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By Akbar E Torbat

Iran’s Parliamentary elections is scheduled to be held on March 1, 2024. The elections will be for the twelfth term of the 290 seats of the Islamic Consultative Majles (House of Representatives). The elections for the Assembly of Leadership Experts, which is an entirely clerical body, will also be held at the same time.

Following the election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, the deterioration of the economic situation, and the emergence of protests in Iran in 2017, many people refrained from participating in the elections due to the disappointment of reforms and the lack of improvement in economic conditions. After the death of Mahsa Amini in the autumn of 2022, opposition to the regime intensified due to nationwide protests over women’s rights to oppose the enforcement of hijab law. The crackdown of the protestors resulted in hundreds of deaths and many injuries, and several thousands were arrested by security forces.

Despite the US sanctions, Iran’s economy has recently thrived thanks to increasing oil revenues, but skyrocketing inflation has deteriorated the standard of living and increased dissatisfaction among the Iranians. Yet, due to the tragic war of genocide in the Gaza Strip by Israel, the Islamic fundamentalists have gained support in Iran, and that may contribute to their victory in the elections. The genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s complicity in the war by providing money and weapons to Israel and even directly participating in the war by bombing the “Islamic Resistance Front” forces in the area have strengthened the fundamentalists’ position who oppose relations with the West.

Moreover, Islamic fundamentalists, via their influence in the Guardian Council, have engineered the election by pre-selecting their favorite candidates and have rejected many candidates from other parties. The Guardian Council has declared most reformist and moderate applicants ineligible to participate in the election. That has improved the chance of the candidates from the fundamentalist camp winning in the election. In Iran, theocracy has priority over democracy. Instead of people choosing qualified candidates, the 12-member clerics and Islamist jurists in the Guardian Council choose them. This is a gross violation of democratic principles. As a result, the outcome is a number of candidates that people do not have confidence in and are not qualified to represent the people.

This is the first time that candidates had to pre-register because of a new law that was passed in 2023. The Majles approved the law for the parliamentary elections, which specified a week duration for the applicants to pre-register. Some 48,847 applicants pre-registered to participate as candidates in the elections. The time for checking the candidates’ qualifications was November 4-18, 2023. On November 19, the examination of the applicants’ qualifications was completed. Then, 21,000 of them were approved by the Interior Ministry. Finally, on February 8, 2024, the Guardian Council announced that 14,912 applicants had been selected for the parliamentary elections; about 1,700 were female. The chosen candidates were primarily from factions that have fundamentalist tendencies. Twenty-six members of the current Parliament were disqualified. Among them were representatives who had opposed “hejab and chastity” law and/or “filtering of the Internet.” The disqualification of the critics of the government received widespread reactions in the Iranian media. Many called this issue a continuation of the fundamentalists’ domination over all organs of the government.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, is trying to create legitimacy for itself by maneuvering this show election. The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, has declared that elections are a duty, and anyone who opposes the elections has opposed the Islamic Republic and Islam. Khamenei wants the electors to participate in the elections as a duty and fulfill the regime’s show election without having an intended candidate to vote for. Candidacies are given to individuals who believe in the absolute rule of the Guardianship of Islamic Jurist (Valiant-e Faghih), and their loyalty to the regime has been proven, and/or those who do not cause a serious threat to the clerical rule. Nonetheless, Khamenei is under pressure to free some of his opponents to encourage participation in the elections.

The government claims that many applicants have been approved to participate. However, the qualifications of the candidates are the most important matter, not the quantity of participants. Many highly qualified applicants who do not agree with the system do not participate, or if they participate, they will be rejected outright under such restrictive theocratic procedure. The applicants who oppose the clerical rule are disqualified to run.

At present, there is no popular political party in Iran that is supported by the secular political factions. Most of the parties have been organized by the Islamists in the regime or the former officials of the regime. Islamic Coalition Party has invited people to vote. This fundamentalist party favors economic liberalism. It represents the “religious bazaars” stratum within the political factions in Iran. Among the main political factions, the fundamentalists (Principalists) pursue their electoral activity in the form of two main alliance lists: the Coalition Council and the Unity Council. The Coalition Council (Shoraye Eatelaf) is a fundamentalist alliance that was formed by the Islamic Revolution Forces Front in 2016. Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adal, a former speaker of the Parliament, is the head of this council. The Unity Council (Shoraye Vahdat) is another alliance of the fundamentalists that has actively entered the parliamentary elections. Manouchehr Mottaki, a former foreign minister, is the spokesman for the unity council. The Unity Council is critical of the performance of the current 11th Parliament. Both alliances emphasize the need for unity in this election, but in practice, they run for elections independently.

In the reformist’s camp, the Iran Reform Front organization, a coalition of a few reformist parties, is planning to enter the elections.[1]  Other parties have abandoned the regime’s elections. All leftists, nationalists, and major secular parties are currently banned. In the absence of the parties that are banned or have boycotted the elections, the elections will be turned into an internal competition between different spectrums of fundamentalist factions.

The Assembly of Experts Elections

The sixth term election of the Assembly of LeadershipExperts will also be held on March 1 to select new members to serve eight years. The Assembly is composed of 88 Islamic clerics who are responsible for supervising the Supreme Leader and selecting a new leader. This body only meets two times each year. The public directly elects its members from a list of candidates vetted by the Guardian Council. However, the Assembly of Experts’ election is not an actual election since, in some parts of the country, only one candidate is running, which makes it a selection rather than an election. Among notable candidates in this body were former president Hassan Rouhani and his former intelligence Minister, Mahmoud Alavi, who are current members, but the Guardian Council rejected their candidacies. Rouhani was rejected as a candidate for the clerical Assembly presumably because of his disastrous concession with Western powers over the 2015 Nuclear deal (JCPOA). President Ebrahim Raisi, who is currently a member of the Assembly of Experts, is expected to run for re-election in Tehran. The Assembly expects to select the future Supreme Leader.

Despite authorities’ efforts to mobilize the public to vote, low turnout is expected in the elections compared to the prior elections. Iranians express deep frustration because of the lack of freedom and the deterioration of the standard of living.

Akbar E. Torbat (atorbat@calstatela.edu) is the author of “Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran,” Palgrave Macmillan, (2020), https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030337650 .

11 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

On the start of the fifth month of the war on Gaza, Israel is nowhere near to controlling the 365-kilometer Strip. While its army previously thought it would dominate the strip in a matter of weeks, today it is still fighting in what is being termed as the Gaza quagmire of defeat, bloodiness and mass loss in human lives and armory.

While it is true, they wreaked merciless havoc on the enclave and displaced up to 1.9 million of a population of 2.3 million, the majority of which were ordered to go south to Rafah, the Israelis, with their guns, planes, tanks, bulldozers and troop carriers, have not as they claimed subdued Gaza.

While the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the Israel army dominated the northern part of Gaza and dismantled the Hamas infrastructure, it soon became clear this was completely untrue with news of fighting and skirmishes dominating the headlines.

The Palestinian resistance, of mainly Hamas’s Izz Aldin Al Qassam and Saraya Al Qodus of Islamic Jihad, are still going strong in Gaza by the admission of the Israelis and the Americans with Washington talking openly about the formidable force being put up, despite the armor of the Israelis that is mostly US-made.

Bloody conflict

This is proving to be a difficult bloody conflict for the Israelis despite their carefully planned war strategy that was laid out and carefully planned in tandem with the 2000 American “advisors” sent to Tel Aviv soon after 7 October. This war strategy involved striking Gaza’s infrastructure from the air, sea and ground troop forces by splitting the region into north, middle and southern sectors.

It was supposed to have operated on a step-by-step basis – completing one step, ie, the north, combing it from Palestinian fighters, going to the middle, and then south to Rafah, the border town with Egypt. The problem today is the Israeli army and warplanes are fighting on all directions and more/or less at the same time.

They have not been able to control areas and/or sectors despite the heavy bombings. What they so far achieved, minus the ending of the military presence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is to kill Palestinians, most of whom are civilians, destroy their homes, and apartment buildings and turn them into internal refugees.

The Israeli strategy since the beginning was to force the Palestinian population to start moving from the north, to the center and the south of the country. They were forced to do that by missiles but even here, they didn’t succeed for around 700,000 people still remain in the north of the Strip, right to down to the center of Gaza City and just below the refugee camps of Breij, Maghazi, Nuseirat down Khan Younis and its surrounding areas.

Israeli ground forces didn’t manage to enter Khan Younis because of stiff resistance despite the destruction and debris meted out from the air. They have been battling to enter the city for over two months but have not been able to despite the thousands of troops and tanks allocated for the task. In the end, many of the Israeli battalions and brigades had to draw back to the periphery of the Gaza Strip because of the huge loses in their ranks and which they wouldn’t divulge but carefully controlling their words.

Instead of uniting the Israeli political establishment, the war on Gaza added to their frustration and internal bickering. First, the relatives of the hostages taken by Hamas after 7 October, kept hounding the politicians for a ceasefire. They wanted their relatives to be brought out alive especially with news some of these hostages were being killed because of mass bombings by the Israeli force.

This lead also to bickering in the Israeli war cabinet about the conduct of the war that was personally led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, there was the main Israeli cabinet who met to consider with many problems coming out from that direction. There was frustration in the war cabinet about how Netanyahu conducted himself vis-à-vis Defense Minister Gallant and the army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi whose soldiers were on the battlefield getting killed.

There was also a sense of paranoia as Netanyahu installed strict searching procedures of the war cabinet members themselves which created animosity. But then there was their conducted of the war which was strictly monitored by the larger Israeli cabinet, most of whom calling for the ethnic cleaning of Palestinians, reoccupation of Gaza, and the deportation of the people who came to Rafah into neighboring Egypt, into to the Sinai Peninsula.

The idea of deportation of Palestinians has long been seen as a dream of the extreme rightwing member of the Netanyahu cabinet, people like Itamar Bin Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who saw this a valuable opportunity.

Rafah, where to next?

Is this the end of the road for the displaced Palestinians. Can they be deported under the eyes of the world and to where?

Rafah used to be a city with a population of 280,000. Today, its population quickly jumped to 1.3 million thanks to the Israelis coming to be called “tent city” because of the shabby material hoisted to house the displaced.

Everyone fears for their fate. After all, it is Israeli warplanes which forced them to move down here. The next logical step, unless they are stopped, is to tip them into the Sinai Peninsula, another wave of refugees, this time much worse than the 1948 debacle when Israel was created.

Will the Israelis do that under intense international pressure? There are two countries that can stop them: America and the Egypt. The Americans have long said they are against deportations and they want the creation of a Palestinian state.

But the problem is their opinions and statements have been interpreted as lifeless with no punch, after all they have been Israel’s main military suppliers in this war and their words don’t seem to carry much weight by Netanyahu and Gallant who are more interested in defeating Hamas and getting rid of the Palestinians.

Lastly, it might be up to Egypt to stand strong. It has already said it is against any attempt to change the demographics of the area. In a way, it still controls the entry key to crossing the border and can put its foot down. The problem here, the crossing continues to be under the watchful eye of the Israelis who keep bombing it if they see anything not according to their taste. They have already bombed it four times.

This time, together with the United Nations, the White House and the Egyptians will need to impose an enormous amount to pressure to force the Israelis to backdown.

We wait and see!

Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman, Jordan.

10 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Israel’s attack on Rafah would be a “massive operation,” Netanyahu’s office said.

Given that Israel has ordered the people of Gaza to evacuate effectively all other areas of the region, the clear implication is that the population will be expelled into the Sinai Desert, with or without the permission of Egypt.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian Permanent Observer to the UN, said Friday that “if the Israeli army … begins the so-called evacuating [of] the people from Rafah, where would they go?

“They’re saying they’re not allowing them to go to the north. They don’t want them to stay in Rafah—it doesn’t require a nuclear physicist to come to the conclusion that there is only one place for them to go, which is the Sinai Peninsula.”

In October, Israel ordered over one million people in northern Gaza to the south, calling it a “safe zone” and assuring them that they would not be bombed there. Then, in November, Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the city of Khan Younis, forcing civilians in the area to flee south to Rafah. One after another, each of these “safe areas” have been bombed and then attacked by ground troops.

As a result, approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people—are internally displaced, with the majority of those sheltering in Rafah. The trapped refugees are facing famine and lack access to clean water, hygiene and medical care.

In a statement, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, stated, “We would not in any way support forced displacement, which goes against international law.” This statement effectively declares that the Netanyahu government has expressed intent to carry out ethnic cleansing.

The determination of the Netanyahu government to carry out the forced expulsions of the Palestinians from Rafah has produced hypocritical statements from the imperialist backers of the Israeli genocide. US President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters, said that Netanyahu’s “conduct of the response in Gaza in the Gaza Strip has been over the top.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell stated, “Reports of an Israeli military offensive on Rafah are alarming. … It would have catastrophic consequences, worsening the already dire humanitarian situation and the unbearable civilian toll.”

Regardless of such statements, the United States and European imperialist powers have systematically enabled Israel to carry out the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, with the United States repeatedly declaring that there are no “red lines” for the number of Palestinians allowed to be killed.

Reuters reported Friday that Egypt has massively expanded the number of military personnel stationed on its borders with Gaza, deploying 40 tanks and armored personnel carriers to the area over the past two weeks.

Ahead of the expected ground offensive, Israeli forces intensified their aerial bombardment of the city.

“There is a sense of growing anxiety, growing panic in Rafah,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UNRWA agency, said Friday, adding, “People have no idea where to go.”

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said Friday that 27,947 Palestinians have been killed over the past three months, with thousands more unaccounted for. Between the afternoons of February 8 and 9, 107 Palestinians in Gaza were killed, the ministry said.

Even as Israel presses its assault on Gaza, it is systematically destroying buildings throughout the Gaza Strip, targeting in particular all structures that are near the Israeli border.

In a statement Friday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk declared, “Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are reportedly destroying all buildings within the Gaza Strip that are within a kilometre of the Israel-Gaza fence, clearing the area with the objective of creating a ‘buffer zone.’ Destructions carried out to create a ‘buffer zone’ for general security purposes do not appear consistent with the narrow ‘military operations’ exception set out in international humanitarian law. Since late October 2023, my Office has recorded widespread destruction and demolition by the IDF of civilian and other infrastructure, including residential buildings, schools, and universities in areas in which fighting is not or no longer taking place.”

The statement added, “Israel has not provided cogent reasons for such extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure.

“Such destruction of homes and other essential civilian infrastructure also entrenches the displacement of communities that were living in these areas prior to the escalation in hostilities and appears to be aimed at or has the effect of rendering the return of civilians to these areas impossible. I remind the authorities that forcible transfer of civilians may constitute a war crime.”

But this is precisely the plan of the Israeli government, operating with the full military and logistical support of the Biden administration and the European governments. Having seized upon the October 7 attacks as a pretext, Israel has moved to implement a long-term plan to render Gaza uninhabitable and either kill or expel its population. The assault on Rafah will mark a new stage in this vast crime.

10 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

On February 7, 2024, a U.S. drone strike assassinated an Iraqi militia leader, Abu Baqir al-Saadi, in the heart of Baghdad. This was a further U.S. escalation in a major new front in the U.S.-Israeli war on the Middle East, centered on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but already also including ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and the U.S. and U.K.’s bombing of Yemen.

This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.

At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.

What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.

When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.”

The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.

The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.

A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases.

Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.”

Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.

From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.”

Three days later, Guerin would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared.

But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.

Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.

Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.

Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”

After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.

The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.

While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

9 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.

In the abandoned town of Maya Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattering strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count.  They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

9 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is citizen journalist Bissan for Gaza speaking on the horridness of war (loosely used because it’s more like ethnic cleansing) perpetrated by the Israelis on the enclave that seems to be stretching for months on end.  What follows is an edited version of what she said in a video clip.

“A man from Gaza City was going to out bring some food to his family using his bicycle – this is because there is no food, no transport, no markets, there is nothing in the north of the Gaza Strip,” Bissan talks to the camera.

“As he was searching for food he was killed, shot in the back by an Israeli sniper! So, instead of bringing some food, he became food for the strays, for the hungry cats roaming the streets of the city as elsewhere in the enclave.

And like hundreds he will be found as a human skeleton whose body decomposed after weeks of laying in the streets of Gaza that has already been torn apart by the relentless Israeli bombs and missiles.”

Bissan says “Gaza city for those who don’t know, and especially in the last five, years became the city of lights for us and its still – by the way, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the whole area, not only in the Gaza Strip, what I mean is that Gaza city was beautiful on the level of Palestinian cities.

But all this has changed now. Today, this city is full of people, starving and being killed in the streets.

I don’t how we can forget these unjust crimes. How can we deal with the terrible things we are living in now, how can this father’s children live with this pain. How can they deal with being without a father, that their father was killed because he was searching for food for them.

He represented all the other fathers that were killed in Gaza and his children represent all the other children that were also murdered in my once beautiful city, still is to my mind.

There are so many questions about these fathers, about these children, there is a sense of cold alienation. We will now never know the name of the father or his children nor of the other fathers and their siblings and of the many still under the wreckage and rubble, laying as decomposed skeletons.

So yes, the crimes continue with new sufferings persisting.

Thanks world on day 121 of the slaughter.”

Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

8 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

It seemed strange, if not out of context, when Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore”.

Feiglin’s comments were made on October 25, less than three weeks following the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Flood operation and the genocidal Israeli war which followed.

The former Knesset member who, in 2012, challenged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the leadership of the Likud party, proposed, in the same interview that, in order for the Muslims’ fear to be restored, the Israeli military has to turn “Gaza to ashes immediately”.

Feiglin perceives Gaza as something much larger than the 365 km² of land mass. He understood, rightly, that the war is not just about firepower but perceptions, and not only those of Gazans, Palestinians and Arabs, but all Muslims, as well.

The events of October 7 have exposed Israel as an essentially weak and vulnerable state, thus conveying the idea to Arabs, Muslims – in fact, the rest of the world – that the perceived power of Israel’s ‘invincible army’ is but an illusion.

Currently, the problem of perception is Israel’s greatest challenge. Feiglin has expressed this dichotomy in his usual far-right extremist language, but even the most ‘liberal’ of Israel’s leadership shares his anxiety.

When Israeli President Isaac Herzog, for example, declared on October 16 that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”, he was not only preparing his society and US-Western allies for one of the greatest acts of military revenge known in history. He, too, wanted to restore fear in the hearts of Israel’s perceived enemies.

In a more recent statement, on February 1, former Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon asserted, in an interview with Channel 12, that Palestinians will not be able to carry out another October 7-like attack.

Gillon’s comments could easily be mistaken for a rational military assessment. But this cannot be the case, simply because Israel has failed miserably to prevent the Al-Aqsa Flood operation in the first place.

Gillon was speaking of psychology. In his mind, the war on Gaza has always been a revenge war, one that aimed at extracting the very idea from the collective mind of Palestinians that they can stand up to Israel.

To understand the relationship between Israel’s existence and the power – or the perception of power – of its military, one must examine the early political discourse of Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology.

Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party is the direct heir of the right-wing, in fact fascist, ideology that was largely articulated by early Zionist thinker, Vladimir Jabotinsky. Though Jabotinsky’s politics is deeply nationalistic, his ideas ultimately branched into, or at least inspired, the ideological school of religious Zionism.

Unlike more liberal leaning Zionists of that era, Jabotinsky was straightforward regarding the Zionist intentions and ultimate objectives in Palestine.

“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question, either now or in the future,” he wrote in his book The Iron Wall in 1923, adding, “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf.”

For Jabotinsky, it all came down to this maxim: “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force”. Since then, Israel continues to invest in building ‘iron walls’, real or imagined.

In fact, Jabotinsky’s iron wall was a symbolic one. His was an impenetrable fortress of military power, cemented through violence, the relentless subjugation of the natives, which is designed for the purpose of their expulsion.

The fact that Israeli ministers and other leading politicians quickly began advancing plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza immediately after October 7, indicates that Zionism has never abandoned those early ideas. Indeed, the genocidal language in Israel is older than the state itself.

But, if Jabotinsky was still alive, he would be utterly ashamed of his descendants, who allowed their personal interests to trump their vigilance in keeping the Palestinians caged in, crushed by an ever-expanding iron wall. Instead, the wall has been breached, physically, on October 7, and psychologically, ever since. While physical damage can be easily repaired, psychological damage is hard to fix.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a desperate Israeli attempt at raising the costs for Palestinian resistance, so it may reach the future conclusion that resistance is, indeed, futile. This is unlikely to work.

But can Israel re-implant the fear in the collective heart of the Palestinian people? And why is such a fear a prerequisite for Israel’s survival?

Peace “will only be achieved when the hope of the Arabs to establish an Arab state on the ruins of the Jewish state is dashed,” Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich tweeted on February 1.

Even though the ‘Arabs’ are not calling for the destruction of anyone, Smotrich believes that the very idea of a Palestinian state will automatically lead to the destruction of the Zionist fantasy of racial purity.

Note how the Israeli politician did not speak of the Arab political discourse but rather of Arab ‘hope’. It is a different way of saying that the problem is the collective perception of Palestinians and Arabs that justice in Palestine is possible.

Again, this notion has nothing to do with October 7. In fact, three months before the war, precisely on July 1, Netanyahu was even more blunt in his description of the same idea, when he said that Palestinian hopes of establishing a sovereign state “must be crushed”.

This ‘crushing’ has been underway in Gaza and the West Bank for several months now.

This time around, Israel is adopting an even more extreme version of Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ strategy because Israel’s ruling classes truly believe, in the words of Netanyahu, that “Israel is in the midst of a fight for (its) existence”.

By existence, Netanyahu is referencing Israel’s ability to maintain its status of Jewish racist supremacist, settler-colonial expansion and monopoly over violence. Israel calls this deterrence. Many countries and legal experts around the world refer to it as genocide.

In truth, even this genocide will hardly change the new perception that Palestinians have the kind of agency that will allow them, not only to fight back but, ultimately, win.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

7 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The daily killings continue in Gaza with graphic images, despite odd talk of peace and ceasefire. Numbers seem useless but we have to go on! In a statement, the Gaza Ministry of Health states that Israeli warplanes committed 12 massacres in the past 24 hours, killing 107 citizens and wounding 143 others.

It added thousands of casualties remain in the streets and under the rubble as Israel continues to prevent anyone from reaching them.

Until there is a ceasefire, this is to be the fate of the Gaza Palestinians, killing, injury, destruction of houses, starvation and lock-up.

Meanwhile the bombardment of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip continues. The Israeli air force have long been telling civilians to continue to move south to Rafah, the border city with Egypt.

One journalist, Ibtisam Mahdi, explains what it means to continue to move from one place to another, and how Israeli soldiers treat the displaced in an ugly, horrible manner. After all, the soldiers hold the guns and it’s easy to be brave against the vulnerable.

She tells of a tale when she had to argue to the soldier about the fact, she would be rather shot than leave her children behind or of the young man ordered to strip naked and cross the cold water.

Throughout the war, the Israelis continued to tell people to move to Rafah with historical similarities related to World War II. The city previously had a population of 200,000 which has today swollen to 1.3 million. No one exactly knows just where are they supposed to go from here.

Today, Gaza experiences painful scenes of misery and destructions. Videoclips show a tragedy that is never ending with some in hysteria because of the continuing deaths of members of their family who have been killed in scores at a time.

But Palestinians in this war have tended to display resilience. Despite the bombs literally falling on their heads and homes destroyed in an incredible way, they say “we are not leaving”. They have been video clips of them returning to their bombed-out houses and attempting to build and stay on their wrecked homes.

There is also heartache and fear. This war has not been against Hamas as Israel claims as the fighters and leaders of the Islamic organization are nowhere near to being destroyed.

Hamas members are not embedded in the population. They are in deep underground tunnels and only appear to fight Israeli soldiers and are beating the mighty Israelis, destroying their tanks, armor and falling men.

They are still fighting strongly by the admission of the Israelis and the Americans and are likely to do so for a long time with many saying “you can’t beat them.”

The Israeli army have put themselves in an embarrassingly position. They are not the “moral” army as they claim to be because they have simply been dropping bombs on mostly women and children.

These victims include toddlers and babies who are helpless. They live in a state of fear with horrific images being seen all over the world despite the attempt at censorship thanks to the social media.

Literally whole cities, towns, villages, communities have been destroyed in Gaza.

Images of mayhem and destruction have been graphic with magnification added, showing the extent of Israeli vengeance. It would be wrong to talk about one city destroyed for there has been so many over the past months. This reflects the magnanimity of the Israeli destruction and firepower.

https://t.me/hamza20300/210700

And then there is the willful destruction of schools and the pupils. The Gaza Ministry of Education said Israel bombed 400 schools during this war on the Strip and killed 4895 students. This may not be too surprising since this war has been mainly against women and children with the fact many of these schools are run by UNRWA and used as refuge centers for that 1.9 million that were displaced in this war.

And then there was the videoclip of the youth who was shot at in the face while he was filming one of the destroyed neighborhoods of Gaza. He was filmed right at the time when an Israeli sniper fired at him point blank and when he was saying ‘we thank God of the blessings we are in.”

Israeli paranoia

Israelis today are in a state of paranoia. From its top politicians – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, army chief Herzi Halevi to the people-in-the street.

According to the British medical journal, The Lancet, the Israeli population are in a state of national psychological shock and deep depression – a situation that started on 7 October when Hamas operatives invaded the so-called Gaza enveloped and killed 1200 Israelis and took to the enclave about 250 hostages.

Different manifestations are appearing among Israeli soldiers with the most glaring is the fact – and according to their defense and army institutions – is the thousands in need of psychological help in their hospitals. This is being reported all the time, across the media especially by Jewish newspapers.

Interesting are three facts: Soldiers, more and more are shooting at would you believe it, sheep, 31 percent of the wives of reservist soldiers are calling for a divorce and more and more Jews are leaving Israel to elsewhere in the world. In just one day, 30,000 Israelis flew out of Ben Gurion airport.

Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman, Jordan.

7 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Israel has begun an assault on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where over one million people are seeking shelter, unable to go anywhere safe.

Footage published by AFP showed widespread strikes throughout the city on the Egyptian border Tuesday. Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pledged: “We are achieving our missions in Khan Younis, and we will also reach Rafah and eliminate terror elements that threaten us.”

On Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) spokesperson Jens Laerke warned that the assault on Rafah could constitute a war crime. “Intensified hostilities in Rafah in this situation could lead to large-scale loss of civilian lives, and we must do everything possible within our power to avoid that,” he stated.

“We, as the UN and member states of the UN, can bear witness,” Laerke said. “We can make clear what the law says: under international humanitarian law, indiscriminate bombing of densely populated areas may amount to war crimes.”

As Israel continued its push into Rafah, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel Tuesday, in his fifth visit to Israel in the past three months. As part of his visit to the region, Blinken met with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, with the aim of “normalizing” relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The United States is fully complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In the face of clear evidence of systematic war crimes and openly genocidal rhetoric by Israeli officials, Blinken and other US officials have declared their unlimited support for “Israel’s right to defend itself” and have insisted that there are “no red lines” for the number of civilians Israel will be allowed to kill.

Approximately half of Gaza’s population has been forced into the city of Rafah, causing its population to swell. “Refugees facing acute shortages of food, water, shelter, and medicine are still pouring into Rafah as fighting worsens nearby,” UN News reported.

Between February 5 and 6, 107 Palestinians were killed, with 143 injured by Israeli attacks, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Since October 7, Israel has killed 35,096 Palestinians in Gaza, a number that includes 13,642 children and 7,656 women, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The vast majority of those killed are civilians, with 30,571 non-combatants having lost their lives. A further 67,240 people are reported to have been injured.

An estimated 2 million Palestinians have been displaced. Israel has destroyed 79,200 homes and damaged another 207,000, rendering the vast majority of the population homeless, even if they were allowed to return to their shattered homes.

The healthcare system in Gaza also has been devastated, with 309 healthcare professionals killed and 380 injured. Some 235 healthcare facilities, including 26 hospitals and 63 clinics, have been destroyed or damaged, along with 146 ambulances.

In a statement, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said “84 percent of health facilities in Gaza have been affected by attacks.” The agency added that only four of its 22 facilities in Gaza remain operational, amid relentless attacks targeting humanitarian workers by Israeli forces.

In a report published Tuesday, the Euro-Med monitor revealed widespread “forced nudity, sexual harassment, and threats of sexual torture” of detainees by Israeli forces.

The organization reported that “testimonies from a group of recently released detainees who spent varying lengths of time in Israeli jails and detention centers … confirmed that they were subjected to severe beatings, dog attacks, strip searches, and denial of food and bathroom access, among other cruel practices that amount to torture.”

The report continued: “The most concerning testimonies that Euro-Med Monitor received concern female detainees who were directly sexually harassed. The female detainees, who preferred to remain unidentified due to safety concerns, said that Israeli soldiers had harassed them by touching their genitals as well as making them remove their headscarves.”

Euro-Med “confirmed that the soldiers forced the female detainees and their families into providing information about others by threatening to indecently assault and even rape them.”

On Monday, a New York Times investigation compiled social media videos of Israeli forces filming themselves destroying civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

According to the Times, the videos “capture soldiers vandalizing local shops and school classrooms, making derogatory comments about Palestinians, bulldozing what appear to be civilian areas and calling for the building of Israeli settlements in Gaza, an inflammatory idea that is promoted by some far-right Israeli politicians.”

The UN warned that attacks on hospitals are continuing and intensifying. “For over two weeks, heavy fighting continues to be reported near Nasser and Al Amal hospitals in Khan Younis, jeopardizing the safety of medical staff, the wounded and the sick, as well as thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) seeking refuge at both hospitals.”

On February 6, the UN continued, the Ministry of Health in Gaza announced that Israeli forces have intensified their siege of Nasser Hospital, endangering the lives of 300 medical personnel, 450 wounded, and some 10,000 displaced people seeking shelter in the hospital compound.

Meanwhile, hunger is soaring throughout Gaza. According to the UN, screenings of 3,500 children aged 6 months to 59 months found that nearly 10 percent were facing acute malnutrition, a 12-fold increase since the start of Israel’s offensive. In northern Gaza, the figures are even higher, with 15 percent of children reporting severe malnutrition.

Even as the death toll from the Gaza genocide mounts, further questions are being raised about the role of Israeli forces in the killing of Israeli citizens.

On Tuesday, Haaretz reported that the Israeli military has opened an investigation into the deaths of 12 hostages in a house in Kibbutz Be’eri who were killed as a result of shelling by Israeli forces in the initial invasion by Hamas on October 7.

Haaretz reported on “suspicions that Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the commander of the army’s 99th Division who led the fighting in the kibbutz, ordered a tank crew to fire on Cohen’s house even though he knew hostages were being held there.”

7 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Abdulrahim P. Vijapur

Introduction

The Islamic concept of human rights contains numerous moral exhortations. Helping orphans, widows, wayfarers and the poor has been greatly stressed by the holy Quran and Sunnah (Prophetic traditions) which not only helps people overcome their economic problems but also inculcates a kind of fellow feeling among them. Its many injunctions have gone a long way in ameliorating human suffering and creating human rights obligations.

Muslim scholars also contend that the concept of human rights can be traced back to Quranic texts and prophetic traditions. Sultan H. Tabandeh, an Iranian Sufi scholar, writes that contemporary human rights doctrines merely give recognition to 1500 years old Islamic principles. In fact, these principles/doctrines existed in a better and more perfect form in Islam than in any document ever enacted by lawgivers. To him “Islam is a summit and nothing excels it”. Maulana Mawdudi also argues that “Islam has laid down universal fundamental rights for humanity as a whole which are to be observed and respected under all circumstances… fundamental rights for every man by virtue of his status as a human being”. The Sharia embodies the basic concepts and principles of human rights. In this regard, it is pertinent to note a comment made in 1927 by a Western scholar, Count Leon Ostrorog, long before the advent of modern human rights doctrine. In a series of three lectures delivered at the University of London. on the Angora Reform, he observed:

Considered from the point of view of its logical structure, the system (Islamic law) is one of rare perfection, and to this day it commands the admiration of the student. Once … the revelation to the Prophet is admitted as postulate, it is difficult to find a flaw in the long series of deductions; so unimpeachable do they appear from the point of view of Formal Logic and of the rules of Arabic Grammar. If the contents of that logical fabric are examined, some theories command not only admiration but surprise. Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Califate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.

However, Orientalists criticize Islam saying that it does not establish complete equality of man and woman in many areas. For instance, the witness of two females is equivalent to one male witness. No doubt regarding testimony, the Quran enjoins (Chapter 2:282) that when one person lends money to another, two male witnesses should be taken but, if only one male witness is available, then two female witnesses should be taken in lieu of a second male witness. While interpreting this verse it may be noted that the real intent of the Quranic command to take two witnesses in the first place is to ensure the return of the loaned money, and that the stipulation of taking two witnesses may have been the best way possible, at that time to ensure the payment of the loan. Some modern Muslim Scholars have argued that the stipulation rests on the empirically verifiable fact that women in pre-Islamic Arabia generally had, relative to men, little experience of financial matters and likely to err in recalling the details of transactions.

Advanced Concept of Rights

Islam provides the most rational basis to ensure the primacy of the fundamental right to life, and to guarantee its protection. It prohibits female infanticide, a practice prevalent in Arabia and other parts of the world. By not strictly prescribing the death penalty for the crime of murder, an assassin can be pardoned by the victim’s family on receiving blood money (a kind of compensation). Islam introduced the principle of humane treatment of the individual 1500 years ago. This is a marked departure from the then prevailing Roman law which prescribed “an eye for an eye”. It may be recalled that only in the 20th century European nations have enacted laws abolishing the death penalty without any compensation to the family of the victim by the guilty. It may be noted that for many centuries under British and Scottish law, capital punishment was applicable to a variety of crimes, including, horse, sheep and cattle stealing, rape, house-breaking, stealing of letters by the staff of the Post Office, etc. In England, theft of property worth more than a shilling was classified as a felony and like every other felony, was punished with death, up to as late as 1861. In comparison to English law, the Muslim law prescribing cutting the hands of thieves appears less barbaric. Moreover, with the coming up of jails in modern times and the reinterpretation of Islamic penal law most Muslim states have discontinued the practice of cutting off the hands.

The Islamic concept of human rights was very advanced as it included an elaborate set of rights. Three points may be noted: (1) The Islamic concept of human dignity applied to all humans, irrespective of whether they were Muslims or not. Non-Muslim minorities had rights under Islamic law and directives, which no ruling majority could interfere with. (ii) women enjoyed inheritance and other rights much before the West could reform its laws on gender equality; (iii) the principles of universal brotherhood, equality and non-discrimination are significant bases of Islamic concept of rights. The farewell address of the Prophet Muhammad, which he delivered during his last pilgrimage, summarizes the Islamic precept. He said: “O men, truly your God is one God, and your father, too, is one; you are all born of Adam, and Adam is but dust. The noblest of you with Allah is the most dutiful. No man, whether he is an Arab or not and whatever his race and colour, is superior to any other man except in uprightness [Italics added].

Environment Rights

Another Islamic ethical norm prohibits the wasteful use of resources. Prophet Mohammad said that one must not waste water even if one is sitting by a stream, and one must take from the stream only as much water as needed. Islamic environmental law uses a “duty paradigm” in the sphere of the right to a healthy environment, as human beings must not destroy, deplete, or unwisely use natural resources but have an obligation to develop and enhance natural resources. In Islamic environmental law, the human is not the owner of nature, but a mere beneficiary. Islamic environmental safety is based upon the principle of “use” without “abuse”. Environmental protection under the Islamic legal scheme does not differ from any modern environmental legal system.

Humanitarian Law

The Islamic laws of war prohibit Muslim armies from cutting down fruit bearing trees in their path, which in fact amounts to a general rule that the beneficial resources of nature must be preserved. During war, the Muslim army is required to preserve natural vegetation, crops and livestock. This prohibition may be seen as an Islamic approach to environmental issues. Furthermore, these laws introduce many exemplary principles for ensuring that non-combatants like women, slaves, the old and sick, are spread as a target in armed conflicts. Moreover, it also introduced the principle of dignity and integrity of persons towards the enemy. There are many sayings by the Prophet forbidding the burning alive of enemy warriors. The Prophet one said; “No one is entitled to punish with fire except the one who created it, i.e., Allah”. He also prohibited the practice of giving enemy corpses in exchange for money. Giving burial for the bodies of the enemy was also ordered. Prisoners of war (POW) were released either in exchange for Muslim POWs or in exchange for ransom to be paid by the POW, or simply on his agreement that, if he is literate, he will teach some prescribed Muslim. These are some of the Muslim humanitarian laws.

Gender Justice and Empowerment of Women

With regard to gender equality Islamic precepts are worth commending. Marriage is made as a contract, which can be dissolved for reasons of incompatibility and other valid reasons and not on flimsy ground. Unlike in some other religions, it is not indissoluble. Women are given inheritance rights; their consent in marriage is essential.

Though there is no specific stipulation for women assuming leadership roles, the examples of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and Khalida Zia in Bangladesh becoming Prime Ministers of their respective countries are encouraging. It is gratifying to note that even in Iran a woman was recently appointed Vice President of the country. It is a different matter that the position of women in Muslim Society today is generally far short of fulfilling Islamic ideals. But the model of a true Islamic society does exist in Islamic history. It is in this context that we attempt in the following pages the Islamic notion of human rights.

Muslim Contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

No Muslim member state of the United Nations voted against the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as in their view human rights were not inconsistent with Sharia. Except Saudi Arabia (which abstained) the other five states (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan) voted in its favour besides playing a constructive role in its drafting.

A brief comparison of fundamental human rights enshrined in the holy Quran and Sunnah with the rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration will dispel the popularly held view that human rights are of western construct. The European Islamic Council (an NGO composed of eminent Muslim scholars, jurists, and representatives of Islamic movements and thought) adopted the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights on September 19, 1981. The Islamic Declaration has no inconsistency in general with the provisions of the Universal Declaration except on one or two issues related to freedom of religion and freedom of marriage (as Muslims are not allowed to renounce Islam and the Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men, although Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, especially from People of the Book – Jews, Christians or Hindus without converting them to Islam).

Rights and Duties in the Quran

A birds’ eye view of the recognition of the responsibilities and rights in the Holy Quran confirms the view that Islam provided an elaborate list of rights (for reasons of space references to Hadith have been omitted). These are as follows:

(i)    Protection/security of human life (Chapter 5: 32-35; 6:151; 4:30; 17:31; 18:9-10; 17:33; 4:93)

(ii)   Freedom from slavery or servitude: (humane treatment of slaves or granting freedom to them (Chapter 4:36 & 92; 2:177, 9:60; 24:33; 47:4).

(iii)     Right to justice (4:58-59 and 148; 5:42 & 49; 5: 8-9; 4:135; 16:90; 53:38).

(iv) Right of fair trial (2:229; 17:15).

(v)     Right to protection against abuse of power (33:58)

(vi)   Protection of honour and reputation; respect for the chastity of women (49:11-12; 24: 16-19; 7:32).

(vii)  Rights concerning emigrants and refugees (4:98, 101; 16: 42-43; 111; 22:59-60; 59:10; 9:6; 3:97; 2:125 and 22:25).

(viii)            Freedom of conscience and conviction (Freedom of Religion of religious minorities) (18:29; 10:99-100; 2:256; 109:6; 88:21 & 22; 5:48-59; 29:46).

(ix) Equality before law (49:10 & 13; 9:11).

(x) Right and obligation to participate in the conduct and management of public affairs (42:38;

24:55).

(xi) Economic rights (41:10; 51:19; 76:8; 2:188; 46:19; 53:39).

(xii) Status and dignity of workers (9:105; 46:19).

(xiii) Liberty of work (67:10).

(xiv) Protection of property (2:188).

(xv) Right to privacy (24:27-28, 58; 33:53).

(xvi) Right to found a family and related matters (4:1; 2:228; 30:21; 65:7; 17:24).

(xvii) Rights of married women (2:229 & 237; 2:187; 4:4, 12, 19-21; 24:33; 9:71; 7:189; 30:21; 65:6).

(xviii) Principle of racial equality (30:22; 49:13).

Of all the human rights Islam recognizes, religious liberty and tolerance stands out as the most prominent freedom. The Holy Quran pronounces that “there shall be no compulsion in faith”, (Quran, 2:257). “Proclaim: ‘It is the truth from your Lord’: wherefore let him who will, believe, and let him who will disbelieve”, (Quran, 18: 30). At another place, it pronounces that: “To each among you we have prescribed law and a path: And if God had enforced his will, he would have made you one nation or people. But his plan is to test you in what he hath given you”, (Quran, 5:48-59). “You have your own religion and I have mine”, (Quran, 109:6). These Quranic verses reveal two important principles. First, Islam cannot be propagated and preached through force. Second, God has sent messengers or prophets to every people and every nation, thereby firmly believing in religious pluralism.

The Arab Charter on Human Rights

It is gratifying to note that the Arab Charter on Human Rights was adopted by the League of Arab States in 1994. However, none of the member states had ratified the Charter. The Charter was later updated and led to the amended version by the Arab summit in Tunis in 2004. The 2004 version of the Charter came as part of an effort to modernize the League of Arab States. The Arab Charter on Human Rights entered into force on 16 March 2008. The treaty body established to supervise its implementation is the Arab Human Rights Committee.

According to its Preamble, the Charter is based on principles established by the Islamic Shari’a and the other divine religions enshrined in brotherhood and equality amongst human beings. It cherishes the humanitarian values and principles which [the Arab Nation] had established throughout its long history, having had a major role in spreading centres of knowledge between East and West, and made it the destination of people from all over the world and of those seeking knowledge, culture and wisdom. And the Arab World aiming to preserving its belief, having faith in its unity, struggling for its freedom, defending the right of nations to self-determination and to preserve their wealth, and believing in the Rule of Law and that mankind’s enjoyment of freedom, justice and equal opportunity is the hallmark of the profound essence of any society. It rejects racism and Zionism, both of which constitute a violation of human rights and a threat to world peace. It also recognizes the close link between human rights and world peace. It reaffirms the principles of the UN Charter, the UDHR, the provisions of the two International Covenants on Human Rights, and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.

To sum up, human rights in Islam exist only in relation to human obligations. Individuals possess certain obligations toward God, fellow humans and nature – it is a much broader concept of rights indeed!

Abdulrahim P. Vijapur is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Science and Technology Meghalaya.

6 February 2024

Source: countercurrents.org