AMMAN, October 21 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Arab regimes have taken advantage of the U.S.-led "war on terrorism" to adopt extreme security measures eroding civil and political liberties, a groundbreaking U.N. report said Monday, October 20.

The report, commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and released in Amman, said restrictions adopted in the United States and other Western countries in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks had also hit Arabs particularly hard.

"Extreme security measures" adopted in response to the hijackings had "exceeded their original goals and led to the erosion of civil and political liberties in many countries in the world, notably the United States", said the latest Arab Human Development Report, carried by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Such restrictions had often ended up "diminishing the welfare of Arabs and Muslims living, studying or traveling abroad, interrupting cultural exchanges between the Arab world and the West and cutting off knowledge acquisition opportunities for young Arabs."

Inside the Arab world the impact of such "freedom-constraining measures in developed countries" had been even more damaging as they "gave authorities in some Arab countries another excuse to enact new laws limiting civil and political freedoms," read the report.

"The Arab countries as a group adopted an expanded definition of terrorism, which assumed institutional expression at the regional level in 'The Arab Charter against Terrorism'", the report said

It recapitulated criticism of the charter by human rights watchdogs, as "it allows censorship, restricts access to the Internet, and restricts printing and publication," the report said.

The U.N.-commissioned study said the U.S.-led war on terror has radicalized more Arabs angry both with the West and their autocratic rulers restricting their political rights.

The report blamed an absence of "effective and peaceful channels for dealing with injustices" for pushing radical political groups to seek change by violence, said Reuters.

Top U.N. official behind the team of Arab intellectuals who wrote the report Rima Khalaf Hunaidi said anti-Arab sentiment in the West after the 9/11 attacks on U.S. cities was a further factor radicalizing Arabs.

The report cited data from a "number of Arab missions" indicating that Arab student numbers in the United States had dropped by an average of 30 per cent between 1999 and 2002.

The U.N report also took issue with Israel, hitting out at the "horrifying human casualties and material destruction" that had resulted from its military operations in the Palestinian territories.

"From September 2000 to April 2003, Israeli occupation forces killed 2,405 Palestinian citizens and injured 41,000 others," it said.

"Most of those killed (85 percent) were civilians. A large proportion (20 percent) of them were children.

"UNICEF (the UN children's fund) estimates that 7,000 children were injured and that 2,500 persons, of whom 500 were children, suffered permanent handicaps," it added.

The report described the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq as a "challenge" for the region as whole.

"The only way to meet that challenge is to enable the Iraqi people to exercise their basic rights in accordance with international law, free themselves from occupation ... and take charge of rebuilding their country," it said.

Before his death in a truck bombing at the United Nation's Baghdad headquarters in August, U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello had been an outspoken critic of the slow pace of U.S. occupation authorities’ moves to return power to Iraqis.

Knowledge Gaps

It found that the Arab countries need to close a growing knowledge gap by promoting education and open intellectual inquiry.

The report said a best selling novel sold on average only 5,000 copies in the Arab world compared to hundreds of thousands elsewhere.

The usual print generally run for novels ranges from a meager 1,000 to 3,000 copies, and the number of books published in the Arab world did not exceed 1.1 percent of world production though Arabs constitute 5 percent of the world population, it added.

The report cited official educational curricula in Arab countries that " bred submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking."

To remedy the situation, the report proposes the following five strategic steps, Guaranteeing the key freedoms of opinion, speech and assembly through democratic governance, supported by a legal framework; Universal access to high quality education; Making science an integral part of Arab societies, encouraging research and development and joining the information revolution; Shifting rapidly towards knowledge-based and value-added production; and Developing an authentic, broadminded and enlightened Arab knowledge model.

The report id the second of a planned four-part series that analyzes the current state of knowledge in the Arab world. It is written by a group of distinguished Arab scholars, casts a critical eye on knowledge, freedom and the gender gap.