Holy Land Foundation (Re)trial: The Holy Land Foundation (re)Trial. THE PROSECUTION: OUR UNALIENABLE RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK (I pray that my Christian Sisters and Brothers take heed)

This article contains the interesting passage:

Atef Shafik is a senior language analyst for the FBI. He is an Egyptian-American, a Coptic Christian. His testimony in the trial concerned the methodology of translating the years of telephone conversations among the defendants and their colleagues and families (he surely knows every time Mr. Baker took his daughter to the doctor and every time Mr. Abdulqader met with Dallas Mayor Laura Miller).

The prosecution tried to bring into Mr. Shafik’s testimony blatantly un-American aspects of his personal prejudices and angry beliefs. They wanted permission to prompt him to say that when a Muslim uses religious phrases in speech—As God wills it; In the name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful; Peace be Upon You; Praise be to God—he is using code phrases of “Islamism.” Mr. Shafik believes that such religious expressions mean the speaker is fomenting terrorism and ultimately working for the obliteration of Israel (and presumably the United States). The judge disallowed this line of testimony—for now.

There is some truth to the assertion that religious Arabic speakers sometimes chose a phraseology different from that of less religious or secular Arabophones. The patriarch of Palestinian Nasserist family is much more likely to welcome a person into his home with Ahlan wa-Sahlan than with as-Salam Alaykum (equivalent to Peace unto You, Shalom Aleichem or Pax vobiscum), but under some circumstances he might choose as-Salam Alaykum (e.g., welcoming friends into his home for a Ramadan iftar).

In my experience native Arabic-speaking religious Christians, religious Jews and religious Muslims all use the same God-invocations, and degree of Muslim piety has no clear correlation with Islamist political orientation just as level of Jewish piety has a complex correlation with adherence to Zionist ideology.

The two cases are not exactly comparable. Islamism uses religion politically while Zionism is a form of politicized ethnic fundamentalism that occasionally uses scripture to bolster a non-religious ideology. Because Zionists have used state power in various subtle efforts to co-opt religious Jews to Zionism for the last 60 years, religious Jews today often express Zionist ideas unconsciously in ways that would have horrified the vast majority of religious Jews a century ago.

To prove his claim Atef Shafik would have to perform careful contextual forensic linguistic analysis from the audible record of conversations. Transcripts would not be sufficient to support his claims. Sphere: Related Content