Basma Al-Kuwaiti/Ibtisam Hamid Converts to Judaism from Islam
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/02/14
Some news stories in the regular cycle are simply a matter of quaint pleasure or amusement.
Kuwaiti singer, Ibtisam Hamid, has renounced Islam… to convert to Judaism.
Hamid is known as Basma Al-Kuwaiti. She announced leaving Islam and proudly converting to Judaism. From her point of view, she considers Islam a “religion of terror and a religion of hypocrisy, which despises women, oppresses and violates them, and does not give them their full rights…”
That’s highly charged language. She, also, made a political claim with “opposition to – and not belonging to – the Al-Sabah family, which rejects normalisation, freedom of religion and freedom of opinion. I show neither loyalty nor affiliation to them.”
The Al-Sabah family is a Kuwaiti royal family refusing to build ties with Israel, which is seen as an occupation state. Hamid is an Iraqi national born to a Kuwaiti mother while being unable to obtain citizenship because of legal restrictions.
Those legal restrictions prevent the mother from passing nationality onto their children. Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, signed normalization deals with Israel. Kuwait refused until the rights of Palestinians are achieved.
Within the international community for decades, it has been recognized that Palestinians deserve equal rights and Israel is, in part, living and expanding into occupied Palestinian territory by most of the Member States of the United Nations.
In part, Hamid’s move can be considered a sincere change of heart in religious belief and sense of belonging as well as a political act.
With files from MEMO.
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