A guest post by Geary
Kuwait has a very typical Constitution for an Arab state:
Article 1:
Kuwait is an independent sovereign Arab State.The people of Kuwait is a part of the Arab Nation.
Article 2
The religion of the State is Islam, and the Islamic Sharia shall be a main source of legislation.
So, Kuwait’s constitution explicitly favours Arabs and Muslims over all others and actually enshrines this supremacy by adopting Sharia, which notoriously discriminates in favour of Muslims.
No surprises really.
But Egypt, surely Egypt is more cosmopolitan. Sadly … from the Egyptian Constitution:
Article 2
Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic its official language.
Islamic jurisprudence is the principal source of legislation.
Egypt used to have a 20% Christian Copt minority. It has shrunk to 10% due to decades of Muslim Arab intolerance. Again, even the law of the land is set against non-Muslims.
And now just to wrap up, from the Greek Constitution:
The prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. The Orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging our Lord Jesus Christ as its head, is inseparably united in doctrine with the Great Church of Christ in Constantinople and with every other Church of Christ of the same doctrine
The EU doesn’t seem to mind.
So why all the palaver when someone refers to Israel as the Jewish State? Israel has no Constitution and certainly has no version of Sharia to systematically discriminate in law against non-Jews. The core of Israeli jurisprudence largely derives from secular British mandate administrative law with injections of later constitutional legislation (the Basic Laws), and certainly not from Jewish religious law, one of the reasons why Israel has remained such a staunchly liberal country.
To recap. Israel is the Jewish State. That what it was set up to be by the UN. That’s what it needs to be to protect its Jewish population. That’s what it will remain.
Get used to it.
