State Department Blasted
for Lauding PA's 'religious tolerance'

Jerusalem Post
by Melissa Radler

October 11, 2002

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 of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, 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 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.

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