http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=iol1039801429529W643&set_id=1&click_id=123&sf=

US comes down on Israeli sex slave trade

December 13 2002 at 07:43PM
Jerusalem - About three thousand women, mainly from the former Soviet Union, are sold each year into a brisk Israeli sex industry that takes in about a billion dollars annually, a parliamentary report said on Sunday, slamming Israel's justice system for being lax on punishments.

The women, seeking to escape poverty at home, are usually smuggled in by traffickers who promise them legitimate jobs. Once in Israel, they are sold for between $3 000 and $6 000 each (about R27 500 and R55 000). They receive between $25-$30 per customer, of which the pimp takes between 80 and 90 percent, the preliminary report said.

The women work about 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week and service an average of 10 to 15 clients daily, it added. Often, the women live in dismal conditions and sometimes they are physically abused or live in fear of their pimps, the report said.

Israeli courts generally reach a plea bargain with the pimps and sentence them to either a few months of community service or up to an average of two years in prison, punishments which the committee said are too weak to serve as deterrents.

An average of 10 to 15 clients daily
It suggested that these crimes should have minimum prison sentences to deter the sex traders, who sexually exploit the women and often jail, blackmail and enslave them.

In July 2001, a US State Department report placed Israel in the third section of its "black list" on countries whose laws don't meet US criteria for dealing with this crime and threatened economic sanctions.

Israel has reformed the law somewhat since then, but the committee said it is not enough to confront the problem effectively.

In addition to changes in the law, the committee suggested an authority be formed to fight the "war against trafficking in people". - Sapa-AP

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/December/27%20o/Will%20the%20Syrian%20peace%20overture%20be%20the%20last%20hope%20before%20the%20war%20with%20Israel%20By%20Salim%20Nazzal.htm ( http://www.aljazeerah.info/ )
Will the Syrian peace overture be the last hope before the war with Israel?
By Salim Nazzal

Al-Jazeerah, December 27, 2006

In an interview with the Washington post, the foreign minister of Syria declared his country willingness to return to the negotiation table “without preconditions.” This step seems to contradict earlier Syrian position insisted on resuming peace talk with Israel from the point reached at earlier negotiations. Yet it is apparent that the Syrian proposal seems to be sending a signal to the international community that Syria is interested in investing more efforts to evade the region more wars provided that Israel ends its occupation to the Syrian land. In previous negotiations Isaac Rabin showed some willingness to withdraw from most of the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in 1967, and annexed by the likud government in 1981. But after his assassination in 1994 on the hand of a Jewish extremist, no Israeli leader was willing to negotiate the withdrawal from the Syrian land. This position is obvious in the current Israeli inconsiderate response to the Syrian overture.

The right wing politician, Netanyahu, rejects any talk with Syria about the Golan Heights. In his view, if Israel negotiates with Syria, the withdrawal from the Golan Heights must not be taken into the negotiation table. This naturally raises the question, why Syrians would negotiate if their occupied land is not the topic of the negotiation? Prime Minister Olemurt immediately rejected the Syrian step and was not ready to pay it any serious thought. Olemurt repeated the Israeli symphony that Syria is arming the Lebanese resistance movement. In his view Israel would go into negotiation with Syria only if Syria breaks with its allies. This statement sounds odd because Olemurt asks Syria to go away from its allies in order to go into negotiation no body knows where it will end. Past experience with Israel shows that it withdraws from the land it occupies only under the fire of resistance. The Lebanese resistance had to fight 22 years to force Israel to withdraw from the south of Lebanon following the UN resolution 225 which Israel ignored all these years. The Palestinian and the Syrian bitter experiences with Israel in negotiations must have taught Syria that Israel is not the state which puts peace on the list of its priorities. The evidence is that Fourty year passed since the Israeli occupation to the Syrian Golan Heights and no sign from Israel that it intends to withdraw from the whole occupied area.

The Israeli argument which justifies the Israeli rejection on the ground that the Syrian overture aims to decrease the American pressure on Syria does not seem to match up with later developments. The Syrian proposal occurs in a period the aggressive policy of the Neo Cons is in retreat. In Iraq where the US puts all its strength, it has become almost clear that the US has lost the war. The prime aim of the Hamilton /Baker report is to provide the US administration with an exit to keep the face of the current administration. To achieve this goal the report has recommended opening dialogue with Syria to help the US in Iraq. The same report observed that reaching peaceful solutions in the Arab Israeli conflict would help the US in consolidating its deteriorating position in the Middle East. It was not by accident that the Syrian president made it clear that he is ready to dialogue with the US but not to get its orders. The western political movements towards Damascus have increased in the past few weeks confirmed that Syria is not in an isolated position as the Israeli politicians like to expose. Syria was visited by a number of Europian officials and American congressmen which is a clear signal that the policy of isolating Syria has been unsuccessful. Though it is early to judge the outcome of these political activities, which its results do not appear at once, it is difficult to overlook its importance.

In the view of a political analyst these movements can be interrupted in two ways. Firstly, it could be a beginning of western review in the policy towards Syria after it has been evident that the policy of ignoring Syria as a major player has failed.

Secondly, it could mean that the west seeks to explore the situation in Syria in the hope to attract Syria to break its alliance with Iran. Indeed, the Irani / Syrian alliance has demonstrated that it owns the enough strength which appears in its support to the resistance movements in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

After 40 years of the Israeli reluctance to withdraw from the Syrian occupied land, and the failure of the UN to force Israel to implement the international law, it would not be an unnatural thing that Syria seeks to empower its army to face the well equipped Israeli army which the US provides with great generosity. This political analyst compares the Syrian peace proposal with Al Sadat proposal in 1972 to open the Suez Canal which Israel rejected and led as known to the 1973 war.

Actually, Syria never give up the idea of empowering it self to liberate its occupied land. Since the neutralization of Egypt in the Arab Israeli conflict in 1977, Syria tried to substitute the loss of Egypt by restoring the role of what was known as the eastern front. But the Syrian Iraqi difference in 1979 was perhaps the major reason which prevented this front to come true. In the 1980s, Hafez Al Assad of Syria sought to establish what he called a strategic balance with Israel which was disturbed when the Soviet Union, the major source for Syrian arms was dissolved.

The July war in Lebanon has demonstrated that future wars in the Middle East will put all the Israeli settlements under the Syrian fire. In the view of this political analyst, Israel can not bomb the place it wants any longer without expecting retaliation.

The Israeli Blitz Kreig belong to history: modern ballistic rockets have made modern wars much more complicated than ever: the formula of Tel aviv for Damascus is a fact which Israel can not overlook. But it seems that Israeli leaders deny observing that things are changing on the ground. The traditional definition of terms like victory and defeat does not seem to apply on modern warfare. The evidence is that after the huge military success which Israel achieved in 1948 and 1967 wars, it did not break the will of the Palestinians who are still fighting for their freedom despite the huge power difference with Israel.

If a graph is drawn to show the direction of the wars since 1973 to 1982 to the Intifada and until the July war in 2006, it clearly shows that the Israeli army is in decline and gradually demoralized. In the military field the Palestinian and the Lebanese freedom fighters challenged the Israeli military and captured soldiers from their military bases. In the July war in Lebanon the Israeli leadership was unable to provide its soldiers in Lebanon with food a minor logistic problem which did not trouble Ghankiz khan one thousand years ago. On the behavioural level it has become not uncommon that the Israeli soldiers deliberately kill wounded Palestinian resistance fighters, and it has become common that Israeli soldiers steal from Palestinian houses which they raid. These are not mere discipline problems.

For the Israeli society based on the doctrine of militarization, the demoralization of the army is a reflector to the crisis of the whole Zionist project. In the view of a Palestinian specialist in the Israeli affairs the violence of the Israeli soldiers against innocent Palestinians is overturned to the Israeli society it self. This explains in his view the greater than ever number of social problems such as rapes, crimes, narcotics and corruption. According to him the number of Israelis who think that the Zionist project is leading them from war to war is increasing as never before. In his perspective the crisis is not happening because of a corrupted politician or general, but rather the outcome of a racist ideology which seeks to survive by means of force and violence. He believes that the Israeli rejection to the Syrian overture towards resuming peace talks might be the biggest mistake which Israel commit. The year 2007 might witness a war which Israel has no hope to win, no prospect to predict where it will lead, no perspective how it will end, and no insurance that it will not be the last war. The Syrian peace overture might be the last peace initiative before the Syrian Israeli war, which has almost become Inevitable.

More importantly; this war will likely raise serious questions inside and outside Israel about the purpose of the whole Zionist project in the Middle East. The Israeli rejection to the Syrian peace initiative means that Israel is still captive to the old thinking which assumes that Israel is powerful and thusly can keep the occupied areas. If the Syrian peace message did not find listening ears in Israel, the question which many Arabs asks, why the international community should expect that the storage of patience in Syria is without limits.

Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian historian. He has written extensively on social and political issues in the Middle East .Can be contacted at: gibran44@hotmail.com

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=17455
An Israeli volunteer music teacher in East Jerusalem recounts his story: I had never met a sole Palestinian in my life
Date: 24 / 11 / 2006 Time: 14:34

By Danny Felsteiner writing from The Netherlands, 22 November 2006
Originally published at The Electronic Intifada .

Fighting for the Next Generation

Only a few hours after my fiancee, a 24-year-old Dutch musician and I, a 29-year-old Israeli musician and writer, arrived to Israel for the summer vacation, the war in Lebanon broke out. At first, no one dared to call it by the W-word; the media described it as a swift military operation to retrieve the kidnapped soldiers while teaching Hezbollah a bitter lesson. Everyone agreed with an across-the-board solidarity that it was a noble and imperative cause. The Israeli flag was brandished on balconies, cars and T-shirts, left and right-wing politicians were sharing spoons to stir their afternoon teas, and graffitists sprayed the walls with jingoistic 'Go Israel!' or 'Let the IDF win!'.

However, even as the operation fanned out and urgent draft calls were issued to my friends, and even as Hezbollah's katiusha missiles were drizzling around the house of my panic-stricken parents in Haifa, my mind was preoccupied with another conflict, an internal one that was predestined to actualize: my fiancee and I had volunteered to teach music to Palestinian children at a summer camp in East Jerusalem, and there were two weeks left to the first day.

Why conflict, you may ask. Well, in short, I'm an Israeli Jew. I grew up in a society which secretly considers the Palestinian people as inferior, and openly regards them in the media and the educational system as the enemy. My unchronological recollection (sorry, Ms. Kalmann) of Israel's history in relation to Arabs as taught in high school consists predominantly of early clashes with valiant Zionist pioneers, carrying on through the regional wars with the neighboring Arab countries (from which, they accentuated, Israel had always emerged as victorious, hence the superiority complex), and ending with the trigger-happy first Intifada.

I learned in high school, as an undertone, that the back-stabbing Arabs cannot be trusted, and even though I have always considered myself as a mild humanist, the Middle East reality bestowed me with a deep-seated antagonism to Arabs, hidden, denied and grimly adhesive. The last fifteen years solidified that bias: Iraq scattered scud missiles across Israel, the Palestinian suicide-bombing industry thrived, Hezbollah butchered our soldiers in the north -- where I lost one of my best childhood friends -- the second Intifada unleashed, Al-Qaeda made its viability statement worldwide, and Iran's idea of Israel still seems to be that of a nuclear wasteland. Arabs, obviously, are determined to destroy us. Accuse me of hyperbolizing, of facetiousness -- okay, I plead guilty -- but that is the general impression and impact you contract by spending your best years in this hyper-bloody region.

East Jerusalem, where the summer camp was to be held, is in some way the pith of the conflict. It is home to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were subjugated by Israel in the upshot of the 1967 Six Days War, where second and third generations of children who never knew freedom listen to bedtime stories by parents who had experienced the war in deafening earshot. It is a segregated and discriminated population, and most Israelis believe it is also extremely hostile. So the idea of walking into a Palestinian village in East Jerusalem, flaunting my Israeliness and confronting my centenarian enemy was a most distressing predicament, a literal deathtrap in my mind. And while the Zionist-Israeli conflict with the Arab world celebrated its hundredth birthday in Lebanon with a blazon display of martial atrocities, my near future resonated with plight.

And here is the absurdity of all that has been said (hold tight): before the summer camp, I had never met a sole Palestinian in my life. Consequently, generalization and blind, senseless bigotry are unavoidable as they are propagated by the blood and shock-thirsty media. You see, the majority of Israelis have no contact whatsoever with Palestinians, just as the majority of Palestinians come in contact only with Israeli settlers or soldiers; soldiers who are usually eighteen to twenty-one years of age, good kids who have just finished writing their final exams in Israel's blood-spattered history and now happened to hold a gun -- vive l'education!

You might have already guessed that the summer camp idea did not originate in me, but in my fiancee's benignity. She had found the website of Ta'ayush (meaning 'coexistence' in Arabic, and back then, to my mind, an obscure left-wing extremist organization), which was recruiting for artists to volunteer in the summer. The idea was to give these Palestinian children something they purportedly did not have during the year: a reason to smile. I love children, and I endorse and sometimes even partake in charity work, but in this case, I agreed mainly for the sake of our relationship.

As the war escalated, I had grown increasingly anxious about the summer camp, and tried to tow my girlfriend to the dark side, where life was untroubled, nontoxic and did not impose unnecessary confrontations. But her doggedness and kindness were mightier than my angst, and after a fortnight with little sleep, on one very hot Tuesday morning, I found myself standing in front of two hundred Palestinian children, on the terrace of a school located in the middle of the foulest, grimiest neighborhood I had ever set my foot in. But among the eager kids, and the other dozen foreign and Israeli volunteers (most of whom were veterans of previous summer camps), I was the only one who was twitching his nose.

About half an hour later, I was sitting next to my fiancee on a diminutive elementary school chair with a Spanish guitar perched on my shaky thigh, smiling nervously. Facing me were the first group of children, around forty Palestinian kids, aged eight to ten, staring alternately at the guitar to the cello that my fiancee was balancing between her legs. Although there were two teenage Palestinian girls to translate what we had to say, and although I had prepared a sort of an introductory speech about music (universal language, blah, blah, blah), I just couldn't say a word. The girls hushed the bewildered children, and silence pervaded the classroom as if we all went underwater.

I drew a deep breath and strummed the first chord, soon followed by the cello; music swept the classroom in a warm gush, producing wonder, gaping mouths and eyes. When we finished the tune, there was no applause, as though we were playing to the ashen audience of a memorial service. However, I managed to unclench, music always acting as my soother, and I stood up and introduced ourselves; then I held up the guitar and asked, "What is this?"

The girls translated, but the children were gawking at the guitar with intense befuddlement.

"Does anyone know how this is called?" I tried again.

A scrawny boy murmured, "Oud?"

"Almost. It's a guitar," I said and didn't even try with the cello.

During the next couple of days, in the sinister shadow of the Lebanon war, our music workshop flourished. We sang songs, clapped and drummed, learned the Do-Re-Mi and danced to the sweet chant of the cello. My fiancee and I also assisted in the other workshops: sewing mittens from old tattered clothes, sculpting clay figures and little useless baskets, painting an elongated work of art on a brick wall just outside the school, illustrating huge kites, putting up a makeshift theater where all children were actors, and playing soccer on a potholed blacktop courtyard using boulders as the goals' markers. And the children smiled and laughed and couldn't care less whether we were Israelis, Arabs or Martians. In those four days I associated faces with names: Ahmad had a deep scar on his cheek; Fatima's eyes were a dazzling blue; Khaled wore the same shirt every day; Muhammad's ears were too big; Falesteen (Palestine in Arabic) was a stunning beauty; and many other frivolous youngsters who were just that -- children, harmless kids. I felt safe (and a tad silly for my misgivings), but even more, I felt proud -- proud of myself for being there, proud of my uncompromising fiancee, and mostly I felt proud of the concept. You see, their Palestinian parents knew who we, Israelis, were, and still sent their children every morning. Something special and significant was happening.

However, this wasn't exactly the proverbial carefree summer camp. The children's own predicament couldn't be more obvious: one group was singing songs of praise to Hezbollah and the abolishment of Israel; another nine-year-old tried to sculpture a clay tank; the kites were covered in colorful drawings of Israeli soldiers, army vehicles, dead Palestinian martyrs, grenades, fences, walls, random splotches of blood, and the Palestinian flag; in one play, during the drama workshop, a group of five giddy children retold the story of a Palestinian family -- they were all lying dead in the end, to the roaring applause of their classmates.

At first I was appalled and disgusted, even furious: how could we let them demonstrate this burning enmity against us? But one volunteer, a child psychologist, told me that most of them were just confused and traumatized, that they were in constant pursuit of means to unbar and express their turbulent emotions. Then, in the breaks, as I was biting my tongue, I heard the stories of their lives, how they were beaten by Israeli settlers while Israeli soldiers were watching, laughing, doing nothing; how during the countless curfews throughout the year they couldn't leave their homes or villages and go to school; how many of them didn't even go to school anymore or had to share school hours with their friends because of insufficient classrooms; how their houses that had stood there for almost a century were decreed to be demolished and replaced by a verdant archeological park for the recreation of the Jewish population; how their older brothers were incarcerated for months without a trial for silently demonstrating against this demolition; how the mammoth wall that Israel was building separated families and friends, and shattered many lives, humiliating, making them feel forever imprisoned; how one of them, Ahmad (a dimpled, scruffy hyperactive eight-year-old), had to watch his father grovel at the feet of a nineteen-year-old soldier in front of his friends and family, grovel and beg to cross a barrier and fetch medicine for his mother who would not be admitted to a nearby Israeli hospital for an urgent operation; how their lives were monitored, controlled and restricted. How they lived a childhood that I couldn't possibly fathom!

I listened to all of those absurd stories told by the other Israeli volunteers and by the teenage Arab girls, and I witnessed the children's horrific though unreserved and honest renditions, and I heard about the rise in the death toll of innocent Lebanese, killed in their sleep by the Israeli barrage fire -- casualties of war they called them, just like the guiltless Palestinians who got shot or bombarded everyday, family members of these children -- and I started to feel that something was seriously wrong.

As someone who was born into the morbid reality of suicide bombers, I grew up to be an avid advocate for a more secured Israel, but how far can my country go? Yes, one may argue that the Palestinian people are governed by fear and led by hatred -- having choosing Hamas as their leading party is the blatant evidence. A party that supports terror must not be allowed to rule. Terrorists should be hunted down and smitten to ashes. To me, these are unbendable truths, but in those days of the summer camp, and the increasingly controversial war in Lebanon, my firm and relentless trust in the Israeli army and my government's policies had started to wane. Will traipsing over these children's lives result in a better, more secured future? Will it not only sustain the conflict and foster the aggravation of hostilities? Animals can be confined, educated and trained by continual and persistent beating, but humans will fight back, always -- isn't it our nature? And isn't the Israeli government, when sending an Apache helicopter to wipe out a Hamas vehicle that happens to be passing next to a playground, resulting in killing and critically wounding children -- isn't it supporting terror in the guise of befogged security measures? In the bloodshot eyes of those children's mothers, can there be a better definition to terror than that?

I could not and cannot fully answer those questions, at least not yet, for I had only seen the tip of the iceberg, having lived most of my cozy Western life with my eyes shut, on the dark side. But these are vital questions and dilemmas that must be deliberated publicly, not only inside Israel, but also by any international state or organization which claims to take side in this enduring conflict. We cannot -- must not -- allow another Palestinian and Israeli generation to grow up in terror. Children are not enemies until they are taught as much.

At the end of the summer camp, my fiancee and I chucked our plans for the remaining three days in Israel before our flight back to Holland, and volunteered to proceed with our successful music workshop for two additional days in another summer camp in southern Hebron. This time I was better prepared, equipped with newfound awareness and comprehension, still not digested but definitely swallowed. When we reached there and encountered even shoddier, filthier conditions than in East Jerusalem, I wasn't as shocked as on that Tuesday a week before.

As to my Islamophobia or Arab antagonism or Israeli superciliousness complexes, however you name it, I am far from being cured; alas, bad habits dwell deep in our systems like chronic infections -- the definition of jaundice. I believe that our reluctance to lay down our weapons on both sides and pursue peace does not stem in cruelty or shortsightedness, but in a very basic humane emotion: fear. As long as the so-called radical-Islam militant organizations wield the sword of violence and hatred, I, as a Jew, cannot fully wash away fear and mistrust from my system, just as the Palestinians cannot wash away theirs in the face of Israeli tanks and soldiers.

Now I realize that these feelings acted as an autoimmune disease: my own apprehension, which was supposed to protect me, was in effect devouring me from the inside, destroying any prospect for peace -- internal peace but also to some extent, with the minor impact I had on those children, a regional Arab-Jewish one. Following the summer camps, I have become more aware and have managed to exhume and expel some fallacious preconceptions and prejudices, while unintentionally adding guilt and shame to my panoply of feelings, but more importantly, I have decided to make a difference.

Many will argue that it is too late, the conflict too complex, the grief and scars too deep, but I couldn't disagree more. I believe that as long as we create new lives, we also have the power to change and heal. I am bursting with cliches: a brighter future is in our hands! So let's stop it from sifting through our immobile fingers, claiming we didn't know it was there. I was dormant for so long, but not anymore, I am now ready to return and fight for this region -- not for myself, but for the next generation.

----------------
Danny Felsteiner was born in 1977 in Haifa, Israel. He currently works in the Netherlands as a musician and writer. He plans to relocate to Jerusalem next year with his wife, Fabienne. Both are determined to set up a music school to Palestinian children in East Jerusalem, with the eventual prospect of bringing Jewish and Palestinian children together. He can be contacted on dannyfelsteiner@gmail.com

Republished with the author's permission.

You Cannot Live if You Bleed Out
By Dr. Mary Majayda

Gaza City, Kahn Younis,
Rafah, Beit Hanoun
and on goes the list
of towns being bled
a car full here,
a house full there,
one by one
to missiles
and sharpshooters
The blood is running
12 in an hour,
47 in 4 days,
blood is being let

Blood letting
an old fashioned term
expressing
the loss of life’s
necessary fluid
I could live
without tears
uncomfortable
and relief would be needed
but I’d survive
I could also live
without saliva
it jump starts the digestive process
and Moistens food for mastication
and swallowing
but I’d survive
without it

But Blood
life is in the blood
it carried oxygen
and nutrients for energy
and the code of who we are
without it
we are gone

The light of the eye goes out
thought ceases to process
the heart gives up trying
to pump what is not there
the lungs cease to fill and empty
in the process of oxygenating the blood
Feeling flees away
or ceases to exist

Without blood there is no life
you can not resuscitate a body
that has bled out
for with the blood life flows out
and soaks into the sand
and fills the world with the smell
of coppery blood and death
the smell of blood has a taste
like an old penny
you can taste it

Young and old alike
bleed out
In a place called Palestine
be it
an amputated limb
a perforated body
or even
one dismembered
you can smell and taste
the blood
the land cries out

The creator
told the first murderer
“His blood cries out”
if this is true
then Palestine cries out
for the thousands murdered
in that place
for the daily bath
in blood
poured out
hot,
and red,
and sticky

You can not live
if you bleed out
yet
Palestine hemorrhages
and
no one
seems to know a way
to stop the flow
Palestine lays
in her pool of blood
and no one
comes
to her aid

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/775898.html
Targeting Muslims - the new Inquisition

By Bradley Burston

Were I a Muslim living in the West, I'd be mad as hell. Not to mention terrified.

Were I a Muslim living in the West, I'd begin to believe that a new Inquisition had begun. An inquisition aimed at no one but Muslims.

Were I a Muslim living in the West, my wife, or my sister, or my daughter might well decide to wear a headscarf or a veil when she went out in public.

Perhaps it would be because she was tired of men and boys ogling her, objectifying her. Perhaps it would be because she felt she was entitled to her dignity. Perhaps she simply might prefer modesty and privacy to fashion slavery.

Perhaps she just thought it was a free country.

And perhaps, on that last point, she would have been mistaken.

For years, and especially since 9/11, law-abiding Muslims have been verbally and physically attacked across North America and Europe. They are scorned for their faith, shunned for their piety, falsely condemned for dual-loyalty, blamed for the crimes of terrorists they abhor.

Of late, however, there has been a disturbing new trend, particularly in Europe, where cabinet ministers and influential lawmakers have increasingly made it their mission to combat, of all things, the head scarf and veil worn by growing numbers of Muslim women and girls.

In Germany, the states of Baden-Wurttenberg and Bavaria recently introduced legislation to outlaw the wearing of head scarves in schools.

Bavarian Education Monika Hohlmeier said the head scarf was increasingly being used as a political symbol. To the understandable ire of Muslims, Hohlmeier went on to say that it was acceptable to wear Christian crosses or Jewish symbols.

In Spain, home to the original Inquisition, Minister for Social Affairs Juan Carlos Aparicio was quoted as having said that the Muslim veil was "not a religious sign but a form of discrimination against women," and having compared it to genital mutilation.

In Britain, the government minister for race and faith relations, Phil Woolas, was quoted this week as demanding that Muslim teaching assistant Aisha Azmi, 24, who refused to remove her veil at work, be fired for that reason.

"She should be sacked," Woolas was quoted as telling the Sunday Mirror. "She has put herself in a position where she can't do her job."

Azmi worked at the Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, which took pains to state that her suspension had nothing to do with religion.

The scarf issue had already taken center stage when former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, now an MP and Leader of the House of Commons, voiced public objections to the wearing of the niqab, a full-face veil, at face-to-face meetings with his constituents.

The national debate has since widened, with David Davis, a top Conservative Party official, taking the anti-veil stance to a new level.

''What Jack touched on was the fundamental issue of whether in Britain we are developing a divided society,'' Davis said. ''Whether we are inadvertently encouraging a kind of voluntary apartheid.''

The anti-veil arguments dovetail with a parallel campaign, which takes as its premise the concept that Islam itself renders its adherents incapable of integrating into Western societies.

"If you are going to have Islamic schools, the question is whether they are going to embrace Western values," Patrick Sookhdeo, a Pakistan-born Anglican priest in England who converted from Islam, told the New York Times this month.

"I would argue that Islamic values are not compatible with Western values," he said.

And what Western values might these be? Are they the time-honored Western values of intolerance for people of color, suspicion and marginalization of non-Christians, fear and loathing of non-Whites? Exploitation of and contempt for the residents of former imperial possessions and colonies?

At this point, there will be a pause for the springloaded Islamophobes among us to suggest that it is any society's right and duty to protect itself against elements that may foment terrorism. There will be those who will argue that the veil may both mask and encourage extremism.

Perhaps it is time for us in the Western world to declare that Islam has a right to exist.

Perhaps it is time for us to recognize that non-violent, non-Judeo-Christian religious observance is a right, not an act of war.

Scarves don't explode. Veils do not kill. The niqab does not incite.

It takes courage to wear the veil in the West. Certainly, no one should be forced to wear it against her will. But those who do so voluntarily, have chosen to brave ridicule, and perhaps to risk their own livelihood. They have made a choice for self-respect, in the face of all that is vacuous in contemporary Western civilization, where the worship of the superficial has taken on the potency and universality of a state religion.

We in the West have allowed the veil to become the symbol of all that we do not know and do not trust about Islam.

In the Age of Paris Hilton, however, the West desperately needs women who devote themselves to serious pursuits, to the betterment of society, women who believe that self-esteem and dignity are worthy values. If they choose to wear a veil, and we take offense, that is wholly our problem. We have no business making it theirs.
__________________

Talkback Guidelines

The guiding principles of the talkback forum for this article will be mutual respect and an openness to dialogue. Participants, even if they rule out, dismiss or oppose coexistence, must, within the confines of this forum, practice it.

Censorship will be unapologetic.

Political orientation will have absolutely no bearing on whether a comment is posted or rejected.

The following will be grounds for deletion:

1. Racist remarks, as well as slurs on the basis of religion, ethnicity and gender.
2. Use of the terms Nazi, Hitler, ethnic cleansing, to describe the actions and policies of Israelis, Palestinians or other parties to the Israel-Arab conflict.
3. Disparaging remarks, personal attacks, vulgarities and profanities directed at other participants in the forum.
4. Advocacy of violence against individuals or religious, ethnic or racial groups, including statements which may be construed as urging attacks on leaders, officials, security forces or civilians.
5.Use of the phrase: "There are no Palestinians" or derivatives thereof.

All that said.... I'd love your feedback