology and course of history. First became last, last became first. It’s the most massive, longest-lasting example of Russian dezinformatsia. Thus, we are assured by Dmitry Shlapentokh, writing for the WorldSecurityNetwork.com, that Ukrainians simply seek “to minimize Ukraine’s debt to Russian history and culture.”
Nowhere in world history has such revisionism been attempted, much less become “fact” without question or inquiry. Virtual reality was exported to the United States where it became the bedrock of Russian studies, established largely by émigré Russian scholars in such pivotal universities as Harvard, Yale and Columbia. From there, the mythology of the apostles of Russian imperialism enveloped the entirety of American thinking and commentary about “Russia.”
In fact, a miniscule part of present day Russia was embraced by the Kyivan Rus’ Empire, as were territories elsewhere, such as present day Belarus and the Baltic. For today’s Russia, however, a thousand years later, to claim dominion and seniority over the imperial center, Kyiv, and the nation that it remains the capital of, is bizarre. Applying the same logic, because Ukraine drew heavily on present day Greece for its religion and even its alphabet, then today’s Greeks are simply unaware Ukrainians, and Athens is “really” a Ukrainian city. And today’s Romanians, as part of the ancient Roman Empire, have a claim to present day Rome, and today’s Italians are really “Little Romanians.” As discussed earlier, the same could be said of any of the countries—Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Israel—that were part of the Roman Empire.
Extending the example, the United States should, with a straight face, claim its origins to be London, and that Englishmen are Americans’ younger brothers. Mexico, Peru and Cuba can lay claim to Madrid, and Indonesia and Aruba can justify laying claim to Holland, adopting tulips and windmills as their own. Yet even that is less a perversion of logic and history than a Ukraine=Russia equation, since, unlike English or Spanish migration to the New World, there was no migration from the fertile lands of Ukraine to Russia in the north.
As if reversing the flow of history was not enough, Russia played the word game. If credibility is to be given to a seeming “Rus’”/“Russia” parallel and the seduction of nomenclature, what conclusions are then to be drawn from “Brittany” the northwest province of France, and Great Britain? Are Englishmen now really French? Or is it the opposite? The Franks were the largest Germanic tribe, but today’s German term for France is “Frankreich.” Does that entitle Germany to invade France and liberate Paris? Or maybe the opposite would be justified, with the French claiming their origins lie in Berlin?
The French province of Normandy was settled by the Normans (“Vikings”), and two generations later William the Conquerer invaded England, and English history officially began. Are Englishmen therefore French, or the other way around? Or perhaps that transforms today’s Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes into Englishmen? Or is that also the other way around? For that matter, the Kyivan Rus’ Dynasty was significantly forged by Vikings traveling south from Scandinavia. Are Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, consequently and necessarily, really “younger brothers” to the Ukrainians? Furthermore, if “Rus’” really means “Russia,” then are Anglo-Saxons “really” half African and half German—since the term “Anglo” is derived from Angola in Africa, and “Saxon” from the German state of Saxony? That is the irreducible conclusion if you accept the historical revisionism of Putin or Sergei Lavrov, or of generations of other Russian imperialists.
Each of these examples leads to an utterly and irredeemably inane result. Yet the predicate model institutionalized by the Kremlin has been accepted with myopic, monosynaptic conviction by all. The theft of another country’s history and its essential disappearance has ensconced a larcenous litany. It has been fully absorbed, nurtured and then repeated with breathless conviction by all Western institutions, from elementary schools and Ivy universities, to CNN and FOX News, and to Congress and the White House.
Fortunately, at least one American scholar has recently stopped spinning the phantasmagoria. Harvard’s Edward Keenan wrote that for centuries in what was known as Moscovy “in sacred and secular buildings, in the naming and dedication of the churches, in the inscriptions and the chronicle account of the construction—there [was] not so much as a hint or allusion to the Kievan legacy…a total absence of any reference to Kievan symbolism or nomenclatures…the absence of reminiscences of Kiev. These people were not even thinking of Kiev. Another striking and unnoticed manifestation of this discontinuity or historical amnesia is to be found in the naming practices of Moscovite courtiers…what is astonishing against the background of received wisdom about this culture, is the absence of specifically Kievan names.” Tatar names adopted by Russians were more popular than those of the Kyivan era.
Yet former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, and acknowledged “Russian expert,” Condoleezza Rice persists, writing in her memoirs: “[F]or Russia, losing Ukraine was like the United States losing Texas or California. But that doesn’t begin to capture it; it would be like losing the original thirteen colonies.” (With Rice as his expert, what response could President Bush possibly have given to Putin who solemnly and assuredly intoned that Ukrainians are not even a nation?) Rice’s analogy powers a life support system for the perverted catechism of the Russian Tsar’s alchemists qua historians Karamzin et al: a respectable genealogy for Russian despotism by simple diktat as the legatee of the ancient Kyivan Rus’ Imperial Dynasty, in the process usurping Ukraine’s own etiology. And simultaneously vaporizing it as a nation.
“It constitutes one of the major political deceptions of history,” declared Lancelot Lawton. Moscow was able “to create the illusion that a nation still vigorously living had never been born or alternatively that if born it had centuries ago perished.” In his Travels to Russia, French writer Marquis de Custine quotes a Russian civil servant proclaiming proudly: “Russia lies, denies the facts, makes war on the evidence, and wins!”

Best comment:
• Olesya
I’m Ukrainian and I absolutely do not condone what is going on in my country right now and Russia’s role in it. The facts in this article seem right for the most part; but not the conclusions.
One important distinction I’d like to point out is that Kievan Rus’ was not Ukraine. The learned and educated citizens of the ancient civilization were not Ukrainians or Russians.
Kievan Rus’ was the origin for both Russian and Ukraine as nations, both of our cultures and languages, etc developed out of that heritage; and it’s not blasphemy for Russia to claim their origins from Kievan Rus’
Kiev happens to be the capital of Ukraine today, just like Rome happens to be capital of Italy. It doesn’t mean that Kievan Rus’ was Ukraine, or that Italy was the Roman Empire.
Russia lies, yes. So does America. So do all the governments that vie for political influence and power. But don’t manipulate facts to fit your point of view. Russia and Ukraine are and always have been close culturally and closely tied politically and economically. They are also very close ethnically. I have a lot of family members and friends who have family members of both nationalities. The hostility between us is often exaggerated.
On another note, don’t equate the Soviet government to Russian government. They are not one and the same.

COMMENT:
Could it be that both spin their history stories a bit?
Well I said both but the same pretty much applies to most all nations and power seekers.
Listen to the reports on the history of Northern Ireland from the English of the Anglian Church,the Irish Catholics and the Ulster Scot Protestants and usually each will tell a different story.
Move on to Tennessee and listen to the different stories of my Ulster Scot ancestors, my English ancestors and my Cherokee ancestors about the history of East Tennessee.
Comment:
That’s the point I was trying to make. Russians are not Ukrainians, and Ukrainians aren’t Russians.
We came from the same roots. The fact the Kievan civilization originated on current Ukrainian territory does NOT make it Ukraine. Both Russian and Ukrainian people descended from the same roots. It is the struggles and occupations and the rest of history, that made us a nation we are today. Years of intermixing with tatars and poles and russians, etc. always fighting to preserve our culture and our heritage. That is what makes us Ukrainian. And not that we lived in the same geographic location as the previously great Kievan Rus’.
http://www.aim.org/special-report/russias-war-on-ukraine/

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UNITED NATIONS SHAME- UN formed on the ashes of Jewish Holocaust- shame, shame

UNITED NATIONS - Obsessive focus on Israel caused it to miss out on genocides in the Arab world and elsewhere. Because of this obsessive focus on Israel, millions have died since the end of WWII and hundreds of millions live in fear from their dictators. The UN's International Court of Justice chose to condemn not the persistent criminality of Islamic-Palestinian terrorism, but rather the fence erected by Israel to safeguard its citizens from suicide-bombers. The UN tyrants' club is subsidized by Western tax money to defend the honor and pride of worst dictatorships in the world:

A pistol holster protrudes from under Palestinian terrorist chief Arafat's jacket
during his appearance before the UN General Assembly on Nov 13, 1974

Armed Palestinian terrorists hide in UN ambulances (Reuters, May 11, 2004)

For the past four decades the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine of the nom de guerre of Arab and Islamic states — Palestinians. Their aim is to demonize, debilitate, and destroy the state of Israel — the thriving democratic beachhead in their midst — for a start. The original U.N. mission, to protect the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, has been hijacked and corrupted by nations that neither share the universal values of the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights nor have democratic intentions. ... There is only one entire U.N. Division devoted to a single group of people — the U.N. Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977). There is only one U.N. website dedicated to the claims of a single people — the enormous UNISPAL, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. There is only one refugee agency dedicated to a single refugee situation — UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (in operation since 1950).
Terrorism's Silent Partner at the UN - the Organization of the Islamic Conference (56 of the UN's 191 members) defends terrorism as a right

Arab Liberals Petition the U.N. to Establish an International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Terrorists

"Israel is the only UN member not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies. So while membership of the UN Human Rights Commission now includes Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Syria -- four of the seven states designated as state sponsors of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department -- Israel cannot even be a candidate." (Anne Bayefsky, The Globe and Mail, Apr 26, 2002)
Israel follows its own law, not the decision of the United Nations International Court of Justice (Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, JP, Jul 11, 2004

One interpretations of human rights is found in the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 'International Bill of Human Rights'; the other is the 1990 'Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam', approved by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which conforms to Islam and the Shariah. This ambiguity derails the UN's so-called "international legality" since 56 Muslim member states abide to Muslim, and therefore to religious-political principles-- in contradiction to Western secular laws.
Unequal UN mandates for refugees in the world: Palestinians vs. all others:
Of the 20th century 135 million refugees about 0.5% were Palestinians
UNHCR mandated for 20 million refugees worldwide - except "UNRWA's"
UNRWA aids only Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria & Lebanon
UNRWA upgraded Palestinians internally displaced in 1948 to "refugees"
UNRWA upgraded the descendants of these IDPs to "refugees"
UNRWA upgraded imaginary "refugees" to "registered refugees"
UNRWA's Palestinian "registered refugees" multiplied due to natural increase and deception from 914,000 in 1950 to over four million in 2002.
In another 52 years (that is 104 years after their ancestors left Israel), about 17.5 million descendants of Palestinians will qualify for UNRWA "registered refugee" status (given the same UNRWA definitions, the same natural increase and the same deception).
Unequal UN staff members per refugee: Palestinians vs. all others:
UNHCR (non-Palestinians): 1:3,582,
UNRWA (Palestinians): 1:165 (+2,000%)
"Constitution" of Arafat's Fatah (Fatah official website, Sep 20, 2003):
Article (6): UN projects, accords and resolutions, or those of any individual country which undermine the Palestinian people's right in their homeland are illegal and rejected.
Article (22): Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine, as well as any project intended to liquidate the Palestinian case or impose any international mandate on its people.
Ten Tips on How to Be an Arafat Apologist (Jamie Glazov, FP Magazin, Apr 11, 2002)
Hamas Charter, article 13 (Palestine Center website, Aug 9. 2003): “[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith … There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility. The Palestinian people are too noble to have their future, their right and their destiny submitted to a vain game.”
Map printed by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities with a special grant provided by the United Nations through their "UNDP" office in Jerusalem, as stated. Israel does not exist on this map. A UN Agency has obliterated a UN member.

Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) official website, Sep 6, 2003: "... is an inter-governmental organization grouping fifty-six States. These States decided to pool their resources together, combine their efforts ... in absolute priority, with liberating Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa from Zionist occupation."
The World According To Kofi Annan (Tashbih Sayyed, editor-in-chief, USA based Pakistan Today): "Somebody must inform the Secretary General that "poverty, hunger and deadly diseases" are the direct result of unrepresentative and despotic rules of the likes of Saddam Hussein, King Fahd, Sudan's theocratic regime, Iran's Mullahcracy and Islamist radicalism."
A decaying body | The U.N.? Who Cares? (Victor Davis Hanson, Wall Street Journal, Sep 23, 2004): "These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape. Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel continue to be blown apart on buses. No one--whether in Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York--is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual. ... In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent."
The Holocaust and the UN: Justifying "Zionocide' (Anne Bayefsky, Eye on the UN, Feb 3, 2006): "According to the UN, Israel is the world's top human rights violator. Only last December the General Assembly adopted 19 resolutions critical of Israel's human rights record, and 12 resolutions critical of human rights in the other 190 UN states combined. A draft General Assembly resolution focusing on the Sudan, where almost 200,000 have been killed in the past three years and two million more displaced, was defeated. Thirty percent of all resolutions of the UN Human Rights Commission critical of specific states over four decades have been directed at Israel alone. But there has never been a single resolution condemning human rights violations in places like China, Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe. Such demonization is not an abstraction. Combined with the inability of the UN to define terrorism, it is lethal."
Israel's second-class status at the UN (Anne Bayefsky, National Post, Feb 18, 2003):
"In fact, the only remaining elected Israeli on a UN body anywhere is Mayer Gabay, vice-chair of the UN Administrative Tribunal -- whose term ends in December of this year and who is not permitted by general rules concerning time limits to stand for re-election.
By contrast, Egypt has members on all six of the UN human rights treaty bodies. In fact, the Egyptian candidate for the Committee on the Rights of the Child was elected with the highest number of votes by the 191 parties to the Child Convention. This is despite the fact that the leading child rights international NGO (based in Geneva) put out an advisory to countries before the vote. It said: "NGOs feel that she is not very knowledgeable nor reliable on the issues ... due to her strong affiliation and history with the Egyptian government." Translation: When countries of interest to Egypt are considered by the committee, an Egyptian government official sits close to the "independent" Egyptian member just to make sure they get it right.
Israel is also the only UN member state denied membership in any of the UN's five regional groups, which elect UN bodies in Geneva. Elections in the UN are normally based on regional representation or slates prearranged by regional groups. Israel qualifies for membership in the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), composed of geographically diverse states including Canada and Australia. But WEOG, driven by states such as France, refuses to admit Israel to its Geneva operations. This has the consequence that Israel cannot be elected to a whole range of UN bodies. For instance, Israel cannot stand for election to WIPO -- the World Intellectual Property Organization. Similarly, Israel is prevented from running for the International Labour Organization's Governing Body.
Lacking UN regional group membership in Geneva means that Israel is the only UN member forced to sit out consultations on draft resolutions and UN Geneva-based business of all kinds. Israel is refused any possibility of participating in the consultations of regional bodies in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development the World Health Organization. The meetings behind closed doors of regional groups at the Commission on Human Rights negotiate the language of resolutions on all subjects without any Israeli participation. In recent years, Sweden and Co. in the European Union have enjoyed negotiating an agreed-upon level of hostility on the myriad anti-Israel resolutions with Arab states on the commission, before Israeli diplomats got a copy of a first draft."

Undiplomatic Imbalance | The antisemitism at the U.N. is a problem for more than just Israel (Anne Bayefsky, NRO, Dec 13, 2004): "To appreciate fully the extent to which the U.N. has been taken over, observe November 29th, the annual U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which is the only U.N. day dedicated to a specific people. The occasion was held in the U.N.'s elaborate Trusteeship Council before hundreds of delegates. At the front of the room sat the secretary general, the president of the General Assembly, and the chair of that main U.N. body, the Committee on Palestinian Rights. In a repeat of previous years' performances, beside them stood a U.N. flag, a Palestinian flag, and in between, a map in Arabic pre-dating the existence of the U.N. member state of Israel. All participants were asked to rise for "a minute of silence...for all those who have given their lives for the cause of the Palestinian people..." — which would include suicide bombers."
Israel follows its own law, not bigoted Hague decision (Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, JP, Jul 11, 2004): "The Israeli government has both a legal and a moral obligation to comply with the Israeli Supreme Court's decision regarding the security fence. fter all, the Supreme Court is a creation of the Knesset and is therefore representative of all of the people – Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. Moreover, the Supreme Court has a real stake in both sides of the fence dispute. Its job is to balance the security needs of its citizens against the humanitarian concerns of West Bank Palestinians. It tried to strike that balance by upholding the concept of a security fence while insisting that the Israeli military authorities give due weight to the needs of the Palestinians, even if that requires some compromise on the security of Israelis. Contrast this with the questionable status of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. No Israeli judge may serve on that court as a permanent member, while sworn enemies of Israel serve among its judges, several of whom represent countries that do not abide by the rule of law."
AIPAC: "Israel is the only country in the world that is not eligible to sit on the Security Council, the principal policymaking body of the U.N. This situation violates the principle of the “sovereign equality of all member states” of the U.N. under Article 2 of the U.N. Charter."
The U.N.'s Israel Obsession (Davis Tell, The Weekly Standard)
A Tyrants Club. The U.N. Human Rights Commission is worse than a joke (Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal)
U.N., R.I.P. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Jan 31, 2003)
The UN gives hypocrisy a bad name (Shlomo Avineri, Jerusalem Post, Jan 28, 2003): Libya, a totalitarian, fundamentalist tyranny, has been elected to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Iraq, Israel and the United Nations. Double standards (Economist, Oct 10, 2002): " ... a quite distinct sort of claim is also made in the “double standards” debate. This holds that Israel stands in breach of Security Council resolutions in just the way Iraq does, and therefore deserves to be treated by the UN with equal severity. Not so."
Israel and Iraq: United Nations Double Standards – UN Charter Article 25 and Chapters VI and VII (Gerald M. Adler, LLM, JSD, Yale, Aug 20, 2003) (PDF, 320 KB)
The U.N.'s Dirty Little Secret. The international body refuses to condemn anti-Semitism (Anne Bayefsky, Wall Street Journal, Dec 8, 2003): "A draft resolution on anti-Semitism--which would have been a first in the U.N.'s 58-year history--was withdrawn in the face of Arab and Muslim opposition."
One Small Step. Is the U.N. finally ready to get serious about anti-Semitism? (Anne Bayefsky, Wall Street Journal, Jun 21, 2004): "The U.N. has become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism--intolerance and inequality against the Jewish people and its state."
Israelis are sitting ducks in war against terrorism (Anne Bayefsky, Chicago-Sun Times, Sep 19, 2003): "Arafat wrote in his letter of Sept. 9, 1993: 'The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators.' Why keep promises when you have the U.N.?"
Terror Stings Its Pal, the U.N. (Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, Los Angeles Times, Aug 28, 2003): "There are numerous occupied peoples around the world seeking statehood or national liberation, including the Tibetans, Kurds, Turkish Armenians and Palestinians. Only one of these groups has received official recognition by the U.N., including observer status and invitations to speak and participate in committee work. That group is the one that invented and perfected modern international terrorism — namely, the Palestinians. These rewards were first bestowed in the 1970s when the Palestine Liberation Organization was unabashedly committed to terrorism. In fact, Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited to speak to the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 at a time when his organization was seeking to destroy a member-state of the U.N. by terrorism. By rewarding Arafat and the PLO for such behavior, the U.N. made it clear that the best way to ensure that your cause is leapfrogged ahead of others is to adopt terrorism as your primary means of protest. The Tibetans, whose land has been occupied more brutally and for a longer period than the Palestinians, but who have never practiced terrorism, cannot even receive a hearing from the U.N."

The U.N. can't define terrorism, let alone confront it (Anne Bayefsky, WSJ, Apr 28, 2003)
Genocide (Louis Rene Beres, FrontPageMagazine, Sep 4, 2003): "Readers of daily newspapers are now well acquainted with unending Palestinian calls for the annihilation of Israel. What might not be apparent, however, is that such calls - sometimes in the carefully whispered voice of the Palestine Authority, more often in the strident voice of PA accomplices in Hamas and other related terror groups - constitute an especially serious crime under international law. ... For example, the Fatah organization website still calls openly for the "eradication" of Israel. This call echoes earlier genocidal codifications in the still unchanged Palestinian National Charter, in Fatah's ongoing calls for Inqirad mujtama (the extinction of Israeli society), and in the Charter of Hamas ("There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad....I swear by that who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad! I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.")"
UN Arab Human Development Report 2002. Read/download the complete 178 pages report in one big file (5,209 KB) which the UN has commissioned from a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals: The GDP of all 280 million Arabs combined is less than what the 40 million inhabitants of Spain produce. Only about 300 books are translated annually for the 280 million people of the Arabic speaking world - this is 20% the number that are translated for the 10 million people of Greece!!! Freedom scores of ALL Arab states: Please don't ask ... Interestingly, while the category "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is included in practically ALL comparison tables of the report, most of the PALESTINIAN DATA IS MISSING. Why? One must conclude that the comparison of the Palestinian with the other Arabs' data would rather indicate that the Palestinians live in a paradise, compared with most other Arabs, and that the allegedly poor and desperate Israel-repressed Arabs in the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" are simply the richest, most educated, healthiest and freest Arabs in the neighborhood. However, the report reveals SOME of the Palestinian data: See for yourself that the allegedly poor and desperate Israel-repressed Arabs in the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" have the highest annual growth rate (4.78% p.a.) of ALL Arab states, and twice as high as the average of ALL neighboring states (Jordan: 2.90, Egypt: 1.82, Lebanon: 1.97, Syria 2.59). One must conclude that Israeli health care is good for Arab growth ... Number of frequently cited scientific papers per million people: Egypt: 0.02, Israel: 169 - this is 8,500 - eight thousand five hundred - times more than in Egypt, and 17,000 times more than Algeria. The rest is history ... So why does Palestinian society appear to be suicidal? That's a long story, but recall how highly advanced and sophisticated Germany and Japan tried very hard to destroy their neighborhoods and ended up disgracing themselves. The USA/GB liberated these people from their own dictators and their "occupation" resulted in democratic education, free press, free market etc. Within a decade, the German and Japanese people became higly respected partners and even allies of their former enemies. Complete 178 pages UN Arab Human Development Report 2002 (PDF, 4511 KB)
Tables of UN Arab Human Development Report 2002 (PDF, 128KB)
UN Arab Human Development Report 2003
UN Arab Human Development Report 2004
Arab development. Self-doomed to failure (The Economist, July 4, 2002): "WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. It shook off its colonial or neo-colonial legacies long ago, and the countries that had revolutions should have had time to recover from them. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can. Across dinner tables from Morocco to the Gulf, but above all in Egypt, the Arab world's natural leader, Arab intellectuals endlessly ask one another how and why things came to turn out in this unnecessarily bad way. A team of such scholars (it is indicative of the barriers to freely expressed thought that there are almost no worthwhile think-tanks in the Arab world) have now spent a year putting their experience to diagnostic use in the “Arab Human Development Report 2002”, published this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)."
Human Development in the Arab World: A Study by the United Nations (Dr. Raphaeli)
United Nations Human Development Report 2003
The Refugee Curse (Daniel Pipes, The New York Post, August 19, 2003: "Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees?
Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.
Not so the Palestinians. For them, the refugee status continues from one generation to the next, creating an ever-larger pool of anguish and discontent.
Several factors explain this anomaly but one key component - of all things - is the United Nations' bureaucratic structure. It contains two organizations focused on refugee affairs, each with its own definition of "refugee":
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees. Cubans who flee the Castro regime are refugees, but not so their Florida-born children who lack Cuban nationality. Afghans who flee their homeland are refugees, but not their Iranian-born children. And so on.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees. They are persons who lived in Palestine "between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees.
The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)
The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today.
UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees.
The 200,000 refugees by the global definition make up less than 5 percent of the 4.25 million by the UNRWA definition. By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.
The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.
It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape the refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees."
UNRWA official website (Jul 9, 2004): "UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than four million in 2002, and continues to rise due to natural population growth."

Report of the Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA] - July 1997 - 30 June 1998): "UNRWA registration figures are based on information voluntarily supplied by refugees primarily for the purpose of obtaining access to Agency services, and hence cannot be considered statistically valid demographic data; the number of registered refugees present in the Agency's area of operations is almost certainly less than the population recorded."
On Hating Israel. What we know but can't say out loud. (Victor Davis Hanson, NRO, May 7, 2002)
Death in Darfur (Arab-American activist Mohamed Buisier, Wall Street Journal, Jun 2, 2006): Once again, the international community, and the U.N. in particular, is being shamed into acting to stop the massacres in Darfur, and once again the Arab League and Arab leaders are unwilling and unable to face facts, or to deal with them in a civilized and humane manner. Indeed, the most recent Arab League summit, which took place in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum -- presumably as a show of support to the host government -- ended with a resolution denying that any massacres had taken place in Darfur and expressing resistance to any outside intervention in the "internal" affairs of an Arab country. (Not surprisingly, this stance is identical to that taken by Osama Bin Laden.)
UN Watch
Promoting the balanced, fair, and non-discriminatory application of the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter: E

Citizens for a Constructive UN
Monitoring the United Nations: E
United Nothing
Monitoring the United Nations: E
NGO-Monitor
Promoting critical debate and accountability of human rights NGOs in the Arab-Israeli conflict: E
EU Funding
The European Union, and European governments and organizations provide financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. This has led to two problems. One is the continuing problem of hate-centered education under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. The other is the diversion of funds from their intended and much needed purposes to the nurturing and financing of corruption and terror. E
http://www.middle-east-info.org/gateway/unitednations/index.htm

Contentions
Europeans Fund Lawfare Against “Allies” Israel and Canada
Tom Wilson | @TomJamesWilson 03.23.2014 - 11:00 AM
The growing European hostility toward the Jewish state is well publicized, as is the corresponding European support for the Palestinians and their agenda. The Palestinian Authority’s largest funder is not the oil-rich and supposedly sympathetic Arab world. It is not even the United States. No, despite its own critical financial situation, the largest single funder of the dubious Fatah-run mini-state in the West Bank is the European Union. Given the way in which the PA is known to squander huge sums of money through corruption, that it is guilty of torturing and persecuting political opponents, openly incites genocidal levels of Jew-hatred among its population and generally obstructs the peace process at every turn, this level of European funding ought to raise some eyebrows.
Yet, in addition to this direct funding to the PA, European countries are also channeling large amounts of money to highly politicized activist groups, and in doing so financing the legitimacy war being waged against Israel. In a report released by NGO Monitor earlier this month, it has been exposed that the EU, along with several other European governments, is paying for the waging of what has come to be known as “lawfare” against Israel. More noteworthy still is the way this funding is also being used by one particularly hostile and activist NGO to even pursue Canada, a close of ally of Israel, at the UN. The large body of evidence here really does have to be seen to be believed. Yet there is no denying it: European countries are indeed financing “lawfare” against two nations that they purport to consider friends.
The Palestinian NGO in question is the cryptically named Norwegian Refugee Council, a title that offers few clues as to the group’s actual activities. Quite simply, the primary function of this organization appears to be to wage “lawfare” against Israel’s judicial system in an effort to sabotage its legal process and subvert the democratic structures for determining Israeli policy. NGO Monitor reports that NRC has financed at least 677 cases that received full legal representation in court and other administrative bodies in Israel. According to an eyewitness report, the strategy here is to “try every possible legal measure to disrupt the Israeli judicial system… as many cases as possible are registered and that as many cases as possible are appealed to increase the workload of the courts and the Supreme Court to such an extent that there will be a blockage.”
In addition, NGO Monitor details how NRC pursues “public interest cases” concerning some of the most sensitive aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in an effort to circumvent the democratic process for determining Israeli policy on these matters, instead seeking to alter policy by obtaining legal precedents at the court level. Some of the most outrageous cases taken up by the NRC involve attempts to abrogate Jewish property rights in Jerusalem by bringing private cases seeking to nullify Jewish claims to property owned prior to 1948 and the Jordanian expulsion of all Jews from north, east, and south Jerusalem.
Most remarkable of all has to be the NRC’s activities against Canada. In 2008 another Palestinian campaign group masquerading as an NGO called Al Haq brought a civil case to court in Quebec that accused three Canadian companies of having operated illegally by being involved in the construction of West Bank settlements on privately owned Palestinian land. This was despite the fact that six lawsuits on this matter had already been filed in Israel itself. Primarily it appears that bringing the case to Canada was part of an orchestrated publicity stunt.
Yet, in 2009 the court in Quebec found that the campaigners had produced “no evidence whatsoever” to support their claims about the ownership of the land, and as such their case was thrown out, with partial costs being awarded to the defendants. In 2010 the court of appeal upheld the lower court’s decision and in 2011 the Canadian Supreme Court endorsed both of these previous rulings. Having still not received their desired outcome, in 2013 the NRC took the astonishing action of pursuing Canada at the UN, using funds specifically provided by Britain to do so. Issuing a complaint against the Canadian judicial system to the UN Human Rights Committee, the group also claimed that, “Canada violated its extra-territorial obligation to ensure respect for Articles 2, 7, 12, 17 and 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” Given just how supportive Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has been of Israel, one cannot help but wonder if this might not be part of the reason that Canada is being targeted at the UN in this way.
The primary donors for the NRC are Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the EU. Given that both Sweden and the UK already pay into the EU budget, tax payers in these countries are funding this organization twice over. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, the NRC spent $20 million on its lawfare campaigns. With the considerable deficits that most EU countries are currently running up, how might European publics react to discovering that this is how their tax euros are being spent? The British public exists in a permanent state of embitterment regarding the poor state of the country’s National Health Service. Imagine the news going down that while hospital wards are being closed, the British government is directing huge sums of money to a rogue NGO that engages in such activity as pursuing Canada at the UN on entirely trumped-up charges?
If nothing else, as long as this funding continues to flow, the Europeans cannot expect to play any role as fair brokers in the peace process, and they must be allowed absolutely no say in that matter.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/03/23/europeans-fund-lawfare-against-allies-israel-and-canada/#more-843505

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Canada Shows the Way on Jerusalem
Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 04.16.2013 - 5:50 PM

The Palestinian Authority is up in arms over a cup of coffee consumed by Canada’s foreign affairs minister, John Baird. He was in the Middle East last week and made the requisite pilgrimage to Ramallah to give PA President Mahmoud Abbas a photo opportunity as well as a chance to beg yet another Western leader for more cash to keep his sinking ship afloat. But whatever success Abbas and company may have had in hitting up the Canadians for more money to squander is being overshadowed by their rage for Baird’s decision to meet with Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Since it was located over the green line in the part of the city that was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 prior to Jerusalem’s unification, the Palestinians consider this a violation of international law. In consequence of this protest, Baird received a stern letter from the PA and a Canadian diplomat was summoned for another meeting in Ramallah where, after the scolding is finished, the Palestinians would, no doubt, have another chance to talk about more cash to spread around in no-show and no-work patronage jobs that enable the Fatah Party to maintain its hold on the area.
Left-wing Canadian politicians are also using the incident to lambast Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, but no one in Ottawa should be trembling at the thought of offending Abbas. Though the Canadians say the meeting shouldn’t be construed as a change in policy, the get-together exposes the lie at the heart of so much of international comment about Israel’s capital. For decades the world has adhered to the fiction that Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital and kept embassies in Tel Aviv so as to avoid giving the impression that it recognizes the reality that the ancient city is part of the Jewish state. But the world did not end when Baird sipped coffee with Livni. Nor did it further complicate the already moribund peace negotiations. All that happened is that the beggar of international politics got mad at one of their benefactors.
Even before this incident, Harper’s government has repeatedly demonstrated its friendship for Israel with warmth that often exceeds that of the relationship between Israel and the United States. While the importance of its alliance with the world’s sole superpower cannot be compared to the one with its far less populous neighbor, the Canadians’ decision to buck conventional wisdom on Jerusalem and other issues is more than refreshing. It shows that the impact on peace or regional stability of doing things that do not adhere to the Palestinian line is negligible.
Meeting with Israelis in Jerusalem or even moving an embassy there wouldn’t prevent peace, were it possible. But it does deliver a body blow to the Palestinian delusion that if they just keep denying reality long enough, the rest of the world will force the Israelis to abandon their capital.
That’s a point the U.S. should consider when it panders to the Palestinians on Jerusalem. Even though everyone in Washington from President Obama on down knows that Israel will never return to the 1967 lines in the city, they have gone along with the myth that Israel’s government does not reside in the capital.
That this dispute should come up in the very week that Abbas and his cronies have finally rid themselves of the one Palestinian that the West trusts with their donations to the PA is telling. The resignation of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad pleases both Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas since his focus on development and honest governance was a problem for the corrupt agenda of the former and the terrorist aims of the latter. Both seem to think that his exit will not mean an end to the gravy train of Western donations. Nor do they think their dependence on the West should cause them to moderate their stands or even negotiate peace with an Israel that is willing to talk without preconditions.
Canada’s chutzpah shows that fears about the blowback for breaking down the myth about Israel and Jerusalem are overblown. It also demonstrates that what is needed is some reality-based diplomacy that will bring home to the PA that their effort to isolate Israel and to avoid peace negotiations will have consequences. Far from hurting the peace process, actions such as those undertaken by Canada only serve to prod the Palestinians to stop relying on the world to do their dirty work for them. As President Obama said last month, those who expect Israel to eventually disappear are mistaken. The same can be said for those who think it will be booted out of Jerusalem. Canada deserves cheers for reminding the Palestinians of this fact.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/04/16/canada-shows-the-way-on-jerusalem-palestinians/#more-822884

Democracy and Homogeneity in Tunisia
Abe Greenwald01.21.2011 - 4:10 PM
As we try to determine the odds of a successful democracy in post-revolution Tunisia, it’s worth considering the question of ethnic and religious homogeneity. This quote jumped out from a Reuters story: “‘Tunisia is a small country but it has room for everyone and everyone’s ideas. They thought there would be chaos in Tunisia but we are united. We do not have Shi’ites, Christians, Jews. We are all Sunni Muslims and this unites us,’ worshipper Rida Harrathi told Reuters before Friday prayers.”
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Obama and Burger King Demagoguery

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 08.26.2014 - 7:30 PM
Who are the biggest villains in the United States today? As much as Americans may rightly fear the rise of ISIS Islamist terrorists, to listen to some commentators, the owners of the Burger King fast-food chain aren’t just the epitome of corporate greed. They’re also being depicted as 21st century Benedict Arnolds for planning to move their corporate headquarters to Canada to evade high U.S. tax bills. But instead of joining in a cost-free demagogue fest that both left and right-wingers can enjoy, rational citizens should be blaming the tax code and a president who could reform the system if he was willing to work with Republicans rather than use them as rhetorical punching bags.
The manner by which Burger King is heading to the great white north is called corporate inversion and is being facilitated by the fast-food franchise purchase of Tim Horton’s, the Canadian donut chain named after an otherwise obscure hockey player. Once they own Horton’s, BK can shift its corporate operations to Canada where they will pay lower taxes than they do now. This is an eminently sensible business decision, but to listen to the likes of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, it’s tantamount to treason; the onetime congressman says he won’t eat there any more is encouraging others to do the same. Left-wing lawmakers like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown agrees and also supports a boycott which would aid both White Castle and Wendy’s that are currently based in his state.
President Obama isn’t calling for a boycott. Instead he issued a call for Congress to pass corporate tax reform that would eliminate the need for American companies to flee the country over their tax bill. But he also said that the need to immediately pass a bill prohibiting such corporate moves shouldn’t have to wait until a solution to the years-long standoff about taxes that helped fuel numerous confrontations between the White House and congressional Republicans is found. Which is to say, he wants companies like Burger King compelled to stay without actually offering them tax relief.
Nobody need hold a benefit for Burger King but the hypocrisy and foolishness that form the foundation for all the demagoguery being aimed at that company seems at least equal to the venality of the fast food franchise.
First, the talk about patriotism and hamburgers is pure baloney. In the global economy trying to tie down a company that does business around the world in this fashion is silly. Americans haven’t owned Burger King since 2010 when SG Capital, a Brazilian private equity firm, purchased it when its previous proprietors dumped it because of its declining value. Expecting these stockholders who purchased a flagging company in the hope of increasing its worth and not to do their part in funding America’s out-of-control government spending is absurd. Global capitalism may not appeal to our sentimentality but it is a reality, and for supposedly smart people who are otherwise happy to profit from it to bash BK in this manner is hypocrisy on an Olympic scale.
Second, the president’s umbrage should be tempered by the fact that the person enabling this transaction is none other than his good buddy Warren Buffett. In 2012, Buffett was a major asset to Obama’s reelection because the billionaire’s support for higher taxes was seen as a definitive answer to conservatives who rightly believed Obama’s budget plans were bad for the economy and economic growth. But though he claimed to be personally in favor of higher taxes for himself, apparently Buffett doesn’t think the same principle applies to companies and it is his Berkshire Hathaway firm that is financing Burger King’s purchase of Horton’s. Hopefully, his secretary, whose higher personal tax rate than her boss (a disingenuous argument if ever there was one) became a staple of Democratic campaign rhetoric, will get a cut of the profits from the deal.
But more important than either of those facets of the story is the fact that if President Obama really wanted to reform our tax code, he could have done so years ago. While joining in the gang tackle of Burger King, Obama lamented Congress’s failure to pass reforms that would have made such moves unnecessary. Yet he torpedoed every opportunity to do so by demanding that a fairer revenue code be tied to tax increases. Rather than make cuts in the entitlements and government boondoggles he wishes to preserve, Obama preferred a continued stalemate because it enabled him to blame this failure on his congressional antagonists. That’s good politics but bad economics.
Liberals have given a lot of praise to Canada in recent years because of its government health-care program, but instead of trying to work toward the creation of a medical system that is a bad fit for Americans, they should have been studying our northern neighbor’s tax codes. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of those wanting to boycott Burger King, the president and his supporters should stop the demagoguery and begin negotiating in good faith with Republicans in order to create a tax system that doesn’t punish success or reward failure. Kicking Burger King is easy. Protecting both citizens and corporations from the greed of the government and its permanent bureaucracy is hard.

comment:
Tim Horton was not an obscure hockey player. He played 24 years in the NHL and was regarded as one of thee best defenceman in the league. Otherwise, good comment.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/08/26/obama-and-burger-king-demagoguery-taxes-warren-buffett/#more-850677

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1. Dubai - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai - Cached - Similar
Although Dubai's economy was historically built on the oil industry, the emirate's ... In 2014, Dubai and the UAE as a whole was ranked first in the Middle East in terms ... about the UAE's early inhabitants as only a few settlements have been found. ..... Non-Muslim groups can own their own houses of worship, where they can ...
2. Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think - Watch Free ...
topdocumentaryfilms.com/inside-islam-what-billion-muslims-really-think/ - Cached - Similar
Yet for all the heat and controversy, the actual views of the world's Muslims .... It's only when Israel or the west does something the Muslims riot and laughably kill each other. ... The MSM will never tell the truth you have to do your own research. ...... really only one God) would only reveal himself in the Middle East to a group ...

1. Japan: The Land Without Muslims | The Muslim Issue
https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/...muslims/comment-page-3/ - Cached - Similar
22 May 2013 ... The article does not claim that there exist no muslims at all in Japan. ... on concerns such as oil and gas, which Japan imports from some Muslim countries. .... Originally published at Middle East and Terrorism under the title, ...... Yes, there may be Muslims living in Japan but they are only with their own kind.

1. Muslim World: how Muslims will take over the world via population ...
brie-hoffman.hubpages.com/.../Muslim-World-how-muslims-will-take-over-the-world-via-population-growth - Cached - Similar
Not only is it dangerous but due to population growth it is the fastest growing ... Now let's take a look at some Muslims countries, Afghanistan is 47.02 per 1000 ... Muslim populations are filling up the birth shortfalls all throughout Europe and have ..... does..listen to terrorist videos and even local videos from the middle east..

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11. “Why Middle East is burning” By Latheef FarookSailan ...
www.sailanmuslim.com › … › Muslim Issues › INTERNATIONAL
Political uprising sweeping Middle East and North Africa has taken the world by surprise. Only a few months ago mere thought of ... ruling families own everything ...

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LIFE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: POWER AND PETROLEUM IN THE GULF IN 1945

View AgainDmitri Kessel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Iran's Abadan oil refinery, the largest in the Mideast in 1945. It was destroyed by Iraq in 1980 during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War.
'40s
Oil. A simple word that for much of the 20th century, and well into the 21st, has meant unimaginable wealth for a very few; plentiful and (for a time, at least) cheap energy for consumers and industries around the globe; deadly conflicts and tensions, as international powers jockeyed to ensure access to wells, fields and pipelines; and, of course, myriad and well-founded worries about the poisoning of land, sea and sky — and still, the world craves more, always more, of the precious stuff
In an online article titled “There Will Be Oil — and That’s the Problem,” a companion piece to his recent TIME cover story, writer Bryan Walsh argues that oil supplies aren’t going to vanish any time soon, but that fact shouldn’t leave us any less concerned about our dependence on petroleum:
“[Discoveries of new oil reserves] are occurring around the world,” Walsh points out, “from the deepwater finds off Brazil to the North Dakota tight oil that has led to a resurgence of American crude production. There are oil sands in Canada and new resources in the melting waters of the Arctic. There will be oil —and that may be the problem. That’s because the new supplies are for the most part more expensive than traditional oil from places like the Middle East — sometimes significantly so. They are often dirtier, with a greater risk of more devastating spills and accidents.”
Walsh goes on to discuss far more complex and enduring issues around the production and consumption of oil, but a central, unsettling question looms: in a world with an unslakable thirst for petroleum, will human beings pay a higher and higher price — in blood, in treasure, in environmental degradation — rather than rethink their addiction to oil?

LIFE’s Dmitri Kessel, photographed by his colleague Frank Scherschel in 1955
With that question hanging in the air, LIFE.com looks back at one of the earliest and most comprehensive features any publication anywhere ever published on the fraught and lucrative Mideast petroleum industry: a massive photo essay in the June 11, 1945, issue of LIFE magazine titled, simply, “Middle East Oil,” that provided (in LIFE’s words) “the first complete look at this fabulous and troublesome part of the world.”
[See how the original feature looked when it ran in LIFE.]
Photographer Dmitri Kessel spent eight weeks traveling and photographing in Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. (“It was so hot,” LIFE informed its readers of the photographer’s time in the desert, “that for periods Kessel could not handle his camera without scorching his hands.”) The result is a remarkable chronicle of a world both familiar and impossibly remote, where preteen dynastic kings, transplanted Texas wildcatters and armies of anonymous workers play out their lives amid the forces shaping the region’s landscape and transforming ancient cultures: the towering oil wells and refineries so colossal they sometimes seem ready to dwarf the desert itself.
NOTE: A sharp reminder that the original “Middle East Oil” feature was published in an era vastly different than our own can be found in the dated language and, even more so, in the blatant, invidious bias occasionally on display in the article. For example, one photo caption reads, in part: “Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. employs 40,000 Iranians, many trained in its own Institute of Petroleum Technology. It has built its own city beside the old town. Iranian workers are usually honest and as industrious as heat permits.”
It goes without saying that LIFE would not have made a similar assertion about, say, American workers at a refinery in Texas or Louisiana.
Related Topics: 1945, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Saudi Arabia
http://life.time.com/history/life-in-the-middle-east-power-and-petroleum-in-the-gulf-in-1945/

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Anatomy of a Killer Fact: The World’s 85 Richest People Own as much as the Poorest 3.5 Billion
SUBMITTED BY DUNCAN GREEN ON TUE, 02/04/2014
Ricardo Fuentes (@rivefuentes) reflects on a killer fact (85 individuals own as much wealth as half the world’s population) that made a big splash last week, and I add a few thoughts at the end.
Last week we released a report on the relationship between the growing concentration of income and biases in political decision making. “Working for the Few” got a lot of attention, generating the biggest-ever traffic day on the Oxfam International website the day of the launch.

A large part of the attention was generated by one fact: the 85 richest people own as much as the bottom half of the world.

We had direct reference to Oxfam’s “85” on The Now Show on BBC radio 4 and in The Onion with a pull-quote: “Imagine if the wealthiest donated just one dollar a day to charity. That could work out to around 85 bucks a day.”
Others pieces with large readership that featured our number include the World Bank president Jim Kim’s personal blog, The Atlantic magazine, Slate news website, Salon news website, Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, National Public Radio and The New Yorker.
How did we come to this figure? It’s a simple calculation. And yet it required a lot of work.
First, we didn’t design the statistic to shock, as some commentators have argued. What’s shocking is the concentration of wealth around the world – that’s a fact. Instead, we studied a series of available databases on income and wealth and analysed the trends. That fact captured the attention but we did plenty more data work with alternative sources. All of them pointed to the same results: since 1980 or so, concentration of income and wealth has been increasing and is now at remarkably high levels.
One of the databases we worked with is the 2013 Global Wealth Report and Databook, compiled by James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas and Anthony Shorrocks for Credit Suisse. They all are respected economists. Shorrocks is probably the best known. He was the director of the United Nation’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (better known as UNU-WIDER) and has a long list of publications on poverty and inequality.
Davis, Lluberas and Shorrocks have been calculating global personal wealth for four years now and the estimates are as credible as one can get on global wealth by country and around the world. I spent several weeks studying the methodology and understanding their assumptions. I also asked the opinion of Branko Milanovic and James Foster, respected scholars in the field, about the quality of the database. I was confident we could use it for the analysis we presented in “Working For The Few”. So we did.
The summary statistics of the Global Wealth Report are eye-popping. We reproduced some of them in the paper: The richest 1% own 46% of the world’s wealth. The richest 10% own 86% of wealth. The poorest 10% live in debt.
Once Nick Galasso and I had mostly finished the paper last December, I decided to go back to the Credit Suisse report and look for more facts that could add punch to our argument. There was one sentence that caught my eye: the bottom half of the population own less than 1% of global wealth. The report didn’t have the exact figure, so I had to dig into the statistical annex and the long list of PDF tables (to the best of my knowledge, there is no datafile available to the public) until I found the share of wealth by decile on page 106 of the Databook. Adding the bottom five deciles gave me a figure of 0.71 %. Yes. Unbelievable. Half the world own only 0.71 % of global wealth, totaling 1.7 trillion dollars (just multiply that 0.71% by 241 trillion dollars reported as total global wealth by Credit Suisse).
The next step was to go to the Forbes list of billionaires (which is, fittingly, sorted in descending order) and add up the richest individual’s wealth. By the time I got to number 85 among in the league table of wealthiest people I had reached 1.7 trillion dollars, the same amount as the total wealth of the bottom half.
For the billionaires list, I chose Forbes over Bloomberg because the Credit Suisse work actually uses the Forbes list to adjust their methodology since the richest people in the world are unlikely to be captured in the distribution of global wealth without that adjustment. This means that the two databases (Forbes and Credit Suisse) are consistent.
What assumptions did I make? I took Credit Suisse’s work at face value, so I implicitly accepted their assumptions. Then I made some additional ones. The sample for the Credit Suisse Report is world’s adults – it doesn’t include youth or children. We could then either say we are only talking about the world’s adults or assume that children do not possess any individual wealth and there are the same number of children in each wealth decile – clearly, a conservative approach as fertility rates are higher in poorer households. Our number might actually underestimate the extent of wealth inequality.
This killer fact – 85 people owns as much as half of the world – has created a massive interest in our work but the analysis we produced in the paper goes well beyond it. We used four different databases (all cited in the paper) in our work. We studied the problem at length, and during that process we identified some eye-opening trends. We did not intend to shock. The facts themselves are quite shocking enough. There is no need to make up injustices when there are so many real-life ones.
And a few thoughts from me
What struck me as the media storm engulfed Ricardo is the importance of timing. A great killer fact will get media attention, but this one came not just in time for Davos, but when the global head of steam on inequality was already building – Ricardo’s paper (with Nick Galasso) has certainly added to that momentum. For Davos last year, we produced a similar fact (the 100 richest individuals in the world earned enough to end world poverty four times over). It got good coverage (you can see a spike in the website hits) , but nothing like this time. The report backing it up had a greater investment in research this time (although last year’s stat was based on work by Bloomberg and the Brookings Institution, so it was hardly back of an envelope). But maybe the zeitgeist just wasn’t ready for it last year.

This post first appeared on From Poverty to Power
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/anatomy-killer-fact-world-s-85-richest-people-own-much-poorest-35-billion

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Super Rich Hide $21 Trillion Offshore, Study Says
It's isn't beaches like this that draw the extremely wealthy to the Cayman Islands. (Photo credit: toddwickersty)
A new report finds that around the world the extremely wealthy have accumulated at least $21 trillion in secretive offshore accounts. That’s a sum equal to the gross domestic products of the United States and Japan added together. The number may sound unbelievable, but the study was conducted by James Henry, former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, an expert on tax havens and offshoring. It was commissioned by Tax Justice Network, a British activist group.
According to an early report on the study in The Guardian, Henry’s research
shows that at least £13tn [$21 trillion] – perhaps up to £20tn [$31 trillion] – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy“. According to Henry’s research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn [$6.2 trillion] in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.
The report’s analysis, based on data from many sources including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, indicates that enough money has left some developing countries since the 1970s to pay off all their debts to the rest of the world. “The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments,” the report says.Money has especially flowed out of oil producing states. Some $700 billion has left Russia since the 1990s: $305 billion has flowed out of Saudi Arabia since the 1970s, and about the same amount from Nigeria.
Henry calculates that some 92,000 people, a thousandth of a percent of the world’s population, control $9.8 trillion, and that if all the $21 trillion that has been offshored earned 3% a year and were taxed at 30%, it would raise $188 billion in revenues, more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world every year.
Read The Guardian’s article here, and find the full study here.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super-rich-hide-21-trillion-offshore-study-says/

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Rigged rules mean economic growth increasingly “winner takes all” for rich elites all over world

Published: 20 January 2014

Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations.

Winnie Byanyima

Executive Director, Oxfam International

Wealth of half the world’s population now the same as that of tiny elite

Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population, worldwide development organization Oxfam warns in a report published today.

Working For the Few, published ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, details the pernicious impact that widening inequality is having in both developed and developing countries, helping the richest undermine democratic processes and drive policies that promote their interests at the expense of everyone else.

The report says that there is a growing global public awareness of this power-grab. Polls done for Oxfam in six countries (Brazil, India, South Africa, Spain, the UK and US) show that most people questioned in all those countries believe that laws are skewed in favor of the rich.

Social stability and security are at risk: urgent action needed

Inequality has shot up the global agenda in recent years: US President Obama has made it a key priority for 2014. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has identified widening income disparities as the second greatest worldwide risk in the next 12-18 months. WEF’s Global Outlook report, published in November, warned inequality is undermining social stability and ‘threatening security on a global scale.’

Oxfam wants governments to take urgent action to reverse the trend. It is asking those attending the WEF to make six-point personal pledge to tackle the problem.

Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam Executive Director who will attend the Davos meetings, said: “It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world’s population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all sit comfortably in a single train carriage.

Facing inequality is key

“We cannot hope to win the fight against poverty without tackling inequality. Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table.

“In developed and developing countries alike, we are increasingly living in a world where the lowest tax rates, the best health and education and the opportunity to influence are being given not just to the rich but also to their children.

“Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest.”

Wealth and power

Policies successfully imposed by the rich in recent decades include financial deregulation, tax havens and secrecy, anti-competitive business practice, lower tax rates on high incomes and investments and cuts or underinvestment in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 of the 30 countries for which data are available, meaning that in many places the rich not only get more money but also pay less tax on it.

A recent US study presented compelling statistical evidence that the interests of the wealthy are overwhelmingly represented by the US Government compared with those of the middle classes. The preferences of the poorest had no impact on the votes of elected officials.

This capture of opportunities by the rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes has helped create a situation where seven out of every ten people in the world live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and one per cent of the world’s families now own 46% of its wealth ($110 trillion).

The report says:
•Globally, the richest individuals and companies hide trillions of dollars away from the tax man in a web of tax havens around the world. It is estimated that $21 trillion is held unrecorded and off-shore;

•In the US, years of financial deregulation directly correlates to the increase in the income share of the top one per cent which is now at its highest level since the eve of the Great Depression;

•In India, the number of billionaires increased tenfold in the past decade, aided by a highly regressive tax structure and the wealthy exploiting their government connections, while spending on the poorest remains remarkably low;

•In Europe, austerity has been imposed on the poor and middle classes under huge pressure from financial markets whose wealthy investors have benefited from state bailouts of financial institutions;

•In Africa, global corporations – particularly those in extractive industries - exploit their influence to avoid taxes and royalties, reducing the resources available to governments to fight poverty.

Oxfam is calling on those gathered at WEF to pledge to:
•Support progressive taxation and not to dodge their own taxes;

•Refrain from using their wealth to seek political favors that undermine the democratic will of their fellow citizens;

•Make public all the investments in companies and trusts for which they are the ultimate beneficial owners;

•Challenge governments to use tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection for citizens;

•Demand a living wage in all companies they own or control;

•Challenge other members of the economic elite to join them in these pledges.

Oxfam is calling on governments to tackle inequality by cracking down on financial secrecy and tax dodging, including through the G20; investing in universal education and healthcare; and agreeing a global goal to end extreme inequality in every country as part of the post 2015 negotiations.

http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2014-01-20/rigged-rules-mean-economic-growth-increasingly-winner-takes-all

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Poverty Facts and Stats
Author and Page information
• by Anup Shah
• This Page Last Updated Monday, January 07, 2013
• This page: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.
• To print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print version:
o http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/26
1. Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.

At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.Source 1
2. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.Source 2
3. The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.Source 3
4. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”Source 4
5. Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. The two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
If current trends continue, the Millennium Development Goals target of halving the proportion of underweight children will be missed by 30 million children, largely because of slow progress in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.Source 5
6. Based on enrollment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimistic numbers.Source 6
1.7. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.Source 7
2.8. Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.Source 8
9. Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world. An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide.Source 9
10. Water problems affect half of humanity:
o Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
o Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.
o More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.
o Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.
o 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but not in their house or yard, consume around 20 litres per day. In the United Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. The highest average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day.)
o Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea
o The loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness.
o Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
o Millions of women spending several hours a day collecting water.
o To these human costs can be added the massive economic waste associated with the water and sanitation deficit.… The costs associated with health spending, productivity losses and labour diversions … are greatest in some of the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5% of GDP, or some $28.4 billion annually, a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to the region in 2003.Source 10
11. Number of children in the world
2.2 billion
Number in poverty
1 billion (every second child)
Shelter, safe water and health
For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:
o 640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
o 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
o 270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)
Children out of education worldwide
121 million
Survival for children
Worldwide,
o 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
o 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation
Health of children
Worldwide,
o 2.2 million children die each year because they are not immunized
o 15 million children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS (similar to the total children population in Germany or United Kingdom)
Source 11
12. Rural areas account for three in every four people living on less than US$1 a day and a similar share of the world population suffering from malnutrition. However, urbanization is not synonymous with human progress. Urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin.Source 12
13. Approximately half the world’s population now live in cities and towns. In 2005, one out of three urban dwellers (approximately 1 billion people) was living in slum conditions.Source 13
14. In developing countries some 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass—fuelwood, charcoal and animal dung—to meet their energy needs for cooking. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 80 percent of the population depends on traditional biomass for cooking, as do over half of the populations of India and China.Source 14
15. Indoor air pollution resulting from the use of solid fuels [by poorer segments of society] is a major killer. It claims the lives of 1.5 million people each year, more than half of them below the age of five: that is 4000 deaths a day. To put this number in context, it exceeds total deaths from malaria and rivals the number of deaths from tuberculosis.Source 15
16. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth just 1.5%:

The poorest 10% accounted for just 0.5% and the wealthiest 10% accounted for 59% of all the consumption:
Source 16
17. 1.6 billion people — a quarter of humanity — live without electricity:
Breaking that down further:
Number of people living without electricity
Region Millions without electricity
South Asia 706
Sub-Saharan Africa 547
East Asia 224
Other 101
18. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.Source 18
19. World gross domestic product (world population approximately 6.5 billion) in 2006 was $48.2 trillion in 2006.
o The world’s wealthiest countries (approximately 1 billion people) accounted for $36.6 trillion dollars (76%).
o The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).
o Low income countries (2.4 billion people) accounted for just $1.6 trillion of GDP (3.3%)
o Middle income countries (3 billion people) made up the rest of GDP at just over $10 trillion (20.7%).Source 19
20. The world’s low income countries (2.4 billion people) account for just 2.4% of world exportsSource 20
21. The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.”
In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004.
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.
The next 51 percent of all wealth is owned by the next 8.4 million — just 0.14% of the world’s population. Almost all of it has managed to avoid all income and estate taxes, either by the countries where it has been invested and or where it comes fromSource 21
22. For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.Source 22
3.23. 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.Source 23
4.24. The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.Source 24
5.25. The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.Source 25
6.26. In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.Source 26
7.27. An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and poorest countries was about:
o 3 to 1 in 1820
o 11 to 1 in 1913
o 35 to 1 in 1950
o 44 to 1 in 1973
o 72 to 1 in 1992Source 27
8.28. “Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.”Source 28
9.29. For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980). Among the findings:
o Growth: The fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across the board for all groups or countries.
o Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy 69-76 years).
o Infant and Child Mortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over the previous two decades.
o Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of globalization.Source 29
10.30. A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.Source 30
31. Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998
Global Priority $U.S. Billions
Cosmetics in the United States 8
Ice cream in Europe 11
Perfumes in Europe and the United States 12
Pet foods in Europe and the United States 17
Business entertainment in Japan 35
Cigarettes in Europe 50
Alcoholic drinks in Europe 105
Narcotics drugs in the world 400
Military spending in the world 780
32. And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:
Global Priority $U.S. Billions
Basic education for all 6
Water and sanitation for all 9
Reproductive health for all women 12
Basic health and nutrition 13
33. Source 31
Notes and Sources
1. Sources:
o Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, The developing world is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty, World Bank, August 2008
o For the 95% on $10 a day, see Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula, Dollar a day revisited, World Bank, May 2008. They note that 95% of developing country population lived on less than $10 a day. Using 2005 population numbers, this is equivalent to just under 79.7% of world population, and does not include populations living on less than $10 a day from industrialized nations.
This figure is based on purchasing power parity (PPP), which basically suggests that prices of goods in countries tend to equate under floating exchange rates and therefore people would be able to purchase the same quantity of goods in any country for a given sum of money. That is, the notion that a dollar should buy the same amount in all countries. Hence if a poor person in a poor country living on a dollar a day moved to the U.S. with no changes to their income, they would still be living on a dollar a day.
The new poverty line of $1.25 a day was recently announced by the World Bank (in 2008). For many years before that it had been $1 a day. But the $1 a day used then would be $1.45 a day now if just inflation was accounted for.
The new figures from the World Bank therefore confirm concerns that poverty has not been reduced by as much as was hoped, although it certainly has dropped since 1981.
However, it appears that much of the poverty reduction in the last couple of decades almost exclusively comes from China:
o China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people
o China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty
o Excluding China, poverty fell only by around 10%

The use of the poverty line of $1 a day had long come under criticism for seeming arbitrary and using poor quality and limited data thus risking an underestimate of poverty. The $1.25 a day level is accompanied with some additional explanations and reasoning, including that it is a common level found amongst the poorest countries, and that $2.50 represents a typical poverty level amongst many more developing countries.
The $10 dollar a day figure above is close to poverty levels in the US, so is provided here to give a more global perspective to these numbers, although the World Bank has felt it is not a meaningful number for the poorest because they are unfortunately unlikely to reach that level any time soon.
For further details on this (as well as some additional charts), see Poverty Around The World on this web site. back
1.2. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.
back
2.3. Ibid
back
3.4. See Today, around 21,000 children died around the world from this web site. (Note that the statistic cited uses children as those under the age of five. If it was say 6, or 7, the numbers would be even higher.)
back
5. See the following:
o 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25. (The report also notes that although India is rising economically, “the bad news is that this has not been translated into accelerated progress in cutting under-nutrition. One-half of all rural children [in India] are underweight for their age—roughly the same proportion as in 1992.”)
o Millennium Development Goals Report 2007
back
4.6. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 . The report importantly notes that “As high as this number seems, surveys show that it underestimates the actual number of children who, though enrolled, are not attending school. Moreover, neither enrolment nor attendance figures reflect children who do not attend school regularly. To make matters worse, official data are not usually available from countries in conflict or post-conflict situations. If data from these countries were reflected in global estimates, the enrolment picture would be even less optimistic.”
back
5.7. The State of the World’s Children, 1999, UNICEF
back
6.8. State of the World, Issue 287 - Feb 1997, New Internationalist
back
7.9. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.
back
8.10. 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, pp.6, 7, 35
back
9.11. State of the World’s Children, 2005, UNICEF
back
10.12. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.
back
11.13. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007
back
12.14. Ibid, p.45
back
13.15. Ibid, p.45
back
14.16. World Development Indicators 2008, World Bank, August 2008
back
15.17. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 , p.44
back
18. See the following:
o World Bank Key Development Data & Statistics, World Bank, accessed March 3, 2008
o Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass, The World’s Richest People, Forbes, March 3, 2007
o World Bank’s list of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (41 countries), accessed March 3, 2008
back
19. See the following:
o World Bank Key Development Data & Statistics, World Bank, accessed March 3, 2008
o Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass, The World’s Richest People, Forbes, March 3, 2007
back
16.20. Trade Data, World Bank Data & Statistics, accessed March 3, 2008
back
17.21. Eileen Alt Powell, Some 600,000 join millionaire ranks in 2004, Associate Press, June 9, 2005; James Henry, The Price of Offshore Revisited , Tax Justice Network, July 2012, p.36
back
22. Based on World Bank data (accessed March 3, 2008) as follows:
o Total debts of the developing world in 2006: $2.7 trillion
o Total official development assistance in 2006: $106 billion
back
18.23. See the following:
o Holding Transnationals Accountable, IPS, August 11, 1998
o Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power, by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies, November 2000
back
19.24. Log cabin to White House? Not any more, The Observer, April 28, 2002
back
20.25. Debt - The facts, Issue 312 - May 1999, New Internationalist
back
21.26. 1999 Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme
back
22.27. Ibid
back
23.28. World Resources Institute Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems, February 2001, (in the Food Feed and Fiber section). Note, that despite the food production rate being better than population growth rate, there is still so much hunger around the world.
back
24.29. The Scorecard on Globalization 1980-2000: Twenty Years of Diminished Progress, by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Egor Kraev and Judy Chen, Center for Economic Policy and Research, August 2001.
back
25.30. Maude Barlow, Water as Commodity - The Wrong Prescription, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3
back
26.31. The state of human development, United Nations Human Development Report 1998, Chapter 1, p.37)
back
Where next?
Related articles
1. Poverty Facts and Stats
2. Structural Adjustment—a Major Cause of Poverty
3. Poverty Around The World
4. Today, around 21,000 children died around the world
5. Corruption
6. Tax Avoidance and Tax Havens; Undermining Democracy
7. Foreign Aid for Development Assistance
8. Causes of Hunger are related to Poverty
9. United Nations World Summit 2005
10. IMF & World Bank Protests, Washington D.C.
See more related articles
Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, Global Issues, Updated: January 07, 2013
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One of the most insular countries in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has emerged from being an underdeveloped desert kingdom to become one of the wealthiest nations in the region thanks to vast oil resources.
But its rulers face the delicate task of responding to pressure for reform while combating extremist violence.
Named after the ruling Al Saud family, which came to power in the 18th century, the country includes the Hijaz region - the birthplace of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad and the cradle of Islam. This fact, combined with the Al Sauds' espousal of a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism, has led it to develop a strongly religious self-identity.
Saudi women live under a wide range of restrictions, from dress to driving
Saudi Arabia was established in 1932 by King Abd-al-Aziz - known as the Lion of Najd - who took over Hijaz from the Hashemite family and united the country under his family's rule. Since his death in 1953, he has been succeeded by various sons.
The Al Saud dynasty's monopoly of power meant that during the 20th century successive kings were able to concentrate on modernisation and on developing the country's role as a regional power.
It has always been in the ruling family's interests to preserve stability in the region and to clamp down on extremist elements. To this end, it welcomed the stationing of US troops in the country after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
At a glance
• Politics: The Al Saud dynasty holds a monopoly of power; political parties are banned and the opposition is organised from abroad; militant Islamists have launched several deadly attacks
• Economy: Saudi Arabia is the world's dominant oil producer and owner of the largest hydrocarbon reserves; rapidly growing unemployment is a major challenge
• International: Saudi Arabia is one of the main players in the Arab and Muslim worlds; its stature is built on its geographic size, its prestige as the custodian of the birthplace of Islam and status as major oil producer
Country profiles compiled by BBC Monitoring
But the leadership's refusal to tolerate any kind of opposition may have encouraged the growth of dissident groups such as Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda, which benefited from popular resentment against the role of the US in the Middle East. Members of the large Shia minority, who form a majority in oil-rich Eastern Province, have become increasingly vocal in their demands for civil rights.
After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001 - carried out mainly by Saudi nationals - the Saudi authorities were further torn between their natural instincts to step up internal security and pressure to allow a greater degree of democracy.
In 2003 suicide bombers suspected of having links with al-Qaeda killed 35 people - including a number of foreigners - in the capital Riyadh. Some Saudis referred to the attacks as their own 9/11. The targets of other militant attacks have included foreign workers. The security forces have made thousands of arrests.
Demands for political reform have increased. Municipal elections in 2005 were a first, limited exercise in democracy. But political parties are banned - the opposition is organised from outside the country - and activists who publicly broach the subject of reform risk being jailed.
Calls for social change are on the rise, too. Activists for women's rights have become more vocal, focusing on practical campaigns such as the right to drive. Social media users are also testing the limits of freedom of expression.
Saudi Arabia sits on more than 25% of the world's known oil reserves. It is capable of producing more than 10 million barrels per day; that figure is set to rise.
Millions of Muslim pilgrims from all over the world congregate in the holy city of Mecca every year
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14702705

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Tiny Qatar makes mischief in Middle East

HENRY SREBRNIK
Published August 28, 2014 - 4:53pm

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal delivers a speech in Doha, Qatar on Thursday. “Qatar has allowed Meshaal to live in luxury in Doha after he left Damascus in 2012 as the Syrian civil war intensified,” writes Henry Srebrnik. (OSAMA FAISAL / AP)

There are countries that are known to punch above their weight. One of these of late has been the Gulf state of Qatar.

It’s a tiny country of 11,571 square kilometres jutting out from the Arabian peninsula into the Persian Gulf, its only land neighbour Saudi Arabia. Most of its population is composed of guest workers; only 278,000 of its 1.5 million residents are Qatari citizens.

Qatar is a puzzle. On the one hand, it has embraced modernity: Doha is a dazzling city of luxury hotels and skyscrapers — when completed, the Dubai Towers will be 1,434 feet in height — and a centre for global business.

Qatari-owned al-Jazeera has become one of the most influential television networks in the world and currently has a total of 82 bureaus around the globe, the second largest number of any media company after the BBC. It now has millions of viewers worldwide, including in North America.

The FIFA World Cup, soccer’s greatest spectacle, is scheduled to take place in Qatar in 2022. It will be the first World Cup in the Middle East.

Yet Qatar follows the strict Wahhabi Sunni form of Islam found in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and it remains an absolute monarchy — the Consultative Assembly created in 2003 has very limited powers.

It has been ruled since the 19th century by the al-Thani family (although as a British protectorate between 1916 and 1971). The current emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has been in power since 2013, when his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, abdicated in his favour.

Thanks to oil and natural gas revenues, Qatar today has the highest per capita income in the world. And it is using its money shrewdly to buy influence throughout the Middle East. Among other things, it plays host to Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of Hamas, and supports the Muslim Brotherhood with money and political assistance.

In 2011, the emirate sent hundreds of troops and tens of millions of dollars in weapons and aid to the Libyans fighting Moammar Gadhafi, including those with Islamist ties, such as the 17 February Martyrs Brigade, one of the most influential rebel formations. Its air force was also involved.

Qatar has also been the most prominent regional opponent of the Assad regime in Syria, and has given generously to those fighting the Shi’ite regime in Damascus. Last year, Qatar used a shadowy arms network to move at least two shipments of shoulder-fired missiles to Syrian rebels who have used them against Assad’s air force. In April 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama warned the Qataris about the dangers of arming Islamic radicals in Syria, including Jabhat al-Nusra. But this has clearly continued.

Doha supported Islamist organizations and Muslim Brotherhood-led administrations, including that of Egypt’s former president Mohammed Morsi, during the Arab Spring. Qatar gave refuge to many Brotherhood members who were pushed out of Egypt after Morsi’s downfall, most notably the controversial and highly influential Egyptian sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Egypt has demanded his extradition.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Aug. 24 accused Qatar and Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood of spending millions of dollars to spread chaos in the Arab world.

All this has strained relations with the Saudis and other Gulf states, for whom the Brotherhood is anathema. Months of tension between Qatar and its neighbours came to a head in March when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates withdrew their ambassadors.

As a major supporter of Hamas, Qatar has been instrumental in providing funds to the group. In October 2012 then Emir Hamad visited Gaza, where he announced a $400-million aid program to the Islamist organization. And Qatar has allowed Meshaal to live in luxury in Doha after he left Damascus in 2012 as the Syrian civil war intensified.

Indeed, on Aug. 21 Meshaal and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with the Emir in Doha to discuss the Gaza war. Meshaal praised “the brave posture adopted by Qatar and its political leadership” on the Palestinian cause.

“We appreciate Qatar’s stand, the brave political stand of its government and people,” he told the Turkish news agency Anadolu. “Qatar’s support is not just for the Hamas movement, the country extends its support to all the Palestinian people.”

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1232617-tiny-qatar-makes-mischief-in-middle-east

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