Deputy PM seeks efforts to prevent provocations .

Gulf Times Sunday, 19 February, 2006, Doha

FIRST Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister HE Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani has called for “best efforts” to prevent provocations and provide respect for all beliefs and religious symbols without discrimination.

“Let us not have double standards as we have recently witnessed regarding the publication of caricatures insulting the Prophet Muhammad,” the First Deputy Premier told the inaugural session of the three-day-long US Islamic World Forum which opened in Doha yesterday.

“Islam is well known for adopting the principle of communication, intermediation and moderation,” he said.

“It is incorrect – while we are working to attain our common interests – that the Islamic world is targeted by some groups for political reasons. This situation springs from an intellectual crisis arising from the inability to form the right knowledge about the other party and draw up faithful and correct means to deal with it.”

He said fundamentalism and extremist trends calling for a clash of civilisations are present on both sides.

“Therefore, the intellectual reform, even the institutional reform, shall be the duty of the Islamic countries and effective powers together.”

Referring to the Palestinian issue, the Foreign Minister said it is the duty of the international community to respect the desire of the Palestinian people as expressed in the recent polls.

He praised the Palestinian Authority for its “responsible spirit” during the January 25 elections.

He lauded the efforts of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to make the elections successful and transparent.

The general feeling in the Islamic world is a feeling of injustice, he said. The first priority is to solve the Palestinian cause.

He suggested co-operation and assistance in the economic development of Islamic states to strengthen the democratic foundation.

The Foreign Minister said the reason of frustration that leads to commit terrorist actions needs to be studied.

“Such actions should be confronted with preventive policies which shouldn’t be necessarily military.”

The minister said: “We are required to care about the near future of the Islamic-US relations which is not an easy task if we take into consideration the wide range of fields that we have to tackle with”.

Talking about his vision for the Middle East for the next five years, he said failure could continue if serious decisions were not taken to solve the illnesses of the region.

“We can define some aspects of the common work initially; we hope to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding through dialogue in order to reach policies that will serve the interests of the Islamic world and the US,” he said.

Among such policies are:

l To work effectively and actively to settle the Palestinian question based on legal, international resolutions and reference.

l To help solve the crises and conflicts suffered by the Islamic world with necessary objectivity which makes the solutions to be elements for permanent peace and security. This is particularly applied to the situation in Iraq, Lebanon and the Iranian nuclear issue.

l To co-operate and assist in the economic development of the Islamic states in order to strengthen the democratic structure.

l To study the reasons of frustration which are conductive to the creation of environment favourable to commit terrorist acts and to confront such acts with preventive and curative policies and precautions which should not necessarily be purely military.

l To make plans for executing awareness campaigns in order to remove all intellectual misconceptions from the other party’s thoughts.

“These are some initial concepts. I am confident that the discussions of the forum will handle them with the appropriate details,” he said.

Karen Hughes, the United States’ top imagemaker abroad and a close adviser to President George W Bush, in her address to the gathering, reiterated US concern about the threat posed by Iran to regional stability and the need for Palestinian election winner Hamas to recognise Israel, adds AFP.

She also urged regional leaders to deepen democracy in their own countries and to work closer with the United States to combat terrorism.

“We must do for terror what was done to slavery and make it an international pariah,” she said.

“If we truly desire to reach a better understanding of each other, if we truly want our dialogue to produce results, we have to stop demonising each other and replace hate with hope.”

She said that although many US newspapers chose not to reprint cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, recognising “they are deeply offensive, even blasphemous to the precious convictions of our Muslim friends,” nothing justified violent protests, which claimed the lives of at least 11 people in Libya on Friday.

“As we discuss these often difficult issues, we must not allow the extremes to define us,” said Hughes as she urged governments and journalists alike to speak out against anti-Semitic and anti-Christian sentiments and to seek greater freedom of expression in the region.

“The challenge for leaders in this region is to listen to their people’s call for greater freedom, allow them to form political parties, let them gather and speak more freely, give them access to newsprint so they can run their own papers.”

Earlier, H E Mohamed al-Rumaihi, Assistant to the Foreign Minister for Follow Up Affairs, told reporters that this year’s gathering might go further than previous ones by discussing the establishment of a “council for Islamic-US relations.”

Despite the fact that the cartoons controversy started in Europe, not in the United States, “one of the biggest challenges in international policy today is the growing tension between the United States and Islamic societies,” Rumaihi said.

“Some (in the Islamic world) diverted the popular anger (toward the United States) in order to settle old scores with Washington,” Abdul Hamid al-Ansari, former dean of the Shariah faculty at Qatar University, said.

“The forum is being held at a difficult time, amid high tension between the East and the West, which for many is embodied in America,” he said.

Ansari lamented how “regimes in the Islamic world continue to marginalise liberals and keep them out of positions of responsibility, while appeasing the sides who fuel hostility to the United States.”

Participants in the three-day gathering include Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who earned the wrath of some religious leaders last year when she led a prayer service in New York.