State Department blasted for lauding PA's 'religious tolerance' [IMRA: Rely
on US observers?!?]
By MELISSA RADLER The Jerusalem Post 10 October 2002

[IMRA: It should be noted that according to current plans, the same U.S.
authorities responsible for whitewashing the PA in this report are to be
relied upon to accurately prepare reports on Palestinian security
compliance.]

NEW YORK Is the Palestinian Authority a model for religious tolerance?
According to the State Department's annual International Religious Freedom
report, the PA "generally respects religious freedom in practice," it
"attempts to foster goodwill among religious leaders" and it "makes a strong
effort to maintain good relations with the Christian community." But with
Israel designated as a country that has "discriminatory legislation or
policies disadvantaging certain religions" and PA abuses all but ignored,
some religious freedom experts are decrying the report as biased and
misleading.

By failing to hold the PA accountable for its violations, said some experts,
the department is effectively undermining President George W. Bush's call
for democracy in the region.

The report, which was mandated by the 1998 International Religious Freedom
Act, details the status of religious freedom and abuses in 192 countries.
States of particular concern in this year's report, which was released on
Monday, include Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, China, and Burma, said the
department's Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, John
Hanford. The only country that saw freedom of religion improve
significantly, according to the report, was Afghanistan.

Israel and the PA lumped together in a section titled "Israel and the
occupied territories" were both lauded for generally respecting freedom of
worship. But criticism of Israel took up most of the 15-page section. It
included details on tensions between Jews and non-Jews, including reports of
Christians and Muslims being mistreated and prevented from worshipping as a
result of security measures; Israeli policies in Jerusalem and the North
that inhibit non-Jewish growth; and social ills that result from Orthodox
control over Jewish law.

Anti-Jewish sentiment in the PA was limited to one paragraph that criticized
"the rhetoric of some Jewish and Muslim religious leaders," which it
described as "harsh and at times constituted an incitement to violence."
Palestinian violence against settlers attempting to worship at Rachel's Tomb
and at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron was noted, and one suicide
attack a March 27 attack on a Passover seder in Netanya that killed 29
people is mentioned. The number of dead, however, is erroneously reported as
20.

The report also notes that while the PA doesn't provide financial support to
Jewish holy sites in the areas under its control, it "paid for the
refurbishment of Joseph's Tomb" after the tomb was ransacked by Palestinian
rioters in October 2000. According to media reports, the funds were used to
turn the tomb into a mosque, after which it was declared a Muslim holy site.
The IDF spokesman's office and the State Department declined to comment on
the subject.

The omission from the report of Palestinian suicide bombings, which have
been promoted by some Muslim leaders in the PA as a religious duty, is
glaring in light of its detailed critique on Israel's military response to
these actions, said a number of experts.

"Gross caricatures of Jews, reminiscent of the Hitler era, are published
throughout the Palestinian Authority, and it's a shameful disgrace that the
State Department appears to ignore this," said Michael Horowitz, director of
the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute.

"In a report like this, America comes across as being the ally of
oppressors," said Meyrav Wurmser, a senior fellow and director of the Center
for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute, who criticized the report
for omitting the PA's mistreatment of Christians and the controversy
surrounding the building of a mosque on church property in Nazareth.

"Forget about the president calling for democracy in the Middle East. When
his State Department comes up with a report that, in fact, whitewashes the
oppression of a people by a certain group, it's a total contradiction of the
president's declaration," she said.

According to a State Department official, the department used its own
resources, press reports and information from international NGOs to compile
the country reports. The official said that the department made an effort to
differentiate between religious abuse and acts that happen to target people
of a specific religion.

"It's not always easy to tell what is religiously motivated," he said.
"We're looking in this report at the ability to practice and choose your
religion, so things that may have a religious dimension to them don't go
into this area as an infraction of a religious freedom right," he said.

However, according to Richard Land, President of the Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the State Department
should be faulted from generally downplaying Arab anti-Semitism throughout
the report, and he noted that ignoring this area of religious abuse has
already contributed to regional violence. "You would never know from this
State Department report that the vilest kind of anti-Semitism, that we
haven't seen since the fall of the Third Reich, is being poured out by
official government agencies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and the PA," he
said.

Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at
Freedom House, noted that there is no Israeli equivalent to the PA's
broadcasting of Friday mosque sermons that sometimes call for the
annihilation of Jews. "To say that the rhetoric of some Jewish and Arab
leaders has been harsher, that does not get at the reality. There's a
difference in the scale and intensity of what's been said," he said.

Several experts said that lack of access to the PA and its lack of
transparency may have contributed to the report's near-silence on both
anti-Semitism and its refuting of reports on anti-Christians acts, while
Israeli democracy permitted the State Department to criticize its every
move.

"It's a very difficult situation in which to gather reliable information,
period, for anybody," said Land. During a March 2001 mission to the region,
the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, of which Land is a
member, was unable to conduct interviews with Palestinian leaders due to the
security situation, said a commission spokesman.

One country report that received praise was the one on Iran. For the first
time, the report listed the names and ages of 12 Jews who disappeared after
attempting to leave Iran in the 1990s a move lauded by the Los Angeles-based
Council on Iranian American Jewish Organizations.