Moslem Apartheid

At a time that it has become popular to call Israel an apartheid state and compare it to South Africa, some apply the term apartheid to Hamas.

Little Green Footballs points to an article in The Jerusalem Post about Hamas in Kalkilya supporting the call to close the local YMCA under the pretense that it is a threat to prosletize the local Moslems. Some YMCA offices have already been burned down. Under the title Apartheid Hamas, LGF writes:

The Hamas charter is quite clear about their intent to establish an Islamic state ruled by shari’a law, and one of the steps toward this goal is the eradication of Christian organizations—like the YMCA.

On a different angle, today on Best of the Web, James Taranto responds to those that claim there is a need to do business with Hamas. Taranto writes:

These warnings about the consequences of refusing to do business with Hamas are reminiscent of the arguments made in the 1980s by opponents of sanctions against South Africa--yet those sanctions surely hastened the end of apartheid. The moral case for sanctions is even stronger in the Palestinian case. Apartheid entailed the subjugation of South African blacks; Hamas seeks the elimination of Israeli Jews.

But accusing Moslems of apartheid is neither new nor limited to Hamas. Back in December 2001, Colbert I. King wrote Saudi Arabia's Apartheid for the Washington Post. He quotes an American official who had just finished a tour of duty in Riyadh:

"One of the (still) untold stories, however, is the cooperation of U.S. and other Western companies in enforcing sexual apartheid in Saudi Arabia. McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and other U.S. firms, for instance, maintain strictly segregated eating zones in their restaurants. The men's sections are typically lavish, comfortable and up to Western standards, whereas the women's or families' sections are often run-down, neglected and, in the case of Starbucks, have no seats. Worse, these firms will bar entrance to Western women who show up without their husbands. My wife and other [U.S. government affiliated] women were regularly forbidden entrance to the local McDonald's unless there was a man with them."

Colbert goes over some anti-apartheid history, writing that after Leon Sullivan joined the board of directors of GM in 1971, he got them to withdraw out of South Africa. His next step was to draft a set of workplace principles in 1977 for US companies to practice, including in South Africa. The first one on the list was: "Non-segregation of the races in all eating, comfort and work facilities."--which obviously is not being followed today in Saudi Arabia. But today, in regards to Saudi Arabia, instead of an uproar there is quiet.

In December 2002, The San Diego Union Tribune carried a story about another kind of separation carried out in Saudi Arabia:

The city of Mecca lies 45 miles east of Jeddah. A few miles before reaching the city, the highway splits.

Green signs overhead direct non-Muslims to steer their cars into the right lanes to take a fork that completely bypasses Mecca. A ring of small mountains surrounds the city, preventing even a distant view of it.

Only Muslims may enter the ring of mountains and the historic and holy city of Mecca. Cars going straight stop at a checkpoint just beyond the signs, where everyone must present documents proving he or she is Muslim. The city of Medina, Islam's second-holiest site, similarly is off-limits to non-Muslims.

John V. Last wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about this back in August 2003, noting the discrepancy:

This law is something of a singularity among major religions, because it isn't merely the Grand Mosque that is off-limits to nonbelievers, the way, for instance, a Mormon Temple is. It's a city--a major city with hotels, supermarkets, schools and a population of 1.2 million people. (The city of Medina, population 700,000, also forbids non-Muslims.)

...In 1995, incidentally, Saudi money funded the building of an enormous, $50 million mosque in Rome, just a stone's throw from St. Peter's Square.

But how is the media dealing with the situation in Saudi Arabia today? Today it is not a major focus.

The articles above about segregation in Saudi Arabia are from 2001 and 2002. Just as the media today did not publish the Danish cartoons, they are more unlikely to point to issues such as the segregation of women and non-Moslems in Moslem countries--issues which are more likely to be viewed as internal affairs.

Besides, there's always Israel.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Apartheid and Hamas and Islam and Saudi Arabia and Mecca.