Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Arab Liberals speak!

Yesterday, I found a very interesting letter on “Sawt Al Iraq”.
It was prepared by a group of recognized Arab thinkers among whom is the Iraqi former minister of planning Dr. Jawad Hashim who’s been living in exile since the late 1970's.

The letter is calling for the establishment of an international court to prosecute individuals or groups who support and justify terrorisim, namely clerics who release “fatwas” that provoke hatred and encourage terrorist attacks(like Qaradawi for example), and the letter will eventually be sent to the Security Council and the UN secretary general after getting sufficient support.

The letter was shown in Arabic and an e-mail address is provided, where readers who are interested in this subject can contact Dr. Jawad and support the request by signing the letter, so I e-mailed him offering my support and my signature and I asked him to send me the letter in English if possible as I thought that it would be a good idea to spread the word about this letter, and perhaps this will get more people to give their signatures.

Today, I got a reply from Dr.Jawad with a translated version of the letter and it was amazing to know that within a couple of days, they managed to collect over 10 000 signatures from Arab liberals, writers and intellectuals.
Support coming from anywhere would be helpful of course but I understood from his reply that he would prefer support from inside the Arab or Muslim world and I assume that he thinks that this way there will be no chance for those who believe in conspiracies to question the integrity of this project, as those idiots will not hesitate to call it a “crusade” if the support came from westerners.


Here’s the full story.

And here's the link in Arabic.

Ali.

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