Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish gender segregation campaign turns violen

Clashes erupted on Monday between police and several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews from a town near Jerusalem who are campaigning for men and women to be segregated, an AFP journalist said.

Israeli police had stepped up their patrols in Beit Shemesh following unrest sparked by discrimination against women imposed by a radical fringe of the town’s religious Jews.

Several demonstrators were taken in for questioning after police and journalists were roughed up and insulted by ultra-Orthodox men telling them to “clear off,” the journalist said.

There were also shouting matches between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews.

Beit Shemesh residents showered police and television crews with eggs and also set fire to the contents of refuse bins.

Several placards urging segregation between men and women that had been removed by police were later put back by protesters.

Earlier, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said a man from Beit Shemesh had been arrested over an assault on Sunday on a TV crew filming a sign instructing women to cross the street to avoid walking past a synagogue.

Other signs posted in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood instructed women to dress “modestly” in long sleeves and calf-length skirts.

The Haaretz newspaper said that the cameraman from commercial station Channel Two was thrown to the ground and his sound recordist grabbed by the throat in the attack by ultra-Orthodox men.

Other journalists were also attacked and a police car stoned.

"A male was arrested and is being questioned in connection with the incident which took place on the Channel Two team," Rosenfeld told AFP.

“Municipal inspectors have been working in the street taking down posters ... Police have stepped up patrols in Beit Shemesh.”

Israeli media said images broadcast on Channel Two last week of an ultra-Orthodox man in Beit Shemesh spitting at a woman led to his arrest on Saturday night.

The Jerusalem Post said he was freed by magistrates on Sunday after being fined and ordered to stay out of Beit Shemesh for a week.

The violence in the town west of Jerusalem came after a wave of incidents elsewhere in Israel in which women have been compelled to sit at the back of segregated buses serving ultra-Orthodox areas or get off, despite court rulings that women may sit where they please.

Women’s rights activists say that the ultra-Orthodox ─ around 10 percent of the population ─ have become increasingly radical over gender segregation and are winning concessions that harm women.

“Discrimination and violence against women, purportedly motivated by religious sensibilities, have spiralled out of control,” the liberal Haaretz said in an editorial on Monday.

“In recent weeks, we have been witness to women attacked for refusing to move to the back of the bus to uphold a policy of gender segregation; women forced out of a venue where elections in a Jerusalem neighborhood were being held,” it said.

It said women had been barred from a health ministry prize-giving ceremony and prevented from serving in key military posts “due to the opposition of a growing, increasingly vocal group of religious male soldiers and officers.”

Maariv newspaper compared the Beit Shemesh violence to attacks by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinian property, homes and offices of Israeli peace activists and army bases, in protest against demolitions of wildcat settlements.

“It is the exact same story,” it wrote. “Organized gangs, increasing in strength and audacity, of people who do not regard the state laws as the source of authority but rather rely on their various rabbis and peculiar divine voices in their heads.

Thousands march in Casablanca for political change

Several thousand people took to the streets of Casablanca Sunday to press for deeper political reforms, saying recent changes did not go far enough.

The protesters, mobilizing on a call from the so-called Feb. 20 pro-democracy movement, held their first demonstration without the Islamist Justice and Charity group.

The group withdrew from the Feb. 20 movement earlier this month, claiming it had been the object of “attacks” from youths within the movement.

Up to 5,000 people demonstrated in Casablanca’s poor Hay Mohammadi suburb, an AFP journalist witnessed, while police said about 3,500 people in total protested countrywide.

“We are here to say that the fight will continue despite the withdrawal of political organizations, Islamic or otherwise,” protester Hamza Mahfoud told AFP.

“Our demands are legitimate and they have not changed: a parliamentary monarchy and more social justice,” said Mahfoud.

About 300 to 500 people took part in a similar protest in Rabat.

Earlier this month, the Feb. 20 movement said it was willing to talk with the newly elected Islamist head of government under conditions that included the release of political prisoners, a guarantee of press freedom and more individual liberties.

The Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) won elections in November which the protest movement boycotted.

Unlike the overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, Morocco’s king nipped swelling protests in the bud by offering constitutional reforms that curbed his near absolute powers.

For the mostly young protesters who began to march in February giving the movement its name, the reforms were not enough, but the movement has lost some momentum since the elections.

Trial of Egypt’s Mubarak and sons to resume in Cairo amid tightened security

The trial of former president Hosni Mubarak, his two sons Alaa and Gamal, former interior minister Habib al-Adly and six senior police officers accused of ordering the killing of protesters during the Jan. 25 revolution, is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, following a three-month halt.

More than 5,000 policemen will be deployed to secure the trial upon the directives of Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim, Egypt’s official news agency reported on Monday.

Earlier this month, the court turned down an appeal for a new judge which was filed by lawyers representing the victims’ families to change Judge Ahmed Refaat.

Television cameras, which were allowed in for the opening sessions, will not be allowed in court when the trial resumes. 

Egypt’s military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi testified in Mubarak’s trial on Sept. 24 under a total media blackout. Leaks of his testimony suggested that he sought to absolve Mubarak of any responsibility for the killing of nearly 850 protesters during the 18-day uprising that forced him to step down on Feb. 11.

Mubarak is charged with complicity in the killings. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Tantawi was Mubarak’s defense minister for some 20 years, and was widely believed to be blindly loyal to the former leader.

However, he and some two dozen generals who sit on the now-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took control of the country from Mubarak when he stepped down, pledging to return to the country to civilian rule after a transition period.

Many Egyptians believe the army is no longer fit to manage security on the ground and carry out difficult reforms at a time of political and economic crisis.

On Friday, thousands rallied in Cairo and other cities to demand the army give up power and to vent anger after 17 people were killed in recent protests where troops beat and clubbed women and men even as they lay on the ground, according to Reuters.

Protests continue daily in Tahrir Square. Several hundred protesters have set up camp there. Some are demanding the army bring forward the presidential vote to as early as Jan. 25, the first anniversary of the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

Others, worrying that 10 months after Mubarak’s downfall Egypt remains in disarray, protested on Friday to end protests so order can be restored and the economy revitalized.

israel lawmakers debate recognizing Armenia genocide

An Israeli parliamentary committee was holding a debate on Monday on recognizing genocide in Armenia, a move likely to further strain already tense relations with Turkey.

The education committee began discussing a proposal to mark April 24, the day when Turkish mass killings of Armenians started in 1915, as a memorial day for “the massacre of the Armenian people.”

A similar proposal was rejected by parliament in 2007, when ties between Israel and Turkey were warm.

But relations plunged into deep crisis last year when Israeli forces killed nine Turks in a raid on a Turkish ferry, part of an activist flotilla seeking to breach Israel's naval blockade of Gaza.

“We’ve been working on this for many years,” Georgette Avakian of the Armenian National Committee in Jerusalem told Israeli public radio. “I hope the time has come.”

In October, Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador and axed military ties and defense trade. Last week, Israel cancelled completion of a 2008 contract to sell Turkey aerial surveillance equipment.

A parliamentary supporter of an Israeli memorial day for Armenian genocide -- Zahava Gal-On of the left-wing Meretz party -- said the changed diplomatic climate might mean that the measure gains support this time.

“For many years, Israel's government has refused to recognize the genocide for cynical, strategic and economic reasons, connected to its ties with Turkey,” she told the Haaretz daily.

“Now, given the state of relations between the countries, I can’t rule out the possibility that the foreign ministry is exploiting affairs.”

But Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin said the issue was not a political one.

“The subject has not arisen at the Knesset because things happened between Israel and Turkey; not because we want to exploit a political situation in order to settle accounts,” he told the education committee at the start of its debate.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen died in orchestrated killings during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

But the Turkish government strongly denies this, saying 300,000 Armenians and as many Turks were killed in civil conflict when the Christian Armenians, backed by Russia, rose up against the Ottoman Empire.

France’s lower house voted last week to criminalize the denial of genocide in Armenia, prompting Turkey to suspend political and military cooperation.

Brotherhood members accuse Christian political figure of inciting sectarian strife

Two Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) members accuse the high-profile Christian businessman and political figure, Naguib Sawiris, of inciting sectarian strife.

Sawiris, who is no stranger to controversy, caused uproar among Islamists after stating that they are receiving financial aid from Arab Gulf countries, including the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Newly elected parliamentary member from the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party said: “Sawiris is trying to incite sectarian strife, he is trying to make the most of his arguments with the Muslim Brotherhood to serve his political purposes.”

“A Christian businessman should not interfere in anything related to Islam. It’s a religious matter.”

Sawiris established a liberal party in the wake of January’s popular revolution, which overthrew autocratic president Hosni Mubarak on 11 February.

His Free Egyptians Party is part of the Egyptian bloc, deemed as one of the FJP's main opponents in the ongoing parliamentary elections. The FJP has secured an overwhelming win in the first two stages of the complicated election process, which is due to end on 11 January.

Salafist party El-Nour is the current runners-up, followed by the Egyptian bloc that is struggling to compete with Islamists.

 El-Masry Kashik, another FJP member, who won a parliament seat in Beheira governorate, echoed the sentiment of his party mate.

Suicide bombing rocks Iraq as Biden urges ‘dialogue’ to head off political crisis

A suicide bomber in a car killed at least six people and wounded 31 more when he detonated explosives outside Iraq’s interior ministry in Baghdad, police and hospital sources said on Monday, as Washington called on Iraq’s feuding leaders to start a “dialogue” to avoid possible sectarian tensions.

The blast followed Thursday’s wave of explosions that killed at least 72 people in Baghdad in the first such attacks since a crisis erupted between Iraq’s Shiite-led government and Sunni rivals days after the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops, Reuters reported.

An interior ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the explosion was the work of a suicide car bomber. State broadcaster al-Iraqiya TV also reported this as the cause of the attack.

Iraq is mired in a political row with authorities calling for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on charges he ran a death squad, accusations Hashemi denies, according to AFP.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has also called for the sacking of his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlaq, who has denounced the premier as a dictator “worse than Saddam Hussein.”

Meanwhile, the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc of Hashemi and Mutlaq has boycotted cabinet and parliament.

Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday urged Iraq’s feuding leaders to convene a “dialogue” to head off a worsening political crisis that has raised sectarian tensions.

Biden, President Barack Obama’s point man on Iraq, has made a flurry of calls to Iraqi leaders this week, urging them to mend fences after Maliki accused Hashemi of running a death squad staffed by bodyguards.

In calls to Maliki on Sunday and to Kurdish leader Massud Barzani on Saturday, Biden “exchanged views... on the current political climate in Iraq and reiterated our support for ongoing efforts to convene a dialogue among Iraqi political leaders,” the White House said in a statement, according to AFP.

Biden also offered condolences after a spate of attacks in Baghdad on Thursday that killed scores of people.

The strikes and the growing political row have heightened sectarian tensions just a week after the last U.S. soldiers of a force that once numbered 170,000 left Iraq, drawing the nine-year war to a close.

Hashemi -- holed up at an official guesthouse of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in the country’s autonomous Kurdish region after an arrest warrant was issued against him -- has acknowledged that his guards may have carried out attacks but denied any personal involvement.

Asked if he would return to Baghdad to face trial, the 69-year-old Hashemi told AFP: “Of course not,” attributing his refusal to poor security and the alleged politicization of the justice system.

Hashemi’s Iraqiya bloc, part of Maliki’s national unity government, has boycotted parliament and the cabinet in protest at the prime minister's alleged centralization of power.

The New York Times, citing senior U.S. administration officials, reported that the United States is weighing a far more subdued role in Iraq and has no intention to send U.S. troops back to the country.

But it quoted one administration official as saying the future security and diplomatic relationship with Iraq would be “colored” by how well Maliki holds together a governing coalition that includes Sunnis and Kurds.

The newspaper also noted that U.S. commandos may be able to operate in Iraq on covert CIA missions like the one that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May.

“As the U.S. military has drawn down to zero in terms of combat troops, the U.S. intelligence community has not done the same,” it quoted a senior administration official as saying.

“There are serious counterterrorism issues that confront Iraq... And we don’t want to let go of the very solid relationships we have built over the years to share information of importance to both countries.”

Libyan minister resigns amid protest pressure

Libya’s new leaders say the economy minister resigned after protests demanding that former regime officials be barred from serving in government.

Taher Sharkas had been appointed to the same post by Muammar Qaddafi just two months before the longtime leader’s capture and killing in October and around three days before rebel fighters took over the capital, Tripoli.

Protesters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi had been calling for Shakars’ ouster after it was discovered that he was appointed as minister by Qaddafi on Aug. 18.

Government spokesman Ashour Shames said Saturday that Taher Sharkas resigned due to health reasons.

The government has said it is open to some reconciliation with former regime officials, but protesters are mostly opposed.