Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I was going to call it Jews for Jihads, but the whole Jews for Jesus thing is that they’re Christians pretending to be Jews, so I had to get the relationship right. 
Dr. Ofer Grosbard, a lecturer in counselling at the University of Haifa has responded to requests from his Bedouin students to contextualise their advice for ‘traditional’ Bedouin clients in terms they will understand. One of his students, Bushra Mazarib, approached him after a lecture and pointed out that “Nothing of what you are teaching me will help when a parent may come to me and say, ‘The devil has gotten into my son.’” She commented further to CNN: “I want to explain something to parents in a language that they will understand. They don’t understand psychology, they only understand the Quran”. Grosbard thus set his students the task of combing the Qur’an for “the most educational and inspirational verses” and briefly explain their practical use.
The results have been compiled on the website Quranet which, curiously, bears the subtitle “a Bridge between Islam and the West”. But does this mean explaining western psychological terms in language traditional Muslims better understand, or explaining Islam to the West? It seems to aim to be a little of both, with one of its purposes cited as that “it both refutes various prejudices against Islam, and provides a resounding response to warped exploitation of the Quran for the justification of terror.”
Dana Rosenblatt, author of the CNN article, claims that “Some Arab media, however, urge Muslims to be wary of an ‘Israeli Web site’ that interprets the Quran to serve the ‘political agenda’ of Israel.” To whom this may refer is unknown, as Rosenblatt quickly changes tack and quotes a generally conciliatory comment from American scholar Professor Akbar Ahmed about positive relations between Islam and the rest of the world.
I was able to find one story on gulfnews.com, by Mariam Al Hakkem reporting from Riyadh. Dr Abdullah Al Mutlaq of the Senior Ulema Board in Saudi Arabia advised caution in accepting Quranic interpretation from an Israeli source: “A Muslim, who wants to abide by Islamic teachings, should not depend on this website for interpretation of the Holy Quran whatever the case”.
Conversely, there are less than conciliatory voices on the other side of the equation. Israpundit refers to the site as the “latest dhimmi excess by Israelis who should know better.”
