Word: abdullah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Some of Abdullah's reforms are still blocked by Islamic opposition. His efforts to bring the kingdom into the World Trade Organization, for example, could help create jobs, and unemployment is 15%. But the obstacles to membership include the country's lack of appropriate commercial and insurance laws. Islamic traditionalists regard such laws as an affront to Shari'a, the rules of life that, according to Muslim tradition, were handed down...
...Abdullah faces similar difficulties when it comes to issues like gender, sex and education. In 1999 Abdullah declared that the country would "open all doors" so that women could play a greater role in society. But to this day, Saudi women are entirely forbidden to drive and are prohibited from traveling by plane without the permission of a male guardian. Abdullah has approved a population-control campaign to address what may be the gravest long-term threat to stability, a birthrate unofficially put at 4.2%, one of the world's highest. Yet fearing the wrath of religious leaders, who claim...
There are some things that even the relatively progressive Abdullah wouldn't want to change. He gives no indication, for instance, that he plans to introduce democracy to the kingdom, whose national assembly comprises 120 appointees. It is just after evening prayers when Abdullah sits back in a stuffed chair for a three-hour discussion of the challenges the kingdom faces. As he chain-smokes his way through a pack of Vantage cigarettes, his bottom line is that change will come, but at a Saudi pace. "It is more rational to change gradually," he explains. "There is less disruption...
...worry. Yet another pledge of peace is being dangled. This time it is the Saudi "peace plan." Crown Prince Abdullah tells the New York Times that he has a speech in his desk drawer promising normalization with Israel if it returns to its 1967 borders. He would love to give the speech, he avers, but he cannot because of the beastly actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon...
...Israel to withdraw to defensible borders. The 1967 lines are inherently indefensible. They would make central Israel eight miles wide. Eight miles between, say, the massed tank armies of Iraq and Syria to Israel's front and the Mediterranean Sea to its back. This is suicide. Nor, contrary to Abdullah's formula, is Israel going to give up Judaism's holiest shrine (the Western Wall) and Old Jerusalem, continuously inhabited by Jews for centuries until expelled by the Jordanians...