[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 167 (Thursday, December 16, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2170-E2172]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BRIEFING ON ``SAUDI ARABIA: FUELING RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AND
EXTREMISM''
______
HON. TRENT FRANKS
of arizona
in the house of representatives
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Madam Speaker, I would like to submit the
following for the Record:
Remarks of Maria McFarland, Deputy Washington Director, Human Rights
Watch
In the last couple of years, Saudi King Abdullah has
received praise in some circles for having taken a few
cautious steps in support of religious tolerance through his
Interfaith Dialogue Initiative. But that initiative has been
limited to international settings.
Within Saudi Arabia, repression of religious freedom
continues unabated, particularly with respect to Shia
Muslims. Saudi textbooks, including those used abroad,
include material that promotes hostility toward the Shia
creed and other religions and may in some cases justify
violence. The right of non-Muslims to worship in private is
subject to the whims of the local religious police. Public
worship of faiths other than Islam remains prohibited as a
matter of policy.
Shia Saudis, who make up an estimated 10-15 percent of the
population, are the group most affected by repression of
religious freedom. Shia face systematic exclusion in
employment, as well as discrimination in religious education
and worship.
In some cases, this discrimination amounts to persecution.
Professing Shia beliefs in private or in public may lead to
arrest and detention. Saudi Shia visiting the holy shrines in
Mecca and Medina regularly face harassment by the Wahhabi
religious police. A government promise to update the vague
law outlining religious police jurisdiction and powers has
remained unfulfilled for three years.
In al-Ahsa' province, the governor, Prince Badr bin Jilawi,
has repeatedly had Shia citizens arrested and detained on his
authority and in violation of Saudi criminal procedure law
simply for praying together in private or publicly displaying
banners or slogans or wearing clothing associated with
certain Shia rituals. In late January or mid-February, six
young Shia of al-Ahsa', between 19 and 24 years old, were
detained on Prince Badr's orders because of their peaceful
exercise of their religious beliefs. As of mid-September,
they remained in detention without charge or trial despite a
limit of six months for pre-trial detention under the Saudi
criminal procedure code. The Saudi government has yet to take
meaningful steps to stop these abuses or bring to justice
those responsible.
Shia face officially sanctioned discrimination in the
judicial system too. There has been no progress in affording
Shia outside of the Eastern Province with courts for personal
status matters to conclude marriages and adjudicate divorces,
inheritances, child custody disputes, and such matters. This
affects the so-called Nakhawila, Twelver Shia in Medina, and
the Ismailis in Najran province as well as a small group of
Zaidi Muslims in Jizan and Najran provinces. There is no
separation of secular from religious law in Saudi courts, and
all Shia, including in the Eastern Province where they have
their own personal status courts, must follow Sunni law as
interpreted in Saudi Arabia. Shia are sometimes not allowed
to testify in court.
Saudi officials who engage in anti-Shia speech rarely face
any reprimand for doing so. For example, on December 31,
2009, Shaikh Muhammad al-`Arifi, the government-paid imam of
the Buradi mosque in Riyadh, as well as Salih bin Humaid,
Saudi chief judge, visited frontline troops in southern Saudi
Arabia fighting Yemeni Huthi rebels, who belong to a branch
of Shiism, albeit different from that of most Saudi Shia. Al-
`Arifi can be seen in photos wearing camouflage, firing
weapons, and preaching to soldiers. Press reports said al-
`Arifi stressed the necessity of jihad (holy war) and
commended the soldiers for performing their national and
religious duty. Upon returning to Riyadh, al-`Arifi, in a
sermon on Friday, January 1, 2010 condemned the Huthi rebels
and called Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani--an Iranian living in
Iraq, who is the highest religious authority for many Saudi
Shia-an ``obscene, irreligious atheist.''
Meanwhile, Saudi authorities have taken steps to silence
Shia critics. Saudi domestic intelligence agents have been
holding Munir al-Jassas, a Shia who criticized state
repression against the Shia online, in detention without
charge for over a year. On June 22, 2008, authorities
arrested Shia cleric Shaikh Tawfiq al-`Amir, after he spoke
out in a sermon against a May 30 statement signed by 22
prominent Saudi Wahhabi clerics, in which they called the
``Shia sect an evil among the sects of the Islamic nation,
and the greatest enemy and deceivers of the Sunni people.''
Of the 22 signatories, II were current government officials
and 6 were former government officials.
In its annual reports on religious freedom on Saudi Arabia,
the United States Department of State has consistently and
accurately documented severe repression of religious freedom
and systematic violations against certain groups, including
especially the Shia. Yet, while the United States has for
years designated Saudi Arabia as a Country of Particular
Concern, it has failed to take meaningful steps to promote
reform in Saudi Arabia. The United States has continually
waived sanctions provided under the law, and aside from
issuing the annual report, has remained mostly silent in
public on the subject.
The United States has also applauded King Abdullah's
Interfaith Dialogue Initiative (IDI) as evidence of greater
promotion of religious tolerance. Cynical observers would see
the IDI as a promotional tour of Western countries designed
to soften Saudi Arabia's image of an exporter of religious
hatred. Uncritical supporters of the initiative claim it as
evidence that the kingdom is opening up.
Whatever its motivation, the fact remains that this
initiative abroad has had no policy repercussions at home.
Saudis recognize domestic state-controlled media reporting on
the IDI as an official campaign, and it only serves to
highlight the stark contrasts between ideals upheld abroad
and the harsh reality of repression at home. If the United
States is serious about promoting religious tolerance in
Saudi Arabia, it cannot remain content to publish a report
once a year about religious repression or to praise Saudi
Arabia for symbolic commitments to religious tolerance.
Instead, it must take a clear, public stance on Saudi
Arabia's systematic repression of religion and press the
Saudi government to undertake effective institutional reforms
to end discrimination and repression on the basis of religion
in that country.
Remarks of Mansour Al-Hadj, Editor, Aafaq
At the outset, I would like to say that my paper is based
on my personal experience as someone who was born and grew up
in Saudi Arabia, and has always been concerned about Saudi
Arabia--since it's my homeland and also since I have been
monitoring the Saudi media closely for the last four years as
co-founder of the liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq, of
which I am currently editor-in-chief.
There is great conflict and tension between liberals and
conservatives in Saudi Arabia--but it is unfortunately a fake
war, because both sides are working for the government--that
is, the House of Saud. Both the liberals--who are actively
writing articles for government-owned newspapers or appearing
on government-owned TV channels--and the conservatives--who
are active in mosques and on websites and who are also
appearing on government-owned TV channels--are well aware of
their limits and of the red lines that they must not cross.
The one red line that neither conservatives nor liberals
dare to cross is talking or writing anything about political
reform or the rights of religious minorities. Those who
refuse to follow these limits are banned from writing in
Saudi newspapers, and many of them are imprisoned and/or
prohibited from leaving the country.
Saudi liberals are very hesitant to question the illegal
arrest and persecution of reformers. One such case, that went
completely unreported in Saudi Arabia, is that of Hadi Al-
Mutif, an Ismai'i Shi'ite who has been imprisoned since 1993,
serving what is by now the longest prison sentence ever in
Saudi Arabia for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Also, not a
single Saudi newspaper reported on the arrest of Mokhlif Al-
Shammari, a Saudi human rights activist accused of annoying
others for posting online articles criticizing radical
sheikhs who call for the eradication of the Shi'ites.
Saudi liberals have never advocated for the reformers who
openly demand political and constitutional reform--such as
Ali Aldumaini, Matrook Al-Faleh, and Abdallah Al-Hamid, who
are officially banned from writing in Saudi newspapers and
from traveling outside the country. The liberals do not dare
to question the brutal punishments of beheading, amputation
and flogging carried out by the Saudi authorities. They avoid
writing about the plight of the Shi'a minorities whose
mosques are repeatedly shut down and whose imams are arrested
for conducting prayers in their homes. They never dare to
call for a new and modern interpretation of the Koran, never
dare to advocate for gays' and lesbians' right to not be
punished or even killed for something they could not choose.
All of these issues are on the other side of the red line
that they cannot cross.
Last month, Saudi women's rights activist Wajeha al-
Huwaider was interviewed by the LBC (Lebanese Broadcasting
Corporation)
[[Page E2171]]
``No Censorship'' show, with airing scheduled for October
2010. However, the show has not yet aired. Observers said
that a high-level Saudi official ordered LBC not to broadcast
Wajeha's interview, in which she talked about women's right
to drive cars in Saudi Arabia, the plight of the Shi'a
minorities in the country, the male guardian system, and the
unjust punishment of Saudi reformers. Wajeha is banned from
writing in Saudi newspapers.
Last week, the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah refused to publish an
article by female university professor Fawziyah Abdallah Abu
Khaled. In her article, Abu Khaled called the government to
allow those who oppose its policies to be part of society and
for it to stop persecuting and criminalizing them. She wrote:
``Peaceful opposition is part of the social power of any
society, and it should not be handled with hostility,
eradication, or constant persecution.''
The only people who enjoy freedom of expression are the
radicals--as long as they do not call for Jihad against the
House of Saud. Sheikh Abdel Rahman Al-Barak has called many
times for the killing of Shi'ites and many Saudi liberals,
and issued a new fatwa stating that the U.S. is the real
enemy of the Muslims and that Jihad cannot be superseded by
international conventions.
You might ask, what about the launch of the Saudi national
dialogue, the establishment of King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology, the appointment of the first female
vice minister for women's education, the municipal election,
the interfaith conferences organized by the Saudi government
to which Christians and Jews were invited, and the recent
ruling restricting the right to issue fatwas to senior
religious leaders.
The national dialogue has accomplished nothing; the new
university is a closed and isolated institution for
international students and a very few Saudis that is aimed at
producing Saudi engineers and doctors, not at encouraging
unfettered research, and certainly not to produce new and
modern interpretations of the Koran that are peaceful and
that respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This
university is one of dozens of Islamic universities in Saudi
Arabia. The appointment of Noura Al-Fayz as the first female
member of the Saudi Arabia Council of Ministers means
nothing--she still cannot drive a car, travel by herself, go
jogging or engage in other sports, choose her own husband, or
receive decent child support if she divorces. Regarding the
election, we all know that women were not allowed to vote;
and the interfaith conferences will remain meaningless until
a church is built in Saudi Arabia and Christians are allowed
to worship freely. As to the restriction on fatwas, no one
pays any attention at all; new fatwas are issued on a
daily basis.
The House of Saud has used its oil wealth to control
people's lives. Whether conservative or liberal, ultimately
people need to put food on the table, and as long as almost
everything in the kingdom is controlled by the government, it
will be very difficult to both cross red lines and make a
living. That is how the House of Saud maintains its game of
balance.
I understand this on a very personal level; I have seen how
people struggle to swim upstream under totalitarian regimes.
What I cannot understand, however, is how a country like the
U.S. that has always championed human Rights and religious
freedom has been unable to free a young man who has been
imprisoned for 17 years because of his religious belief as an
Isma'ili Shi'ite. I can only hope that the House of Saud is
not aiming to play the game of balance internationally--
because I have heard that a $60 billion arms deal is in the
works.
Remarks of Nina Shea, Director, Hudson Institute's Center for Religious
Freedom
Last Sunday, a December 2009 cable that was cited by the
New York Times but has not yet been posted by Wikileaks says
that Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni
militant groups such as Al Qaeda.
America's top financial-counterterrorism official, Treasury
Undersecretary Stuart Levey, believes there's a strong link
between education and support for terror. As he wrote in the
Washington Post last June, to end support for such terror,
among other steps: ``we must focus on educational reform in
key locations to ensure that intolerance has no place in
curricula and textbooks. . . . [U]nless the next generation
of children is taught to reject violent extremism, we will
forever be faced with the challenge of disrupting the next
group of terrorist facilitators and supporters.''
Saudi Arabia is one such ``key location.'' The kingdom is
not just any country with problematic textbooks. As the
controlling authority of the two holiest shrines of Islam,
Saudi Arabia is able to disseminate its religious materials
among the millions of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca each
year. Such teachings can, in this context, make a great
impression. In addition, Saudi textbooks are also posted on
the Saudi Education Ministry's website and are shipped and
distributed free by a vast Sunni infrastructure established
with Saudi oil wealth to many Muslim schools, mosques and
libraries throughout the world. In his book The Looming
Tower, Lawrence Wright asserts that while Saudis constitute
only 1 percent of the world's Muslims, they pay ``90 percent
of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other
traditions of Islam.'' Others estimate that, on an annual
basis, Saudi Arabia spends three times as much in exporting
its Wahhabi ideology as did the Soviets in propagating
Communism during the height of the Cold War. From the
Netherlands and Bosnia, to Algeria and Tunisia, to Pakistan
and Afghanistan, and to Somalia and Nigeria, nationals of
these countries have reported that over the past twenty to
thirty years local Islamic traditions are being transformed
and radicalized under intensifying Saudi influence. The late
President of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid wrote that Wahhabism
was making inroads even in his famously tolerant nation of
Indonesia.
To understand why Jim Woolsey and other terrorism experts
call Wahhabism as it spreads through the Islamic diaspora
``kindling for Usama Bin Laden's match,'' it is important to
know the content of Saudi textbooks. They teach, along with
many other noxious lessons, that Jews and Christians are
``enemies,'' and they dogmatically instruct that that it is
permissible, even obligatory, to kill various groups of
``unbelievers''--apostates (which includes Muslim moderates
who reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which can
include Shias and Sufis, as well as Christians, Hindus, and
Buddhists), Jews, and adulterers. The texts also teach that
the ``punishment for homosexuality is death'' and discusses
that this can be done by immolation by fire, stoning or
throwing the accused from a high place.
Under the Saudi Education Ministry's method of rote
learning, these teachings amount to indoctrination, starting
in first grade and continuing through high school, where
militant jihad on behalf of ``truth'' has for years been
taught as a sacred duty. The ``lesson goals'' of one of the
text books is to have the children list the ``reprehensible''
qualities of Jewish people and another, that Jews are pigs
and apes.
Reformist Muslims can also be labeled as ``apostates,'' and
thus they can be killed with impunity. In the opening fatwa
of a Saudi government booklet distributed to educate Muslim
immigrants in 2005 by the Saudi embassy in the United States,
the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (a cabinet level government
post) responded to a question about a Muslim preacher in a
European mosque who said ``declaring Jews and Christians
infidels is not allowed.'' The Grand Mufti accused the
unnamed European cleric of apostasy: ``He who casts doubts
about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his own
infidelity.''
The intellectual pioneer of takfiri doctrine is the
medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Tamiyya. He is cited as a moral
guide in the Saudi textbooks--including in the newly edited,
heavily redacted texts used in the Islamic Saudi Academy, a
school operated in Fairfax County, VA, by the Saudi embassy.
Students of Saudi high school textbooks are instructed to
consult his writings when they face vexing moral questions.
West Point's Center for Combating Terror found that Ibn
Tamiyya's are ``by far the most popular texts for modern
jihadis.''
Saudi foreign-affairs officials and ambassadors do not
dispute the need for education reform. Their reactions,
though, have alternated over the years between insisting that
reforms had already been made and stalling for time by
stating that the reforms would take several years more to
complete, maybe banking on the hope that American attention
would drift.
Four years ago, the Saudis gave a solemn and specific
promise to the United States. Its terms were described in a
letter from the U.S. assistant secretary of state for
legislative affairs to Sen. Jon Kyl, then chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism and
Homeland Security: ``In July of 2006, the Saudi Government
confirmed to us its policy to undertake a program of textbook
reform to eliminate all passages that disparage or promote
hatred toward any religion or religious groups.''
Furthermore, the State Department letter reported that this
pledge would be fulfilled ``in time for the start of the 2008
school year.''
Saudi Arabia has failed to keep its promise to the United
States. One Wikileak cable from the U.S. embassy reports that
Saudi education reform seems ``glacial.'' In its newly
released 2010 annual report on religious freedom, the State
Department itself asserted, albeit with diplomatic
understatement, with respect to Saudi Ministry of Education
textbooks: ``Despite government revisions to elementary and
secondary education textbooks, they retained language
intolerant of other religious traditions, especially Jewish,
Christian, and Shi'a beliefs, including commands to hate
infidels and kill apostates.'' (emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, Saudi royals have stepped up their philanthropy
to higher education around the world, for which they have
garnered many encomiums and awards. Hardly a month goes by
without a news report that one of the princes is endowing a
new center of Islamic and Arabic studies, or a business or
scientific department, at a foreign university. The king
himself recently founded a new university for advanced
science and technology inside Saudi Arabia.
These efforts have bought the royal family much good will,
but they should not distract our political leaders from the
central concern of the Saudi 1-12 religious curriculum. This
is not the time for heaping unqualified praise on the aging
monarch for promoting ``knowledge-based education,''
``extending the hand of friendship to people of other
faiths,'' promoting ``principles of moderation tolerance, and
mutual respect,'' and the like (phrases with which our
diplomatic statements on Saudi Arabia are replete).
[[Page E2172]]
The State Department needs to begin regular and detail
reporting on the remaining objectionable and violent passages
in Saudi government textbooks and to press in a sustained
manner for the kingdom to keep its 2006 pledge to us
regarding textbook reform. As USCIRF recommends, the
administration should also lift the indefinite waiver of any
action pursuant to the designation of Saudi Arabia as a
``Country of Particular Concern'' under the International
Religious Freedom Act--the only ``CPC'' to receive an
indefinite waiver.
In one of the Wikileaks cables written earlier this year on
Saudi King Abdullah to Secretary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador
James Smith makes the following observation: ``Reflecting his
Bedouin roots, he judges his counterparts on the basis of
character, honesty, and trust. He expects commitments to be
respected and sees actions, not words, as the true test of
commitment. . . .''
Bedouin or not, we should start demanding the same from
him.
Remarks by R. James Woolsey, Former Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency
I met on several occasions with the late President of
Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, after his Presidency but while
he was leading the world's largest libertarian Muslim
organization, Nandlatul Ulama. What a truly magnificent man
he was. Nandlatul Ulama's members, as is the case for the
vast majority of Indonesia's Muslims, espouse essentially the
Enlightenment's embrace of reason and in particular it's
separation of the spiritual and secular realms. Indonesia's
traditions in this regard harken back hundreds of years, and
this country that contains more Muslims than any other does
not call itself a Muslim nation.
There are hundreds of millions of such truly moderate
Muslims in the world, including a very substantial share of
those in the U.S. They should be regarded as our colleagues
and friends in trying to build a peaceful and prosperous
modern world. To use a very rough analogy to the Cold War
years, such truly moderate Muslims are something like the
Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists--George Orwell,
Helmut Schmidt--who were our colleagues in winning the Cold
War against a communist empire that called itself
``socialist'' but whose essence was totalitarian.
Of course terrorists, whether Muslim or not, are not our
colleagues and friends but our enemies through and through,
just as were the communists' instruments of violence such as
the Spetznaz. But some have come to believe that in the world
of Islam today these two groupings--moderate Muslims and
terrorists--are the only ones that exist. Sadly such is not
the case.
During the Cold War there were non-violent totalitarians--
such as many members of the American Communist Party--who
fervently worked for the triumph of communism and the
establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat but
utilizing non-violent means. So also today there are some
Muslim groups and individuals who work hard to replace our
Constitution with the totalitarian socio-political doctrine
that Islam calls shariah. Shariah has as its objective the
establishment of a world-wide caliphate--a theocratic
totalitarian state. Along the way to this objective adherence
to shariah entails accepting a set of doctrines that calls
for: death to apostates and homosexuals, brutal treatment of
women, rejection of democracy (and indeed all man-made law),
anti-semitism, and much else.
In order to bring about the caliphate--the complete
rejection of Article VI of the Constitution--it is not always
tactically wise to utilize violence, or violent jihad.
Sometimes what Muslim Brotherhood writers call ``civilization
jihad'' is a shrewder tactic. It is well-defined in a
document, ``An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General
Strategic Goal for the Group'' entered into evidence in the
2008 case, United States v. Holy Land Foundation. The
document was written by Mohammed Akram, a senior Hams leader
in the U.S. and a member of the Board of Directors of the
Muslim Brotherhood in North America. The document makes it
clear that what is involved is a ``settlement process'' lead
by the Muslim Brotherhood that constitutes a ``grand jihad in
eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from
within and `sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands
and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated. . .
.''
In the Holy Land Foundation case, which dealt with
terrorist financing, it was established that a number of
Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as CAIR and ISNA,
though not indicted, were part of the terror-financing
conspiracy.
In short, as during the Cold War, we need to understand
that the central distinction is between those who accept
democracy and the rule of (man-made) law and those who do
not. We were on the same side during the Cold War as
socialists George Orwell and Helmut Schmidt and both the Red
Army and Gus Hall were on the other. Today we can make common
cause with all Muslims who are neither planning to blow up
airliners nor working on ``eliminating and destroying the
Western civilization from within.''
But we must not ignore those who are making such efforts or
be deterred from dealing with them just because they engage
in name-calling, such as labeling those who call them to
account as ``Islamophobes.'' Those who bravely stood up
against the Spanish Inquisition--whether Muslims, Jews, or
Christians--were not ``Christianophobes.'' We need to find
Constitutional means--drawings on our experiences during the
Cold War--to thwart the Islamist sabotage called for by the
Muslim Brotherhood document and to do so in such a way as to
protect the rights of those Muslims who are not engaged in
either violent jihad or ``civilization jihad'' against us.
This will require us to think clearly about how to deal
with Saudi Arabia, our ally on some aspects of fighting
terrorism, but also the principal source of funding of a
major share of the terrorists who attack us and the teaching
of hatred that fuels the civilization jihad as well.
Above all, we cannot begin to deal with these issues unless
we speak clearly. It is time to end the euphemisms and the
verbal dancing. One is hot accusing all Christians of burning
women at the stake if one examines how the Salem witch trials
grew out of some Puritan thinking. So too with totalitarian
offshoots of any religion, including Islamism. Islamists'
efforts to establish a caliphate and sabotage our
Constitution have to be called what they are--they are not
random acts of ``violent extremists.'' They are, for
Islamists, jihad. And they must be defeated.
____________________