Vatican Cardinal Fearful of Fundamentalist Muslims

Seems that a Vatican Cardinal is worried about Muslim fundamentalists

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican's Council for Interreligious Dialogue, said..."The part of Jerusalem within the walls -- with the holy sites of the three religions -- is humanity's heritage, as each has its roots there," he said in reference to Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

"Let's suppose that tomorrow part of Jerusalem belongs to a Palestinian state: one morning a group of fundamentalist Muslims could decide to build a mosque where the Holy Sepulchre stands," he added.

The Vatican says the answer is to have the global community regulate the sites -- and it favours handing the task to a "large group" of states, rather than placing it in the hands of the United Nations Security Council or Europe.

"The sacred and unique character of the area must be safeguarded and it can only be done with a special, internationally-guaranteed statute," Tauran said.

Actually, Cardinal Tauran, only Israel's sovereignty can and will guarantee complete religious freedom.

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Pfeffer Prefers Incitement

Whether Anshel Pfeffer is still wearing a kippah I do not know. I do know, ,though, that he is firmly in line with his employer's outlook on religion, that being Haaretz where he writes. I first met him in the late 1990s when he was a reporter on KolHair, the Haaretz Jerusalem weekly. He contributes to, what else, The Guardian.

Here is a forthright statement of his today:

...there is a world of difference between the Islamist and the Israeli ultra-Orthodox religious-right establishments, but they have one trait in common, and that is fundamentalism. They share a firm and unshakable belief that in every instance, their religious code is supreme over all man-made legal systems, especially democracy. In other words, sharia or halakha trumps every other consideration.

That doesn't read that bad even if, as we know, in comparing two things, especially two socio-cultural aspects like religion, one is in danger in persuading your reader, or listener, that the two things are always equal and in all circumstances. And the additional dange is not only mixing up people but that your own journalistic rhetoric becomes incitement itself. And that is what he does in his opening paragraphs:-

A few months from now, Egypt may come under the rule of a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose supreme spiritual leader said just a few years ago that God would "destroy the seed of the Jews and extirpate them from the world. These Jews are accursed scoundrels, crying crocodile tears while they murder people; it is forbidden to have any mercy on them. We have to destroy them with great missiles."

And if you think this is populist scare-mongering, and that this represents only one benighted faction of the popular Egyptian movement, here is what the leader of a rival faction of the Brotherhood said about Israeli civilians: "There is nothing in Islamic law about consideration for innocents in time of war." And lest there be any mistake, his secretary explained that "there is no problem with killing Jewish civilians, because the entire population supports Israeli terror."

It's quite a nightmarish scenario just over the Negev border - except that it isn't happening in the land of the Nile, but right here in Zion. Substitute "Arab" for the words "Jewish" and "Israeli" and you have a representative sample of the teachings of rabbis Ovadia Yosef and Dov Lior...

But he does manage to salvage his liberal outlook when he makes this point, which should be obvious to anyone in a democratic society:

...as inflammatory as their statements are, a police investigation is not the way to counter their influence. It will only confer martyr status on them and do nothing to encourage their followers to adopt a more democratic stance. These rabbis are the enemies of democracy, and we shouldn't hand them the achievement of an erosion of a basic democratic right. The laws against incitement should be used as sparingly as possible, only in cases when there is a clear and direct call for violence.

Basic Jewish values and outlook are debatable and that is what the book was engaged in. It was not a political tract and it needs be challenged but Israel still has to find it's way as the so-called liberal and progressive forces that have the power to sway judges, police and government officials are the more illiberal elements on the scene.

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What Means "Islamist" and Who Is Fomenting Revolution in Israel

[The fomenting is below]

From a 2003 piece on someone who I read about many years ago, Sayyid Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb),
"the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide":

...even before his voyage to America, he was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism. It is true that, after his return to Egypt, he veered into ever more radical directions. But in the early 1950's, everyone in Egypt was veering in radical directions. Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of nationalist army officers overthrew the old king in 1952 and launched a nationalist revolution on Pan-Arabist grounds. And, as the Pan-Arabists went about promoting their revolution, Sayyid Qutb went about promoting his own, somewhat different revolution. His idea was ''Islamist.'' He wanted to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society, to be based on ancient Koranic principles. Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, became the editor of its journal and established himself right away as Islamism's principal theoretician in the Arab world.

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

The book I read was THE DUAL NATURE OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM by Johannes Jansen
wherin he describes and analyzes from original Arabic sources the Islamic incarnation of such a fusion of religion and politics.

This extract of another article highlights the problem the West faces as for example whether to prefer Mubarak or let the Cairene street be taken over by worse forces:

...fundamentalism is [intimated to be] a common denominator in Islamic historiography for revival, reform, and radical groups. The third stage is a prelude to fundamentalism's transformation into a "totalitarian ideology." 4...both view political Islam as a radical departure from the basic tenets of Islam adhered to by the Muslim hoi polloi...Arguing that the religious and political components give fundamentalism its dual nature, Johannes Jansen emphasizes violence as a distinguishing feature of fundamentalism...Abul A'la Maudoodi and Sayyid Qutb revised thejahiliyya (pre-lslamic society) doctrine and took Islamic radicalism to the extreme. They shifted attention from European secular nationalism and its concomitant Pan-Arabism to rectifying the "jahiliyya within"...Maudoodi and Qutb's glorification of jihad (holy war) and the shahid(martyr) was a significant change in strategy...although Jansen feels imprisoned by the term fundamentalism, he also uses it in the title of his book.10 In berating the fundamentalists for ignoring the "growth of Muslim thought" in the Middle Ages, Shaukat AIi uses the term Islamist in the title of his book to examine the "dimensions and dilemmas" of the movement, but his chapters refer to fundamentalism.17...Jansen alludes to a 1976 essay in the Commentary, "The Return of Islam," by Bernard Lewis as identifying fundamentalism with Islam in western literature. Lewis does not use the term fundamentalism, but points to a recoupling of religion and power as a "fundamental attitude" in the binary worldview of the post-18th century Muslim resurgence movements. 19While the term was given added circulation in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, what Jansen overlooks is the significance of the year 1976 in the aforementioned work by Lewis. It predates the 1979 Islamic theocracy and American hostage taking in Iran. The publication by Lewis followed at the heel of the 1973 oil embargo against the US and the Netherlands by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a group in which the Muslim countries comprised the pivotal core. And that episode was preceded by the first Islamic Heads of State Summit in 1969 in Rabat, Morocco...This perceived rise (reemergence) of Islamic power was soon transformed from oil to religion with the advent of an anti-US theocratic regime in Iran. It is the anti-western element that is important to note because until after the September 11, 2001 tragedy hardly anyone in the West questioned US relations with Saudi Arabia. And Stephen Schwanz illustrates that point in his vituperation of the ruling AlSaud family's acceptance of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.21

4. Yousseff M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism. 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Pinter, 1997), pp. xvii, 44. 63-64.
5. Emmanuel Sivan. Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 50, 184.
6. Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), pp. 42-47.
7. Luisa Giuriato and Maria C. Molinari, "Rationally Violent Tactics: Evidence from Modern Islamic Fundamentalism," in Albert Breton. Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, and Ronald Wintrobe, (eds.), Political Extremism and Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 184, 188.
8. Ibid, p. 183fn2.
9. Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (London: C. Hurst, 1997), p. xiv.
10. Sivan, Radical Islam, pp. 27-29, 38-40, 47.
11. William E. Shepard, "Sayyid Qutb's Doctrine of Jahiliyya," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (November 2003), pp. 527, 529, 536.
12. Sivan, Radical Islam, pp. 186-187.
13. John Ruedy, "Introduction," in John Ruedy, ed., Islamism and Secularism in North Africa (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), p. xv.
14. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism, p. xi.
15. William M. Watt, Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 2.
16. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, p. 17.
17. Shaukat Ali, Dimensions and Dilemmas of Islamist Movements (Lahore, Pakistan: Sang-e-Meel, 1998), pp. 502-503.
18. Bruce B. Lawrence, "Muslim Fundamentalist Movements: Reflections toward a New Approach," in Stowasser, ed., The Islamic Impulse, pp. 32-34.
19. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, p. 14; Bernard Lewis, "The Return of Islam," Commentary, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January 1976): 40-41, 44.
20. Ali, Dimensions and Dilemmas of Islamist Movements, pp. 74-75.
20. Vijay K. Singh, Security Implications of the Rise of Fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Its Regional and Global Impact (Charlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, 2001), p. 15.
21. Stephen Schwanz, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism (New York: Anchor, 2003), pp. 80-83. Yet, it was the Standard Oil of California that assured "financial foundation" for the political-religious alliance between the Al-Saud and the Al-Wahhab families. See, Bernard Lewis, This Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 126.

And k/t to SoccerDad for these two reference sources from Bernard Lewis:  One and Two.
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[here's the fomenting]

And if that isn't enough, here is Akiva Eldar fomenting revolution:

Doesn't the West Bank have Facebook?

Don't the Al Jazeera on-the-scene reports about the riots in Egypt spark thoughts of uprising among unemployed Palestinians in the West Bank?

By Akiva Eldar

The riots began in Silwan, spread to Sheikh Jarrah, moved on to Shuhada Street in Hebron and reached their peak in Ramallah. College students and the jobless, along with former Hamas prisoners and embittered Fatah activists, took over the Muqata. Masses of people bearing placards condemning the occupation marched toward the settlement of Psagot. A small group of soldiers who were stationed along the way took fright and fired live bullets at the protesters. News about the death of 10 youths inflamed the Arab towns in the Galilee and the Triangle region, and the outrage spread to Jaffa and Ramle. The Israel Defense Forces seized control of the territories and restored military rule. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced his resignation and dismantled the PA.

A hallucination? The product of a wild imagination? If only.

"If only"?

Helloooo! Police? GSS?

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