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Link TV

“Muslims on Screen”

A new series called “Who Speaks for Islam?” will kick off Saturday on Link TV (also available to be screened online at linktv.org/whospeaksforislam) and it features a particularly relevant second episode titled “Muslims on Screen,” with interviews and clips of television series that have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to portray Muslims.

Hosted by PBS’s Ray Suarez, the panel discussion has its kick-off segment, “What A Billion Muslims Really Think” on Sunday at 7 p.m. (PT) and repeating Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. If you get DirecTV (channel 375) or Dish (channel 9410), you can see it as it airs, or you can use The Chronicle’s updated online TV page to see if the series is available on your cable carrier. Barring that, you can watch it online at the above link for Link TV.

While the first hour is more of your standard NPR fare about exploring big picture issues of Islamic views, culture, attitudes, etc., the second installment, “Muslims on Screen” is more relevant for TV viewers and it might also have a greater impact on whether the issues brought up in the first hour are ever truly understand by Americans, since television remains the most powerful medium on the planet.

Suarez does a fine job in the first hour of moderating the flow of the discussion between Dalia Mogahed (who co-authored “Who Speaks for Islam?”) and Reza Aslan (author of “How to Win A Cosmic War” and Middle East analyst for CBS News). But he seems to really get into the idea of both progress and lessons learned in the second installment, which features “24″ executive producer Howard Gordon; screenwriter Kamran Pasha (“Sleeper Cell,” “Kings”); actor and comedian Maz Jobrani (“Better Off Ted,” “The Interpreter,” the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour) and Zarqa Nawaz, the creator of the hit Canadian comedy “Little Mosque on the Prairie”). Read the rest of this entry »

By Asma Alsharif

RIYADH, Oct 24 (Reuters) – A Saudi court sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes in a case brought after a Lebanese television channel she worked for aired the sex confession of a Saudi man, the reporter and a lawyer said.

Rosana, 22, who did not want her full name disclosed, said a court in Jeddah convicted her on Saturday on grounds that the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) she worked for did not have proper authorisation to operate in the Islamic kingdom.

The ruling follows the sentencing by the same court of Mazen Abdul-Awad to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes earlier in October after he appeared on an LBC show and talked about his sexual exploits.

The show has sparked a public outcry in the U.S. ally, one of the world’s most conservative countries where clerics have wide-ranging influence and control.

“I had nothing to do with Mazen Abdul-Jawad’s show. The verdict was just because I cooperated with LBC,” the female journalist told Reuters.

LBC is a popular channel in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most conservative societies, and many Saudis tune into its Western-style entertainment programmes and talk shows.

“I was not aware (that LBC was unlicenced) but in the end this is the verdict and I accept it. I don’t want to appeal,” Rosana said.

The court could not be reached, while a spokesman for the information ministry in Riyadh declined to comment.

“This is the first case in which a journalist was tried at a court of summary jurisdiction for an offence relating to the nature of his or her profession,” said Sulaiman al-Jumaie, a lawyer who defended Abdul-Jawad.

Saudi authorities closed the LBC offices after the show was aired. Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a shareholder in LBC.

Abdul-Jawad, a divorced father of four, was arrested in August after discussing his premarital sexual encounters on LBC’s “In Bold Red” programme.

Judges, who are clerics of Saudi Arabia’s strict Wahhabi school of Islam, have wide powers of discretion and can issue sentences according to their interpretation of Islamic law, which critics said has led to some arbitrary rulings.

King Abdullah has begun to reform education and the judiciary in recent years, partly to discourage Islamic militancy but he faces resistance from clerics.

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090925/FOREIGN/709249932/1002

–>NAZARETH // A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.

The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate – and little discussed – initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.

In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.

Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel’s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state’s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.

Since the state’s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.

Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.

In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple’s return.

Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was “too small to be studied”. “Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.”

The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva.

The girls’ involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode among some young people.

In sentiments widely shared, Mr Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said “Russian girls”, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.

Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships with Arab men because they “did not undergo the religious and Zionist education” to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.

Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.

“We can’t tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice,” he said.

Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into the city as a result.

Petah Tikva’s hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is shared by other communities.

In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as “Fire for Judaism” that tries to stop interracial dating.

Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem’s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.

One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, said: “Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to explain to them the dangers of what they’re getting themselves into. In the last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian] villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren’t heard from after that.”

He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.
Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an “unnatural phenomenon”.

Haim Shalom, head of the municipality’s welfare department, is filmed saying: “The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab.”

In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to “beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime”.
Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the “seducing” of Jewish girls was “another form of war” by Arab men.

Both Kiryat Gat and Safed’s campaigns were supported by a religious organisation called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to “saving” Jewish women.

According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West Bank. It launches “military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab villages” in co-ordination with the police and army.

“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the website.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae

http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/09/22/857

Inter-family marriages lead to genetic diseases: report Arabs suffer from high rate of gene disorders

Egyptian couples arrive at Cairo stadium for a collective wedding (File)

DUBAI (Loukia Papadopoulos)Despite the fact that it is widely practiced across the Middle East, marrying within the family might not be such a good idea, according to a report published Tuesday.

The report by the Dubai-based Center for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS) said Arabs have one of the highest rates of genetic disorders mainly due to consanguinity, or marriages between close relatives.

	Prevalence of genetic diseases is very high in the UAE compared to the rest of the world, so it is a major concern. It also puts a lot of burden on the government financially. We need to prepare strategies with a special focus on genetics
Dr. Ghazi Omar Tadmouri, Assistant Director of CAGS

The genetic research institute found that around 63 percent of the genetic conditions found in Arabs, who often practice marriage between relatives, were related to consanguinity and warned the numbers were likely to rise as more research is conducted and more disorders discovered.

In the United Arab Emirates, a country with the fifth highest rate of inter-family marriages, there are currently more than 250 types of genetic diseases, the second highest after neighboring Oman.

“Prevalence of genetic diseases is very high in the UAE compared to the rest of the world, so it is a major concern. It also puts a lot of burden on the government financially. We need to prepare strategies with a special focus on genetics,” Dr. Ghazi Omar Tadmouri, assistant director of CAGS, said in a statement.

CAGS has so far completed studies in the UAE, Oman and Bahrain and plans to continue extensive research throughout the Arab world.

	The chance of genetic diseases increases with each consanguine marriage between defective gene carriers. A genetic pool with a long history of such marriages would indeed bread very interesting results
Dr. Anain Yvorra

Epidemic levels

Reports have found that several genomic diseases such as the blood disorder thalassaemia, diabetes, breast cancer and Down’s syndrome have reached epidemic levels, more than 100 cases per 100,000, in the three Gulf countries researched so far.

Ghazi said building the database was important as “it gives us a bird’s-eye view of each country on genetic diseases. Some are epidemic and some very rare,” he told the UAE paper The National.

Dr. Anain Yvorra, general director of France’s Eurobiomed, organizer of this year’s Montpellier conference on rare genetic diseases, told Al Arabiya the research done by CAGS would be of great interest to the field of genomic studies.

“The chance of genetic diseases increases with each consanguine marriage between defective gene carriers. A genetic pool with a long history of such marriages would indeed bread very interesting results.”

He noted however that although most of the diseases recognized by CAGS as epidemics in the UAE, Oman and Bahrain, are genetically related, breast cancer could also have many other triggers.

“Breast cancer could be environmental or emotional as well as genetic.”

The center funded by the Sheikh Hamadan Award for medical sciences states on its website that its vision is “to alleviate human suffering from genetic diseases in the Arab World.”