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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Mauritania</title>
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		<title>Africa’s New Nelson Mandela?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/africas-new-nelson-mandela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=africas-new-nelson-mandela</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/africas-new-nelson-mandela/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-slavery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dah Obeid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mauritania]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235734</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the world’s worst slave state, a heroic anti-slavery activist comes second in a presidential election.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/biram-dah.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235738" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/biram-dah-362x350.png" alt="biram-dah" width="294" height="284" /></a>While the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls into slavery by the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, received abundant media coverage, and deservedly so, the mainstream media regrettably failed to bestow similar attention on an equally newsworthy and globally important anti-slavery story occurring simultaneously nearby in Mauritania.</p>
<p>In a national election last June, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a West African country like Nigeria, re-elected President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, a former army general, to a second five-year term with 81.94 percent of the vote despite accusations of extensive voter fraud. The dubious distinction of a Third-World ruler getting himself re-elected dictator is, unfortunately, nothing new. But what distinguished markedly this particular Mauritanian election from previous ones was Aziz’s main opponent, Biram Ould Dah Abeid, a remarkable and fearless Mauritanian anti-slavery activist whose <em>Radicals For Global Action (RAG) </em>party came second.</p>
<p>“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” said Dah Abeid in an interview with <em>Le Courier de Sahara</em>. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and against corruption. The true opposition, it’s us!”</p>
<p>Though largely unknown in the Western general public, Dah Abeid was recognized in 2013 by the United Nations (UN) as one of of the world’s foremost abolitionists, receiving the prestigious UN Human Rights Prize from Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last year in New York. Reflecting his human rights stance and his <em>Le Journal de Sahara</em> statement, Dah Obeid’s <em>RAG</em> ran on an anti-slavery, anti-racism, anti-corruption platform in the recent election. Dah Abeid himself is the son of a slave; his father was freed by his grandmother’s master, but his grandmother and uncles remained slaves.</p>
<p>“I am from the servile community of Mauritania that makes up 50 percent of the population,” said Dah Abeid in a speech at the UN Human Rights Summit in Geneva earlier this year. “Twenty percent of the 50 percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”</p>
<p>And Mauritania is direly in need of such dauntless slavery opponents. Through his own research, Dah Abeid believes his country possesses the highest number of chattel slaves in the world, to which he estimates 20 percent of his country’s 3.3 million people belong (Most observers admit, however, that an exact number is difficult to determine).</p>
<p>Mauritania’s slaves are black and their owners are Arabs or Berbers, called “whites,” who constitute about 20 percent of the population and almost all of the political, business and military elite class that controls the country. Like most other Mauritanians, both slaves and masters are Muslim, enmeshed in a cruel, life-destroying institution that dates back centuries in Mauritania, with some slave families remaining trapped in this evil for generations.</p>
<p>“This is a state racism that has become institutionalised, that has caused pogroms, purges, bloody purges, murdering of the black population, of different groups like the Wolof (a black African people)…” Dah Abeid said in his Geneva speech.</p>
<p>Dah Abeid belongs to the Haratin class, an oppressed group of people composed of freed slaves and their descendants, while members of black African groups, like the Wolof, form another 20 percent of Mauritania’s population. But all “free” black Mauritanians suffer discrimination based on race and live in what Dah Abeid calls “sub-citizenship.” Some “free” black Mauritanians’ slave origins can be identified in their names, like Dah Abeid’s, whose last name is Arabic for “slave.”</p>
<p>“The proverbs of our masters say that the difference between a slave and one who is freed is the distance which separates the tail of a cow from the ground. In Mauritania, our cows have very long tails,” Dah Abeid said in a <em><a href="http://slate.com">slate.com</a></em> interview.</p>
<p>In 2013, indicating the extent of the slavery tragedy in Mauritania, Global Slavery Index ranked the country number one in the world for its prevalence there. Slavery was abolished in Mauritania in 1981 and criminalized in 2007, but only one person has ever been convicted and jailed for owning a slave. Local and foreign observers of Mauritania’s human rights situation generally regard these decrees as having been made solely for foreign consumption. The slavery situation remains the same despite government denials that only “vestiges” remain.</p>
<p>However, Dah Abeid, a constant thorn in the ruling Arab-Berber class’s side regarding slavery, used Global Slavery Index’s announcement to “congratulate” in a sarcasm-laden speech his government’s winning “the trophy and the title of the first slave state in the world.”</p>
<p>“We (anti-slavery activists) have been working towards the re-foundation of a Mauritania without masters and servants but, once again, you have beaten us,” he said. “We will never stop complimenting you on this enviable place on the international stage that you have managed to achieve, after a hard fight, for our country…Your leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz deserves to be re-elected in the first round of the presidential election in 2014…”</p>
<p>With other members of the Mauritanian anti-slavery group <em>Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) </em>he founded in 2008, Dah Abeid has undertaken several public actions to embarrass the government into freeing slaves and to abolish slavery. In 2011, for example, he and several others staged a protest demonstration to obtain a ten-year-old slave girl’s freedom from her mistress. The Mauritanian government reacted accordingly for a pro-slavery regime. It didn’t arrest the mistress under its 2007 law and free the girl but rather punished the protesters with jail terms.</p>
<p>In 2012, Dah Abeid and other IRA activists staged a sensational (for Mauritania) anti-slavery protest on a Friday outside a mosque. There, Dah Abeid symbolically destroyed a copy of the Sharia law code used by Mauritania’s ruling class to justify slavery. According to the eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, “…the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Sharia law.”</p>
<p>Dah Abeid said he made sure he first removed the pages referring to the Koran and those containing the names of the Prophet Mohammad and Allah before carrying out this provocative and symbolic act. The anti-slavery activist does not believe Sharia is divine law, as more fundamentalist Muslims do, saying it is simply outdated codes drawn up during Islam’s Middle Ages.</p>
<p>“In the Constitution of Mauritania, they are the primary source of law. But it completely contradicts the letter and spirit of the actual Quran, which is in its nature egalitarian,” he said.</p>
<p>The government reaction to the anti-Sharia demonstration was as overwhelming as it was barbaric. Dah Obeid’s home was violently raided and he and other anti-slavery activists were imprisoned and tortured. But due to the international outcry, President Aziz had him released from jail. A Sharia court, however, declared Dah Abeid an apostate and he is currently under sentence of death.</p>
<p>“There were TV programs transmitted that talked about how I was going to be hanged…,” he said. “And they said on television we will kill him, like we kill a cat.”</p>
<p>But Dah Abeid says what disturbed him the most about this grisly affair was the silence of “ambassadors of democratic countries” who “did not speak up about freedom of speech and worship.”</p>
<p>Dah Abeid and other Mauritanian anti-slavery activists have been arrested, imprisoned and tortured multiple times. Both his anti-slavery group and political party were banned almost the moment they were announced. Dah Obeid’s non-violent protest activities, sense of justice and self-sacrifice for the most powerless in his country remind one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who, Dah Obeid says, is his role model. Fittingly, both Mandela and King were previous recipients of the same UN human rights award bestowed on Dah Abeid. But Dah Abeid’s struggle is probably fraught with more obstacles, since he is confronted with an established slave system, backed by Sharia law, and a slave-owning political class that supports both.</p>
<p>So it is all the more remarkable, and probably unprecedented, that the son of a slave, under sentence of death and heading a banned party, ran in a presidential election against the incumbent representative of his country’s slave-owning class. Despite the alleged voter fraud, <em>RAG </em>still managed to receive 8.72 percent of the vote. The other three presidential candidates all received under five percent. Some opposition parties boycotted the election to protest expected voting irregularities.</p>
<p>“If these elections were held under normal circumstances, I would get between 35 and 40 percent of the vote,” said Dah Abeid after the election.</p>
<p>Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London and author of several books on Africa, agrees. Before the election, Keenan wrote that “Mauritania’s elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”</p>
<p>“If all Haratin (freed black slave class) and blacks were registered on the voters role, which they are not, and if Mauritanian elections were 100 per cent free and fair, which they are not, and if all Haratin-blacks voted on racist-ethnic lines, which is conceivable, then Biram Dah Abeid would be president,” wrote Keenan.</p>
<p>The mainstream media’s neglect regarding Dah Abeid and the Mauritanian election story is all the more curious when one considers the story’s heroic nature as well as its far-reaching implications that could eventually end the suffering of hundreds of thousands of enslaved black African Mauritanians, whose same sad fate the young Nigerian women are now experiencing. Already, Dah Abeid’s and <em>IRA’s</em> efforts are reported to have led to the release of two thousand slaves.</p>
<p>And that, definitely, is news worth reporting.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Muslim Country With 25% Slave Population Elected VP of UN Human Rights Council</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-country-with-slave-population-elected-vp-of-un-human-rights-council/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-country-with-slave-population-elected-vp-of-un-human-rights-council</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-country-with-slave-population-elected-vp-of-un-human-rights-council/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:31:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mauritania]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slavery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united nations human rights council]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168915</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The UN Human Rights Council met today in Geneva and elected Mauritania as its Vice-President and Rapporteur for the next year, the second highest position at the world's top human rights body. According to a recent report by the Guardian, "up to 800,000 people in a nation of 3.5 million remain chattels," ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-country-with-%25-slave-population-elected-vp-of-un-human-rights-council/0a117/" rel="attachment wp-att-168916"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-168916" title="0A117" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/0A117.jpg" alt="" width="306" height="229" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.unwatch.org/cms.asp?id=3649877&amp;campaign_id=65378">But look on the bright side</a>, at least it wasn&#8217;t Sudan, Syria or Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m coming around to the opinion that we should do everything possible to keep the UN Human Rights Council around. Not only is it the greatest source of irony since fish in a blacksmith shop, but it&#8217;s also a living reminder that the United Nations is to human rights as an exploding train is to transportation safety.</p>
<blockquote><p>The UN Human Rights Council met today in Geneva and elected Mauritania as its Vice-President and Rapporteur for the next year, the second highest position at the world&#8217;s top human rights body.</p>
<p>&#8220;It is obscene for the U.N. to use the occasion of Human Rights Day, when we commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to elect the world&#8217;s worst enabler of slavery to this prestigious post,&#8221; said Hillel Neuer, UN Watch executive director.</p>
<p>&#8220;The U.N. is making an arsonist head of the fire department. It defies both morality and common sense.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to a recent report by the Guardian, &#8220;up to 800,000 people in a nation of 3.5 million remain chattels,&#8221; with power and wealth overwhelmingly concentrated among lighter-skinned Moors, &#8220;leaving slave-descended darker-skinned Moors and black Africans on the edges of society.&#8221;</p>
<p>UN Watch expressed regret that while the dictatorship of Belarus took the floor in today&#8217;s meeting to criticize the election of Poland, none of the democracies said a word about the election of Mauritania or Ecuador.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course not. No one wants to offend the Muslim world by criticizing a cultural tradition that we, with our white privilege, have no right to object to the semi-white privilege of the Mauritanian rulers.</p>
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		<title>The Burqa Bomb</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ryan-mauro/the-burqa-bomb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-burqa-bomb</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ryan-mauro/the-burqa-bomb/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:02:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Babil Province]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58632</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Terrorists disguised as women blow themselves up in Pakistan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/burka.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58634" title="burka" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/burka.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="365" /></a></p>
<p>On April 17, a refugee camp at Kohat in Pakistan was struck by two suicide bombers that disguised themselves with burqas, the full-body veil worn by some Muslim women to make sure none of their skin is exposed. The attacks, which killed 41 people and injured 62, are sure to heighten the debate in Europe about whether wearing burqas and niqabs in public should be banned.</p>
<p>A parliamentary committee in Belgium has unanimously <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1977350,00.html">approved</a> such a ban, with the final vote in the House of Representatives coming April 22 and it is expected to pass. Movements to ban the burqa in Europe are quickly growing due to concern that the burqas can be used to disguise the identities of terrorists planning attacks like those that just happened in Pakistan and over the lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrant communities.</p>
<p>These concerns are not unfounded. Even though Islam frowns upon cross-dressing, male terrorists dressing up as burqa-clad women in order to carry out attacks is becoming more and more part of their modus operandi. This tactic has even been used by bank robbers and other criminals on many occasions, including in the U.S., as thoroughly <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/11/niqabs-and-burqas-as-security-threats">documented</a> by Daniel Pipes.</p>
<p>Terrorists have repeatedly donned burqas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as in the United Kingdom, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, India, Somalia and Mauritania. In the United   Kingdom, one man who tried to set off a bomb in July 2005 in London was able to escape by wearing a burqa. The use of this clothing makes counter-terrorism more difficult because female police, which are in shorter supply, must be used to search those wearing it. The police chief of Iraq’s Babil Province in August 2008 complained about this after two burqa-wearing females attacked Shiite piligrims.</p>
<p>Daniel Bacquelaine of the Reformist Movement party in Belgium says that he supports the ban because it contradicts liberal democratic values. “There is nothing in Islam or the Koran about the burqa. It has become an instrument of intimidation, and is a sign of submission of women. And a civilized society cannot accept the imprisonment of women,” he <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1977350,00.html">told</a> <em>TIME Magazine.</em> The argument follows that the ban, therefore, does not violate freedom of religion since it is more of a cultural practice than something mandated by Islam. Of course, radical Salafists like those in Saudi   Arabia would disagree.</p>
<p>Banning or at least severely limit the wearing of burqas will cause outrage in the Muslim world and raises legitimate questions about civil liberty violations. However, a surprising amount of Muslims, including imams, support the ban. The Conference of French Imams has declared its support of the ban, saying it is not required in Islam. The chairman of the group, Hassen Chalghoumi, has had his Paris mosque <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/7053101/Paris-imam-backs-Frances-burqa-ban.html">stormed</a> and has received death threats in response.</p>
<p>The ruling of the group of French imams is supported by Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi, who was until his death in March the Grand Mufti of Egypt and highest Sunni authority in the Islamic world.  In October, Tantawi <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/6262819/Egypt-purges-niqab-from-schools-and-colleges.html">created</a> a stir when told a student to remove her niqab, saying it “had no connection with religion” and said it shouldn’t be worn, especially in schools.</p>
<p>A female Muslim in the U.K. has <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1195052/Why-I-British-Muslim-woman-want-burkha-banned-streets.html">written</a> an op-ed saying that “Nowhere in the Koran does it state that a woman’s face and body must be covered in a layer of heavy black cloth. Instead, Muslim women should dress modestly, covering their arms and legs.” She favors the ban because it “is a sign of creeping radicalization” and “is an imported Saudi Arabian tradition.”</p>
<p>Dounia Bouzar, a female Muslim who sits on the board of the Council of the Muslim Faith in France, is particularly <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905554,00.html">forceful</a> in her opposition to the burqa. “Imposition of this garment on women is one manner Salafists get individuals to renounce their individuality and submit to the extremist cult thinking that masquerades as Islam—but which is an abomination of it,” she says.</p>
<p>When an Indian college in September 2009 banned the burqa (and went one step further and banned the headscarf), some Muslim leaders defended the decision. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, the author of over 200 books about Islam, <a href="http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3613.htm">said</a> that it is “un-Islamic” to force anyone to dress a certain way, and that “the burqa is not part of Islam.” He was even lenient about the headscarf ban, saying to respect the rules of the school, and “if you don’t agree, you quit the college.” A professor at a New Delhi school that is a Muslim scholar agreed, saying “the burqa has become the symbol of rigidity and has nothing to do with Islam” and recommended that students not wear it at school.</p>
<p>Terrorists have shown that they have no qualms about using burqas as a disguise to carry out attacks with. The European movement to outlaw the wearing of the burqa is understandable in light of the criminal and violent activities carried out by wearing the clothing. Such a ban brings up legitimate civil liberties concerns, but those that disagree are obligated to offer a different solution. If Belgium becomes the first country to enforce the ban and other states take similar measures, they can count on extremists to portray it as proof that the West has declared war on Islam, but there will be plenty of brave Muslims that will not allow that theme to go unchallenged.</p>
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		<title>An Ex-Islamist Needs U.S. Support &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/an-ex-islamist-needs-u-s-support-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-ex-islamist-needs-u-s-support-wsj-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:02:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[age]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48530</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania&#8217;s Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania&#8217;s Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania&#8217;s Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania&#8217;s Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been one of them.</p>
<p>I met Hanevy, now 34, for the first time last year, and I asked him about why he broke with the Islamists as an 18-year-old. He expressed disgust with the government&#8217;s and elite society&#8217;s tolerance of slavery. He also recounted the horror of witnessing a massacre of black Africans, a minority in Mauritania. The corrosive impact of his country&#8217;s dictatorship and religious extremism, he explained, stunted society. Instead of a radical cleric, he became a reformer committed to secular democracy.</p>
<p>In 2007, Hanevy seized upon a unique opportunity. The fall of a 20-year dictatorship and presidential elections suggested that the time was ripe for new democratic experiments. He launched Taqadoumy.com (Arabic for &#8220;progressive&#8221;), a news portal in Arabic, French and English featuring investigative journalism unparalleled in the Arab world.</p>
<p>Despite limited resources, Hanevy recruited a team of reporters and was soon running the country&#8217;s most-read news site—the local equivalent of the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post. Taqadoumy fearlessly exposed scandals and corruption, attracting thousands of readers with photos and documents providing hard evidence for sensational scoops.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703906204575027462093163750-lMyQjAxMTAwMDAwMjEwNDIyWj.html">An Ex-Islamist Needs U.S. Support &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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