LOCALARAB TIMES, MONDAY, JULY 1, 2019

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A DIGEST OF PUBLIC OPINION

DIWANIYAOnce upon a time were allies of the extremist group

Arab attitude succumbs to US policy“THE US President Donald Trump has shown much wisdom in terms of his reaction towards Iran follow-ing Tehran shooting down the US drone because there have been no victims behind this incident as Wash-ington absorbed the anger to prevent the explosive situation in the Gulf and eventually saving the lives of thousands of innocent people in this part of the world in addition to the losses that could reach in billions of dollars,” columnist Dr Hamed Al-Humoud wrote for Al-Qabas daily.

“In this connection, it looks like President Trump listens to more than one party of his advisors when dealing with signifi cant issues. In this context, we cite how the president showed wisdom in dealing with an-other issue towards the end of last April although this issue was less in terms of its importance than the issue of shooting down the drone.

“Meanwhile, we would like to point out that follow-ing the visit of Egyptian President Abdulfattah el-Sisi to Washington DC the US president had issued a state-ment indicating that he is studying the possibility of is-suing a decision to list the Muslim Brotherhood Group among the terrorist organizations.

“However, this statement was supported by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the National Security Advisor John Bolton, but this decision may have been issued or may not have been issued, because the issuance of this decision would be embarrassing for America in dealing with some countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco and the State of Kuwait in addition to many other countries where the Muslim Brotherhood Groups have deeply ingrained their ex-istence in those countries and have founded popular bases in these countries .

“For his part, the American Emil Nakhlah who oc-cupied a senior position in the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sees the classifi cation of the Muslims Brotherhood Group as a terrorist organization, and this shall constitute a threat to America’s national security and shall destabilize some Sunni ma-jority Islamic countries.

“He added that this type of the prospective decision actually refl ects the ignorance in dealing with the modern political history of the region, because this type of decisions shall transform the moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood Group into extremists.

“Not only that, according to Nakhlah, the classifi ca-tion of the Muslim Brotherhood Group as terrorists, shall send a message to the Arab world indicating the US is not keen to promote democratic values in the region (the Middle East).

“Anyway, the situation became more obvious in Britain after conducting a long study on the history and situation of the Muslim Brotherhood Group in Britain and the outcome of this study was published in The Daily Telegraph on December 17, 2015 where the then British prime minister David Cameron had issued a statement indicating the activities of the Mus-lim Brotherhood will not be prevented in Britain.

“As a matter of fact, the elements of the Muslim Brotherhood Group are practicing their activities in most European countries, but the question here is, why some Arab countries are keen to link the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism. This happens while the Eu-ropean countries and Americans are dealing leniently with this group.

“However, I think this occurs because the European countries foremost see that the Muslim Brotherhood Group is an organization and is likely to practice politics through the ballot boxes in the long term and this shall help boost the democratic values in the Islamic states.

“In this context, we say the symptoms of such prac-tice was represented by the Tunisian experiment and although the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood Group represented by Al-Nahdha (Renaissance) Party, lost their parliamentary majority, the party had accepted the outcomes of the relevant democratic parliamentary elections and this is applicable to the Turkish Justice and Development Party, which has accepted its loss in the Municipal elections that were held recently in Is-tanbul, but when the relevant democratic process is re-jected, then the Muslim Brotherhood Group, will that turndown and then latter will be branded as terrorists.

“On the other hand, we say the elements of the Mus-lim Brotherhood Group who were exposed to torture in the Egyptian prisons were transformed into terror-ists including Dr Aymen Al-Thawahri (of al-Qaeda Network) and after the latter left the prison with a grudge he took part in the formation of the al-Qaeda network.

“Apart from the above, it seems to be important, but inevitable to say that the US and some Gulf states once upon a time were allies of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood Group fi ghting the Soviet invasion of Af-ghanistan.

“Anyway, the ‘tag’ of terrorism was inherent to the Muslim Brotherhood Group organization since the assassination of the former Egyptian prime minister Mahmoud Fahmi Al-Neqrashi in 1948 – the assassina-tion that was carried out by one of the members of the group, but the founder of the Group Hassan Al-Banna had condemned this assassination and Al-Banna, him-self was killed two months after the assassination of Al-Neqrashi.”

Also:“The US President Donald Trump prepares himself

to grant Israel Arab and international recognition for legalizing all recent privileges that were given by him to Israel including Washington’s recognition of Jeru-salem as the capital of Israel and the shifting of his country’s embassy there,” columnist and former min-ister of state for National Assembly Affair Dr Abdul-hadi Abdulhameed Al-Saleh wrote for Al-Anba daily.

“In this context, we say Washington has stopped its fi nancing to the UNRWA and withdrawn from UN-ESCO because ‘The State of Palestine’ had joined this international organization. Not only that, America also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights which is currently under the Israeli occupation.

“For the time being, Trump is currently paving the way to promote his alleged ambiguous ‘Deal of the Century’ and would like to boost this deal by giving ‘a tip’ of $50 billion to be invested in Palestinian ter-ritories given the fact the Palestinians themselves have described the same as ‘the promised illusion’, but it looks like Trump will still pursue his policy of taking money from the Arabs and give it to Israel.

“However, the response shown by some Arab and foreign states for taking part in a conference that was prepared to pass the deal in question, is regretting in-deed and seems to be against both the mind and the logic, because holding this conference was against the will of the owners of the right to the land, the Palestin-ians, for the latter had strongly refused to participate

in this conference, and branded it pessimistically as ‘Trump Promise’ like the notorious ‘Balfour Promise’ that was given on Nov 2, 1917 by the then British for-eign secretary Arthur James Balfour.

“But the Arab attitude unfortunately succumbs to the US policy which has proved that it respects only those who encounter it and this was evident through its current confl ict with Iran. This happens although the Arabs possess all the constituents of pride and dignity in addition to the strong words and the head held high.

“In conclusion, we would like to laud the Kuwaiti leadership and the civil institutions which have ve-hemently rejected the conference in question. In the meantime, we hope the offi cial Kuwait attitude will be in harmony with its declared permanent attitude in the international forums.”

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“Intellectuals and ordinary citizens agree that the problem in our Arab world and the Third World is the lack of separation between religion and politics, and the management of state affairs – a state that is supposed to be civil as per the constitution and politi-cal system – via religious thought that control all the laws and decisions,” Iqbal Ahmad wrote for Al-Qabas daily.

“The picture may not come across in a direct form, but it occurs through domination of religion in the most important basic joints of society, mainly educa-tion. Religious thought has dominated life in its vari-ous aspects including political, social and cultural, at various stages of the history of mankind. Over the years, this infl uence went up and down but it never disappeared.

“The basic characteristic of religiosity among gov-ernments in vulnerable societies has moved the state away from the concept of civilization because of the desire of the state to fortify itself and encourage itself to be religious, albeit in formality. Such political reli-gious harmony may occur at the expense of basic lib-erties of the people, as it increases the problems in dai-ly lives of ordinary citizens by restricting and directing them based on certain interests and orientations.

“The effects of this combination of religion and pol-itics has led to the distortion of the religion and failure of politics. Religion should not be mixed with politics. It should be independent, clear and acceptable to all. It has its own divine goals.”

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“‘Expatriates, Bedoun residents, urbanists, non-Arab Kuwaitis and traders are a nuisance’ … this and many such words of racism are present in the Kuwaiti society. The only thing that these obscene words can do is destroy and ruin, due to which they should be removed from our vocabularies so that we live in peace,” Eng . Tareq Jamal Al-Derbas wrote for Al-Anba daily.

“As I was browsing through Twitter, I came across a tweet by a teacher called Haifa Behbehani, in which she narrated a sad story about her students. She had asked them if Kuwaitis hate expatriates or rather for-eigners. Even though she hoped to hear a resounding ‘No’, silence dominated the class of 23 students for a while as though they were in doubt of their answer. After she repeated the question, one of the students said, ‘Yes, I hate them. I hate them because they have occupied our country.’

“It is unfortunate that the young generation is be-ing brought up with such racist and even xenophobic tendencies, even though we have to admit that such tendencies did not come out of a blue, but from the environment that surrounds them. Nonetheless, we have to agree on the fact that we are all against mar-ginal workers, even though they came to this country through corrupt citizens – the infl uential traitors.

“We should also agree that we need skilled foreign workforce, irrespective of their numbers, especially in fi elds that Kuwaitis are not willing to work. We should acknowledge that development is achieved through able and hardworking workforce. Expatriates are not the reason behind the bad public services such as crowded hospitals and roads, and substandard educa-tion; the reason is mismanagement by the government.

“Expatriates pay for most of the public services they receive but Kuwaitis get it for free; therefore, it is the right of those who pay for these services to receive them without feeling as though the state is doing them a favor. We should agree on the fact that we will nev-er grow as long as we look down on expatriates; we should respect their humanity and cure our dark hearts so that we can prosper together as a nation.

“Advanced countries benefi t positively from their expatriates to build their nations. Therefore, it is time to activate laws and fi ght fi ercely against visa traders who spread corruption and wreck the country. We should shut every mouth that spits racist words in our society.”

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“How did the violence erupt and were the politi-cal cards mixed up in the past few days? Why do Su-danese people suffer and is their country really poor? Does hunger really make humans to be so callous to-ward kinsmen and compatriots?” Taleb Shalash wrote for Shahed daily.

“Although this country has for decades been named the world’s food basket, this is what they call a country that owns 220,000,000 acres of arable land equivalent to 45 percent of the production of all Arab countries that have good land for agriculture, but only 45,000,000 acres are used, while 175,000,000 acres remain untapped.

“Sudan also contains 52,000,000 acres of forests. Sudan also has surplus water resources coming from the blue and white Nile estimated at 50,000,000 cu-bic meters annually. Sudan possesses abundant ani-mal resources capable of supplying the needs of Arab countries in dairy products and meat. The country has 102,000,000 herds of livestock, including 50,000,000 cows, in which Sudan is ranked third in the world in terms of number of livestock. The country is rich in mining resources while it has the world’s largest cop-per reserves of about 5,000,000 tons in only one mine, 140 tons of gold, 700 tons of zinc and 5,000 tons of silver in this mine only valued at $17,000,000,000.

“The Sudanese people must make a fi rm decision to open their minds to the drafting of a new constitution governing the people. The punishment for a thief, bribe-giver and bribe-taker should be severe. The people of Sudan, both civilians and the military, should know that no one can help them. Everyone is preoccupied with the problems of their country and Sudanese alone can help themselves to start a new era toward their homeland, which is exhausted by wars and looting, theft and cor-ruption. The wealth they have is enough to take care of them and some countries with them. The choice is still in your hands, while we pray that God leads the patient Sudanese people to success.”

– Compiled by Zaki Taleb

Al-Humoud

Int’l community backs Iraq, praisessacrifi ces against IS: chief of UNSCUNSC team discussed Iraq-related issues in Kuwait: Otaibi

BAGHDAD, June 30, (KUNA): President of UN Se-curity Council, Kuwait’s per-manent representative Man-sour Al-Otaibi, said UNSC’s delegation visit to Iraq was to send a message that the international community was standing by Iraq.

The second message is to con-vey the international community’s appreciation for great sacrifi ces of Iraq and Iraqi people that contrib-uted to defeat of so-called Islamic State, which committed heinous crimes against civilians in the country, Al-Otaibi told a news conference in Baghdad.

He said the UNSC delegation vis-ited Kuwait and met with Deputy Pre-mier and Foreign Minister Sheikh Sa-bah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah and deputy UN secretary general’s repre-sentative, and discussed Iraq-related issues like missing Kuwaitis and return of Kuwaiti properties.

Al-Otaibi said they have also dis-cussed the international conference for reconstruction of Iraq, which was held in Kuwait in February 2018, and how to create a mechanism to spent the USD 30 billion pledges.

Al-Babtain Foundation holds event

Forum for Peace Culture hailedKUWAIT CITY, June 30: Chair-man of Finance and Administrative Committee at the Permanent Court of Arbitration and Advisor to the International Court of Jus-tice, Counselor Tariq Al-Sha-mimri praised the Forum for Peace Culture organized by the Abdu-laziz Saud Al-Babtain Foun-dation in The Hague on June 13, 2019 and expressed his deep happiness with this forum and the ensuing results, reports Al-Anba daily.

In an interview with Al-Anba, he said the presence of a number of per-sonalities known for their participa-tion in peace conferences and events facilitated the coordination process with the International Court of Jus-

tice. The reputation of the Al-Babtain

Foundation for these pioneering ac-tions helped the interaction of the president of the International Court of Justice and a number of officials and participation in the meetings and discussions that took place in the forum.

He added that this forum is an extension of previous programs and events organized by the foun-dation.

Al-Shamimri explained Kuwait was represented by the embassy to arrange legal visits to the Kuwaiti delegations to The Hague, as it is a city known for courts and interna-tional organizations, indicating that his election from Asia as Chairman of the Finance and Administrative Committee of the Court of Arbi-tration and the International Court of Justice consultant has opened many doors for cooperation with international courts in The Hague.

KUNA photo Kuwait Petrochemical Company on Sunday obtained the ISO 20400 certifi cate for sustainable sales management after successfully passing through all stages of inspection by Lloyd’s Inspection Agency. In a press release, Kuwait Petrochemical Company disclosed that the company was able to get the certifi cate by adopting the sustainable sale strategy it has been following and implementing in three dimensions – environmental, community and eco-

nomic. The certifi cate obtained will consolidate and propel the company towards steady growth.

Tariq