Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2007, 10:31:40 AM
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All:
I will be posting more about this point, but it seems to me that we need to have a thread dedicated to how to communicate with the Muslim world.
I begin with a piece from the WSJ.
Marc
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Boos for Al-Hurra
May 11, 2007; Page A10
We've been watching the debate over Al-Hurra, the U.S.-funded Middle East TV channel that has lately developed a reputation as a friendly forum for terrorists and Islamic radicals. A bipartisan group of Congressmen has called for Al-Hurra's news director, former CNN producer Larry Register, to resign -- and it's time he and his supervisors gave taxpayers some answers.
With an annual budget over $70 million, Al-Hurra is part of the long arm of America's public diplomacy in the Middle East. The network was established to provide a credible source of information in the region, in a market dominated by Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. The goal was to help start a discussion about freedom and democracy. Instead, the network seems to have aligned itself with everyone else in pandering to the so-called Arab street.
The shift began when Mr. Register took over last November. As journalist Joel Mowbray has detailed in these pages, Al-Hurra has made a practice in Mr. Register's tenure of friendly coverage of camera-ready extremists from al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Most famously, the network gave more than 60 minutes of airtime to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, who informed viewers that Hezbollah was "facing a strategic and historic victory." Under Mr. Register, Holocaust denial panels became "Holocaust existence panels." People like al Qaeda operative Muhammed Hanja received airtime to celebrate America's "defeat" on September 11.
Mr. Register's defense has been, in essence, that if Al-Hurra doesn't run anti-American content, no one will watch. He seems to have misunderstood his assignment: Al-Hurra is not meant to compete with Al-Jazeera but to offer an alternative view of the Middle East from those of either its dictators or jihadis.
But Al-Hurra is not alone in its failures. VOA and Radio Farda in Iran also stray into broadcasts that wax critical on U.S. policies. Here's betting those outlets see more scrutiny in coming days, and there's plenty of people besides Mr. Register to question -- starting with the Broadcasting Board of Governors that is charged with the network's oversight.
The BBG failed to investigate Mr. Register's change of journalism-marketing strategy when criticism began to emerge. After Mr. Mowbray's original article in March, Joaquin Blaya, chairman of the Board's Middle East Committee, wrote us a letter dismissing the criticism. Mr. Blaya was more accommodating in a second letter that we ran May 9 -- perhaps because he's feeling heat from Capitol Hill.
He certainly hasn't felt any heat from Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, who sits on the board and has also preferred to see no evil. Ms. Hughes has conceded that the Nasrallah interview was "a violation of our policy." But in a speech to the Board of Governors and Freedom House last week, she missed an opportunity to clarify what is expected of Al-Hurra in return for taxpayer support. On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Mr. Register is doing "a very good job."
Al-Hurra (which means "the free one") can be a useful tool in the battle of ideas that is crucial to the war on Islamic extremism. But if it and its sister broadcasts are merely going to provide one more outlet for anti-U.S. propaganda, who needs them? Dissidents in Soviet Russia and its satellites once looked to Radio Free Europe and VOA as sources of truth they weren't getting from local media. Nobody thinks the Cold War would have ended sooner if they had offered more airtime to the Kremlin.
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Although I suppose it would be accurate to call this piece propaganda, but we need to remember that this hatred is part of the landscape in the Muslim world and has been since before modern Israel.
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamic-mein-kampf/
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Tawfik Hamid speaks truth to power in the usually reliably dhimmi Wall Street Journal, echoing points we have often made here:
To bring an end to Islamophobia, we must employ a holistic approach that treats the core of the disease. It will not suffice to merely suppress the symptoms. It is imperative to adopt new Islamic teachings that do not allow killing apostates (Redda Law). Islamic authorities must provide mainstream Islamic books that forbid polygamy and beating women.
Accepted Islamic doctrine should take a strong stand against slavery and the raping of female war prisoners, as happens in Darfur under the explicit canons of Shariah ("Ma Malakat Aimanikum"). Muslims should teach, everywhere and universally, that a woman's testimony in court counts as much as a man's, that women should not be punished if they marry whom they please or dress as they wish.
We Muslims should publicly show our strong disapproval for the growing number of attacks by Muslims against other faiths and against other Muslims. Let us not even dwell on 9/11, Madrid, London, Bali and countless other scenes of carnage. It has been estimated that of the two million refugees fleeing Islamic terror in Iraq, 40% are Christian, and many of them seek a haven in Lebanon, where the Christian population itself has declined by 60%. Even in Turkey, Islamists recently found it necessary to slit the throats of three Christians for publishing Bibles.
Of course, Islamist attacks are not limited to Christians and Jews. Why do we hear no Muslim condemnation of the ongoing slaughter of Buddhists in Thailand by Islamic groups? Why was there silence over the Mumbai train bombings which took the lives of over 200 Hindus in 2006? We must not forget that innocent Muslims, too, are suffering. Indeed, the most common murderers of Muslims are, and have always been, other Muslims. Where is the Muslim outcry over the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq?
Islamophobia could end when masses of Muslims demonstrate in the streets against videos displaying innocent people being beheaded with the same vigor we employ against airlines, Israel and cartoons of Muhammad. It might cease when Muslims unambiguously and publicly insist that Shariah law should have no binding legal status in free, democratic societies.
It is well past time that Muslims cease using the charge of "Islamophobia" as a tool to intimidate and blackmail those who speak up against suspicious passengers and against those who rightly criticize current Islamic practices and preachings. Instead, Muslims must engage in honest and humble introspection. Muslims should--must--develop strategies to rescue our religion by combating the tyranny of Salafi Islam and its dreadful consequences. Among more important outcomes, this will also put an end to so-called Islamophobia.
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I admit to being moved by this.
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The Evils of Holocaust Denial
By ABDURRAHMAN WAHID and ISRAEL LAU
June 12, 2007; Page A17
BALI, Indonesia -- Today, religious leaders from many faiths and nations will gather here for a landmark conference in a unique place -- an island of tolerance, not terrorism. In a world in which religion is manipulated to justify the most horrific acts, it is our moral obligation not only to refute the claims of terrorists and their ideological enablers but also to defend the rights of others to worship differently: in freedom, security and dignity.
While there are many things that can be said and done to advance this cause, one issue in particular stands out as something we religious leaders must unite in denouncing: Holocaust denial. This denial is not a new phenomenon. Yet it is becoming an increasingly pervasive one. Long a hobbyhorse of the neo-Nazis and other figures from the fringe, it is gaining currency among millions of people who are either ignorant of history or are being misled by their media, their governments or -- sad to say -- their own religious authorities.
A scene from the liberation of Auschwitz.
In recent years, we have seen that notorious 19th century Russian forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," being widely disseminated in bookshops from London to Cairo. We have seen Hitler's "Mein Kampf" become a bestseller in Turkey. We have seen schools in Britain stop teaching the Holocaust for fear of offending their students. We have seen notorious academic frauds invited by the president of Iran to raise "questions" about the Holocaust -- as if this is just another controversy in which all opinions are equally valid. We have seen the Holocaust deniers use the fashions of moral relativism and historical revisionism to deny not just truth but fact, all the while casting themselves as martyrs against censorship.
Worst of all, we have seen Holocaust denial being turned to an insidious political purpose: By lying about the events of the past, the deniers are paving the way toward the crimes of the future. They are rendering that well-worn yet necessary phrase "Never Again" meaningless by seeking to erase from the pages of history the very event that all people of good faith seek never to repeat.
Let us be clear: The real purpose of Holocaust denial is to degrade and dehumanize the Jewish people. By denying or trivializing the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies, the deniers are seeking to advance their notion that the victims of the 20th century's greatest crime are, in fact, that century's greatest victimizers. By denying or trivializing the Holocaust, the deniers are seeking to rob Jews of their history and their memory -- and what is a people without history and memory?
Indeed, by denying or trivializing the Holocaust, the deniers are perpetrating what is, in effect, a second genocide. Extinguished as they were from the ranks of the living, Hitler's Jewish victims are now, in effect, to be extinguished from the ranks of the dead. That is the essence of Holocaust denial.
Yet even as we recognize the threat that Holocaust denial poses to Jews everywhere, we must also be cognizant of the peril it represents to people of all faith traditions. Nations or governments that historically have given free rein to Jew-hatred -- whether in Medieval Europe or Inquisition-era Spain or 1930s Germany -- have invariably done lasting damage to themselves as well.
Today, the countries in which Holocaust denial is most rampant also tend to be the ones that are most economically backward and politically repressive. This should not be surprising: Dishonest when it comes to the truth of the past, these countries are hardly in a position to reckon honestly with the problems of the present. Yes, the short-term purposes of unscrupulous rulers can always be served by whipping up mass hysteria and duping their people with lurid conspiracy theories. In the long term, however, truth is the essential ingredient in all competent policy making. Those who tell big lies about the Holocaust are bound to tell smaller lies about nearly everything else.
Holocaust denial is thus the most visible symptom of an underlying disease -- partly political, partly psychological, but mainly spiritual -- which is the inability (or unwillingness) to recognize the humanity of others. In fighting this disease, religious leaders have an essential role to play. Armed with the knowledge that God created religion to serve as rahmatan lil 'alamin, or a blessing for all creation, we must guard against efforts to demonize or belittle followers of other faiths.
Last year, Muslims from Nigeria to Lebanon to Pakistan rioted against what they saw as the demonizing of their prophet by Danish cartoonists. In a better world, those same Muslims would be the first to recognize how insulting it is to Jews to have the apocalypse that befell their fathers' generation belittled and denied.
Sadly, we do not live in such a world. Yet if radical clerics can move their assemblies to hatred and violence -- as was the case during the Danish cartoons episode -- then surely moderate and peace-loving clerics can also move theirs to rise above their prejudices and facilitate good relations between peoples of different faiths. In the words of the Holy Quran, which echo the story of creation from the book of Genesis: "Oh mankind! We created you from a single pair, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another, and not to despise each other."
Today in Bali, we look forward to hearing different ideas from diverse voices on how to advance this divine goal. Facing up frankly to the evil of Holocaust denial will be evidence that the conferees are "living in truth" and determined to act against hatred.
Mr. Wahid is the former president of Indonesia and co-founder of the LibForAll Foundation. Mr. Lau, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is the former Chief Rabbi of Israel. Today's conference in Bali, "Tolerance Between Religions: A Blessing for All Creation," is cosponsored by LibForAll Foundation, the Wahid Institute and the Museum of Tolerance.
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June 20, 2007
Journey into Islam
By Tony Blankley
I have just finished reading a deeply disheartening book by my friend
Professor Akbar Ahmed. Dr. Ahmed is the former Pakistani high commissioner
to Britain and member of the faculties of Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge,
current chair of Islamic Studies at American University -- and is in the
front ranks of what we Westerners call the moderate Muslims, who we are
counting on to win the hearts and minds of the others.
I first met Professor Ahmed shortly after Sept. 11. He, his friends and I
broke bread several times and discussed the condition of Islam and the West.
He graciously agreed to share a stage with me at the National Press Club to
debate with me the merits of my book, "The West's Last Chance: Will We Win
the Clash of Civilization?" As my book was very harshly received by many
Muslims around the world, I don't doubt that Dr. Ahmed shared that stage
with me at some risk at least to his reputation -- if not more.
We even considered doing a weekly cable TV show on the clash of civilization
from our different (but respectful) points of view -- although nothing came
of it. Dr. Ahmed is a worldly man of letters who profoundly believes that
collective good can be accomplished by individual acts of good conscience --
that each of us (Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu) must connect with others and
live out our convictions for our common humanity in the face of tribalism,
religion and other dividing forces. Thus, his reach out to me, a fiery
American nationalist TV commentator and editor to find if not complete
common ground, at least common friendship.
His new book, "Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization," is thus
particularly heartbreaking for me. As a trained anthropologist, he took
three of his students on a six-month journey around the Muslim world to
investigate what Muslims are thinking.
His conclusion: Due to both misjudgments by the United States and
regrettable developments in Muslim attitudes, "The poisons are spreading so
rapidly that without immediate remedial action, no antidote may ever be
found." And Dr. Ahmed has always been an optimist.
He divides Muslim attitudes into three categories named after Indian Muslim
cities that have historically championed them: Ajmer, Aligarh and Deoband.
Ajmer represents peaceful Sufi mysticism, Aligarth represents the instinct
to modernize without corrupting Islam, Deoband represents non-fatalistic,
practical, action-oriented orthodox Islam. It traces to Ibn Taymiyya, a
14th-Century thinker who lived when Islam was reeling from the Mongol
invasions. He rejected Islam's prior easy, open acceptance of non-Muslims.
In short, Dr. Ahmed is an Aligarth. As a young man he was one of new
Pakistan's best and brightest, led by Pakistan's founding father and first
president, Dr. Jinnah. They hoped to build a modern democracy, overcome
tribalism and the more obscurantist aspects of Islam while still being "good
Muslims." The Deobands are the Bin Ladens and all the other Muslims we fear
today.
Even one or two years ago, I think Dr. Ahmed was reasonably hopeful that his
views had a fighting chance around the Islamic world. So, my jaw dropped
when I got to page 192 of his new book and he described his thoughts while
in Pakistan last year on his investigative journey: "The progressive and
active Aligarth model had become enfeebled and in danger of being overtaken
by the Deoband model ... I felt like a warrior in the midst of the fray who
knew the odds were against him but never quite realized that his side had
already lost the war."
He likewise reported from Indonesia -- invariably characterized as
practicing a more moderate form of Islam. There, too, his report was
crushingly negative. Meeting with people from presidents to cab drivers,
from elite professors to students from modest schools (Dr. Ahmed holds a
respected place in the Muslim firmament around the globe), reports that 50
percent want Shariah law, support the Bali terrorist bombing, oppose women
in politics, support stoning adulterers to death. Indonesia's secular legal
system and tolerant pluralist society is being "infiltrated by Deoband
thinking ... Dwindling moderates and growing extremists are a dangerous
challenging development."
Although I dissent from several of Dr. Ahmed's characterizations of the Bush
Administration, Washington policymakers and journalists should read this
book because it delivers a terrible message of warning both to those who say
things aren't as bad as Bush says, and we can rely on the moderate voices of
Islam -- with a little assist from the West -- winning; and for those who
argue for aggressive American action to show our strength to the Muslims
(because, in Bin Laden's words, they follow the strong horse).
To the first group he says that the "moderate" voice is in near hopeless
retreat across the Muslim world. Don't count on them. To the second group he
says, whatever Bush's intentions, our aggression only strengthens our
enemies.
I think he knows his solution is forlorn: "Although the planet's societies
are running against time ... [we must] transcend race, tribe and religion
and cherish our common humanity, every individual must become the message."
Let us pray.
But for those of us who don't expect the milk of human kindness to suddenly
start flowing, it behooves us to read Professor Ahmed's honest assessment of
the real state of Muslim world attitudes and coldly re-assess our various
policy prescriptions in its light.
These are grim times, but we must resist indulging ourselves in hopeful
fantasies. Every piece of our national security calculations must be
realistically assessed against the available facts. What is working, what
isn't, what to do?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/06/20/video-ex-terrorist-walid-shoebat-on-the-jihadist-mindset/
Stuff worth reading on addressing the global jihad.
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http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/217/the-bush-admini...slim-brotherhood.com
Jun 22, 09:40
The Bush Administration's Outreach Program to the Muslim Brotherhood
The New York Sun writes that the Bush administration is quietly laying the groundwork for reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it doesn’t say is that the Muslim Brotherhood, through its chapter in the United States (CAIR, ISNA et al) have already launched one of the most successful outreach programs of any group in the country.
The U.S. government has formally named these groups as part of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have met recently with senior leaders of the Pentagon, DHS, DOD and have been in the White House across two administrations.
Only the Justice Department’s naming of the groups as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case kept these same groups from being the stars at an ill-conceived “outreach” event hosted by AG Alberto Gonzalez.
So outreach to the Brotherhood, especially in this country, is not a new policy at all. Everyone from the FBI to the NSC has been bullied, pushed, cajoled and duped into meeting with them, despite their well-documented ties to terrorism, terrorist organizations and terrorist leaders.
The question to me is not whether to talk to the Muslim Brotherhood, here, in Egypt or its international structure. One can have legitimate reasons for doing so. The question is the underlying premise of the conversations. If we recognize they are a political-religious movement committed to the cause of creating a unified Islamic state across the world, including the United States, and will use any means available to do so-and still think there are strategic interests the dictated discussions-then that is legitimate.
But we are being told repeatedly and erroneously that these groups are our friends and possible allies. And that is simply not true.
Why the pressure now to reach out to the group that is directly, organically tied to Hamas, runs a multi-billion dollar financial empire, and has been the spawning ground of every major salafist jihadi movement and leader?
The drive to legitimize the Muslim Brotherhood is being driven by Robert Leiken and other academics who have forgotten, apparently, any lessons they ever learned during the Cold War. (For a look at Leiken’s shifting positions during that time, particularly his gullibility on the Sandinistas, see Patrick Poole’s American Thinker piece).
I am not going to rehash the arguments raised by Leiken and those of us in response to him. I just want to point out that the entire project of legitimizing the Brotherhood is built on a deliberate misstatement of the truth.
I am rather surprised that Leiken and others with his experience in Central America (my own included), where the Sandinistas, particularly, lied, used front groups and battled to define the language that was used to grossly mislead us all. Leiken admitted to being fooled by them.
As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The MB, on an international level (individual country chapters vary, but the international structure is running the expansion programs in Europe and the United States) is essentially a front group. It uses people adept at speaking our language, relating to issues we understand and working very hard and successfully to achieve a particular agenda. In this case it is the Islamization of the United States and Europe. They have said this publicly and repeatedly.
They cannot use violence now against the United States, as they themselves say, because they do not have the means to take over by force. Yousef al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential theologian, has made clear, this clear in his writings:
“We depend on others for military power. Those against whom we want to launch our offensive jihad are the same people who make all sorts of weapons and sell them to us. But for them, we would be unarmed, defenseless and unable to do anything!
That being the case, how can we talk of launching offensives to subject the whole world to our Message, when the only weapons we can muster are those given us by them and when the only arms we can carry are those they agree to sell us.”
A trenchant observation, and honest. It is, however, not a disavowal of violence, merely a recognition that tactically it is impossible for the moment.
Leiken et al of course ignore these writings and rely on the fundamental lie being perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood now: That the MB has rejected the Islamist teachings of Sayid Qutb, articulated in “Milestones,” and is instead now embracing Hasan al Hudaybi’s writings in “Preachers not Judges.”
I and others wrote about how preposterous this thesis is, and I won’t rehash it all here. But it is classic double-speak we knew so well in Marxism (takiyya in the Islamist conception). They want to get rid of us. They will engage in any strategy that will advance that goal.
This is what is so disheartening about the current debate, especially when people like former senior FBI officials like Mike Rolince deliberately misstate the facts.
Let’s understand who CAIR, ISNA and the International Muslim Brotherhood are. Then, when we properly define them and their agenda, rather than letting them dictate the terms of the debate, there can be honest discussion about whether outreach is in our strategic interest.
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Second post of the day:
Radical Outreach
Bush coddles American apologists for radical Islam
By Steve Emerson
At Wednesday’s rededication ceremony of the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., President Bush missed a perfect opportunity to repudiate apologism for radical Islam, and instead announced his latest plan to get the Muslim world to stop hating America: appoint a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
Bush praised the OIC, saying, “We admire and thank those Muslims who have denounced what the Secretary General of the OIC called ‘radical fringe elements who pretend that they act in the name of Islam.’” The special envoy’s mission, Bush said, would be to “listen and learn” to OIC ambassadors.
While this may sound nice, it is rooted in complete ignorance of the rampant radicalism, pro-terrorist, and anti-American sentiments routinely found in statements by the OIC and its leaders, including referring to “Islamophobia” — and not the mass slaughter of innocents in the name of Islam — the “worst form of terrorism,” as OIC did last May.
In 2002, the OIC published its “Declaration on International Terrorism.” Therein, the authors stated, amongst other outrageous claims, that there was no such thing as Palestinian terrorism, writing, “We reject any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.” To the OIC, groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hezbollah are not terrorists, but “freedom fighters.”
This is just the beginning of a litany of the OIC’s wrongs.In March 2006, OIC General Secretary Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu embraced Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal at a press conference at OIC’s headquarters. Ihsanoglu whitewashed: “With its win, Hamas begins a new stage in the development of the Palestinian issue. We assure that Hamas will deal with all national and international requirements in a practical and logical way.”
At a “special session” of the OIC in August of the same year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for “the elimination of the Zionist regime,” a statement that OIC failed to condemn. Moreover, the OIC has repeatedly backed Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As Ishanoglu said in April, “All member states of the OIC and I have obviously supported Iran's right to access peaceful nuclear technology,” despite clear indications that the Iranian regime’s uranium-enrichment program is designed chiefly to make nuclear weapons.
And then, there is OIC’s explaining away of the 9/11 attacks, which “expressed the frustration, disappointment, and disillusion that are festering deep in the Muslims’ soul towards the aggressions and discriminations committed by the West.”
These are the people that President Bush feels the need to “listen and learn” from. And the Bush administration’s wishful thinking extends beyond his feelings toward the OIC, to the very location where Bush was giving his speech.
The 2005 Freedom House report on the Saudi-led radicalization of American mosques specifically identifies the Washington Islamic Center as a hotbed of hatred. In the past decade, I personally collected numerous copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from the mosque. The Freedom House report chronicles the center’s extremism: imams instructed their students to distance themselves from the West, forbade Muslim students from wearing the traditional cap and gown at during University graduation, and warned that participating in American holidays was the “most dangerous form of imitating the unbelievers, the most destructive and the most prevalent among the Muslims.”
The center’s library included a Saudi text book for 11th graders that described “the role of the Jews in the corruption of the European way of life,” and that Jews used “innocuous-sounding themes as ‘progress and civilization’ or ‘individual freedom’ to destroy Europe.”
There are many more examples in the report. Unfortunately, the President’s lack of awareness is not limited to the OIC and the Washington Islamic Center, but also to the officials of the so-called “moderate” Muslim organizations whom the FBI, Department of Justice, Defense Department, and Department of State routinely invite to meetings and hearings.
In his speech, Bush said, “This enemy falsely claims that America is at war with Muslims and the Muslim faith, when in fact it is these radicals who are Islam's true enemy.” Yet that very talking point is the refuge of America’s supposedly mainstream Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North American (ISNA).
In March 2002, in response to an FBI raid of Islamist organizations in Northern Virginia, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said, “This is a war against Islam and Muslims… Our administration has the burden of proving otherwise.” In February 2004, MPAC Vice Chairman Aslam Abdullah said, “in the name of the ‘war on terror,’ Islam and Muslims have become a target in America and elsewhere,” and in June 2004 Abdullah accused President Bush of engaging in “a religious and racist agenda and prejudice against Islam, Muslims, and Arabs.” In 2004, Louay Safi, a top ISNA official, went further, writing that the “assertion by ‘world leaders’ that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam is nothing but a piece of propaganda and disinformation that was meant to appease Western Muslims and to maintain the coalition against terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Bush’s own Justice Department recently formally named CAIR and ISNA as Muslim Brotherhood–front groups, listing them as unindicted co-conspirators in the largest terrorist financing case in U.S. history, against the Holy Land Foundation, an alleged Hamas front group.
In his wrongheaded outreach to the OIC, the president aligns with those who think the West is responsible for Islamic terrorism. Bush himself has said we “abandoned Muslims in the Middle East to tyrants and terrorists.” Yet Wahhabism was born in the 18th century, long before Western colonialism in the Middle East and the resulting appointment of despotic rulers. It was the fascist Muslim Brotherhood that gave birth to terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Hamas, and it is the absence of a reformation that keeps the Muslim world boiling and in regression.
Unfortunately, despite his best intentions, the president gave the wrong speech at the wrong time. Perhaps the most telling indicator of his error was the fact that hours after his speech, CAIR, the un-indicted co-conspirator in the Hamas case in Dallas, congratulated the president on the appointment of a representative to OIC. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
— Steve Emerson is executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism,
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODU1YWMyN2M4MWY0OW...MzY0MTM1Yjg1NGY5ZTQ=
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The new British PM has orderd that reference's to terrorism no longer use the world "Muslim". See e.g. this report from Fox a few days ago:
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Report: British Prime Minister Bans Use of 'Muslim' in Connection With Terrorism
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has instructed his ministers not to use the word "Muslim" in connection with the recent terrorist incidents in Glasgow and London, the Daily Express reports.
The phrase "War on Terror" has also been dropped in an effort to improve community relations with the nation's Islamic community, the paper reported.
Click here to read the Daily Express report.
“There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,” a spokesman told the paper. “It is important that the country remains united.”
The move has drawn some criticism from Brown's opponents in the Tory Party.
“I don’t know what purpose is served by this," Tory member Philip Davies told the paper. "I don’t think we need (to) pussyfoot around when talking about terrorism.”
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Here's one response to this:
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Article published Jul 6, 2007
Call it like it is
Diana West - Q: Who is winning the really important war of ideas — the one between the West and itself? A: Not the side that understands jihad as a foundational Islamic institution.
This is nothing new. From September 11 onward, the yeoman effort of elites has been to wrench "Islam" away from all acts of jihad. But now, particularly after the London and Glasgow attacks, their efforts have achieved a deeper level of denial, and, worse, broader consensus.
The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has directed ministers to omit "Muslim" when discussing (Muslim) terrorism. And forget the generic "war on terror"; even that pathetic phrase is off limits. (This has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Brown's unctuously stated goal to make Britain "the gateway for Islamic finance.") The new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (love that "i" ending) refers to British Muslims as "communities" — maybe a prelude to not mentioning them at all. Both have done the "perversion of a great faith" dance to enlightened applause, taking cues from the unpublished "EU Lexicon," which reportedly nixes such "offensive" phrases as "Islamic terrorism."
British literary lions couldn't agree more. Philosopher John Gray and historian Eric Hobsbawm recently said on British television that even the word "Islamist" was "unfair" because "it implied a strong link to Islam." Never mind the link is doctrinally accurate. Better to accommodate mortal threat without identifying its Islamic roots. Instead of defending their nations — for starters, stopping Islamic immigration and, with it, the progression of Islamic law into Western societies — our elites have decided to pretend Islam isn't there at all.
In the media, the effort is misleading to the point of farce. Joel Mowbray, writing at the Powerline blog, noted that the New York Times has identified Britain's Muslim terrorists as "South Asian people" — which, considering Britain's largest South Asian population is Hindu, is beyond absurd. "Diverse group allegedly in British plot," the Associated Press reported, missing that unifying Islamic thread. "All 8 detainees have ties to health service," wrote the Toronto Star, "but genesis of terror scheme still eludes investigators."
If they read Robert Spencer's jihadwatch.org, the essential daily compendium of jihad and dhimmi news, they might get a clue. But, very ominously, Mr. Spencer's Web site is being blocked by assorted organizations which, according to his readers, continue to provide access to assorted pro-jihad sites. Mr. Spencer reports he's "never received word of so many organizations banning this site all at once." These include the City of Chicago, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, GE IT, JPMorgan Chase, Defense Finance and Accounting Services and now, a federal employee in Dallas informs him, the federal government.
Reason given? Some Internet providers deem the factually based, meticulous analysis on display at jihadwatch.org to be "hate speech." This should send Orwellian shivers up society's spine, but, alarmingly, such reactions to jihad analysis are increasingly the norm.
Case in point: Objecting to a recent column characterizing his views as being non-comprehending or indifferent to jihad, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to our forces in Iraq, wondered in an e-mail whether I "may not like Muslims, and that's your choice." It was a long e-mail — one of several — but even these few words convey the viewpoint, increasingly prevalent, that discounts the doctrinal centrality of Islam to jihad violence convulsing the world, from Iraq to London. In the mental no-jihad zone (and, in Lt. Col. Kilcullen's case, despite what he calls his "significant personal body count of terrorists and insurgents killed or captured"), only personal animus can explain alarm over the Islamic institution of jihad (let alone dhimmitude). "Alternatively," he wrote, "you may think Islam contains illiberal and dangerous tendencies."
I may think? I do think "tendencies" such as jihad and dhimmitude. "Again," he said, "you're entitled to that view."
"That view" is increasingly absent at the top, where Islam itself is politically and strategically beside the point. Consider current military thought, as expressed by Lt. Col. Kilcullen: Typical terrorists, he wrote, are "driven by fundamentally non-religious motivational factors." I wonder which non-religious motivational factors inspired Glasgow's terror-docs to scream "Allah, Allah" while ramming a flaming car into the airport.
Of course, it gets worse. Debate now divides the Pentagon over a new lexicon for Centcom. At stake is the Islamic term "jihad" itself, which could become officially verboten within the ranks of the fighting force that is actually supposed to defeat it.
This might leave us speechless, but it better not shut us up.
======================
Comments?
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To borrow from a leftist group "Silence=Death". This is especially true regarding the global jihad.
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Public Diplomacy for Dummies
The Bush administration falters in the battle of ideas.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Late last month, President Bush gave an address at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., where he announced that the United States would for the first time appoint an observer to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. "Our special envoy will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America's views and values," he said. "This is an opportunity for Americans to demonstrate to Muslim communities our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship."
To say public diplomacy hasn't been this administration's forte is a truism and an understatement. Still, it's hard to recall any presidential initiative as spectacularly misjudged and needless since Ronald Reagan paid tribute to Nazi soldiers at Bitburg. The OIC's signal contribution to date has been a decades-long boycott by Muslim countries against Israel. The Islamic Center is a Saudi-funded institution that, as Freedom House documented in 2005, distributes Wahhabi religious literature. Charming tidbit: "It is forbidden for a Muslim to be the first in greeting an unbeliever, even if he had prestigious position. This is due to many established holy traditions, in this matter, like his [Prophet Muhammad] saying [peace be upon him]: Do not be first, in greeting the Jews and the Christians."
Dutifully in attendance at the president's speech was Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes. Critics of the administration usually point to Mr. Bush's policies and his public persona as the source of America's declining stock in global public opinion surveys. But public diplomacy is also the job of American embassies and ambassadors, taxpayer-funded broadcasting corporations such as Voice of America, military officials and especially Ms. Hughes. In theory, their job is to wage a battle of ideas against radical Islam. In practice and effect, however, too often reality is otherwise.
Take the case of career diplomat Francis Riccardione, currently the U.S. ambassador to Egypt. In interviews with the Egyptian media, Mr. Riccardione has said that American officials have "no right to comment" on the case of Ayman Nour, the former opposition leader imprisoned on trumped-up charges; that faith in Egypt's judiciary is "well-placed," and that president Hosni Mubarak--now in his 26th year in office-- "is loved in the U.S." and "could win elections [in America] as a leader who is a giant on the world stage." Mr. Riccardione also admits he "enjoyed" a recent film by Egyptian artist Shaaban Abdel Rahim, best known for his hit song "I Hate Israel."
Or take the Voice of America's Persian Service. According to a Farsi-speaking source who tracks the broadcasts, during last year's war between Hezbollah and Israel, VOA reporter Nazi Beglari opined that "Hezbollah ended the Israeli occupation in the past and is doing it again." Camera shots lingered over toys scattered near bomb sites and a burnt page of the Quran--evidence, presumably, of Israel's intent to destroy Islam and murder Muslim children.
Then there is Ms. Hughes herself. During one of her first overseas ventures as public diplomacy czarina, Ms. Hughes visited Indonesia--the world's largest Muslim country--where she met its very own Bono, rock star Ahmad Dhani. Mr. Dhani had recently released his album "Laskar Cinta," or "Warriors of Love," a deliberate and political response to the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Laskar Jihad. Ms. Hughes seemed enthralled by both the message and the messenger.
"Hughes met Dhani, praised him to the skies, and said 'people like you are exactly what we need,'" recalls C. Holland Taylor, an American who runs the LibForAll foundation with which Mr. Dhani is associated. "She then asked us whether he would be willing to work with the State Department, whether he'd be willing to travel and whether there was anything she could do for him. We answered all three questions affirmatively. Since then there's been a vast silence."
LibForAll is itself a model of what a competent public diplomacy effort in the Muslim world should look like. Mr. Taylor, a former telecom executive who moved to Jakarta in the 1990s and speaks fluent Indonesian, has engaged influential and genuinely reform-minded Muslims--as opposed to the faux "moderates" on whom Mr. Bush lavished praise at the Islamic Center--to articulate and defend a progressive and tolerant version of Islam.
In its brief life, LibForAll has helped turn back an attempted Islamist takeover of the country's second-largest Muslim social organization (with 30 million members), translated anti-Wahhabist books into Indonesian, sponsored a recent multidenominational conference to denounce Holocaust-denial, brought Mr. Dhani to Colorado to speak to U.S. military brass, and launched a well-researched "extremist exposé" in order, Mr. Taylor says, "to get Indonesian society to consciously acknowledge that there is an infiltration occurring of radical ideology, financed by Arab petrodollars, that is intent on destroying Indonesian Islam."
For his efforts, Mr. Taylor has been cold-shouldered by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta--more proof that when it comes to public diplomacy the U.S. government functions with its usual genius and efficiency. But there's more at work here than a bumbling and insipid bureaucracy. As the scholar Carnes Lord notes in his useful book on public diplomacy, "Losing Hearts and Minds," America's public diplomatists "are today no longer as convinced as they once were that America's story is after all fundamentally a good one, or believe an alternative, negative story is at least equally plausible." Hence someone like Mr. Riccardione can say, when asked about discrimination in Egypt (where a Coptic population amounting to about 10% of the population has one member in the 444-seat parliament) that it "happens everywhere, even in the U.S."
No doubt a dose of moral equivalence served Mr. Riccardione's purposes in getting through his interview without a rhetorical scrape. No doubt, too, maintaining (or pretending) a blissful ignorance about the ideology being propagated by the Islamic Center served Mr. Bush's political purposes. But if effective public diplomacy is really as vital in the war on terror as everyone appears to agree it is, we need better ambassadors, better administrators and a better sense of who we need to engage and how. At least Mr. Taylor has a clue. The administration could stand to learn from him.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.
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Second post of the morning:
WSJ
What About Muslim Moderates?
By R. JAMES WOOLSEY and NINA SHEA
July 10, 2007; Page A21
Islamist terrorism has led the American and British governments in the past month to launch separate public diplomacy programs aimed at engaging Muslims at home and abroad. A quick comparison shows the two initiatives are headed in opposite directions. At least the Brits have finally got it right.
The Bush administration is building bridges to well-funded and self-publicized organizations that claim to speak for all Muslims, even though some of those groups espouse views inimical to American values and interests. After years of pursuing similar strategies -- while seeing home-based terrorists proliferate -- the Blair-Brown government is now more discerning about which Muslims it will partner with. Stating that "lip service for peace" is no longer sufficient, the British are identifying and elevating those who are willing to take clear stands against terrorism and its supporting ideology.
Thus, in a major address at a two-day government conference early last month (titled "Islam and Muslims in the World Today"), then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, with Gordon Brown in attendance and hosting a reception, vowed to correct an imbalance. He stated that, in Britain's Muslim community, unrepresentative but well-funded groups are able to attract disproportionately large amounts of publicity, while moderate voices go unheard and unpublished.
Mr. Blair emphasized that Islam is not a "monolithic faith," but one made up of a "rich pattern of diversity." The principal purpose of the conference, Mr. Blair stressed, was to "let the authentic voices of Islam, in their various schools and manifestations, speak for themselves." He was as good as his word.
Invitations to participate in the assembly were extended to the less-publicized, moderate groups, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, the British Muslim Foundation and Minhaj-ul-Quran. Notably absent from the program was the Muslim Council of Britain, a group that claims to represent that nation's Muslims but is preoccupied with its self-described struggle against "Islamophobia" -- a term it tries to use to shut down critical analysis of anything Islamic, whether legitimate or bigoted.
Also dropped from the speaking roster was the leading European Islamist Tariq Ramadan, who, while denied a visa by the United States, has been a fixture at official conferences on Muslims in Europe. The grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Ramadan is fuzzy on where he stands on specific acts of terror -- and he infamously evaded a challenge by Nicolas Sarkozy to denounce stoning.
Mr. Blair committed funds to improve the teaching of Islamic studies in British universities; announced a new effort to develop "minimum standards" for imams in Britain; and, most significantly, declared that henceforth the government would be giving "priority, in its support and funding decisions, to those leadership organizations actively working to tackle violent extremism." Routine but vague press releases against terrorism would no longer do.
A few days later, British backbone was demonstrated again with the knighting of novelist Salman Rushdie. Since 1989, when Iran's mullahs pronounced one of his works "blasphemous," Mr. Rushdie has lived under the shadow of a death threat, the first fatwa with universal jurisdiction against a Muslim living in the West. With the news that Britain would honor him, extremist Muslims rioted. But many Western Muslim reformers, increasingly threatened by death threats and murderous fatwas themselves, cheered the Brits. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch parliamentarian who was born a Muslim in Somalia, wrote: "The queen has honored the freedom of conscience and creativity cherished in the West."
On the eve of his departure from office, Mr. Blair gave a television interview taking on those he once courted -- British Islamists who have been quick to level charges of Islamophobia and oppression against Britain and the United States: "The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle [against terror] is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, 'It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.' . . . Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism."
Contrast this with the Bush administration's new approach. On June 27, President Bush delivered his "Muslim Initiative" address at the Washington Islamic Center in tribute to the 50th anniversary of that organization's founding, by Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, and its extremist ideology often flows with the kingdom's money. The Islamic Center is not an exception.
A few years ago when we were with Freedom House, concerned Muslims brought us Saudi educational material they collected from the Washington Islamic Center that instructed Muslims fundamentally to segregate themselves from other Americans. One such text stated: "To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one's guard against them, never to imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law."
Though Mr. Bush's remarks were intended for all American Muslims, the administration left the invitation list to Washington Islamic Center's authorities. Predictably, they excluded the truly moderate, who are not Saudi-founded or funded: the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Center for Eurasian Policy, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, the Islam and Democracy Project, the Institute for Gulf Affairs, the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia and many others.
These organizations are frequently shut out of U.S. government events and appointments on the basis that they are considered insignificant or "controversial" by the petro-dollar-funded groups. The administration makes a terrible mistake by making such Wahhabi-influenced institutions as the Washington Islamic Center the gate keepers for all American Muslims.
The actual substance of Mr. Bush's mosque speech -- particularly good on religious freedom -- was overshadowed by the announcement of its single initiative: America is to send an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference. Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was created explicitly to promote hostility to Israel, and its meetings largely consist of ritualistic Israel-bashing. At one last year, Iran's president called for the "elimination of the Zionist regime." It has no mechanism for discussing the human rights of its member states, and thus has never spoken out against Sudan's genocide of Darfuri Muslims. It is advancing an effort to universalize Islamic blasphemy laws, which are applied as often against speech critical of the governments of OIC member states as against profanities. Last month the OIC council of foreign ministers termed Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." Currently no Western power holds either member or observer status at the OIC.
The Bush administration is now actively considering whether its public diplomacy should reach out to Muslim Brotherhood groups. While such groups may pay lip service to peace, they do not denounce terror by Hamas, a Brotherhood offshoot. It keeps as its motto: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." By choosing those whose definition of terror does not include the murder of Jews, honor killings and lethal fatwas against Muslim dissidents and reformers, the U.S. government makes them look strong -- particularly in the shame-and-honor culture of the Middle East -- and strengthens their hand against the real moderates and reformers.
Great Britain, as we were reminded over the past week, has much work ahead in defeating Muslim terror, as well as in overcoming the misguided form of multiculturalism of its recent past. Not all of Britain's measures will be right for America, with our First Amendment. But the British Labour Party socialists appear to have done one major thing right that this American Republican administration has not: Reach out to Muslim leaders who are demonstrably moderate and share our values, even though they may not have petrodollar-funded publicity machines.
While we don't have a Queen to dub knights, Americans do have distinct way of honoring our heroes. Mr. President, confer the Medal of Freedom on one of our own outstanding Muslim-American citizens. For a selection of honorees, look at who was not invited to your recent speech. If Islamists charge "Islamophobia," repeat after Tony: "Loopy loo. Loopy loo."
Mr. Woolsey, co-chair of the Committee on the Present Danger, was Director of Central Intelligence 1993-1995. Ms. Shea is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute.
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HEARTS AND MINDS
What About Muslim Moderates
London does a better job than Washington reaching out to them.
BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY AND NINA SHEA
Sunday, July 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Islamist terrorism has led the American and British governments in the past month to launch separate public-diplomacy programs aimed at engaging Muslims at home and abroad. A quick comparison shows the two initiatives are headed in opposite directions. At least the Brits have finally got it right.
The Bush administration is building bridges to well-funded and self-publicized organizations that claim to speak for all Muslims, even though some of those groups espouse views inimical to American values and interests. After years of pursuing similar strategies--while seeing home-based terrorists proliferate--the Blair-Brown government is now more discerning about which Muslims it will partner with. Stating that "lip service for peace" is no longer sufficient, the British are identifying and elevating those who are willing to take clear stands against terrorism and its supporting ideology.
Thus, in a major address at a two-day government conference early last month (titled "Islam and Muslims in the World Today"), then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, with Gordon Brown in attendance and hosting a reception, vowed to correct an imbalance. He stated that, in Britain's Muslim community, unrepresentative but well-funded groups are able to attract disproportionately large amounts of publicity, while moderate voices go unheard and unpublished.
Mr. Blair emphasized that Islam is not a "monolithic faith," but one made up of a "rich pattern of diversity." The principal purpose of the conference, Mr. Blair stressed, was to "let the authentic voices of Islam, in their various schools and manifestations, speak for themselves." He was as good as his word.
Invitations to participate in the assembly were extended to the less-publicized, moderate groups, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, the British Muslim Foundation and Minhaj-ul-Quran. Notably absent from the program was the Muslim Council of Britain, a group that claims to represent that nation's Muslims but is preoccupied with its self-described struggle against "Islamophobia"--a term it tries to use to shut down critical analysis of anything Islamic, whether legitimate or bigoted.
Also dropped from the speaking roster was the leading European Islamist Tariq Ramadan, who, while denied a visa by the United States, has been a fixture at official conferences on Muslims in Europe. The grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Ramadan is fuzzy on where he stands on specific acts of terror--and he infamously evaded a challenge by Nicolas Sarkozy to denounce stoning.
Mr. Blair committed funds to improve the teaching of Islamic studies in British universities; announced a new effort to develop "minimum standards" for imams in Britain; and, most significantly, declared that henceforth the government would be giving "priority, in its support and funding decisions, to those leadership organizations actively working to tackle violent extremism." Routine but vague press releases against terrorism would no longer do.
A few days later, British backbone was demonstrated again with the knighting of novelist Salman Rushdie. Since 1989, when Iran's mullahs pronounced one of his works "blasphemous," Mr. Rushdie has lived under the shadow of a death threat, the first fatwa with universal jurisdiction against a Muslim living in the West. With the news that Britain would honor him, extremist Muslims rioted. But many Western Muslim reformers, increasingly threatened by death threats and murderous fatwas themselves, cheered the Brits. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch parliamentarian who was born a Muslim in Somalia, wrote: "The queen has honored the freedom of conscience and creativity cherished in the West."
On the eve of his departure from office, Mr. Blair gave a television interview taking on those he once courted--British Islamists who have been quick to level charges of Islamophobia and oppression against Britain and the United States: "The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle [against terror] is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, 'It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.' . . . Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism."
Contrast this with the Bush administration's new approach. On June 27, President Bush delivered his "Muslim Initiative" address at the Washington Islamic Center in tribute to the 50th anniversary of that organization's founding, by Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, and its extremist ideology often flows with the kingdom's money. The Islamic Center is not an exception.
A few years ago when we were with Freedom House, concerned Muslims brought us Saudi educational material they collected from the Washington Islamic Center that instructed Muslims fundamentally to segregate themselves from other Americans. One such text stated: "To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one's guard against them, never to imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law."
Though Mr. Bush's remarks were intended for all American Muslims, the administration left the invitation list to Washington Islamic Center's authorities. Predictably, they excluded the truly moderate, who are not Saudi-founded or funded: the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Center for Eurasian Policy, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, the Islam and Democracy Project, the Institute for Gulf Affairs, the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia and many others.
These organizations are frequently shut out of U.S. government events and appointments on the basis that they are considered insignificant or "controversial" by the petro-dollar-funded groups. The administration makes a terrible mistake by making such Wahhabi-influenced institutions as the Washington Islamic Center the gate keepers for all American Muslims.
The actual substance of Mr. Bush's mosque speech--particularly good on religious freedom--was overshadowed by the announcement of its single initiative: America is to send an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference. Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was created explicitly to promote hostility to Israel, and its meetings largely consist of ritualistic Israel-bashing. At one last year, Iran's president called for the "elimination of the Zionist regime." It has no mechanism for discussing the human rights of its member states, and thus has never spoken out against Sudan's genocide of Darfuri Muslims. It is advancing an effort to universalize Islamic blasphemy laws, which are applied as often against speech critical of the governments of OIC member states as against profanities. Last month the OIC council of foreign ministers termed Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." Currently no Western power holds either member or observer status at the OIC.
The Bush administration is now actively considering whether its public diplomacy should reach out to Muslim Brotherhood groups. While such groups may pay lip service to peace, they do not denounce terror by Hamas, a Brotherhood offshoot. It keeps as its motto: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." By choosing those whose definition of terror does not include the murder of Jews, honor killings and lethal fatwas against Muslim dissidents and reformers, the U.S. government makes them look strong--particularly in the shame-and-honor culture of the Middle East--and strengthens their hand against the real moderates and reformers.
Great Britain, as we have been reminded recently, has much work ahead in defeating Muslim terror, as well as in overcoming the misguided form of multiculturalism of its recent past. Not all of Britain's measures will be right for America, with our First Amendment. But the British Labour Party socialists appear to have done one major thing right that this American Republican administration has not: Reach out to Muslim leaders who are demonstrably moderate and share our values, even though they may not have petrodollar-funded publicity machines.
While we don't have a Queen to dub knights, Americans do have distinct way of honoring our heroes. Mr. President, confer the Medal of Freedom on one of our own outstanding Muslim-American citizens. For a selection of honorees, look at who was not invited to your recent speech. If Islamists charge "Islamophobia," repeat after Tony: "Loopy loo. Loopy loo."
Mr. Woolsey, co-chair of the Committee on the Present Danger, was Director of Central Intelligence 1993-1995. Ms. Shea is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute.
WSJ
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Wasn't quite sure in which thread to put this one.
======
Support for suicide bombings against civilians has fallen sharply across the Muslim world since 2002, a major survey has suggested.
However, 70% of Palestinians interviewed said they believed such attacks were sometimes justifiable.
The Global Opinion Trends survey, by the US-based Pew Research Centre, polled 45,000 people in 47 countries.
It also found widespread optimism in poor countries that the next generation will enjoy better lives.
And it suggested that people viewed the US as the most friendly country in the world and the most feared.
Sectarian tension
In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Jordan, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who support suicide bombing has declined by half or more since 2002.
But in areas of conflict, the results are different - 70% of Palestinians said that suicide bombings against civilians were sometimes justifiable.
There is also declining support among Muslims for Osama Bin Laden. In Jordan, just 20% express a lot or some confidence in Bin Laden, down from 56% four years ago.
However, the survey found broad concern among Muslims that tensions between Sunni and Shia are not limited to Iraq and represent a growing problem for the Muslim world.
The survey also suggests that as countries and families grow richer, optimism increases, as well as support for ruling governments.
In Latin America, the poll results indicate that despite the electoral success of a new generation of left-wing leaders, the majority of respondents believe that people are better off living in a market economy.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...as/6914959.stm
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At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: September 22, 2007
WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.
A page from the Web site Arabs Gate, one of the sites where a State Department blog team has contributed to the debate.
So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?
Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”
The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.
The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.
Brent E. Blaschke, the project director, said the idea was to reach “swing voters,” whom he described as the silent majority of Muslims who might sympathize with Al Qaeda yet be open to information about United States government policy and American values.
Some analysts question whether the blog team will survive beyond the tenure of Karen P. Hughes, the confidante of President Bush who runs public diplomacy. The department expects to add seven more team members within the next month — four more in Arabic, two in Farsi and one in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.
The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al Jazeera or charismatic Muslim figures like Amr Khaled, as well as Arab news sites like Elaph.com. They choose them based on high traffic and a focus on United States policy, and they always identify themselves as being from the State Department.
They avoid radical sites, although team members said that jihadis scoured everywhere.
The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting. But so far only the webmaster at the Islamic Falluja Forums (www.al-faloja.info) has revoked their password and told them to get lost, they said.
Not that they don’t attract plenty of skeptical, sarcastic responses. One man identifying himself as an Arab in Germany commented that they were trying to put lipstick on a pig. During Congressional testimony last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, for example, the two-man team went into chat rooms to ask people their opinion.
“God bless America, the giving mother,” went one sarcastic response, going on to say that everything the United States does goes into “the balance of your pockets, I mean the balance of your rewards.” Another noted that Iraqis were better off before the invasion, while a third jokingly asked the Digital Outreach Team for a green card.
Mr. Jawad’s responses tend toward the earnest: “We do not deny that the situation in Iraq is difficult, but we are achieving success in decreasing the level of violence there with the contribution of the Iraqis who care about their nation and who reject the terrorists and killers who target their victims based on sect,” he wrote at one point. He directed the green card writer to the Web sites describing how to apply.
Mr. Jawad and his colleague, Muath al-Sufi, are circumspect about biographical details that would allow readers to pigeonhole them by their roots, religion or education. Mr. Jawad, would only say that he is in his 30s, was born in Texas and raised around the Arab world. Mr. Sufi also said he was in his 30s.
The team said certain topics repeated regularly, including arguments over the accusations that American soldiers tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and President Bush’s comment that the fight against terrorism is a “crusade.” Much time is also spent trying to douse the Internet brush fires that erupt whenever prominent Americans from talk-show hosts to politicians make anti-Muslim remarks of the “bomb Mecca” variety.
Each response is carefully shaped in English by the team and translated into often poetic Arabic.
“We try to put ourselves in the mindset of someone receiving the message,” said Duncan MacInnes, the director of the Counterterrorism Communication Center, of which the Digital Outreach Team is one branch. “Freedom for an Arab doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning it has for an American. Honor does. So we might say terrorism is dishonorable, which resonates more.”
Analysts said they had been surprised by the positive response, with people seemingly eager to engage, although the overall impact was impossible to assess. “They are not carrying the slogans of liberalization or democratization across the region,” said Adel al-Toraifi, a Saudi political analyst. “They are talking about peace and dialogue, and I think that makes it difficult for those debating them to justify criticizing them.”
Mr. Toraifi said the postings had generated some debate in the Arab world and had been the subject of a column in an Algerian newspaper lauding the State Department for discussing policy with ordinary people, something the writer said the Algerian government would never do.
Indeed, several analysts said having State Department employees on the Web helps to counter one source of radicalization — the sense that Washington is too arrogant to listen to the grievances of ordinary Arabs, so violence is the sole means to attract attention.
Mr. Jawad and Mr. Sufi say that in their roughly two dozen weekly postings they avoid all religious discussions, like whether jihad that kills civilians is legitimate. They even steer clear of arguments, instead posting straightforward snapshots of United States policy.
Mr. Jawad is often maligned as a “U.S. agent,” including by Radad, the man of the “just Shiites” remark. After Mr. Jawad wrote that all life was equally worth preserving, part of the man’s response was, “Don’t you think an agent of Arab nationality deserves to be killed?”
Mr. Jawad wrote back in part, “It seems to me that many people are quick to offer judgments based on political views so those who oppose them are always agents and infidels. Which leads to law of the jungle, which is not just, but chaotic.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
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Second post of the morning:
Although the Egyptian Government is usually on the other side of things, this article seems relevant to the subject of this thread:
===========
WSJ
Egyptian Exile
By JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
September 22, 2007
Far from the public eye a drama is playing out that will have the utmost consequences for the Bush administration's goal of promoting democracy in the Middle East. The region's most prominent dissident, Egyptian sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, suddenly finds himself in a kind of perambulatory exile, hopping from conference to conference -- in nine countries in the last three months. The one place he dare not go is home to Egypt because well-placed officials have warned him not to put himself within President Hosni Mubarak's grasp.
What has Mr. Ibrahim done to enrage President Mubarak? He has loudly advocated democracy in public writings, interviews with Western reporters, and, most unforgivably, in a face-to-face meeting with President George W. Bush. As a result, members of Mr. Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party filed nine formal requests with the state prosecutor's office this summer for indictments against Mr. Ibrahim, for "damaging the state's economic interests" and even "treason." The state-run press has conducted a smear campaign against him.
Most recently, Egypt's largest paper, Al Ahram, carried a front-page editorial signed by Osama Saraya, its editor-in-chief, that branded Mr. Ibrahim an "agent" of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a "criminal." Still more ominously, the author averred that Mr. Ibrahim had "repeated his old crime itself by giving false information to a foreign reader" to obscure "the environment of freedom and reform that Egypt lives in."
The real point of this absurd argument was to encourage and justify a repetition of the ordeal to which the Egyptian state subjected Mr. Ibrahim seven years ago. In 2000 he became the region's most celebrated political prisoner when he was jailed on spurious charges stemming from the efforts of his Ibn Khaldun Center to monitor Egyptian elections. Altogether he spent two years behind bars before Egypt's highest and most politically independent judicial body, the Court of Cassation, overturned his conviction. Alas, this did not come before his health had been permanently damaged.
Torture is all too common in Egyptian prisons, but his jailers were reluctant to leave scars on Mr. Ibrahim because the U.S. government followed his case closely. (He is married to an American and holds American as well as Egyptian citizenship.) Instead they resorted to sleep deprivation. After 45 days of being roughly wakened each time he started to doze, Mr. Ibrahim suffered a stroke.
A fit, athletic man who was still jogging at the age of 60, Mr. Ibrahim, 68, now walks with a severe limp. Another term in prison could literally seal his doom. Worse, Egyptian dissidents do not put it past the intelligence services, or mukhabarat, to arrange an "accident" that would rid Mr. Mubarak of this meddlesome advocate without generating the international campaign that will ensue if he is imprisoned. They point to the recent mysterious defenestration in London of Ashraf Marwan, an alleged spy for Israel, whose death the Israeli press suggests may have been caused by Egyptian agents. Fears of such dirty tricks are not paranoid: Just prior to Mr. Ibrahim's imprisonment in 2000 an unidentified truck ran his car into a ditch.
The campaign against Mr. Ibrahim is the latest evidence that Egypt is marching backwards on democracy and human rights. In his 2005 state of the union address, President Bush had called upon "the great and proud nation of Egypt [to] show the way toward democracy in the Middle East." When Mr. Mubarak announced Egypt's first ever presidential election, it seemed as if his exhortation was being heeded. To no one's surprise, the election was not fair, but hopes for the future were kindled by Mr. Mubarak's pledge to inaugurate an era of political reform after his re-election.
Instead, Mr. Mubarak had his main competitor, Ayman Nour, tossed in prison on trumped up charges, where he languishes in declining health. Mr. Mubarak then pushed through constitutional "reform" in the form of 35 amendments adopted as a single indivisible package, precluding meaningful deliberation. This was followed by arrests of dissident bloggers and other critics -- both secular and Islamist -- and then by the vicious persecution of a group of "Quranists," Muslim reformers who want a return to original Scripture as opposed to subsequent interpretations that are often more narrow-minded. Now, the hounding of Mr. Ibrahim completes the mockery of the hopes of 2005.
The new attacks on Mr. Ibrahim began in late May this year when the wife of the emir of Qatar hosted a conference to launch the Arab Foundation for Democracy. The Qatari government endowed it with $10 million with which to support reformers in the region, and Mr. Ibrahim was named to the board. Some of Egypt's state-controlled media portrayed the whole operation as a front for Mr. Ibrahim's disloyal activities. Ironically, he had been condemned previously for accepting Western donations for pro-democracy work, but now it turned out that Arab donations were no better. Apparently it was the purpose of the funds, rather than their source, that made them taboo.
A week later, Mr. Ibrahim spoke at a conference on democracy held in Prague, where President Bush met with him and dissidents from other countries. The Egyptian press again went into high dudgeon -- some even dubbing Mr. Ibrahim's organization the "Son of Zion Center" -- when Mr. Bush, in his highly publicized speech there, mentioned Ayman Nour as one of those "who couldn't join us because they are being unjustly imprisoned." The other absentees named by Mr. Bush were from Belarus, Burma, Cuba and Vietnam. The Egyptian government bristled at being placed in such company and accused Mr. Ibrahim of putting Mr. Bush up to it.
In his own Prague remarks, Mr. Ibrahim appealed to Western governments: "As freedom fighters, we ask you to stop supporting dictators in our countries. . . . in the name of stability and continuity." Soon thereafter, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to reduce U.S. aid to Egypt by $200 million unless that country showed progress on human rights. Mr. Mubarak blamed Mr. Ibrahim.
All of this has profound consequences not only for Mr. Ibrahim and Egypt, but for Washington, too. Mr. Ibrahim is being persecuted more for the actions of the U.S. president and Congress than for what he, himself, did. Can we tolerate this? In May, the Syrian dissident, Kamal Labwani, was sentenced to years in prison for the simple act of meeting U.S. officials. But Syria is a hostile state, an unindicted coconspirator in the Axis of Evil. Egypt, in contrast, is an ally to which we give $2 billion each year.
This relationship, of course, is exactly the problem. No U.S. administration wants to butt heads with Egypt, and the Senate declined to go along with the House's conditional cut in Egypt's aid.
Mr. Mubarak may see Mr. Ibrahim's alleged offenses as a matter of national honor. But is our own national honor not also at stake if someone, an American citizen no less, is persecuted for holding a conversation with the president of the U.S.? Somehow, Mr. Bush and Congress must convey a stern warning to Mr. Mubarak: Hands off Saad Edin Ibrahim.
Mr. Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book about democrats in the Middle East.
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The unfortunate truth is that a fair election in Egypt may well result in the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power. It's the old "One man, one vote, one time" scenario.
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Woof GM:
I certainly appreciate your point, but let me offer this:
The same thing as you properly predict with the MB in Egypt just happened with Hamas in Palestine/Gaza. I know that some have used this to say that President Bush's push for democracy is foolishness. However, to me it seems like what happened with Hamas has been a good thing. No longer are we pushing Israel to negotiate with a government that does not represent its people nor can commit them. No longer does the world subsidize the PA government as it did before. The Gaza strip has been declared , , , what was it? "hostile territory"? as Israel begins to shut down electricity and other essentials. Would any of this have been possible without the election of Hamas?
What would happen if the MB took over Egypt via elections?
In the big picture are we better off standing by our convictions, or supporting yet again another problematic regime out realism?
The question is just that-- a question, not an argument.
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In many ways, Egypt is the cultural center of gravity for the arab world. The majority of tv, movies and radio produced in arabic is created in Egypt. This is why despite the various dialects of arabic, Egyptian Arabic is understood everywhere. If the MB took power in Egypt, I fear a possible wave of MB based revolution through the region, creating the restored caliphate Osama has been calling for. I really don't want to see the pyramids and other monuments go the way of the Buddhas of Bamyan.
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Wednesday, Sep. 26, 2007
My Dinner with Ahmadinejad
By Richard Stengel
The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran "requests the pleasure" of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The dinner is at the Intercontinental Hotel — with names carefully written out at all the place settings around a rectangular table. There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There's Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. And at a little after 8pm, on a day when he has already addressed the U.N., the evening after his confrontation at Columbia, a bowing and smiling Mahmoud Admadinejad glides into the room.
This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.
The format of the evening is curious. In his calm and fluent voice — "dear friends," he calls us — he requests that we not ask questions, but make statements, so that he can react to them in a form of dialogue. The academics are not shy. They make statements not only about the need for dialogue and reconciliation, but castigate the Iranian government for chilling press freedoms and for arresting Iranian-American scholars who were only trying to foster better relations between America and Iran. Throughout, Ahmadinejad is courtly, preternaturally calm, and fiercely articulate.
After an hour, he is ready to respond. He does so first with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi. "I believe that Almighty God created the universe for mankind. Man is God's most important creation and it is through him that we appreciate the beauties of the universe. God has sent man here on a mission." That mission, he says, is to pursue love, justice, kindness and dignity. In fact, he repeats those works so often that it begins to sound like a mantra: Love. Justice. Kindness. Dignity. He speaks with the quiet zeal of a not-very-flamboyant televangelist. "The pursuit of justice through love and kindness and human dignity can end all conflicts on earth," he says. "Inshallah."
When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently. Some highlights:
- Iran has not violated any of the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ahmadinejad says. He has proposed a multilateral uranium enrichment program with different nations, and can't understand why no one has taken up his offer.
- The US and Iran can play a positive role together in Iraq. "If the US withdraws from Iraq, good things will happen," he says. "I believe that the Iraqi people can rule themselves."
- In the Middle East, Ahmadinejad says the world must allow the Palestinians to decide their future for themselves: "That is the human solution to sixty years of instability." He refers to Israel only as "the Zionist regime" and does not mention the Holocaust.
- Ahmadinejad claims there are thirty newspapers published in Iran that are opposed to his government, citing that as evidence of press freedom in Iran.
- In answer to a question about how he viewed Hitler's legacy, he says, "I view Hitler's role as extremely negative, a despicably dark face."
- He notes that Americans don't understand Iranian history, saying that the movie 300 — with which he seems intimately familiar — was a "complete distortion of Iranian history." Iran, he says, has never invaded anyone in its history.
Finally, in response to a question about whether war with Iran was growing more likely, he says, "Mr. Bush is interested in harming Iran. But I believe there are wise politicians in America who will prevent such a war. We hate war. We would not welcome it. But we are prepared for every scenario. Yet I don't think war will happen."
With that, Ahmadinejad says he has an early morning appointment the next day, and that he welcomes greater dialogue like this evening. And then, still composed, and with the same slightly mysterious smile that never leaves his face all evening, he bows deeply and heads upstairs.
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This from today's NY Times. One wishes that the anthros had a different point of view, but , , , there it is.
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Op-Ed Contributor
A True Culture War
NY Times
By RICHARD A. SHWEDER
Published: October 27, 2007
Chicago
IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?
A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.
How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? A group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has called for a boycott and asked faculty members and students around the country to pledge not to contribute to counterinsurgency efforts. Their logic is clear: America is engaged in a brutal war of occupation; if you don’t support the mission then you shouldn’t support the troops. Understandably these concerned scholars don’t want to make it easier for the American military to conquer or pacify people who once trusted anthropologists. Nevertheless, I believe the pledge campaign is a way of shooting oneself in the foot.
Part of my thinking stems from an interview with Ms. McFate on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” to which I tried to listen with an open mind. My first reaction was to feel let down. It turns out that the anthropologists are not really doing anthropology at all, but are basically hired as military tour guides to help counterinsurgency forces accomplish various nonlethal missions.
These anthropological “angels on the shoulder,” as Ms. McFate put it, offer global positioning advice as soldiers move through poorly understood human terrain — telling them when not to cross their legs at meetings, how to show respect to leaders, how to arrange a party. They use their degrees in cultural anthropology to play the part of Emily Post.
More worrisome, it was revealed that Tracy, the mystery anthropologist, wears a military uniform and carries a gun during her cultural sensitivity missions. This brought to my increasingly skeptical mind the unfortunate image of an angelic anthropologist perched on the shoulder of a member of an American counterinsurgency unit who is kicking in the door of someone’s home in Iraq, while exclaiming, “Hi, we’re here from the government; we’re here to understand you.”
Nevertheless the military voices on the show had their winning moments, sounding like old-fashioned relativists, whose basic mission in life was to counter ethnocentrism and disarm those possessed by a strident sense of group superiority. Ms. McFate stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with younger boys on “love Thursdays” and do some “hanky-panky.” “Stop imposing your values on others,” was the message for the American soldiers. She was way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I found it heartwarming.
I began to imagine an occupying army of moral relativists, enforcing the peace by drawing a lesson from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans lasted a much longer time than the British Empire in part because they had a brilliant counterinsurgency strategy. They did not try to impose their values on others. Instead, they made room — their famous “millet system” — for cultural pluralism, leaving each ethnic and religious group to control its own territory and at liberty to carry forward its distinctive way of life.
When the American Anthropological Association holds its annual convention in November in Washington, I expect it to become a forum for heated expression of political and moral opposition to the war, to the Bush administration, to capitalism, to neo-colonialism, and to the corrupting influence of the Pentagon and the C.I.A. on professional ethics.
Nevertheless I think it is a mistake to support a profession-wide military boycott or a public counter-counterinsurgency loyalty oath. And I think it would be unwise for the American Anthropological Association to do so at this time.
The real issue for academic anthropologists is not whether the military should know more rather than less about other ways of life — of course it should know more. The real issue is how our profession is going to begin to play a far more significant educational role in the formulation of foreign policy, in the hope that anthropologists won’t have to answer some patriotic call late in a sad day to become an armed angel riding the shoulder of a misguided American warrior.
Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist and professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Thinking Through Cultures.”
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A nice rhetorical flourish here, but perhaps it misses the point about the central role of Kurdish separatism in the mix?
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“If there is one idea that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, share on how to fight the war on terror, it is that we need to reach out to and win the hearts and minds of the moderate, modern, peaceable, more secularist Muslims and empower them to defeat by both persuasion and other methods the radical, violent fundamentalists in their religion. That would be a very, very good idea. But consider the Turkish experience in the past six years. The Turks are the moderate, modern, peaceable, more secularist Muslims. Moreover our countries have been close allies for a half-century. And Turkey has had extensive friendly commercial relations with Israel. They are Turks, not Arabs, and are therefore less susceptible to the emotional plight of the West Bank Arabs under Israeli occupation. And yet we have lost the Turks almost as badly as we have lost the angriest fundamentalist Arab Muslims. If we can’t keep a fair share of their friendly attitude, how do we expect to win the much vaunted and awaited hearts and minds campaign?” —Tony Blankley
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...1-12B71D02ADD7
What I Said
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | 10/30/2007
[The following is a speech given by David Horowitz at the University of Wisconsin last Monday as part of the university’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week program]
I understand that the cold weather set in just to day so I planned this event to warm things up. Actually, it wasn’t my plan to warm things up. The heat has been provided by a national hate campaign organized by the political left to intimidate and discredit the student organizers of the event and prevent the discussion they hoped to stimulate from taking place. Some of this hate crowd is present tonight. Yes, I can hear you. You attack this event by alleging that it is put on by racists and bigots and Islamo-phobes. I’m going to disappoint you, if you listen. This evening is not about prejudice against Muslims. On the contrary, this evening is on behalf of all those Muslims who are oppressed by Islamo-Fascism, which you would know if you read what we have said.
If you want to understand what this week is about, here is the poster we designed to announce our events. What it shows is a soccer field in Afghanistan. The figure with the AK-47 is a Taliban soldier. And this poor woman, who is about to have her head blown off at point blank range by an AK-47 has been accused of sexual improprieties, which violate Islamic law. As you may or may not know, in countries where Sharia, which is Islamic law, is imposed by the state, women cannot be witnesses. So this poor woman had no defense. Nor could other women testify in her behalf. Islamic law forbids it. The person who shot the video from which this still is taken asked the Taliban why they were doing this on this soccer field. It happens the United States, in its never-ending generosity, gave Afghanistan that soccer field. The Taliban soldier replied, “Well, if the United States will give us a place for executions, we will play soccer on the soccer field.” These are the religious barbarians we face.
Every person in this photo is a Muslim. The victim is a Muslim. There are 130 million girls in Islamic countries who have had their genitals sliced off at puberty, without anesthetic, because sexual pleasure in a woman is held to be evil by some perverted interpretation of Islamic law. The clitorectomies are to save these girls from evil. This evening and this week is to protest that barbaric treatment of young Muslim women. There are 4,000 homosexuals who have been executed in Iran. This evening is to protest that as well. There are 52 countries in the world where there have been honor killings of Muslim women. If a Muslim woman is raped, her family is shamed. Remove the stain of that shame, one of her relatives, a brother, a cousin, parent, murders her. This is a week to bring awareness about that barbaric practice by Islamo-fascists and to try to stop it.
One of our concerns in this regard is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. There are probably 600 Women’s Studies programs on American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. We have had a very hard time locating a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.
As you probably know, women under Islamic law get half the inheritance a man does. In some countries where Sharia is enforced, women can’t even get an education. In Saudi Arabia, there is currently a campaign for women’s liberatiion which is attempting to get women the right to drive an automobile. To drive an automobile! Why aren’t Women’s Studies Departments up in arms about this? You can probably go to a Women’s Studies class at this university and learn about the oppression of women in the faculty lounge, but you can’t learn about the oppression of women in Tehran or Riyadh or Kuala Lumpur.
For the information of our opponents here tonight, this week is already a tremendous success, because no matter how hostile you are to what you imagine to be our views, which have been unbelievably distorted in the attacks this week, you yourselves are already now discussing the issues we set out to raise: “Why is it that American feminists are not up in arms about the savage abuses of women by Islamo-fascists, about those 130 million young girls who have their genitals sliced off?”
So we have already done a service to Muslim women all over the world just by raising this. I know that there are the people who feel that the Muslim community is under threat here. But think of the Muslim community in Algeria where between 150,000 and 200,000 moderate Muslims were slaughtered in the 1990s, by an organization calling itself Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb. Think about the Muslims in the Sudan who are being slaughtered by a Taliban-like regime, simply because they don't subscribe to the regime's version of Islam. This is a serious problem in the Islamic world where (except for the nation of Turkey, which seems to be going in the other direction) there is a lack of separation of church and state. What that means is if radical clerics get in control of the state, they will use the state law to enforce their version of the Qur'an.
In Iran, just last week, the modesty police issued a new edict that couples can't hold hands in public. If you want the definition of a totalitarian state, it's a state that controls every aspect of a person's life. Religions, and particularly Islam, are concerned with many aspects of a person’s life. Religion is about morality, about the family, and about social relations. So when interpretations of religious law are enforce by the political state that’s the end of all freedom. It means one set of priests is going to have the power state behind their interpretation of what you can and cannot do. The end result of that process is this poor woman in the photo who is about to have her head blown off by an AK-47 for violating a government edict about her sex life. I don’t think there is anybody in this room who would support that. I hope there isn’t.
That’s really what we intended to do with this week, to make people aware of this problem. I have called it “Islamo-Fascism.” That is not a term designed to say that all Muslims or a majority of Muslims are fascists. In fact a majority of Muslims are either victims of Islamo-Fascists or threatened by them. The FoxNews channel anchor and other misguided individuals think that the term “Islamo-Fascism” is hate speech. That’s the same thing as saying the term should be banned. In a democracy, at least in our democracy as it has been degraded by so-called liberals today, the way you ban ideas is by calling them “hate speech.” But saying that Islamo-Fascism implicates all Muslims make no logical sense.
We use the term “Italian Fascism” without assuming that all Italians are fascists. Hitler did not even win a majority of the vote in Germany, yet we use the phrase “German Fascism” without implying that all people of German descent are fascists. People like Alan Colmes will throw around the term “white racism” pretty casually. Everyone in this room has either used the phrase “white racism” or read it without objection. Do you mean to call every white person a racist when you use that term? That would make Alan Colmes a racist. Yet that’s precisely what the opponents of Islamo-Fascism week seem to be claiming.
The hateful attacks on this week are, in fact quite stupid, when you think about what they are claiming. If I intended to come on a college platform and say hateful things about all Muslims, I would be hooted off the stage. No campus organization would invite me to say such things and if I did say them I would never be invited by any campus organization again. Since no one on a college campus is prepared to hear hate speech, why bother to protest it in advance. It’s self-discrediting. Yet we live in such Orwellian times that no one laughs when the left makes these preposterous claims.
So, on the one hand, the hate campaign against us is a very stupid campaign, although it is also malicious. On the other, it is quite sinister. When you are called a racist from one end of the country to another, when you are identified as somebody who is preaching hate against a religious or ethnic or racial group, someone is going to believe those charges. The effect, in other words, is to put a target on your back. Which is why there is so much security present tonight...
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WSJ
Benazir's Legacy
By MARK A. SIEGEL
February 16, 2008; Page A10
This week's publication of Benazir Bhutto's "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West" is bittersweet to me, her friend and collaborator on the book, which was written in her last days. Many mullahs may hate the book, but so might many in the U.S. State Department. It takes on both the West and the Islamic world equally, exposing the dysfunctions of their respective world views, and puts Pakistan at the epicenter of the dual crises that were Benazir's themes -- the internal crisis within Islam and the crisis between Islam and the West.
Benazir and I worked on this project over the last very difficult days of her life, through assassination attempts, house arrest, emergency rule, martial law and constant harassment and intimidation. We had reason to know that all of our conversations and email exchanges were intercepted and monitored by the Musharraf regime. What we could not know, of course, was that this book would become Benazir's untimely final legacy.
Benazir believed that the international terrorist movement has two primary aims. First, the jihadists seek to reconstitute the concept of the caliphate, politically uniting the great Muslim populations of the world. Second, they seek to provoke the much debated clash of civilizations between Western values and Islam that they hope will result in the domination of a medieval interpretation of Islam that rejects modernity and pluralism. Benazir hoped to pre-empt this collision through reconciliation with the West and mobilization of the moderates within the world's 1.4 billion Muslims.
Benazir was critical of Western governments that in the past helped Muslim monarchs and dictators suffocate democratic movements and democratic governance. But she condemns Muslim hypocrisy as well. She says that while one billion Muslims around the world seem united in their outrage at the war in Iraq and the deaths of Muslims caused by U.S. military intervention, there is little similar outrage against the sectarian civil war in Iraq that has led to far more casualties. Benazir castigates Muslim leaders and intellectuals for criticizing harm inflicted on fellow Muslims by the West, but remaining deadly silent when confronted with Muslim-on-Muslim violence. She finds the Muslim community's silence about genocide in Darfur particularly reprehensible.
In her book, Benazir seeks to educate the West about what she believed to be the true nature of Islam. From the core of her being she rejects those who would use Islam to justify acts of terror; who pervert, manipulate and exploit religion for their political agendas. Chronicling and cataloging their assertions against democracy, pluralism, tolerance to other religions and societies, equality for women, and rejection of technology and modernity, she shows through specific citations of the Quran that the jihadist interpretations are not only antithetical to Islam but specifically prohibited by it.
Benazir believed that extremism thrives under dictatorship, and is nurtured and fueled by it. She believed that when people lose faith in the political process, frustration and despair lead them to reach out to extra-governmental solutions. That is exactly what she believed is happening in Pakistan today. The U.S. is once again "dancing with a dictator" by supporting President Pervez Musharraf, a policy that will come back to haunt America. Despite the administration casting its lot with a military dictator, extremism has flourished.
Benazir Bhutto and I collaborated on "Reconciliation" while she planned her return to Pakistan to contest parliamentary elections that all polls indicated she would win. Mr. Musharraf repeatedly denied requests for meaningful security for Benazir, even after the heinous assassination attempt against her on Oct. 19 that left 179 dead. The State Department continued to dismiss repeated expressions of concern about her safety. When Congress sent letters and made phone calls, Congress was ignored.
And on Dec. 27 Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, in the heart of the nation's military garrison. On Monday Pakistan will hold the national elections for which Benazir returned. The U.S. Congress has demanded that these elections be free, fair, transparent and internationally monitored. The U.S. State Department however, seems content to concede that the elections will not be free and fair but still (somehow) "good." In Islamabad these words are seen as a green light to rig with impunity.
Benazir Bhutto gave her life for the principles in which she believed. It is time for the Bush administration to tell Mr. Musharraf that anything less than free and fair elections is unacceptable and that an electoral fraud will not stand.
Mr. Siegel collaborated with Benazir Bhutto on the recently published book "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West" (Harper). He is a partner at Locke Lord Strategies in Washington, D.C.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Islam at the Ballot Box
By AMIR TAHERI
February 21, 2008; Page A17
Pakistan's election has been portrayed by the Western media as a defeat for President Pervez Musharraf. The real losers were the Islamist parties.
The latest analysis of the results shows that the parties linked, or at least sympathetic, to the Taliban and al Qaeda saw their share of the votes slashed to about 3% from almost 11% in the last general election a few years ago. The largest coalition of the Islamist parties, the United Assembly for Action (MMA), lost control of the Northwest Frontier Province -- the only one of Pakistan's four provinces it governed. The winner in the province is the avowedly secularist National Awami Party.
Despite vast sums of money spent by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and wealthy Arabs from the Persian Gulf states, the MMA failed to achieve the "approaching victory" (fatah al-qarib) that Islamist candidates, both Shiite and Sunni, had boasted was coming.
The Islamist defeat in Pakistani confirms a trend that's been under way for years. Conventional wisdom had it that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lack of progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict, would provide radical Islamists with a springboard from which to seize power through elections.
Analysts in the West used that prospect to argue against the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East. These analysts argued that Muslims were not ready for democracy, and that elections would only translate into victory for hard-line Islamists.
The facts tell a different story. So far, no Islamist party has managed to win a majority of the popular vote in any of the Muslim countries where reasonably clean elections are held. If anything, the Islamist share of the vote has been declining across the board.
Take Jordan. In last November's general election, the Islamic Action Front suffered a rout, as its share of the votes fell to 5% from almost 15% in elections four years ago. The radical fundamentalist group, linked with the Islamic Brotherhood movement, managed to keep only six of its 17 seats in the National Assembly. Its independent allies won no seats.
In Malaysia, the Islamists have never gone beyond 11% of the popular vote. In Indonesia, the various Islamist groups have never collected more than 17%. The Islamists' share of the popular vote in Bangladesh declined from an all-time high of 11% in the 1980s to around 7% in the late 1990s.
In Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas -- the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- won the 2006 general election with 44% of the votes, far short of the "crushing wave of support" it had promised. Even then, it was clear that at least some of those who run on a Hamas ticket did not share its radical Islamist ideology. Despite years of misrule and corruption, Fatah, Hamas's secularist rival, won 42% of the popular vote.
In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won two successive general elections, the latest in July 2007, with 44% of the popular vote. Even then, AKP leaders go out of their way to insist that the party "has nothing to do with religion."
"We are a modern, conservative, European-style party," AKP leader and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, likes to repeat at every opportunity. In last July's general election, the AKP lost 23 seats and, with it, its two-third majority in the Grand National Assembly.
AKP's success in Turkey inspired Moroccan Islamists to create a similar outfit called Party of Justice and Development (PDJ). The PDJ sought support from AKP "experts" to prepare for last September's general election in Morocco. Yet when the votes were counted, the PDJ collected just over 10% of the popular vote, winning 46 of the 325 seats.
Islamists have done no better in neighboring Algeria. In the latest general election, held in May 2007, the two Islamist parties, Movement for a Peaceful Society and Algerian Awakening, won less than 12% of the popular vote.
In Yemen, one of the Arab states where the culture of democracy has struck the deepest roots, a series of elections in the past 20 years has shown support for Islamists to stand at around 25% of the popular vote. In the last general election in 2003, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform won 22%.
Kuwait is another Arab country where the holding of reasonably fair elections has become part of the national culture. In the general election in 2006, a well-funded and sophisticated Islamist bloc collected 27% of the votes and won 17 of the 50 seats in the National Assembly.
In Lebanon's last general election in 2005, the two Islamist parties, Hezbollah (Party of God) and Amal (Hope) collected 21% of the popular vote to win 28 of the 128 seats in the parliament. This despite massive financial and propaganda support from the Islamic Republic in Iran, and electoral pacts with a Christian political bloc led by the pro-Tehran former Gen. Michel Aoun.
Many observers do not regard Egypt's elections as free and fair enough to use as a basis for political analysis. Nevertheless, the latest general election, held in 2005, can be regarded as the most serious since the 1940s, if only because the Islamist opposition was allowed to field candidates and campaign publicly. In the event, however, Muslim Brotherhood candidates collected less than 20% of the popular vote, despite widespread dissatisfaction with President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian rule.
Other Arab countries where elections are not yet up to acceptable standards include Oman and Bahrain. But even in those countries, the Islamists have not done better than anywhere else in the region. In Tunisia and Libya, the Islamists are banned and thus have not put their political strength to the electoral test.
Afghanistan and Iraq have held a series of elections since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul and the Baath in Baghdad. By all standards, these have been generally free and fair elections, and thus valid tests of the public mood. In Afghanistan, Islamist groups, including former members of the Taliban, have managed to win around 11% of the popular vote on the average.
The picture in Iraq is more complicated, because voters have been faced with bloc lists that hide the identity of political parties behind a blanket ethnic and/or sectarian identity. Only the next general election in 2009 could reveal the true strength of the political parties, since it will not be contested based on bloc lists. Frequent opinion polls, however, show that support for avowedly Islamist parties, both Shiite and Sunni, would not exceed 25% of the popular vote.
Far from rejecting democracy because it is supposed to be "alien," or using it as a means of creating totalitarian Islamist systems, a majority of Muslims have repeatedly shown that they like elections, and would love to join the global mainstream of democratization. President Bush is right to emphasize the importance of holding free and fair elections in all Muslim majority countries.
Tyrants fear free and fair elections, a fact illustrated by the Khomeinist regime's efforts to fix the outcome of next month's poll in Iran by pre-selecting the candidates. Support for democratic movements in the Muslim world remains the only credible strategy for winning the war against terror.
Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe, 2002).
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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The largest survey to date of Muslims worldwide suggests the vast majority want Western democracy and freedoms, but do not want them to be imposed. The poll by Gallup of more than 50,000 Muslims in 35 nations found most wanted the West to instead focus on changing its negative view of Muslims and Islam.
The huge survey began following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.
The overwhelming majority of those asked condemned them and subsequent attacks, citing religious reasons.
The poll, which claims to represent the views of 90% the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, is to be published next month as part of a book entitled Who Speaks For Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think.
New policies
According to the book, the survey of the world's Muslim community was commissioned by Gallup's chairman, Jim Clifton, shortly after US President George W Bush asked in a 2001 speech: "Why do they hate us?"
The radicals are better educated, have better jobs, and are more hopeful with regard to the future than mainstream Muslims - but they're more cynical about whether they'll ever get it.
John Esposito
Author, Who Speaks For Islam?
Mr Bush wondered why radical Islamist militant groups such as al-Qaeda hated democratically elected governments, as well as "our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assembly and disagree with each other".
But one of the book's authors, John Esposito, says the survey's results suggest Muslims - ironically even many of the 7% classing themselves as "radical" - in fact admire the West for its democracy and freedoms. However, they do not want such things imposed on them.
"Muslims want self-determination, but not an American-imposed and defined democracy. They don't want secularism or theocracy," said the professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
"What the majority wants is democracy with religious values."
The poll sought to answer a question asked by George Bush
Mr Esposito said "radical" Muslims believed in democracy even more than many of the moderate Muslims questioned.
"The radicals are better educated, have better jobs, and are more hopeful with regard to the future than mainstream Muslims," he added.
"But they're more cynical about whether they'll ever get it."
The research also indicates most Muslims want guarantees of freedom of speech and would not want religious leaders to have a role in drafting constitutions.
Those polled also said the most important thing the West could do to improve relations with Muslim societies was to change its negative views towards Muslims and respect Islam.
The authors said the conflict between Islam and the West was not inevitable, but needed decision makers to listen and consider new policies if the extremists on both sides were not to gain ground.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...as/7267100.stm
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John Esposito is a Saudi funded shill. This book is pretty obviously just a psyop to pacify the western masses.
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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTUwY2QyNjA0NjcwMjExMzI2ZmJiZTEzN2U1YjYyZjE=&w= MQ==
Islam’s ‘Public Enemy #1’
Coptic priest Zakaria Botros fights fire with fire.
By Raymond Ibrahim
Though he is little known in the West, Coptic priest Zakaria Botros — named Islam’s “Public Enemy #1” by the Arabic newspaper, al-Insan al-Jadid — has been making waves in the Islamic world. Along with fellow missionaries — mostly Muslim converts — he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.
Botros is an unusual figure onscreen: robed, with a huge cross around his neck, he sits with both the Koran and the Bible in easy reach. Egypt’s Copts — members of one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East — have in many respects come to personify the demeaning Islamic institution of “dhimmitude” (which demands submissiveness from non-Muslims, in accordance with Koran 9:29). But the fiery Botros does not submit, and minces no words. He has famously made of Islam “ten demands,” whose radical nature he uses to highlight Islam’s own radical demands on non-Muslims.
The result? Mass conversions to Christianity — if clandestine ones. The very public conversion of high-profile Italian journalist Magdi Allam — who was baptized by Pope Benedict in Rome on Saturday — is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Islamic cleric Ahmad al-Qatani stated on al-Jazeera TV a while back that some six million Muslims convert to Christianity annually, manyof them persuaded by Botros’s public ministry. More recently, al-Jazeera noted Life TV’s “unprecedented evangelical raid” on the Muslim world. Several factors account for the Botros phenomenon.
First, the new media — particularly satellite TV and the Internet (the main conduits for Life TV) — have made it possible for questions about Islam to be made public without fear of reprisal. It is unprecedented to hear Muslims from around the Islamic world — even from Saudi Arabia, where imported Bibles are confiscated and burned — call into the show to argue with Botros and his colleagues, and sometimes, to accept Christ.
Secondly, Botros’s broadcasts are in Arabic — the language of some 200 million people, most of them Muslim. While several Western writers have published persuasive critiques of Islam, their arguments go largely unnoticed in the Islamic world. Botros’s mastery of classical Arabic not only allows him to reach a broader audience, it enables him to delve deeply into the voluminous Arabic literature — much of it untapped by Western writers who rely on translations — and so report to the average Muslim on the discrepancies and affronts to moral common sense found within this vast corpus.
A third reason for Botros’s success is that his polemical technique has provenirrefutable. Each of his episodes has a theme — from the pressing to the esoteric — often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes — always careful to give sources and reference numbers — from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet — the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present — the illustrious ulema.
Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open — and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,” — “evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains — not shout-downs or sophistry.
More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence — which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him — which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.
Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous — and authentic — hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact — the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.
To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University — Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution — went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.
Botros played the key role in exposing this obscure and embarrassing issue and forcing the ulema to respond. Another guest on Hala Sirhan’s show, Abd al-Fatah, slyly indicated that the entire controversy was instigated by Botros: “I know you all [fellow panelists] watch that channel and that priest and that none of you [pointing at Abd al-Muhdi] can ever respond to him, since he always documents his sources!”
Incapable of rebutting Botros, the only strategy left to the ulema (aside from a rumored $5-million bounty on his head) is to ignore him. When his name is brought up, they dismiss him as a troublemaking liar who is backed by — who else? — international “Jewry.” They could easily refute his points, they insist, but will not deign to do so. That strategy may satisfy some Muslims, but others are demanding straightforward responses from the ulema.
The most dramatic example of this occurred on another famous show on the international station, Iqra. The host, Basma — a conservative Muslim woman in full hijab — asked two prominent ulema, including Sheikh Gamal Qutb, one-time grand mufti of al-Azhar University, to explain the legality of the Koranic verse (4:24) that permits men to freely copulate with captive women. She repeatedly asked: “According to sharia, is slave-sex still applicable?” The two ulema would give no clear answer — dissembling here, going off on tangents there. Basma remained adamant: Muslim youth were confused, and needed a response, since “there is a certain channel and a certain man who has discussed this issue over twenty times and has received no response from you.”
The flustered Sheikh Qutb roared, “low-life people like that must be totally ignored!” and stormed off the set. He later returned, but refused to admit that Islam indeed permits sex-slaves, spending his time attacking Botros instead. When Basma said “Ninety percent of Muslims, including myself, do not understand the issue of concubinage in Islam and are having a hard time swallowing it,” the sheikh responded, “You don’t need to understand.” As for Muslims who watch and are influenced by Botros, he barked, “Too bad for them! If my son is sick and chooses to visit a mechanic, not a doctor — that’s his problem!”
But the ultimate reason for Botros’s success is that — unlike his Western counterparts who criticize Islam from a political standpoint — his primary interest is the salvation of souls. He often begins and concludes his programs by stating that he loves all Muslims as fellow humans and wants to steer them away from falsehood to Truth. To that end, he doesn’t just expose troubling aspects of Islam. Before concluding every program, he quotes pertinent biblical verses and invites all his viewers to come to Christ.
Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.
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All:
This post could have gone in various threads, but I wound up putting it here because this is a point that is important to understand in developing our abiilty to communicate effectivley with the Muslim world.
Marc
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The Sunni-Shiite Terror Network
By AMIR TAHERI
March 29, 2008; Page A9
WSJ
The American presidential election campaign took a bizarre theological turn recently when Barack Obama accused John McCain of not being able to distinguish Sunnis from Shiites.
The exchange started when Sen. McCain suggested that the Islamic Republic in Iran, a Shiite power, may be helping al Qaeda, a Sunni outfit, in its murderous campaign in Iraq and elsewhere. Basing its position on received wisdom, the Obama camp implied that Sunnis and Shiites, divided as they are by deep doctrinal differences, could not come together to fight the United States and its allies.
The truth is that Sunni and Shiite extremists have always been united in their hatred of the U.S., and in their desire to "bring it to destruction," in the words of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
The majority of Muslims does not share that hatred and have no particular problem with the U.S. It is the country most visited by Muslim tourists and it attracts the largest number of Muslim students studying abroad.
But to understand the problem with extremists, it is important to set aside the Sunni-Shiite divide and focus on their common hatred of America. Theology is useless here. What we are dealing with is politics.
For Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, the slogan "Death to America" was as important as the traditional device of Islam "Allah Is The Greatest" – hence his insistence that it be chanted at all public meetings and repeated after each session of the daily prayers. And to that end, Khomeinists have worked with anyone, including brother-enemy Sunnis or even Marxist atheists.
The suicide attacks that claimed the lives of over 300 Americans, including 241 Marines, in Lebanon in 1983, were joint operations of the Khomeinist Hezbollah and the Marxist Arab Socialist Party, which was linked to the Syrian intelligence services. The Syrian regime is Iran's closest ally, despite the fact that Iranian mullahs regard the Alawite minority that dominates it as heretics or worse. Today in Lebanon, Tehran's surrogate, Hezbollah, is in league with a Maronite Christian faction, led by ex-Gen. Michel Aoun, in opposition to a majority bloc that favors close ties with the U.S.
For more than a quarter century, Tehran has been host to the offices of more than three dozen terrorists organizations, from the Colombian FARC to the Palestinian Hamas and passing by half a dozen Trotskyite and Leninist outfits. It also finances many anti-American groups and parties of both extreme right and extreme left in Europe and the Americas. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has bestowed the Muslim title of "brother" on Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Communist North Korea is the only country with which the Islamic Republic maintains close military-industrial ties and holds joint annual staff sessions.
George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Lebanese maverick who led a campaign of terror in Paris in the 1980s on behalf of Tehran, was a Christian. So was Anis Naqqache, who led several hit-teams sent to kill Iranian exile opposition leaders. For years, and until a recent change of policy, Tehran financed and offered shelter to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Marxist movement fighting to overthrow the Turkish Republic. Why? Tehran's displeasure with Turkish membership of NATO and friendship with the U.S.
Yes, Mr. Obama might ask, but what about Sunni-Shiite cooperation?
The Islamic Republic has financed and armed the Afghan Sunni Hizb Islami (Islamic Party) since the 1990s. It's also financed the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS), a Sunni political-terrorist outfit in Algeria between 1992 and 2005.
In 1993, a senior Iranian delegation, led by the then Islamic Parliament Speaker Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, attended the Arab-Muslim Popular Congress organized by Hassan al-Turabi, nicknamed "The Pope of Islamist Terror," in Khartoum. At the end of this anti-American jamboree a nine-man "Coordinating Committee" was announced. Karrubi was a member, along with such Sunni eminences as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. Turabi and the Algerian Abdallah Jaballah. The fact that Karrubi was a Shiite mullah did not prevent him from sitting alongside Sunni sheikhs.
In 1996, a suicide attack claimed the lives of 19 American servicemen in Al Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia. The operation was carried out by the Hezbollah in Hejaz, an Iranian-financed outfit, with the help of the Sunni militant group "Sword of the Peninsula."
In 2000, Sunni groups linked to al Qaeda killed 17 U.S. servicemen in a suicide attack on USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. This time, a Shiite militant group led by Sheikh al-Houti, Tehran's man in Yemen, played second fiddle in the operation.
In Central Asia's Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Tehran has for years supported two Sunni movements, the Rastakhiz Islami (Islamic Awakening) and Hizb Tahrir Islami (Islamic Liberation Party). In Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, Tehran supports the Sunni Taleshi groups against the Azeri Shiite majority. The reason? The Taleshi Sunnis are pro-Russian and anti-American, while the Shiite Azeris are pro-American and anti-Russian.
There are no Palestinian Shiites, yet Tehran has become the principal source of funding for radical Palestinian Sunni groups, notably Hamas, Islamic Jihad and half a dozen leftist-atheist minigroups. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh refuses to pray alongside his Iranian hosts during his visits to Tehran. But when it comes to joining Khomeinist crowds in shouting "Death to America" he is in the forefront.
With Arab oil kingdoms no longer as generous as before, Iran has emerged as the chief source of funding for Hamas. The new Iranian budget, coming into effect on March 21, allocates over $2 billion to the promotion of "revolutionary causes." Much of the money will go to Hamas and the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah.
In Pakistan, the Iran-financed Shiite Tehrik Jaafari joined a coalition of Sunni parties to govern the Northwest Frontier Province, until they all suffered a crushing defeat at last month's parliamentary elections.
The fact that the Sunnis and Shiites in other provinces of Pakistan continued to kill each other did not prevent them from developing a joint, anti-U.S. strategy that included the revival of the Afghan Taliban and protection for the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all self-styled "holy warriors" who go to Iraq on a mission of murder and mayhem are Sunnis. And, yet most pass through Syria, a country that, as already noted, is dominated by a sect with a militant anti-Sunni religious doctrine.
Next month, Tehran will host what is billed as "The Islamic Convergence Conference," bringing together hundreds of Shiite and Sunni militants from all over the world. The man in charge, Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Taskhiri, has described the goal of the gathering to be delivering "a punch in the face of the American Great Satan."
Still, Mr. Obama might ask: what about al Qaeda and Iran?
The 9/11 Commission report states that Tehran was in contact with al Qaeda at various levels before the 2001 attacks. Tehran has admitted the presence of al Qaeda figures in Iran on a number of occasions, and has arranged for the repatriation of at least 13 Saudi members in the past five years. The Bin Laden family tells us that at least one of Osama's sons, Sa'ad, has lived in Iran since 2002.
Reports from Iran claim that scores of Taliban leaders and several al Qaeda figures spend part of the year in a compound-style housing estate near the village of Dost Muhammad on the Iranian frontier with Afghanistan. One way to verify these claims is to allow the world media access to the area. But Tehran has declared large segments of eastern Iran a "no-go" area, even for its own state-owned media.
In short, the claim that al Qaeda and the Khomeinists, not to mention other terrorist groups operating in the name of Islam, would not work together simply because they have theological differences is both naive and dangerous.
Messrs. McCain and Obama do not need to know about doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The problem they face is not theological but political. All they need to know is that there are deadly and determined groups dedicated to destruction of the U.S. in the name of a perverted version of Islam, and that they need to be resisted, fought and ultimately defeated.
Mr. Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran and the Khomeinist Revolution," will be published later this year by Encounter Books.
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I had a fair amount of inner chatter over which thread in which to post this. If it is PC (and a pretty fair case can be made that it is), then it belongs in the PC thread. That said, the claim is made that this will facilitate effective communication with the Muslim world (and hinder it here amongst us Infidels) so I post it here:
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U.S. aims to unlink Islamic, terrorism
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
May 7, 2008
U.S. officials are being advised in internal government documents to avoid referring publicly to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahedeen, which "unintentionally legitimize" terrorism.
"There' s a growing consensus [in the Bush administration] that we need to move away from that language," said a former senior administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue.
Instead, in two documents circulated last month by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the multiagency center charged with strategic coordination of the U.S. war on terror, officials are urged to use terms such as violent extremists, totalitarian and death cult to characterize al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
"Avoid labeling everything 'Muslim.' It reinforces the 'U.S. vs. Islam' framework that al Qaeda promotes," according to "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counter-Terrorism Communication," produced last month by the center.
"You have a large percentage of the world' s population that subscribes to this religion," the former official said. "Unintentionally alienating them is not a judicious move."
The documents, first reported by the Associated Press, were posted online last week by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
They highlight developments in the Bush administration' s strategy for its war on terror that have been fiercely criticized by some who have been its closest allies on the issue, and apparently are being ignored by the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Some commentators noted after President Bush' s State of the Union speech in January that Mr. McCain had stopped using the term Islamic terrorism, instead referring — as the NCTC guide recommends — to "terrorists and extremists — evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule."
But in a recent interview with The Washington Times, a McCain aide said the senator would continue to use the term Islamic terrorism.
Daniel Sutherland, who runs the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, insisted that the avoidance of the term Islam in conjunction with terrorism "is in no way an exercise in political correctness. ... We are not watering down what we say."
"There are some terms which al Qaeda wants us to use because they are helpful to them," he said.
The "Words That Work" guide notes, "Although the al Qaeda network exploits religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions, we should treat it as an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal."
Instead of calling terrorist groups Muslim or Islamic, the guide suggests using words like totalitarian, terrorist or violent extremist — "widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy."
By employing the language the extremists use about themselves, the guide says, officials can inadvertently help legitimize them in the eyes of Muslims.
"Never use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahedeen' ... to describe the terrorists," the guide says. "A mujahed, a holy warrior, is a positive characterization in the context of a just war.
In Arabic, jihad means 'striving in the path of God' and is used in many contexts beyond warfare. Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad unintentionally legitimizes their actions."
A longer document produced by Mr. Sutherland' s office and also circulated by the NCTC compiles advice from Islamic community leaders and religious professionals in the United States about terminology officials should use and avoid.
"Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims," says officials should use "terms such as 'death cult,' 'cult-like,' 'sectarian cult,' and 'violent cultists' to describe the ideology and methodology of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups."
It also recommends eschewing the terms Islamist or Islamism — the advocacy of a political system based on Islam — "because the general public, including overseas audiences, may not appreciate the academic distinction between Islamism and Islam."
The use of the term may be accurate, the document says, but "it may not be strategic for [U.S. government] officials to use the term."
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/...725367235/1001
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How good it feels to read something like this coming from a major player in the Muslim world.
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The Obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian Peace
By ABDURRAHMAN WAHID and ABDUL A'LA
May 10, 2008; Page A11
The prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a far-reaching impact not only upon the lives of those who dwell in the Holy Land, but upon virtually every nation and community on earth. On a daily basis, self-interested parties are callously manipulating the most basic values of humanity and religion in order to advance their personal or political interests. Sectarianism, violence, arrogance and deception are constantly subverting the fundamental values of life, and turning religious principles upon their heads.
This horrific process demands that every moral human being, religious community and nation throughout the world contemplate this tragedy and offer assistance, however small, to help resolve the profound human crisis in the Holy Land. Peace is both a process and a goal that the world can neither morally nor practically afford to push off into the future yet again.
We must develop and implement concrete strategies to resolve the conflict, while inspiring hope that peace can actually be achieved. The problem is that the various obstacles to peace seem nearly impossible to eliminate. These obstacles are rendered even more severe by the fact that both major parties in the conflict harbor groups absolutely convinced of the correctness of their mutually exclusive views and agendas. Such groups reject not only the rights, but the very existence, of the other side.
The corrosive effect of this phenomenon is the evocation and rationalization of the use of violence, either through terrorism or militarism. Prejudiced views on both sides, not only by those directly engaged in the conflict, but by their allies as well, further stoke the flames of hatred and violence.
These prejudices contaminate public discourse throughout the world, and are constantly exploited by Middle Eastern regimes that fuel anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic emotions for political purposes, while displaying little or no actual concern for the well-being of the Palestinians themselves.
Under such conditions, it is nearly impossible for sincere dialogue even to occur, much less to develop or flourish. Instead, the cycle of violence breeds a hardening of mutual hatred.
The Palestinian side routinely condemns its enemy as a colonial power whose entire population is demonized as "imperialists," while the Israeli side brands its political opponents as terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers.
For six decades, the peace process has been conducted primarily by self-interested political players who cannot penetrate to the heart of the underlying problems, much less resolve them. This gives rise to deeply cynical views on the part of certain groups on both sides, who view the peace process as absurd, its goals unobtainable, and continued violence better than compromise.
Yet the difficulties that have swamped every Israeli-Palestinian peace process to date do not mean that achieving peace is impossible. Rather, they point to the need for a new and more holistic path to peace in the Middle East. This path would mobilize the populations of Israel and Palestine toward this goal, with the active encouragement and support of the rest of the world.
The December 2007 visit to Israel and Palestine by a group of Indonesian ulama from the world's two largest Muslim organizations – LibForAll Foundation and the Indonesian Peace Delegation – represents one such effort, and the first step in a larger, systematic process. Conducted under the joint aegis of LibForAll Foundation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, members of the group consistently observed that the silent majorities on both sides of the conflict sincerely desire an end to the cycle of violence, and peace for themselves and their children. This is remarkable, given the decades of incitement to hatred and violence in Palestinian mosques, schools and mass media, and a political culture that eschews compromise.
It is tragic that the voice of the people – full of an honest and sincere longing for peace – should be drowned out by violence and the narrow interests of politicians and extremists on both sides. We have a responsibility to amplify the voices of the innocent who pay with their blood and sorrow the price of others' ambitions and hatred.
We must also strengthen and facilitate the people's efforts to pressure their political elites – in a manner that is focused, intense and vocal, yet simultaneously civilized – to create a just and lasting peace.
Palestinians and Israelis need the world's support to create a new reality, in which the highest values of religion and humanity are restored to their proper dignity. We must also help Muslim populations – not only in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world – to rise to embrace a profoundly spiritual and tolerant understanding of Islam, and a humanistic attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that acknowledges the legacy of suffering on all sides. Such an attitude is a necessary precondition for recognizing Israel's unique history and right to exist, while truly advancing the interests of Palestinians as well.
Last year's LibForAll/Indonesian Peace mission to Israel and Palestine was designed to initiate such a process. After the religious leaders who participated returned to Indonesia, they faced intense condemnation from Muslim extremists, who accused them of having betrayed their Palestinian brethren and embarrassed Indonesia's Muslim community. Yet there is nothing shameful about working to realize the highest values of religion – which God intended to serve as a blessing, and not a curse, to all of humanity.
Although the obstacles to peace in the Holy Land may appear insurmountable, it is the responsibility of religious leaders on all sides to attempt the impossible, and to accept whatever threats, slander and stigma may follow.
Mr. Wahid is the former president of Indonesia and co-founder of LibForAll Foundation. Mr. A'la is an associate dean of graduate studies at Sunan Ampel Islamic State University in Surabaya, Indonesia.
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Democracies Can't Compromise on Core Values
By NATAN SHARANSKY
June 16, 2008
As the American president embarked on his farewell tour of Europe last week, Der Spiegel, echoing the sentiments of a number of leading newspapers on the Continent, pronounced "Europe happy to see the back of Bush." Virtually everyone seems to believe that George W. Bush's tenure has undermined trans-Atlantic ties.
There is also a palpable sense in Europe that America will move closer to Europe in the years ahead, especially if Barack Obama wins the presidential election.
But while Mr. Bush is widely seen by Europeans as a religious cowboy with a Manichean view on the world, Europe's growing rift with America predates the current occupant of the White House. When a French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, declared that his country "cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper power," President Clinton was in the seventh year of his presidency and Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas.
The trans-Atlantic rift is not the function of one president, but the product of deep ideological forces that for generations have worked to shape the divergent views of Americans and Europeans. Foremost among these are different attitudes toward identity in general, and the relationship between identity and democracy in particular.
To Europeans, identity and democracy are locked in a zero-sum struggle. Strong identities, especially religious or national identities, are seen as a threat to democratic life. This is what Dominique Moisi, a special adviser at the French Institute of International Relations, meant when he said in 2006 that "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare."
This attitude can be traced back to the French Revolution, when the forces fighting under a universal banner of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were pitted against the Church.
In contrast, the America to which pilgrims flocked in search of religious freedom, and whose revolution amounted to an assertion of national identity, has been able to reconcile identity and freedom in a way no country has been able to match. That acute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, long ago noted the "intimate union of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty" that was pervasive in America and made it so different than his native France.
The idea that strong identities are an inherent threat to democracy and peace became further entrenched in Europe in the wake of World War II. Exponents of what I call postidentity theories – postnationalism, postmodernism and multiculturalism – argued that only by shedding the particular identities that divide us could we build a peaceful world. Supranational institutions such as the EU, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations were supposed to help overcome the prejudices of the past and forge a harmonious world based on universal values and human rights.
While these ideas have penetrated academia and elite thinking in the U.S., they remain at odds with the views of most Americans, who see no inherent contradiction between maintaining strong identities and the demands of democratic life. On the contrary, the right to express one's identity is seen as fundamental. Exercising such a right is regarded as acting in the best American tradition.
The controversy over whether Muslims should be able to wear a veil in public schools underscores the profound difference in attitudes between America and Europe. In Europe, large majorities support a law banning the veil in public schools. In the U.S., students wear the veil in public schools or state colleges largely without controversy.
At the same time severe limits are placed on the harmless expression of identity in the public square, some European governments refuse to insist that Muslim minorities abide by basic democratic norms. They turn a blind eye toward underage marriage, genital mutilation and honor killings.
The reality is that Muslim identity has grown stronger, has become more fundamentalist, and is increasingly contemptuous of a vapid "European" identity that has little vitality. All this may help explain why studies consistently show that efforts to integrate Muslims into society are much less effective in Europe than in America, where identity is much stronger.
Regardless of who wins in November, the attitudes of Americans toward the role of identity in democratic life are unlikely to change much. Relative to Europe, Americans will surely remain deeply patriotic and much more committed to their faiths.
Europeans, meanwhile, may move closer to the Americans in their views. The recent shift to the right in Europe – from the victory of conservative leaders like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi to the surprise defeat of the leftist mayor of London, Ken Livingston – might partially reflect a belated awareness there that a unique heritage is under assault by a growing Muslim fundamentalism.
The logic of the struggle against this fundamentalist threat will inevitably demand the reassertion of the European national and religious identities that are now threatened.
Europeans are now saying goodbye to Mr. Bush, and hoping for the election of an American president who they believe shares their sophisticated postnational, postmodern and multicultural attitudes. But don't be surprised if, in the years ahead, European leaders, in order to protect freedom and democracy at home, start sounding more and more like the straight-shooting cowboy from abroad they now love to hate.
Mr. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is the author, most recently, of "Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy" (PublicAffairs).
See all of today's editorials and op
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http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/88_say_free_speech_is_good_but_only_53_oppose_ban_on_hate_speech
Death, by a thousand cuts.
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How to Win the War of Ideas
By JAMES K. GLASSMAN
June 24, 2008
Military action against insurgents, terrorists and those who give them safe harbor is essential. It is working now in Iraq, and has helped keep Americans safe since 9/11. But as President Bush's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism put it two years ago, "In the long run, winning the War on Terror means winning the battle of ideas."
Many of the strongest supporters of ideological engagement can be found in the Department of Defense, starting with Secretary Robert Gates, who reminded senators earlier this year that the Cold War was "as much a war of ideas as it was of military power." Unfortunately, since the rise of Islamic terror, we haven't done enough on this front.
That's changing. Throughout the government and the private sector, the war of ideas is in early renaissance. The enthusiasm is bipartisan, and we have the opportunity to leave a robust legacy for the next administration.
But what kind of war of ideas will fit the terrorist threat today? First, we need to get the goal straight.
While educational exchanges and other such efforts seek over the long term to encourage foreigners to adopt more generally favorable views of the United States, the war of ideas today should have a different, specific focus. The aim must be to ensure that negative sentiments and day-to-day grievances toward the U.S. and its allies do not manifest themselves in violence. We want to create an environment hostile to violent extremism, especially by severing links between al Qaeda and like-minded groups and their target audiences.
For starters, we should confront the ideology of violent extremism directly. The most credible voices here are those of Muslims themselves – especially Islamists – who have publicly disavowed al Qaeda's methods and theology. Lately such apostates include Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who laid the foundation for the movement's bloody ideology and has now repudiated it, and Noman Benotman, a Libyan close to Osama bin Laden who rebuked al Qaeda bluntly last year.
Our public diplomacy efforts should encourage Muslims, individuals and groups, to spread the denunciations of violence by these men and others far and wide. But non-Muslim Americans themselves should not shrink from confidently opposing poisonous ideas either.
A second approach to the war of ideas may, in the long run, be even more effective. Call it "diversion."
The ideology that motivates al Qaeda and similar groups is based on the notion that believers have a duty to carry out the excommunication (and execution) of unbelievers, or even of those who collaborate with unbelievers, or refuse to resist them. This ideology posits a Manichean world, divided into two camps: one practicing the terrorists' version of Islam, the other not.
This is a fantasy, but a distressingly powerful one. Our vision is a pluralistic world with many peaceful and productive choices on how to order one's life. The task is not to persuade potential recruits to become like Americans or Europeans, but to divert them from becoming terrorists.
We do that by helping to build networks (virtual and physical) and countermovements – not just political but cultural, social, athletic and more: mothers against violence, video gamers, soccer enthusiasts, young entrepreneurs, Islamic democrats. For example, there is an emerging global network of families of Islamic victims of terrorist attacks. While winning hearts and minds would be an admirable feat, the war of ideas needs to adopt the more immediate and realistic goal of diverting impressionable segments of the population from being recruited into violent extremism.
Unlike the containment policy of the Cold War, today's diversion policy may not primarily be the responsibility of government. My own job, as the interagency leader for the war of ideas, is to mobilize every possible American asset – public and private, human and technological – in the effort.
Where does Iran fit in? The pool of future suicide bombers and insurgents is sustained by people like the leadership of Iran. Both of the approaches I have outlined – ideological confrontation and diversion – should appeal to a proud and sophisticated Iranian population that is open to pluralistic ideas.
What we seek is a world in which the use of violence to achieve political, religious or social objectives is no longer considered acceptable, efforts to radicalize and recruit new members are no longer successful, and the perpetrators of violent extremism are condemned and isolated.
Military success is necessary, but it is not sufficient – for the simple reason that we face as an enemy not a single nation, or even a coalition, but a stateless global movement. Without a vigorous war of ideas, as we kill such adversaries others will take their place.
Mr. Glassman was sworn in on June 10 as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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The following cuts against the aspirations of the preceding post:
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Bookshelf
Unfriendly Fanatics
By C. HOLLAND TAYLOR
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
June 24, 2008
My Friend the Fanatic
By Sadanand Dhume
(Text Publishing, 271 pp., A$34.95)
Terrorist acts perpetrated in the name of Islam have dominated news headlines for years, yet Western readers are often left wondering what motivates such radicalism, and how it spreads. Few nations are more strategically vital to the struggle for the "soul" of Islam than Indonesia. Home of the world's largest Muslim population and democracy, Indonesia's ancient traditions of pluralism and tolerance are under siege by a well-organized and heavily financed extremist movement.
The current radical trends in Indonesia are inextricably linked to Islam's 700-year history in the East Indies. Sunni Islam arrived peacefully in what is now Indonesia, brought by Arab, Indian and Chinese merchants active in the fabled spice trade. Once they acquired sufficient economic power, such merchants established Islamic city-states that rebelled against, and ultimately destroyed, the pre-existing Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit. It was only the subsequent military and political triumph of indigenous Javanese in 1586 – following a bloody, century-long struggle – that preserved the region's pluralistic and tolerant traditions, in the form of a deeply spiritual understanding of Islam that did not conflict with pre-existing faiths.
In "My Friend the Fanatic," journalist Sadanand Dhume guides the reader deftly through the whirlpool these currents have created. Descriptions of a young, charismatic author titillating avant-garde audiences in the nation's capital – with her sexually provocative short stories and performance art – alternate with on-the-scene reportage of Muslim radicals' success at mobilizing grassroots support throughout the vast archipelago. Mr. Dhume took an unusual trek through Indonesia's lush, tropical landscape with Herry Nurdi, the "fanatic" of the book's title and editor of Sabili, a mass-circulation extremist magazine whose explicit goal is to undo radical Islam's history of failure in Indonesia and assure its final triumph.
By some counts at least, Mr. Nurdi and his ilk are winning. In recent years, extremists have taken advantage of regional autonomy to impose Shariah-based regulations in nearly 70 of Indonesia's 364 local regencies. These laws, among other things, compel women and girls to wear so-called "Muslim" clothing that reveals only the face, hands and feet, even if they are Christian; require students, civil servants and even couples applying for marriage to demonstrate an ability to read the Quran; and effectively restrict women from going out at night without a male relative.
Mr. Dhume's description of the extremists' rise will be dispiriting to those who view democracy as an antidote to radicalism. Indeed, one of the most striking facts he reports is the extent to which those leading the charge to institutionalize radicalism in Indonesia today are directly linked to postindependence rebellions and failed extremist movements from the past. Whereas their ideological forebears (and literally, in many cases, their fathers or grandfathers) were crushed by Indonesian nationalists committed to upholding Indonesia's secular constitution and pluralist state ideology, the new generation of radicals use democracy and the symbols of Islam to erode and ultimately destroy Indonesia's heritage of religious pluralism and tolerance. This phenomenon is rendered possible and dramatically accelerated by the tendency of opportunistic politicians and political parties – often corrupt and lacking in Islamic legitimacy – to engage in a "chase to the lowest common denominator" of Islam, in a cynical attempt to prove their Muslim bona fides.
Unfortunately, the current government in Jakarta – led by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – has done little to retard the rapidly metastasizing phenomenon of political Islam. This threatens not only religious minorities such as the Muslim Ahmadiyah sect and Christians, but also the safety and security of the Indonesian nation-state itself. Just this month, in fact, religious extremists beat a group of moderates marching for religious freedom on the grounds of the national monument, in full view of onlooking police and the nearby state palace.
While Mr. Dhume argues convincingly about the radicals' current strength and momentum, he is strangely silent about their most vocal and effective opponents, who represent the world's best hope for a truly democratic and tolerant Islam. Virtually absent from Mr. Dhume's book are the valiant efforts of Indonesian Muslim leaders to stem the Arab petrodollar-funded tide of radical Islam, and thereby uphold the secular foundations of the Indonesian nation-state. Former President Abdurrahman Wahid, a member of the LibForAll Foundation which I head, has vigorously opposed the Islamist agenda and succeeded at blocking many of their initiatives. So, too, have other key leaders of the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the world's biggest Muslims organizations, which are based in Indonesia and boast 70 million followers.
Islam's future – as a religion of peace and tolerance, or of hatred, violence and supremacy – may well hinge upon Indonesia's destiny, as Middle East financial backers and their indigenous allies well know. Mr. Dhume is pessimistic, sensing that the "totalitarian cast" of the extremist movement will "grind what remained of a once proud culture to a hollow imitation of Arabness." Yet while the situation is undoubtedly grave, it is far from hopeless. Indonesia boasts a moderate public and self-confident Muslim leaders who do not conflate Islam with arrogance, extremism, supremacy or violence. Mr. Dhume's book shows that the battle is raging, but its conclusion is far from preordained.
Mr. Taylor is the chairman & CEO of the LibForAll Foundation, a nonprofit that works to reduce religious extremism worldwide and discredit the use of terrorism.
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The core problem is, jihadists aren't "radicals" or "extremists", they are just observant muslims.
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Fight Terror With YouTube
By DANIEL KIMMAGE
Published: June 26, 2008
Baku, Azerbaijan
NY Times
AL QAEDA made its name in blood and pixels, with deadly attacks and an avalanche of electronic news media. Recent news articles depict an online terrorist juggernaut that has defied the best efforts by the United States government to counter it. While these articles are themselves a testimony to Al Qaeda’s media savvy, they don’t tell the whole story.
When it comes to user-generated content and interactivity, Al Qaeda is now behind the curve. And the United States can help to keep it there by encouraging the growth of freer, more empowered online communities, especially in the Arab-Islamic world.
The genius of Al Qaeda was to combine real-world mayhem with virtual marketing. The group’s guerrilla media network supports a family of brands, from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (in Algeria and Morocco) to the Islamic State of Iraq, through a daily stream of online media products that would make any corporation jealous.
A recent report I wrote for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty details this flow. In July 2007, for example, Al Qaeda released more than 450 statements, books, articles, magazines, audio recordings, short videos of attacks and longer films. These products reach the world through a network of quasi-official online production and distribution entities, like Al Sahab, which releases statements by Osama bin Laden.
But the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is about letting users run wild with self-created content and interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0.
In late 2006, with YouTube and Facebook growing rapidly, a position paper by a Qaeda-affiliated institute discouraged media jihadists from overly “exuberant” efforts on behalf of the group for fear of diluting its message.
This is probably sound advice, considering how Al Qaeda fares on YouTube. A recent list of the most viewed YouTube videos in Arabic about Al Qaeda included a rehash of an Islamic State of Iraq clip with sardonic commentary added and satirical verses about Al Qaeda by an Iraqi poet.
Statements by Mr. bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, that are posted to YouTube do draw comments aplenty. But the reactions, which range from praise to blanket condemnation, are a far cry from the invariably positive feedback Al Qaeda gets on moderated jihadist forums. And even Al Qaeda’s biggest YouTube hits attract at most a small fraction of the millions of views that clips of Arab pop stars rack up routinely.
Other Qaeda ventures into interactivity are equally unimpressive. Mr. Zawahri solicited online questions last December, but his answers didn’t appear until early April. That’s eons in Web time.
Even if security concerns dictated the delay, as Mr. Zawahri claimed, this is further evidence of the online obstacles facing the world’s most-wanted fugitives. Try to imagine Osama bin Laden managing his Facebook account, and you can see why full-scale social networking might not be Al Qaeda’s next frontier.
It’s also an indication of how a more interactive, empowered online community, particularly in the Arab-Islamic world, may prove to be Al Qaeda’s Achilles’ heel. Anonymity and accessibility, the hallmarks of Web 1.0, provided an ideal platform for Al Qaeda’s radical demagoguery. Social networking, the emerging hallmark of Web 2.0, can unite a fragmented silent majority and help it to find its voice in the face of thuggish opponents, whether they are repressive rulers or extremist Islamic movements.
Unfortunately, the authoritarian governments of the Middle East are doing their best to hobble Web 2.0. By blocking the Internet, they are leaving the field open to Al Qaeda and its recruiters. The American military’s statistics and jihadists’ own online postings show that among the most common countries of origin for foreign fighters in Iraq are Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It’s no coincidence that Reporters Without Borders lists Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as “Internet enemies,” and Libya and Yemen as countries where the Web is “under surveillance.” There is a simple lesson here: unfettered access to a free Internet is not merely a goal to which we should aspire on principle, but also a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos will not be to everyone’s liking, but it may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda’s totalitarian ideology.
It would be premature to declare Al Qaeda’s marketing strategy hopelessly anachronistic. The group has shown remarkable resilience and will find ways to adapt to new trends.
But Al Qaeda’s online media network is also vulnerable to disruption. Technology-literate intelligence services that understand how the Qaeda media nexus works will do some of the job. The most damaging disruptions to the nexus, however, will come from millions of ordinary users in the communities that Al Qaeda aims for with its propaganda. We should do everything we can to empower them.
Daniel Kimmage is a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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Calling All Pakistanis
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 2, 2008
NYT
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.
First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered.
At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of Nov. 29 from Karachi: “ ‘I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,’ the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told I.P.S. ‘I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.’ ”
But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.
Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.
Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.”
Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can’t have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight — including some 40 other Muslims — in a suicide-murder operation, without even bothering to leave a note. Because the act was their note, and destroying just to destroy was their goal. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process.
“I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community.
We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.
Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.
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“Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons. “
I once saw a plaque on a wall which said,”I am my brother’s keeper”. I thought to my self, I am responsible for my own actions and I will mind my own buisness. I would not like others poking their noises into my business I will not do that to them. The plaque haunted me though, I would think about it every now and again. Why would some one put such a thing up? Then 9/11 occurred. I watched as the Muslim community did not denounce the terrorist. Then it dawned on me. I am my brother’s keeper. We have to give up some rights in order to have a civilized society. There has to be a limit at which we can not cross or allow others to cross without protest. If we pass this limit we move one step closer to a state of nature and with each step down that path society diminishes until at some point it must be reformed. This is what the fundamentalist are trying to do. They wish to reform society to their twisted version. If the common people of Pakistan do not stand up and protest the attacks in Mumbai the terrorist have moved society one step closer to the changing of society.
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The muslim masses will not condemn Mumbai, Bali, Beslan, 9/11, 7/7 or any other islamic terrorism because these are acts that stem from core islamic beliefs. It would be like jews condeming keeping kosher.
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The muslim masses will not condemn Mumbai, Bali, Beslan, 9/11, 7/7 or any other islamic terrorism because these are acts that stem from core islamic beliefs. It would be like jews condeming keeping kosher.
I would agree and disagree. I work with a number of people originally or ethically Pakistani, and all of them condemn these acts. One common theme is that they actually blame the Saudi's for spreading radicalism in Pakistan. But they also agree that no "official" condemnation would happen, because it would give creedance that it is Islam that is to blame which I can understand. No one expects the Vatican to apologize for the IRA.
Vince
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No one expects the Vatican to apologize for the IRA.
Well yes, but the Vatican would condemn violence perpetrated in the name of Christianity. Think your comparison is between apples and oranges.
The point remains that some fairly tame cartoons caused all sorts of outrage in Muslim circles, yet an incident orders of magnitude more horrific inspires little public outcry in the same circles. A case of misapplied outrage, yes?
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Cartoons of Mohammed cause protests and riots worldwide. Where is the outrage for this latest outrage?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/12/03/questions-that-answer-themselves-2/
Questions that answer themselves
posted at 2:43 pm on December 3, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Tom Friedman asks in his New York Times column today why we haven’t seen Muslims protesting in the street after the Mumbai attacks:
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai?
I can provide an answer: apathy and rationalization, and not just from Muslims. Deepak Chopra blamed it on the Bush administration and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as if the causation was reversed. While Bollywood condemned the terrorist attacks, some followed Chopra’s example.
Has Friedman seen massive protests in the streets against radical Islamist terrorists in these Muslim countries, ever? Did any of them protest the 9/11 attacks, or the Madrid attack, or any of the large-scale attacks on Western civilians or previous attacks in India at all? Either we heard ululating or deafening silence, punctuated with a few diplomatic missives about solidarity and the occasional criticism on the effect the attacks have on Muslims.
In other words, we can either expect delight or a collective yawn from the Muslim world. It’s been a week since the attacks commenced. Thus far, all we’ve gotten is the latter. Why would this surprise Friedman, given the history?
And what does that tell us about the attitude towards the terrorists among the Muslim nations? They may not endorse terrorist attacks, but they certainly don’t strenuously object to them, either. While we’re wringing our hands over interrogation techniques, and not for bad reasons, they’re indifferent to mass murder. At some point, the world — or in Friedman’s tiresome terminology, the “village” — will have to come to terms with that reality.
Muslims will not care about terrorist attacks until the cost becomes too high for them. The risk-to-reward ratio hasn’t reached that level yet, and probably hasn’t come near it. Mewling about the “village” and asking for a little outrage won’t do it, either.
Update: SANEworks has a few thoughts along the same lines.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/12/03/quote-of-the-day-410/
Here are the protests!
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**Finally, some expressions of regret! :evil: **
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/12/apologetic-mumbai-killers-we-didnt-get-the-memo-about-obama.html
Apologetic Mumbai Killers: "We Didn't Get the Memo About Obama"
MUMBAI - Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving member of the 10-man team of Pakistani gunmen that left hundreds dead or wounded after a bloody three day rampage in Mumbai, today blamed the mayhem on an "email mixup" that left him and his colleagues unaware that Barack Obama had won election as President of the United States.
"What? Oh bloody hell, now you tell me," said Kasab, as he was led away in handcuffs by Indian security forces.
Kasab, 21, apologized to Indian President Pratibha Patil, explaining that no one in his group had known about the recent U.S. election results.
"Boy, talk about having egg on the face," said a visibly embarrassed Kasab. "If we knew Bush was on his way out, obviously we would have called off the crazy random baby-shootings and martyrdom stuff, and signed on with the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity. At this point I guess all I can say is 'my bad.'"
"Seriously, I can't even begin to tell you how shitty the whole situation makes me feel," he added dejectedly. "Don't get me wrong, I'm as thrilled as everybody else to find out Barack won the election, but this moment is always going to be bittersweet knowing that all those shootings were tragically unnecessary. Not to mention the six weeks I wasted in training camp."
Kasab, who is personally suspected of killing over 30 victims at point-blank range in a posh Mumbai hotel, was at a loss to explain how he and other members of the terrorist assault team remained unaware of the historic U.S. election results that many American analysts predicted would lead to an immediate and permanent outbreak of rapturous harmony and transcendent brotherly love throughout the universe.
"Jeez, I'm... I don't know, I just never got any kind of memo," said Kasab. "The ironic thing is that just the other day, when we were ritually shaving our testicles for final martyrdom, a bunch of us were talking about how great and symbolic it would be if the American infidels would only elect an handsome, articulate young African-American infidel. That way we could just lay down the suicide belts and scimitars and suitcase nukes and finally get involved in the positive aspects of community activism, like raising awareness for breast cancer research. Look, I know it's a cliche to point fingers at the IT department, but our email system really sucks. And it's hard to find a decent wi-fi hot spot in Northwest Pakistan."
Tragically, though, it appears that internet connectivity was only the tip of the iceberg in a system-wide Obama news communication failure at Al Qaeda Headquarters.
"Obama won? Seriously?" said an astonished Abdul Aziz Qasim, Senior Media Affairs Director for Al Qaeda's Peshawar Office at an afternoon press conference announcing responsibility for the attacks. "I mean... you're positively sure of that?"
After a reporter screened a YouTube video for him showing Obama's election night celebration, Qasim angrily summoned his intelligence department.
"Have any of you seen this? Any of you?" shouted Qasim, jabbing at the laptop screen with his hook, as his staff awkwardly stared at their sandals. "Because it would have been nice to know about it TWO FUCKING WEEKS AGO."
"Can one of you idiots remind me why I pay you?" he continued. "Because all I know is that I'm the only one in this goddamn tent who ends up taking the heat from bin Laden and Zawahiri, and gets stuck doing the damage control caused by you stupid fuckups."
Regaining his composure, Qasim said that Al Qaeda would work to make amends with victims of the Mumbai tragedy, including sending flowers and handwritten apology notes containing 1000 rupee ($12.65) PakMart gift cards to the surviving families of all 173 dead. Wounded victims are slated to receive a 50 rupee coupon good at participating Waziristan Fried Chicken restaurants.
"Ultimately, I know the 'buck stops here,' but I just want to remind everybody in the infidel world that the only gripe that we've really ever had with you is about George Bush," said Qasim. "There's just something instantly irritating about that guy, you know what I mean? It's that smirk, the way he says 'nuke-u-ler' and all that 'evildoers' crap. There's only so much you can take of him before you start flying planes into skyscrapers or bombing subways, or shooting Hindus, or beheading Thai school teachers, and what-have-you."
"Believe me, now that Bush is out of the picture we're just as upset about those senseless killings as everybody else, especially those of us who actually did the senseless killing," he added. "All we ask is that the Indian judges not take it too hard on Ajmal. The poor kid feels bad enough already. It's not his fault he didn't find out about the infidel elections, you know how hard it is to get a decent Verizon cell in Mumbai. Now that we're all on the same page again it would be a great time for all of us, believers and infidels alike, to put all the nonsense of the Bush years behind us and rekindle that beautiful peace and friendship thing we all had going on back in 2000."
"I know my wife is looking forward to another Florida vacation -- even though she'll have to drop a few pounds to fit back into her beach chador," Qasim joked. "She was only ten when we were there for our honeymoon."
"Oh, before I forget, let me finally send our belated congratulations to President-Elect Obama," said the Al Qaeda spokesman. "Let me also say we're very sorry for the snafu in Mumbai, and hope this won't put a damper on our negotiations for the peaceful return of Spain. We're cool, right?"
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By TAWFIK HAMID
The film "Fitna" by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders has created an uproar around the world because it links violence committed by Islamists to Islam.
Many commentators and politicians -- including the British government, which denied him entry to the country last month -- reflexively accused Mr. Wilders of inciting hatred. The question, however, is whether the blame is with Mr. Wilders, who simply exposed Islamic radicalism, or with those who promote and engage in this religious extremism. In other words, shall we fault Mr. Wilders for raising issues like the stoning of women, or shall we fault those who actually promote and practice this crime?
Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.
Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.
While many religious texts preach violence, the interpretation, modern usage and implementation of these teachings make all the difference. For example, the stoning of women exists in both the Old Testament and in the Islamic tradition, or "Sunna" -- the recorded deeds and manners of the prophet Muhammad. The difference, though, is that leading Jewish scholars agreed to discontinue these practices centuries ago, while Muslim scholars have yet to do so. Hence we do not see the stoning of women practiced or promoted in Israel, the "Jewish" state, but we see it practiced and promoted in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the "Islamic" states.
When the British government banned Geert Wilders from entering the country to present his film in the House of Lords, it made two egregious errors. The first was to suppress free speech, a canon of the civilized Western world. The second mistake was to blame the messenger -- punishing, so to speak, the witness who exposed the crime instead of punishing the criminal. Mr. Wilders did not produce the content of the violent Islamic message he showed in his film -- the Islamic world did that. Until the Islamic clerical establishment takes concrete steps to reject violence in the name of their religion, Mr. Wilders's criticism is not only permissible as "controversial" free speech but justified.
So, Islamic scholars and clerics, it is up to you to produce a Shariah book that will be accepted in the Islamic world and that teaches that Jews are not pigs and monkeys, that declaring war to spread Islam is unacceptable, and that killing apostates is a crime. Such a book would prove that Islam is a religion of peace.
Mr. Hamid, a former member of an Egyptian Islamist terrorist group, is an Islamic reformer and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
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WASHINGTON — President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html?_r=1&ref=politics
Stem cells have all but swept this under the rug.
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WASHINGTON — President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html?_r=1&ref=politics
Stem cells have all but swept this under the rug.
Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:03pm IST
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban on Tuesday turned down as illogical U.S. President Barack Obama's bid to reach out to moderate elements of the insurgents, saying the exit of foreign troops was the only solution for ending the war.
Obama, in an interview with the New York Times, expressed an openness to adapting tactics in Afghanistan that had been used in Iraq to reach out to moderate elements there.
"This does not require any response or reaction for this is illogical," Qari Mohammad Yousuf, a purported spokesman for the insurgent group, told Reuters when asked if its top leader Mullah Mohammad Omar would make any comment about Obama's proposal.
"The Taliban are united, have one leader, one aim, one policy...I do not know why they are talking about moderate Taliban and what it means?"
"If it means those who are not fighting and are sitting in their homes, then talking to them is meaningless. This really is surprising the Taliban."
In Iraq, the use of Sunni Muslim community leaders to employ their people to patrol their neighbourhoods has been credited as one of the main reasons behind sharp falls in violence.
Obama did point out that compared to Iraq, the situation was more complex in Afghanistan, where nearly 70,000 foreign troops, 38,000 of them American, are due to be joined in coming months by another 17,000 U.S. soldiers.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been leading Afghanistan since U.S.-led troops overthrew the Taliban in an invasion in 2001, welcomed Obama's proposal.
The number of foreign troops in Afghanistan has risen steadily since Taliban's ouster after they refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
So has the level of Taliban attacks against the government and foreign forces, prompting Obama to term Afghanistan as a top foreign policy priority for his new administration.
Some Western politicians and military officers now say the war cannot be won by military means alone and a solution will have to involve some form of reconciliation.
Yousuf said expulsion of foreign troops was the only solution for Afghanistan's spiraling violence.
"Afghans know better how to decide about their destiny," he replied when asked if the Taliban were willing to hold talks with Karzai's government should and when the troops leave.
http://in.reuters.com/article/southAsiaNews/idINIndia-38433020090310
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BBG, JDN, and GM may be coming to this thread and in preparation of their arrival I would like to offer the following:
SPEAK IN POSITIVES.
For me it looks like this:
The American Creed (see our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution) declares that our inalienable rights come from The Creator. In other words, they are not subject to limitation by man or state. Amongst them are Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness-- in short, Freedom of Choice. Freedom of Choice is informed by Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Speech is made real by Separation of Church and State. Ultimately we the well-armed unorganized militia enforce our rights against all comers.
Anyone who is comfortable with this can be a good American and can be my friend.
It is up to the Muslim world to define itself.
I will accept whichever choice it makes.
If it limits itself to religion, fine. Indeed, there is much there to admire and in the absence of fascist thuggery and intimidation I would be glad of conversation.
OTOH if it seeks to blend religious belief with the coercive power of the state, it is a fascist political ideology and per se seditious to the American Creed. We need to be utterly clear on this: Freedom of Religion has nothing to do with this.
TAC!
Marc
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Today is Holy Thursday for Christians and the start of Passover for Jews. This week was an opportune time for President Barack Obama to visit Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, which has been both a Byzantine church and Islamic mosque. In Turkey he spoke of seeking engagement with Islam based on "mutual respect."
The subject of this column is the status of minority faith groups, mostly Christian, living inside Islamic countries. That status is poor. In some cases it verges on extinction, after centuries of coexistence with Islam. So it is useful to review what Mr. Obama said of his goals for living with Islam:
"I know that the trust that binds the United States and Turkey has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. So let me say this as clearly as I can: The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam. . . .
"We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith. . . . Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them."
Islam must show respect for Christian minorities, says Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger. (April 9)
This is an eloquent description of ecumenical civility. In reality, the experience of Arab Christians living now amid majority Islamic populations is often repression, arrest, imprisonment and death.
Coptic Christians in Egypt have been singled out for discrimination and persecution. Muslim rioters often burn or vandalize their churches and shops.
In Turkey, the Syriac Orthodox Church (its 3,000 members speak Aramaic, the language of Christ) is battling with Turkish authorities over the lands around the Mor Gabriel monastery, built in 397.
Pakistan's recent peace deal with the Taliban in the Swat Valley puts at risk the 500 Christians still trying to live there. Many fled after Islamic extremists bombed a girls' school late last year. Pakistan has never let them buy land to build a church.
Podcast
Listen to Daniel Henninger's Wonder Land column, now available in audio format.
In 1995, the Saudis were allowed to build a mosque in Rome near the Vatican, but never reciprocated with a Christian church in their country. Saudi Arabia even forbids private worship at home for some one million Christian migrant workers.
In Iraq, the situation for small religious minorities has become dire. Reports emerge regularly of mortal danger there for groups that date to antiquity -- Chaldean-Assyrians, the Yazidis and Sabean Mandaeans, who revere John the Baptist. Last fall the Chaldean-Assyrian archbishop of Mosul was kidnapped and murdered. Some Iraqi Christians believe the new government won't protect them, and talk of moving into a "homeland" enclave in Nineveh. Penn State Prof. Philip Jenkins, author of "The Lost History of Christianity," calls the Iraq situation "a classic example of a church that is killed over time."
In short, the "respect" Mr. Obama promised to give Islam is going only in one direction. And he knows that.
Candidate Obama last fall sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice expressing "my concern about the safety and well-being of Iraq's Christian and other non-Muslim religious minorities." He asked what steps the U.S. was taking to protect "these communities of religious freedom." Candidate Obama said he wanted these groups represented in Iraq's governing institutions. Does President Obama believe these things?
A Bush official who worked on this problem in Iraq told me there is a school of thought that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki understands that these ancient groups are Iraq's "connective tissue," and that weaving them formally into the system could be a basis for binding together his fractured nation. If these harmless peoples can't coexist, who can?
Mr. Obama's designated ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, has been criticized for subordinating human-rights issues with North Korea. That would be a mistake in the Middle East. The willingness of Islamic governments to formally protect these small Christian groups should be a litmus test of their bona fides on larger political issues.
If Islam won't let its leaders give basic rights to a handful of ancient Christians, there is no hope for what Mr. Obama proposed this week in Turkey. What his special envoy for Middle East peace, George Mitchell, wishes to achieve with Israel and its neighbors will also fail, again.
An established network of smart people exists to help Mr. Obama here, starting with the Vatican of Pope Benedict XVI and its diplomatic outreach efforts to senior Islamic clerics. The widely connected Anglican Vicar of Baghdad, Andrew White, also happens to be director of the little-known Religious Sectarian project for the U.S. Department of Defense. There are many others.
Mr. Obama should make formalized tolerance of Christian sects in the Middle East the basis for arriving at what he called "common ground" with Islam. As will be noted in churches in the rest of the world this weekend, that "common ground" was first walked in the Middle East 2,000 years ago.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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REUEL MARC GERECHT
'The United States is not at war with Islam and will never be. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."
Getty ImagesSo spoke President Barack Hussein Obama in Turkey last week. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to "Islamic terrorism," "Islamic radicalism," or "Islamic extremism" aren't in his speeches. "Jihad," too, has been banished from the official lexicon.
But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you'll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.
Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group -- if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn't a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.
Theologically, Muslims are neither fragile nor frivolous. They have not become suicide bombers because non-Muslims have said something unkind; they have not refrained from becoming holy warriors because Westerners avoided the word "Islamic" in describing Osama bin Laden and his allies. Having an American president who had a Muslim father, carries the name of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, and wants to engage the Muslim world in a spirit of "mutual respect" isn't a "game changer." This hypothesis trivializes Islamic history and the continuing appeal of religious militancy.
Above all else, we need to understand clearly our enemies -- to try to understand them as they see themselves, and to see them as devout nonviolent Muslims do. To not talk about Islam when analyzing al Qaeda is like talking about the Crusades without mentioning Christianity. To devise a hearts-and-minds counterterrorist policy for the Islamic world without openly talking about faith is counterproductive. We -- the West -- are the unrivalled agent of change in the Middle East. Modern Islamic history -- including the Bush years -- ought to tell us that questions non-Muslims pose can provoke healthy discussions.
The abolition of slavery, rights for religious minorities and women, free speech, or the very idea of civil society -- all of these did not advance without Western pressure and the enormous seductive power that Western values have for Muslims. Although Muslims in the Middle East have been talking about political reform since they were first exposed to Western ideas (and modern military might) in the 18th century, the discussion of individual liberty and equality has been more effective when Westerners have been intimately involved. The Middle East's brief but impressive "Liberal Age" grew from European imperialism and the unsustainable contradiction between the progressive ideals taught by the British and French -- the Egyptian press has never been as free as when the British ruled over the Nile valley -- and the inevitably illiberal and demeaning practices that come with foreign occupation.
Although it is now politically incorrect to say so, George W. Bush's democratic rhetoric energized the discussion of representative government and human rights abroad. Democracy advocates and the anti-authoritarian voices in Arab lands have never been so hopeful as they were between 2002, when democracy promotion began to germinate within the White House, and 2006, when the administration gave up on people power in the Middle East (except in Iraq).
The issue of jihadism is little different. It's not a coincidence that the Muslim debate about holy war became most vivid after 9/11, when the U.S. struck back against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Many may have found Mr. Bush's brief use of the term "Islamofascism" to be offensive -- although it recalls well Abul Ala Maududi, a Pakistani founding father of modern Islamic radicalism, who openly admired European fascism as a violent, muscular ideology capable of mobilizing the masses. Yet Mr. Bush's flirtation with the term unquestionably pushed Muslim intellectuals to debate the legitimacy of its use and the cult of martyrdom that had -- and may still have -- a widespread grip on many among the faithful.
When Sunni Arab Muslims viewed daily on satellite TV the horrors of the Sunni onslaught against the Iraqi Shiites, and then the vicious Shiite revenge against their former masters, the debate about jihadism, the historic Sunni-Shiite rivalry, and the American occupation intensified. Unfortunately, progress in the Middle East has usually happened when things have gotten ugly, and Muslims debate the mess.
Iran's former president Mohammed Khatami, whom Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to engage, is a serious believer in the "dialogue of civilizations." In his books, Mr. Khatami does something very rare for an Iranian cleric: He admits that Western civilization can be morally superior to its Islamic counterpart, and that Muslims must borrow culturally as well as technologically from others. On the whole, however, he finds the West -- especially America -- to be an amoral slippery slope of sin. How should one talk to Mr. Khatami or to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the less curious but morally more earnest clerical overlord of Iran; or the Saudi royal family and their influential state-supported clergy, who still preach hatred of the West; or to the faithful of Pakistan, who are in the midst of an increasingly brutal, internecine religious struggle? Messrs. Khatami and Khamenei are flawlessly polite gentlemen. They do not, however, confuse civility with agreement. Neither should we.
It's obviously not for non-Muslims to decide what Islam means. Only the faithful can decide whether Islam is a religion of peace or war (historically it has been both). Only the faithful can banish jihad as a beloved weapon against infidels and unbelief. Only Muslims can decide how they balance legislation by men and what the community -- or at least its legal guardians, the ulama -- has historically seen as divine commandments.
Westerners can, however, ask probing questions and apply pressure when differing views threaten us. We may not choose to dispatch the U.S. Navy to protect women's rights, as the British once sent men-of-war to put down the Muslim slave trade, but we can underscore clearly our disdain for men who see "child brides" as something vouchsafed by the Almighty. There is probably no issue that angers militants more than women's rights. Advancing this cause in traditional Muslim societies caught in the merciless whirlwind of globalization isn't easy, but no effort is likely to bear more fruit in the long term than having American officials become public champions of women's rights in Muslim lands.
Al Qaeda's Islamic radicalism isn't a blip -- a one-time outgrowth of the Soviet-Afghan war -- or a byproduct of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. It's the most recent violent expression of the modernization of the Muslim Middle East. The West's great transformative century -- the 20th -- was soaked in blood. We should hope, pray, and do what we can to ensure that Islam's continuing embrace of modernity in the 21st century -- undoubtedly its pivotal era -- will not be similarly horrific.
We are fooling ourselves if we think we no longer have to be concerned about how Muslims talk among themselves. This is not an issue that we want to push the "reset" button on. Here, at least, George W. Bush didn't go nearly far enough.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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**Yes, here in America. At Harvard.**
Chaplain’s E-mail Sparks Controversy
Published On 4/14/2009 1:45:38 AM
By MELODY Y. HU
Crimson Staff Writer
CLARIFICATION APPENDED
Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates.
In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”
The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in many cases, criticism of Abdul-Basser from those who have interpreted his statement as supporting the execution of those who leave the Islamic religion.
“I believe he doesn’t belong as the official chaplain,” said one Islamic student, who asked that he not be named to avoid conflicts with Muslim religious authorities. “If the Christian ministers said that people who converted from Christianity should be killed, don’t you think the University should do something?” [SEE CLARIFICATION BELOW]
According to the student, many of Abdul-Basser’s other views are “not in line with liberal values, such as notions of human rights. He privileges the medieval discourse of the Islamic jurists, and is not willing to exercise independent thought and judgment beyond a certain limit,” the student said.
Samad Khurram ’09-’10 said Abdul-Basser’s remarks conflicted with the Harvard United Ministry’s support of freedom of religion.
“I support free speech, freedom of belief and association, so this came as a big shock to me,” Khurram said.
“[His remarks] are the first step towards inciting intolerance and inciting people towards violence,” said a Muslim Harvard student, who requested that he not be named for fear of harming his relationship with the Islamic community.
Aqil Sajjad, a Harvard graduate student, also said that Abdul-Basser’s statements were “totally wrong, definitely out of line for somebody in that position. I wouldn’t go and seek religious advice from one who is saying this.”
A Muslim student at MIT, who also asked to remain anonymous to preserve his relationship with the Islamic community, said the chaplain’s remarks wrongly suggested that only Westerners and Westernized Muslims who did not fully understand Islam would find the killing of apostates objectionable.
“If what he said was what I thought, then it is very shocking and not something that I would expect or want coming out of a chaplain at any major American university,” he said.
Abdul-Basser wrote in a later e-mailed statement that he “never expressed the position that individuals who leave Islam or convert from Islam to another religion must be killed. I do not hold this opinion personally.” He explained that he was not advocating for the positions mentioned in his e-mail, but rather “addressing them in the context of the evolution of an Islamic legal doctrine.”
“[Abdul-Basser] was speaking as a chaplain to a student in a private e-mail exchange. One of these e-mails was misinterpreted, misconstrued, and posted on the blogosphere,” said Harvard Islamic Society spokesperson Nafees A. Syed ’10, who praised Abdul-Basser for promoting diversity within HIS and the campus at large.
“His immeasurable contributions should not be overlooked in this matter,” she said.
—Staff writer Melody Y. Hu can be reached at melodyhu@fas.harvard.edu.
CLARIFICATION: The April 14 article "Chaplain's E-mail Sparks Controversy" included a quotation from a named Harvard student, who was later granted anonymity when he revealed that his words could bring him into serious conflict with Muslim religious authorities.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=527653
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — He has been mentor to some of the most brutal terrorists on earth. But Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a prominent cleric and theorist of jihad living in Jordan, has grown tired of hearing younger extremists accuse him of going soft.
The site Jihadica notes Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s citation and has one of its own.
So in a recent Internet post to his followers, Mr. Maqdisi defended his hard-line credentials by invoking a higher authority: the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
“Credit is due to the testimony of enemies,” Mr. Maqdisi wrote, as he directed his readers to a recent journal article by Joas Wagemakers, a Dutch scholar of jihadism, and the “Militant Ideology Atlas,” both published by the center. Both identified Mr. Maqdisi as a dangerous and influential jihadi theorist, he noted.
So did two articles by liberal Arab columnists, Mr. Maqdisi added proudly, including one that referred to him as a “sheik of violence” and “the head of the snake.”
It is not new for Islamic extremists to cite Western counterterrorism reports. Ayman Zawahri, the deputy of Osama bin Laden, has referred at least twice in his taped statements to “Stealing Al Qaeda’s Playbook,” a 2004 article also published by the center. But recently Mr. Maqdisi has taken this hall-of-mirrors phenomenon to a new level, complaining bitterly that secular Western analysts generally understand him better than many in his own community.
“I am surprised at the low level of their thinking,” Mr. Maqdisi wrote of his critics, “and how the enemies of religion read and understand us better than they do.”
The complaint is a testament to the growing community of Western jihad watchers, an obsessive and multilingual crew who monitor and debate terrorist Web statements like Talmudic scholars poring over a manuscript.
It also illustrates the fragmentation of authority within the global jihadist movement, where even prominent figures like Mr. Maqdisi are vulnerable to younger critics who feel free to interpret the call to jihad, and the Koran generally, as they see fit.
For the Western analysts, being cited approvingly by a Qaeda figure can be unsettling.
“It is inevitably a little bit flattering,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who first pointed out Mr. Maqdisi’s complaint on the blog he edits, Jihadica. “But it does make me worry a bit about the implications of what I do and what I write.”
The home page of the Jihadica site, founded a year ago by the scholar William F. McCants, advertises itself with an anonymous quotation said to be taken from a survey of jihadists about Internet sites that monitor militant Islamism online: “It is, in my view, the most important and dangerous among the sites in this group.”
All this self-consciousness is multiplied by the Internet, which has become a recruiting tool for jihadists but is also uniquely vulnerable to spies and informers. The fact that Western scholars and defense analysts have occasionally proposed using influential theorists like Mr. Maqdisi to undermine jihadist movements only makes this worse.
For all their suspicion toward each other, many militant Islamists often speak of Western analysts — especially those with a clear link to the military — with the respect due a true enemy. Mr. Maqdisi, whose Web site includes the world’s largest online compilation of jihadist literature (it is searchable by author), is clearly aware of what is written about him, and about jihad generally.
Despite his stature, he has been fighting off criticism from jihadists for years. Born in what is now the West Bank, Mr. Maqdisi spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, where his writings and speeches legitimizing violence influenced Osama bin Laden and others. In the mid-1990s he was sent to prison in Jordan and became the spiritual mentor of a fellow prisoner, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who later became notorious for decapitating hostages as the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
In 2005 Mr. Maqdisi was briefly released from prison and criticized Mr. Zarqawi’s bloody car-bombing campaign against the Shiites of Iraq. That led some to accuse him of becoming a tool for the Jordanian or American authorities, an accusation that has been renewed in recent months.
Mr. Maqdisi, who is now under house arrest in Jordan, has angrily turned that accusation against his critics, arguing that their efforts to undermine him and other jihadist leaders derive from a strategy outlined by Western analysts working for “the Crusader RAND Corporation.”
In fact, at least a few Islamists seem to see the hand of the RAND Corporation, an American policy organization that produces reports on terrorism and other subjects, in many plots. This year a hard-line Saudi cleric told this reporter during an interview that “RAND-ites” were seeking to de-Islamize Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Maqdisi’s problem is more homegrown. A new generation of jihadists, many of them less educated and respectful of authority than their elders, has begun taking issue with him. Mr. Maqdisi believes suicide bombing is a legitimate tactic but has said it should not be used indiscriminately, and he has spoken against the sectarian massacres in Iraq. For this he is accused of turning his back on jihad.
In a sense, Mr. Maqdisi can hardly complain, because he did the same thing to his clerical elders when he was young.
“For several decades, there has been a dynamic at work in the radical Sunni Islamist community where each new generation becomes less principled, less learned, more radical, and more violent than the one before it,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle East studies at Princeton.
In fact, recently some Western counterterrorism experts have seized on this trend and hailed it as proof that Al Qaeda and its affiliates are doomed to destroy themselves in an orgy of violence and in-fighting. Whether Mr. Maqdisi will also cite those Western theories in defense of his own approach remains to be seen.
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About 18 monts old:
A U.S. Marine squad was marching north of Fallujah when they came upon
an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side
of the road was an American Marine in a similar but less serious state.
The Marine was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both
men, the squad leader asked the injured Marine what had happened.
The Marine reported, "I was heavily armed and moving north along the
highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent."
We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. I
yelled to him that Saddam Hussein was a miserable, lowlife scum bag who
got what he deserved, and he yelled back that Ted Kennedy is a fat,
good-for-nothing, left wing liberal drunk who doesn't know how to drive.
So I said that Osama Bin Ladin dresses and acts like a frigid,
mean-spirited lesbian! He retaliated by yelling, "Oh yeah? Well, so
does Hillary Clinton!"
"And, there we were, in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when a
truck hit us."
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Obama Praises Islam as 'Great Religion'
President says Islam is "part of America," hails the religion's "commitment to justice and progress"
AP
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Sept. 1: President Obama introduces college basketball player Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir at a dinner celebrating Ramadan in the State Dining Room at the White House. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised American Muslims for enriching the nation's culture at a dinner to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
"The contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country," Obama said at the iftar, the dinner that breaks the holiday's daily fast.
The president joined Cabinet secretaries, members of the diplomatic corps and lawmakers to pay tribute to what he called "a great religion and its commitment to justice and progress." Attendees included Congress' two Muslim members -- Reps. Keith Ellison and Andre Carson as well as ambassadors from Islamic nations and Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren.
Obama shared the story of Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, another invited guest, who broke a state record for most career points as a Massachusetts high school student.
"As an honor student, as an athlete on her way to Memphis, Bilqis is an inspiration not simply to Muslim girls -- she's an inspiration to all of us," he said.
Obama also noted the contributions of Muhammad Ali, who was not in attendance, though the president borrowed a quote from famous boxer, explaining religion.
"A few years ago," Obama said, "he explained this view -- and this is part of why he's The Greatest -- saying, 'Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams -- they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do -- they all contain truths."'
Ramadan, a monthlong period of prayer, reflection and sunrise-to-sunset fasts, began Aug. 22 in most of the Islamic world. It is believed that God began revealing the Quran to Muhammad during Ramadan, and the faithful are supposed to spend the month in religious reflection, prayer and remembrance of the poor.
White House dinners marking the holy month are nothing new. Former President George W. Bush held iftars during his eight years in office.
Obama has made a special effort since taking office to repair U.S. relations with the world's Muslims, including visits to Turkey and Cairo. In a June speech at the Egyptian capital, as well as in one to another important Muslim audience, in Turkey, Obama said: "America is not -- and never will be -- at war with Islam."
Obama also released a video message to Muslims before the start to Ramadan. In the video, he said Ramadan's rituals are a reminder of the principles Muslims and Christians have in common,including advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
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Wasn't quite sure where to put this:
Obama offers millions in Muslim technology fund
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The White House Friday highlighted a new multi-million-dollar technology fund for Muslim nations, following a pledge made by President Barack Obama in his landmark speech to the Islamic world.
The White House said the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) had issued a call for proposals for the fund, which will provide financing of between 25 and 150 million dollars for selected projects and funds.
The Global Technology and Innovation Fund will "catalyze and facilitate private sector investments" throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the White House said in a statement.
Eligible projects would advance economic opportunity and create jobs in areas like technology, education, telecoms, media, business services and clean technology, the White House said.
OPIC said sample projects could help foster the development of new computer technology or telecommunications businesses, or widen access to broadband Internet services.
Proposals must be submitted by the end of November, and managers of funds that make a final short list will make presentations in Washington in January.
Final selections will be announced next June.
In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo last June, Obama argued that "education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century" and that under-investment was rife in many Muslim nations.
As well as the fund, Obama also said he will host a summit on entrepreneurship this year to deepen ties between business leaders in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.
In his speech on June 4, Obama vowed to forge a "new beginning" for Islam and America, promising to purge years of "suspicion and discord."
In what may be one of the defining moments of his presidency, Obama laid out a new blueprint for US Middle East policy, pledged to end mistrust, forge a state for Palestinians and defuse a nuclear showdown with Iran.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1
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Haven't read the whole thing yet, but the starting premise seems interesting:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/renouncing-islamism-to-the-brink-and-back-again-1821215.html
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The air is thick and hazy as I tiptoe over the leaves of euphoria-inducing qat, through hoops of golden embroidered hookas, and nestle into the divan between women in Ottoman headdresses singing as frankincense wafts around them. Abeer leans towards me with her wide green eyes and whispers: "Do you know why we burn incense? It is because whenever you sing Muhammad's name, you smell heaven."
Night falls in the Old City of Sana'a as I ride the bus for five cents from this wedding celebration toward the great wall that once protected the city's 14,000 majestic tower houses, many now crumbling. From my dorm window I spot a hoopoe bird soaring over the brown castles, looking down on this high plateau that was once the home of the Queen of Sheba.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's language school is just down the winding cobblestone alleyway from the school where I study Arabic. From my classroom I can hear the call to prayer at the Great Mosque, built during Muhammad's lifetime, where Abdulmutallab prayed day and night. What could this young Nigerian man have seen of Sana'a during his stay in Yemen, before he boarded the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?
Perhaps he passed the boy who travels a mile to obtain a fresh bottle of water for me when his shop runs out—sprinting the whole way—and sweetly responds to my thanks: "You are welcome, my sister." Or the cook who gives me a chair hidden from the strong gaze of men chewing qat. Or the motorcyclists narrowly missing the small boys selling tiny bottles of perfume in cardboard boxes on the ground. In the poorest country in the Arab world, would Abdulmutallab have noticed the gentle smile of the cook as he hands me fresh bread at no cost?
I try to open the window of my Arabic classroom, and Arwa, my instructor, swiftly pushes it open. "I am stronger than you." We arm wrestle to prove it, laughing until neither of us can win, and then continue our reading of Arabic media: "President Bush invaded Iraq because of suspected weapons of mass destruction." Arwa quips: "There were no weapons of mass destruction." Just then, we hear a knock at the door and Arwa becomes a black curtain. Only her eyes can be seen through the narrow slat of her naqab.
"Why don't you wear the kind of balto that has the pretty designs on its sleeves?" I ask. "Because then I wouldn't be invisible," she answers. I visit her house, and in a room of dirty clay walls she teaches me to sing a traditional Sana'ani oud song: "How shall I blame my heart? For in loving, it neither thinks nor reasons . . ."
One afternoon, a group of children stop playing to ask me whether I wish to enter Islam to go to heaven. "No? Then you cannot go to heaven." Another day I wear pink instead of black. A boy spits on me.
Children here are more conservative than adults. Abeer's family tells me of Yemeni children returning from Saudi-supported Wahabi summer camps to denounce their parents as "non-Muslims." But with about a 35% unemployment rate, and 75% of Yemen's population under the age of 25, there are few other activities for young people. Extremist organizations providing resources and a sense of purpose thrive. After all, foreigners are kidnapped in this country not to inspire terror, but to bargain with their own government for services.
I spend a morning talking with Abdul Majeed al-Zindani's daughter, Asma, about women's rights. Her father, who is on the U.S. list of al Qaeda affiliates and heads al-Iman University where Abdulmutallab studied in Sana'a, recently launched the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, modeled after the Saudi Arabian organization. "Since women cannot bear the hot sun, why would they want to get a job when they can stay safely inside their homes?" Asma asks me.
One night, I meet with a young imam reputed to give violently anti-American sermons, and ask him to define "extremism." With a large knife, he cuts me a slice of Bint Asahan, a traditional Yemeni dessert drizzled in honey, and insists that I wait for his friend to arrive. A short man with piercing blue eyes and a British accent soon appears, but does not shake my hand. Without answering any of my questions, he cuts deep into my vulnerabilities: my ability to speak Arabic fluently; my right to write my doctoral dissertation on Islam; my understanding of the Yemeni people. I hold back tears. "Not a word, not a word shall you ever write about this interview," he warns. "And do not accuse me of anything."
A few days later, Abeer serves me gisher, made from the roasted shells of al-Mokha coffee beans mixed with cinnamon—a drink Abdulmutallab would have shared many times with his Yemeni counterparts. "This is a gift from me to you," she beams as she places a necklace of coral beads over my head. "I want you to consider me as your sister."
What would Abdulmutallab have thought, had he seen us, or had he been there later that day, when some European students and I play Beatles songs on a guitar in front of the president's mosque? Yemeni boys and girls surround us and cheer. For a few hours in Sana'a, we have something to do.
Ms. Davis-Packard studied in Yemen during the summer of 2008. She is a Ph.D. student in international affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins.
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1977 vs. 1979 Recommend
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 13, 2010
Visiting Yemen and watching the small band of young reformers there struggle against the forces of separatism, Islamism, autocracy and terrorism, reminded me that the key forces shaping this region today were really set in motion between 1977 and 1979 — and nothing much has changed since. Indeed, one could say Middle East politics today is a struggle between 1977 and 1979 — and 1979 is still winning.
How so? Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. In its wake came two broad alternatives: The first, manifested by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in his 1977 trip to Israel, was a bid to cast the Arab world’s future with the West, economic liberalization, modernization and acceptance of Israel. The weakness of “Sadatism,” though, was that it was an elite ideology with no cultural roots. The Egyptian state made peace with Israel, but Arab societies never followed.
The second Arab-Muslim response emerged in 1979. To start, there was the takeover that year of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. The Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their Islamists: Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and religious education inside Saudi Arabia — and abundant resources to spread Sunni Wahabi fundamentalism abroad.
The Saudi lurch backward coincided with Iran’s revolution in 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. That revolution set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for who was the real leader of the Muslim world, and it triggered a surge in oil prices that gave both fundamentalist regimes the resources to export their brands of puritanical Islam, through mosques and schools, farther than ever.
“Islam lost its brakes in 1979,” said Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. And there was no moderate countertrend.
Finally, also in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Arab and Muslim mujahedeen fighters flocked to the cause — financed by Saudi Arabia at America’s behest — and in the process shifted Pakistan and Afghanistan in much more Islamist directions. Once these hard-core Muslim fighters, led by the likes of Osama bin Laden, defeated the Soviets, they turned their guns on America and its Arab allies.
In a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal, titled “The Radical Legacy of 1979,” the retired U.S. diplomat Edward Djerejian, who led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1979, noted: “Last year we celebrated the great historic achievements marked by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany. But we should also remember that events in the broader Middle East of 30 years ago have left, in sharp contrast, a bitter and dangerous legacy.”
In short, the Middle East we are dealing with today is the product of long-term trends dating back to 1979. And have no illusions, we propelled those trends. America looked the other way when Saudi Arabia Wahabi-fied itself. Ronald Reagan glorified the Afghan mujahedeen and the Europeans hailed the Khomeini revolution in Iran as a “liberation” event.
I believe the only way the forces of 1979 can be rolled back would be with another equally big bang — a new popular movement that is truly reformist, democratizing, open to the world, yet anchored in Muslim culture, not disconnected. Our best hopes are the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq, the tentative green revolution in Iran, plus the young reformers now coming of age in every Arab country. But it will not be easy.
The young reformers today “do not have a compelling story to tell,” remarked Lahcen Haddad, a political scientist at Rabat University in Morocco. “And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ”
Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.
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These words from the preceding piece seem to me to articulate something quite important:
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“And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ”
Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge.
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Anyone want to comment or have at it?
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The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’
The only truth to that is with regards to weaponization/militarization.
Yeah we don't want Arabs and Muslims getting their hands on nuclear weapons, long range missles etc.
No one is stopping them from modernizing otherwise.
Look at Dubai.
"rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge."
No one is stopping them from this - just leave out the weapons.
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All well and good-- but isn't the question presented HOW to counter that narrative in the Arab/Muslim world?
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Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq.
Well it is already been said that we should do all we can to promote democratizing Iraq, Iran etc.
But it looks like time is running out.
Iran appears to be on a trajectory to have nucs by then which some experts feel will spark an arms race.
The truth is the US is now too weak.
Iran knows it.
We offer peace and cooperation. Or we offer to wipe out their nuclear capability.
That WAS the answer. But I guess not anymore. They will get the bomb.
And we will have half the nation paying for the debts of the other half.
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The others' mindset:
www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2388.htm
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Yeah, that about sums it up. Command, Forbid, Destroy Laws of Man. Destroy Intellectual Idols like democracy and freedom and replace them with obedience to Allah.
I have seen stuff like that in some real nasty cults.
The "freebies" are seductive, too all you give up is a bunch of free will and submit to Allah. The key to that game is who determines what Allah wants? The Elders of the cult. Welcome to COG, KoolAid, The Solar Temple............
I never have been able to figure out that mind set.
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The Poet Versus the Prophet: On standing up to totalitarian Islam
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http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/1...us-the-prophet
Mark Goldblatt | May 14, 2010
I got to know the poet Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life. Not very well, just a nodding acquaintance, but after he died I attended a memorial in his honor at the City University Graduate School. At that service, his personal assistant related a story about Ginsberg’s reaction to the death sentence pronounced on the novelist Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie’s “crime,” you’ll recall, was writing a provocative, perhaps even blasphemous novel inspired by the life of Muhammad called The Satanic Verses.
Though I might be screwing up a few details, the gist of the story was as follows: Soon after news of the fatwa broke, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed into the back seat of a taxi in Manhattan. After a glance at the cab driver’s name, Ginsberg politely inquired if he was a Muslim. When the cabbie replied that he was, Ginsberg asked him what he thought about the death sentence on Rushdie. The cabbie answered that he thought that Rushdie’s book was disrespectful of Islam, and that the Ayatollah had every right to do what he had done. At this point, according to his assistant, Ginsberg, one of the gentlest men ever to walk the planet, flew into a rage, screaming at the cabbie as he continued to drive, “Then I shit on your religion! Do you hear me? I shit on Islam! I shit on Muhammad! Do you hear? I shit on Muhammad!” Ginsberg demanded that the cabbie pull over. The cabbie complied, and, without paying the fare, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed out. He was still screaming at the cabbie as the car drove off.
I’ve had a couple of weeks now to think about Ginsberg cursing out that cabbie, and cursing out Islam and Muhammad. You see, I live in Manhattan, three blocks from Times Square. As near as I can determine, I was walking with a friend about thirty feet from the car bomb on May 1st right around the time it was supposed to detonate. Except for the technical incompetence of a Muslim dirtbag named Faisal Shahzad, I and my friend would likely be dead now. Note the phrase: “Muslim dirtbag.” Neither term by itself accounts for the terrorist act he attempted to perpetrate; both terms, however, are equally complicit in it. It might have been a crapshoot of nature and nurture that wrought a specimen like Shahzad, but it was Islam that inspired him, that gave his fecal stain of a life its depth and its justification. Why is that so difficult to admit?
Let me ask the question another way: Where’s the rage? Why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab? If Islam justifies, or is understood by millions of Muslims to justify, setting off a bomb in Times Square, then I shit on Islam.
There are times for interfaith dialogue, for mutual respect and compassion. This isn’t one of them. Shahzad’s car bomb was parked in front of the offices of Viacom, the parent company of the Comedy Central, which airs the program South Park. Last month, the creators of South Park decided to poke fun at the Prophet Muhammad—just as they’d poked fun at Moses and Jesus many times in the past. Death threats followed. It’s too early to connect the Times Square bomb plot to the South Park blasphemy, but police have not ruled it out.
If Shahzad was offended by an animated cartoon and decided to defend the Prophet’s name by killing hundreds of civilians—mothers with their babies in strollers, wide-eyed teenagers in tour groups, husbands and wives out for a night on the town—then I’ll say, along with the poet, I shit on Muhammad.
Americans characterize our collective deference towards the feelings of Muslims as “political correctness.” The phrase may be apt with respect to certain ethnic and religious minorities, but our tip-toeing around Islamic sensibilities is nothing more than plain, old-fashioned cowardice. MSNBC stooge Lawrence O’Donnell, for example, repeatedly slandered Mormonism during the 2008 presidential campaign as a sidebar to his creepily obsessive verbal jihad against then-candidate Mitt Romney. But when asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would insult Muhammad the way he’d insulted Joseph Smith, O’Donnell replied with rare candor: “Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the... that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.... Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell. But it’s not just O’Donnell’s problem. It’s our problem. America’s problem. The West’s problem. We lack the moral courage to walk the walk, to put our individual lives on the line in order to defend the principles of free thought and free expression—the very principles that allowed the Judeo-Christian West to leave the Islamic East in the dust, literally and figuratively, three centuries ago.
When Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for producing a short movie critical of Islam’s treatment of women in 2004, where were the public screenings of the film? When Muslims in several countries rioted against pen and ink images of Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, where were the public billboards of those sketches? And when the creators of South Park trotted out the Prophet in a ridiculous bear costume, and received death threats in return, where were the mass-produced tee shirts of that image?
I’ll take a size-medium, cotton if possible, and I’ll wear it in Times Square.
Since 2001, many Americans have asked how they can contribute in a direct way to the war against totalitarian Islam. Now we have an answer. If it’s legal, and likely to offend the radicals, just do it. That seems straightforward enough. But how many of us will have the nerve to stand up to a million or so Muslim dirtbags, and to scores of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of their fellow travelers and psychic enablers, and say in unison, “You want to kill the Enlightenment, you’re going to have to come through me.”
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I have a newfound respect for Allen Ginsburg.
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Editor's Note: The controversy over a proposed mosque in lower Manhattan has spurred a wider debate about the nature of Islam. We asked six leading thinkers to answer the question: What is moderate Islam?
The Ball Is in Our Court
By Anwar Ibrahim
Skeptics and cynics alike have said that the quest for the moderate Muslim in the 21st century is akin to the search for the Holy Grail. It's not hard to understand why. Terrorist attacks, suicide bombings and the jihadist call for Muslims "to rise up against the oppression of the West" are widespread.
The radical fringe carrying out such actions has sought to dominate the discourse between Islam and the West. In order to do so, they've set out to foment anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. They've also advocated indiscriminate violence as a political strategy. To cap their victory, this abysmal lot uses the cataclysm of 9/11 as a lesson for the so-called enemies of Islam.
These dastardly acts have not only been tragedies of untold proportions for those who have suffered or perished. They have also delivered a calamitous blow to followers of the Muslim faith.
These are the Muslims who go about their lives like ordinary people—earning their livings, raising their families, celebrating reunions and praying for security and peace. These are the Muslims who have never carried a pocketknife, let alone explosives intended to destroy buildings. These Muslims are there for us to see, if only we can lift the veil cast on them by the shadowy figures in bomb-laden jackets hell-bent on destruction.
These are mainstream Muslims—no different from the moderate Christians, Jews and those of other faiths—whose identities have been drowned by events beyond their control. The upshot is a composite picture of Muslims as inherently intolerant, antidemocratic, inward-looking and simply unable to coexist with other communities in the modern world. Some say there is only one solution: Discard your beliefs and your tradition, and embrace pluralism and modernity.
View Full Image
Associated Press
The Ottoman-era Sultan Ahmed or Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
.This prescription is deeply flawed. The vast majority of Muslims already see themselves as part of a civilization that is heir to a noble tradition of science, philosophy and spirituality that places paramount importance on the sanctity of human life. Holding fast to the principles of democracy, freedom and human rights, these hundreds of millions of Muslims fervently reject fanaticism in all its varied guises.
Yet Muslims must do more than just talk about their great intellectual and cultural heritage. We must be at the forefront of those who reject violence and terrorism. And our activism must not end there. The tyrants and oppressive regimes that have been the real impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world must hear our unanimous condemnation. The ball is in our court.
Mr. Ibrahim is Malaysia's opposition leader.
A History of Tolerance
By Bernard Lewis
A form of moderation has been a central part of Islam from the very beginning. True, Muslims are nowhere commanded to love their neighbors, as in the Old Testament, still less their enemies, as in the New Testament. But they are commanded to accept diversity, and this commandment was usually obeyed. The Prophet Muhammad's statement that "difference within my community is part of God's mercy" expressed one of Islam's central ideas, and it is enshrined both in law and usage from the earliest times.
This principle created a level of tolerance among Muslims and coexistence between Muslims and others that was unknown in Christendom until after the triumph of secularism. Diversity was legitimate and accepted. Different juristic schools coexisted, often with significant divergences.
Sectarian differences arose, and sometimes led to conflicts, but these were minor compared with the ferocious wars and persecutions of Christendom. Some events that were commonplace in medieval Europe— like the massacre and expulsion of Jews—were almost unknown in the Muslim world. That is, until modern times.
Occasionally more radical, more violent versions of Islam arose, but their impact was mostly limited. They did not become really important until the modern period when, thanks to a combination of circumstances, such versions of Islamic teachings obtained a massive following among both governments and peoples.
From the start, Muslims have always had a strong sense of their identity and history. Thanks to modern communication, they have become painfully aware of their present state. Some speak of defeat, some of failure. It is the latter who offer the best hope for change.
For the moment, there does not seem to be much prospect of a moderate Islam in the Muslim world. This is partly because in the prevailing atmosphere the expression of moderate ideas can be dangerous—even life-threatening. Radical groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the likes of which in earlier times were at most minor and marginal, have acquired a powerful and even a dominant position.
But for Muslims who seek it, the roots are there, both in the theory and practice of their faith and in their early sacred history.
Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Don't Call Me Moderate, Call Me Normal
By Ed Husain
I am a moderate Muslim, yet I don't like being termed a "moderate"—it somehow implies that I am less of a Muslim.
We use the designation "moderate Islam" to differentiate it from "radical Islam." But in so doing, we insinuate that while Islam in moderation is tolerable, real Islam—often perceived as radical Islam—is intolerable. This simplistic, flawed thinking hands our extremist enemies a propaganda victory: They are genuine Muslims. In this rubric, the majority, non-radical Muslim populace has somehow compromised Islam to become moderate.
What is moderate Christianity? Or moderate Judaism? Is Pastor Terry Jones's commitment to burning the Quran authentic Christianity, by virtue of the fanaticism of his action? Or, is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas Party in Israel, more Jewish because he calls on Jews to rain missiles on the Arabs and "annihilate them"?
The pastor and the rabbi can, no doubt, find abstruse scriptural justifications for their angry actions. And so it is with Islam's fringe: Our radicals find religious excuses for their political anger. But Muslim fanatics cannot be allowed to define Islam.
The Prophet Muhammad warned us against ghuluw, or extremism, in religion. The Quran reinforces the need for qist, or balance. For me, Islam at its essence is the middle way in all matters. This is normative Islam, adhered to by a billion normal Muslims across the globe.
Normative Islam is inherently pluralist. It is supported by 1,000 years of Muslim history in which religious freedom was cherished. The claim, made today by the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, that they represent God's will expressed through their version of oppressive Shariah law is a modern innovation.
The classical thinking within Islam was to let a thousand flowers bloom. Ours is not a centralized tradition, and Islam's rich diversity is a legacy of our pluralist past.
Normative Islam, from its early history to the present, is defined by its commitment to protecting religion, life, progeny, wealth and the human mind. In the religious language of Muslim scholars, this is known as maqasid, or aims. This is the heart of Islam.
I am fully Muslim and fully Western. Don't call me moderate—call me a normal Muslim.
Mr. Husain is author of "The Islamist" (Penguin, 2007) and co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, a counterextremist think tank.
Putting Up With Infidels Like Me
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Moderate Islam is the faith practiced by the parents of my Pakistani British roommate at the University of Edinburgh—and, no doubt, by the great majority of Muslim immigrants to Europe and the United States.
Khalid's mother and father were devout Muslims. His dad prayed five times a day and his mom, who hadn't yet learned decent English after almost 20 years in the industrial towns of West Yorkshire, gladly gave me the impression that the only book she'd ever read was the Quran.
I was always welcome in their home. Khalid's mother regularly stuffed me with curry, peppering me with questions about how a non-Muslim who'd crossed the Atlantic to study Islam could resist the pull of the one true faith.
Determined to keep their children Muslim in a sea of aggressive, alcohol-laden, sex-soaked disbelief, they happily practiced and preached peaceful coexistence—even with an infidel who was obviously leading their son down an unrighteous path.
That is the essence of moderation in any faith: the willingness to exist peacefully, if not exuberantly, alongside nonbelievers who hold repellant views on many sacred subjects.
It is a dispensation that comes fairly easily to ordinary Muslims who have left their homelands to live among nonbelievers in Western democracies. It is harder for Muslims surrounded by their own kind, unaccustomed by politics and culture to giving up too much ground.
Tolerance among traditional Muslims is defined as Christian Europe first defined the idea: A superior creed agrees not to harass an inferior creed, so long as the practitioners of the latter don't become too uppity. Tolerance emphatically does not mean equality of belief, as it now does in the West.
Even in Turkey, where authoritarian secularism has changed the Muslim identity more profoundly than anywhere else in the Old World, a totally secularized Muslim would never call a non-Muslim citizen of the state a Turk. There is a certain pride of place that cannot be shared with a nonbeliever. Wounded pride also does the Devil's work on ecumenicalism. Adjusting to modernity, with its intellectually open borders and inevitable moral chaos, is brutally hard for monotheisms, especially for those accustomed to rule. But it happens.
When I told Khalid's father that his children—especially his daughters—would not worship the faith as he and his wife had done, he told me: "They are living a better life than we have lived. That is enough."
Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA operative, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Don't Gloss Over The Violent Texts
By Tawfik Hamid
In regards to Islam, the words "moderate'" and "radical" are relative terms. Without defining them it is virtually impossible to defeat the latter or support the former.
Radical Islam is not limited to the act of terrorism; it also includes the embrace of teachings within the religion that promote hatred and ultimately breed terrorism. Those who limit the definition of radical Islam to terrorism are ignoring—and indirectly approving of—the Shariah teachings that permit killing apostates, violence against women and gays, and anti-Semitism.
Moderate Islam should be defined as a form of Islam that rejects these violent and discriminatory edicts. Furthermore, it must provide a strong theological refutation for the mainstream Islamic teaching that the Muslim umma (nation) must declare wars against non-Muslim nations, spreading the religion and giving non-Muslims the following options: convert, pay a humiliating tax, or be killed. This violent concept fuels jihadists, who take the teaching literally and accept responsibility for applying it to the modern world.
Moderate Islam must not be passive. It needs to actively reinterpret the violent parts of the religious text rather than simply cherry-picking the peaceful ones. Ignoring, rather than confronting or contextualizing, the violent texts leaves young Muslims vulnerable to such teachings at a later stage in their lives.
Finally, moderate Islam must powerfully reject the barbaric practices of jihadists. Ideally, this would mean Muslims demonstrating en masse all over the world against the violence carried out in the name of their religion.
Moderate Islam must be honest enough to admit that Islam has been used in a violent manner at several stages in history to seek domination over others. Insisting that all acts in Islamic history and all current Shariah teachings are peaceful is a form of deception that makes things worse by failing to acknowledge the existence of the problem.
Mr. Hamid, a former member of the Islamic radical group Jamma Islamiya, is an Islamic reformer and a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
Mystics, Modernists and Literalists
By Akbar Ahmed
In the intense discussion about Muslims today, non-Muslims often say to me: "You are a moderate, but are there others like you?"
Clearly, the use of the term moderate here is meant as a compliment. But the application of the term creates more problems than it solves. The term is heavy with value judgment, smacking of "good guy" versus "bad guy" categories. And it implies that while a minority of Muslims are moderate, the rest are not.
Having studied the practices of Muslims around the world today, I've come up with three broad categories: mystic, modernist and literalist. Of course, I must add the caveat that these are analytic models and aren't watertight.
Muslims in the mystic category reflect universal humanism, believing in "peace with all." The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi exemplifies this category. In his verses, he glorifies worshipping the same God in the synagogue, the church and the mosque.
The second category is the modernist Muslim who believes in trying to balance tradition and modernity. The modernist is proud of Islam and yet able to live comfortably in, and contribute to, Western society.
Most Muslim leaders who led nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century were modernists—from Sultan Mohammed V, the first king of independent Morocco, to M.A. Jinnah, who founded Pakistan in 1947. But as modernists failed over time, becoming increasingly incompetent and corrupt, the literalists stepped into the breach.
The literalists believe that Muslim behavior must approximate that of the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia. Their belief that Islam is under attack forces many of them to adopt a defensive posture. And while not all literalists advocate violence, many do. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Taliban belong to this category.
In the Muslim world the divisions between the three categories I have delineated are real. The outcome of their struggle will define Islam's fate.
The West can help by understanding Muslim society in a more nuanced and sophisticated way in order to interact with it wisely and for mutual benefit. The first step is to categorize Muslims accurately.
Mr. Ahmed, the former Pakistani ambassador to Britain, is the chair of Islamic studies at American University and author of "Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam" (Brookings, 2010).
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Oh, for pete's sake!
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39032043/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia
P.C.
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Yeah- for Pete's sake......
Let the troops know what is happening and broadcast this stuff, the radicalized haters who will act out are exactly the ones we need to kill.......... Meantime the Quran burners are indulging in the same freedom of speech as the Iranian President indulges in.........
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This just in.......
The existence of non-muslims found to inflame, provoke muslims. :roll:
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/09/06/burning-korans-im-agin-it/
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Minister wants Obama to become Ameer-ul-Momineen
Published: September 02, 2010
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ISLAMABAD – In a development that could be duly termed as one and only of its kind, an incumbent Government’s Minister has urged US President Barrack Obama to offer Eid prayers at Ground Zero Mosque and become “Ameer-ul-Momineen” of Muslim Ummah.
Minister of State for Industries and former member Pakistan Ideological Council Ayatullah Durrani called TheNation on Wednesday to register his demand made to President Obama.
“The coming Eid would expectedly be observed on 9/11, this a golden opportunity for President Obama to offer Eid prayers at Ground Zero and become Amir-ul-Momineen or Caliph of Muslims. In this way, all the problems of Muslim World would be solved,” he thought.
Durrani argued that Muslim World was in “dire need” of a Caliph and the distinguished slot of Caliphate would earn President Obama the exemplary titles of what he termed, “Mullah Barrack Hussain Obama” or “Allama Obama.” “The time is approaching fast. Barrack Hussain Obama must act now. This is a golden opportunity, Muslims badly need it,” he added, saying that the elevation of President Obama to Muslim’s Caliphate would be the “key to success.”
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http://michellemalkin.com/2010/09/09/what-else-is-new-muslim-initiates-burn-the-stars-and-stripes-day/
What else is new?
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I guess if the pastor simply painted a picture of the quran burning and dipped it in urine. He could call it art and apply for a NEA grant.
I am so glad Hillary weighed in on this.
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We have race baiting Reverends. Now we have religious baiting "imams".
What a racket! This is becoming a tried and true business model.
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http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/285123/christians_in_gaza_fear_for_their_lives.html
What if muslims started burning bibles and crucifixes? Oh, wait.....
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Robert Wright is the author of two wonderful books I have read on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal and Non-Zero Sum, and also "The Evolution of God" which I have not read. His thoughts here are of a different tenor than most of what we see on this forum concerning Islam, but are none the less worthy for consideration for it.
==================================
The Meaning of the Koran
By ROBERT WRIGHT
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Test your religious literacy:
Which sacred text says that Jesus is the “word” of God? a) the Gospel of John; b) the Book of Isaiah; c) the Koran.
The correct answer is the Koran. But if you guessed the Gospel of John you get partial credit because its opening passage — “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God” — is an implicit reference to Jesus. In fact, when Muhammad described Jesus as God’s word, he was no doubt aware that he was affirming Christian teaching.
Extra-credit question: Which sacred text has this to say about the Hebrews: God, in his “prescience,” chose “the children of Israel … above all peoples”? I won’t bother to list the choices, since you’ve probably caught onto my game by now; that line, too, is in the Koran.
I highlight these passages in part for the sake of any self-appointed guardians of Judeo-Christian civilization who might still harbor plans to burn the Koran. I want them to be aware of everything that would go up in smoke.
But I should concede that I haven’t told the whole story. Even while calling Jesus the word of God — and “the Messiah” — the Koran denies that he was the son of God or was himself divine. And, though the Koran does call the Jews God’s chosen people, and sings the praises of Moses, and says that Jews and Muslims worship the same God, it also has anti-Jewish, and for that matter anti-Christian, passages.
The regrettable parts of the Koran — the regrettable parts of any religious scripture — don’t have to matter.
.This darker side of the Koran, presumably, has already come to the attention of would-be Koran burners and, more broadly, to many of the anti-Muslim Americans whom cynical politicians like Newt Gingrich are trying to harness and multiply. The other side of the Koran — the part that stresses interfaith harmony — is better known in liberal circles.
As for people who are familiar with both sides of the Koran — people who know the whole story — well, there may not be many of them. It’s characteristic of contemporary political discourse that the whole story doesn’t come to the attention of many people.
Thus, there are liberals who say that “jihad” refers to a person’s internal struggle to do what is right. And that’s true. There are conservatives who say “jihad” refers to military struggle. That’s true, too. But few people get the whole picture, which, actually, can be summarized pretty concisely:
Reading the scripture.The Koran’s exhortations to jihad in the military sense are sometimes brutal in tone but are so hedged by qualifiers that Muhammad clearly doesn’t espouse perpetual war against unbelievers, and is open to peace with them. (Here, for example, is my exegesis of the “sword verse,” the most famous jihadist passage in the Koran.) The formal doctrine of military jihad — which isn’t found in the Koran, and evolved only after Muhammad’s death — does seem to have initially been about endless conquest, but was then subject to so much amendment and re-interpretation as to render it compatible with world peace. Meanwhile, in the hadith — the non-Koranic sayings of the Prophet — the tradition arose that Muhammad had called holy war the “lesser jihad” and said that the “greater jihad” was the struggle against animal impulses within each Muslim’s soul.
Why do people tend to hear only one side of the story? A common explanation is that the digital age makes it easy to wall yourself off from inconvenient data, to spend your time in ideological “cocoons,” to hang out at blogs where you are part of a choir that gets preached to.
Makes sense to me. But, however big a role the Internet plays, it’s just amplifying something human: a tendency to latch onto evidence consistent with your worldview and ignore or downplay contrary evidence.
This side of human nature is generally labeled a bad thing, and it’s true that it sponsors a lot of bigotry, strife and war. But it actually has its upside. It means that the regrettable parts of the Koran — the regrettable parts of any religious scripture — don’t have to matter.
After all, the adherents of a given religion, like everyone else, focus on things that confirm their attitudes and ignore things that don’t. And they carry that tunnel vision into their own scripture; if there is hatred in their hearts, they’ll fasten onto the hateful parts of scripture, but if there’s not, they won’t. That’s why American Muslims of good will can describe Islam simply as a religion of love. They see the good parts of scripture, and either don’t see the bad or have ways of minimizing it.
So too with people who see in the Bible a loving and infinitely good God. They can maintain that view only by ignoring or downplaying parts of their scripture.
For example, there are those passages where God hands out the death sentence to infidels. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are told to commit genocide — to destroy nearby peoples who worship the wrong Gods, and to make sure to kill all men, women and children. (“You must not let anything that breathes remain alive.”)
As for the New Testament, there’s that moment when Jesus calls a woman and her daughter “dogs” because they aren’t from Israel. In a way that’s the opposite of anti-Semitism — but not in a good way. And speaking of anti-Semitism, the New Testament, like the Koran, has some unflattering things to say about Jews.
Devoted Bible readers who aren’t hateful ignore or downplay all these passages rather than take them as guidance. They put to good use the tunnel vision that is part of human nature.
All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.
Of course, the street runs both ways. Muslims can influence the attitudes of Christians and Jews and hence the meanings of their texts. The less threatening that Muslims seem, the more welcoming Christians and Jews will be, and the more benign Christianity and Judaism will be. (A good first step would be to bring more Americans into contact with some of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are in fact not threatening.)
You can even imagine a kind of virtuous circle: the less menacing each side seems, the less menacing the other side becomes — which in turn makes the first side less menacing still, and so on; the meaning of the Abrahamic scriptures would, in a real sense, get better and better and better.
Lately, it seems, things have been moving in the opposite direction; the circle has been getting vicious. And it’s in the nature of vicious circles that they’re hard to stop, much less reverse. On the other hand, if, through the concerted effort of people of good will, you do reverse a vicious circle, the very momentum that sustained it can build in the other direction — and at that point the force will be with you.
Postscript: The quotations of the Koran come from Sura 4:171 (where Jesus is called God’s word), and Sura 44:32 (where the “children of Israel” are lauded). I’ve used the Rodwell translation, but the only place the choice of translator matters is the part that says God presciently placed the children of Israel above all others. Other translations say “purposefully,” or “knowingly.” By the way, if you’re curious as to the reason for the Koran’s seeming ambivalence toward Christians and Jews:
By my reading, the Koran is to a large extent the record of Muhammad’s attempt to bring all the area’s Christians, Jews and Arab polytheists into his Abrahamic flock, and it reflects, in turns, both his bitter disappointment at failing to do so and the many theological and ritual overtures he had made along the way. (For a time Muslims celebrated Yom Kippur, and they initially prayed toward Jerusalem, not Mecca.) That the suras aren’t ordered chronologically obscures this underlying logic.
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Second post:
http://evolutionofgod.net/swordverse
Here is the exegis Wright mentions in my previous post-- I am left with wondering whether Muslims define Christians concept of Jesus as polytheism:
excerpt from
Chapter 17
* * *
Right-wing Web sites devoted to showing the “truth about Islam” array searing verses that seem to show the Koran offering a nearly unlimited license to kill. (A few years after 9/11, a list of “the Koran’s 111 Jihad verses” was posted on the conservative Web site freerepublic.com.) But the closer you look at the context of these verses, the more limited the license seems.
The passage most often quoted is the fifth verse of the ninth sura, long known to Muslims as the “Sword verse.” It was cited by Osama bin Laden in a famous manifesto issued in 1996, and on first reading it does seem to say that bin Laden would be justified in hunting down any non-Muslim on the planet. The verse is often translated colloquially—particularly on these right-wing Web sites—as “kill the infidels wherever you find them.”
This common translation is wrong. The verse doesn’t actually mention “infidels” but rather refers to “those who join other gods with God”—which is to say, polytheists. So, bin Laden notwithstanding, the “Sword verse” isn’t the strongest imaginable basis for attacking Christians and Jews.
Still, even if the Sword verse wasn’t aimed at Christians and Jews, it is undeniably bloody: “And when the sacred months are passed, kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every kind of ambush.” It seems that a polytheist’s only escape from this fate is to convert to Islam, “observe prayer, and pay the obligatory alms.”
But the next verse, rarely quoted by either jihadists or right-wing Web sites, suggests that conversion isn’t actually necessary: “If any one of those who join gods with God ask an asylum of thee, grant him an asylum, that he may hear the Word of God, and then let him reach his place of safety.” After all, polytheists are “people devoid of knowledge.”
And the following verse suggests that whole tribes of polytheists can be spared if they’re not a military threat. If those “who add gods to God” made “a league [with the Muslims] at the sacred temple,” then “so long as they are true to you, be ye true to them; for God loveth those who fear Him.” For that matter, the verse immediately before the Sword verse also takes some of the edge off it, exempting from attack “those polytheists with whom ye are in league, and who shall have afterwards in no way failed you, nor aided anyone against you.”
In short, “kill the polytheists wherever you find them” doesn’t mean “kill the polytheists wherever you find them.” It means “kill the polytheists who aren’t on your side in this particular war.”
Presumably, particular wars were the typical context for the Koran’s martial verses—in which case Muhammad’s exhortations to kill infidels en masse were short-term motivational devices. Indeed, sometimes the violence is explicitly confined to the war’s duration: “When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters. And afterwards let there either be free dismissals or ransomings, till the war hath laid down its burdens.”
Of course, if you quote the first half of that verse and not the second half—as both jihadists and some western commentators might be tempted to do—this sounds like a death sentence for unbelievers everywhere and forever. The Koran contains a number of such eminently misquotable lines. Repeatedly Muhammad makes a declaration that, in unalloyed form, sounds purely belligerent—and then proceeds to provide the alloy. Thus: “And think not that the infidels shall escape Us! . . . Make ready then against them what force ye can, and strong squadrons whereby ye may strike terror into the enemy of God and your enemy.” Then, about thirty words later: “And if they lean to peace, lean thou also to it; and put thy trust in God.”
If the Koran were a manual for all-out jihad, it would deem unbelief by itself sufficient cause for attack. It doesn’t. Here is a verse thought to be from the late Medinan period: “God doth not forbid you to deal with kindness and fairness toward those who have not made war upon you on account of your religion, or driven you forth from your homes: for God loveth those who act with fairness. Only doth God forbid you to make friends of those who, on account of your religion, have warred against you, and have driven you forth from your homes, and have aided those who drove you forth.”
Besides, even when enmity is in order, it needn’t be forever: “God will, perhaps, establish good will between yourselves and those of them whom ye take to be your enemies: God is Powerful: and God is Gracious.”
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The Wahabis do definitely define the christian trinity as polytheism. Robert Wright is no islamic scholar, and his weak attempts at defanging islamic theology are wrong and embarrassingly ignorant of what the koran, sunna and hadith teach muslims.
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Instead of trying to sell his hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya b.s. here, Robert Wright needs to go to the muslim world and convince them of the peaceful and moderate nature of islamic theology.
He can start with the cleric below.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/05/jordanian-muslim-cleric-islam-will-rule-the-world-america-will-fall.html
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/09/05/ , , , though I think the example of ending the Iran-Iraq War well wide of the mark , , ,
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/09/09/ et seq
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Robert Wright has written two outstanding books on evolutionary psychology:
The Moral Animal, and
Non-Zero Sum, the logic of human destiny
Here is his piece from today's POTH. Is he right? If not, where is he wrong?
=========================
As if we needed more evidence of America’s political polarization, last week Juan Williams gave the nation a Rorschach test. Williams said he gets scared when people in “Muslim garb” board a plane he’s on, and he promptly got (a) fired by NPR and (b) rewarded by Fox News with a big contract.
Suppose Williams had said something hurtful to gay people instead of to Muslims. Suppose he had said gay men give him the creeps because he fears they’ll make sexual advances. NPR might well have fired him, but would Fox News have chosen that moment to give him a $2-million pat on the back?
I don’t think so. Playing the homophobia card is costlier than playing the Islamophobia card. Or at least, the costs are more evenly spread across the political spectrum. In 2007, when Ann Coulter used a gay slur, she was denounced on the right as well as the left, and her stock dropped. Notably, her current self-promotion campaign stresses her newfound passion for gay rights.
Coulter’s comeuppance reflected sustained progress on the gay rights front. Only a few decades ago, you could tell an anti-gay joke on the Johnny Carson show — with Carson’s active participation — and no one would complain. (See postscript below for details.) The current “it gets better” campaign, designed to reassure gay teenagers that adulthood will be less oppressive than adolescence, amounts to a kind of double entrendre: things get better not just over an individual’s life but over the nation’s life.
When we move from homophobia to Islamophobia, the trendline seems to be pointing in the opposite direction. This isn’t shocking, given 9/11 and the human tendency to magnify certain kinds of risk. (Note to Juan Williams: Over the past nine years about 90 million flights have taken off from American airports, and not one has been brought down by a Muslim terrorist. Even in 2001, no flights were brought down by people in “Muslim garb.”)
A few decades ago, people all over America knew and liked gay people — they just didn’t realize they were gay.
.Still, however “natural” this irrational fear, it’s dangerous. As Islamophobia grows, it alienates Muslims, raising the risk of homegrown terrorism — and homegrown terrorism heightens the Islamophobia, which alienates more Muslims, and so on: a vicious circle that could carry America into the abyss. So it’s worth taking a look at why homophobia is fading; maybe the underlying dynamic is transplantable to the realm of inter-ethnic prejudice.
Theories differ as to what it takes for people to build bonds across social divides, and some theories offer more hope than others.
One of the less encouraging theories grows out of the fact that both homophobia and Islamophobia draw particular strength from fundamentalist Christians. Maybe, this argument goes, part of the problem is a kind of “scriptural determinism.” If religious texts say that homosexuality is bad, or that people of other faiths are bad, then true believers will toe that line.
If scripture is indeed this powerful, we’re in trouble, because scripture is invoked by intolerant people of all Abrahamic faiths — including the Muslim terrorists who plant the seeds of Islamophobia. And, judging by the past millennium or two, God won’t be issuing a revised version of the Bible or the Koran anytime soon.
Happily, there’s a new book that casts doubt on the power of intolerant scripture: “American Grace,” by the social scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell.
Three decades ago, according to one of the many graphs in this data-rich book, slightly less than half of America’s frequent churchgoers were fine with gay people freely expressing their views on gayness. Today that number is over 70 percent — and no biblical verse bearing on homosexuality has magically changed in the meanwhile. And these numbers actually understate the progress; over those three decades, church attendance was dropping for mainline Protestant churches and liberal Catholics, so the “frequent churchgoers” category consisted increasingly of evangelicals and conservative Catholics.
So why have conservative Christians gotten less homophobic? Putnam and Campbell favor the “bridging” model. The idea is that tolerance is largely a question of getting to know people. If, say, your work brings you in touch with gay people or Muslims — and especially if your relationship with them is collaborative — this can brighten your attitude toward the whole tribe they’re part of. And if this broader tolerance requires ignoring or reinterpreting certain scriptures, so be it; the meaning of scripture is shaped by social relations.
The bridging model explains how attitudes toward gays could have made such rapid progress. A few decades ago, people all over America knew and liked gay people — they just didn’t realize these people were gay. So by the time gays started coming out of the closet, the bridge had already been built.
And once straight Americans followed the bridge’s logic — once they, having already accepted people who turned out to be gay, accepted gayness itself — more gay people felt comfortable coming out. And the more openly gay people there were, the more straight people there were who realized they had gay friends, and so on: a virtuous circle.
So could bridging work with Islamophobia? Could getting to know Muslims have the healing effect that knowing gay people has had?
The good news is that bridging does seem to work across religious divides. Putnam and Campbell did surveys with the same pool of people over consecutive years and found, for example, that gaining evangelical friends leads to a warmer assessment of evangelicals (by seven degrees on a “feeling thermometer” per friend gained, if you must know).
And what about Muslims? Did Christians warm to Islam as they got to know Muslims — and did Muslims return the favor?
That’s the bad news. The population of Muslims is so small, and so concentrated in distinct regions, that there weren’t enough such encounters to yield statistically significant data. And, as Putnam and Campbell note, this is a recipe for prejudice. Being a small and geographically concentrated group makes it hard for many people to know you, so not much bridging naturally happens. That would explain why Buddhists and Mormons, along with Muslims, get low feeling-thermometer ratings in America.
In retrospect, the situation of gays a few decades ago was almost uniquely conducive to rapid progress. The gay population, though not huge, was finely interspersed across the country, with representatives in virtually every high school, college and sizeable workplace. And straights had gotten to know them without even seeing the border they were crossing in the process.
So the engineering challenge in building bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims will be big. Still, at least we grasp the nuts and bolts of the situation. It’s a matter of bringing people into contact with the “other” in a benign context. And it’s a matter of doing it fast, before the vicious circle takes hold, spawning appreciable homegrown terrorism and making fear of Muslims less irrational.
After 9/11, philanthropic foundations spent a lot of money arranging confabs whose participants spanned the divide between “Islam” and “the West.” Meaningful friendships did form across this border, and that’s good. It’s great that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a cosmopolitan, progressive Muslim, got to know lots of equally cosmopolitan Christians and Jews.
But as we saw when he decided to build an Islamic Community Center near ground zero, this sort of high-level networking — bridging among elites whose attitudes aren’t really the problem in the first place — isn’t enough. Philanthropists need to figure out how you build lots of little bridges at the grass roots level. And they need to do it fast.
Postscript: As for the Johnny Carson episode: I don’t like to rely on my memory alone for decades-old anecdotes, but in this case I’m 99.8 percent sure that I remember the basics accurately. Carson’s guest was the drummer Buddy Rich. In a supposedly spontaneous but obviously pre-arranged exchange, Rich said something like, “People often ask me, What is Johnny Carson really like?” Carson looked at Rich warily and said, “And how do you respond to this query?” But he paused between “this” and “query,” theatrically ratcheting up the wariness by an increment or two, and then pronounced the word “query” as “queery.” Rich immediately replied, “Like that.” Obviously, there are worse anti-gay jokes than this. Still, the premise was that being gay was something to be ashamed of. That Googling doesn’t turn up any record of this episode suggests that it didn’t enter the national conversation or the national memory. I don’t think that would be the case today. And of course, anecdotes aside, there is lots of polling data showing the extraordinary progress made since the Johnny Carson era on such issues as gay marriage and on gay rights in general.
On another note: Here’s my review of “American Grace”. (I should note that the authors’ exposition of the “bridging” dynamic comes in the context of interfaith tolerance, not gay-straight tolerance. But I have little doubt that they think the dynamic applies to both contexts.)
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I forget, did Ann Coulter have to go into hiding after making an anti-gay statement? How many buildings are missing from the Manhattan skyline because of radical homosexuals? Gays tend to inflict lots of violence on their fellow gays, as well as fatal viriii, but but aside from some ugly anti-christian acts, tend not to harm the greater public, to the best of my knowledge.
Is this really that hard to figure out?
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Well duh, no. Wright here presents a very common line of thought, so I am hoping for a nice little outline of the counter syllogism. :-)
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There are stupid people and then there are smart people who choose to be stupid because it wins them approval they are seeking from certain others. Robert Wright is obviously trying for the latter. He isn't interested in facts. The information is easily available and obvious to anyone who wanted to spend 5 minutes researching the topic. His integrity clearly means less to him than his need for approval from the left. He isn't interested in logic or facts in this matter.
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I don't think Williams was expressing a phobia (irrational fear) of Muslims. He was IMO expressing a rational wish to not die in a plane crash. The intent of the horror of 9/11 and other attacks was not for the .001% of Americans who were killed, but to place the fear in the other 300 million people here and billions around the globe. Juan Williams was saying that effect is still there for him. The only issue is whether he should or should not have reported his honest feeling publicly. The blame doesn't go to Juan Williams or to the peaceful Muslims, it goes to the people who so dramatically created that link.
Some gay people have a gay agenda and want something from the rest of us politically. Most gay people want life liberty and pursuit of happiness like the rest of us. Some non-gays see the gay acts as unnatural and repulsive. Some express those real feelings honestly and get ripped for it. But GM already said it, no gay movement we know of is intentionally associating gayness or gay agenda with death to America or danger on airplanes.
Regardless of the author's other good works, this comparison is based on a false premise.
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I emailed Robert Wright this yesterday:
Islamaphobia?
Is her fear irrational?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17cartoon.html
A cartoonist in Seattle who promoted an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” last spring is now in hiding after her life was threatened by Islamic extremists.
The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has changed her name and has stopped producing work for a local alternative newspaper, Seattle Weekly, according to the newspaper’s editor, Mark D. Fefer.
Mr. Fefer declined an interview request Thursday, citing “the sensitivity of the situation.” But in a letter to readers about Ms. Norris on Wednesday, he said that “on the insistence of top security specialists at the F.B.I., she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.”
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I emailed Robert Wright this yesterday:
Islamaphobia?
Is her fear irrational?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17cartoon.html
A cartoonist in Seattle who promoted an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” last spring is now in hiding after her life was threatened by Islamic extremists.
The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has changed her name and has stopped producing work for a local alternative newspaper, Seattle Weekly, according to the newspaper’s editor, Mark D. Fefer.
Mr. Fefer declined an interview request Thursday, citing “the sensitivity of the situation.” But in a letter to readers about Ms. Norris on Wednesday, he said that “on the insistence of top security specialists at the F.B.I., she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.”
No response thus far. I sent this today:
Keeping in mind the news today, would you feel afraid to get on a plane with a package mailed by a muslim? If you did, would that be an irrational fear?
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/maldives/8095705/You-are-swine-and-infidels-.-.-.-secret-insults-at-wedding-blessing-in-paradise.html
The couple chose an idyllic resort in the Maldives as the perfect place to renew their marriage vows and pledge everlasting love.
But their happiness has turned to humiliation after the wedding video was posted on YouTube and subtitles disclosed that their "Islamic blessing", which was conducted by a hotel employee in the native Dhivehi language, was in fact a stream of insults.
"You are swine. The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine. Your marriage is not a valid one," he intoned as the couple held up their hands in prayer, blissfully unaware of what was being said.
Dismissing them as pork-eating "infidels", the employee went on: "You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel. The other too is an infidel and, we have reason to believe, an atheist who does not even believe in an infidel religion.
"You fornicate and make a lot of children. You drink and you eat pork. Most of the children that you have are marked with spots and blemishes."
Several other staff members were present at the ceremony but said nothing. One appeared to be stifling a laugh.
The "celebrant", identified as Hussein Didi, made reference to bestiality and "frequent fornication by homosexuals". Close inspection of the official-looking document in front of him reveals it to be a copy of the staff employment regulations.
The video was shot by hotel employees who can be heard sniggering in the background and debating whether or not the bride is wearing a bra. "Don't look at the breasts!" says one as the bride leans over in her white wedding gown to plant a coconut palm. "My beard has gone grey watching those things. I have seen so many of them now that I don't even want to look any more when I see them."
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http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/quran/098.qmt.html
098.006
YUSUFALI: Those who reject (Truth), among the People of the Book and among the Polytheists, will be in Hell-Fire, to dwell therein (for aye). They are the worst of creatures.
PICKTHAL: Lo! those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings.
SHAKIR: Surely those who disbelieve from among the followers of the Book and the polytheists shall be in the fire of hell, abiding therein; they are the worst of men.
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005.056
YUSUFALI: As to those who turn (for friendship) to Allah, His Messenger, and the (fellowship of) believers,- it is the fellowship of Allah that must certainly triumph.
PICKTHAL: And whoso taketh Allah and His messenger and those who believe for guardian (will know that), lo! the party of Allah, they are the victorious.
SHAKIR: And whoever takes Allah and His messenger and those who believe for a guardian, then surely the party of Allah are they that shall be triumphant.
005.057
YUSUFALI: O ye who believe! take not for friends and protectors those who take your religion for a mockery or sport,- whether among those who received the Scripture before you, or among those who reject Faith; but fear ye Allah, if ye have faith (indeed).
PICKTHAL: O Ye who believe! Choose not for guardians such of those who received the Scripture before you, and of the disbelievers, as make a jest and sport of your religion. But keep your duty to Allah if ye are true believers.
SHAKIR: O you who believe! do not take for guardians those who take your religion for a mockery and a joke, from among those who were given the Book before you and the unbelievers; and be careful of (your duty to) Allah if you are believers.
005.058
YUSUFALI: When ye proclaim your call to prayer they take it (but) as mockery and sport; that is because they are a people without understanding.
PICKTHAL: And when ye call to prayer they take it for a jest and sport. That is because they are a folk who understand not.
SHAKIR: And when you call to prayer they make it a mockery and a joke; this is because they are a people who do not understand.
005.059
YUSUFALI: Say: "O people of the Book! Do ye disapprove of us for no other reason than that we believe in Allah, and the revelation that hath come to us and that which came before (us), and (perhaps) that most of you are rebellious and disobedient?"
PICKTHAL: Say: O People of the Scripture! Do ye blame us for aught else than that we believe in Allah and that which is revealed unto us and that which was revealed aforetime, and because most of you are evil-livers?
SHAKIR: Say: O followers of the Book! do you find fault with us (for aught) except that we believe in Allah and in what has been revealed to us and what was revealed before, and that most of you are transgressors?
005.060
YUSUFALI: Say: "Shall I point out to you something much worse than this, (as judged) by the treatment it received from Allah? those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil;- these are (many times) worse in rank, and far more astray from the even path!"
PICKTHAL: Shall I tell thee of a worse (case) than theirs for retribution with Allah? (Worse is the case of him) whom Allah hath cursed, him on whom His wrath hath fallen and of whose sort Allah hath turned some to apes and swine, and who serveth idols. Such are in worse plight and further astray from the plain road.
SHAKIR: Say: Shall I inform you of (him who is) worse than this in retribution from Allah? (Worse is he) whom Allah has cursed and brought His wrath upon, and of whom He made apes and swine, and he who served the Shaitan; these are worse in place and more erring from the straight path.
005.061
YUSUFALI: When they come to thee, they say: "We believe": but in fact they enter with a mind against Faith, and they go out with the same but Allah knoweth fully all that they hide.
PICKTHAL: When they come unto you (Muslims), they say: We believe; but they came in unbelief and they went out in the same; and Allah knoweth best what they were hiding.
SHAKIR: And when they come to you, they say: We believe; and indeed they come in with unbelief and indeed they go forth with it; and Allah knows best what they concealed.
005.062
YUSUFALI: Many of them dost thou see, racing each other in sin and rancour, and their eating of things forbidden. Evil indeed are the things that they do.
PICKTHAL: And thou seest many of them vying one with another in sin and transgression and their devouring of illicit gain. Verily evil is what they do.
SHAKIR: And you will see many of them striving with one another to hasten in sin and exceeding the limits, and their eating of what is unlawfully acquired; certainly evil is that which they do.
005.063
YUSUFALI: Why do not the rabbis and the doctors of Law forbid them from their (habit of) uttering sinful words and eating things forbidden? Evil indeed are their works.
PICKTHAL: Why do not the rabbis and the priests forbid their evil-speaking and their devouring of illicit gain? Verily evil is their handiwork.
SHAKIR: Why do not the learned men and the doctors of law prohibit them from their speaking of what is sinful and their eating of what is unlawfully acquired? Certainly evil is that which they work.
005.064
YUSUFALI: The Jews say: "Allah's hand is tied up." Be their hands tied up and be they accursed for the (blasphemy) they utter. Nay, both His hands are widely outstretched: He giveth and spendeth (of His bounty) as He pleaseth. But the revelation that cometh to thee from Allah increaseth in most of them their obstinate rebellion and blasphemy. Amongst them we have placed enmity and hatred till the Day of Judgment. Every time they kindle the fire of war, Allah doth extinguish it; but they (ever) strive to do mischief on earth. And Allah loveth not those who do mischief.
PICKTHAL: The Jews say: Allah's hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so. Nay, but both His hands are spread out wide in bounty. He bestoweth as He will. That which hath been revealed unto thee from thy Lord is certain to increase the contumacy and disbelief of many of them, and We have cast among them enmity and hatred till the Day of Resurrection. As often as they light a fire for war, Allah extinguisheth it. Their effort is for corruption in the land, and Allah loveth not corrupters.
SHAKIR: And the Jews say: The hand of Allah is tied up! Their hands shall be shackled and they shall be cursed for what they say. Nay, both His hands are spread out, He expends as He pleases; and what has been revealed to you from your Lord will certainly make many of them increase in inordinacy and unbelief; and We have put enmity and hatred among them till the day of resurrection; whenever they kindle a fire for war Allah puts it out, and they strive to make mischief in the land; and Allah does not love the mischief-makers.
005.065
YUSUFALI: If only the People of the Book had believed and been righteous, We should indeed have blotted out their iniquities and admitted them to gardens of bliss.
PICKTHAL: If only the People of the Scripture would believe and ward off (evil), surely We should remit their sins from them and surely We should bring them into Gardens of Delight.
SHAKIR: And if the followers of the Book had believed and guarded (against evil) We would certainly have covered their evil deeds and We would certainly have made them enter gardens of bliss
005.066
YUSUFALI: If only they had stood fast by the Law, the Gospel, and all the revelation that was sent to them from their Lord, they would have enjoyed happiness from every side. There is from among them a party on the right course: but many of them follow a course that is evil.
PICKTHAL: If they had observed the Torah and the Gospel and that which was revealed unto them from their Lord, they would surely have been nourished from above them and from beneath their feet. Among them there are people who are moderate, but many of them are of evil conduct.
SHAKIR: And if they had kept up the Taurat and the Injeel and that which was revealed to them from their Lord, they would certainly have eaten from above them and from beneath their feet there is a party of them keeping to the moderate course, and (as for) most of them, evil is that which they do
_______________________________________________
007.166
YUSUFALI: When in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions, We said to them: "Be ye apes, despised and rejected."
PICKTHAL: So when they took pride in that which they had been forbidden, We said unto them: Be ye apes despised and loathed!
SHAKIR: Therefore when they revoltingly persisted in what they had been forbidden, We said to them: Be (as) apes, despised and hated.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/01/allahs_special_little_apes_and.html
January 26, 2005
Allah's special little apes and pigs
By James Arlandson
It has been bandied about in the media that Islamic fanatics shriek that Allah turned certain Jews into apes and pigs. Is this true?
If it is, where does this harsh polemics come from? Do they get it from the hadith (Muhammad's sayings and deeds outside of the Quran)? From later traditions? From thin air?
Sadly, fanatics get it from the Quran itself, in three different verses: 7:166, 2:60, and 5:65.
To show how, we follow a specific method of exegesis (detailed analysis of a text), where relevant. First, the historical context of the three verses is explained, so their meaning can be made clear. Second, the literary context of each one is described, so we do not take them out of context—a frequent reflexive reaction from Muslims. Third, we quote them from a reputable Muslim translator, not a Western one, so that the Muslims speak for themselves in their sacred book. Fourth, we explain the content of the verse itself, such as key words. Fifth, we compare them with a passage or two from the New Testament, so we can put Islam into a clear perspective. And finally we look at how fanatics use the verses.
Sura 7:166
The historical context of this sura (chapter) is Muhammad's persecution by his fellow Meccans before his Hijrah or Emigration from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. Still, despite this persecution, Muhammad seeks to demonstrate that his revelations are superior to the Torah and Moses, and this brings us to the literary context, which is far more revealing of the content of Sura 7:166 than the historical context.
After recounting the stories of various prophets, Muhammad comes to Moses (v. 103) and sketches out Moses' mission: he liberates the Children of Israel from the grip of Pharaoh (vv. 103—137); he encounters God on Mt. Sinai on which he receives the Two Tablets (vv. 142—147); and finally he confronts Israel's transgression in worshipping the golden calf (148—156). Now Muhammad turns to himself and asserts that the Torah (and the Gospels) describes himself and his Quran; he is now the one who commands people to do good and forbids them to do wrong; that is, he is the one who is rightly guided and who now fulfills and completes Moses (and Jesus).
Muhammad then recounts a legend—not found in the Talmudists—about Jews fishing or working on the Sabbath in a town that tradition says was located on the Red Sea (vv. 163—167). God made fish appear on the surface only on the Sabbath, never on weekdays. This tempted some Jewish fishermen to break their holy day of rest, ignoring their teachers' warnings. The Sabbath—breakers become so arrogant and deep in their violations that God addresses�them in the royal 'We':
7:166 But when even after this they disdainfully persisted in that from which they �were forbidden, We said to them, 'Become apes—despised and disgraced!' (Maududi)
The question is: should this verse be taken literally or metaphorically? That is, were these Jews physically transformed? This question is better answered in two later passages, chronologically speaking, in the Quran.
Sura 2:65
The historical context of Sura 2:65, as far as this can be determined, sees the founding of the Muslim community in Medina, a year or two after the Hijrah. Muhammad works hard at reconciling his message with the earlier religion of Judaism—indeed, he sees himself as a reformer of both Judaism and Christianity. But the Jews do not receive his message for two major reasons: he is a Gentile, and his knowledge of the Torah is confused. But the polemics�have not yet heated up, at least not as much as�they will be.
Thus, the literary context of Sura 2:65, having as its background the fishermen's legend in Sura 7:163—166, says that if the People of the Book (Jews and Christians, but he deals mostly with Jews in Medina) believe in Allah, the Last Day, and do good, they will not suffer at judgment. However, Muhammad issues a warning against Sabbath—breakers. Allah through Muhammad addresses the Jews as 'you' and refers to himself in the royal 'We':
2:65 And you know well the story of those among you who broke Sabbath. We said to them: 'Be apes—despised and hated by all.'� 66 Thus We made their end a warning to the people of their time and succeeding generation, and an admonition for God—fearing people. (Maududi)
So the question, again, is—does this passage support the literal or figurative transformation of the Jews?
Modern commentators with the exception of Maududi explain that this transformation is a metaphor. For example, M.A.S. Abdel Haleem says in his notes in his Oxford University Press translation (2004) that it is a figure of speech. The radical Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, who was tried and executed for plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government, says that one does not need to be concerned with whether the metamorphosis was physical, for the Jews' minds and spirits fell into a beastly state. He is also honest enough to say, though, that the Arabic implies that it really happened physically, e.g. 'Be apes,' not 'be as or like apes.' Two commentators and apologists, Muhammad Yusuf Ali and Maulana Muhammad Ali, in both of their translations and commentaries, take it figuratively, inserting the softening words 'as' and 'like.'
But the hadith and earlier commentators believe that Allah transformed them literally. For example, Ibn Ishaq, an early and reliable biographer of Muhammad, takes the metamorphosis literally, and he has Muhammad calling the Medinan Jewish clan, Qurayzah, 'brothers of monkeys.' Medieval commentator Ibn Kathir references Ibn Abbas, Muhammad's cousin, who interpreted this metamorphosis literally, implying that Muhammad did too. The Iranian Medieval commentator Razi, widely respected even today, speculates that perhaps the 'accidents' or appearances of the Jews were changed, but they kept their mental awareness. Even the Medieval mystic and commentator Ibn Arabi says that the transformation, at its base, is real and not metaphorical, though he puts mystical spins on the verse.
Maududi the modern scholar agrees with the classics: 'In my opinion their bodies were transformed into those of apes, but their human minds were left intact in order to subject them to extreme torture.' He says of the Arabic wording: 'The words of the Qur'an . . . indicate that it was not a moral but a physical metamorphosis.'
More important than all of these is Muhammad. Did he take this transformation literally or metaphorically? A hint is found in v. 66. He needs to hold over the heads of his enemies (and the God—fearing people) this miraculous act and threaten them with the same punishment. It is a very special historical case designed to warn people. It must be seen as an object lesson, and in this case the objects are the literally changed Jews.
Also, Muhammad is constantly incorporating tall tales into his Quran, which too often make Jews look bad, such as the fiction about Moses and Khidir, a servant (so named in Islamic tradition, but not in the Quran). Khidir leads Moses around by the nose, so to speak, revealing to the baffled prophet the divine purposes of Allah (Sura 18:60—82). The clear message: Muhammad is better than Moses. Hence, a physical metamorphosis in v. 65 would fit with such passages that make Jews look bad.
Thus, it is Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad's cousin Ibn Abbas, the classical commentators, and Maududi, agreeing with Muhammad, who correctly interpret these verses, not the moderns.
Sura 5:60
The historical context of Sura 5:60 is difficult to pin down. It may have been revealed five to seven years after the Hijrah, or some scholars place it a year or two later. Whatever the exact timeframe, Muhammad's polemic against the Jews heats up, since time has elapsed after his Hijrah, and the confrontations have increased. In fact, he has expelled by now two major Jewish clans from Medina, the Qaynuqa and the Nadir; and if the later date of Sura 5 is acceptable, then he has beheaded around 600 male Jews of the Qurayzah clan. (For more information on these violent expulsions and this atrocity, see this article.)
Thus, the literary context of Sura 5:60, having as its background the fishermen's legend in Sura 7:163—166, sees Muhammad exhorting his Muslims not to take as allies those who ridicule his religion and make fun of it—whether they are People of the Book or unbelievers (v. 57). This verse reflects historical reality, for sometimes a few Jews and unbelievers would in fact make fun of his revelations. He then issues another warning, similar to the one in 2:65, against the Jews who are on the verge of being severely punished, just as the Jews in the past were, when they were transformed into apes and pigs. Allah is commanding his prophet to 'say' the following:
5:60 Say: 'Shall I tell you [People of the Book] who will receive a worse reward from God? Those whom God has cursed and with whom He has been angry, transforming them into apes and swine, and those who serve the devil. Worse is the plight of these, and they have strayed farther from the right path.' (Dawood)
The Jews are said to be turned into apes and swine for generally disbelieving in Muhammad's revelations—in this case warning them for resenting Muhammad and his Quran (v. 59). The wording of this verse differs from the previous two verses, for here Muhammad matter—of—factly reports that Allah was angry with certain ones, 'transforming' them into apes and swine; he does not give the command, 'Be apes!' This report should leave no doubt that Muhammad believed that this actually happened physically as a warning and an object lesson.
Finally, we can get a clearer perspective on Islam if we compare it with Christianity.
To begin with, Yusuf Ali in his commentary on Sura 5:60 is terribly mistaken when he compares the Quranic verse with Matt. 8:28—32, in which demons went into swine, after Jesus cast them out from two poor, possessed men. Jesus commanding demons to go into a herd of swine is far different from Allah turning Jews into apes and swine. But Yusuf Ali's comparison shows how far Muslim apologists will go in order to defend the ambiguities in their sacred book.
Next, Jesus calls Jewish religious leaders a 'brood of vipers' (Matt. 12:34) and 'snakes' and again a 'brood of vipers' (Matt. 23:33), but the differences between Muhammad's epithets and Christ's are profound.
First, on an historical and sociological level (setting aside theology), Jesus himself was a Jewish religious leader, beginning a new 'movement' within Israel, so he was dealing with his own community. Muhammad, on the other hand, was an outsider to Judaism, not a Jew, but a Gentile. Thus, an insider (Jesus) speaking emotionally to his own household is different from a stranger (Muhammad) storming into the house and forcing holiness onto the occupants.
Second, not even a wisp of a faint hint suggests that Jesus took his denunciation literally. He is simply following a tradition of prophetic denunciations found, say, in the Book of Enoch or in Elijah or the other prophets. After all, in Matt. 23:27—part of the literary context of 23:33—he likens the religious leaders to whitewashed tombs, but he does not believe that they literally are. Furthermore, in a gentler metaphor he refers to his people as sheep (John 10:14), but he does not believe that they literally are. Muhammad, on the other hand, indicates by his wording in Arabic and by the literary context that some Jews were actually and literally turned into apes and swine as a special punishment, to warn people. Thus, the original Greek in the Gospel of Matthew does not say, 'Be a brood of vipers!' Rather, Jesus uses a straightforward epithet, 'You brood of vipers!' The Quran, in contrast, says: 'Be apes!' as in 'presto—change—o!'
Consequently, no reputable priest or pastor or scholar today in Christianity ever discusses whether these Jewish religious leaders were actually turned into snakes and vipers—or whether the common people were turned into sheep. However, in Islam today, scholars discuss this sort of transformation precisely because of the Arabic in Suras 2:65—66, 5:60, and 7:163—166, and because of the literary context of each passage indicates an actual, physical metamorphosis.
This brings us to the last and most important point. All of the discussion over whether the transformation was literal or figurative, according to the moderns or the earlier commentators and Maududi, is really academic, for the terrorists and non—violent fanatics shriek that the transmogrification dehumanizes Jews today—a replay of Nazi propaganda.
At the Sheikh Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris, employee in the Religious Affairs Ministry in the Palestinian Authority, uses the Battle of Badr (AD 624) as a rallying cry for his fellow jihadists to fight the Jews, who are the descendants of apes and pigs.
Then came the great battle of Badr, where the Muslims grew stronger. This brought the third stage of dealing with the Jewish existence in Al—Madina. We have tolerated you for a long time — you offspring of apes and pigs! We have tolerated you for a long time.
The Imam of the Al—Haram mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abd Al—Rahman Al—Sudayis, explained in one of his sermons:
Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of today: infidels, falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers, deniers of prophecies . . . the scum of the human race, accursed by Allah, who turned them into apes and pigs . . . These are the Jews — an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption . . .
At the same link, Sheikh Muhammad Al—Saleh Al—'Athimein said in a sermon at the Great Mosque in Al—'Unayza, Arabia:
O Muslims, the Jews are treacherous and deceitful people over whom lies the curse and anger of Allah. They permitted what Allah forbade, with the lamest of excuses; therefore, He cursed them and turned them into apes and pigs. Allah sentenced them to humiliation anywhere they might be . . . .�
Note how the Sheikh draws the inference for today: 'Allah sentenced them to humiliation anywhere they might be.' This means the Jews of today.
Finally, it is not all bad news in the Muslim world. The editor of an Egyptian weekly condemns�an exhibit that placed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion next to the Torah. The 'circles' are the ideologues and journalists who present the Middle East conflict by using Medieval anti—Semitic legends:
[These circles] do not flinch from disseminating, espousing, and publishing all the legends that were common in medieval Europe in order to justify Europe's persecution of the Jews because of their monopoly in financial activity and money—lending, one of which was the 'matza of blood' that the Jews [allegedly] prepare on Passover from the blood of a gentile child. These circles disseminate among Muslims the perception that all the modern Jews are the offspring of the Jews who violated the word of the Prophet Moses, whose prayer Allah then answered and turned [the Jews] into apes and pigs. [These circles also say] that the Jews are responsible for their forefathers' crime, the crucifixion of Jesus. They embraced, and still warmly embrace, the stupid book 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' fabricated by the advocates of the Czarist tyranny in Russia to arouse hatred of the Jews because many of them were participating in revolutionary activity against the [Czarist] empire.
However, in another place in the article the editor still believes that the Palestinians are oppressed, while the Israelis are the oppressors, so the positive article goes only so far.
Can the Islamic world be reformed? It seems that (semi)moderate voices like this Egyptian editor's are rare. But the liberation of Iraq, as well as of Afghanistan, is encouraging. Maybe in a few decades when (or if) a free press soaks the dry ground, we will hear more moderate views, and maybe they will prevail.
Jim Arlandson (PhD) teaches introductory philosophy and world religions at a college in southern California. He has published a book, Women, Class, and Society in Early Christianity (Hendrickson, 1997).�
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7KSHy34zyY&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7KSHy34zyY&feature=player_embedded
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http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/10/saturday-night-card-game-bill-maher-out.html
Waiting for the left to Juan Williams Bill Maher......
Yup, any time now.
**crickets**
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This evening I was watching the Bret Baier Special Report on FOX (my idea of a good news program FWIW). My 11 year old son was reading and my eight year old daughter was playing on the living room floor. A piece on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was on and my daughter started asking some serious questions. How fascinating to watch an empty cup mind engage with questions-- as is the experience of answering the questions honestly judgemental way (everything is not relative/morally equivalent/arbitary.) yet also establishing open mind thought patterns.
The next piece was on Afpakia and the complex dance there of the Whackostans, the Afghans, the Paks, and the US.
Again the questions came. How to explain to an eight year old? :? I tried talking about religous crazies and what they did to people in the name of God. The concept was hard for her to grasp. I tried explaining that they kill girls who want to learn to read and kill their teachers too because they think God says so and will reward them with heaven when they kill go impose God's word.
"But Dad, then the girls won't be educated!"
"They say God does not want the girls educated. They like bossing them around."
"Well, if they want someone to boss around, why don't they get a golden retriever? They like learning to take commands."
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The Muslim Brotherhood in the West
Oct 28th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION of The Economist
Two books with a very different approach
The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition. By Alison Pargeter. Saqi; 248 pages; £20. To be published in America by Saqi in January; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, buy from Amazon.co.UK
WHICH Muslims should Western governments engage with, and which should they shun? Since the bombings in New York and Washington on September 11th 2001, and the later attacks in Madrid and London, few questions have been so urgent or have generated such fevered debate. Some experts and government officials—Lorenzo Vidino, in the first of these books, calls them the optimists—argue for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s which now has a worldwide network of followers and institutions. A countervailing school—the pessimists, to whom Mr Vidino is closer—suggests that the Brothers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, sharing much of the militants’ agenda but hiding behind a mask of doublespeak.
Mr Vidino, who recently joined the RAND Corporation, a research outfit in Washington, DC, has in the past prophesied, in sometimes strident tones, that the Brotherhood’s ultimate goal is to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and America. He has berated those who fail to see the danger as hopelessly naive. His book is more restrained. He allows the “optimists” their say and acknowledges that the West faces a genuine dilemma in forming a judgment about such a big, baggy movement which speaks with many voices.
Though he remains a sceptic, he provides a wealth of information to let the rest of us make up our minds. He explains how in the 1950s a small, tightly knit band of Brothers successfully transplanted the movement to Europe. Led by Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, these pioneers turned Geneva and Munich into the hubs of a network of mosques and institutions lubricated with Saudi funding.
A similar process was at work in the United States, and here Mr Vidino’s charge-sheet may give even optimists pause. He makes extensive use of court documents from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based Muslim charity convicted in 2008 of channelling money to the Palestinian group, Hamas. Mr Vidino believes the documents reveal the existence of a wide and hitherto secret Brotherhood network with links to two of America’s best-known Muslim organisations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America. Both groups deny having such links, and have long condemned terrorism in unequivocal terms.
As for his bolder claim—that the movement aims at nothing less than the spread of Islamic law through Europe and America—Alison Pargeter, a Cambridge scholar and author of the second of these books, considers this scaremongering. Her book is shorter and more measured than Mr Vidino’s, and she has a surer grasp of the political dynamics of the Middle East, the soil from which the Brotherhood sprang. As her subtitle suggests, she regards it as an essentially reactionary movement unable to break with its past. Its hallmarks are pragmatism, opportunism and an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of violence.
The difference in the two authors’ approach is exemplified by their treatment of a document found by the Swiss authorities in 2001 at the home of a senior Brotherhood financier. The Arabic document, dated December 1982 and widely known as “The Project”, sets out what Mr Vidino regards as the movement’s strategy for global dominion. Ms Pargeter sees it as a “fairly mundane wish list”. The portrait of the Brotherhood that emerges from her book is scarcely attractive but it is a weaker, more fractured thing than the sleekly dangerous creature depicted by Mr Vidino.
Should the West engage with the Brothers? On this, perhaps surprisingly, the two authors agree. The Islamists have become “part of the furniture”, as Ms Pargeter puts it; besides, there are few credible alternatives. It is better to talk to them, carefully and without illusions.
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By DONALD J. KOCHAN
At this time of unrest and transition in the Arab world, the United States's capacity to communicate core values of democracy and individual liberty is a priority. Our capability to translate them into Arabic is a necessity. We need to expose the Arab world to the fundamental texts of Western political and philosophical thought. Indeed, the export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.
Of course we hear similar sentiments often. But our seduction by the power of the Internet has distracted us from remembering the power of books.
Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. State Department initiated a little-known but very important project, the Arabic Book Program. It primarily operates out of our embassies in Cairo and Amman, and the U.S. Consulate General's office in Jerusalem. As the State Department explains, the objective is "translating into Arabic, publishing and distributing selected books from American writers in various areas, including economics, management sciences, politics, humanities, arts, and the environment."
Global View Columnist Bret Stephens reveals the disturbing history of one of Egypt's rising powers.
.A March 2010 State Department Inspector General Report stated that the Cairo and Amman embassies operate the translation program, but that it "is relatively small, translating 6 to 10 titles each year." In addition, the title selection committee "meets every six months." This is hardly a rigorous production schedule, and it demonstrates a lack of serious commitment to the project.
Quality is also an issue. Despite a stated intent to do so, the Arabic Book Program has not prioritized its limited resources on primary source documents of political philosophy or books that constitute expositions on core principles that can assist struggling nations.
The "in stock" publications available from the embassy in Amman, for example, include only one text from the American founding, "The Federalist Papers." That's a good choice, but Publius cannot carry the weight alone.
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Our seduction by the power of the Internet has distracted us from remembering the power of books. The export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.
.To its credit, the program has translated Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." But these are not listed as in stock. In contrast, available titles currently circulating include things like the popular environmental studies textbook "Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of the Environmental Crisis" and novelist Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club."
Notably missing are translations of John Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" and many other influential classics of Western liberal thought. Search the program's collections and you will not find Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," but you will find a more recent book called "The Natural Wealth of Nations: Harnessing the Market for the Environment."
The Arabic Book Program was a good idea that was never taken far enough. A 2002 United Nations Arab Human Development Report noted that, "Translation is one of the most important channels for the dissemination of information and communication with the rest of the world." It added that, "The translation movement in the Arab world, however, remains static and chaotic."
The report explained that in the Arab world fewer than five translated books per million people were published in the early 1980s, while a corresponding rate in a country like Hungary was 519 translated books per million. Little has changed in the past three decades.
These failures need correction. The ongoing revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere are a stark reminder of the exigency involved. The State Department program should start doing more and better now.
Mr. Kochan is an associate professor of law at Chapman University.
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It'll be good news when any pro-western book comes close to the popularity of "Mein Kampf" in the muslim world.
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I think the piece is on to a very important point. Much thinking in the Arab world is a result of what is learned in the aftermath of the suppression of free speech. I would REALLY like to see A LOT of this.
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Can anyone show that there is a demand for these books in the muslim world?
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http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/18/the-closing-of-the-muslim-mind/
The hurdles faced in reform.
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The enemies of freedom are patient.
Are we?
Moral power is part of the American mix. We don't fight nearly as well without it as with it.
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Horse------>water
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“We should never lose sight of the fact that, no matter how entertaining a picture may be or how much money it may make, it can do our country a great deal of harm if it plays into the hands of our enemies.” – Samuel Goldwyn, Hollywood producer
In 2006, five American soldiers raped and murdered a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered other members of her family. The participants were convicted by U.S. civilian or military courts and sentenced to up to 110 years each; the ringleader, Steven Dale Green, is serving life without possibility of parole.
This horrific crime, rather than any of the countless selfless and heroic incidents performed by the U.S. military in our current wars, served as inspiration for filmmaker Brian De Palma’s 2007 barely-fictionalized movie version called Redacted. De Palma may have been the director of such popular fare as Scarface and Mission:Impossible, but American audiences showed exactly how they felt about this vile denigration of our warriors: Redacted scraped in a career-killing box office pittance of $25,000 on opening weekend.
But don’t underestimate the film’s impact abroad. John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media reports confirmation that the Muslim shooter who killed two American soldiers and wounded a third at the Frankfurt Airport earlier this month in an act of terrorism was inspired by YouTube clips from Redacted. They were presented as actual footage – along with Arabic music, text, and voiceover – in a propaganda video posted under the title “American Soldiers Rape our Sisters! Awake Oh Ummah.” (The ummah is the worldwide Muslim community.)
For better or worse, Hollywood has been called the greatest propaganda machine in human history. But what propaganda is it sending out about America and fundamentalist Islam? About terrorism? About our military and the war effort? Are Hollywood’s messages promoting our values, cultural vigor and national unity? Or are they playing into the hands of our enemy, as Samuel Goldwyn warned against?
While writing the screenplay for the movie Superman Returns several years ago, the screenwriters and director deliberately changed Superman’s classic credo – “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” – to “truth, justice, and all that stuff,” because they felt the phrase “American Way” has become loaded and outdated. The film grossed $391 million worldwide, spreading the message that Hollywood filmmakers, and presumably Americans in general, can’t even bring themselves to say “the American Way” with an unconflicted sense of pride that would have been taken for granted decades ago.
Every time Hollywood sends out such weak, apologetic cultural signals or makes such anti-American propaganda as George Clooney’s Syriana, which has been used as a recruitment tool to radicalize young Muslims; or Leonardo DiCaprio’s spy thriller Body of Lies, which puts our CIA on the same low moral footing as terrorists; or Matt Damon’s political action thriller The Green Zone, which revisits the tired leftist fantasy that America went to war in Iraq on the basis of a Bush lie; every time Hollywood produces such ideologically subversive fare, the message is reinforced here and abroad that we are the bad guys, and that our geopolitical meddling, not global jihad, is the genesis of Islamic terrorism.
Every time Hollywood rewrites history to suit its narrative of moral equivalence – as with the Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, which suggests that Christians are ruthless hypocrites, Muslims are religiously tolerant, and no one has a legitimate claim to Jerusalem – then Hollywood betrays historical truth, undercuts our moral standing and empowers our enemy.
Every time Hollywood dismisses the war on terror as “the politics of fear” and portrays Muslims as victims of our Islamophobia – as in an episode of The Simpsons, in which Midwestern oaf Homer falsely suspects a local Muslim couple of plotting to blow up a mall, or in the movie Flightplan, in which star Jodie Foster falsely accuses Arab airline passengers of kidnapping her daughter – the world takes note and Islamism advances.
And every time Hollywood churns out another anti-war movie that depicts our soldiers and their families struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, like Tobey McGuire’s Brothers, it confirms for the world what Usama bin Laden always says: The American soldier is a paper tiger. He is weak and fears death. We, on the other hand, love death more than life. We brought down one superpower – Russia – and we can bring down America.
Meanwhile the Islamists are feeding each other a steady diet of fist-pumping propaganda videos of infidels being beheaded, sniper attacks on soldiers in Iraq, paramilitary training, religious exhortations to kill Jews and Americans – and Hollywood depictions of American soldiers as raping, murdering occupiers.
Our conflict with fundamentalist Islam is the epic, defining challenge of our time. We’re at war with an enemy that, unlike us, has absolutely no crisis of confidence, no capacity for apology, and no anguished need to be liked by the rest of the world. Hollywood, post-9/11, too often undermines America in that fight at home and abroad, in ways both subtle and sweeping. It is broadcasting signals to a receptive world that we lack the cultural confidence, the moral authority, and the will to oppose evil – and that, like a dying animal, we are now easy prey for the jackals.
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By JAMES K. GLASSMAN
AND JUAN ZARATE
The twin events of the Arab Spring and the death of Osama bin Laden provide President Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the distorted narrative that the West is at war with Islam. His speech today, addressed mainly to the world's one and a half billion Muslims, is a perfect moment to establish a clear new story line—one that puts Muslims, and not the U.S., at the center of events in the Middle East and South Asia.
During our time in government, we put heavy emphasis on pushing back against the pernicious ideology of America's enemies. We believed that to make America safe we had to prevail in a war of ideas. But we also learned quickly that it was ineffective simply to say: "You're wrong when you accuse us of trying to destroy your religion. It's clear that we are good, tolerant people."
Despite the declining popularity of al Qaeda over the past few years and the change in American administrations, the prevailing and persistent narrative among Muslim communities is that the U.S. and the West in general are trying to destroy Islam and humiliate and marginalize Muslims. Once someone believes this narrative, he interprets events in any way necessary to fit into that framework.
Thus the American intervention to save Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s is ignored or explained away. Or, when the U.S. sends troops to Indonesia on a humanitarian mission to distribute food after a devastating tsunami, rumors sweep the country that the true objective is to lay the groundwork for conquering the nation in the name of Christianity.
The only way to answer a false narrative is to develop a true one, to promote it heavily, and to wait until events make the alternate narrative so broadly self-evident that it supplants the old one. In this case, the true narrative is that there is an epochal conflict occurring. It is not a "clash of civilizations," as Samuel Huntington described the confrontation between Islam and the West, but rather a "clash within a civilization"—that is, within Muslim communities themselves.
This narrative properly removes the U.S. from center-stage, and it allows Muslims to assume responsibility for critical events unfolding in their countries rather than feeling like impotent bystanders.
There are two conflicts that make up this clash within a civilization and both have become much clearer in the wake of the Arab Spring. The first is between believers in the great religion of Islam and violent Islamist extremists. The second struggle is between Muslims and others in the Middle East striving for freedom against autocratic rulers. When justice in this long battle finally prevails—when al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups are defeated and when freedom and democracy triumph—the victory will be justifiably a source of Muslim pride and renewal.
Though neither of these conflicts is about the U.S. directly, both affect us, as we learned on 9/11. For moral and national security reasons, we must be involved by supporting those fighting ideological oppression. Yet in the end, the conflicts have to be resolved by Muslims themselves.
The message that Americans will continue to help the forces of pluralism and moderation should have been the focus of President Obama's Cairo speech two years ago. Unfortunately, the president played into the prevailing narrative, apologizing for past American action in sweeping terms.
Worse, the resulting policy of engagement with autocratic regimes in the Middle East sacrificed our principles for the false hope of diplomatic breakthroughs. For instance, America tried actively to engage with repressive rulers in Iran, Syria and elsewhere; we reduced financial backing for civil society advocates in Egypt; and we failed to provide vigorous moral and material support to pro-democracy dissidents in Iran before they were crushed.
The good news is that the groundwork that had been laid previously (in large part during the Bush administration) and, more important, the will of Muslims themselves, have begun to pay off. The new narrative of a conflict within a civilization has emerged without any apparent assistance from U.S. strategic communicators. One handmade protest sign in Egypt summed it up: "Why enslave people? We're born free."
Meanwhile, the dramatic events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere show that President George W. Bush was right when he said that "freedom is universal" and that the "untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." Muslims desire and deserve freedom as much as everyone else. (A new Pew poll finds that vast majorities in Jordan, Egypt and other Muslim nations believe that democracy is better than any other kind of government.) Muslims aren't condemned to being permanent democratic outliers. The battle for freedom is far from over, but the path is now clear.
President Obama should use his speech to shape this narrative. The story is not about us. It's about brave Muslims fighting for freedom, who, in the end, will triumph.
Mr. Glassman served as under secretary of state for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the George W. Bush administration and is now executive director of the Bush Institute in Dallas. Mr. Zarate was deputy national security advisor for Counter-Terrorism and is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
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"There are two conflicts that make up this clash within a civilization and both have become much clearer in the wake of the Arab Spring. The first is between believers in the great religion of Islam and violent Islamist extremists."
Funny, I see would-be reformers from within islam murdered or living under threats of death and the "vast majority of peaceful muslims" have yet to show up to defend them.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiTaAh0W5Is&feature=player_embedded
Very weak by Rumbo IMHO.
There WERE in house objections to the sufficiency of Rumbo's troop numbers-- General Shikaleli (sp?) who was Ch. of Joint Chief of Staff and it is more than a little disingenuous of Rumbo to say otherwise.
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(http://barnhardt.biz/blogimages/WorksBothWays.jpg)
http://barnhardt.biz/blogimages/WorksBothWays.jpg
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/us-military-goes-online-to-rebut-extremists.html?ref=us
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By Matthew Kaminski
Egypt left a couple of enduring images to finish the year of Arab tumult. There were the long lines of patient faces, each waiting to cast the first meaningful ballot of a lifetime. There was also the young woman at a Cairo protest, beaten to the ground, her black abaya pulled back over her head to reveal a blue bra. A conscript's boot stomps down on her exposed torso.
Arab brute or Arab voter? It's an easy choice, no matter what the Middle East's experiment with democracy brings. And in Egypt, peaceful elections are throwing up distressing results. In the first two of three stages of parliamentary elections, Islamists have won around 70%; more than a quarter of the vote went to Salafists who practice Osama bin Laden's creed of Islam. Liberals trail behind.
Yet any sort of civilian rule looks better with each day under the hard-knuckled generals, who took over in February from Hosni Mubarak, a general himself. On Thursday, supposedly interim military rulers raided the offices of 17 pro-democracy nonprofit groups, including three funded by the United States. A week before, security forces killed more than a dozen demonstrators.
So, no, elections and new rulers aren't the primary threat to Egypt's stability or future. But certainly the election rout by Islamists frames the challenge ahead. Democracy's success depends in large measure on how Islam (and its self-styled political avatars) adapts to and coexists with pluralistic, free politics. This may require a Muslim reformation, which is no small matter. But then democracy may be the surest route to one.
Islamists have done well before in elections in Turkey and Indonesia, the closest that the Muslim world gets to mature democracies. Hardline parties in Indonesia reached a high mark in 2004, at 21% of the vote, but have fallen off since. After a few turns at the polls, says Anies Baswedan, president of Paramadina University in Jakarta, "people don't vote for you because you're Muslim. People ask, what are you going to deliver for us?"
This is what explains the electoral dominance of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP), not its roots in political Islam. In the past decade under the AKP, Turkey escaped an IMF-run intensive-care ward and became the world's fastest-growing economy. The rigid Kemalist secularism enforced by a dominant military was partly dismantled. In its place has emerged a more dynamic society, more tolerant of differences. The AKP does have a mild-to-festering authoritarian streak, depending on whom you believe, but that's rooted in Turkish as much as Islamist political culture.
In any case the appeal of political Islam, which grows when religiosity is repressed by nominally secular regimes, tends to diminish over time in Muslim countries with freer politics. Why?
When the state isn't hostile to religion, ideological Islam isn't a bankable political issue. Elections usually turn on more pedestrian matters. The AKP re-election campaign last June was all about the thriving economy.
By supporting Islamist candidates, Egyptians aren't voting for theocracy. Conservative lower- and middle-classes make up majorities that, for decades, were shut out of the establishment. To them, the Islamist brand suggests opposition to corruption and a common touch. For many, a vote for Islam was the most obvious rebuke to the ancien regime in a first free election.
Egypt begins this journey with serious handicaps, and comparisons with Turkey, Indonesia or Tunisia, which launched the Arab Spring early last year, can only stretch so far. Tunisia has a large, educated middle class. Most significantly, perhaps, it also has empowered women who tend to work. October elections were a good mirror to this society and the vote split evenly between moderate Islamists and secular liberal parties. Salafists there are a fringe—unlike in Egypt, where what is now the second-largest party threatens Egypt's large Coptic Christian minority and demands the imposition of Shariah religious law.
Islam can make for an ill fit with modern civil society. You might read almost anything into the Quran and Hadiths, a million or so sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Some find inspiration for a free market; others for stoning. Muhammad warned against ghuluw (extremism) and pleaded for qist (balance) in religion, yet in recent decades the loudest voices within Islam ignored that advice.
Iranian mullahs, Saudi virtue squads and bin Ladens have drawn on Islam's stricter precepts to justify their totalitarianism. Shariah imposes many religious duties and punishments that are outdated. It doesn't set out rights that deserve protection. It makes few allowances for minorities or dissenters, the sine qua non of liberal democracy.
Political Islam, a good case can be made, is itself a perversion—the reformation in reverse. Calls for Shariah to become state law emerged only in the 20th century, as a result of Islam's encounter with the West. The Quran is politically agnostic and says nothing about the preferable form of government.
After the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, political Islam grew out of the Arab world's experiments with Western-style nationalism and socialism. In his recent book "Islam Without Extremes," Turkish author Mustafa Akyol calls Islamists the "illegitimate sons" of the Muslim world's hardcore secularists. Like Marxists or Fascists, Islamists want to relegate "Islam to a collectivist 'system,' devoid of personal religiosity." From Mr. Akyol's religious perspective, for mere mortals to claim to establish rule by God is sacrilege.
The Muslim Brotherhood probably won't be easily dissuaded. If a future Egyptian or Libyan state is to be built in part on Quranic laws, however, it depends on which aspects of the Quran are chosen. Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian religious philosopher, proposes to selectively apply the Quran and Hadiths. This way, he says, Islam can be "humanized."
Mr. Soroush's prescriptions make him a notable Muslim Luther in waiting. After the Iranian revolution, he was Ayatollah Khomeini's leading propagandist and adviser. He broke with Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's current supreme leader, and now lives in suburban Washington, D.C., exile. His experience of the Islamic Republic inspired one of the most thorough critiques of what happens when Islam intrudes into political life. He says the clerics became the worst kind of rulers, feeling "a right and a duty" to impose tyranny. "Islamic democracy" isn't the goal, and it makes no more sense than "Islamic technology." What Muslim countries need, he says, is a "just and democratic Islam."
Imagine a society that respects religious invocations to dress or eat a certain way without imposing them. America is one; not France, whose state-dominated secularism was the model for so many Muslim leaders of the last century. The U.S. is the more religiously vibrant country. Mr. Soroush, who has a wide following in Iran, says that a mosque-state separation serves Islam best. "A religious society becomes more religious as it grows more free and freedom loving, as it trades diehard dogma with examined faith," he writes in his collection of essays, "Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam" (2000). "This is the spirit that breaks the tyrannical arm of religious despotism and breathes the soul of free faith in the body of power."
New Arab leaders will have enough headaches of government to occupy them for years. Islam will be just part, hopefully small, of the story of those who undertake democratic reform. Yet this may also be the best chance for another overdue experiment to reconcile Islam with modern politics. No faith that makes strong demands on its practitioners necessarily dooms itself to tyranny. As the former Polish dissident and writer Adam Michnik rather impishly says, "If Judaism can co-exist with democracy, any religion can."
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.smaller Larger 'We have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals." That was President Obama at the State Department last May, rolling out his own version of the freedom agenda for the Muslim world. So why has the Administration been virtually silent when it comes to one of the most notorious and long-running abuses of power taking place in the Muslim world today—this one in our good friend and ally, Malaysia?
The abuses in question concern Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who on Monday faces a verdict—and potentially years of jail time—on dubious sodomy charges. Mr. Anwar first went through this charade as a deputy prime minister in the late 1990s, when he fell out with then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad during the Asian financial crisis, was savagely beaten by police and ultimately sentenced to prison on sodomy and corruption charges.
Mr. Anwar spent six years in prison. In 2004 the sodomy charges were overturned by the country's highest court—a year after Mr. Mahathir had left office. Yet Mr. Anwar was again served with sodomy charges four years later, after the ruling UMNO party had lost its two-thirds majority and the opposition seemed close to assembling a parliamentary majority.
The current case is even flimsier than the last one. It is based mainly on the word of one accuser who, as it so happened, had met with then-deputy prime minister, now Prime Minister, Najib Razak days before the alleged incident. Doctors at two hospitals could find no evidence of rape in the aftermath of the alleged incident. Nonetheless, political observers anticipate a guilty verdict.
This is happening in the context of growing discontent among Malaysians with UMNO's ruling order, and Mr. Najib's ambivalent attempts at political reform. But if that's reminiscent of the unhappiness that presaged the Arab Spring, so too is the don't-rock-the-boat attitude of the Obama Administration.
Malaysia is supposedly a moderate Muslim country and a useful regional counterweight to China, and the President was full of praise for Mr. Najib's "great leadership" when they last met in November. As for Mr. Anwar, the State Department has publicly offered no more than boilerplate about his case. Perhaps quiet diplomacy is now at work on Mr. Anwar's behalf, but that kind of diplomacy is fine only as long as it produces results.
In the meantime, Malaysian democracy could benefit from a sign that the U.S. is not indifferent to Mr. Anwar's legal ordeal or to the political system that has allowed it to continue. U.S. interests could benefit as well. "Failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our own interests at their expense," said Mr. Obama in May. Mr. Anwar's case gives the President a chance to show that he meant what he said.
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Anwar found not guilty :-)
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CAIRO — Stepping from the cloud of tear gas in front of the American Embassy here, Khaled Ali repeated the urgent question that he said justified last week’s violent protests at United States outposts around the Muslim world.
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“We never insult any prophet — not Moses, not Jesus — so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” Mr. Ali, a 39-year-old textile worker said, holding up a handwritten sign in English that read “Shut Up America.” “Obama is the president, so he should have to apologize!”
When the protests against an American-made online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad exploded in about 20 countries, the source of the rage was more than just religious sensitivity, political demagogy or resentment of Washington, protesters and their sympathizers here said. It was also a demand that many of them described with the word “freedom,” although in a context very different from the term’s use in the individualistic West: the right of a community, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish, to be free from grave insult to its identity and values.
That demand, in turn, was swept up in the colliding crosscurrents of regional politics. From one side came the gale of anger at America’s decade-old war against terrorism, which in the eyes of many Muslims in the region often looks like a war against them. And from the other, the new winds blowing through the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which to many here means most of all a right to demand respect for the popular will.
“We want these countries to understand that they need to take into consideration the people, and not just the governments,” said Ismail Mohamed, 42, a religious scholar who once was an imam in Germany. “We don’t think that depictions of the prophets are freedom of expression. We think it is an offense against our rights,” he said, adding, “The West has to understand the ideology of the people.”
Even during the protests, some stone throwers stressed that the clash was not Muslim against Christian. Instead, they suggested that the traditionalism of people of both faiths in the region conflicted with Western individualism and secularism.
Youssef Sidhom, the editor of the Coptic Christian newspaper Watani, said he objected only to the violence of the protests.
Mr. Sidhom approvingly recalled the uproar among Egyptian Christians that greeted the 2006 film “The Da Vinci Code,” which was seen as an affront to aspects of traditional Christianity and the persona of Jesus. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and other Arab countries banned both the film and the book on which it was based. And in Egypt, where insulting any of the three Abrahamic religions is a crime, the police even arrested the head of a local film company for importing 2,000 copies of the DVD, according to news reports.
“This reaction is expected,” Mr. Sidhom said of last week’s protests, “and if it had stayed peaceful I would have said I supported it and understood.”
In a context where insults to religion are crimes and the state has tightly controlled almost all media, many in Egypt, like other Arab countries, sometimes find it hard to understand that the American government feels limited by its free speech rules from silencing even the most noxious religious bigot.
In his statement after protesters breached the walls of the United States Embassy last Tuesday, the spiritual leader of the Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, declared that “the West” had imposed laws against “those who deny or express dissident views on the Holocaust or question the number of Jews killed by Hitler, a topic which is purely historical, not a sacred doctrine.”
In fact, denying the Holocaust is also protected as free speech in the United States, although it is prohibited in Germany and a few other European countries. But the belief that it is illegal in the United States is widespread in Egypt, and the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mohamed Badie, called for the “criminalizing of assaults on the sanctities of all heavenly religions.”
“Otherwise, such acts will continue to cause devout Muslims across the world to suspect and even loathe the West, especially the U.S.A., for allowing their citizens to violate the sanctity of what they hold dear and holy,” he said. “Certainly, such attacks against sanctities do not fall under the freedom of opinion or thought.”
Several protesters said during the heat of last week’s battles here that they were astonished that the United States had not punished the filmmakers. “Everyone across all these countries has the same anger, they are rising up for the same reason and with the same demands, and still no action is taken against the people who made that film,” said Zakaria Magdy, 23, a printer.
In the West, many may express astonishment that the murder of Muslims in hate crimes does not provoke the same level of global outrage as the video did. But even a day after the clashes in Cairo had subsided, many Egyptians argued that a slur against their faith was a greater offense than any attack on a living person.
“When you hurt someone, you are just hurting one person,” said Ahmed Shobaky, 42, a jeweler. “But when you insult a faith like that, you are insulting a whole nation that feels the pain.”
Mr. Mohamed, the religious scholar, justified it this way: “Our prophet is more dear to us than our family and our nation.”
Others said that the outpouring of outrage against the video had built up over a long period of perceived denigrations of Muslims and their faith by the United States or its military, which are detailed extensively in the Arab news media: the invasion of Iraq on a discredited pretext; the images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison; the burning or desecrations of the Koran by troops in Afghanistan and a pastor in Florida; detentions without trial at Guantánamo Bay; the denials of visas to prominent Muslim intellectuals; the deaths of Muslim civilians as collateral damage in drone strikes; even political campaigns against the specter of Islamic law inside the United States.
“This is not the first time that Muslim beliefs are being insulted or Muslims humiliated,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo.
While he stressed that no one should ever condone violence against diplomats or embassies because of even the most offensive film, Mr. Shahin said it was easy to see why the protesters focused on the United States government’s outposts. “There is a war going on here,” he said. “This was a straw, if you will, that broke the camel’s back.
“The message here is we don’t care about your beliefs — that because of our freedom of expression we can demean them and degrade them any time, and we do not care about your feelings.”
There are also purely local dynamics that can fan the flames. In Tunis, an American school was set on fire by protesters angry over the video — but then looted of computers and musical instruments by people in the neighborhood.
Here in Cairo, ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis initially helped drum up outrage against the video and rally their supporters to protest outside the embassy. But by the time darkness fell and a handful of young men climbed the embassy wall, the Salafis were nowhere to be found, and they stayed away the rest of the week.
Egyptian officials said that some non-Salafis involved in the embassy attacks confessed to receiving payments, although no payer had been identified. But after the first afternoon, the next three days of protests were dominated by a relatively small number of teenagers and young men — including die-hard soccer fans known as ultras. They appeared to have been motivated mainly by the opportunity to attack the police, whom they revile.
Some commentators said they regretted that the violence here and around the region had overshadowed the underlying argument against the offensive video. “Our performance came out like that of a failed lawyer in a no-lose case,” Wael Kandil, an editor of the newspaper Sharouq, wrote in a column on Sunday. “We served our opponents something that made them drop the main issue and take us to the margins — this is what we accomplished with our bad performance.”
Mohamed Sabry, 29, a sculptor and art teacher at a downtown cafe, said he saw a darker picture. “To see the Islamic world in this condition of underdevelopment,” he said, “this is a bigger insult to the prophet.”
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/16/ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-the-islamists-final-stand.html
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How to Win an Ideological War
Against a fanatical foe, any suggestion of compromise or acceptance of the enemy ideology is taken as a sign of weakness..
By YURI YARIM-AGAEV
On Nov. 9, 1938, thousands of German storm troopers, acting under direct orders, launched the Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. The attacks left approximately 100 Jews dead and 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged. Hundreds of homes and synagogues were vandalized.
The mastermind of the pogrom, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, explained it to the world as a "spontaneous" reaction to the murder of German diplomat by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew. Goebbels said the pogrom showed the "healthy instincts" of the German people.
Some Jewish organizations, while strongly condemning German actions, expressed concern about the pogrom's alleged cause. The World Jewish Congress stated that it "deplored the fatal shooting of an official of the German Embassy by a young Polish Jew." These displays of contrition did not help. Kristallnacht was soon followed by the Holocaust, in which more than six million European Jews died.
What can we learn from that tragic history? First, atrocities on such a scale are rarely "spontaneous." They require preparation and organization. Equally important is the lesson that accepting enemy propaganda makes us look weak and shortsighted. Any appreciation of the pretexts for such atrocities makes their perpetrators bolder and more aggressive.
Unfortunately, these lessons have not been learned. America's ambassador to Libya is dead, U.S. embassies in Egypt and other Muslim countries are under siege, the American flag is being burned, and the Obama administration and media have blamed a video clip instead of denouncing the perpetrators.
The Nazis claimed their Kristallnacht pogrom was 'spontaneous.'
The lack of realism is stunning. "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others," said President Barack Obama—not about the murder of Americans or the persecution of Christians and Jews in Muslim countries, but about an amateur film on YouTube. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the film is "disgusting and reprehensible." These sentiments were echoed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and a multitude of pundits.
Yet all evidence indicates that events of Sept. 11, 2012, were not a "spontaneous reaction" to the 14-minute trailer, but were pre-organized—not only in Benghazi but in Cairo as well. The film, "Innocence of Muslims," was available on YouTube for a long time without attracting any attention. Two days before the riots, the film was broadcast in Arabic on the Salafi Egyptian television channel Al-Nas. Several popular preachers on other conservative Islamic satellite channels called upon people to turn out Tuesday at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. If this was not organization, what was it?
Still, America's leaders have effectively accepted that the main blame for the embassy attacks should be put on the producers of video clip, rather than on the organizers and participants of the violence. America's leaders did not stand up for freedom of speech. Instead, they practically apologized for the lack of censorship in the U.S.
"The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video," said Mrs. Clinton. She clearly does not understand that for those brought up in the world of Islamist propaganda, any attempt to distance the American government from the film can only feed suspicions that the U.S. was responsible for its production.
These are not merely rhetorical errors. In an ideological war, such errors each represent a lost battle.
It is not surprising that America's leaders are not proficient in the strategies and tactics of ideological warfare. Lessons learned from communism are now long forgotten, and are certainly not taught to current U.S. politicians. Still, U.S. leaders could have made fewer mistakes had they adhered to basic principles of American society, which require respecting the right of any person to practice his religion peacefully—but not necessarily respecting that religion itself.
I know that difference from personal experience. In the Soviet Union, I fought together with my fellow dissidents for religious freedom. Believers appreciated our support and never asked us to express any allegiance to their faith. Most of us dissidents were not religious people ourselves, but we risked our freedom to stand up for the right to worship. We did it because we believed that religious freedom is a fundamental human right.
President Obama, too, should stand for religious freedom. But he does not have an obligation to respect Islam or any other particular religion. America's constitutional separation of church and state obliges its leaders to avoid publicly endorsing any particular religion even to the extent of expressing "respect" for it. Similarly, they are enjoined from crusading against blasphemy.
It is important to remember that a war with a fanatical foe is first of all an ideological war, and in such a war, appeasement doesn't work. There are no defensive strategies. Any attempt to prove that you are right is a defeat. Any suggestion of compromise or acceptance of the legitimacy of your enemy's ideology is a sign of your weakness—which only provokes further attacks.
The winning formula against Soviet communism proved to be peace through strength. A strong military and economy are important, but even more important is standing strong for basic principles. Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Soviet and East European dissidents all understood this.
We did not start wars with communism, Nazism or Islamism. They were imposed upon us. Those ideologies thrive on confrontation with the free world. Today we must revisit Kristallnacht, the Holocaust and the Cold War, to recollect our successful experience of dealing with those virulent ideologies.
Mr. Yarim-Agaev is a scientist and human-rights activist who was a leading dissident in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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Morsi's Election Can't Erase Radical Record
IPT News
September 25, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3758/morsi-election-cant-erase-radical-record
New Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is being received as a visiting dignitary in New York this week for meetings surrounding the opening of the United Nations' General Assembly. He is scheduled to address the assembly Wednesday morning and is meeting with U.S. officials and other dignitaries.
On Tuesday, as the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report noted, he is to appear with former President Bill Clinton at the closing plenary of Clinton's Global Initiative conference.
The man being showered with attention as a respectable international leader may rank shy only of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when it comes to anti-Semitism and bluster against the state of Israel.
He was the subject of a front-page story in Sunday's New York Times, in which he claimed Egypt is not moving toward theocracy, but acknowledged being shaped by an organization that seeks a global Islamic state.
"I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood," he said in the Times interview. "I learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned how to love my country with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned politics with the Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood."
In a 2005 article touting Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary candidates, Morsi invoked the Brotherhood's motto in making the case that "Islam is the solution":
"God is our goal. The Messenger is our example. The Quran is our constitution; Jihad is our way and death for the sake of God the highest aspiration."
He repeated that theme during a campaign appearance last May, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) showed, leading the crowd in chanting "The Quran is our constitution. The Prophet Muhammad is our leader. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration."
That could help explain his affection for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which was created to be a terrorist branch of the Brotherhood, and which has a series of anti-Semitic statements in its charter.
"In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised, it says. Elsewhere, it says "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
Since December, Morsi has met with Hamas leaders Khaled Meshaal, Ismail Haniyeh and Mousa Abu Marzook. He also is eager to see Hamas open an office in Cairo. "Support for the Palestinian cause is a duty upon us we will discharge," Morsi said. "In fact, the Egyptian role for Gaza and Hamas after the revolution is a distinctive one."
In April 2011, he "called on Arab and Islamic regimes and governments to address and stop continuing Zionist crimes against the Gaza Strip," the Brotherhood's Ikhwanonline website reported. "Dr. Morsi called for the Palestinian resistance to be supported with money, weapons and equipment to challenge this Zionist aggression, stressing that Arab regimes deal in the same way as before with the suffering of our brothers in Gaza."
In 2008, he called for international aid to Gaza, which he said was needed to stop the "bloodthirsty Zionist usurper created by injustice and international terrorism." An Israeli blockade on Gaza, imposed to stop the terrorist group from importing weapons and explosives supplies for terrorist attacks, was part of "American-Zionist plots which aim to eliminate the Palestinian cause," he said.
"We will sacrifice for you with our blood and our children and our money," Morsi said. "Our hands are in your hands to keep you steadfast raising the banner of the right in the first cause of the Muslims first. May God strengthen you and strengthen your backs and increase your faith. May He grant you victory over our enemy and your enemy."
"We are with you," he said in a 2009 article. "May God accept you, and your deeds not leave you. God has chosen you to help His religion and defending his Aqsa, and indeed Arabism and Islam, against the herd of Zionists, descendants of apes and pigs." Like Ahmadinejad, Morsi predicted Israel's destruction. "In the end the peoples will remain and the regimes disappear sooner or later, and the usurping intruding Zionist entity will disappear with them."
In a previous statement, he praised Palestinian jihad "against the Zionist American project" and said people will stand by them "by all means to liberate their land from the filth of the Zionist usurpers."
Since rising to power, Morsi has embraced the cause of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the group behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Abdel Rahman is serving a life prison sentence after being convicted in a subsequent plot to bomb New York tunnels and landmarks.
The blind sheikh's case is "on my shoulders," he said during his presidential campaign. He repeated a pledge to seek Abdel Rahman's freedom the day he took office.
Violent protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo two weeks ago likely had more to do with the Abdel Rahman case than with an online video ridiculing the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Protesters entered the embassy grounds and replaced the American flag with the black flag of Islam. Morsi's original response was considered anemic and slow, and he called on the United States to arrest the video's producer.
He may be the elected leader of Egypt, but Morsi's record demonstrates he is no statesman. He should not be treated as one.
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Backlash to the Backlash
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 25, 2012 52 Comments
One of the iron laws of Middle East politics for the last half-century has been that extremists go all the way and moderates tend to just go away. That is what made the march in Benghazi, Libya, so unusual last Friday. This time, the moderates did not just go away. They got together and stormed the headquarters of the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia, whose members are suspected of carrying out the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the death of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
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It is not clear whether this trend can spread or be sustained. But having decried the voices of intolerance that so often intimidate everyone in that region, I find it heartening to see Libyans carrying signs like “We want justice for Chris” and “No more Al Qaeda” — and demanding that armed militias disband. This coincides with some brutally honest articles in the Arab/Muslim press — in response to rioting triggered by the idiotic YouTube video insulting the Prophet Muhammad — that are not the usual “What is wrong with America?” but, rather, “What is wrong with us, and how do we fix it?”
On Monday, the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, which tracks the Arab/Muslim press, translated a searing critique written by Imad al-Din Hussein, a columnist for Al Shorouk, Cairo’s best daily newspaper: “We curse the West day and night, and criticize its [moral] disintegration and shamelessness, while relying on it for everything. ... We import, mostly from the West, cars, trains, planes ... refrigerators, and washing machines. ... We are a nation that contributes nothing to human civilization in the current era. ... We have become a burden on [other] nations. ... Had we truly implemented the essence of the directives of Islam and all [other] religions, we would have been at the forefront of the nations. The world will respect us when we return to being people who take part in human civilization, instead of [being] parasites who are spread out over the map of the advanced world, feeding off its production and later attacking it from morning until night. ... The West is not an oasis of idealism. It also contains exploitation in many areas. But at least it is not sunk in delusions, trivialities and external appearances, as we are. ... Therefore, supporting Islam and the prophet of the Muslims should be done through work, production, values, and culture, not by storming embassies and murdering diplomats.”
Mohammad Taqi, a liberal Pakistani columnist, writing in the Lahore-based Daily Times on Sept. 20, argued that “there is absolutely no excuse for violence and indeed murder most foul, as committed in Benghazi. Fighting hate with hate is sure to beget more hate. The way out is drowning the odious voices with voices of sanity, not curbing free speech and calls for murder.”
Khaled al-Hroub, a professor at Cambridge University, writing in Jordan’s Al Dustour newspaper on Sept. 17, translated by Memri, argued that the most “frightening aspect of what we see today in the streets of Arab and Islamic cities is the disaster of extremism that is flooding our societies and cultures, as well as our behavior. ... This [represents] a total atrophy of thought among wide sectors [of society], as a result of the culture of religious zealotry that was imposed on people for over 50 years, and which brought forth what we witness” today.
The Egyptian comedian, Bassem Youssef, wrote in Al Shorouk, translated by Memri, on Sept. 23: “We demand that the world respect our feelings, yet we do not respect the feelings of others. We scream blue murder when they outlaw the niqab in some European country or prevent [Muslims] from building minarets in another [European] country — even though these countries continue to allow freedom of religion, as manifest in the building of mosques and in the preaching [activity] that takes place in their courtyards. Yet, in our countries, we do not allow others to publicly preach their beliefs. Maybe we should examine ourselves before [criticizing] others.”
Whenever I was asked during the Iraq war, “How will you know when we’ve won?” I gave the same answer: When Salman Rushdie can give a lecture in Baghdad; when there is real freedom of speech in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. There is no question that we need a respectful dialogue between Islam and the West, but, even more, we need a respectful dialogue between Muslims and Muslims. What matters is not what Arab/Muslim political parties and groupings tell us they stand for. What matters is what they tell themselves, in their own languages, about what they stand for and what excesses they will not tolerate.
This internal debate had long been stifled by Arab autocrats whose regimes traditionally suppressed extremist Islamist parties, but never really permitted their ideas to be countered with free speech — with independent, modernist, progressive interpretations of Islam or by truly legitimate, secular political parties and institutions. Are we seeing the start of that now with the emergence of free spaces and legitimate parties in the Arab world? Again, too early to say, but this moderate backlash to the extremist backlash is worth hailing — and watching.
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We obviously just need a few crates of "COEXIST" bumper stickers shipped over there ASAP.
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TRIPOLI, Libya — One brother joined the global jihad against the West under the nom de guerre Abu Yahya al-Libi. He rose to become Al Qaeda’s brightest star and second in command, until an American drone strike killed him in Pakistan four months ago.
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Mr. Qaid says his brother Abu Yahya al-Libi became a radical after being imprisoned by Americans in Afghanistan.
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The other brother, Abdel Wahab Mohamed Qaid, was the first to become an Islamist militant but is now a moderate member of Libya’s new Parliament.
As the United States weighs responses to the Islamist-led assault on its diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Mr. Qaid says the two brothers’ diverging paths trace a timely lesson: a parable of the dangers of treating the many different strands of political Islam as a single radical threat.
Abu Yahya’s support for Al Qaeda, Mr. Qaid said, began after his years as a prisoner at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — an account supported by Western analysts who have studied Abu Yahya’s life.
Both brothers had previously shunned Osama Bin Laden and the cause of global jihad as irrelevant to their single-minded focus on ousting the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But then, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Americans began rounding up any Islamist militants they could find, regardless of their specific ideology or agenda; Abu Yahya was captured in Pakistan and imprisoned without trial at Bagram.
When he finally escaped in 2005, picking a prison lock and evading his guards, Abu Yahya, originally known as Mohamed Hassan Qaid, was reborn as the leading theologian, propagandist and battlefield commander of an Islamic holy war against the West that left little room for local concerns like the struggle for Libyan democracy.
The older Mr. Qaid, who is 45 and is speaking publicly for the first time, argued that Abu Yahya had been drawn into battle with the United States mainly because its military had treated him as an enemy. The vast majority of young Libyans, including many armed Islamists, now feel warmly toward America for its support against Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Qaid said, and the impulse of United States officials and liberal Libyans to associate them all with Al Qaeda risks pushing them closer to the terrorist group.
“When they see they are lumped together with Al Qaeda, even those unsympathetic to it will become more sympathetic, and this would be the best gift you could ever give to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Qaid said, charging that many Americans often treated all Islamists as shades of Al Qaeda.
Many other Libyan Islamist militants who had taken refuge from Colonel Qaddafi in Pakistan or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan have told similar stories, attesting that they were wrongly imprisoned and mistreated by the United States on suspicion of ties to Al Qaeda though their only fight was against the Libyan dictator. Last month, Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group, documented more than 15 such cases of Libyan Islamists captured by the United States, including two who told the group that they had been subjected to a form of coercive interrogation known as waterboarding.
Unlike Abu Yahya, however, most of the captured Libyans never turned to Al Qaeda. Some are now playing prominent roles in their country’s transition toward democracy. And, conversely, a few others enlisted in the Al Qaeda cause without American imprisonment or mistreatment.
Just what factors may have shaped the psychology of Abu Yahya or any other militant remains “highly speculative,” said Brian Fishman, a researcher at the New America Foundation who previously worked at West Point studying terrorist movements. But “it is absolutely true that we failed to distinguish between Al Qaeda and a variety of Islamist militant groups that were operating in Afghanistan, and we should have distinguished between them because not all of them had accepted Al Qaeda’s worldview,” he said.
Mr. Qaid insisted that although he and his brother had both been militants, part of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group determined to oust Colonel Qaddafi, they were never terrorists or enemies of the West.
Both brothers — each the spit and image of the other, both known for their poetic gifts and theological knowledge — were drawn into politics by the Libyan student movement of the mid-1980s. As a medical student at the University of Benghazi, Mr. Qaid said, he was appalled by the Qaddafi government’s use of torture and public hangings to quell dissent. “I started to realize the scale of the oppression,” Mr. Qaid said in lilting, classical Arabic, sitting in the cafe of the Rixos hotel here in a crisp white galabeya and prayer cap with a purple pillow scrunched in his lap.
By 1989, Mr. Qaid had fled to Tunisia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in international Islamist circles, and Abu Yahya, two years younger, followed in his footsteps two years later.
In 1995, Mr. Qaid crossed into Libya on a mission for the group when he was captured by Colonel Qaddafi’s agents. At 28, he was sentenced to death but ultimately spent the next 16 years in the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. “I grew up in prison,” he said.
As young men, Mr. Qaid said, he and his fellow Islamists had sometimes been overconfident in their “righteousness” and too ready to impose it on others, and they did not listen to the debates among older Muslim scholars.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/world/africa/political-islam-and-the-fate-of-two-libyan-brothers.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121007
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-malala-assess-20121013,0,3563096.story
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zhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/world/asia/pakistan-rage-at-girl-shooting-gives-way-to-skepticism.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121020
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Who Is Fethullah Gülen?
Controversial Muslim preacher, feared Turkish intriguer — and “inspirer†of the largest charter school network in America
Claire Berlinski
With the American economy in shambles, Europe imploding, and the Middle East in chaos, convincing Americans that they should pay attention to a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen is an exceedingly hard sell. Many Americans have never heard of him, and if they have, he sounds like the least of their worries. According to his website, he is an “authoritative mainstream Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader and educational activist who supports interfaith and intercultural dialogue, science, democracy and spirituality and opposes violence and turning religion into a political ideology.†The website adds that “by some estimates, several hundred educational organizations such as K–12 schools, universities, and language schools have been established around the world inspired by Fethullah Gülen.†The site notes, too, that Gülen was “the first Muslim scholar to publicly condemn the attacks of 9/11.†It also celebrates his modesty.
Yet there is a bit more to the story. Gülen is a powerful business figure in Turkey and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly influential businessman globally. There are somewhere between 3 million and 6 million Gülen followers—or, to use the term they prefer, people who are “inspired†by him. Sources vary widely in their estimates of the worth of the institutions “inspired†by Gülen, which exist in every populated continent, but those based on American court records have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. Most interesting, from the American point of view, is that Gülen lives in Pennsylvania, in the Poconos. He is, among other things, a major player in the world of American charter schools—though he claims to have no power over them; they’re just greatly inspired, he says.
Even if it were only for these reasons, you might want to know more about Gülen, especially because the few commentators who do write about him generally mischaracterize him, whether they call him a “radical Islamist†or a “liberal Muslim.†The truth is much more complicated—to the extent that anyone understands it.
To begin to understand Gülen, you must start with the history of the Nurcu movement. Said Nursî (1878–1960), a Sunni Muslim in the Sufi tradition, was one of the great charismatic religious personalities of the late Ottoman Caliphate and early Turkish Republic. His Risale-i Nur, disdained and sometimes banned by the Republic, nevertheless became the basis for the formation of “reading circlesâ€â€”geographically dispersed communities the size of small towns that gathered to read, discuss, and internalize the text and to duplicate it when it was banned. Nurcus tend to say, roughly, that the Risale-i Nur is distilled from the Koran; non-Nurcus often find the claim inappropriate or arrogant.
These reading circles gradually spread through Anatolia. Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish political scientist at the University of Utah, calls the Nurcu movement “a resistance movement to the ongoing Kemalist modernization process.†But it is also “forward-looking,†Yavuz says, a “conceptual framework for a people undergoing the transformation from a confessional community (Gemeinschaft) to a secular national society (Gesellschaft). . . . Folk Islamic concepts and practices are redefined and revived to establish new solidarity networks and everyday-life strategies for coping with new conditions.†To call this movement “fundamentalist†or “radical†is to empty both terms of meaning. It is equally silly to dismiss it as theologically primitive. I confess that I have not read all 6,000 pages of the Risale-i Nur, but I have read enough to be convinced that Nursî is a fairly sophisticated thinker.
Gülen’s movement, or cemaat, arose from roughly a dozen neo-Nur reading circles. Gülen was born in 1941 in a village near Erzurum, the eastern frontier of what is now the Turkish Republic. This territory was bitterly contested by the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires and gave rise to interpretations of Islam strongly infused with Turkish nationalism: when nothing but the Turkish state stands between you and the Russians, you become a Turkish nationalist, fast. Likewise, contrary to a common misconception among Americans who view the Islamic world as monolithic, Gülenists do not consider Persians their friends.
Two notable points about Gülen’s philosophy. First, he strongly dissuades his followers from tebliğ, or open proselytism. He urges them instead to practice temsil—living an Islamic way of life at all times, setting a good example, and embodying their ideals in their way of life. From what I have seen in Turkey, the embodiment of these ideals involves good manners, hard work, and the funding of many charities. It also involves a highly segregated role for women. I would not want to live in the segregated world that they find acceptable here; neither, I suspect, would the Western sociologists who have enthusiastically described the Gülen movement as analogous, say, to contemporary Southern Baptists or German Calvinists.
Second, Gülen holds (publicly, at any rate) that Muslims and non-Muslims once lived in peace because the Ottoman Turks established an environment of tolerance. To restore this peaceful coexistence worldwide, he says, Turks should become world leaders in promoting tolerance among religions—and Turks following his teachings should become world leaders.
Gülen’s detractors, however, inevitably point to a speech of his that surfaced in a video in 1999:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers. . . . Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, . . . like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. . . . The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. . . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey . . . . Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence . . . trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
By this point, Gülen had decamped from Turkey to the United States for medical treatment. Nonetheless, in 2000, he was tried in absentia by a state security court for endeavoring to replace Turkey’s secular government with an Islamic one; the indictment alleged that his movement had attempted to infiltrate Turkey’s military schools. His followers say that the video was altered to incriminate him, but they have never produced the putatively innocuous original videotape. After years of legal wrangling, Gülen was acquitted in 2008.
Gülen’s cemaat is by far the strongest Nurcu group in Turkey, described by many as Turkey’s third power, alongside Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP, its initials in Turkish) and the military. The structure and organization of the cemaat are a subject of controversy. Members tend to be evasive not only about their relationship to Gülen but about the very existence of the cemaat; of late, some have urged Turks to use the word camia in its place. What’s the difference? Not much. Camiaconveys looser ties; cemaat can mean “congregation,†whereas a camia is more like a circle. But the word cemaat has become so fraught with sinister overtones that rebranding was in order. Gülen himself calls his movement Hizmet, or service.
The movement’s supporters say that its structure is informal—that being “inspired†by Gülen is akin to being “inspired†by Mother Teresa. Critics, including many people who have left the movement, observe that its organizational structure is strict, hierarchical, and undemocratic. Gülen (known to his followers as Hocaefendi, or “master teacherâ€) is the sole leader, they say, and each community is led by abis, or elder brothers, who are privy to only a limited amount of information. Sociologist Berna Turam has argued that the abis make strong suggestions about, and perhaps dictate, whom members should marry. Even if prospective spouses are not within the cemaat, the cemaat should benefit from them; a spouse from a rich or powerful family would be an asset, for example. This sounds plausible: we often see this approach to marriage in societies with weak institutions and low social trust, and Turkey is certainly such a society.
The movement, according to researchers such as Yavuz, has three coordinated tiers: businessmen, journalists, and teachers. The first tier, the so-called Anatolian bourgeoisie, provides financial support: it funds private high schools, universities, colleges, dormitories, summer camps, and foundations around the world. The journalists of the second tier own one of the leading Turkish dailies, Zaman; its English-language counterpart, Today’s Zaman (which is often not a faithful translation); the Turkish television station STV; the Cihan news service; many magazines and academic journals; several lesser dailies and TV channels; and many Internet-only news outlets. Finally, teachers operate the schools.
An e-mail message released by WikiLeaks and written by Reva Bahalla, an employee of the private intelligence company Stratfor, details the first two tiers. The e-mail describes “hanging out with hardcore Gülenists†in Istanbul. It begins with a visit to the headquarters of Zaman:
The way they represent their agenda is that this is about democratization in Turkey, human rights, world peace, etc. The guy was actually quoting Western liberal philosophers trying to show how much in common they have with them in respect for these democratic values, and this is what’s essential for Turkey’s candidacy in the EU. The irony, they claim, is that people think because they’re Islamist, they’re fundamentalist and not modern, whereas the authoritarians (in their view) i.e. the military, are the ones who are seen in the West as modern. . . . (my note—what Emre and I noticed is that in all our meetings with Gülenists, they recited almost the same lines verbatim. . . .)
The next day, Emre and I visited a major Gülenist organization that puts together these massive conferences all over the world to promote their agenda, raise funds, recruits, etc. Their office is in a very expensive part of Istanbul. They’ve got the best facilities, this beautiful theater system. In short, they’ve got money. Now you have to ask yourself, where is the money coming from? . . . Their funding comes mainly from co-opting the Anatolian business class. . . .
After getting a very long tour of the entire building, top to bottom, they sat us down for a Gülen propaganda film in their theater. . . . The Gülen guy is so overcome by the speech shown in the video by Fethullah Gülen, that he starts crying. Meanwhile I’m trying really hard not to laugh.
Well, it’s funny unless you have to live here.
Wherever the movement establishes itself, it seems to follow a particular pattern. Sociologist Jonathan Lacey has studied its activities in Ireland, where the Gülen-inspired Turkish-Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS) organizes one-week trips to Turkey for non-Turkish people:
I established that these trips are subsidized by businessmen, who are members of the Gülen Community. Members of TIECS claim that these trips are subsidized in order to promote intercultural dialogue. However, given the fact that the Gülen Community is actively engaged in trade as well as education in Central Asia, I proposed that these businessmen subsidize these trips, at least partly, to increase trade between Ireland and Turkey. Another possibility for these subsidies may lie in the hope of promoting a positive impression of Turkey in Europe and thereby securing entry into the European Union.
French researcher Bayram Balcı, who is of Turkish origin, describes something similar in the movement’s activities in Central Asia:
Businessmen from a particular city in Turkey, for example Bursa, will decide to concentrate their efforts on a particular Central Asian city, for example Tashkent. Nurcu investment will then become important in Tashkent, and a kind of twinning . . . between the two cities results. Nurcu group members—whom we can consider as missionaries—are sent by the movement with the aim of making contact with important companies, bureaucrats and personalities in order to appraise local needs. They then invite some of these important personalities to Turkey. . . . Nurcu organizations receive them and show them the private schools and foundations of the cemaat, without ever mentioning this word.
Whether one should admire the cemaat or be disturbed by it depends on the answer to this question: What is it after? And to arrive at that answer, we should explore two things about it that are known to be troubling. First, there is evidence that the cemaat is internally authoritarian, even cultlike. Ilhan Tanır, a Turkish journalist who was in the cemaat but who left it, has expressed particular concern about the blind obedience demanded of its members:
Confusing the real world with the cosmic one, the movement sees itself many times as self-righteous and blessed in every occasion, and surrounded with miracles.
Consequently, when hearing any criticism against its wishes and work, it equates suspicious inquirers either with iniquity or having ulterior motives. “Itaat,†or obedience, therefore becomes the first and the most important characteristic of a “good†and “trusted†member. . . . Living in such an environment for so long, many of these people simply become afraid to face the outside or are too weak to live in a real world.
Moreover, Tanır holds, the cemaat believes that its cosmic mission “justifies any conduct to achieve its ends at any cost.â€
In 2008, the Dutch government investigated the movement’s activities in the Netherlands. Ella Vogelaar, the country’s minister for housing, communities, and integration, warned that “in general terms, when an organization calls for turning away from society, this is at odds with the objectives of integration.†It was, she noted, incumbent upon the government to “keep sharp watch over people and organizations that systematically incite anti-integrative behavior, for this can also be a breeding ground for radicalization.†Testifying about one of the schools in the investigation, a former member of the movement called it a “sect with a groupthink outside of which these students cannot [reason]â€:
After years living in the boarding school it is psychologically impossible to pull yourself away; you get guilt feelings. Furthermore, it forces the students to live, think and do as the Big Brothers [the abis] instruct them to. Furthermore, through psychological pressure, these students are told which choice of career is the best they can make for the sake of high ideals. . . . Another very bad aspect is that students no longer respect their parents and they do not listen if the parents do not live by the standards imposed by the group; they are psychologically distanced from their parents; here you have your little soldiers that march only to the orders of their abis. The abis are obliged to obey the provincial leaders, who in turn must obey the national leaders, who in turn obey Fethullah Gülen.
Following the investigation, the Dutch government, presumably concluding that the Gülen schools did indeed promote “anti-integrative behavior,†reduced their public funding.
The belief that the movement commands or inspires blind obedience is not confined to those who have left it—its spokesmen are proud of it. In 2010, American journalist Suzy Hansen, writing for The New Republic, visited the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, where Gülen lives. The president of the facility, Bekir Aksoy, explained to her that “our people do not complain. . . . They obey commands completely. . . . Let me put it this way. If a man with a Ph.D. and a career came to see Hocaefendi, and Hocaefendi told him it might be a good idea to build a village on the North Pole, that man with a Ph.D. would be back the next morning with a suitcase.â€
The second troubling fact about the cemaat’s activities is that the Turkish media organizations associated with it are clearly pursuing an agenda at odds with the movement’s publicly stated ideals. The English version of Zaman is often significantly different from the Turkish one. Remarks about enemies of Islam, perfidious Armenians, and Mossad plots are edited out of the English version, as are other comments that sound incompatible with the message of intercultural tolerance. For example, Today’s Zaman last year published Gülen’s criticism of the government for failing to solve long-standing issues over the rights of Kurds, but omitted his ambiguous prayer: “Knock their homes upside down, destroy their unity, reduce their homes to ashes, may their homes be filled with weeping and supplications, burn and cut off their roots, and bring their affairs to an end.†Gülen’s supporters will insist that he was referring only to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the United States quite properly considers a terrorist group. But many ethnically Kurdish citizens of Turkey heard this as a call for genocide and were terrified by it.
Or consider Gülen’s reasonable rebuttal, printed in Today’s Zaman, to the common charge that his followers have infiltrated the organs of the state: “To urge fellow citizens to seek employment at state institutions is not called infiltration. Both the people urged and these institutions belong to the same country. . . . It is a right for them to be employed in state posts.†Those ellipses indicate something from the Turkish-languageZaman that has been omitted from the translation. What has been omitted is “Kastedilen manadaki sızmayı belli bir dönemde bu milletten olmayanlar yaptılar,†meaning roughly that in the past, the state wasinfiltrated—by those who “weren’t part of this nation.†Those who know Turkey will immediately recognize the statement as part of a common understanding of history in which infiltration explains the state’s actions as far back as the nineteenth century. The clear intimation is that the state was once infiltrated by non-Muslims or people only pretending to be Muslim—among them Atatürk, of course. (Though expatriates in Turkey read Today’s Zaman for roughly the reasons that Kremlinologists once read Pravda, I should note that it seems to be influential among foreign observers and is apparently beloved of Anne-Marie Slaughter, recently the State Department’s director of policy planning.)
But to understand the strongest case against the Gülen media empire, we must explore some recent Turkish history. In June 2007, police discovered a crate of grenades in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed that they belonged to a shadowy clique of conspirators called Ergenekon. The organization was supposedly an outgrowth of the so-called Deep State—a secret coalition of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime, which surely existed at one point and doubtless still does. Ergenekon allegedly planned to stage a series of terrorist attacks throughout Turkey and use the ensuing chaos as the pretext for a military coup.
Since the day this news broke, thousands of Turks have been arrested by the AKP-led government, including military officers, academics, theologians, and journalists. In 2009, a new round of mass arrests began, targeting Kurds and leftists, as well as their attorneys. Journalists who witness these trials come away shocked, unable to believe the absurdity of the spectacle. I’ve watched a presiding judge, for example, ask a defendant why—if the evidence against him had been forged, as the defendant claimed—he had not caught the forger. Beyond the irrelevance of the question (that isn’t the job of the accused), there was the obvious fact that the defendant had been in a prison cell since his arrest and thus hardly in a position to do freelance police work.
It’s impossible not to conclude that something is rotten in the way the judicial process works in these cases, which until recently were under the control of the so-called Special Authority Courts. These were sold to the public as an advance upon Turkey’s loathed military courts, but as far as I can tell, they have represented no great improvement in the justice system. You don’t have to be a forensic specialist to see this; you only have to spend 15 minutes looking at the quality of the evidence upon which they rely. The most famous example involves the admission as evidence of coup plans that refer to entities that did not yet exist in the year that they were allegedly drafted; but anyone who wants other examples is spoiled for choice.
Yet the Gülenist media have cheered on these arrests and mass trials—representing them as the cleansing of the Deep State; describing them as a move against “terrorist networksâ€; calling those who question the cases’ legal standards darbeci, or coup-mongers; and failing to retract or correct misleading claims in their reporting. In other respects, by the way, journalists employed by the Gülen-“inspired†media are often better reporters than those employed by Turkey’s older media, so it’s not convincing to suggest that they’re just dumb and sloppy. They are careful and professional when they want to be. For these trials, they apparently don’t want to be.
Now to America. Gülen lives in the United States, and he has received praise and support from high-level figures in the American government. Bill Clinton and James Baker have delivered encomiums to his contributions to world peace, for instance, and President Obama has made an admiring visit to the Gülen-inspired Pinnacle School in Washington, D.C. Former CIA officer Graham Fuller—also former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and the author of The Future of Political Islam—vouched for Gülen personally in his green-card application process, as did former CIA officer George Fidas and former ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz.
All this support fuels conspiracy theories in Turkey and feeds deep anti-American sentiment among those who fear Gülen. They don’t understand why these former spooks and diplomats have been helping him. Frankly, neither do I. Nor can I dismiss their fears as absurd Oriental delusions; on the face of it, it might make sense for the United States to back Gülen. He is pragmatically pro-American; he has been quoted as saying that he would do nothing to undermine America’s interests in the region. He is suspicious of Russians and Iranians, as are we. He is influential enough in Turkey that it’s at least plausible to imagine that America wants to placate him or use him. I understand why many Turks believe that Gülen is reposing himself in the Poconos because, for some inscrutable imperial purpose, we’re protecting him.
Unfortunately, I know enough about American foreign policy to be confident that we’re not that smart. Our government is often astonishingly incompetent, with branches habitually failing to communicate important information with one another and even senior officials uninterested in following the details of complex events in Turkey. I also know that Americans are on the whole very kind and decent and want very much to be friends with Muslims who say that they denounce terrorism. But they don’t understand that by befriending Gülen, they infuriate Muslims in Turkey who likewise denounce terrorism but who also loathe Gülen as a power-hungry opportunist.
Gülen has used his time in America to become the largest operator—or perhaps merely inspirer—of charter schools in the United States. Sharon Higgens, who founded the organization Parents Across America, believes that there are now 135 Gülen-inspired charter schools in the country, enrolling some 45,000 students. That would make the Gülen network larger than KIPP—the runner-up, with 109 schools. The schools, in 25 states, have anodyne names: Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science, Beehive Science and Technology Academy. Thousands of Turkish nationals, almost all of them male, have come to America on H-1B visas specifically to teach in them. The schools focus on math and science, and their students often do well enough on standardized tests. The administrators say that they have no official ties to Gülen, and Gülen denies any connection to the schools. But federal forms required of nonprofits show that virtually all the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired groups—local nonprofits that promote Turkish culture. The Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield, for example, cosigned a five-year building lease with Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which explicitly promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “tolerance, dialogue and peace.â€
The FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education have been investigating the hiring practices of some of these schools, as the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer have reported—particularly the replacement of certified American teachers with uncertified Turkish ones who get higher salaries than the Americans did, using visas that are supposed to be reserved for highly skilled workers who fill needs unmet by the American workforce. The schools claim, according to an article written by Higgens in the Washington Post, that they are unable to find qualified teachers in America—which seems implausible, given that we’re in the depths of the worst economic downturn in postwar memory, and given that some of these new arrivals have come to teach English, which often they speak poorly, or English as a second language, which often they need themselves. They have also been hired as gym teachers, accountants, janitors, caterers, painters, construction workers, human-resources managers, public-relations specialists, and—of all things—lawyers.
Two of the schools, located in Texas, have been accused of sending school funds—which are supplied by the government, of course, since these are charter schools—to other Gülen-inspired organizations. Last year, theNew York Times reported that the charters were funneling some $50 million in public funds to a network of Turkish construction companies, among them the Gülen-related Atlas Texas Construction and Trading. The schools had hired Atlas to do construction, the paper said, though other bidders claimed in lawsuits that they had submitted more economical bids. Meanwhile, Atlas may have played a part in protecting Gülen charter schools; Folwell Dunbar, an official at the Louisiana Department of Education, has accused Atlas’s vice president, Inci Akpinar, of offering him a $25,000 bribe to keep mum about troubling conditions at the Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans. Dunbar sent a memo to department colleagues, the Times-Picayune reported, noting that “Akpinar flattered him with ‘a number of compliments’ before getting to the point: ‘I have twenty-five thousand dollars to fix this problem: twenty thousand for you and five for me.’ †Abramson is operated by the Pelican Foundation, which is linked to the Gülen-inspired Cosmos Foundation in Texas—which runs the two Texas schools.
Utah’s Beehive Science and Technology Academy, another Gülen-inspired charter, was $337,000 in debt, according to a financial probe by the Utah Schools Charter Board. The Deseret News tried to figure out where all this taxpayer money had gone. “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey,†the newspaper reported. “Many of these teachers had little or no teaching experience before they came to the United States. Some of them are still not certified to teach in Utah. The school spent more than $53,000 on immigration fees for foreigners in five years. During the same time, administrators spent less than $100,000 on textbooks, according to state records.†Reports have also claimed that the school board was almost entirely Turkish.
A reporter for the leftist magazine In These Times noted in 2010 that the Chicago Math and Science Academy obscured its relationship to Gülen. And the school board was strikingly similar to Beehive’s: “When I went to the school’s board meeting on July 8, I was taken aback to see a board of directors comprised entirely of men. They all appeared of Turkish, Bosnian or Croatian descent. Although I have nothing against Turkish, Bosnian or Croatian men, it does seem that a school board serving students who are 58 percent Hispanic/Latino, 25 percent African American, 12 percent Asian and 5 percent white might be well served by some women board members and board members from ethnic backgrounds the school predominantly serves.â€
Federal authorities are also investigating several of the movement’s schools for forcing employees to send part of their paychecks to Turkey, the Inquirer reports. Also worrying is that some of these schools, after being granted the right to issue large, tax-free public bonds, are now defaulting on them. The New York Times recently reported that Gülen-inspired schools in Georgia had defaulted on $19 million in public bonds, having granted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to businesses associated with Gülen followers.
There is no evidence that Islamic proselytizing takes place at the American Gülen schools and much evidence that students and parents like them. Most seem to be decent educational establishments, by American standards; graduates perform reasonably well, and some perform outstandingly.
So what are the schools for? Among other things, they seem to be moneymakers for the cemaat. They’re loaded with private, state, and federal funding, and they have proved amazingly effective at soliciting private donations. The schools are also H-1B visa factories and perhaps the main avenue for building the Gülen community in the United States. In 2011, 292 of the 1,500 employees at the Gülen-inspired Harmony School of Innovation, a Texas charter school, were on H-1B visas, the school’s superintendent told the New York Times. The feds have investigated Concept Schools, which operate 16 Horizon Science Academies across Ohio, on the suspicion that they illegally used taxpayer money to pay immigration and legal fees for people they never even employed, an Ohio ABC affiliate discovered. The feds’ suspicion was confirmed by state auditors. Concept Schools repaid the fees for their Cleveland and Toledo schools shortly before the ABC story broke, but it’s unclear whether they have repaid—or can repay—the fees for their other schools.
Perhaps to deflect scrutiny from the schools, people “inspired†by Gülen are constantly inviting high-ranking leaders to dinners to speak and lavishing them with awards. And remember those trips to Turkey that the Turkish-Irish Educational and Cultural Society organizes? The same thing happens in the United States. Dozens of Texans, ranging from state lawmakers to congressional staff members to university professors, have taken trips to Turkey financed by Gülen’s foundations. The Raindrop Foundation, for instance, paid for State Senator Leticia Van de Putte’s travel to Istanbul, according to a recent campaign report. Last January, she cosponsored a state senate resolution commending Gülen for “his ongoing and inspirational contributions to promoting global peace and understanding.â€
Steve Terrell, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, did a bit of digging and found that a remarkable number of local lawmakers had recently taken trips to Turkey courtesy of a private group, the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, that is tied to Gülen. In Idaho last year, a full tenth of state legislators went on the Turkey-trot tour, thanks to the Pacifica Institute, also inspired by Gülen. The Hawaii State Ethics Commission sent a memo to lawmakers reminding them to check with the commission before accepting the all-expenses-paid trip to Turkey to which they’d been invited by Pacifica. “The State Ethics Commission,†said the memo, “does not have sufficient understanding of Pacifica Institute, the purpose of the trip, or the state ‘benefit’ associated with the trip.â€
It is no very cynical asperity to wonder if all these trips are connected to the staggering amount of public money going to Gülen-inspired charter schools. Indeed, America is the only country in the world where the Gülen movement has been able to establish schools funded to a great extent by the host country’s taxpayers.
But does the cemaat want something more than money? Its supporters call it a “faith-based civil-society movement.†Mehmet Kalyoncu, an advisor to the ambassador of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to the United Nations, has observed correctly that the cemaat’s Turkish enemies call it a creature of the CIA or the Mossad, a secret servant of the pope, or a Trojan horse trying to Christianize Muslims or weaken them. To some Western critics, such as Michael Rubin, the cemaat is “a shadowy Islamist cult,†anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and trying to Islamize Americans. Gülen is a second Khomeini, Rubin has warned, who is trying to establish a new caliphate.
But none of that is quite right. According to researcher Aydin Ozipek, who attended a Gülen school, “the primary objective of the Gülen Movement is to increase its share of power.†That, it seems to me, is the most accurate description of all. The cemaat poses problems not because its members are pious Muslims (that’s probably the most admirable thing about them) but because it’s a power-hungry business that often behaves repulsively—like a mafia, in other words. Gülen does not run “madrassas†in America, as some have suggested; he runs charter schools. He does not “practice taqiyaâ€; he just dissimulates, like any ordinary politician.
I doubt that Gülen is a significant threat to American interests in the Middle East. For pragmatic reasons, the movement is friendly to any country where it can establish a business presence; if we stay friendly to business, it will stay friendly to us, however we define our interests. Thecemaat need not be a problem within America, either, so long as we deal with it with our eyes open and make sure that its members are obeying the law. But eyes open is the key. Here’s another excerpt from that infamous sermon that surfaced in 1999: “The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do. We don’t lay the web to eat or consume them but to show them the way to their resurrection, to blow life into their dead bodies and souls, to give them a life.†Those are words that suggest that Gülen’s activities in the United States deserve careful scrutiny—scrutiny because his business is organized and he thinks ahead.
Overall, America’s assimilative power has a track record far more impressive than Gülen’s. Our posture toward the Gülen movement in America has been, if inadvertently and late in coming, the right one: indict those who need indicting for specific, established crimes—visa fraud and, I suspect, racketeering—and wait for the next generation to become Americans. Treat people inspired by Gülen to the rule of law—to the same laws that everyone else in America follows. If they don’t already see it, they will recognize in time that those laws are excellent and connected to the economic opportunities that they enjoy. In fact, they may even do America some good, insofar as they’re locked into battle with the teachers’ unions: if Gülen’s followers can break them, more power to them. Maybe one day, we’ll even get a great American cemaatnovel out of their experience.
Our posture toward the movement as a foreign policy actor, however, to the extent that I can understand it, has been foolish. It is wrong to imagine that Gülen can be some kind of asset to us internationally or to accept or promote him as one. He has not been elected in Turkey—our NATO ally—or anywhere else. We have an interest in seeing Turkey become a full-fledged liberal democracy. That means supporting Gülen’s stated ideals—not him.
Claire Berlinski is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
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State Department's Continued Outreach to Radicals
by Abha Shankar
IPT News
December 18, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3856/state-department-continued-outreach-to-radicals
The Obama administration's efforts to conquer hearts and minds in the Muslim world as part of its broader strategy to battle Islamist terrorism may be a laudable goal. But the administration's continued pandering to radical Islamists both at home and abroad continues to baffle and frustrate opponents of political Islam and Islamist organizations.
The administration has been swift to embrace newly-elected Islamist regimes in the Middle-East despite their violent and pro-jihadi rhetoric. Last month for example, it heaped praise on Egypt's new Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi for helping broker a truce between Israel and Hamas after eight days of fighting. In lauding Morsi, the U.S. government overlooked statements supporting Hamas issued by Morsi's colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood and their celebration of rocket attacks on Israel. Morsi was a senior Brotherhood official for years before seeking office.
This international outreach to authoritarian Islamist regimes bestows undue legitimacy on Islamists and renders democratic and secular opposition and dissident groups voiceless. The same flawed outreach is being pursued domestically.
The latest example comes from a State Department-sponsored delegation last year of five Bulgarian Muslims who came to discuss the role of religion in the United States. Details of the trip, funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs under its International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), were obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The delegation hoped to "learn about the environment of religious tolerance in the U.S. and how religious groups function in a democratic society with a separation of church and state," records in the 379-page FOIA release show. It described meetings the delegation had with leading Islamist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and individuals in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and Chicago from Sept. 26-Oct. 14, 2011.
This is a problem that has been detailed before. Rather than seeking views from the broader, more diverse Muslim American community, government officials grab at "the lowest hanging fruit," said Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-based doctor who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. "But they ignore ideological diversity and instead take the shortcut of generally allowing those Muslims who are part of a national and global political Islamist movement to represent our faith community."
"When confronted the White House and State Department will say that the ideological positions of Muslim groups is not their concern," added Jasser, whose appointment this year to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom sparked ire among Islamists.
Jasser also blamed political correctness for the government's flawed outreach policy:
"In part this also happens out of an absurd degree of political correctness and in part because these organizations have been very successful at branding themselves as the 'voice of the Muslims.' Even our National Strategy on Counterterrorism has been hijacked by this behavior, where it references the word ideology over 20 times but never names the ideology. The truth is that there is not and will never be one Muslim voice. We are a very diverse community…."
Jasser's views were echoed by Qanta Ahmed, a New York-based physician and ardent critic of radical Islam.
The government's failure to distinguish "Islam" from "political Islam" and its "willful engagement with non-violent Islamists" has resulted in the Islamists "owning the narrative," she said. In congressional testimony given in June, she also highlighted the threat Islamist ideology poses to the American democracy:
"While we have been pursuing conventional international warfare and in fact have assassinated the leader of Al Qaida for instance, we have remained dangerously vulnerable because of our delayed realization of the political science aspects of Islamist ideology and the very serious threat this poses to our democracy," Ahmed said. She described threats to free speech in the debate over radical Islam due to threats of litigation and false claims of bigotry that are used to stifle other points of view. Already, due to Islamist influence, the U.S. government has stopped using words like "Islamist" and "radical Islam."
"This sanitization of our lexicon reveals a shocking and perhaps specious reluctance to engage with the problem or worse, a foolhardy embrace, unintentional or otherwise, with the Islamist stance," Ahmed said.
These are vulnerabilities which cannot be safeguarded by drones, or gunships but instead must be secured by counter ideological warfare which begins here, by widening the debate, discussion and scholarship in the area."
Such considerations were absent in planning the Bulgarian delegation's itinerary, as the FOIA documents show a parade of meetings with prominent U.S.-based Islamist organizations and individuals.
The delegation, for instance, visited the headquarters of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) in Washington, D.C. and met with Haris Tarin, director of the organization's Washington office. Founded in the U.S. in 1986, MPAC has a history of defending designated terrorist organizations and their supporters, opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts, and spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric. The group has questioned America's designation of Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups and called the Hizballah bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut as "exactly the kind of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against Washington's enemies."
Tarin has been critical of U.S. foreign and counterterrorism policies, has attempted to whitewash the jihadist threat, and embraced senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders. On Nov. 29, 2011 MPAC hosted a Capitol Hill forum on "Islamic Political Movements and the Arab Spring: Committed to Democracy and Pluralism?" The forum was followed by special dinner with Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia's Ennahda Party. Tarin was a featured speaker at the event. He wrote a post on his Facebook page praising Ghannouchi: "Ghannouchi is an [sic] modern intellectual giant on Islam and governance. BIG TIME! If you are in DC and want to come, hit me up!"
In an interview with the Al Arab Qatari website six months earlier, Ghannouchi called for the destruction of Israel. "I give you the good news that the Arab region will get rid of the bacillus of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this," Ghannouchi said
The delegation also visited the ADAMS Center, a radical Northern Virginia-based mosque that was found to be home to Saudi-produced radical and jihadist literature. According to a 2005 Freedom House report on radical Saudi literature found in American mosques, the materials collected by investigators included a fatwa that forbids Muslims to become United States citizens since the country is governed by infidels:
"It is forbidden for a Muslim to become citizen of a country [such as the United States] governed by infidels."
The Bulgarian delegation met with the staff of the CAIR office in Chicago. CAIR was founded by leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), formerly a central player in Hamas' support network in the U.S. Evidence in the Hamas-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation placed CAIR within the "Palestine Committee," a network of Muslim Brotherhood-tied organizations in the United States working to support Hamas.
Internal records entered into evidence in the case showed that the Palestine Committee was created to support Hamas "with what it needs of media, money, men and all of that." HLF and five of its employees were found guilty in 2008 on 108 counts for funneling money to Hamas through zakat (charity) committees in the Palestinian territories.
The delegation also visited the Mosque Foundation of Bridgeview, Ill., where they met with Kifah Mustapha. Mustapha also was implicated in the HLF investigation, listed by prosecutors as a Palestine Committee member. Mustapha was a paid HLF fundraiser and sang in the al-Sakhra band, which frequently performed at HLF events.
Mustafa is shown in a video exhibit introduced in the HLF trial performing with the al-Sakhra musical troupe. Mustafa can be seen singing in the chorus supporting Hamas' call for jihad:
"O mother, Hamas for Jihad. Over mosques'
loudspeakers, with freedom. Every day it resists
with stones and the dagger. Tomorrow, with God's
help, it will be with a machine gun and a rifle."
The government's outreach to radical Islamist groups and individuals is not new and has been ongoing for at least the past two decades under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Some of these Islamists include groups and individuals who have been convicted, indicted or designated unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism prosecutions in the U.S.
The State Department spent $40,000 from 1992-2000 to sponsor Abdurahman Alamoudi to represent American Muslims in speaking engagements overseas. Alamoudi, a former head of the now-defunct American Muslim Council, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for illegal financial dealings with Libya. Alamoudi also confessed to being part of a Libyan plot to assassinate the then-crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided financial aid to the Hamas-tied Holy Land Foundation. In 2000, on discovering the agency was providing aid to a terror-linked charity, Thomas R. Pickering, then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, ordered termination of HLF's registration with USAID since it was found the partnership was "contrary to the national interests and foreign policy of the United States."
Islamist apologist John Esposito has been sponsored by the State Department to travel overseas and talk about life for Muslims in America to international audiences. FOIA records obtained earlier by the IPT show Esposito traveled overseas several times between 1997 and 2007 on the State Department's dime, including to Pakistan, Bosnia, and Croatia. Esposito has a track record of downplaying the threat from Islamist terrorism and has close ties to CAIR and the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR)—two Muslim Brotherhood front groups that were identified by federal prosecutors in the HLF trial as part of the Hamas-support network in the U.S. Esposito also served as a defense expert in the HLF trial and considers U.S.-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operative Sami Al-Arian a close friend.
A March 2009 State Department booklet, titled "Being Muslim in America," ostensibly seeks to debunk the myth that American Muslims are marginalized and do not form part of mainstream America. But at closer glance the booklet reads more like a pro-Islamist propaganda mouthpiece giving voice to standard Islamist grievances such as growing Islamophobia and racial profiling in post-9/11 America.
More recently, the State Department sent MPAC's founder and president, Salam al-Marayati, as its emissary to a human rights forum in Poland in October. Al-Marayati earlier alleged Israel as a suspect behind the 9/11 attacks and called Hizballah attacks "legitimate resistance." This is not the first time the State Department handpicked al-Marayati as its representative, sending him on a 2010 trip to Europe where al-Marayati spoke about free speech and religious freedom.
Jasser criticized the State Department and the Obama administration for their work with "patently Islamist ideologues" such as ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), MPAC and CAIR that helps promote and provide legitimacy to such groups.
"Even though those groups have reportedly anywhere from 4-12% support of American Muslims, the USG endorsements in all its forms props up these groups more as the de facto tribal leaders of our American faith community," Jasser said in an email exchange with the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
"If the Obama administration would actually reach out to more ideologically diverse Muslims, i.e. our AILC [American Islamic Leadership Coalition], they would find that many of the lenses through which they view our communities would need to be changed. They would be forced to address the ideology of Islamism and how to understand the impact that has upon the actions of those groups."
Currently, Jasser emphasized, Islamists provide "unfettered advice [that] leads to pro-Islamist positions domestically and abroad, leading to stronger positions of influence for Islamists and less access for anti-Islamist Muslims. They falsely convince the White House that anti-Islamists are anti-Muslim when the reality could not be more pro-Muslim."
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_B1H-1opys
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Israel's jihad is mine
by Qanta Ahmed
Times of Israel
January 10, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3887/israel-jihad-is-mine
As Israel considers building a new fence to contain the Syrian conflict to the north, which fences can keep out Hamas's even more lethal ideologies? While Gaza and the Muslim Arab world continue to claim victory in the recent Israel-Hamas conflict, for the sane observers among us, there is only ever defeat – the defeat of morality in the desecration of a great religion. While most Muslims laud Hamas and scorn Israel, for me, an observing Muslim, Israel's war against Hamas remains my struggle – my jihad.
Israel's eight-day operation "Pillar of Defense" sought to dismantle the Hamas apparatus from within Gaza. The predictably seamless alignment of the Muslim world against Israel was even more breathtaking than usual in the face of Syria's 22 months of systematic genocide, one which has consistently failed to trigger unanimous Muslim protest.
What does this say about us as Muslims?
We are hypocrites.
While Muslims define Israel as the enemy, we ignore Assad, and diabolically laud Hamas. Hamas is never sated – each year it devours ever more Palestinians, regardless of age or gender. If Israelis lose fewer citizens than the Palestinians in these conflicts it is for the same reason Israel exchanges more prisoners for each captive soldier: quite simply Israel values human life more than does Hamas, which relishes ground operations taking place among densely populate civilian areas.
Explaining this to Muslims in the Twitterverse, I get sharply reminded that Hamas does not have the "luxury of launch sites" that Israel enjoys. Have we lost our minds, Muslims? How can we speak of 'launch sites' as 'luxuries' while disregarding the culling taking place in Syria? Perhaps we have not lost our minds, but we have most certainly lost our religion.
As I am not one to speak for others, allow me to let Hamas speak for themselves. They are bald-faced about their mission, seeking glory through death, annunciation through annihilation:
We are ready to offer 1,000, 2,000 or even 10,000 martyrs every year. We are ready to keep offering martyrs for twenty years because we are sure we are moving in the right direction and that we will prevail in the end" (Hamas leader Khalid Al Mish'al in Gaza"
To Hamas, a Palestinian life is worth more when "martyred," a dead child more of a blessing than one living. "The children of the kindergarten are the shaheeds [martyrs] of tomorrow," reads a sign displayed at a Hamas-run kindergarten. The martyrdom mantra is their anthem.
While observers speculate Hamas will shortly usurp the crumbling Fatah leadership and ideologically annex the West Bank, we must remember Hamas' raison d'etre: Islamist nihilism, a totalitarian ideology, jet-fueled on the language and images stolen from mighty Islam. Israeli negotiators who must engage with this opponent are walking on the sharp-edged sword of Damocles and unlike Muslims, the Israelis certainly know it.
Coloring their fascism with Islam, Hamas claims religious legitimacy to openly seek destruction of the Jewish state and eradication of the Jewish people. By grafting themselves onto Into Islamic ideals – the vertebral column of that which is most sacred to Muslims – they render Islam itself heinous, representing their true ruthlessness: theirs is a willingness to sacrifice anything –including Islam – to portray Israel as evil.
This ethos was captured in a single unprecedented obscenity: Hamas' morbid motorcade. Cocksure thugs, defiantly cruising on motorcycles trailed exposed cadavers of Palestinians – Muslim men – trousers pooled at dead ankles. To chants of 'Allah-hu-Akbar' as dozens of Palestinian onlookers silently watched, Hamas took its ghoulish victory lap explicitly to show Gazans how they execute 'suspected informers to Israel'. This is the Islam of Hamas.
This is why Hamas does not represent me, or other believing Muslims. This is why Israel's battle is mine. This is why Israel's struggle – Israel's jihad – is mine. These are the 'Muslims' that Israelis must confront and these are the "Muslims" who intimidate innocent Palestinians into subjugation to their monstrous political Islamism.
But we Muslims in particular, more than conflict-hardened Israelis, should hardly be surprised, for it was Muslims who were once forewarned of scourges such as Hamas.
The Prophet Mohammed (SAW) was once asked what he most feared for his followers. Centuries later, his response, recorded in the hadith, haunts, stating he feared those who:
…Interpret verses of the Qur'an out of context…A people that recite Qur'an….but it will not go past their throats, a people with excellent words and vile deeds. They will pass through the religion (of Islam) like the arrow passes through its quarry. They will no more come back to the religion than the arrow will come back to its course. They are the worst of human beings and the worst of all creation. They summon to the book of Allah, but they have nothing to do with it. Whoever kills them is closer to Allah than they.
This is the true nature of Hamas, which recites the Quran yet doesn't hold it in their hearts, that "summon to the book of Allah but have nothing to do with it." By the above, it would seem the IDF (that eliminates Hamas) is surely closer to Allah than Hamas.
Yet instead of condemning Hamas, and recognizing them as imposters among us, the Muslim world celebrates them, even as Hamas violates the most profound Islamic principle: the sanctity of life, a right man must protect even in preference to any rights God claims from man.
When Muslims support Hamas, we support no less than the signatories to Islam's collective extinction. Muslim support renders Hamas legitimate, their methods acceptable, their ideals valid. Our support as Muslims is their lifeblood. In supporting them, we hemorrhage our only currency, our only asset – our great monotheism.
Two years into the Arab Awakening, the freshly turned soil is ripe for the seeding. Hamas operatives everywhere are already celebrated as 'liberators' of Gazans, when they have actually long been their jailers, 'victors' over Israel, when Hamas is the personal death knell of all pluralism in the region. Gazans so recently celebrating in the street are no more than hostages afflicted with the worst Stockholm Syndrome imaginable, heading to their own death through their misplaced hope in their virulently Islamist leadership.
During Operation Pillar of Defense, Jewish friends said "this must be such a difficult time for you, but I am glad of our friendship" implying that because I am Muslim, my loyalty must surely be to Gaza, my enmity automatically aligned with Israel.
Not so. As a Muslim, I am clear: my loyalty is with Islam, and therefore explicitly with justice, justice for all humanity, a humanity that must include Jews. Hamas is obscenely unjust, so how can my loyalty be with them? To be loyal to Hamas is no less than to abandon Islam. To be loyal to Hamas is the ultimate blasphemy.
While I understand the need for Israeli negotiators to engage with Hamas first to secure the current ceasefire and then for some sort of functional peace, the reality is their militant ideology must be suffocated out of existence or else the détente is little more than an illusion. For this, unlike for suicide bombers or Syrian rockets, there are no Israeli fences or walls, no Iron Domes, only Muslim barriers – robust barriers of counter-ideology.
It is Muslims who must take the first steps to excoriate Hamas, to expose them as the ruthless nihilists they explicitly announce themselves to be. We must scorn Hamas for masquerading among the poor as their savior when they are instead their executioner. Muslims must hold all media accountable for telling the truth: Palestinians are the Muslims orphaned not by Israel but by the entire Muslim world itself. Land-grabs and permanent refugee camps are testament to such.
We must ask ourselves the difficult questions. Does Hamas, who prostitute their progeny in the service of terror, represent Islam? Is Hamas emulating our Prophet as they rain rockets on unarmed, civilian, non-combatants? Do their Fajr missiles, named after Muslim prayers no less, encompass the spirit of Islam as was revealed to its followers? Do Hamas' stated goals – including elimination of Israel – represent coexistence with the People of the Book, who are cherished in the Quran as dear to God and their Messenger, Moses, particularly admired by our Maker for his courage in the face of fear?
Don't be fooled by Hamas' words Muslims; we have a duty to judge them on their vile deeds.
If Islam is to truly thrive, it will only do so when more and more anti-Islamist Muslims confront and extinguish radical Islamist ideologues. Otherwise, we stand to lose both Israel and Islam in one fell swoop of the Islamist axe. Whether rescuing Palestinians and Israelis captive to the whim of Hamas, or rescuing Islam from Islamist Hamas, this is truly our jihad and no one else's, which is why Israel's jihad is also mine.
Qanta Ahmed is a physician and author of In the Land of Invisible Women; Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion; @MissDiagnosis; www.huffingtonpost.com/qanta-ahmed/
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http://unitedwithisrael.org/turkish-journalist-outspokenly-defends-israel/
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/algerian-jihadists-wanted-to-teach-the-americans-what-islam-is/
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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/04/16/muslims-celebrate-with-sweets-praise-to-allah-over-boston-bombing-62151
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second post of the day:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/16/muslim-brotherhood-leader-pens-bizarre-boston-bombing-note-pointing-to-widespread-conspiracy/
Muslim Brotherhood Leader Pens Bizarre Boston Bombing Note Pointing to Widespread Conspiracy
Dr. Essam el-Erian, a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has apparently turned to his Facebook page to put out some confounding commentary about Monday’s tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon. According to an English translation, el-Erian expressed sympathy for the American people, but then purportedly connected the bombings to other incidents that have unfolded in the Middle East of late. The tone was conspiratorial in nature, as the note connected global events and wondered who is planting Islamophobia. Here’s how Foreign Policy’s Passport blog frames the message:
A common criticism of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has always been that it delivers one message in English to an international audience, and another message entirely in Arabic to its domestic audience. If anyone is ever looking for an example of this, they need to look no further than the Islamist organization’s reaction to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
In English, the Brotherhood’s political party released a statement “categorically reject[ing] as intolerable the bombings committed in the U.S. city of Boston,” and “offer[ing] heartfelt sympathies and solemn condolences to the American people and the families of the victims.”
In Arabic, senior Brotherhood leader and the vice chairman of the group’s political party Essam el-Erian took a different tack. In a post on his Facebook page, he condemned the Boston attack — but also linked it to the French war in Mali, the destruction in Syria and Iraq, and faltering rapprochement between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels.
While el-Erian’s post starts with condolences, most of its contents are devoted to posing odd questions and pondering who is behind attacks on Islamic states.
“Our sympathy with the families of the victims, and the American people do not stop us from reading into the grave incident,” he wrote, launching into a recap of recent violence. “This series of events began with the sending of French battalions to Mali in a war against organisations that are said to belong to Al-Qaeda.”
After referencing Mali, the note goes on to discuss Syria, claiming that “bombings intensified” there “in a suspicious manner.” And violence, too, it charges, has returned to Iraq.
“Violent explosions returned, rearing their ugly heads again in Iraq, targeting peaceful movements aiming for needed reform,” the Muslim Brotherhood leader continued. “After a reasonable calm in Somalia, the capital Mogadishu shook again, leading to lowered confidence in the new president and government.”
And he didn’t end there. While one might be confused as to what he is alluding to throughout the Facebook post, at the end of his writings it becomes clear: He’s looking for someone — mainly a group — to blame for what he sees as potentially-coordinated unrest in the Middle East.
“Who disturbed democratic transformations, despite the difficult transition from despotism, corruption, poverty, hatred, and intolerance to freedom, justice tolerance, development, human dignity, and social justice?,” el-Erian asked. “Who planted Islamophobia through research, the press, and the media? Who funded the violence?”
It’s difficult to tell who the Muslim Brotherhood official is blaming for the unrest. But his claims also caught the attention of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who called them “bizarre.”
We’ll leave you with el-Erian’s full statement, below (as per mbinenglish.com):
The criminal acts in Boston, which killed three and wounded 244, comes in the context of reproducing an old case that will not return and not produce negative effects on Islam and Muslims. Our sympathy with the families of the victims, and the American people do not stop us from reading into the grave incident.
This series of events began with the sending of French battalions to Mali in a war against organisations that are said to belong to Al-Qaeda. Bombings intensified in Syria in a suspicious manner that deviated from the path of the great Syrian revolution, and smear campaigns began. Violent explosions returned, rearing their ugly heads again in Iraq, targeting peaceful movements aiming for needed reform. After a reasonable calm in Somalia, the capital Mogadishu shook again, leading to lowered confidence in the new president and government. The historic agreement, which ended the fiercest regional conflict, between Erdogan and the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is faltering.
A question that forces itself: Who disturbed democratic transformations, despite the difficult transition from despotism, corruption, poverty, hatred, and intolerance to freedom, justice tolerance, development, human dignity, and social justice?
Who planted Islamophobia through research, the press, and the media?
Who funded the violence?
The march of the Arab peoples will continue, and the will of right, justice, and dignity will triumph, and Syria will triumph to democratic transition movements with the permission of the victorious One God Almighty, who cannot be rendered incapable.
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Boston Bomber Exposes Islamist Secret
IPT News
April 23, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3993/boston-bomber-exposes-islamist-secret
Now he's in trouble.
It is one thing for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be seen on security camera videos placing one of the bombs that killed three people at last week's Boston Marathon.
But now he's really crossed a line.
Tsarnaev is telling investigators he and his brother were motivated by religion to plot their carnage, media reports citing anonymous federal sources say.
Radical Islam. It's a label banned by the Obama administration. National Islamist groups say it doesn't belong in conversations about terrorism. Tsarnaev didn't get the memo.
Recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, Dzhokhar told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were driven by religious fervor and took their instructions from al-Qaida's Inspire magazine, NBC News reports. Anger at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled their rage, the Washington Post reports.
That motivation echoes justifications offered by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan for the Fort Hood shooting spree that killed 13 people and Faisal Shahzad's sentencing rant about his attempt to bomb Times Square in 2010. "The crusading U.S. and NATO forces who have occupied the Muslim lands under the pretext of democracy and freedom for the last nine years and are saying with their mouths that they are fighting terrorism, I say to them, we don't accept your democracy nor your freedom, because we already have Sharia law and freedom," Shahzad told the court. "Furthermore, brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me."
Despite this candor from terrorists, the Obama administration and Islamist groups have argued that referring to terrorists' religious motivations somehow grants them religious legitimacy. "Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists," CIA Director John Brennan said in 2009 when he was White House terrorism adviser. "Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term 'jihad,' which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve."
Similarly, Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul Stockton squirmed and obfuscated when asked about the role radical Islam played in past terror plots.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) tried to stem the tide about radical Islam that Tsarnaev unleashed by issuing a news release Tuesday. It decries the focus on a radical Islamic motive for the Boston Marathon bombings as inherently bigoted. The "wave of inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric" is solely due to the Tsarnaev's Muslim faith, the statement said.
CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad "said the recent spike in hate rhetoric comes in the wake of a coordinated long-term effort by Islamophobic activists and groups to demonize Islam and marginalize American Muslims."
One imagines they'll give Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a good talking-to for demonizing Islam in his statements to investigators.
The Tsarnaev case threatens the Islamist narrative that radical Islamic ideology in terror attacks should be ignored or minimized.
As former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani writes in Tuesday's Washington Post, the Tsarnaevs' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, offered an example for Muslims to follow. In an impromptu exchange with reporters outside his home, Tsarni expressed profound grief toward the victims, acknowledged "somebody radicalized" his nephews, and said they were "losers" who brought shame to the family."
This, Nomani writes, "accomplished something that 11 years of post-9/11 press releases, news conferences and soundbites by too many American Muslim leaders has failed to do on the issue of radicalization and terrorism: with raw, unfettered emotion, he owned up to the problem within."
Contrary to the expectations of a backlash against Muslims described by Islamist groups, Tsarni was not met with rank bigotry. He was hailed for his heartfelt response and became an Internet sensation.
"And the collectivist-minded Muslim community needs to learn an important lesson from Tsarni," Nomani writes. "It's time to acknowledge the dishonor of terrorism within our communities, not to deny it because of shame. As we negotiate critical issues of ethnicity, religious ideology and identity as potential motivators for conflict, we have to establish basic facts."
Nomani is an individual Muslim, and someone outside the national advocacy groups which claim to speak for Muslim Americans. There is little indication those national organizations are ready to meet the challenge. Hassan Shibly, director of the Tampa office for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), rules out religion as a factor in an interview with On Islam.
Asked whether Islam, a "wicked understanding" of it or American policy influenced the Tsarnaevs, Shibly answered, "None of the above" and cast the brothers as mentally ill. "No mentally healthy individual can accept the intentional attack against innocent civilians, especially not in the name of any divine faith."
But reports of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's radicalization grow more numerous by the hour. He frequented jihadi websites, officials told the Associated Press Tuesday. He posted jihadi videos to his Youtube account.
Examining the Tsarnaevs' radical Islamic beliefs is not a statement about any other Muslims, but an acknowledgement of the reality that led them to murder innocent people at a marathon race. Motivation is relevant in a crime. There is no outcry when motive is discussed in radical supremacist or anti-government violence. There should be no chilling of discussion about radical Islam when it clearly is present.
But liberal academics and media figures continue to try to quash such talk. On HBO's "Real Time," host Bill Maher – himself a liberal – dismissed California State San Bernandino's Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism Director Brian Levin's accusation of Islamophobia as "liberal bulls**t."
His students, and even his children's dentist, are Muslims, Levin said, and are "fine, upstanding" people. By focusing on radical Islam, Maher is "promoting Islamic hatred."
Maher shot that down, saying there's a problem when religiously motivated violence emanates more from one faith than all others.
One thing Levin got right is that there is vast heterogeneity among the world's 1.4 billion Muslims. That's why national Islamist groups which claim to speak for Muslim Americans can't be considered reliable even though reporters and many government officials treat them as though they are. CAIR is lashing out, trying to cast the focus on radical Islam as a bigoted conspiracy to marginalize all Muslim Americans.
You won't see CAIR or other Islamist groups standing by Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, or Sacramento Imam Abu Laith Luqman Ahmad. Politically, there's probably very little on which these three agree, reflecting that diversity Levin referenced. But they all believe Muslims need to be bolder in confronting the radical segments within their own faith community.
"There is a deep soulful battle of identity raging within the Muslim consciousness domestically and abroad between Westernism and liberalism," Jasser said this week. "In essence the Islamists confront every situation in a selfish 'we are the victims' mentality and the rest of us non-Islamist Muslims need to instead respond with a louder and more real leadership and say: 'We will not be victims.'"
In a 2011 column, Ahmad called it "a mistake in my view for American Muslims to categorize every and all suspicion or criticism of Islam and Muslims as simply the result of islamophobia. To do so, only serves to perpetuate the view that many Americans have of Muslims as irrational people, who cannot be trusted. This makes our fight against islamophobia using our current tactics, a winless and counterproductive campaign.
"The obsessive American Muslim campaign against islamophobia and the questionable tactics we are employing to that end, says a lot about who we are as a people of faith. It implies that we reject our own religious axioms of being able to withstand criticism, hatred, and accepting that not everyone will share our point of view. It also says that we have very little spiritual fortitude."
Jasser, Imam Ahmad and Nomani display confidence in their faith. They aren't afraid of the debate. If only national Islamist groups could be so bold.
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The Boston Marathon massacre was carried out by two Caucasian Muslim brothers, one an American citizen, the other likely a green-card holder.
In the aftermath, the politically correct media and commentators are all flabbergasted. Over and over, the media reported, “Dzhokhar was a normal American kid.” They wondered: What could be the terrorists’ motivations?
Recently, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh came under liberal media attack for linking the bombers’ behavior to the “liberal elite intellectual thought” that infects the Boston community. Limbaugh explained to a caller on his show how such a mindset harms young kids.
“They hang around people that don’t like America, they get inspired or influenced by it somehow, and it’s no wonder. If you end up around the wrong people long enough and you’re young enough and impressionable enough, then that kind of thing can happen,” Limbaugh said.
With the questions swirling of why two upwardly mobile young people in America could commit such acts, a good place to start would be the “educations” the two Tsarnaev brothers received. Younger brother Dzhokhar graduated from the celebrated Boston high school Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS). A graduate of CRLS has had years of anti-American claptrap crammed down his throat.
The media has widely quoted retired CRLS teacher Larry Aaronson’s shocked reminiscences about Dzhokhar. Aaronson told The Boston Globe, “This is a progressive town, the People’s Republic, and how could this be in our midst?
“I’m at a loss. I’m at a total and complete loss.”
Well, Larry might start looking at his own classroom handiwork. Aaronson is an acolyte of the raving, America-hating, deceased “revisionist historian” Howard Zinn.
Zinn was a liberal elite darling. Zinn claimed his eyes were opened to the racist, imperialist horror that is America by writer I.F. Stone, who later was confirmed to be a KGB covert influence agent when the Iron Curtain fell and certain Soviet documents became public.
Aaronson, who retired in 2007, used to brag to anyone who would listen that he had taught Zinn’s textbook to CLRS students since the beginning of his career in 1981.
Aaronson also proudly related how his students at CLRS had included actor Matt Damon and Damon’s brother. He proudly told how the Damon boys were taken with the anti-American history of Zinn. Larry, in an homage to Zinn upon his death in 2008, started with this quote from the movie “Good Will Hunting,” quoting Matt Damon, “You wanna read a really good American history book? Read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’ It will knock your socks off.”
If you don’t know Zinn’s handiwork, here’s a sample of his writing in The Progressive. Zinn’s contempt for America and its citizens fairly drips from each word: “The deeply ingrained belief — no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to ‘pledge allegiance’ (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with ‘liberty and justice for all.’
“And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ announcing that we are ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ There is also the unofficial national anthem ‘God Bless America,’ and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation — just 5 percent of the world’s population — for his or her blessing.”
Aaronson boasted that angry parents called him to say their kids were talking about “that bastard Christopher Columbus … and his genocide, and how we have to question our history books and re-examine the evidence.” The CRLS teacher continued with relish, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
With that backstory illuminated, let’s return to the liberal media puzzling over “What could the Tsarnaev boys’ motive possibly be?”
After the Marathon massacre, the media quoted the Zinn-acolyte Aaronson in its stories about the terrorist mass murderer.
Aaronson was “utterly shocked by the news.” The media reported that, “Aaronson taught social studies at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where Dzhokhar was a student.”
The media reports continued, “Dzhokhar also lives just about three houses down from Aaronson’s condo, so they would talk from time to time after Dzhokhar's graduation in 2011.”
“I will say to you and to anyone who asks me,” Aaronson told WBUR’s David Boeri outside his home in Cambridge on Friday morning, “he had a heart of gold, he was a sweetheart, he was gracious, he was caring, he was compassionate.”
ABC, CBS, USA Today, The New York Times, and CNN all carried versions of Aaronson’s comments about “how normal” his neighbor and student Dzhokhar was.
None of the media provided any other background on Aaronson and his brainwashing of students at CRLS with Zinn’s history. The media reports studiously ignore the connection between Dzhokhar’s anti-American lessons taught by a “social justice” weenie like Aaronson or from a book by follower Zinn who took his cues from a KGB covert influence agent named Stone – and was later slyly celebrated in a Hollywood film known as Matt Damon’s “Good Will Hunting.”
As for the older brother Tamerlan’s “education,” it appears that he was a follower of a Lebanese-Australian extremist cleric whose messages of hatred for Western culture were prominent on Tamerlan’s YouTube playlists, and he may well have been taught terrorist techniques during a recent trip abroad.
It appears that Tamerlan recently spent six months overseas. In Russia? Or did he travel elsewhere? Did he go to Chechnya? Did he spend time in what appears to be his homeland, Dagestan, where his father now lives? Who did he meet there? What did he do there? We do know that Tamerlan returned “from Russia” in the summer of 2012. His brother would have been out of high school for about a year. His return was about nine months before the Boston Marathon bombing.
If Tamerlan trained on bombing and attack techniques, he could have returned to Boston with the attack plan fully laid out. He would have the skills required to make the bombs. He would likely already have identified the target. And he would have the techniques required to carry out the attacks. All that would be missing was the materials to make the bombs, and an accomplice.
So, in this scenario, we have a committed, trained Islamic terrorist ready to carry out his attack. What pool will he draw from to recruit his accomplice?
Why, his “average American” brother, Dzhokhar.
Kent Clizbe is a former CIA counterterrorism operations officer. His two books, “Willing Accomplices” and “Obliterating Exceptionalism,” detail how political correctness became part of American culture. His website is KentClizbe.com
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/rush-boston-bombers/2013/04/24/id/501161?s=al&promo_code=1342C-1
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http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/american-professor-who-hates-america-stabbed-in-cairo-by-muslim-who-also-hates-america/
American Professor Who Hates America Stabbed in Cairo by Muslim Who Also Hates America
May 10, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield Comments (89)
Sometimes poetic justice is very poetic. Other times it’s ironic. And sometimes it’s a teachable moment about the folly of appeasement.
Not that Dr. Christopher Stone will have learned anything from his experience. Leftist academics are not very educable. Not even when their Muslim teachers are stabbing them in the neck. (via Debbie Schlussel)
A man stabbed in the neck near the US Embassy in Cairo on Thursday has been identified as Chris Stone, an American academic. Stone is associate professor of Arabic and head of the Arabic Programme at City University.
Lebanese political science professor Asaad Abu Khalil described Stone via Facebook as a “model academic and a man who has dealt with Arabs and their causes with extreme respect, sensitivity, and support.” Stone is a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and writes frequently against Zionism, Khalil added.
According to Al-Ahram, Stone told prosecutors the attack took place while he was on his way to the US Embassy to finish some paperwork for his wife. A young man enquired about his nationality and stabbed him in the neck after he said he was American.
Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever about the motive, Mahmoud Badr, the stabber, who has a bachelor’s degree in commerce, clarified his motive…
The man who stabbed an American in Cairo on Thursday says he was motivated by a hatred of the United States.
Ironically, hating the United States was something that Mahmoud had in common with Christopher. When invited to a seven year old’s Israel themed birthday party, Stone declined by asserting that he didn’t just hate Israel… he also hated America, writing…
“If she had invited me to a party celebrating the US I suspect my response would have been the same. This is not ONLY because of the odious behavior of the US and Israeli governments, but also because of the destruction wrought in the name of nationalism in general.”
So presumably Christopher Stone didn’t do Fourth of July parties. He did however sign a petition demanding that the NYPD commissioner step down for fighting Muslim terrorism. And wrote angry letters to the paper about the Zionist Entity.
Gaza is a virtual prison, and the West Bank is on its way to being chopped up into apartheid-like cantons…
Mr. Morris says the Iranian president’s denial of the existence of homosexuality in Iran ”underscore his irrationality.” State denial of facts was not invented by Iran. Does not Israel’s denial of its own state terrorism underscore its irrationality?
Speaking of irrationality, Stone imagined that he could parade around a newly Islamist Egypt protected only by his hatred of the Great and Little Satan.
He was mistaken.
Muslim violence doesn’t just hurt the “bad” Americans who watch 4th of July fireworks and like the Constitution. It also hurts good Americans who teach Arabic and hate America.
Back in the day, Muslims had special clothing for Dhimmis to wear to signify their acceptance of second class status under Islamic supremacism. Stone though that his Keffiyah did the trick. Next time he’ll know better.
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:-D :-D :-D
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Keeping Our Heads in the Sand After Boston
IPT News
May 14, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4016/keeping-our-heads-in-the-sand-after-boston
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The Obama administration's policy banning references to "Islamic extremism" and "jihad" in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday's House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings.
The bombings "should again teach us that the enemy we face is violent Islamist extremism, not just al Qaida," said former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. "Osama bin Laden is dead. And the remaining leadership of al Qaida is on the run, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is rapidly spreading."
The Boston investigation already has shown that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev "adopted the outrageously false narrative of violent Islamist extremism, that Islam and America are involved in a struggle to the death with each other," Lieberman said.
It has been more than five years since the Department of Homeland Security, under the Bush administration, issued a directive about "the difficult terrain of terminology" as recommended by unidentified academics and Muslim American activists. "Jihadist" and "Islamist terrorist" were identified as terms to be avoided. Jihad "glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe," the memo said.
By identifying them as mere extremists or criminals, they lose some of the luster that attracts recruits, the argument goes.
Is it working? How can you tell?
Anecdotally, this strategy did nothing to dissuade the Tsarnaevs, or any of the other homegrown terrorist plotters in recent years. The policy's effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But skeptics, such as Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program Director Jeffrey M. Bale, say the language policy is illogical.
"Why, after all, would Muslims look to non-Muslims to interpret their religion for them, or for guidance about how to identify and label Islamists?" Bale said in response to an email from the Investigative Project on Terrorism. "Indeed, if we call jihadists 'criminals,' it may actually have the counterproductive effect of garnering more sympathy for them given the levels of anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility throughout the Muslim world."
Jihadists routinely make it plain that – while religion may not be the sole factor driving them to violence – their Islamic beliefs and identities dominate their thinking. "We in the West just don't seem to want to believe what they constantly say," Bale wrote. (Read his full response here.)
Faisal Shahzad failed to set off the car bomb he built and parked near Times Square in 2010. But he said he tried to kill Americans because he saw himself as part of "the war against people who believe in the book of Allah and follow the commandments, so this is a war against Allah. So let's see how you can defeat your Creator, which you can never do. Therefore, the defeat of U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future, inshallah [God willing], which will only give rise to much awaited Muslim caliphate, which is the only true world order."
Farooque Ahmed similarly thought he was acting to defend Muslims when he plotted to attack subway stops along Washington's Metro.
FBI agents were drawn to Ahmed after he tried to make contact with terrorist groups so he could wage jihad against Americans. At Ahmed's sentencing, public defender Kenneth Troccoli explained that Ahmed's extreme religious beliefs helped land him in front of the court.
"First, there's an incessant message that is delivered by radical followers of Islam that one cannot be true to the faith unless they take action, including violent action, most especially violent action. And this is a message which of course the United States combats in many different fronts," Troccoli said. "But [it] is an incessant message nonetheless that for a person like Mr. Ahmed who is a believer in Islam and is a Muslim, he hears all the time that he is not -- not only is he not sufficient under the faith, if one were to believe these negative messages, but he's also not patriotic because he was born and raised until he was 16 in Pakistan."
Ahmed bought the message offered by American-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, among others, that Muslims who do not wage jihad, "literally will not find salvation under their faith."
The problem is especially acute for converts, a study by the Henry Jackson Society found. They were involved in nearly a quarter of the 171 al-Qaida related offenses in the United States since 1997.
Zachary Chesser wanted to join the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab not long after converting to Islam. Chesser is serving 25 years in prison for trying to provide material support to al-Shabaab and for his role in threatening the producers of "South Park" following an episode portraying the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. The producers wanted to show that Islam is the only major religion which prompts violent reactions to any criticism or mockery.
His case generated a bipartisan report on online radicalization by the Senate Homeland Security Committee. In a handwritten letter from prison, Chesser told committee staffers that, "My religion, the state of affairs in the Muslim world and a desire to alleviate suffering within it led me to desire to fight jihad."
Muslims investigating their faith find two choices, he wrote, "do nothing and pray or fight jihad somewhere. Increasingly, 'somewhere' is here. One does not typically run across the fiqh [jurisprudence] of diplomacy and negotiations unless to go into great depth."
"The one who sets out to learn inevitably sees jihad as viable and preferable at some point," Chesser wrote.
Rather than merely ignoring Chesser's path to radicalization, and his language, a counter-narrative is needed to rebut the narrative put forth by al-Qaida, Awlaki and other religious scholars that are readily accessible on the Internet. There are heroic efforts made by individual Muslims. But it is here that the government policy, stoked by national Islamist groups (see sidebar), proves woefully misguided.
During an appearance on CNN after the Marathon bombing, former radical Islamist Maajid Nawaz advocated "challenging the jihadist ideology, discrediting their propaganda." Ask someone to identify the symbols and leaders representing radical Islam, and "[y]ou'd think of the black flags, you'd think of the leaders such as bin Laden, Awlaki, Ayman Zawahiri. If I asked the same question for leaders and symbols of democratic activism in the Middle East today, we're much harder pressed to think of those leaders and symbols. And that tells us something about the power of the radical Islamist brand today versus the power of the democratic brand. And that's what we should really be focusing on."
But you can't counter narratives when you refuse to acknowledge their existence. That's what the current policy does.
In a separate CNN appearance, Nawaz said Muslim jihadists see America as the true enemy in a global war. "The younger [Tsarnaev] brother, let's remember, said in his interview that he was fighting on behalf of the Afghans and the Iraqis. He's probably never visited those two countries. Yet somehow, he felt that he owed more allegiance to Iraq and Afghanistan than to the very country that adopted him," Nawaz said.
The American-Islamic Forum for Democracy has launched a Muslim Liberty Project aimed at promoting patriotism as compatible with faith, rather than promoting the notion of a universal "ummah," or Muslim nation. The 2008 DHS directive on language frowns upon use of the word "liberty," saying that "many around the world would discount the term as a buzzword for American hegemony.
Forum founder Zuhdi Jasser said national Islamist groups have failed to lead on the issue.
"And that many of the leadership in our community says, oh, there's no problem. These guys weren't even really Muslims. We don't have the narrative about victimization, America's biggest, America's anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, they're killing Muslims abroad. They're in Muslim lands," Jasser said. "This narrative is not balanced by other Muslim leaders, the reformists that are anti-Islamist that believe in American liberty, and that imbalance creates a narrative that makes them feel that this society is not theirs, that they're visitors."
Jasser is a devout Muslim working to elbow his way into the discussion about Islam in America. When Islamist groups like CAIR or the Muslim Public Affairs Council – which are used to controlling the microphone – cannot argue against the merits of Jasser's message, they quickly turn to vicious ad hominem attacks.
A look at the home pages for CAIR, MPAC, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society and others shows plenty of blanket condemnations of the Boston attacks and statements that they do not represent Muslims. But no one has produced a detailed rebuttal to the ubiquitous online rhetoric that radicalized the Tsarnaevs and dozens of other young people.
In a recent column, Canadian physician and writer Ali A. Rizvi, an atheist who left Islam, criticized what he called "the 'anything but jihad' brigade" which wants to consider every possible motivation for the Boston attacks and a disrupted terror plot in Canada, except for religious radicalism, despite what Tsarnaev told investigators.
If terrorists say they were motivated by their interpretation of Islam, it should be openly discussed, Rizvi wrote. Doing so is not an indictment of all Muslims any more than saying "smoking is bad" is the same as saying "all smokers are bad."
"Timothy McVeigh (also a terrorist by any definition of the word) didn't yell 'Jesus is great!' before carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing," Rizvi wrote. "His brand of terrorism wasn't linked to Christianity, because it wasn't carried out in the name of it. (In contrast, the bombing of abortion clinics is terrorism universally acknowledged as being linked with Christian religious extremism.)"
Radical rhetoric is not shunned when it comes to other forms of political violence. When Jared Laughner killed six people and wounded 13 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in January 2011, media attention immediately turned to a political ad that featured crosshairs over various congressional districts, including Giffords'. Subsequent investigation, however, failed to turn up any political motivation for Laughner's madness.
Similarly, when some Tea Party rallies drew people carrying arms, talking heads expressed concern that it posed an inherent risk of violence.
Nobody tried to stifle those debates and, if they had merit, they would have been vigorously pursued. It should be no different when Muslims pursue political violence which they say is in furtherance of their religious beliefs.
It's time to review the policy on politically correct language.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Problem of Muslim Leadership
Another Islamist terror attack, another round of assurances that it had nothing to do with the religion of peace.
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
I've seen this before. A Muslim terrorist slays a non-Muslim citizen in the West, and representatives of the Muslim community rush to dissociate themselves and their faith from the horror. After British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death last week in Woolwich in south London, Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain, quickly stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were "sickened" by the attack, "just like everyone else."
This happens every time. Muslim men wearing suits and ties, or women wearing stylish headscarves, are sent out to reassure the world that these attacks have no place in real Islam, that they are aberrations and corruptions of the true faith.
But then what to make of Omar Bakri? He too claims to speak for the true faith, though he was unavailable for cameras in England last week because the Islamist group he founded, Al-Muhajiroun, was banned in Britain in 2010. Instead, he talked to the media from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, where he now lives. Michael Adebolajo—the accused Woolwich killer who was seen on a video at the scene of the murder, talking to the camera while displaying his bloody hands and a meat cleaver—was Bakri's student a decade ago, before his group was banned. "A quiet man, very shy, asking lots of questions about Islam," Bakri recalled last week. The teacher was impressed to see in the grisly video how far his shy disciple had come, "standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away."
Bakri also told the press: "The Prophet said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That's a beautiful saying. May God reward [Adebolajo] for his actions . . . I don't see it as a crime as far as Islam is concerned."
The question requiring an answer at this moment in history is clear: Which group of leaders really speaks for Islam? The officially approved spokesmen for the "Muslim community"? Or the manic street preachers of political Islam, who indoctrinate, encourage and train the killers—and then bless their bloodshed?
In America, too, the question is pressing. Who speaks for Islam? The Council on American-Islamic Relations, America's largest Muslim civil-liberties advocacy organization? (MARC: I would not give this organization the respect Ali appears to give here) Or one of the many Web-based jihadists who have stepped in to take the place of the late Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda recruiter?
Some refuse even to admit that this is the question on everyone's mind. Amazingly, given the litany of Islamist attacks—from the 9/11 nightmare in America and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, to the slayings at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, at the Boston Marathon last month and now Woolwich—some continue to deny any link between Islam and terrorism. This week, BBC political editor Nick Robinson had to apologize for saying on the air, as the news in Woolwich broke, that the men who murdered Lee Rigby were "of Muslim appearance."
Memo to the BBC: The killers were shouting "Allahu akbar" as they struck. Yet when complaints rained down on the BBC about Mr. Robinson's word choice, he felt obliged to atone. One can only wonder at people who can be so exquisitely sensitive in protecting Islam's reputation yet so utterly desensitized to a hideous murder explicitly committed in the name of Islam.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Woolwich murder, it was good to hear expressions of horror and sympathy from Islamic spokesmen, but something more is desperately required: genuine recognition of the problem with Islam.
Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds. Think of the Tsarnaev brothers and the way they justified the mayhem they caused in Boston. Ponder carefully the words last week of Michael Adebolajo, his hands splashed with blood: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day."
My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam. In the courtroom, the killer looked at Theo's mother and said to her: "I must confess honestly that I do not empathize with you. I do not feel your pain. . . . I cannot empathize with you because you are an unbeliever."
And yet, after nearly a decade of similar rhetoric from Islamists around the world, last week the Guardian newspaper could still run a headline quoting a Muslim Londoner: "These poor idiots have nothing to do with Islam." Really? Nothing?
Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.
On both sides of the Atlantic, politicians, academics and the media have shown incredible patience as the drumbeat of Islamist terror attacks continues. When President Obama gave his first statement about the Boston bombings, he didn't mention Islam at all. This week, Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson have repeated the reassuring statements of the Muslim leaders to the effect that Lee Rigby's murder has nothing to do with Islam.
But many ordinary people hear such statements and scratch their heads in bewilderment. A murderer kills a young father while yelling "Allahu akbar" and it's got nothing to do with Islam?
I don't blame Western leaders. They are doing their best to keep the lid on what could become a meltdown of trust between majority populations and Muslim minority communities.
But I do blame Muslim leaders. It is time they came up with more credible talking points. Their communities have a serious problem. Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
I wonder what would happen if Muslim leaders like Julie Siddiqi started a public and persistent campaign to discredit these Islamist advocates of mayhem and murder. Not just uttering the usual laments after another horrifying attack, but making a constant, high-profile effort to show the world that the preachers of hate are illegitimate. After the next zealot has killed the next victim of political Islam, claims about the "religion of peace" would ring truer.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is the author of "Nomad: My Journey from Islam to America" (Free Press, 2010). She is a fellow at the Belfer Center of Harvard's Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Given the role of Baathism in Iraq and Syria, this seems the most fitting thread for this interesting article:
Baathism: An Obituary
The end of an ideology
Paul Berman
IT IS CHEERING to reflect that, when Bashar Al Assad’s government finally collapses in Syria, the governing ideology known as Baathism will likewise undergo a massive setback—though whether Baathism will fade away without a trace is something we can doubt. Baathism is one of the last of the grandiose revolutionary ideologies of the mid-twentieth century—an ideology like communism and fascism in Europe (both of which exercised a large influence on Baathist thinking), except in an Arab version suitable for the age of decolonization. Its champions came to power not only in Syria but in Iraq, in both cases in the 1960s; and the consequences were not of the sort that leave people unchanged.
In Iraq, the Baath ruled for 35 years, chiefly under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, and this meant repeated military campaigns and acts of extermination against Iraq’s Kurdish population (Baathism is anti-Kurd), against Iran (Baathism, in its Iraqi version, is anti-Persian), against Kuwait, and against Iraq’s Shiite population, not to mention the protracted two-act war with the United States and its allies—from all of which the poor and suffering Iraqis will need a hundred years to recover. In Syria, the Baath has ruled for half a century, usually more shrewdly than Saddam. And yet, in Syria, too, permanent crisis has been the norm—the unending emergencies that derive from the Syrian Baath’s repeated wars against Israel and from the proxy wars using guerrilla armies and terrorists in Palestine and Jordan, together with the Baath’s intervention in Lebanon. And there is the history of Baathist mass executions and civilian massacres within Syria itself.
Even so, Baathism enjoyed for long decades a prestige almost everywhere across the region, with branch organizations in various countries. Baathism appeared to be, in the eyes of its admirers, the ultimate in revolutionary principle—the truest hope for a “resurrection” or “Baath” of the Arab people from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, regardless of the really-existing Baathist regimes. And all of this is going to mean that, soon enough, when the Syrian Baath finally tumbles from power, the Baath’s legacy will be triply visible.
The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, will be pockmarked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia will hover overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of everyone across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea. And more than visible will be the triumphant zeal of Baathism’s principal rivals in the matter of grandiose revolutionary ideology—the champions of the single Middle Eastern millenarian doctrine still standing, once the Assad regime has finally gone. These will be the Islamists.
BAATHISM IS A PRODUCT of the European 1930s. The doctrine’s founders were Syrian students who attended the Sorbonne in the ’20s and ’30s, took their readings seriously, and came away with two impulses. The students wanted to overthrow French and British colonialism in the Middle East. And they wanted to conduct the overthrow in a modern spirit of revolutionary reform. Only they never could decide which version of revolutionary reform might suit them best, and they spent the next few decades veering from one to another, such that oscillation became Baathism’s identifying trait.
The chief theoretician was a philosopher from Damascus named Michel Aflaq, who, during his Sorbonne years, sympathized with communism, mostly because communism appeared to be Western imperialism’s antithesis. In 1936, after his return to Damascus, it dawned on Aflaq, however, that Syria’s Communist Party was subservient to France’s Communist Party, which meant the Soviet Union, whose interests were not those of the Arab world. Also he read André Gide on the Soviet reality. He never did abandon entirely his left-wing instincts, which helps to explain why, in later years, he and his followers, having merged their organization with a left-wing party, ended up calling themselves the Arab Baath Socialist Party. But meanwhile he found new and more fecund inspirations in an alternative set of equally up-to-date ideas, which were those of German nationalism.
German nationalism in the ’30s mooned over an imaginary long-ago when Teutonic Aryans roamed the ancient pan-Germanic forests. The German nationalists dreamed of reuniting the scattered Germanic tribes, and dreamed of reviving, through purification of the blood, the heroic Teutonic virtues. They inebriated themselves with mystic hoodoo about their own spiritual loftiness. They knew how to loathe. And all of these impulses proved to be transplantable to the Arab East. The post-communist Aflaq took to mooning over the Arab seventh century. He imagined a return to yore through a revived appreciation of blood ties. He attached to those ideas the modern-sounding concept of socialism, thus arriving at a national-socialism. He identified the spiritual loftiness of the Arabs. He located ethnic enemies, some of whom, by odd coincidence, turned out to be the very enemies that German nationalism likewise loathed. And he began to picture the pan-Arab resurrection.
HIS BAATH EMERGED in Syria in 1941, in response to a coup d’état in Iraq. The coup overthrew a pro-British government and installed in power the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali Al Gaylani, who right away aligned his new government with Germany and the wartime Axis. The British sent troops. Rashid Ali fled to Berlin, where he spent the war broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Arabic. In Syria, though, Aflaq and his comrades meanwhile put together a solidarity committee for the coup. By 1943, the committee thickened into something of a political party (though the official founding convention took place only later). And Aflaq delivered a lecture at the University of Damascus called “In Memory of the Arab Prophet,” laying out his thoughts.
His theme was Arab weakness in the modern world. Among the Arabs, he said, words had lost their meaning, such that “empty rhetoric” had ended up destroying the Arab sense of self-confidence. Another cause of weakness was psychological:
Today we stand witness to a conflict between our glorious past and shameful present. The Arab personality was in our past unified in one body: there was no divide between its soul and its intellect, no divide between its rhetoric and its practice, its private and its public codes of conduct ... In contrast, in our present time, we witness only a fragmented personality, a partial, impoverished life ... It is time we removed this contradiction and return to the Arab personality in its unity, and make whole Arab life once again.
This was going to require a purification. “We must remove all obstacles of stagnation and degradation, so that our pure blood lineage will run anew in our veins.” And what was this pure blood lineage? It was the blood line that got started with the divine revelations communicated to the Prophet Muhammad. “Islam constituted for the Arabs a dynamic earth-shaking movement that stirred the internal potential of the Arabs, imbued it with life, and enabled it to drive out the obstacles of imitation and the shackles of reform.” This was achieved by leading the earliest Muslims to transform themselves:
So before they could conquer new lands and reach as far as they did, they had to begin with and conquer themselves, and to know who they were searching for in their souls. Before they ruled over other people, they had to rule over themselves, and learn how to control their temptations and to take charge of their will.
Modern Arabs needed to adopt the Prophet Muhammad himself as their model:
In the past, one person’s life summarized the life of a nation. Today the life of the whole nation in its new revival should become a detailed exposition of the life of its great man. Muhammad was all the Arabs. Let all the Arabs be Muhammad today.
Baathism, then, the original idea from 1943, was an anti-colonial and pan-Arabist doctrine, not unwilling to ally with the Axis. It was a revolutionary doctrine. It claimed a pure blood lineage to the origins of Islam and, at the same time, invoked the mid–twentieth century ideals of socialism. Baathism was dedicated to the purification of Arabic political speech. And it was a psychological doctrine, dedicated to healing the wounded modern psyche by repulsing what Aflaq called “Western civilization’s invasion of the Arab mind.”
Aflaq was nominally a Christian from a Greek Orthodox background, but, to be honest, Christian influences in his doctrine are hard to see. It is true that, when he invokes Islam, he does so on nationalist grounds. But this is not unusual even among overtly Islamic thinkers, who conventionally invoke the ancient caliphate as proof of Islam’s divine origins. And Aflaq speaks repeatedly of the Arab nation’s “eternal mission” and “spirit,” which hints at more than worldly concerns.
He worked up these ideas during the same period when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was putting together its own doctrines, and I am struck by the overlap, Baathist and Islamist. I wonder if Sayyid Qutb, the greatest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideologues, ever had occasion to study the writings of Aflaq. Occasional phrases of Aflaq’s do seem to turn up in Qutb’s essays and commentaries from the ’50s and ’60s, somehow or another. The notion of returning to the ancient Islamic past in order to construct a postcolonial future, the emphasis on psychological and cultural problems deriving from the penetration of Western ideas, the occasional fascist overtones, and the special role granted to the Arab people (a feature not just of Baathism but of the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Islamism), together with the veneration of Islam and its prophet—this is a lot to share.
Then again, in Aflaq’s Baath, the party leaders thought of themselves as the ultimate authority, instead of invoking the authority of the sacred texts and religious interpretations. The irksome little details of theology, sharia, and ritual interested Aflaq not at all. His Baathism was about Islam, or maybe it was an addendum to Islam, but it never claimed to be Islam itself. And Aflaq, with his talk of socialism, reserved the option of veering flexibly in different directions entirely—all of which has meant that, on doctrinal grounds, Baathists and Islamists could look upon one another as either friends or enemies, depending on whether they chose to emphasize the overlap or the lack of overlap. And, to be sure, the history of the Arab East over the last half century has offered examples of Baathist-Islamist alliance and enmity in roughly equal measures: In the case of Syria, the Baath’s violent enmity for its archenemy, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, contrasted with the Baath’s longstanding alliances with any number of Islamist groups: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the case of Iraq, the Baath’s insistence on war against the Islamist mullahs of Iran, contrasted with the Baath’s persistent habit of supporting Islamist terrorist groups elsewhere in the world, not to mention the Iraqi Baath’s post-defeat guerrilla alliance (if I may touch on a controversial matter) with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—enmities and alliances that follow naturally from the doctrine.
THE BRANCHES OF Aflaq’s party tended to be conspiracies of the elite, consisting of schoolteacher intellectuals like Aflaq himself, together with military officers and tough-guy bruisers, who maneuvered clandestinely in the hope of staging their own coups d’état. This was the kind of movement that used to be known in the classic European left as “Blanquist”—secretive, crafty, steely, and revolutionary, indifferent to questions of mere popularity. (You haven’t heard of Auguste Blanqui? He wouldn’t mind.) And the Blanquist approach led to ideological consequences.
The original Baath party in Syria conformed to the inclusive pan-Arabist ideal, with room in the ranks for Sunni Arabs, for Christians like Aflaq himself, for members of the heretical Alawi sect of Shiism, for Druzes and Ismailis, and for anyone at all who claimed some kind of Arab background, if only linguistically (though, to be sure, Aflaq ultimately reserved to himself the right to determine who is an Arab, with the crucial factor being in agreement with Aflaq’s ideas). But the demands of hugger-mugger inevitably tilted the Baath toward pickier ways of selecting comrades. Anyone joining a Baathist cell would naturally want to trust the other conspirators, and the simplest way to keep everyone reassured was to enroll people from similar backgrounds—comrades from the same denomination within Islam, or the same town, or neighborhood, or family. And when Baathists came to power, the conspiratorial habits led naturally to the triumph of the party’s military cells over its civilian cells.
Aflaq’s Baath staged its coup in Syria in 1963, only to discover that, after a while, the Baath Secret Military Committee was running out of patience for the Baath’s civilian leaders. Aflaq himself, a mere schoolteacher, fled into exile. And who was the Secret Military Committee? The leading personalities turned out to be not just members of Syria’s Alawi minority, but people from a single village, belonging to a section of a single tribe and, in the inner circle, to the family of Colonel Hafez Al Assad, the father of Bashar. The Iraqi Baath, which welcomed Aflaq after his exile from Damascus, went through similar evolutions. The original leaders in Iraq belonged to the majority confession, which is Shiite. The leaders went down to defeat. The party revived sufficiently to stage a coup in 1963, and the new leaders turned out to be ruffians from a single neighborhood in Baghdad. Their coup was overthrown.
The Iraqi Baath staged another coup in 1968, this time with sufficient strength to remain in power, and the principal leaders, this time, turned out to be members of a single tribe from the town of Tikrit, and especially from a single family, whose most prominent son turned out to be Saddam, a member of the Sunni minority—and Aflaq’s protegé, by the way. In this fashion, the Baath in Syria and Iraq alike ended up preaching an expansive pan-Arabism while practicing a narrow politics dominated by ever tinier kinship groups: anthropology’s triumph over ideology. You want family values? Baathism is for you. And, under these circumstances, nothing prevented the official doctrine from oscillating ever more wildly.
Here is another difference between the Baath and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has always been a mass organization, never a conspiracy, and its reliance on scripture and Islamic scholarship has meant that no one, not even a supreme guide of the Brotherhood, could alter the ideology at whim: “Oh, I think I’ll recognize the Zionist entity.” But Baathist ideology is what the coup leaders say it is. Or it is what Aflaq chose to say—which, after he was done with pure blood lineages and the “eternal mission” and Arab “spirit,” began to sound, in the mid-’50s and afterward, ever more left-wing, as if his philo-communist origins were stirring into renewed life. “The Baath is scientific socialism plus spirit,” said Aflaq in the ’60s, which suggested that Baathism, having already claimed to be an addendum to Islam, was also an addendum to Karl Marx.
The leftward turn accounted for Baathism’s inspirational appeal to Third World revolutionaries in Africa and Latin America—an element of Baathism’s success that hardly anyone can remember anymore. Baathism appeared to show that revolutionary political movements could adopt everything that was deemed to be attractive in communism (“scientific socialism,” the one-party Leninist dictatorship, the cult of the leader, the five-year plans, the expropriation of feudal estates, and so forth), without having to abandon a sentimental nostalgia for the local culture and a pious veneration of the local religion. And the left-wing and religious oscillations allowed for no end of political maneuverability.
Saddam—to cite the Iraqi example—began as a religious believer. And yet, if you read his speeches from the 1970s, you could almost imagine that a communist is hectoring you from the podium. Here was a left-wing oscillation that appears to have been more enthusiastic even than Aflaq’s. And then, a few years later, Comrade Saddam oscillated back into the renewed emphasis on Islam that you can see in his final literary composition—his novel Demons, Be Gone! (or, in my Google translation from the Arabic, Get Out of My Damned), from early in 2003, pre-invasion—a Koranic action-hero melodrama, climaxing in a barely disguised burst of Baathist applause for Al Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center.
The Assads, father and son, have displayed the Syrian version. Hafez, the father, rose within the party at a time when, among the Syrian Baathists, Marxism was enjoying its maximum prestige. Once in power, though, he took to courting the traditional-minded clerics and Islamic scholars, as no Marxist would have done. And Bashar, the son, has gone further yet in trying to shore up his Muslim bona fides, not that he has enjoyed much success. But no one can say that Bashar has betrayed the Baathist principles. In matters of religion, Baathism is strictly AC/DC, and it can go either way.
THE WHOLE DOCTRINE can be summed up in Aflaq’s slogan, which you will find stamped on party documents. The slogan is “Unity, Freedom, Socialism.” The slogan means anything you want it to mean. Or it means anti-Zionism, on the grounds that Arab unity, freedom, and social justice are incompatible with the continued existence of the country that Aflaq called, in quotation marks, “Israel.” Aflaq was also in favor of what he called “love,” which he regarded as the true meaning of Arab nationalism.
It is tempting to conclude that Baathism is a nonsense ideology, and the truest goal of Baathist leaders has never been anything loftier than power and their own pragmatic self-interest. But that seems to me inaccurate. “Unity, Freedom, Socialism” has, in fact, always expressed something, even if, like a football chant, the meaning bears no relation to the words. The slogan expresses an ideal of ferocity. And ferocity does not entail pragmatism. Given a choice between ferocity and their own best interest, the Baathist leaders have more than once chosen ferocity. In the weeks or months in 2003 when Saddam was composingDemons, Be Gone!, with the Coalition of the Willing getting ready to invade, he could certainly have elected to negotiate a gilded exile for himself and his family. He preferred otherwise.
Bashar Al Assad’s instincts appear to be similar. Surely Kofi Annan’s ultimate goal in Syria was, like a real estate broker, to relocate the unhappy Assad family to a London townhouse, where the ex-dictator would have discovered, ten years from now, that Vogue was once again fascinated by his wife, and his own opinions on Middle Eastern affairs were keenly solicited. But, like Saddam, Bashar prefers to hunker down. Or he is like Muammar Qaddafi, another revolutionary with a nutty revolutionary doctrine—and not like, say, the non-Baathist and merely corrupt dictator of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who, at the start of the Arab Spring, proved that he was genuinely a pragmatist by cutting his losses and those of Tunisia and getting on a plane.
Baathism is, in short, a cult of resistance. Resistance to what? And on whose behalf? Resistance to imperialism and Zionism, of course. Zionism especially. Resistance on behalf of the pan-Arab people and their “spirit.” Baathism’s leaders would rather die than abandon these words, even when the words are meaningless. Death it is, then.
Surely this is Baathism’s most destructive trait of all. The cult of resistance leads to a culture of hysteria. Once you have spent 35 years or 50 years manning a machine gun and vowing resistance to the end, your ability to work up more thoughtful habits of mind is bound to become a little circumscribed. A capacity to weigh evidence, a feeling of curiosity about other people’s views, a spirit of tolerance, the traits that are necessary for a liberal alternative, in short—these traits are not likely to survive. We have seen the results in Iraq, and we will see them in Syria.
Some of the Baathists themselves appear to have noticed these developments. The most important of Aflaq’s comrades in founding the movement was Salah Bitar, a fellow student at the Sorbonne back in the ’20s and ’30s. By 1977, Bitar was in a mood to take stock, and he spoke his mind to Hafez Al Assad in person. Bitar told Assad that Syria was dead. He said, “Today only democracy can give a new vitality to Syria.” But this was not a welcome message. Bitar was obliged to go into exile in Paris, where he was assassinated, and his dissent left no legacy at all. Orthodoxy belonged either to the Assads or to Saddam.
Something in the Baathist doctrine is insane, and this is worth emphasizing. The Arab Baath Socialist Party has slaughtered more Arabs than any institution in modern history, though the French army in Algeria may be able to put up a rival claim. No one has definitively tallied up the deaths committed by the Baath in Syria, not in 1981, when Hafez Al Assad presided over executions by the hundreds, nor when he leveled entire neighborhoods in Hama back in 1982, nor in 2011 and 2012, when his son has gone about doing the same on what appears to be an even bigger scale. It is a matter of tens of thousands, though (and worse may be to come). The Iraqi Baath achieved a toll of many hundreds of thousands. The Baath in Iraq was the only government in the world, after the Nazis, to use poison gas on its own people. And here is Bashar’s Syrian Baath threatening to make use of its own stocks of poison gas, if only against foreign invaders—meaning, from a Baathist standpoint, against anyone at all who has taken up arms.
Will someone argue that, in Syria and Iraq, the Baath never succeeded in establishing total control, therefore should not be considered a totalitarian movement? But totalitarians never achieve total control. They merely give it an honest try. What marks a totalitarian movement is the vigor and lunacy that animates the honest try. Ultimately a totalitarian movement is a political tendency that, in a spirit of nihilism, is committed to achieving the opposite of whatever it says it is going to achieve, and will stop at nothing to bring this about. Soviet communism in the age of Stalin was ruthlessly devoted to constructing a gigantic slave-labor system in the prison camps. Nazism left no stone unturned to bring about the ruination of Germany. Baathism is an anti-Arab movement. Hasn’t this been obvious? But this did not prevent the Baath from thriving, in its day.
BAATHISM AROSE in competition with four other main Arab ideological currents in the post–World War II years, with all four currents preaching revolution in some version or another—not just Islamism, but also Gamal Nasser’s variant of pan-Arabism in Egypt (a current very similar to Baathism, without the extremist edginess), together with a couple of currents that were overtly secular or even anti-religious: single-country nationalism (Syrianism, for example) and communism. Today, three of those movements survive only in shards and fragments, which would be encouraging to learn, except that Islamism is in bloom.
In the political psychology of the region, the era of decolonization has somehow not yet come to an end. The questions that Michel Aflaq worried about in 1943 are the questions that Islamist authors still worry about in our own moment, as if, in the mind of masses of people, nothing has changed. These are questions about alienation—about the conflict between the glorious past and the shameful present; about the divide between soul and intellect, and between private and public codes of behavior; about the need to control the temptations; about the need, finally, to repel Western civilization’s invasion of the Arab mind. But the Islamist answers are unlikely to be any better than Aflaq’s.
We will know that a genuinely modernizing impulse has overtaken the region when altogether different questions begin to dominate the discussion, namely: how to become prosperous? And free?—along with a liberal willingness to evaluate the real-life results. Only, these questions imply a non-ideological habit of mind, and the world left behind by the Baath and its doctrines does not appear to be a world of the post-ideological.
Paul Berman is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the October 4, 2012 issue of the magazine.
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CAIRO — Sheik Mohamed Abu Sidra had watched in exasperation for months as President Mohamed Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood bounced from one debilitating political battle to another.
“The Brotherhood went too fast, they tried to take too much,” Sheik Abu Sidra, an influential ultraconservative Islamist in Benghazi, Libya, said Thursday, a day after the Egyptian military deposed and detained Mr. Morsi and began arresting his Brotherhood allies.
But at the same time, Sheik Abu Sidra said, Mr. Morsi’s overthrow had made it far more difficult for him to persuade Benghazi’s Islamist militias to put down their weapons and trust in democracy.
“Do you think I can sell that to the people anymore?” he asked. “I have been saying all along, ‘If you want to build Shariah law, come to elections.’ Now they will just say, ‘Look at Egypt,’ and you don’t need to say anything else.”
From Benghazi to Abu Dhabi, Islamists are drawing lessons from Mr. Morsi’s ouster that could shape political Islam for a generation. For some, it demonstrated the futility of democracy in a world dominated by Western powers and their client states. But others, acknowledging that the coup accompanied a broad popular backlash, also faulted the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood for reaching too fast for so many levers of power.
The Brotherhood’s fall is the greatest in an array of setbacks that have halted the once seemingly unstoppable march of political Islam. As they have moved from opposition to establishment , Islamist parties in Turkey, Tunisia and now Egypt have all been caught up in crises over the secular practicalities of governing like power sharing, urban planning, public security or even keeping the lights on.
Brotherhood leaders — the few who have not been arrested or dropped out of sight — have little doubt about the source of their problems. They say that the Egyptian security forces and bureaucracy conspired to sabotage their rule, and that the generals seized on the chance to topple the Morsi government under the cover of popular anger at the dysfunction of the state.
Their account strikes a chord with fellow Islamists around the region who are all too familiar with the historic turning points when, they say, military crackdowns stole their imminent democratic victories: Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954; Algeria in 1991; and the Palestinian territories in 2006.
“The message will resonate throughout the Muslim world loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims,” Essam el-Haddad, Mr. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, warned on his official Web site shortly before the military detained him and cut off all his communication. The overthrow of an elected Islamist government in Egypt, the symbolic heart of the Arab world, Mr. Haddad wrote, would fuel more violent terrorism than the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And he took aim at Western critics of the Islamists. “The silence of all of those voices with an impending military coup is hypocritical,” Mr. Haddad wrote, “and that hypocrisy will not be lost on a large swath of Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims.”
In Egyptian Sinai just hours later, thousands of Islamists rallied under the black flag of jihad and cheered widely at calls for “a war council” to roll back Mr. Morsi’s ouster. “The age of peacefulness is over,” the speaker declared in a video of the rally. “No more peacefulness after today.”
“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response.
After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end.
“Didn’t we do what they asked,” asked Mahmoud Taha, 40, a merchant. “We don’t believe in democracy to begin with; it’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it. We followed them, and then this is what they do?”
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In Syria, where the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood once hoped to provide a model of moderation and democracy, some fighters battling President Bashar al-Assad now say it is the other way around. Egyptian Islamists “may have to pursue the armed option,” said Firas Filefleh, a rebel fighter in an Islamist brigade in Idlib, in northern Syria. “That may be the only choice, as it was for us in Syria.”
In the United Arab Emirates, where the authoritarian government just sentenced 69 members of a Brotherhood-linked Islamist group to prison in an effort to stop the spread of Arab spring revolts, Islamists said the crackdowns were driving a deeper wedge into their movement.
“The practices that we see today will split the Islamists in half,” said Saeed Nasar Alteneji, a former head of the Emirates group, the Islah association. “There are those who always call for centrism and moderation and peaceful political participation,” he said. “The other group condemns democracy and sees today that the West and others will never accept the ballot box if it brings Islamists to power.”
“And they have lots of evidence of this,” he said, now citing Egypt as well as Algeria.
Other Islamists, though, sought to distance themselves from what they considered the Egyptian Brotherhood’s errors.
As the military takeover began to unfold, Ali Larayedh, the Islamist prime minister of Tunisia, emphasized in a television interview that “an Egypt scenario” was unlikely to befall his Ennahda movement because “our approach is characterized by consensus and partnership.”
Emad al-din al-Rashid, a prominent Syrian Islamist and scholar now based in Istanbul, said that he “expected this to happen” because of the Muslim Brotherhood’s style of governance. “The beginning was a mistake, a sin, and the Brotherhood were running Egypt like they would run a private organization, not a country,” he said. “They shouldn’t have rushed to rule like they did. If they had waited for the second or third elections, the people would have been asking and yearning for them.”
Hisham Krekshi, a senior member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood in Tripoli, Libya, said the Egyptian Brotherhood “were not transparent enough. They were not sharing enough with other parties. We have to be sure that we are open, to say, ‘We are all Libyans and we have to accept every rainbow color, to work together.’ ”
Even among Egyptian Islamists there have been signs of dissent from the Brotherhood leadership. The largest ultraconservative party, Al Nour, had urged the Brotherhood to form a broader coalition and then to call early presidential elections, and it finally supported the takeover.
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a relatively liberal former Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate popular among many younger members, also urged Mr. Morsi to step down to defuse the polarization of the country.
But, said Ibrahim Houdaiby, a former Brotherhood member, “the feeling of exclusion might actually lead to the empowerment of a more radical sentiment in the group that says, ‘Look, we abided by the rules, we were elected democratically, and of course we were rejected, and of course by a military coup, not by popular protest.’ ”
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352884/blasphemy-why-not-enhance-american-national-security-speaking-honestly-about-sharia
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http://freearabs.com/
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Why are the Jews So Powerful?
Posted on May 6, 2013 by alaiwah
By Farrukh Saleem
The writer is the Pakistani Executive Director of the Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank established in 2007, and son in law of Khalilur Rehman of the Jang Group.
There are only 14 million Jews in the world:
seven million in the Americas
five million in Asia
two million in Europe
100,000 in Africa .
For every single Jew in the world there are 100 Muslims.
Yet, Jews are more than a hundred times more powerful than all the Muslims put together.
Ever wondered why?
Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish.
Albert Einstein, the most influential scientist of all time and TIME magazine’s ’Person of the Century’, was a Jew.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis was a Jew.
So were Karl Marx, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.
Here are a few other Jews whose intellectual output has enriched the whole humanity:
Benjamin Rubin gave humanity the vaccinating needle.
Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine.
Albert Sabin developed the improved live polio vaccine.
Gertrude Elion gave us a leukemia fighting drug.
Baruch Blumberg developed the vaccination for Hepatitis B.
Paul Ehrlich discovered a treatment for syphilis.
Elie Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize in infectious diseases.
Bernard Katz won a Nobel Prize in neuromuscular transmission.
Andrew Schally won a Nobel in endocrinology.
Aaron Beck founded Cognitive Therapy.
Gregory Pincus developed the first oral contraceptive pill.
George Wald won a Nobel for our understanding of the human eye.
Stanley Cohen won a Nobel in embryology.
Willem Kolff came up with the kidney dialysis machine.
Over the past 105 years, 14 million Jews have won 15-dozen Nobel Prizes while only three Nobel Prizes have been won by 1.4 billion
Muslims (other than Peace Prizes).
Stanley Mezor invented the first micro-processing chip.
Leo Szilard developed the first nuclear chain reactor;
Peter Schultz, optical fibre cable;
Charles Adler, traffic lights;
Benno Strauss, Stainless steel;
Isador Kisee, sound movies;
Emile Berliner, telephone microphone;
Charles Ginsburg, videotape recorder.
Famous financiers in the business world who belong to Jewish faith include:
Ralph Lauren (Polo),
Levis Strauss (Levi’s Jeans),
Howard Schultz (Starbuck’s) ,
Sergey Brin (Google),
Michael Dell (Dell Computers),
Larry Ellison (Oracle),
Donna Karan (DKNY),
Irv Robbins (Baskins & Robbins) and
Bill Rosenberg (Dunkin Donuts).
Richard Levin, President of Yale University, is a Jew. So are Henry Kissinger (American secretary of state), Alan Greenspan (Fed chairman under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush), Joseph Lieberman (US Senator), Madeleine Albright (American secretary of state), Casper Weinberger (American secretary of defense), Maxim Litvinov ( USSR foreign Minister), David Marshal ( Singapore ‘s first chief minister), Issac Isaacs (governor-general of Australia ), Benjamin
Disraeli (British statesman and author), Yevgeny Primakov (Russian PM), Barry Goldwater (US Senator), Jorge Sampaio (president of Portugal ), John Deutsch (CIA director), Herb Gray (Canadian deputy PM), Pierre Mendes (French PM), Michael Howard (British home
secretary), Bruno Kreisky (chancellor of Austria ) and Robert Rubin (American secretary of treasury).
In the media, famous Jews include:
Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Barbara Walters (ABC News), Eugene Meyer (Washington Post), Henry Grunwald (editor-in-chief Time), Katherine Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), Joseph Lelyveld (Executive editor, The New York Times), and Max Frankel (New York Times).
The most beneficent philanthropist in the history of the world is George Soros, a Jew, who has so far donated a colossal $4 billion most of which has gone as aid to scientists and universities around the world.
Second to George Soros is Walter Annenberg, another Jew, who has built a hundred libraries by donating an estimated $2 billion.
At the Olympics, Mark Spitz set a record of sorts by winning seven gold medals; Lenny Krayzelburg is a three-time Olympic gold medalist.
Spitz, Krayzelburg and Boris Becker (Tennis) are all Jewish.
Did you know that Harrison Ford, George Burns, Tony Curtis, Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Paul Newman,
Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, Kirk Douglas, Goldie Hawn, Cary Grant, William Shatner, Jerry Lewis and
Peter Falk are all Jews.
As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself was founded by a Jew.
Among directors and producers, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Oliver Stone, Aaron Spelling ( Beverly Hills 90210), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Andrew Vaina (Rambo 1/2/3), Michael Man (Starsky andHutch), Milos Forman (One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad ) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) are all Jewish.
So, why are Jews so powerful?
Answer : EDUCATION
Why are Muslims so powerless?
There are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and six million in the Americas . Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are two Muslims, for every Buddhist there are two Muslims and for every Jew there are 100 Muslims.
Ever wondered why Muslims are so powerless?
Here is why: There are 57 member-countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around
500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims.
The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407.
In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’ , and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.
As per data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian-majority states have a literacy rate of 100 per cent.
A Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 per cent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent.
Some 98 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.
Around 40 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world attended university while no more than two per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.
Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million.
In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs. (in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million).
The Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around five per cent of its GDP.
Conclusion: The Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge!
Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society.
In Pakistan , there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK , the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20.
Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge.
Exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. Pakistan ‘s export of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one per cent. The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 per cent; Kuwait , Morocco , and Algeria are all at 0.3 per cent, while Singapore is at 58 per cent.
Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge.
Why are Muslims powerless?
…..Because we aren’t producing knowledge,
…..Because we aren’t diffusing knowledge.,
…..Because we aren’t applying knowledge.
And, the future belongs to knowledge-based societies.
Interestingly, the combined annual GDP of 57 OIC-countries is under $2 trillion.
America , just by herself, produces goods and services worth $12 trillion; China $8 trillion, Japan $3.8 trillion and Germany $2.4 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).
Oil rich Saudi Arabia , UAE, Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $500 billion; Spain alone produces goods and services worth over $1 trillion, Catholic Poland $489 billion and Buddhist Thailand $545 billion.
….. (Muslim GDP as a percentage of world GDP is fast declining).
All we do is shout to Allah the whole day and blame everyone else for our multiple failures!
Muslims are not happy
They’re not happy in Gaza
They’re not happy in Egypt
They’re not happy in Libya
They’re not happy in Morocco
They’re not happy in Iran
They’re not happy in Iraq
They’re not happy in Yemen
They’re not happy in Afghanistan
They’re not happy in Pakistan
They’re not happy in Syria
They’re not happy in Lebanon
So, where are they happy?
They’re happy in Australia
They’re happy in England
They’re happy in France
They’re happy in Italy
They’re happy in Germany
They’re happy in Sweden
They’re happy in the USA & Canada
They’re happy in Norway
They’re happy in almost every country that is not Islamic!
And who do they blame?
Not Islam…
Not their leadership…
Not themselves…
THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN
And they want to change the countries they’re happy in, to be like the countries they came from, where they were unhappy.
Try to find logic in that!
Jeff Foxworthy on Muslims:
1. If You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to liquor. You are a Muslim
2. If You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can’t afford shoes. You are a Muslim
3. If You have more wives than teeth. You are a Muslim
4. If You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean. You are a Muslim.
5. If You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide. You are a Muslim
6. If You can’t think of anyone you haven’t declared Jihad against.
You are a Muslim
7. If You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing. You are a Muslim
8. If You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs. You are a Muslim
9. If You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least four. You are a Muslim
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http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/arab-world-holds-hamas-responsible-latest-conflict
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http://www.arabnews.com/columns/what-if-arabs-had-recognized-israel-1948
What if the Arabs had recognized Israel in 1948?
Now, the Palestinians are on their own; each Arab country is busy with its own crisis and has put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on hold. I have been exposed to Palestinians since I was in first grade in Al- Hassa, Saudi Arabia. They were the most dedicated and intelligent among all my instructors, from elementary to high school. When I was attending New York-based SUNY Maritime college (1975-1979), I read a lot of books about Palestinians, Arabs and the Israelis. I have read every article about the many chances the Palestinians missed to solve their problem, especially the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. I have seen and read about the lives of Palestinians in the US and other places. They are very successful in every field.
At the same time, I saw the Arab countries at the bottom of the list in education and development. And I ask the question: What if the Palestinians and Arabs accepted Israel on May 14, 1948 and recognized its right to exist? Would the Arab world have been more stable, more democratic and more advanced? If Israel were recognized in 1948, the Palestinians would have been able to free themselves from the hollow promises of Arab dictators who kept telling them the refugees would be back in their homes, all Arab lands would be liberated and Israel would be sent to the bottom of the sea. Some Arab leaders used the Palestinians to suppress their own people and stay in power.
Since 1948, if an Arab politician wanted to be a hero, he had an easy way of doing it. He just needed to shout as loud as he could about his intention to destroy Israel, without mobilizing a single soldier (talk is cheap).
If Israel were recognized in 1948, there would have been no need for a coup in Egypt against King Farouk in 1952 and there would have been no attack on Egypt in 1956 by the UK, France and Israel. Also, there would have been no war in June 1967, and the size of Israel would not have increased and we Arabs would not have the need for a UN resolution to beg Israel to go back to the pre-1967 borders. And no war of attrition between Egypt and Israel that caused more casualties on the Egyptian side than the Israeli side.
After the 1967 war, Israel became a strategic ally of the US. Before then, the US was not as close to Israel as some in the Arab world believe. The Israelis fought that war using mainly French and British weapons while the US administration refused to supply Israel with more modern aircraft and weapons systems, such as the F-4 Phantom.
Palestinian misery was also used to topple another stable monarchy, this time in Iraq, and replace it with a bloody dictatorship. Iraq is rich in minerals, water reserves, fertile land and archeological sites. The military, led by Abdul Karim Qassim, killed King Faisal II and his family. Bloodshed in Iraq continued, and this Arab country has seen more violent revolutions.
One of them was carried out in the 1960s by a brigade sent to help liberate Palestine. Instead it went back and took over Baghdad.
Years later, Saddam Hussein said he would liberate Jerusalem via Kuwait; he used Palestinian misery as an excuse to invade that country.
If Israel had been recognized in 1948, the 1968 coup would not have taken place in another stable and rich monarchy – Libya, where King Idris was toppled and Muammar Gaddafi took over.
There were other military coups in the Arab world, such as in Syria, Yemen and Sudan. And each one of them used Palestine as the reason for such acts.
The Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser used to call the Arab Gulf states backward, and he tried to topple their governments using his media and military forces. He even attacked the southern borders of Saudi Arabia using his air bases in Yemen.
Even a non-Arab country (Iran) used Palestine to divert its people from internal unrest. I remember Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declaring that he would liberate Jerusalem via Baghdad, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad making bellicose statements about Israel, though not even a firecracker was fired from Iran toward Israel.
Now, the Palestinians are on their own; each Arab country is busy with its own crisis – from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon and the Gulf states.
For now, the Arab countries have put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on hold.
• The writer is a commodore (ret.) in the Royal Saudi Navy. He is based in Alkhobar, Saudi Arabia, and can be contacted at almulhimnavy@hotmail.com
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http://www.dennisprager.com/arab-world-produces/
What the Arab World Produces
Tuesday, Sep 30, 2014
At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products.
It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development.
According to the most recent United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (2003-2005), written by Arab intellectuals, Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, population 370 million. Nor is this a new development. The total number of books translated into Arabic during the last 1,000 years is less than Spain translates into Spanish in one year.
ArabianBusiness.com reports that about 100 million people in the Arab world are illiterate; and three quarters of them are between the ages of 15 and 45.
As for Arab women, the situation is even worse. Nearly half of the Arab world’s women are illiterate, and sexual attacks on women have actually increased since the Arab Spring, as have forced marriages and trafficking. And the exact number of women murdered by family members in “honor killings” is not knowable. It is only known to be large.
In Egypt, the largest Arab country, 91 percent of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF. Not to mention the number of women in the Arab world who must wear veils or even full-face and full-body coverings known as burkas. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is infamous for not allowing women to drive a car.
Another unhappy feature of the Arab world is the prevalence of lies. To this day, Egypt denies that it was the Egyptian pilot, Ahmed El-Habashi, who allegedly crashed an EgyptAir jet into the ocean deliberately. Vast numbers of Arabs believe that Jews knew of the 9-11 plot and avoided going to work at the World Trade Center that day.
So, then, is there anything at which the Arab world has excelled for the past two generations? Has there been a major Arab export?
As it happens, there are two.
Hatred and violence.
The Arab world has no peer when it comes to hatred – of the Western world generally, and especially of Israel. Israel-hatred and its twin, Jew-hatred, are the oxygen that the Arab world breathes.
Two of the most popular songs in Egypt over the past decade have been “I Hate Israel” and the ironically named “I Love Israel.”
Lyrics of the latter song include:
“May it [Israel] be destroyed. May it be wiped off the map. May a wall fall on it. May it disappear from the universe. God, please have it banished.”
“May it dangle from the noose. May I get to see it burning, Amen. I will pour gasoline on it. I am an Egyptian man. I am not a coward.”
“I Hate Israel” is so popular that it was the song which Egypt’s pop star Chaaboula sang at the largest music festival in the Arab world, Morocco’s Mawazine. The festival, one of the biggest in the world, featured Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin and Kool and the Gang.
Some of the lyrics:
“I hate Israel, and I would say so if I was asked to.
“Two faces of the same coin, America and Israel. They made the world a jungle and ignited the fuse.
“About that [Twin] Tower, oh people. Definitely! His friends [Israel] were the ones who brought it down.”
The other major Arab product and export has been violence.
It is difficult to overstate the amount of violence in the Arab world. Mass murder and cruelty have characterized the Arab world.
Regarding Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Dexter Filkins, the New York Times correspondent in Iraq from 2003-2006 wrote: “Here, in Hussein, was one of the world’s indisputably evil men: he murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead.”
Syria, too, has been a country of mass murder, torture, and brutal totalitarian rule — under the rule of Hafez Assad (in power 1971-2000), and his son, Bashar, the current killer-dictator who, among other atrocities, used Sarin gas against his own people in 2013.
In the ongoing Syrian Civil War, according to the United Nations, between March 15, 2011 and April 30, 2014, 191,000 Syrians, about a third of them civilians, were killed. In addition, 2.5 million people have fled Syria to neighboring countries, and 6.5 million have fled their homes within Syria.
In Algeria in the 1990s, Islamist terrorists engaged in wholesale murder of their fellow Algerians. That war cost Algeria about 100,000 lives, mostly civilian.
In Sudan, the Arab government’s atrocities against the non-Arab population in the region of Darfur led to about 300,000 deaths and over a million refugees. In addition there was systematic rape of untold numbers of non-Arab women by Arab gangs known as the Janjaweed.
And then there was the terror unleashed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians in restaurants, at weddings, on buses, etc. The Palestinians are the modern fathers of terrorism directed solely at civilians.
There are two possible reactions to this description of the Arab world. One is that it is an example of anti-Arab “racism.” That would be the reaction in much of the Arab world, on the left and among most academics — despite the fact that the description is of a culture and that the Arabs are not a race. The other is that is that it is tragically accurate. That would be the reaction of some in the Arab world and anyone who cares about truth. One such individual is an Arab. In Politico Magazine two weeks ago. Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite channel, titled his article “The Barbarians Within Our Gates.” The subtitle is “Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.”
Islamic State, which is overwhelmingly Arab, is just the latest manifestation.
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Second post of the morning, and definitely to be read in conjunction with the first:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_castle_of_backwardness
In this 2010 interview Ibrahim Al-Buleihi contends that progress for the Arab and Islamic world will only come from Western civilization
It is important that we make a distinction between Islam as a set of teachings, values, principles and legislations, and between the reality of Muslims in the past and in the present. Islam – as a set of rituals and beliefs – has continued to be conscientiously practised, whereas in the teachings of Islam the affairs of this world (dunyā) have not been fully inculcated.
What illustrates this best is that despite the fact that politics and political governance constitute some of our most pressing and crucial concerns, they have not attracted the attention of our scholars. These instead have left us devoid of a tradition of political thought.
This is in sharp contradistinction to Greek civilisation of the 5th century BC which, in the field of political thought and its connection with ethics and worldly concerns, achieved things which still excite admiration and wonder.
Our scholars meanwhile have yet to achieve anything in this most important issue of worldly affairs; we would be hard put to say that that they have accomplished anything of significance in this or in how one might promote either private or common wealth or make good use of things and release latent energies.[1]
Disdain for reason in Islam
The scholars of Islam did concern themselves with rulings on human interactions and with all manner of mundane matters, but only for the purpose of making these conform to the Sharīʻa. Indeed they laid stress on the importance of worldly affairs being conducted in security, fairness and justice; but this interest of theirs was simply part of their preoccupation with religion and was not for the sake of the dunyā per se.
It is important to understand the qualitative difference between, on the one hand, a concern to regulate worldly affairs according to the religious law and, on the other hand, activities geared to temporary concerns and to offering up ideas for developing the means to make a living and open up minds to the huge, latent potential in things. Our scholars were preoccupied with making reality conform to the teachings of Islam and were not interested in growth or the development of reality. The difference here is a qualitative difference.
Our heritage is in fact replete with expressions of disdain for anyone occupying oneself with worldly affairs or taking an interest in them. For example, in his treatise Degrees of Knowledge, Ibn Hazm holds that anyone who occupies himself in anything other than the sciences of the Sharīʻa has simply become foolish, short-sighted and a menace only to himself:
“His primary interest should be a knowledge of what is it that brought him into this world and whither he will go when he exits; if he remains in ignorance of the Sharīʻa and occupies himself with other things he has become short-sighted and oppressive to his own self.”
Such expressions are by no means exceptional; traditional writings are stuffed with similar sentiments. Even Ibn Khaldūn *, who was possessed of a brilliant mind, ridiculed those who occupied themselves with philosophy and experimental sciences such as chemistry – which he considered to be little more than a form of sorcery.[2]
Scholars and philosophers such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen), Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), al-Fārābī, al-Kindī and Ibn Rushd (Averroës) were brilliant individuals who, whilst living in an Arab environment, actually lay outside the prevailing Arab cultural norms intellectually. For studying Greek thought they were disdainfully referred to as “weeds”, and their fields of interest thereby dismissed. That is, the prevailing culture considered them to be harmful plants sprouting up amid more useful crops. I have read dozens of their works and found them all to be students of Greek thought.
Moreover, they were working as individuals scattered here and there and they did not come together to constitute a trend in society. Each of these individuals was a product of his own self and not the product of a school of thought that perpetuated earlier voices or continued on after them. Indeed, they sounded a dissident note from the prevailing culture. This is something that is abundantly clear and even those who vaunt the superiority of the Arabs over the West confirm this fact.
Objectivity demands that we grant that some Arab original thinkers may be commended for having participated in awakening the European mind towards the close of the Middle Ages – at the forefront of whom one may mention Ibn Rushd, al-Kindī, al-Rāzī, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn al-Nafīs, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Jābir ibn Hayyān.
But these and other geniuses like them were looked down upon by the Arab environment, while the European environment celebrated them. For even during its decadent eras Europe understood, and still does understand, the value of the creative thinking demonstrated by these individuals, whereas we – even in our flourishing eras – dismissed their ideas and prohibited their circulation. In fact we strangled originality, persecuted original thinkers and burned their books!
So when we boast of our superiority over Western civilisation we are ignoring the fact that this superiority amounts to no more than Europe benefiting from individuals such as Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Rāzī, who were scholars who had studied Greek thought and were therefore not the product of Arab culture.
At the same time we ignore the fact that in our culture those individuals were rejected by us and subjected to continuing condemnation and aversion – not just in the past but even today, for we still express our condemnation of them and ban their thoughts. If we burned their books and still prohibit the reading of them, how can we then boast of that which was once, and still is, rejected by us?
Hatred of reason
One fearful point that itself would justify an objective, profound study and a precise analysis, is the fact that every attempt – past and present – to augment the role of reason and science in our cultural, social and political life has led to a contrary result.
Hatred of reason has only become more prevalent and the antipathy has accumulated over generations on account of the fact that rational orientations were never accepted and their associated activities were halted. Their exponents vanished from the scene and their works became scattered, so that generations no longer had any knowledge of them other than what they heard from their opponents and detractors.
Despite the disappearance of the rational movement, opponents of rationality nevertheless continue to issue warnings against reason and demonise those who display rationalist tendencies. As a result of the centuries-long indiscriminate war waged against rationalist thinkers they almost vanished for good. When some of them were rediscovered, interest was confined to a few individuals, academics and researchers, whereas works opposing or outright warring against rationality continued to enjoy wide circulation – to the point of becoming the most important ingredient of our culture and education.
These anti-rationalist works were, and still are, taught at every stage in our educational system with the result that generations have been programmed to be hostile to reason and to fear rational thought.
My advocacy of rational thought is not something absolute, for it is after all a human endeavour subject to error, failings, bias and other natural concomitants of human activity. But these endeavours have been subjected to such ferocious attacks that generations have been led to think of them as a form of pure evil; they have focused their vision entirely upon their negative side, passing over entirely their positive aspects. It is for this reason that the Muslim nation has absorbed the ‘necessity’ to isolate itself, nurtured delusions as to its own perfection, and sanctified self-sufficiency.
The Islamic catastrophe
The greatest catastrophe to befall Islam and the Muslims is the catastrophe that has conscripted the Nation against reason from our earliest history. The consummate refusal of rationality and the war against enlightenment has locked all doors and windows against any attempts at illumination.
The problem is not merely a war against Ibn Rushd and the burning of his books, nor is it merely the expulsion of other prominent proponents of reason; Arab Islamic history has built up an entire culture at odds with rationality. Our culture has ended up stamped with this mustering against reason – not only lining up against specialists but inducing all students to hate reason, abhor thinking and imagine that this is what the Islamic religion demands of them.
The emotions of the entire Muslim Nation have been conscripted to this cause. It is directed not against the Muʽtazila school or any specific sects or tendencies that support the role of reason in the interests both of religious and mundane affairs; rather it is directed against the rationalist orientation in toto, down to its last detail. Generations have now been raised abhorring reason, wary of thinking, fearful of rationality, harbouring hatred against rational thinkers and warring against them.
It is important, therefore, that we do not content ourselves with saying that Arab culture has merely rejected those of its thinkers who have failed to elicit a response. We should instead keep in mind that attempts at rationality have borne contrary results to those intended. Instead of disdaining the capacity of reason to serve the faith and develop our dunyā, opponents of reason have ganged up together to ridicule it. Libraries are stuffed with works dedicated to this mockery, works which now constitute the authorities consulted by generations for knowledge and intellectual orientation.
We have now become fully immersed in anti-reason hostility – and this strange phenomenon could do with some deep, comprehensive, objective study, to evaluate the contrary effects that rationalist movements have spawned.
Ibrahim al-Buleihi is a Saudi liberal writer, thinker and philosopher who is currently a member of the Saudi Shura Council. This article is an excerpt from I. Buleihi, (Castles of Backwardness) Al-Jamal Publications (Beirut 2010). It has been republished with permission from Almuslih.
Notes
* Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406) is famous for his groundbreaking work on the sociology of history, contained in his Muqaddima (‘Introduction’) to his history. In Section 13, “On the Various Kinds of Intellectual Sciences”, he makes this interesting observation: “We hear now that the philosophical sciences are greatly cultivated in the land of Rome and long the adjacent northern shore of the country of the European Christians. They are said to be studied there again and to be taught in numerous classes. Existing systematic expositions of them are said to be comprehensive, the people who know them numerous, and the students of them very many. God knows better what exists there.” However, he goes on to express his disdain: “But we must refrain from studying these things, since such (restraint) falls under (the duty of) the Muslim not to do what does not concern him. The problems of physics are of no importance for us in our religious affairs or our livelihoods. Therefore, we must leave them alone.” (Ed.)
- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_castle_of_backwardness#sthash.8qFTiGBi.dpuf
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/05/ayaan-to-liberals-get-your-priorities-straight.html
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LONDON — HUMZA ARSHAD pokes fun at Pakistani accents and emotional soccer fans. He jokes about his weight, his voice and his own mother. But mostly, he laughs at jihadists.
“Have you noticed how in those terrorist videos they’re always sitting on the floor?” Mr. Arshad asked a group of high school students the other day. “What’s up with that? I swear they can afford a chair.”
And their pants: “Always coming up to here,” he said, pointing at his shin, “like, did you borrow this from your little brother or something?”
Mr. Arshad, 29, is no ordinary comedian. A practicing Muslim in hip-hop gear whose YouTube videos have drawn millions of views, he is the centerpiece of the British government’s latest and perhaps cleverest effort to prevent students from running off to Syria and joining the Islamic State. Since March, Mr. Arshad has been on tour with the counterterrorism unit of the Metropolitan Police. They have already taken their double act (“Ten percent message, 90 percent comedy”) to more than 20,000 students in 60 high schools across London.
Now Mr. Arshad, who says he first discovered stand-up as a 10-year-old watching American shows like “Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam,” hopes to take his act across the Atlantic: At the end of the month he is headed to New York and Los Angeles to meet with Hollywood studios and television networks — and hold exploratory talks with American schools on his counterextremism work.
About 700 British Muslims have traveled to Syria, including dozens of minors. Schools here have been on high alert especially since February, when three teenage girls left their family homes in east London. The footage of them calmly passing airport security has become emblematic of the youthful following faraway militants have established in the West — often using the same social media that has given Mr. Arshad his fan base.
He knows the brother of one of the girls well.
“I wish I could have prevented my friend’s sister from going,” he told the packed auditorium at a west London high school that recent afternoon. It was one of the rare serious moments in a 45-minute stand-up show that mostly saw him mocking converts with “beards to their belly buttons,” terrorists with dry ankles (“from all that sitting on the floor”) and — affectionately — his own mother, a Muslim who came to Britain from rural Pakistan and wears a head scarf. (“Is she really as bad as you say on YouTube?” one student asked. “No,” Mr. Arshad replied. “Much worse.”)
“Listen, I’m here for two reasons,” he said. “No. 1, I’m a British citizen, and I’m proud of where I’m from. No. 2, I don’t want people losing their lives. That’s not what Islam is about.”
“But there are some misguided individuals who are giving us a bad name,” he said. “We all have to do our part.”
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A weekly profile of the individuals who are shaping the world around them.
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IT is a message that police officers find harder to communicate, said Rick Warrington of the Counter Terrorism Command, or SO15, who held the session with Mr. Arshad.
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“There is always that barrier,” he said. “I remove all badging from the presentation; I come in plainclothes but I’m still a 45-year-old white police officer.”
Sometimes the police bring in Muslim charity workers to talk to students one-on-one. That does not always go over well.
“They bring in all these ‘moderate Muslims’ to talk to us,” sighed one 15-year-old girl of Bengali descent, who preferred not to be identified. “What does that make us?”
Like many students in the schools he visits, Mr. Arshad takes his religion seriously. Back in his purple-colored south London bedroom, the backdrop to many of his YouTube videos, the first item on a to-do list on his white board is “pray.”
But that does not stop him from ridiculing jihadists.
“Their ankles are very dry,” he said. “I’m just, like, looking at the ankles, and I’m thinking, bro, I don’t even think they have E45 cream in Syria. Maybe we should make a donation.”
Why do you always wear a beanie, a student heckled, pointing at Mr. Arshad’s hallmark woolly hat. “It’s like the male version of the hijab,” he shouts back. “This is the man-jab, know what I mean?”
At one point, the fire alarm went off. Mr. Arshad did not miss a beat: “What the heck? Terror attack! ISIS!”
At times lacking in subtlety, his humor still provides comic relief to an audience that has found itself under the microscope in the news media, in school and sometimes at home. These days, jokes about terrorism are not just frowned upon, “they can get you into trouble,” explained one girl of Somalian descent after seeing Mr. Arshad’s show.
BORN and raised in south London, Mr. Arshad experienced firsthand how perceptions of Muslims changed in Britain. He was 15 and on the school bus home when terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in 2001. Four years later, a series of suicide bombs blew up on London’s public transport system. Each time, he found his mother glued to the television, his mother “who never watches television,” and each time she told him, “It will be even harder to be a Muslim now.”
After finishing drama school and seeing one friend after another land jobs in television or on stage, Mr. Arshad found himself being offered minor roles as, well, the terrorist.
“I didn’t want to be typecast as the Muslim, you know, Terrorist No. 2 on the plane with just one line: ‘Allahu akbar!’” he said in a recent interview at his home (he still lives with his parents).
The idea of creating his own show on YouTube came in September 2010, after a video he uploaded went viral. It was a nine-minute clip about a young Muslim in high-top sneakers and a hoodie complaining about his Pakistani mother, who beat him up and cooked too many lentils. The video hit 5,000 views on the first day. “I thought to myself, ‘Either I’m onto something, or some freak has watched this 5,000 times,’ ” he said.
But within 10 days, the clip had more than a million views. “Diary of a Bad Man” was born, a YouTube satire of life as a young British Asian that rapidly attracted a mass teenage following. Today, Mr. Arshad’s YouTube channel has over 245,000 subscribers.
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One of the teenagers who got hooked on “Bad Man” was the 11-year-old son of Rizwaan Chothia, a police constable. Constable Chothia, an officer in an East Midlands special operations unit, watched over his son’s shoulder one night and later scrolled through Mr. Arshad’s other videos, noticing his follower numbers and calling around his extended family across Britain.
“Every teenager in my family knew him,” recalled Constable Chothia.
Soon after, he met Mr. Arshad and they agreed to produce a video together to show in schools as part of a police counterextremism presentation.
In the video, titled “I’m a Muslim not a terrorist,” Mr. Arshad, in character as Bad Man, notices his cousin changing as he falls into the orbit of an extremist group.
“Bro, why are you looking at people getting their heads cut off and stuff?” he asks his cousin, later speculating to a friend, “Maybe he’s going through puberty.”
“He’s 23,” the friend replies.
“He’s Asian, you know,” Bad Man answers. “Maybe he’s late.”
In the end, thanks to a series of frank conversations with Bad Man, the cousin abandons extremism.
It was a big decision to work with the police, Mr. Arshad said: “Of course I was worried that it would hurt my street cred.” But he wanted to do his part. The hate mail still gets to him. “I’m not a politician, I’m a comedian,” he said.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/02/middle-eastern-journalists-push-muslims-to-acknowledge-that-terrorism-is-connected-to-islam/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-2-15%20FINAL
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http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=18c_1448405998
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My friend Obaid just posted this. Obaid was a local Afghan translator working with Americans, and is now an American citizen and fellow Texan. Obaid was with me during my first big fight in Afghanistan, and was later wounded by a Taliban IED. He's a proud Muslim, proud American, and has fought more Muslim extremists than any ten American soldiers I know. We should listen to what he has to say.
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"Let me make somethings clear to my fellow Muslim friends.
Believe it or not terrorism and some mosques are related to each other, I have seen it with my own two eyes and I am sure those who lived in the Middle East, Afghanistan or Pakistan has also witnessed it. Muslim extremist clergies preach to kill non Muslims, spread the religion by the sword and promote rebellion. Most Muslims who has never been exposed to such things will try to deny it, some will deny it despite the fact that it's true and they know it but just because it is coming from a non Muslim they will not acknowledge it because it will make them or the religion look bad or sound barbaric but that's not how you make the religion or yourself look good either.
Let's set aside our egos, acknowledge the facts that the number of Islamic terrorists are much higher than that of other religions, there are many Muslims and mosques who promote violence and are actively involved in terrorism.
Terrorism is the biggest threat to Islam than any other religion, the number of Muslims who lose their lives as the result of terrorism is extremely high. By denying the facts you are not only doing anything good but you are also facilitating for the terrorist to exist longer!
Acknowledge and take action if you really want to show that Islam is about peace and not violence. if you know a place where hatred and intolerance is being preached or if you know people are involved in such activities report them, you are not endangering the innocents you are saving them!"
-Obaid, American Muslim and former Afghan translator, December 7th 2015
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKerbOi_mrI
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-nationalism-can-solve-the-crisis-of-islam-1495830440
How Nationalism Can Solve the Crisis of Islam
Transnational liberalism breeds resentments and anxieties that are only beginning to surface across the developed world.
By Sohrab Ahmari
May 26, 2017 4:27 p.m. ET
442 COMMENTS
Paris
Last Sunday President Trump stood before Muslim leaders in Riyadh and declared: “America is a sovereign nation, and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”
Amid the journalistic uproar that greets nearly everything Mr. Trump says, few noted the connection he made between these two concepts: We are sovereign, and we don’t want to lecture. By putting them together, the president scrambled the pattern that has long shaped the West’s relations with Islam.
For decades, the West has seen itself as an empire of rights and liberal norms. There were borders and nations, but these were fast dissolving. Since rights were universal, the empire would soon encompass the planet. Everyone would belong, including Muslims, who were expected to lose their distinctness.
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It didn’t work, as the latest jihadist attack, at a concert for teens in Manchester, England, attests. So it makes sense to consider alternatives. Judging by his Saudi speech, Mr. Trump wants to revive the nation-state as the primary political vehicle for encountering Islam. The nation has clear—and limited—territorial and cultural boundaries. It says we are this, and you are that.
To the French philosopher Pierre Manent, such thinking is the beginning of wisdom. “We have a big problem with Islam,” he tells me. “And it’s impossible to solve it through globalist, individualist, rights-of-man mantras.”
I meet Mr. Manent, 68, in his office at the prestigious School for Advanced Social Studies in Paris. For years he has been associated with the school’s Raymond Aron Center for Political Research, named for the great Cold War liberal who denounced Soviet tyranny even as most French thinkers grew addicted to what Aron called the “opium of the intellectuals”—Marxism and radicalism. Aron was Mr. Manent’s mentor.
Illustration: Zina Saunders
Although Mr. Manent has retired from teaching, he still writes and lectures across Europe, mainly on how to preserve political freedom and liberal order in the face of globalization, mass migration and Islam. His ideas have wide application in the West.
Here in France, the government has vowed to counter Islamist terror with a military and intelligence surge. But newly elected President Emmanuel Macron generally eschews the more profound, unresolved questions of community and belonging that haunt French society. “There is no such thing as a single French culture,” he said in February. “There is culture in France, and it is diverse.”
These glib assertions lead Mr. Manent to conclude that Mr. Macron has fully imbibed the “acceptable opinions, or the PC opinions,” about Islam and nationhood that prevail among trans-Atlantic elites. In these circles, even to suggest a problem with Islam is to invite “scowls,” he says. “Everything they say about the situation is determined by their purpose, which is to prove that there is no problem with Islam—against their own anxiety.” Not to mention the evidence.
He regards Islam as a powerful and “starkly objective” faith. Wherever it spreads, it brings a set of “authoritative mores,” whose adherents constitute the faithful community, or ummah. This is in contrast to Christianity, with its emphasis on subjective, inner assent to the Redeemer, distinctions between the visible and invisible church, Caesar and God, and so on.
Islam instead rests on a political geography that divides the world, Mr. Manent has written, between the “house of submission,” where the faith reigns, and the “house of war,” where it doesn’t. As a political form, Islam thus most closely resembles an empire, he argues. The trouble—for Muslims and for the West—is that since the Ottoman collapse in 1924, it “has been an empire without an emperor.”
Meanwhile, the liberal West has grown tired of the older forms of “communion” that used to define it. Liberals in Europe, and to a lesser extent the U.S., wish to dispense with both the modern nation-state, the political communion that once gave concrete shape to the open society, and Judeo-Christianity, the sacred communion that used to provide the moral and spiritual frame.
For the West’s professional classes, Mr. Manent contends, the only acceptable sources of political communion are the autonomous individual, on the one hand, and humanity as a whole, on the other. He understands the jet-setters’ impulse: “We can go anywhere on the planet, work anywhere on the planet—these new liberties are inebriating.” Better, then, “to be a citizen of the world.”
But Mr. Manent, a Catholic and classical liberal in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, thinks this attitude breeds resentments and anxieties that are only beginning to surface across the developed world.
To wit, for most people everywhere, humanity is “too large and too diverse” to provide meaningful communion. “I cannot prove that the nation-state is the only viable form,” he says. “But what I’m sure about is that to live a fully human life, you need a common life and a community. This is a Greek idea, a Roman idea, a Christian idea.”
It’s why 19th-century liberals such as Tocqueville were so enthralled by the modern democratic nation-state. It was committed to universal human rights, but it housed them within a pre-existing “sacred community” that had its own inherited traditions—and boundaries.
It’s also why in the 21st century, Mr. Manent says, the “small, damaged” nations of Central Europe react most viscerally against transnational liberalism. Hungary fears “it couldn’t have endured and would have disappeared,” he continues, if it faced the same multicultural pressures as, say, France. The European Union’s efforts to punish voters in such countries for electing the wrong kind of government will therefore intensify the backlash.
But there is a bigger wrinkle in the transnationalist pattern: It isn’t universalistic at all. When the house of Islam looks at Europe, it doesn’t see a union with procedural norms, trade ties and kaleidoscopic lifestyles. It sees a collection of particular nation-states. More important, it sees the cross.
In its communiqués claiming credit for terror attacks, Islamic State never fails to mention that the “soldiers of the Caliphate” targeted this or that nation, which “carries the banner of the cross in Europe.” Such statements puzzle secular Europeans, Mr. Manent says, because they think: “Well, perhaps the Americans who intervened in Iraq, but we French are not Crusaders!”
The West has relegated faith to a purely private sphere, in which the believer, in his inner depths, communes with the Almighty. But to adherents of Islam, Christianity’s public, political dimension still shines forth.
This leads to another turn in Mr. Manent’s thought: “In the present circumstances, relations between Europe and the Muslim world will be less fraught if we accepted this Christian mark, while of course guaranteeing that every citizen, whatever his religion and lack of religion, has equal rights.” In other words, the Muslim world would more easily come to terms with the West if Westerners acknowledged who they are.
Take Turkey’s accession to the EU. European leaders for decades have contorted themselves to justify their reluctance to admit Ankara. If it were purely a matter of “rights,” then Ankara would be correct to demand entrance ASAP. But, says Mr. Manent, “Europe” is also a cultural and political community, and it matters that Turkey is a large Sunni Muslim nation with Turkish mores. By being honest about these differences, the West could clarify the terms of the encounter and ease tensions.
As for the West’s often ill-assimilated native Muslim populations, like the British community that produced the Manchester bomber, here too Mr. Manent prefers a “national solution.” For starters, he says, “we must accept that the Muslims who are among us will remain Muslims.” It follows that the West must “do things so that Muslims feel that they can be reasonably happy Muslims” in a non-Muslim environment.
The basic bargain: “We accept Muslims, but they also have to accept us.” In France that might mean dialing back laïcité, the official secularist dogma that restricts many public expressions of faith. “We won’t bother you about your veils or the way you eat,” Mr. Manent says. “In school lunches, meat without pork will be available. It’s silly and mean to say, ‘They will eat pork or they won’t eat.’ Muslims shouldn’t always be under suspicious eyes.”
But then, he continues, the French would demand reciprocity of Muslims: “You really belong to France. You turn toward it and your life will be centered on this European country, which is not and will never be a Muslim country.”
What he wants to combat is the widespread sense of alienation, particularly among young Muslims who are “paper French”—citizens without political attachment. In practice, this would involve the government’s insisting that mosques and cultural associations cut their ties with Algeria, Tunisia and other foreign countries and instead actively promote an indigenous French Islam.
His grand-bargain vision has detractors on the left, who call it discriminatory, and the right, who find the offer too generous. Others think it’s too late. But Mr. Manent is optimistic that the combination of political liberty and nationalism is more resilient than most people suppose.
Then again, the 19th-century marriage of liberalism and nationalism ended in a very ugly divorce in the first half of the 20th century. What about the dangers of reviving nationalism today? “There is no a priori guarantee that it could not devolve into something nasty,” Mr. Manent says. “But if we don’t propose a reasonable idea of the nation, we will end up with an unreasonable idea of the nation. Because simply: However weakened the idea of the nation, nations do not want to die.”
Then there is the example across the Atlantic. Like Tocqueville, Mr. Manent sees much to admire in the American experiment. Even as Europeans have sought to pool or even abandon their sovereignty, he says, “Americans remained very much attached to the idea of a people making its laws to protect itself.”
True, “this people was open to the world, since of course it was formed by immigration. But people came from all over the world, not to be human beings but to be citizens of the United States, which had a keen sense of its exceptionalism and unique character.” In the Second Amendment, the persistence of the death penalty, and the reluctance of U.S. courts to follow foreign precedents, Mr. Manent sees “not a proof of American barbarism” but of democratic vigor.
And realism. Europeans, he says, imagined the world was so safe for liberty that they could discard the harsh, Hobbesian elements of power. Americans recognize that the modern world still has one foot in the state of nature, and this calls for the sovereign prerogatives of self-preservation: We are sovereign—we don’t lecture.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer in London.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U49nOBFv508
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/17159/fighting-islamism-will-require-destroying-these-3-ben-shapiro
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U49nOBFv508
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/17159/fighting-islamism-will-require-destroying-these-3-ben-shapiro
What is the effective radius of a bomb vest? A knife? a rifle? A truck running you over?
It's impossible for a muslim to do any of the above when they aren't in your country.
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http://www.cracked.com/blog/isis-wants-us-to-invade-7-facts-revealed-by-their-magazine/
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1780-we-built-their-death-squads-isiss-bizarre-origin-story.html
much twaddle mixed in, but some reminders of the humanity of many of the refugees
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1916-we-met-syrias-war-refugees-7-awful-things-they-told-us.html
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRPzkB5mr1U
Amazing! Still picking my jaw up off the floor. :-o