Saudi Arabia has no minimum age for marriage. This fact leads to several unhappy outcomes. First, young girls, as young as eight, are sometimes married off by their parents. Their agreement usually involves a hefty payment by the would-be husband, often decades (if not a generation) older than the bride. Various reports, including by Saudi researchers, have found that marriage is not something for small children to undertake for reasons of both psychological and physical health. Then too, child marriage is extremely objectionable to most societies across the world. That Saudi Arabia permits it to continue provides grounds for Saudi-bashing.
Now, Saudi media report, the Ministry of Justice is preparing to announce a minimum age for marriage. The Ministry is not yet prepared to say just what that age is as it is still under discussion.
The major problem facing the Ministry is that child marriage has a long tradition in the region and is not forbidden by Islam. People can point to Islamic history and see that even Mohammed, in a very different time, married Aisha at a young age – various reports say she was 8, 9, or 13.
The fact that something is not forbidden by religion, though, does not mean that it cannot be forbidden by the state. Slavery, too, is permitted within Islam (as it is, textually, within Christianity and Judaism). But societies around the world, including Saudi Arabia in the 1960s, have banned slavery. Not only do attitudes change over time, but circumstances do as well. While child marriage may have made sense when societies were small and under constant threat of annihilation, they no longer do. Saudi society is now mostly urban, tribes and tribal identities are less important, society knows more about the psychology and physiology for young women. Too, the institution of marriage in Saudi Arabia is under great pressure already, with a large proportion of them ending in divorce. Permitting another negative factor to be introduced does nothing to resolve those problems.
While no age is yet stated, I expect it will be set at 13. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 16, but doubt that Saudi Arabia will go as high as 18, though many of its neighbors have. Saudis go for compromise and consensus and 13 strikes me as the number most likely to find that consensus. This does not mean that that age is fixed forever, though. Once the fact that law can operate in setting a limit, that limit can be later changed. As Saudi society continues to change, as Saudi women continue to be educated and employed, there will be fewer parents who believe that their financial salvation rests in the bodies of their daughters.
Age of consent for marriage of Saudi girls soon
DAMMAM: ARAB NEWSThe Justice Ministry will soon make an announcement to establish the age of consent for Saudi women to marry, local daily Al-Madinah reported yesterday quoting an official source at the ministry.
Director of the Department of Marriage at the ministry Muhammad Al-Babtain said a decision on the issue would soon be announced following the agreement of departments in the ministry involved on deciding on an age of consent.
“The project was discussed by a number of government departments concerned. The ministry deemed it appropriate to decide a certain age for the marriage of the underage girls taking into account its social and psychological aspects,” he said.
Al-Babtain declined to reveal the age of consent for marriage, but said the issue was still being discussed.
He said fixing an age for the marriage of young girls is commensurate with Shariah rules and the culture of the society. “Underage marriages are permissible under Islamic law,” he explained.
Al-Babtain pointed out the ministry had prepared a Shariah-based study that confirmed that marrying young girls was not against Shariah rules.
…
Saudi Arabia’s reputation as a place unfriendly to human rights is taking a toll on businesses, a front-page story in Saudi Gazette reports. Saudi employers simply do not have the legal right to hold the passports of their employers. Not only is this behavior forbidden under international human rights law, but it is forbidden under Saudi law as well.
Employers who hold onto the passports of their workers or their workers’ families do so in the belief that this will prevent the employee from leaving. It doesn’t work that way, though. Bad employers will find that their employees will leave when they find a better opportunity and can figure out how to get around the bureaucratic red tape. Or, they’ll just flee. Depriving employees of their rights is not how an employer builds loyalty.
Laws that are not obeyed and laws that are not enforced are a problem. Both lead to a lessening of respect for government. In this case, they also lead to a lessening of respect for Saudi businesses and Saudi Arabia as a whole by providing yet another opportunity for ‘Saudi-bashing’.
‘Unlawful to hold passports of expats’
RIYADH – Saudi employers are breaking the Kingdom’s laws by holding the passports of their foreign employees, said Fadhl Abu Al-Ainain, an economist.
Al-Ainain was quoted Monday in a section of the Arabic press as saying that the law is ignored by some employers and not enforced by government agencies. This has resulted in unnecessary litigation with various international organizations.
As a consequence, some international human rights and labor organizations accuse the Kingdom of condoning and abetting human trafficking, he added.
Al-Ainain said certain business owners are giving the Kingdom a bad name internationally with this type of illegal behavior.
…
Asharq Alawsat‘s Salman Aldossary writes that the 9/11 attacks, which involved 15 Saudi nationals, had a profound affect on Saudi Arabia. It took time – Aldossary says months, but years is more accurate – but both the Saudi government and Saudi society awoke to the dangers they had helped create. I’ve argued that the ‘help’ was mostly through inactivity, intellectual laziness, and a willingness to extend trust too far. I’ll stick with that now.
Nevertheless, when Saudi Arabia awoke, it did move decisively. Its war against Al-Qaeda was successful in driving the group out of the Kingdom, though at some cost to individuals in both civilian life and the security sector. Through the actions of Crown Prince and then King Abdullah, hardline xenophobia and religious intolerance were halted and a new culture of dialogue was started. Serious government attention was paid to social issues and the media’s leash was slackened.
The article notes that relations with the US have greatly improved since the days following the attack. This is the result of the efforts on the part of both the US and Saudi governments, working to ease the tensions and improve their own images with the other’s citizens.
These changes could have and should have happened without the deaths of thousands to pay the price. That is not how history unfolded, though. We should be grateful that the changes have happened.
Saudi Arabia: A decade on after 9/11
Salman AldossaryBetween the American insistence on portraying it as a modern holocaust, and the insistence of others on clinging to conspiracy theories, the world has experienced a frightening decade following the infamous 9/11 attacks. During this time the world has seen two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being killed and wounded. This is not to mention the financial cost of the war, estimated at $3 trillion, which has harmed the US economy and in turn affected the global economy. Although Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that was most affected by these attacks – as 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens – it has also, relatively speaking, suffered the least losses. Indeed these losses have today been transformed into gains.
Saudi society required long months to comprehend the extent of this disaster that a group of its citizens were accused of perpetrating, whilst the confession [martyrdom videos] of the hijackers failed to assist those who are trying to promote conspiracy theories. It was only natural that the shocking participation of 15 Saudi citizens in this terrorist operation would place Saudi Arabia in a vulnerable position, and this led to clear hostility towards Saudi Arabia in many countries, particularly the US, which even reached the point of some US parties calling for the bombing of Mecca!
…
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia announced that it was reducing its oil production by 800K barrels per day. According to this Reuters report carried in Asharq Alawsat, the Saudis claim that there is an oversupply in the market and they don’t see demand growing over the next few months. (OPEC will be looking at production/pricing figures again in June.) According to the Saudis and many economists, the current high prices are all the result of market forces. The market forces aren’t exactly about oil, but about oil as a place to invest money. Currently, with the US dollar weak and not many new places to put investment money, investors are looking for sureties. Right now, that’s gold and oil. They aren’t investing in oil because they need it, but because sometime down the road, others will need it and will pay for it.
There’s a certain amount of amusement to be found in how various audiences are parsing the Saudi reduction. Most of what I’ve seen looks at it as a purely economic affair. Others see it as a way for Saudi Arabia to pay for the tens of billions of dollars it is dedicated to social programs within the Kingdom. Certain sectors of investors see it as proof that ‘peak oil’ has been reached. There is a paranoid fringe, though, that chooses to see this as an indirect attack by the Saudis on the American economy. With gasoline prices in the US nearing historic highs, they figure that somebody is out to hurt them and it might as well be the Saudis…
Saudi slashes oil output, says market oversupplied
KUWAIT (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said on Sunday the kingdom had slashed output by 800,000 barrels per day in March due to oversupply, sending the strongest signal yet that OPEC will not act to quell soaring prices.
Consumers have urged the exporters’ group to pump more crude to put a cap on oil, which surged to more than $127 a barrel this month, its highest level in 2 1/2 years amid unrest in North Africa and the Middle East.
Oil Ministers from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates echoed Saudi Arabia’s Ali al-Naimi’s concerns about oversupply and said rocketing crude prices were out of the hands of OPEC, which next meets in June.
“The market is overbalanced … Our production in February was 9.125 million barrels per day (bpd), in March it was 8.292 million bpd. In April we don’t know yet, probably a little higher than March. The reason I gave you these numbers is to show you that the market is oversupplied,” Naimi told reporters.
…
Do Saudi women have their full suite of human rights? I think the answer is pretty clearly, ‘No!’ How short they fall, though, depends on just who you ask. Those asked that question in this Arab News article answer in a variety of ways, from ‘almost there’ to ‘not even close’. The biggest issue is that Saudi women are still considered incompetent to handle their own lives and affairs. Some male guardian is still necessary to provide permission for a whole array of what most of the world considers ordinary matters.
The women note that government has made gestures toward improving the status of women, but that the whole of society needs to get behind the issue. While, for example, the government retracted its ban on women staying alone in hotels, the hoteliers (or their staffs) still give women a hard time, sometimes just refusing their requests.
I don’t think that Saudi women can wait for enlightened males to give them their rights. The women are going to have to find ways to force the issue.
Note that none of the women interviewed here put driving or having to wear an abaya or hijab on their list of things to do. Those are not their major concerns. Being treated as adults is.
Have Saudi women achieved their rights?
WALAA HAWARI | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: On March 8 the world celebrated International Women’s day. Some women across the world either expressed satisfaction at achieving some or all of their rights whereas others expressed aspirations to achieve them. It became clear that women are still demanding their rights and expecting to seem them materialize.
Celebrations within the Kingdom were rather humble and took the form of women simply stating the achievements of Saudi women. The question, however, remains whether Saudi women have actually achieved their rights or at the least some of them.
According to Thurya Abed Sheikh, a PhD holder, founding member of the National Society for Human Rights and vice president of the Al-Wafa Philanthropic Society for Women, Saudi women have “almost” achieved their rights.
…
The hearings held by the House Committee on Homeland Security, looking into radicalization in American Islamic communities and those communities response to it, ran a bit over three hours. In large part, it was political theater, but that does not diminish the importance of the topic. Whether the theater actually helps attain the stated goal, is another matter.
The participants represented not so much a cross-section of American Muslims as a hand-picked assortment of people who deal with extremism in different ways, through different channels of history. Two talked about their family members who had been sucked into extremism: Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali-American whose nephew was killed in Somalia after having been radicalized in the US and Marvin Bledsoe, a Black American whose son became radicalized in Yemen, returned to the US where he attacked a military recruiting station killing a soldier and wounded another. (Bledsoe was to have stood trial in February, but I cannot find any reports on that. I do find stories that report he had pled guilty in 2009, but none giving disposition of that plea.)
Abdirizak Bihi stated that when he went to Muslim leaders at his local mosque to express his concern about his nephew, he was essentially told to shut up and warned that cooperating with authorities would be to act against Muslims. Bledsoe said that his son converted to Islam while in university and became radicalized, though not necessarily through the local mosque.
Zuhdi Jasser, a US Navy veteran, physician, and founder of the American Islamic Forum claimed that the Islamic community was not doing enough in terms of cooperation with authorities. He noted that in 220 terror arrests over the last several years, 180 suspects were Muslims.
Los Angeles County Sheriff, Lee Baca, said that the tight focus on Islam was wrong. He gave details of how his Sheriffs Department worked productively and effectively with the Muslim community. He took strong exception to allegations that CAIR was a terrorist front organization, saying that if the FBI had evidence of this, then they should act against the organization. CAIR did become somewhat of a punching bag during the hearings, with allegations flying around about it, but no proof of anything beyond vague references to FBI reports. Now, CAIR is not my favorite organization. I think it has a tendency to go into ‘victim mode’ whenever a Muslim finds himself in legal trouble. I think, too, that it has been careless in its associations. I do not see evidence that it is a front for Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other organization. Similarly, allegations about Saudi funding of fundamentalist mosques were tossed into the air, but beyond innuendo, there was no ‘there’ there.
The term ‘Islamist’ was getting kicked around a lot, too. It was apparent from those using the term that they didn’t really know what it meant, but it was certainly scary. No definitions were offered, nor was there any discussion of the role of religion, per se, in society or government.
A variety of Representatives were allotted a few minutes in which to make their own remarks. Most of that was, in my opinion, pretty vacuous. Democrats made noises about freedom and not profiling entire groups. Republicans made different noises—though at much the same whiny pitch—about the enemy within and not letting political correctness become a barrier to security. All of these things, of course, are good things, but were offered up with no substance, no argument, no knowledgeable basis for making them. The Representatives came across as walk-on actors in a theater piece.
While these hearings may have had a useful role in bringing important topics to the public, they offered no suggestion as to what should come next, how things should be done or be better done. Rep. King has promised more hearings, at a date to be determined. I hope they are more substantial than what we saw today.
The British daily The Guardian, in its continuing reporting on WikiLeaks, runs a piece in which a Saudi questions whether Saudi ARAMCO has been truthfully reporting its oil production potential. This has led to a flurry of coverage from both environmental and ‘peak oil’ prognosticators, as well as those who just like bashing Saudi Arabia.
WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump
enough oil to keep a lid on prices
US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world’s biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%
John VidalThe US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.
The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.
…
I’ve got some problems with this story…
First, I cannot find the cable itself at any of the sites mirroring WikiLeaks. It’s not on the WikiLeak.org site, either. Without seeing the text of the cable, it’s hard to assess its worth. I note that the Saudi source, Sadad al-Husseini, was a former Saudi ARAMCO employee—not, as the article state, an ‘official’. How long ago did al-Husseini leave his position as head of exploration? The cable itself, Guardian says, dates back to 2007. What was the context of the meeting at which the issue was discussed? Who was the American reporting officer? The article says ‘Consul General in Riyadh’. The Consul General in Riyadh is responsible for, well, consular affairs, that is, visas and the like. The embassy in Riyadh has an Economics Officer whose brief is Saudi oil. Is the reporting officer competent to assess al-Husseini’s comments? There’s also a Consul General in Dhahran, next to ARAMCO, whose entire office has Saudi ARAMCO within its brief. Why isn’t the cable coming from there? I can assume that someone in the Economics section looked at the cable before it was sent, but with the rapid turnover of officers that was going on in 2007—six-month tours of duty—I’m not sure of it.
In sum, I really do want to see the full cable. If any readers find a link to it, I’d appreciate your passing it on.
UPDATE: I’ve yet to find the full-text cable, but commenter ‘Balqis’ sent a link which in turn linked to this piece from Wall St. Journal:
Saudi Oil Reserves and
the WikiLeaks Chinese Whispers EffectAngus Mcdowall
At first glance it looked like a story to shake the world: the WikiLeaks cable suggesting Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves -– the most bountiful on the planet -– may have been overstated by 40%.
It opened the door to a future in which oil would be depleted far more quickly than anybody believed -– raising the threat of sky-high prices and cut-throat competition for scarce resources.
But a conversation this morning with the man whose comments set off the furore revealed a Chinese-whispers chain that ended up giving the apparent imprimatur of the U.S. diplomatic service to a misunderstanding over oil figures.
The story starts back in 2007 when U.S. diplomats had a chat with Abdullah al-Saif, head of exploration at Saudi Arabian Oil Company, commonly known as Saudi Aramco.
He told them that the kingdom had 716 billion barrels of oil –- a figure that would rise to 900 billion in about 20 years.
Enter Sadad al-Husseini, a predecessor of Mr. al-Saif as Saudi Aramco’s exploration head, and pretty much the only company insider ever to speak in public. In the past he has been skeptical of some Saudi forecasts on how much oil it can pump and is regarded within the industry as a careful, knowledgeable man.
Asked by the American diplomats what he thought of Mr. al-Saif’s statements, he made what appeared an extraordinary statement: that the reserves figure was inflated by 300 billion barrels. Deducting that figure from the 716 billion barrels created the idea that Saudi reserves were 40% less than it officially said.
As it turns out, however, Mr. al-Husseini’s memory of that conversation is rather different.
…
And here is the cable. I see no reason to question Mr al-Hussiein’s later remarks.
As reform of Saudi Arabia’s legal system moves slowly along, Arab News reports that efforts are being made to regularize—codify, if you will—punishments that are currently left to the discretion of judges. While hudud punishments are spelled out specifically in the Quran and Sunnah, and cover serious crimes like murder, lesser crimes are liable to ta’zir judgments. These, the article reports, have become excessive over time. While it’s not unusual to see a contemporary judge levy a punishments of thousands of strokes in a flogging, history shows that 100 strokes was the maximum during the early days of Islam.
Saudi religious scholars point out that there are serious restrictions on how lashes can be applied, but that there seems to be no effort to enforce requirements. These scholars also note that the purpose of flogging is not to torture the miscreant, but to help him/her reform. Excess punishments do not serve their intended purpose. It goes without saying, I think, that excessive punishments also blacken the face of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabs, and the Saudi legal system worldwide.
Scholars abhor stringent penalties for Ta’zir crimes
ABHA: Shariah has legislated certain punishment for serious crimes. These punishments, collectively known as Hudud, are mentioned in the two sources of Shariah — the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
As Hudud punishments are sanctioned through the core sources of the Islamic faith, a person found guilty of a Hudud crime is never shown leniency, Al-Riyadh newspaper reported.
In Saudi Arabia, a person found guilty of a crime for which a punishment has not been mentioned in the Qur’an and the Sunnah is usually handed a form of punishment known as Ta’zir. This form of punishment usually includes lashes but can also — depending on the person’s character and the severity of the offense — involve a prison sentence, a formal warning, house arrest, and a court injunction ordering the person to avoid certain areas, towns and people.
Ta’zir punishments are up to the discretion of judges and rulers, something that in practice leads to a disparity in judgments with some judges handing out stringent punishments.
…
Here are two interesting pieces from the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) for whom I do occasional, paid book reviews. The pieces appear in the current, Spring 2010 edition of the MEPC Journal.
The first, by former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles (Chas) Freeman, picks up on a phrase that drove US diplomats crazy: ‘Progress without Change’. This was a trope offered by Saudis that suggested that it was possible to modernize Saudi Arabia without any change in the social or governmental status quo. The concept was risible on its face, but one that many Saudis firmly believed… or at least hoped for. As Freeman points out, with the ascension of King Abdullah to the throne, the notion has been laid aside. Hopefully, it’s being relegated to the dustbin of history once and for all.
Saudi Arabia: The End of Progress without Change
Amb. Charles FreemanI have been asked to speak to you about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a topic I have never before addressed to an American audience. Why bother?
We Americans reserve the right to have strong opinions on the basis of little or no knowledge. There are few countries that better exemplify our assertive ignorance of foreign geography, history, and culture than Saudi Arabia. Most of us are convinced that Saudis are Muslim zealots, control the world’s oil prices, and are absurdly rich, anti-feminist, and undemocratic. They hate our values and want to destroy us. Talk radio confirms this. What more needs to be said?
On reflection, a lot does. Neither caricature nor a priori reasoning is a sound basis for policy. A distorted view of foreign realities precludes success at dealing with them. There is much at stake in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can ill afford to get it wrong.
That country is, of course, the heartland of Islam and the custodian of the world’s largest oil reserves. It lies athwart transport routes between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is at the center of a growing concentration of global capital. Under any circumstances, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be important. It is all the more so in an era when we Americans are at war with ever more peoples in the Islamic world, depend on ever greater amounts of imported energy, and need ever larger foreign loans to run our government and sustain our life style.
…
The second is the start of an article on Saudi Arabia’s quest for food security. It’s by Thomas Lippman, author of the commendable Inside the Mirage, a contemporary history of the Kingdom, and Arabian Knight, a biography of Col. William Eddy, who plaid an important role in early US-Saudi relations.
Unfortunately, the full article is only available to Journal subscribers at this time.
Saudi Arabia’s Quest for “Food Security”
Thomas LippmanOn the broad highway that runs southeast from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, it takes less than an hour to reach the beginning of farm country.
The industrial zones peter out, and suddenly date palms are growing on both sides of the road, not in the random patterns of an oasis but in the long straight rows of cultivated orchards. Then the first chicken hatchery appears, and soon patches of green vegetables and alfalfa. East of the farm town of al-Kharj are vast operations of corporate agriculture, such as Al Safi, the world’s largest dairy farm, and Almarai, a dairy and juice conglomerate.
The landscape is unmistakably desert and hardly looks promising for farming. But agriculture is big business in Saudi Arabia, from Hail in the north to the valleys near Taif in the west to the terraced hillsides of the southwest, made possible mostly by decades of government subsidies and irrigation with water pumped out of caverns deep underground. In 2008, agriculture accounted for nearly 5 percent of the country’s annual GDP and employed about 12 percent of the work force.1
Saudi state television’s “This is Our Country” program features a documentary celebrating the achievements of Saudi agriculture: self-sufficiency in wheat and poultry, impressive harvests of figs, grapes and citrus fruits, increasing production of olive oil. The so-called “Desert Kingdom” is self-sufficient in potatoes — which is saying a lot, given the amount of french fries consumed at the ubiquitous fast-food restaurants — and even produces flowers for export.
Nevertheless, only about 2 percent of the country’s enormous land mass is arable, even with intensive irrigation and modern farming technology, and the country in modern times has always depended on imported food.
…
The Washington Post runs an article arguing that President Obama may be in a constitutional confusion when it comes to accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. It goes into the legalities and past practices in an interesting sort of way, noting among other things that the cash award, some $1.4 million, is not his to give to charity: it belongs to the US government.
Then the article gets rather pissy about how Obama committed an even graver sin by accepting an award from Saudi King Abdullah, the “Collar of the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit” on his visit to the Kingdom last June. The piece provides gratuitous slaps at King Abdul Aziz and the fact that we don’t have peace in the Middle East. It ignores that fact of King Abdullah’s peace plan entirely.
Personally, I think receiving the Collar is not significantly different from receiving the ‘Keys to a City’. It’s a mark of respect and acknowledgment, perhaps even a gift to encourage continued behavior. It’s hardly a bribe, however. Further, whatever monetary value is inherent in the Collar goes to the US government anyway. There are long-standing regulations about what Presidents and other government officials must do with gifts with more than token value: either give them to the US Treasury for safe-keeping or buy them from the Treasury at their fair market value. I suspect the Collar will end up in a warehouse along with various other medals, works of art, and official bric-a-brac.
An Unconstitutional Nobel
Ronald D. Rotunda and J. Peter PhamPeople can, and undoubtedly will, argue for some time about whether President Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, though, there’s a simpler and more immediate question: Does the Constitution allow him to accept the award?
Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, the emolument clause, clearly stipulates: “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.”
…
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the Jordanian-American convicted of taking part in a plot to assassinate the President, was sentenced to 30 years in jail back in 2005. He appealed his sentence and, in a severe rebuke by the court, has had his sentence increased to life in prison.
Abu Ali has two connections with Saudi Arabia. First, he was a graduate of the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia, a fact that those who wish to shutter the Academy are quick to mention. Second, Abu Ali was originally arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2003, in a sweep of those suspected of having taken part in that year’s bombings of residential compounds. After 20 months in a Saudi prison, he was repatriated to the US. Abu Ali, his family and attorneys allege that he was tortured in the Kingdom and forced to make a false confession. He became the poster child for several human rights organizations who assumed his allegations were accurate, a view the courts did not accept. The Washington Post reports…
Va. Man’s Sentence Increased to Life in Terror Plot
Jerry MarkonA Falls Church man convicted of plotting with al-Qaeda to kill President George W. Bush was resentenced to life in prison Monday after the judge said his release would threaten “the safety of the American citizenry.”
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali had been given a 30-year prison term after he was convicted in 2005 of joining an al-Qaeda conspiracy to mount a series of Sept. 11-style attacks and assassinations in the United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld the conviction last year but sent the case back for resentencing, indicating that the sentence should be more severe.
U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee obliged on Monday, saying he had reevaluated the case and concluded that the danger of ever releasing Abu Ali is too great. “I cannot put the safety of the American citizenry at risk,” he said, citing Abu Ali’s “unwillingness to renounce the beliefs that led to his terrorist activities.”
…
There is a very crude fact in American politics: to take money from a Saudi donor is going to be seen as having sold your soul to the devil. That’s the underlying theme of this piece from the conservative journal, ‘National Review’ in its online edition. It’s also the point being made in a variety of conservative and pro-Zionist publications and blogs. It doesn’t matter if there may be a point in criticism of Israel and its policies, if you take Saudi money to make that criticism, you will be defamed and cast into the wilderness.
We see the same arguments being made to diminish think-tanks and universities. Georgetown U. and Harvard were both called illegitimate for taking Saudi money to create or fund Middle Eastern Studies program. Chas Freeman and the Middle East Policy Council which he had headed were both castigated for seeking Saudi money to fund their operations. The Middle East Institute, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Strategic & International Studies… both have been flamed for accepting Saudi funds, even when those funds represent less than 20% of their operations.
The moral of the story is that if you wish to avoid political calumny in the US, stay away from the Saudis. Truth, fairness, equity? Not important, apparently. Just make sure your funding source is approved by those with a political agenda they’re willing to feed to the media and the media is happy to eat.
From Gulag Liberators to Saudi Retainers by Gerald M. Steinberg on National Review Online
Human Rights Watch has betrayed its original mission
Gerald M. SteinbergHuman Rights Watch was founded in 1978 in New York (as Helsinki Watch) with the mission of using public demonstrations and other forms of “naming and shaming” to free prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Gulag denizens, including Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, later recognized HRW’s role in gaining their freedom. Shortly thereafter HRW began advocating on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims in other totalitarian regimes, including in Chile, Argentina, and Greece.
But since then, HRW has lost its moral compass, and the organization is using its substantial budget ($42 million in 2008) to repeatedly attack Israel by exploiting the language of human rights and international law. Tendentious reports and press conferences, using distorted legal rhetoric in place of credible evidence, target Israeli responses to terror attacks from Arafat, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
My organization, NGO Monitor, annually releases a systematic analysis of HRW’s agenda, and our reports clearly show that HRW singles out Israel in the Middle East. For years, this arbiter of international morality and human rights had very little to say about Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Palestinian terrorists. HRW’s recent cautious criticism of Saudi policy came only after a reorganization of the organization’s board — and then only after receiving unwelcome attention for its see-no-evil treatment of the Kingdom. In May 2009, Arab News reported that HRW officials went to Saudi Arabia to raise funds, advertising the numerous condemnations and pseudo-research reports against Israel in the Gaza war. Some of the founders, including Robert Bernstein, are in strong disagreement with the organization they built.
…
UPDATE: Just because today seems like the sort of day it’d be nice to roll around in rich, stinky irony, Earth News has the following story: