By Daoud Kuttab

Palestinians and Arabs are still unsure about what to call the protest activities that began on the eve of the Jewish New Year on Sept. 13, 2015. Since then, 89 Palestinians and 12 Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been killed and many more injured.

After the 1987 first intifada and the 2000 second intifada, it has taken pundits and politicians some time to decide whether what we are witnessing today is a full-blown uprising, or intifada in Palestinian terminology, or simply short, popular outbursts of protests, what Palestinians call “habbeh jamaherieh” in Arabic.

The differences have followed the split within the Palestinian movement with pro-Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas media and politicians calling it habbeh, while pro-Hamas leaders and media are calling it an Al-Quds intifada or Al-Aqsa intifada.

Mohammad Omar, a leading Jordanian media expert and the editor of the Pan-Arab website Al-Bawaba, told Al-Monitor that it is hard to differentiate between the two terms. “What is accepted throughout the Arab world is that the habbeh, or outburst, is usually a reaction, is short winded and doesn’t usually include unified effort,” he explained. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

In fighting the scourge of radicalism and religious fundamentalism, one of the strategies is to use religion.

Proponents of this approach vary from those who insist that Daesh and its ideology is simply built on a warped understanding of religion to those who say that the best way to fight religious fundamentalism is by promoting religious moderation as the effective way of combating dark and deadly ideology.

Both ideas have an inherent problem in them.

Playing the game of the radicals and terrorists is unlikely to solve anything.

The fact is that any religious text is easily amenable to interpretation, which means that anyone can find a text to support his/her position.

It is very easy to take a text out of context in order to support a particular point of view.

Yousef Rababaa, a Jordanian professor at Philadelphia University, north of Amman, argues forcefully against the efforts of Jordan TV to fight religious radicalism by using religion.

In an article recently published on AmmanNet, titled “Fighting radicalism with radicalism”, he argues that radicals will always win if you argue with them, simply on the basis of religious text. Continue Reading »