Gulf leaders decry ‘racist’ rhetoric against Muslims

Reuters, Riyadh 

Gulf Arab leaders condemned “hostile, racist” remarks against Muslims and Syrian refugees in a statement issued on Thursday, days after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on the entry of Muslims into the United States.

“The supreme council expressed its deep concern at the increase of hostile, racist and inhumane rhetoric against refugees in general and Muslims in particular,” the Gulf Cooperation Council said, referring to a GCC heads of state meeting in Riyadh.

Gulf Arab states also called for an international reconstruction conference for Yemen after any peace deal to end the country’s civil war.

The call came in a statement by Gulf Cooperation Council leaders at the conclusion of their summit meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh, which was read out by GCC Secretary-General Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani.

"The council (GCC) members called for an international conference for Yemen reconstruction after the parties reach the aspired political solution," Zayani said in the statement broadcast on Saudi state television.

He said such a programme would be done in accordance with a "practical programme to rehabilitate the Yemeni economy and to ease its merger into the Gulf economies".

Yemeni warring parties are due to gather in Switzerland next week for U.N.-sponsored peace talks to end a civil war that had killed nearly 6,000 people.

The two-day summit in Riyadh brought together Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz said it was imperative for the GCC states to stand united and work together to fortify themselves against foreign threats at a time when the region is passing through tough times.

King Salman reiterated the keenness of the coalition states to achieve security and stability of Yemen under the leadership of its Yemeni President Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi’s government.

“We, the GCC states, will support a peaceful solution so as to enable Yemen overcome the crisis and restore its march toward development,” he said.

At the conclusion of the summit, Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa announced that Manama would host next year's GCC summit.

Over 350,000 petition to ban Trump from UK

Reuters, London

More than a quarter of a million Britons have signed an online petition to ban Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump from the country following his proposal to stop Muslims from entering the United States.

Trump, who owns two golf courses in Scotland which he visited earlier this year, called for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S. “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. His comments followed last week’s deadly shooting spree by two Muslims in California.

The number of signatories to the petition was growing fast but Britain’s finance minister George Osborne said on Wednesday that Trump should not be banned from the country.

In the past, people have been banned from entering Britain for fostering hatred that might provoke inter-community violence.

The petition says: “If the United Kingdom is to continue applying the ‘unacceptable behavior’ criteria to those who wish to enter its borders, it must be fairly applied to the rich as well as poor, and the weak as well as the powerful.”

It was launched by Suzanne Kelly, a Scottish-based campaigner and longtime critic of Trump’s latest golf course in Aberdeenshire.

Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University said on Twitter on Wednesday it was revoking an honorary degree awarded to Trump in 2010 because he had “made a number of statements that are wholly incompatible with the ethos and values of the university”.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon also stripped Trump of his role as a business ambassador for Scotland, a spokeswoman for her Edinburgh-based government said in a statement.

“Simply wrong”

The British government responds to all petitions that gain more than 10,000 signatures, and topics are considered for parliamentary debate if they reach 100,000.

Prime Minister David Cameron said through his spokeswoman on Tuesday that Trump’s comments were “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong”.

But finance minister Osborne went further on Wednesday when he stood in for the absent Cameron at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session in parliament.

“Frankly, Donald Trump’s comments fly in the face of the founding principles of the United States,” he said, adding that they should be confronted through robust democratic argument.

“That is the best way to deal with Donald Trump and his views rather than trying to ban presidential candidates.”

In seeking to defend his proposal, Trump said the U.S. needed to be vigilant because parts of London and Paris were now so radicalized they could no longer be policed by officers, who feared for their lives.

London’s Metropolitan Police took the rare step of criticizing Trump.

“We would not normally dignify such comments with a response, however on this occasion we think it’s important to state to Londoners that Mr Trump could not be more wrong,” the police force said in a statement.

The capital’s Mayor Boris Johnson dismissed Trump’s comments as nonsense, adding: “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

Unholy silence

The Middle East is by almost any reckoning the world's worst region for freedom of expression. Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom lobby, puts war-torn Syria 177th out of 180 countries on its latest annual ranking, in 2014. Iran is 173rd, Sudan 172nd, Yemen 167th, Saudi Arabia 164th. The highest any of the region's countries make it is 91st, with Kuwait, which has a democracy of sorts. According to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, as of 2012, 14 of 20 Middle Eastern countries criminalise blasphemy and 12 of 20 make apostasy—leaving Islam—an offence.

Freedom of expression is particularly curtailed where it concerns politics, sexual matters or Islam, the region's main religion. Even secular or less devout leaders refuse to grant religious freedom, in part to keep hardline clergy and their followers happy, and in part to extend their totalitarian rule into their subjects' private lives. One example is Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family imposes harsh penalties based on sharia law because it rules in tandem with the puritanical Wahhabi clerics. Being openly gay is not tolerated anywhere except in central areas of Beirut, Lebanon's capital, and charges for "debauchery" are not uncommon. The region offers almost no space for legal protest; some countries set ridiculous requirements for protests to have official permission before going ahead—which is only granted when the protests are pro-government. Vague national-security laws and emergency laws allow prosecution for almost anything that rulers do not like.Restrictions bite not only on what is said in the media or public forums. Some countries, including Iran and Syria, have large numbers of security agents who listen in to private conversations on the street or in the market, and use reports from informers who shop their neighbours for badmouthing the regime. Taxi drivers can earn handsome supplements by filing reports on their customers. Only at the dentist, runs a popular Arabic joke, is it safe to open your mouth.

Mocking Jordan's monarch is a criminal offence punishable by prosecution in a military court, but when King Abdullah of Jordan (pictured above with the French president, François Hollande) attended the demonstration on January 11th in Paris to express support for free speech in the wake of the Paris attack, some found ridicule hard to suppress. How could he march in defence of freedom of expression abroad, they asked, when he is such a serial abuser of that freedom at home? Last June he expanded the remit of an anti-terrorism law to include public criticism of the king or his allies. His spooks trawl social media for dissenting Jordanians to arrest. On December 18th the deputy leader of Jordan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was tried before military judges for a colourful posting on his Facebook page denouncing Jordan's allies in the Emirates. Salafi preachers who decline to opine in favour of coalition attacks on Islamic State are sent back to jail. "Everyone in Jordan is assumed to be a terrorist until proven innocent," says an embittered Islamist.

A few days after the king marched in Paris, his security forces beat back protestors heading for the French embassy in Amman. In recent years the king has closed hundreds of news sites for lacking a licence, and ordered those that still operate to appoint editors more likely to toe the government line. An irate taxi driver criticising the king stops himself as he passes a police post in the capital, and then punches the air with his fist to illustrate what might befall him should he speak out.

Egypt's constitution says freedom of belief is absolute, but only guarantees freedom to practise their religions to Muslims, Christians and Jews. That leaves atheists unprotected, and the government, which appears to see homogeneity as desirable and likely to make ruling easier, has recently been cracking down on them. In June it announced a campaign to confront the spread of unbelief. Since a farcical survey in December which found that Egypt had a suspiciously specific 866 atheists, and that this was more than any other country in the Middle East (no mention of the fact that Egypt is also the region's most populous country), the persecution has worsened. On January 10th a court in Idku sentenced Karim Ashraf Mohamad al-Banna, a student, to three years in prison for saying on Facebook that he was an atheist, which, the court decided, counted as "insulting Islam".

Although cases for apostasy and depicting the Prophet Muhammad make the news, many of the region's Muslims agree that such offences should be penalised. Mr Banna was reportedly harassed by his neighbours for his views, before the state got involved.