A very sorry incident took place last month, but I don’t know why it wasn’t picked up by our vigorous press. It seems they’ve been interested in nothing but news of Hisham Talaat Moustafa, Mohsen El Sokkary and Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim with her many husbands, even though no one had ever heard of her or her husbands before but she has now become the most famous singer in the Arab world whose news is pursued by all despite the fact that nobody’s ever heard any of her songs.
But if this is the case with our press, then what was the excuse of the foreign papers, only a few of which reluctantly ran the story?
The news item I am referring to is worlds away from the realm of Lebanese divas and their husbands of various Arab nationalities, even though the two share the crime element.
The crime, however, was neither committed in Dubai nor Egypt, but in Jerusalem and was triggered by a different kind of extremism, this time of a religious nature which has increased significantly in the last quarter of the 20th century, whether in the caves and mountains of Afghanistan or in the offices and corridors of the White House in Washington.
Over the past few years Jerusalem has seen the spread of groups that resemble those which existed in the early 1970s and used to spray sulfuric acid on the faces of women who didn’t cover their faces. They gave themselves the right to attack any woman who did not abide by their fanatic religious teachings.
A Jerusalem court last month heard a case filed against two members of one of these groups accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men.
According to news reports, the unidentified, 31-year-old woman had left the ultra-Orthodox fold after getting divorced, as stated in the indictment filed by the Jerusalem district attorney’s office. The indictment said her assailant tried to get her to leave her apartment in Jerusalem by gagging, beating and threatening to kill her after her neighbors complained of her improper behavior.
Another Jerusalem court heard a case against a young zealot who set fire to a clothes shop in one of the neighborhoods where many of those fanatics live. Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld has stated that their numbers have grown significantly over the past ten years.
The fact we must now reveal is that the perpetrators of these crimes are not Palestinian Muslims, but Israeli Jews belonging to the ‘haredim’ or the God-fearing group, which Rosenfeld stated constitute eight to 10 percent of the Israeli population.
Do you now know why the foreign press hardly gave this piece of news any attention while it persists on covering every single instance of violence committed by Muslims?
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
