SAUDI ARABIA: Kingdom steps up hunt for 'witches' and 'black magicians'

When the popular 46-year-old Lebanese psychic Ali Sibat went on-air and made his predictions about the future, the phone lines of the satellite television station Sheherazade used to be flooded with calls.

But what the star psychic probably did not predict was that his claims to supernatural prowess would land him a death sentence.

"He was the most popular psychic on the channel," the Lebanese news agency Naharnet quoted Sibat’s lawyer May Khansa as saying. "The number of callers, including from all over the gulf, spiked in number when he appeared."

But while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia last year, Sibat was spotted by religious police in the holy city of Medina. Their job it is to battle vice and uphold virtue in the ultraconservative kingdom. So they arrested Sibat in his room at the Medina Hotel on charges of sorcery.

On Nov. 9, Sibat was given a death sentence by a Mecca court for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

SAUDI ARABIA: Security forces issue stern warnings ahead of hajj pilgrimage

Handling an influx of 2.5 million pilgrims is a challenge during a good year, but at a time of increased tensions with Iran and rampant fears of swine flu, Saudi authorities are on high alert for any threat that could disrupt hajj, the annual holy Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

On Sunday, security forces sent a clear message to would-be saboteurs by staging a huge military demonstration involving thousands of troops, armored vehicles, helicopters, and first response teams. The Saudi government has announced it will deploy more than 100,000 security and emergency personnel for hajj, which will last from Wednesday to Sunday.

Sunday's show of force comes after months of deteriorating relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the Houthi rebellion in northern Yemen, with both sides accusing the other of military intervention. Last month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad warned against Saudi restrictions on Iranian pilgrims, eliciting a sharp rebuke from Riyadh with the top Saudi cleric warning against the politicizing of hajj.

"We hope we will not be obliged to resort to force," Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz told reporters after the demonstration Sunday, referring to calls by some Iranian figures for their pilgrims to use hajj as an opportunity to protest against the United States and Israel, Agence France Press reported.

ISRAEL: Specter of Meir Kahane continues to haunt politics

Two decades after his party was banned from running for seats in the parliament, Rabbi Meir Kahane and his ideas are once more on its agenda.

Recently, right-wing legislator Michael Ben-Ari asked to hold a discussion in parliament in memory of Kahane, an American-born rabbi who had founded the Jewish Defense League before moving to Israel and founding the militantly nationalist Kach movement that advocated removal of Arabs from biblical Israel. In 1988, Israeli law was amended to bar candidates who incited racism from running for parliament. Kahane, who had held a seat for four years at the time, was banned, and the party was outlawed altogether in 1994.
 
Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990; some still subscribe to his views.

Ben-Ari filed a motion for a memorial discussion in parliament to mark the assassination anniversary. A reporter spotted it on the list and queried parliament speaker Rubi (Reuven) Rivlin, who removed it, calling it a provocation. Ben-Ari has challenged Rivlin's decision and has brought it up before a parliamentary committee that will vote on it coming few days.

It turns out that other parties expressed keen interest in the issue -- but not Israeli political parties.

IRAN: Prayer leader condemns protesters, shuns 'satanic' nuclear negotiations

Friday prayer leader Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line acolyte of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, condemned the protesters who took part in Wednesday's anti-government march, and attempted to create divisions within the ranks of the protest movement.

Khatami, not to be confused with the reformist former president of the same last name, simultaneously and contradictorily downplayed the protest, admonished opposition supporters and besought them to come back into the fold.

"Out of the hundreds and thousands of people who take to the streets, only one or two thousand shouted" opposition slogans, he said. "Americans must not be happy, as there is no red carpet waiting for them."

Then he shifted gears. 

"My brothers and sisters who have  fallen in the wrong and incorrect track, look who is supporting you," he said. 

"Those who were named by the late imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] as 'blasphemous' and their Islam was called 'Americanized Islam.' The miserable monarchists are supporting you. What is wrong if you follow the mainstream of the nation? Come back to the embrace of the nation and the nation will accept your repenting and remorse."

But, he added, "Of course the criminals’ cases are different and they should be punished." 

SAUDI ARABIA: Push for a smoke-free Hajj pilgrimage

It is not only in the bars of New York or bistros of Paris where smokers are being pushed to the sidelines and asked to step outside to light that cigarette. Now, Saudi Arabia's health ministry is launching a public campaign to make the holy cities of Mecca and Medina smoke-free during this year’s pilgrimage season.

The move is a part of a larger health drive for the pilgrimage season that has been spearheaded by the ministry to create a healthier environment for pilgrims and prevent a swine flu breakout among them. Over 2 million people from around the world travel to the two holy cities each year to perform the pilgrimage.

Speaking to the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, Majed Al-Munif of the health ministry’s Tobacco Control Program said that brochures advertising the anti-smoking campaign are being handed out to arriving pilgrims.

“Under the ministry’s Tobacco Control Program, we have printed around 1.5 million leaflets in different languages for distribution among pilgrims — both smokers and nonsmokers,” he said. 

IRAQ: Burial in Najaf for Baghdad bomb victims

The cars streamed into Najaf over the last two days as families buried loved ones killed in Sunday’s double bombing in Baghdad. 

By Tuesday afternoon, what was thought to be the last of the dead were brought to the Valley of Peace cemetery, the most sacred burial ground for Iraq’s Shiite majority.

Undertaker Mehdi Assadi had listened to mourners’ screams as at least 80 of the estimated 155 killed in Sunday’s Baghdad bombing were buried in the Valley of Peace. Families unloaded loved ones from wood coffins to be washed and then wrapped in white shrouds. From there, Assadi or another grave digger led  mourners to the burial plots. At the graves, Assadi presided over final prayers and recited the names of Shiite Islam's 12 imams. 

EGYPT: Niqab ban adds to Azhar cleric’s woes

The decision to prohibit the face veil, or niqab, among female students attending Al Azhar’s universities and schools is proving yet another reason for many Egyptians to call for the firing of Al Azhar’s grand sheik, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi.

The Supreme Council of Al Azhar banned the niqab last week, days after Tantawi ordered one student to remove her veil, telling her that Islam never obliged women to cover their faces. Al Azhar is the preeminent educational and religious institution in Sunni Islam.

Despite later justifying that he only did so in order to hear the girl while she was speaking with him, the incident angered religious and secular figures alike. Many went so far as to suggest that officially banning the niqab was Tantawi demonstrating his religious authority to the media.

EGYPT: Cleric calls for 'Friday of anger' against Al Aqsa violations

The head of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, Yusuf Al Qaradawi, is urging Egyptians to turn this Friday into a nationwide day of anger against the "Israeli practices at the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem."

The Qatar-based cleric flew to Egypt from Doha on Monday to deliver a speech at the Egyptian Journalists' Syndicate in Cairo, where he condemned the Arab governments' silence towards the "violation of Al Aqsa's holiness" by Israeli settlers and occupation forces.

Tensions erupted in the area known as Al Haram Al Sharif to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews last week when a group of non-Muslims entered the compound, which is the third holiest venue in Islam and the most important in Judaism.

While Israeli authorities said that the group was composed of French tourists, Palestinians believed that they were Israeli extremists entering the mosque in celebration of the Jewish Sukkot festival. Further confrontations took place Sunday as tens of Palestinians entered the mosque overnight amid rumors that larger numbers of Israelis will be allowed to enter the mosque, before Israeli forces shut down the holy site.

MOROCCO: Ramadan 'protest picnickers' face prosecution

Moroccan authorities are expected to prosecute a group arrested for organizing a forest picnic to protest a law that forbids Muslims from eating publicly during Ramadan fasting hours, media reports say.

Members of the Moroccan Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms (MALI) had planned to hold the picnic on Sept. 13 in the woods near the town of Mohammedia, between the Moroccan capital Rabat and Casablanca. Word of the picnic was spread through a page on the social networking site Facebook. 

But as would-be picnickers arrived at the train station in Mohammedia, they were met by a large police squad that searched them and took the names and phone numbers of some of them, according to a statement issued by Human Rights Watch.

IRAN: Ayatollah calls government a 'military regime,' calls for clerical revolt [Updated]

An influential and high-ranking Iranian cleric has issued a scathing denunciation of the Islamic Republic's current leadership, calling on senior Shiite Muslim clergy in the Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad as well as the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf and beyond to speak out against the regime. 

Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri is one of the founders of the Islamic Republic. He was a confidant to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini before he fell out of favor in the late 1980s. 

In a statement issued today, he said that Iran had become a "military regime" not the Islamic government envisioned at time of the 1979 revolution. 

He said it was his fellow clergymen's "religious duty" to speak out against the the government's abuses. 

"We didn't want a mere change in title and slogans while the same oppressions and violations of rights continue under the cover of Islamic government," he said in the statement posted to his website.

Iran continues to reel from the aftermath of disputed June 12 election and a subsequent violent crackdown against those who opposed the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

Montazeri's statement was one of the harshest statements yet by a senior cleric yet in the post-election war of words between the government and its opponents. 

Montazeri doesn't have direct political power, but he's highly regarded among influential and revered Shiite clergy in Lebanon, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf.

His uncompromising denunciation could make it difficult for Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to garner clerical support for the ongoing crackdown and the battered government of Ahmadinejad.  

[Updated, Sept. 15, 12:50 a.m., Hours after the Monday afternoon publication of Montazeri's blistering letter, authorities arrested three of his grandchildren in the holy city of Qom, his son, Ahmad, told local and international media.

No charges have been specified against the three young men, aged 18 to 22.]