April 1979

Iraq

by Claudia Wright
The Atlantic Monthly
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/79apr/wright.htm

I am looking at sandstone eagles in a desert temple dating from 744 B.C. The
enormous birds sit in repose, legless, wingless. Nearby is a statue of a
headless Hercules, his genitalia worn away by the wind and sand to a
proportion that appears ludicrous compared to the grossness of his body.
Further into the dark depths of the temple all the statues seem to have
larger-than-life proportions to simulate strength.

Today Iraq tries to recreate the ancient message of the temple statues of
Hatra, and the larger-than-life concept can be found in the desert in the
form of huge metal sculptures billowing orange flares and pumping the oil
that provides economic strength to the Iraqi people.

Those who seek the mystery and the opulence of the rest of the oil-fed
Middle East won't find it here. The visual contrasts in Iraq are jarring: on
the one hand, traces of Babylon, Assyria, and Sumeria; on the other, the
most advanced plutonium breeder reactor. But the visitor to Iraq must listen
rather than look, and what he will hear is a new tone of Iraqi
self-assertion and confidence.

The country was for a long time regarded as a pariah in international
politics, was forced to travel to other Arab capitals to plead its cause and
was rarely listened to. But the summit meeting of Arab leaders in Baghdad
last November was carried off by the Iraqis in a confident new style. It
marked not only the first time that President Assad of Syria and the leaders
of Iraq had agreed to meet since 1972 but the first time since 1976 that the
PLO leader Yasir Arafat had met with Iraqi officials. (Twelve months of
bloody feuding between the Arafat-led Fatah group and Iraqi-supported
factions of the PLO preceded the meeting.)

The Baghdad summit was also the first major set of Middle Eastern talks
initiated and carried through by the Iraqis. Whether in the Palestinian
showdown with King Hussein in 1970, the Iranian arms buildup in the Gulf,
the oil embargo, or the wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973, the record
shows that Iraq has been generally reluctant to collaborate in joint Arab
initiatives, and other Arab nations have been reluctant to join with Iraq.

The American view of these events has lulled policy-makers into an easy
disregard for the Iraqi regime—an attitude compounded by ignorance, lack of
contact, and a noticeable scorn among State Department veterans. (The two
countries have had no formal diplomatic links since the Iraqis broke off
relations in 1967.) By contrast with the once prosperous and confident
embassy in Tehran across the border, Baghdad has been a backwater and a
hardship post.

To foreign visitors, Baghdad may still evoke the intense
security-consciousness and secrecy associated with Iraq since 1958, when the
British-installed monarchy was overthrown by a nationalist coup, and
certainly since 1968, when the present military-led Baathist regime took
power from a civilian coalition.

The Palace Road quarter of Baghdad contains the kind of expansive,
palm-lined avenues that British colonial engineers built all over their
empire. This is where Baath party President Hassan al-Bakr and Vice
President Saddam Hussein live, along with other leading party and government
officials. In this section tanks can suddenly appear, take up a position for
an hour or two around prominent official buildings, and then disappear.
Heavily armed soldiers can be seen from time to time on the roofs
surrounding the television and radio broadcasting studios, and photographs
of these and other government buildings are not permitted. Although
uniformed police are less obvious in Baghdad than in New York or Washington,
random checks of cars are not uncommon.

Many years ago Munif al-Razzazz, now in his sixties, collaborated with
Michel Aflaq in creating the pan-Arab Baath party. Razzazz is assistant
secretary general of the National Command of the party, which nominally
covers both the Iraqi and the Syrian Regional Commands.

I asked Razzazz about his life as a member of the party. Pale-skinned,
impeccable, and resembling Basil Rathbone, Razzazz sat in his office at the
modern national party headquarters. He told me that he regretted the long
time he had spent away from his home and family but, he emphasized, he did
not regret the solitary confinement and the many years he had spent in jail
as an advocate of the party: "I've seen our revolution grow from ideas we
all had in jail cells."

Not an Iraqi by birth, he acknowledges the volatility of Iraqi and Baathist
politics, but he says that the course of the revolution has depended on it.
Without sharp and fairly continuous change, he insists, the Iraqi regime
would not have achieved the success he believes it has today.

Others who neither share the Baath vision nor would normally be comfortable
with Razzazz's rhetoric now grudgingly accept his verdict. Neighboring
Arabs, the French—who are replacing the conventional nuclear reactor Iraq
obtained from the Russians with a sophisticated plutonium breeder plant—and
the Japanese—who are trading oil for vast investment credits, consider that
the Iraqi regime has all but shrugged off the instability of the past, and
that it is about to assume major regional and international status. In a
recent interview in Washington, Hisham Sharabi, president of the National
Association of Arab-Americans, linked this position to the Camp David
accords: "If Egypt signs a separate bilateral agreement with Israel and is
thereby isolated, the role of Iraq would be the potential leader in the
Eastern Arab world."

Iraq's emergence is the result of three things: oil, military strength, and
internal development. Superficially, Iraq is not overwhelmingly endowed in
any one respect. Saudi Arabia has more oil. Israel and Iran are stronger
militarily in the region. By any measure of industrialization, agricultural
productivity, literacy, and manpower skills, Israel is much more developed.
However, the combination of these three factors has led to Iraq's new status
and to the recognition, everywhere else if not in the United States, of its
extraordinary potential for pre-eminence in the Middle East.

Oil power

With oil reserves now estimated by State Department analysts at over 75
billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia in the World, Iraq has pursued
an oil production and development program which gives it an independence
that no other oil producer possesses, inside or outside of OPEC. Iraqi oil
power is a very recent development, for despite initial efforts at
nationalization of its oil concessions in the early 1960s, Baghdad was
unable to force the private British, French, Dutch, and American companies
on which it continued to depend to produce at levels much higher than 40
percent of capacity. Since 1972, however, when the foreign-dominated Iraq
Petroleum Company (IPC) was taken over, the regime has steadily strengthened
its control over expansion of daily output and has dramatically improved
export earnings.

Strategically speaking, Iraq could not hope to develop its economy without
resolving serious territorial disputes with Iran and Kuwait and ensuring
stable conditions for its oil trade in the Persian Gulf. As a consequence,
in 1975 Iraq signed a border settlement with the shah, and after protracted
discussions over mutual guarantees and protection for Urn Qasr, the new
tanker port being built at the neck of the Gulf, Iraqi troops were withdrawn
from adjacent Kuwaiti territory last year. These agreements helped to end
more than twenty years of tense exchanges and bloody shooting matches.

Iraq is now in a position to recoup the lion's share of its oil exports and
to accelerate the increase in revenues—or almost, for its plan to use oil
revenues and move ahead with national development hinges on the government's
capacity for anticipating future annual oil receipts and for keeping these
in balance with planned expenditures and the rising cost of imports.

What the government has done is unique in the Middle East, for wherever
possible it has negotiated the sale of oil for the import of goods and
technology on a fixed-price, government-agreement basis. Italy, France, and
Japan are currently the major oil purchasers. With each Iraq has signed an
oil-for-import barter agreement. Japan, for example, will buy 9 million tons
of oil a year and provide an annual import purchase credit worth about $1
billion in return. Italy and France have negotiated similar agreements. For
each country, Iraq has used its credit somewhat differently—the Japanese
have been building power stations, refineries, and petrochemical plants; the
Italians, a fruit and livestock farm complex; and the French, an iron and
steel plant, a nuclear power reactor, and Mirage fighter jets.

The record of their complex trade, credit, and investment deals illustrates
also that the Iraqis are restraining oil output and conserving their
resources. According to CIA estimates, the government is holding its
production and export of oil to 67 percent of current capacity, far below
the output-to-capacity ratios of Saudi Arabia (72 percent), Iran (87 percent
before the anti-shah blowup) or Algeria (93 percent). This reflects the
determination of Iraqi planners to limit both production and expenditure
needs over the short term in order to maximize revenues over the longer
future, when they expect the value of their oil to become much greater.

They are also hedging in a clever way to protect their oil earnings from the
effects of the declining. U.S. dollar and worldwide inflation. Instead of
accumulating large dollar surpluses, which the Saudis have put on deposit in
the United States and cannot now move without causing even further dollar
losses and depreciation of their assets, the Iraqis have opted for variable
currency holdings. Unlike Iran and Kuwait, which have used export earnings
to buy reserve positions or long-term borrowing rights in the International
Monetary Fund, Iraq is keeping virtually all of its international reserves
in highly liquid form, 96 percent in foreign exchange and 4 percent in gold.

Thus, the Iraqi oil minister, Tayih Abd al-Karim, was able to say at the
OPEC conference in Abu Dhabi last December that "we do not believe the
Americans will succeed in stabilizing their currency. The only alternative
to the dollar that we can see is a basket of currency like the special
drawing rights, where the dollar has one of many shares with other
currencies."

Ironically, Iraq has obtained a far more effective system of internal
security for its oil production system than has any of its neighbors,
although it has spent only a fraction of what the Saudis and Iranians have
spent for expensive foreign military hardware. The May 1977 explosion and
fire at the main oil field at Abqaiq demonstrated how vulnerable the Saudis
are to sabotage, while the continuing conflict in Iran and the cessation of
oil exports have illustrated how fruitless the shah's precautions were as
insurance against internal dissent.

What was already evident by late 1977 is now, in the wake of the Abu Dhabi
decisions, abundantly clear. Iraq has perceived that it can afford to wield
the "oil weapon" with a militancy that its Arab OPEC partners have hesitated
to do. Without the Camp David accords it might not have been able to use its
leverage over the Saudis, but by the end of the Baghdad summit, agreement
between the two countries on basic strategic principles was sealed.

The shutdown of Iranian oil exports triggered the most serious drop in world
supplies since the 1973 embargo. From the Iraqi point of view, this could
not have come at a better moment, since it enlarged earnings for the rest of
the OPEC producers at the same time that it increased Western, particularly
American, dependence on Arab suppliers. The unwillingness of the Saudis to
give in to American pressure to step up short-term output is a sign of the
effectiveness of the Baghdad summit and the Abu Dhabi meetings in cementing
the Arab leadership in a joint economic strategy.

Iraqis point also to the new strains that the Iranian situation is creating
for the Israeli economy. Although Ayatollah Khomeini's much-publicized
threat to withhold oil is disturbing to the Israelis, a selective embargo
can be survived, as it was in 1973, so long as the oil keeps flowing.
However, a total export cutoff would be crippling. So far the Mexicans have
refused to supply the full emergency rations Israel negotiated for last
year, and in desperation Tel Aviv ordered immediate new drilling on the
shore of the Sinai Peninsula, just north of the Alma field which the
Israelis captured from Egypt in 1973 and which currently produces about 20
percent of the country's daily requirements. This move sharply aggravated
President Sadat, and has been harmful to the negotiations for an
Israeli-Egyptian treaty.

Observers who concede that the Iranian revolution has produced positive
benefits to Iraq suggest that serious costs must also be recognized. The
Soviet Union, for example, has been reluctant to make good on its promises
of military aid to Syria and Iraq in the wake of the Baghdad summit. This
inaction stems from nervousness in Moscow about the outcome of the Iranian
revolution. At first the Soviets were anxious not to be blamed for the
anti-shah movement: then they wanted to keep the Americans out while
avoiding a slide into confrontation. More than usually sensitive to the
threat of Israeli provocations in Lebanon, the Soviet Union was acutely
nervous about the proliferation of flashpoints their strategists were having
to monitor simultaneously. As a result, Soviet military leaders have
deliberately slowed the pace of talks on military aid with Syria and Iraq,
and deferred delivery dates until the environment appears more predictable.
This has provoked open Syrian annoyance, and the crucial supply questions
remain unresolved.

Leaders of the Baath

Iraq, with its population of almost 12 million, is a territory that the
British colonial administration carved out of Turkish Mesopotamia during
World War I, and then administered via the Hashemite royal family until
1958. It has been among the most volatile and unstable of Arab states. After
the republican coup of 1958 overthrew King Faisal II, factions of the Baath
party, pan-Arab groups identified with Gamal Abd al-Nasser of Egypt,
communists, and others sought to gain control of the military and the
government.

The struggle within the Baath party took several ideological turns during
the 1960s, but by 1967 the group that had supported the party founder,
Michel Aflaq, in his contest with the Syrian Baath faction emerged in more
or less solid control of the Iraqi Baath party. The leaders of this group,
which successfully took power In July 1968, were Army General Ahmad Hassan
al-Bakr, who became the president of the new regime, and Saddam Hussein
Takritti, who was at the time deputy secretary-general of the Regional
Command, the party executive.

At the outset, the 1968 government was a coalition of Baathists and two
non-party colonels who had been commanders of the military guard and
intelligence units closest to the former president. These two, al-Dawud and
al-Nayif, became defense minister and prime minister in the new cabinet, but
were edged out in a bloodless purge within two weeks. Both were sent into
exile (al-Nayif was assassinated in London in 1978 by Iraqi agents).

And so, for the last ten years, the Baath party has been able to maintain
its position in government, and has had time and resources to mobilize every
aspect of organized Iraqi society, from the unions and the agricultural
cooperatives to the professional associations and the armed forces.

Asked for an assessment of Iraqi military strength, a U.S. State Department
official answered: "In a word, worthless. They are all talk and no action."
A superficial assessment of recent Middle Eastern military history might
tend to support that view. In the June 1967 war with Israel, Iraq was
soundly defeated in the air, and its losses, although small by comparison
with Syria and Egypt, were sizable. They were more than compensated for,
however, by Soviet replacements, and the signing in 1972 of a cooperative
treaty with the Soviet Union opened the way to substantial Soviet armaments
as well as to military advisers. These remain virtually untested except for
brief and inconclusive tank skirmishes in the last days of the 1973 war with
Israel, and equally inconclusive artillery, rocket, and ground-to-air duels
with Iran in the central border area.

Other military analysts believe that while its offensive forces are inferior
to Israel's, Iraq has built a defensive force capable of deterring most
types of Israeli attack. Roger Pajak, an adviser to the U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency, points to Iraq's possession of advanced TU-22
bombers and at least 80 MiG-23Bs, the sophisticated supersonic fighters
rivaling the American F-4 Phantom. According to another analyst, when the
French-built Mirage F-1s are delivered and then weighed in the balance with
the dense deployment of SAM-missile batteries (these took a heavy toll of
Israeli aircraft over Syria in 1973), an Israeli air attack is likely to
seem too costly to be tried.

The Kurdish problem

One of the reasons Iraq has committed few of its ground forces to battle
with Israel in the past is that it has been preoccupied with the Kurdish
conflict in the northeast. Openly aided, armed, and protected by the shah
(and by the CIA, covertly), the Kurds fought tenacious campaigns from their
border mountain sanctuaries throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s, tying
down the bulk of the Iraqi army and tactical air force.

Despite negotiations for regional autonomy and promises of substantial
economic aid by Baghdad in 1970, the Kurds returned to fighting in 1974
after a three-year lull, but this time Iraq threw in more than 80,000
troops, tanks, bombers, and (because of some Russian hesitancy in meeting
Iraqi requests for more weapons) French helicopters. The result was
militarily much more decisive than in earlier campaigns, and in March 1975
the shah withheld support of the Kurds as part of the quid pro quo
negotiated with Iraq over the two countries' border disputes.

Large Kurdish communities exist not only in Iran and Iraq but also in Syria,
Turkey, and the Soviet Union, and none of these countries has been willing
to tolerate an active secessionist movement. Indeed, they were relieved that
Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani concentrated his resources on Iraq,
and that, in draining each other, neither the Kurds nor the Iraqis appeared
to have much of an appetite for neighboring territory. In 1975, with the
cessation of Iranian support and Barzani's departure into American exile,
the greatest military problem the Baghdad regime had to deal with was
substantially, although not completely, solved.

The legacy of the Kurdish problem is that Baghdad has been caught in an
awkward position toward Tehran. Though Iraq prefers an Islamic republic to
the Pahlevi regime, it was careful to avoid aggravating Tehran or provoking
any large-scale resumption of Iranian aid to the Kurds, who, according to
French intelligence reports, started sporadic raiding again in midsummer of
1978. Indeed, Baghdad was so concerned about its treaty commitments with the
shah that it invited Ayatollah Khomeini to leave his long-time residence on
the Iraqi side of the border. It should be said, however, that at no stage
of Khomeini's fourteen-year exile in Iraq did the authorities try to stop
the steady stream of the Ayatollah's visitors, or suppress his active
direction of the Moslem resistance in Iran.

Water and the land

Next to oil, water is Iraq's most precious resource, and it is the only
oil-rich Arab state with potentially enough water to become self-sufficient
in agriculture, perhaps even an exporter of food grains and livestock. This
looming self-sufficiency is endangered not only by the competing water
claims of Syria and Turkey, where the Euphrates originates, but also by
technical problems of salinity and flood control. Iraq also faces severe
administrative difficulties as it attempts to mechanize agriculture while
many peasants abandon the land for better-paying city jobs. Those who stay
on the land, however, demand more rapid redistribution under the agrarian
reforms in order to build up their holdings to economically profitable
sizes.

My guide in the south, a soldier who doubled as our hunter and cook, told me
that he used to farm rice but found that being a soldier was easier and paid
more, so that, despite his absence from his village, he could better support
a family of ten. Individually, under the reform system, farmers are better
off but their holdings are small, the farm cooperatives that have been
promised are still relatively unorganized, credit takes time to flow, and
too few peasants remain to increase output or productivity. This in turn has
put a strain on Baghdad to stop food prices from rising too steeply.

Perhaps the most far-reaching result of the November summit agreement has
been the rapid improvement of relations with Syria. High-level committees,
representing both sides, have been working continuously since November to
integrate the military commands of the two countries' armed forces, to
reopen the oil trade, and to plan joint use of irrigation and water
conservation projects. On the agricultural side, this promises welcome
relief to the water supply problem while efforts are being made to encourage
Moroccan and other Arab peasant immigration to expand farm employment.
Inflation, which has hit the Middle East just as badly as the rest of the
world, is better controlled in Iraq than in the neighboring economies. With
more than three quarters of the gross national product produced by the
government sector. And with the unions linked to the government through
Baath party mechanisms, the regime's economic planners have managed to hold
annual price increases to less than 10 percent-an achievement that only
Kuwait among the Arab countries has been able to match.

Wages have been increased for all workers, and real income gains have been
supplemented by special government programs to assist minority and
disadvantaged groups. Land reform and extra investment have lifted, the
income of Iraqi Kurds, I was told, way above the Turkish, Syrian, or Iranian
standards, and programs of training, maternity leave, pay equalization, and
state-operated child care have improved the condition of women to an extent
difficult to match in the Moslem world.

Party organization

What exactly is the structure of the Baath party, and who are the men who
control it? Tariq Aziz, one of the party's eminent publicists and
theoreticians and a senior government minister, is protected by more than
half a dozen guards carrying machine guns. But the security, which is all
that Western correspondents often see of the Baathist hierarchy, is a poor
test of the stability of the regime or of its mass appeal.

The party still retains much of the secret, compartmentalized structure and
the clandestine methods by which, like many other revolutionary parties, it
has ensured its survival. Direction of the party comes from the Regional
Command, which represents sixteen provincial units. The members of the
Regional Command are elected from a network of sections and cells not unlike
the local communist party committees in many countries. They function
everywhere—in the workplace, in neighborhoods, and in all ranks of the
military forces—inculcating the party's doctrines of traditional Arab unity,
nationalism, socialism, and spiritual revival. Membership in the party,
which numbers approximately half a million at present, is required of all
regular officers and diplomats.

Since its emergence from the underground, and following a decade of
experience in power, the Baath leadership has been able to train a second
elite group to operate at all levels of the bureaucracy and the military
forces. These are the commissars, and they are often from peasant or
lower-class village backgrounds; few of them have been abroad for university
degrees, and much of their training has been from the military academy.
Al-Bakr and Hussein are also lawyers. The two Iraqi leaders reflect the
strong pull and push of regional factions within the Baath party. Both come
from the same small village, Tikrit, fifty miles north of Baghdad. Several
times during their parallel careers, Al-Bakr through the military and
Hussein through the party, the former has owed his survival to the
intervention of the latter.

Hussein, forty-one years old, has worked his way up through the ranks since
high school days as a Baath youth organizer. He is quite dashing and his
photograph occupies a place with al-Bakr's in all ceremonial locations. If
there are elements of a personality cult in the country, Hussein, who is
famous for his white suits and black ties, outshines the president with his
military ribbons. Western correspondents tend to overemphasize that as a
measure of the two men's power.

They have tried to secure tenure by bringing the Communist and Kurdish
Democratic parties into the Progressive National Front and by severing the
armed forces from the political process to prevent what they call an
"Allende Coup." But challenges do occur, and are swiftly resolved. Last
year, two Communists were executed for creating an anti-cell in the army.
The Communist party has been vocal for fifty years in Iraq and has been
punished often with massacres and jailing for its internal political
schemes. The Communists want Iraqi unification with the Soviet bloc and are
against the government policy of unity with the United Arab Republic. The
government's stability really relies on the Iraqi people and on its ability
to set up the promised national assembly.

Under al-Bakr and Hussein the regime appears flexible enough to tolerate
substantial differences over social and economic policy. When big mistakes
in economic management are made, they are admitted, and the corrections are
reflected in the annual budget and investment program.

After twenty years of chronic warfare in the northeast, tension, and
military preparedness along every frontier, the Iraqis have little taste for
military adventures or bloodshed. And on the domestic front, the present
leadership cannot afford to allow the country's resources to be drained away
by unproductive investment, or its energies to be wasted in protracted
military conflict. Iraq's first goal, as officials declare in interviews and
in the hard facts of the annual budget and the current five-year plan, is to
put internal development ahead of military buildup.

Still, militant and uncompromising hostility to Israel remains the
cornerstone of the country's foreign policy. Iraq's current leadership
believes that Israeli dominance in the Middle East would increase military
pressure on Iraq's borders and threaten every one of its cities. Eventually,
even without another Israeli military success, Iraqis are convinced,
Israel's economic power would penetrate Iraq's domestic product markets,
disturb the balance of the wage and price structure vital to development
planning, and finally undermine the principles of socialism and nationalism
to which the regime is dedicated. When the Camp David accords are viewed in
that light, the Iraqis believe they are facing the most important challenge
to their state since its founding eleven years ago. Washington needs to
understand that.

Friends,

As despicable as the scenes from Fallujah are, Ahmed Nassef writes
in MuslimWakeup.Com that the gruesome scenes of public hangings are
part of American tradition that have now made it to Iraq.

He also highlights the privitization of the US armed forces and
the "disturbing trend...of transferring security and military duties
to mercenary security services, from the US, as well as from
England, South Africa, and Chile. In fact, the victims of
Wednesday's attacks in Falluja worked for the same North Carolina
firm, Blackwater, that is charged with the personal security detail
of US Administrator L. Paul Bremer. Many of these "civilian"
security jobs pay more than $15,000 per month--not quite close to
the average GI's salary."

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
----------------------

Lynching: An American Tradition Comes to Iraq

By Ahmed Nassef
MuslimWakeup.Com
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000680.php#more

"The events which transpired five thousand years ago, five years ago
or five minutes ago, have determined what will happen five minutes
from now, five years from now or five thousand years from now. All
history is a current event."
-- Dr. John Henrik Clarke, African American Historian

Whenever Muslims commit an atrocity against American citizens, we
usually receive a lot of mostly anonymous hate mail. Here's one we
got this morning in the wake of this week's killing of 4 Americans
in Fallujah, Iraq:

The News today confirmed followers of Islam are Satan's chosen
people. What other religion hangs bodies from bridges then tears
them apart? Hell has a special place for those people.

The letters we get make sense, since all Muslims--salafi or
progressive, secular or Sufi, sunni or shi'i--as well as those in
the population who may just "look" Muslim or are particularly adept
at speaking Muslim must answer for the actions of any individual
Muslim anywhere in the world.

Of course, this kind of thinking is exactly what leads to incidents
like the one that took place in Fallujah. For many Iraqis, any
American, by virtue of the passport they carry, becomes a walking
representative of George Bush's invasion and military occupation of
their country. The men who were burned to death and so inhumanely
paraded around the streets of Fallujah were no longer humans in the
eyes of the mob--they had no loved ones to grieve for them, no
children to grow up fatherless without them.

Not long ago, similar scenes were rather regular occurrences in the
United States despite having been erased from our collective memory.
In fact, considering the sheer regularity and frequency of lynchings
in America during the 19th and early 20th centuries, we as Americans
should be able to relate rather well to the ugliness in Fallujah.

The American lynching tradition, which killed thousands, typically
consisted of the following steps:

--a notice to other whites in neighboring towns, so they could
witness the lynching;

--a huge spectacle with thousands watching;

--the burning of the victim, usually a male, at the stake, after
first being exposed to hours of wrathful pain, known as "surgery
below the belt;" and, as if that wasn't bad enough

--the observers took parts of the mutilated body as souvenirs and
took pictures for postcards.

The parallels between what happened in Fallujah and the
peculiarities of the American lynching tradition are remarkably
striking.

Like their Iraqi counterparts, American lynchers liked to parade the
charred corpses of their victims through the main streets of their
towns.

One particularly gruesome image from Fallujah was the photo of the
American victims being hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. The
practice of hanging from bridges was also common in US lynchings:

Researchers confirm the symbolic importance of lynching sites and
the conscious selection of these sites by perpetrators of extra-
legal violence. The dominance of Christian symbology is resurrected
in the lynchers' preference for bodies of water, bridges, and
landmark trees. Bodies of water are the traditional locations for
baptisms; bridges symbolize the most profound rite of passage, the
great "crossing over" to death; and trees are the very symbol of
life and of Christ's crucifixion. The lynchers sought, in the
conscious selection of these sacrificial sites and in their
participation in these ritualized murders, their own salvation and
passage to a safer place without sin and evil - both of which, in
their minds, were physically embodied in the "offending" victim.

However, the similarities end when we consider the specific context
of the Iraqi occupation.

The obvious one is that, unlike African Americans who were brought
to the US against their will and had at least as much right to be
here as their European American lynchers, almost all Americans in
Iraq are there as a result of a highly questionable military
invasion of a sovereign country.

Of course, most of the Americans that are there would rather not be.
If given a choice, most US servicemen and women would eagerly return
home to their families.

Which brings us to another disturbing trend--the increasingly common
practice of transferring security and military duties to mercenary
security services, from the US, as well as from England, South
Africa, and Chile. In fact, the victims of Wednesday's attacks in
Falluja worked for the same North Carolina firm, Blackwater, that is
charged with the personal security detail of US Administrator L.
Paul Bremer. Many of these "civilian" security jobs pay more than
$15,000 per month--not quite close to the average GI's salary.

So who is responsible?

At one level, the people who partook in the heinousness of parading
the bodies and disrespecting the dead are guilty. No matter their
level of desperation or anguish, their actions are inexcusable.

But what about the people who, through their policy of hiring
mercenaries, are blurring the lines between civilian and combatant,
thus further endangering the many civilians who are in Iraq on
humanitarian missions or to report the news? What about the people
who brought us into this mess through a web of outright lies and
half-truths? Are any of them accountable? Will any of them be
brought to justice?

Friends,

Svend White is a Muslim activist in Washington DC where he is Secretary of
the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

In this article for the on-line magazine Open Democracy, Svend White
criticizes the French government for banning the Hijab, but he also
questions Muslims in "how the hijab is sometimes exploited within Muslim
communities in the west in ways that undermine Muslim women and ultimately
pervert the principles for which hijab stands."

He writes that the French ban should be cause for concern among all who
cherish freedom, regardless of creed or nationality. However, he goes on to
admit that not all concerns of the French government are unfounded. He
writes:

"There is, however, another side to this complex story. Muslims standing up
for rights of Muslim women today would do well to concede that not all of
the French concerns about hijab are unfounded. For just as French
policy-makers need to understand that the headscarf is not the banner of
Islamic fundamentalism or ethnic separatism, so must Muslims face the fact
that the hijab, as practiced and envisioned in much of the Islamic world, is
far from the badge of women’s liberation that many assume it to be...when
hijab is coerced, it is a brand used by benighted reactionaries to hijack
the Islamic tradition in their ceaseless efforts to control women."

He goes on to say, "The reality for Muslim women is complex. Many certainly
choose to wear the headscarf freely and because of conviction; others make
that choice under coercion; yet others are penalized harshly for making the
“wrong” choice. It is not unusual for women who abandon the hijab to be
subjected to character assassination, ostracism, and (in the case of many
Islamic organizations) blacklisting within the community."

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
---------------------------------------
Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims

By Svend White
OpenDemocracy.Net
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-1820.jsp#

The French parliament’s decision to ban conspicuous displays of religious
belief in schools – including the Muslim headscarf – has outraged many
liberals and believers, while gaining the support of a majority of French
people. An American Muslim critically examines the principles at stake on
both sides.

The escalation of the long-simmering headscarf affair in France in the early
months of 2004 should be cause for concern among all who cherish freedom,
regardless of creed or nationality.

Patrick Weil, a member of the presidential commission that recommended the
banning of religious apparel in French schools, argues for the government’s
policy in openDemocracy on the basis of the country’s secular tradition and
its need to adapt to new circumstances, especially pressure - some imagined
by nervous French officials, and others real - to force Muslim girls
attending school to cover their hair.

I remain opposed to the ban, both as a democrat and as a Muslim

As a democrat, I believe that the ban calls into question a pillar of
democratic governance around the world and needlessly antagonises Muslims of
nearly every persuasion – and at a time when dialogue is desperately needed
between the west and the umma (Muslim community). It is an anachronistic and
discriminatory edict unworthy of one of history’s great laboratories of
liberty, not to mention a counter-productive social policy likely to
undercut the already frayed social compact binding French Muslims to their
compatriots in the Fifth Republic.

It is right that Muslims around the world should defend a girl’s right to
cover her hair if she so chooses. At the same time, they should also ponder
how the hijab is sometimes exploited within Muslim communities in the west
in ways that undermine Muslim women and ultimately pervert the principles
for which hijab stands. Many Muslim leaders, in short, will need to get over
their own “hijab hang-ups” before they can be part of any solution to
empower Muslim women.

A fractured society

France’s tradition of laïcite (secularism), and its current daunting social
problems of social integration and exclusion, make the authorities’
anxieties about fragmentation of their society understandable. All this is
well explained by both Johannes Willms and Patrick Weil in openDemocracy.

However, even if one accepts the French elite’s approach in its own terms,
the authoritarian ban on the headscarf is wrong both legally and ethically.
It may violate the international juridical codes, like the European
Convention of Human Rights, to which France has subscribed. In its
heavy-handed overreaction to the growing pains of an increasingly diverse
society that runs counter to the Zeitgeist of post-war European political
and cultural life and which is ironically reminiscent of the Taliban, who
also denied women basic human rights for essentially making the wrong
fashion choice. As the Christian Science Monitor dryly observes: “Other
western democracies allow the display of religious headgear and jewellery,
yet survive.”

Moreover, headscarves are a distraction from what should be the real
concerns of President Chirac and the French government. As French writer
Alain Duhamel once pithily said: integration is broken (en panne). This is a
society where formidable and highly visible barriers to social solidarity
are deeply entrenched.

Even a brief visit to one of the numerous cités (housing projects) and
banlieus suburbs) where most French Muslims reside – over a generation since
“guest workers” from North Africa started to arrive in large numbers –
reveals a world set apart from the centre of French life. Their communities
are plagued by crime, poverty, and disproportionately high unemployment.

As the Christian Science Monitor comments, “bigotry and lack of opportunity,
not head scarves, are the threat to France.” There is a profound and
widespread sense of alienation among Muslims, especially within the young
generation of the Beurs – children of immigrants who, having been born and
raised in France, find their economic and social exclusion even more bitter.

The Algerian-born novelist Leïla Sebbar describes starkly the plight of the
Beurs in France. She presents their history with France as one of “love
mixed with hate, perverse and frequently murderous. They are not truly of
their native land, France, nor that of their father and mother.”

The presence of millions of Muslims in France is a reminder that the country
is no longer – if it ever was – ethnically and religiously homogeneous, and
that economic, social, or racial differences just as “conspicuous” as the
headscarf are visible throughout everyday life.

For example, class distinctions are alive and well in French schools, even
though these are contrary to the French republican ethos. As in most
countries, the socio-economic background of a student in France can often be
identified by his or her dress, yet President Chirac is not calling for a
mandated student uniform that would conceal divisive signs of material
wealth or status.

After all, even a rigorously republican educational environment will not
soon erase the social boundaries between a Senegalese boy or a Vietnamese
girl and their classmates who are Français de souche (French by extraction).
The idea that a typical Muslim school student in the Parisian suburban
ghetto of Vitry-sur-Seine differs from her peers in the well-to-do Latin
Quarter primarily by her choice of headgear is naïve in the extreme. Is
social harmony not better promoted by embracing and managing unavoidable
differences?

Seen in this light, the headscarf ban seems rooted in a utopian vision that
is remote from basic demographic realities in post-colonial France in the
era of globalisation.

A crossroads, not a crusade

Muslims are hardly alone in challenging the cultural status quo in France.
This Kulturkampf is but one scene of a larger drama that is unfolding around
the world as societies become increasingly complex and borders become an
abstraction. Thus, if there is any “clash of civlisations”, it is not
between Islam and the west, but between the modern world and the 19th
century. In a period of bewildering diversity and intense scepticism,
cherished nationalist verities can no longer be taken for granted. Old
notions of citizenship, ethnicity, and belonging are under siege in most
societies, as new hybrid identities emerge. France is no exception.

Bernard Stasi, head of the presidential commission on the application of
secularism in France (on which Patrick Weil also sat), has claimed that
Muslims who support the headscarf “want France no longer to be France”.
Perhaps he is right in a different way than he intends: French Muslims do
not want to live in France as it has been, but rather in the rich, dynamic
society that they already know and want it to remain.

Were Honoré de Balzac or Emile Zola chronicling the variety of French life
today, many of their tales would undoubtedly take place in the shadow of
minarets and shawarma stands. Muslims want France to live up to the ideals
of its republican tradition and adapt to the times instead of forcing on
them utopian norms that are rooted in a bygone, if not mythical, social
order.

Muslims’ hijab hang-ups

There is, however, another side to this complex story. Muslims standing up
for rights of Muslim women today would do well to concede that not all of
the French concerns about hijab are unfounded. For just as French
policy-makers need to understand that the headscarf is not the banner of
Islamic fundamentalism or ethnic separatism, so must Muslims face the fact
that the hijab, as practiced and envisioned in much of the Islamic world, is
far from the badge of women’s liberation that many assume it to be. When
chosen freely, it is indeed a badge of empowerment, a radical blow against a
world that objectifies women; but when hijab is coerced, it is a brand used
by benighted reactionaries to hijack the Islamic tradition in their
ceaseless efforts to control women.

The reality for Muslim women is complex. Many certainly choose to wear the
headscarf freely and because of conviction; others make that choice under
coercion; yet others are penalised harshly for making the “wrong” choice. It
is not unusual for women who abandon the hijab to be subjected to character
assassination, ostracism, and (in the case of many Islamic organisations)
blacklisting within the community.

Discrimination within the Muslim community against women who don’t wear the
hijab is so commonplace that it is easy to overlook. The social penalty for
not conforming, even if one does not agree with the traditional
interpretation – and not all Muslims do – falls particularly heavily on
unmarried women.

A lot of progress has been made in the Muslim community in recent years,
both in majority Muslim countries and in the west. Many Muslim leaders are
now openly addressing difficult subjects like ijtihad (religious reform),
religious freedom, democracy, women’s rights, and interfaith dialogue. But
hijab remains the proverbial Achilles’ Heel of many an otherwise
sophisticated and open-minded Muslim thinker.

Islam enjoins modesty, on both sexes, but there is something reminiscent of
Emperor Nero to some Muslim scholars’ fixation with hijab in the context of
western life. Muslim citizens today must contend with immodesties and social
problems far more threatening than the occasional alluring hairdo – the
glorification of crude, loveless sex; ubiquitious nudity or near-nudity;
rampant narcissism and materialism; numbing violence – yet the focus remains
constantly, relentlessly on hijab to the exclusion of nearly all else.

This inordinate emphasis almost makes hijab a sacred cow, an idol (sanam in
Arabic) that distracts a believer from worshipping God (indeed, some Muslims
act as if the hijab were one of the five pillars of Islam). In the process,
Islam is reduced to a glorified dress code, a dry litany of rules and
obsessions that belittles women, exempts men from their responsibilities,
and offers believers no warmth, camaraderie or genuine spiritual sustenance.
This is a mockery of Islamic values, as outrageous as it is tragic.

Muslims should remember the fact that, even if all hijab-wearers were
banished from schools in the land of Voltaire, Muslims in France would still
enjoy freedoms and other basic democratic protections that are the envy of
the Muslim world. It is sobering to consider that even with this benighted
ban in full force, France will offer more religious freedom to Muslims than
any so-called “Islamic” country today grants its non-Muslim minorities.

Thus, as Muslims denounce this violation of religious freedom in France, we
must also defend on principle the rights of non-Muslims – whether they be
Copts, Jews, Bahai’s, Sikhs, Chaldeans, Parsis, and others – to live and
practice their religions unmolested in Muslim societies.

Finally, even with its flaws it is also true that we Americans might be able
learn from France’s handling of the affair. Wrongheaded though the hijab ban
may be, it has at least been enacted through a transparent, democratic
process and widely debated in French society. By contrast, a stealthy and
ultimately more dangerous campaign against Muslim civil rights in the name
of a nebulous “war on terror” has been waged on American soil by the Bush
administration over the last two years with barely any protest from the
media or political establishment.

Friends,

Respected Toronto lawyer Faisal Kutty has accused the Canadian Intelligence
Agency CSIS of harassing Muslims and enticing them with money to snitch on
their co-religionists.

Kutty's statement, reported in the Windsor Star yesterday (attached below)
alleges that CSIS agents are intimidating his client by visiting his home
and phoning him to meet for informal chats.

Faisal Kutty's criticism of CSIS contrasts the position taken by the
Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) who earlier this week issued a press release
revealing that for the past five years they, i.e. CIC, have maintained "good
communications" with CSIS. The CIC now says it wishes to elevate its current
"healthy" relationship with CSIS from "good to excellent."

For the record, here is the exact quote from the press release of the
Canadian Islamic Congress:
"The CIC and CSIS have maintained good communications for the past five
years and that is very encouraging, given the
challenging times we live in. We need to keep this positive relationship
healthy and work to elevate it from good to excellent."

The culture that encourages Muslims to work as informers of the 'mukhabarat'
is quite common in places like Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan. Now this
financially rewarding activity is being given respectability in Canada. Can
we blame CSIS for trying to entice Muslims to work as snitches when
self-styled leaders of the community proudly strut their links to spy
agencies?

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
-----------------------
Friday, April 02, 2004

CSIS seeks Muslim "snitches": Lawyer
U of W student says he feels 'intimidated' by spy agency

By Donald McArthur
The Windsor Star
http://www.canada.com/windsor/story.asp?id=B33BD7CD-361E-442F-A289-42AE5C8F5
2B3

A lawyer representing a University of Windsor student says Canadian security
agents are "creating a lot of fear" in the Muslim community by harassing its
members and offering money for information.

"Don't treat everybody in the community like suspects and ask them to snitch
on each other," said Faisal Kutty, a lawyer with the Canadian Muslim Civil
Liberties Association.

The Windsor student, a Muslim from India, says he felt "intimidated" when
spy agents showed up at his family home in Toronto and repeatedly phoned him
to arrange a "chit-chat" in a doughnut shop. The calls ceased once the
25-year-old nuclear engineering student hired Kutty, but a different agent
recently contacted him again, he said. "They continually harass a lot of
these people" said Kutty.

He maintains agents with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and RCMP
officers are "inducing people to give information on other people. It could
be made up information because they're getting paid for it."

A CSIS spokeswoman rejected Kutty's allegations. "We don't investigate or
target specific communities or ethnic groups within Canada," said Nicole
Courier. "We investigate individuals or activities or groups that may pose a
threat to the security of Canada."

Neither Abdullah Hammoud, Imam at the Al-Hijra mosque, nor Tasdiq Ahmed,
president of the Windsor Islamic Association, have received complaints of
CSIS agents targeting the local Muslim community.

John Thompson, a terrorism expert with the Mackenzie Institute in Toronto,
said locating and nurturing informants was simply good intelligence
gathering on CSIS's part. "That's how they work and there's nothing wrong
with that," he said. "They are looking for people who are willing to be
informants. They need eyes and ears on the ground."

He added the Windsor student was probably a "subject of interest" because he
was pursuing a degree in nuclear engineering. The student said he was
approached by two intelligence agents in late January at his family home in
Toronto, where he was staying while completing a university work placement.

Knocked on door

They phoned but he wasn't home and knocked on the door two hours later but
he still wasn't home. They called later in the evening and he agreed to meet
them but kept putting it off. "I was intimidated and a little apprehensive,"
said the student, who didn't want his name published. "They were repeatedly
calling me at home, to an annoying extent."

The student phoned the agents back from Kutty's office, offering to meet
with them there. The agents said they would phone back with a meeting time
but didn't. They called the student's family home later the same day,
telling him there was no need to involve lawyers. "They said ?you don't need
a lawyer, a lawyer is expensive. It's just a chit-chat,'" said the student.

When he insisted any meetings be conducted in the presence of his lawyer,
the phone calls stopped.

He was contacted this week by another agent saying he had questions related
to security clearance but the student said he has already obtained it.

© Copyright  2004 Windsor Star

Friends,

A painful anniversary has come and gone. The day the Pakistan Army
hanged ZA Bhutto. It was a strategic regime change by the Americans
that had a profound effect on the course of history. April 4, 1979
was a dark day for democracy. The CIA and its Islamist allies killed
an elected Prime Minister.

Funny, how Islamic fundamentalists who rejoiced in 1979 at the
American backed coup of General Ziaul Haq, are now troubled that
their former masters are turning their guns on them. Even now,
Pakistani Islamists rejoice the US backed coup that toppled ZA
Bhutto. It seems the Bin Ladens of this world have no problem with
US imperialism as long as it serves their own interests

I had the privilege of travelling and covering ZA Bhutto as a TV
Reporter for three years. I had no love for his egotistic and
arrogant rule, but he was popular; very popular. Millions would turn
out to hear him speak; and he would not disappoint them.

Here is an article by Anwar Iqbal, correspondent in Washington for
the Karachi newspaper DAWN and the United Press International news
agency.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
---------------------------------------------
When Pakistan Hanged Its Prime Minister

By Anwar Iqbal
MuslimWakeUp.Com
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000685.php#more

April 4th came and went quietly. I am separated by more than 20
years and thousands of miles, so the day Pakistanis hanged their
prime minister was like any other April day in Washington. It was
chilly but pleasant.

But it was different when former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto was hanged on April 4, 1979. That year the summer came
fast in Pakistan, and by the end of April the heat was intolerable.

I lived in a nameless street of an old Pakistani city in those days.
It was the nameless men and women of these nameless streets who
loved Bhutto and later his daughter, Benazir. They remained loyal to
the Bhutto family as long as the Bhuttos were loyal to them, and
perhaps longer: some of them still love the Bhuttos.

So this old man of our story looks around helplessly at the stubborn
night that sits on the roof and refuses to come down. Perhaps it is
scared of the dusty streets and battered mud houses that burn all
day in the scorching sun and never cool. Now they were breathing the
heat out. People prepare to endure another sleepless night.

The old man lights his cigarette, takes a deep, bitter drag, coughs
and spits under his charpoy (bed) in utter disgust. He curses the
night and hits his dreaming child for talking in his sleep. The
boy's cries wake up an old mangy dog sleeping under the charpoy who
drags out his weak, hungry body, stares angrily at the man and barks
a short, feeble rebuff, which impresses no one.

An old woman throws a stone at the dog but misses. She curses the
old man for ruffling the uneasy calm. The little row has no effect
on the night, which stays on the roof, still refusing to come down.
Nothing moves except the heat, the cruel, over-powering, vengeful
heat that stirs the low-blowing wind. It picks up slowly and soon
the subcontinent's notorious loo wind starts to blow. It hisses in
the streets like a snake, infusing poison in everything it touches.
It seems to be coming from the nostrils of the gods of wrath.

A fight breaks out near the corner shop where scores of jobless
young men gather every evening, escaping their low-ceiling homes
that heat up like ovens by the time the sun sets. With nothing else
to do, they often fight. They always find a reason: a cricket match
that the national team lost, local politics, ethnic differences. And
when it is a religious dispute, the fight assumes a holy garb.

When they fight, they really fight. All their inner hatreds-caused
by unemployment, deprivation and sexual frustration-come out with a
vengeance. An altercation leads to a scuffle, a scuffle to a
stabbing and then the guns come out. Only stick pools of blood
searing the street can cool their tempers.

The fight raises a ruckus in the narrow streets where hundreds of
half-naked bodies-mainly of old men and children-sleep out in the
open. Women sleep on the roofs. Teenage girls stare at the wild,
angry men from inside the narrow streets. The girls, unable to vent
their own frustration, fight with their mothers who curse them
loudly. But the night still refuses to cool.

Bats come out of hiding from the old banyan tree in the community
graveyard. They fly over the heads of naked humans lying half-
conscious in the streets.

"They like sucking blood, especially of young women sleeping on the
roof," says the old woman in a voice that betrays a strange passion
for the blood-sucking bats.

An owl hoots. "The bird brings bad luck. We are doomed," says the
old man.

But both the night and the owl ignore him. The owl continues to hoot
and the night remains as hot and oppressive as ever.

"Haven't you noticed, it is only May and it is already so hot," he
says again.

"It is all because of the hanging," says his wife. "You don't hang a
king," she says.

"He was not a king, only a prime minister," reminds the old man.

"It is the same, it is the same," she says.

The wind blows hard, stirring dust, horse dung and dried leaves.
Every body falls silent. The loo wind reaches the banyan tree in the
nearby graveyard. The tree groans a long, agonizing groan.

"Don't you see, the man has not died. He lives, on old trees and
deserted places. On a night like this you can hear him," says the
woman.

The tree groans again. All remain silent. The wind magnifies the
groan and the owl's hoot.

"I can never forget what I saw in the graveyard," says the old
man. "It was a day after they hanged him. I went to the graveyard to
see what those who live on the banyan tree were doing."

People in this neighborhood have always believed that spirits lived
on this tree, which was so old that nobody knew its age. Even during
the day it was dark under the tree as its thick green leaves and
hanging roots prevented the sun from reaching there. People said
spirits of all those buried in that graveyard visited the tree at
night and during hot summer afternoons.

By now the old man had the attention of all those lying within his
hearing.

"It was already past midnight and the tree-dwellers were having
their little meeting," he says. "Among them I saw a new spirit. He
was wearing a golden necklace that shone in the dark. When I looked
closely, it looked like the marks you see around the neck of a
hanged man. It was clearly he.

"He was addressing the spirits as he addressed us when alive. As he
looked at me, the sadness in his eyes sent a chill through my spine.
I ran away."

I was listening to them from my window. I lived in a small room in
an old dilapidated building built during the British Raj. It was hot
and stuffy. When the heat became intolerable, I lifted my charpoy
and came down in the street.

By now another man, a police constable on duty outside the prison
the night Bhutto was hanged, starts telling his version of the
hanging. He claims he heard the eyewitness account of the hanging
from his senior officers who watched the execution.

"He was a brave man. When they came to take him to the gallows, he
asked those army and police officers to salute him first because, he
said, he was still an elected prime minister. Then he shaved, put on
new clothes and walked straight to the gallows without any signs of
weakness. He died peacefully, no screaming, no shouting for help as
other condemned prisoners do. And when he died a very pleasant
aroma, like that of spring flowers, spread all around. The officers
were so impressed, they saluted his dead body."

This was May of 1979. Bhutto was hanged in April and was still very
much a martyr and a saint. So nobody suspected this story. Years
later, after Bhutto's daughter, twice voted to office, disappointed
them, people would question all such stories.

But in those days they rejected any other version that did not
portray Bhutto as a martyr. There were those who said Bhutto could
not walk when brought out of his cell and had to be carried to the
gallows on a stretcher. They said he looked very nervous and shaky
and died quietly. Nobody saluted him. But people paid little
attention to such blasphemy.

As the constable stopped his story, an eerie silence prevailed,
broken only by occasional coughs and groans. But the silence had
little effect on the wind, which wailed on through the streets
throughout the night. When it blew harder, those of the banyan tree
joined the wailing. Then the sun came out, a deep red spilled over
the sky.

The day came suddenly. The sun wasted no time baking an already
subdued city. The mangy old dog crept out of the charpoy, looked
around for shadow and hid himself behind the nearby bushes.

The women came down from the roofs and looked into their pots and
pans for pieces of bread saved from last night's dinner to prepare
breakfast for their men still tossing and turning on their charpoys.
But it was difficult to ignore the sun for long so they woke up and
ate the leftover breads with weak, watery chai or tea. Some went to
work but most stayed at home.

A group of Bhutto's supporters was holding a rally to protest his
hanging, and they wanted to take part.

"I will go, yes, I will," said the old man when I asked him if he
was also going.

Why?

"I can never forget those eyes. They were so hollow, so empty and
yet full of complaints. They seem to be complaining that we did
nothing to save him. I want to do my part now," he said.

Memories of that summer still haunt me. They always will. I had just
started my career in journalism as an apprentice at a new newspaper,
The Muslim, in Islamabad. We were still running free trial issues
when on April 4, 1979 General Zia ul Huq hanged his former boss and
prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The event was so big that the paper sent its entire editorial staff
to the field. So, although an apprentice, I found myself covering
the biggest story that I, perhaps, ever shall.

I still remember the night Bhutto was hanged. I was among dozens of
journalists waiting for the news outside Rawalpindi's central prison
where Bhutto was jailed. Most people believed that Zia would hang
him. They said there was one grave and two bodies and one of them
had to go in. If Zia did not hang him, Bhutto would hang Zia when he
got the chance. Still, everybody was shocked when he was hanged.

From where we stood we could see the former presidential palace
where Bhutto lived first as president and then as the prime minister
of Pakistan. Although the government had not formally announced the
date of execution, on April 3 the word got around that the prison
authorities were making unusual security arrangements while troops
cordoned off the entire area. So we journalists rushed to the
central prison.

It was not a public hanging, but we hoped to see the dead body when
brought out of the prison and handed over to his relatives. But we
were not allowed to do so.

Soon after the sunset an army truck came, collected the journalists
and took us to a nearby camp where we were asked to spend the night.
Afraid of a violent public reaction, the government did not want the
news of the hanging out until it was over. So the army officers made
a pact with the journalists that they would be told the news as soon
as Bhutto was hanged if they sat quietly and enjoyed their
hospitality.

Just before the dawn they were told that Bhutto had been hanged and
his body had been flown to his native town of Larkana in the
southern province of Sindh. They sent the information to the
newspapers where people had been waiting for it all night.

Until then it all looked very mechanical, just like any other story.
Later, some of us went to a roadside tea-stall as we often did after
filing our stories, and ordered cups of thick, milky tea and buns.
It was while sipping the tea in that café that the enormity of the
event hit us.

It felt like being cut by a razor blade, no blood or pain for a
while-not until the sweat seeps in the cut. But we still did not
know how to react. Some of us did not even admire Bhutto. We thought
he was a man who could have done a lot for the country but did not.

But that morning we remembered him as someone we had elected to
rule, not to be hanged. We were not sorry for him but for ourselves.
We felt cheated, deceived, slighted. Those in power hanged an
elected prime minister, and did not even consult those who had
elected him. It seemed as if our votes and opinion had no
importance. We felt helpless.

Later in the day, while returning home, we saw a small group of
students fighting a pitched battle with police near a college. The
students were inside the college and were throwing stones at the
policemen. Police responded with tear gas shells. We stopped to
watch.

While watching those students I felt a strong urge to join them. I
wanted to shout insults at the police, throw stones at them, chant
anti-government slogans. But I was a journalist, aware of the rules
of the game. I could report what I saw, but I could not take part. I
knew that it would compromise my neutrality. Still I had this strong
desire to show my anger, to vent out my frustration.

Shall I pick up a stone and throw it at the police? Shall I join the
crowd and chant anti-government slogans with them? Or shall I simply
watch them, go back to my office and write my story, I wondered.

It seemed like hours before I bent down and picked up a stone. Now I
had the stone in my right hand. I could feel its sharp corners. I
rolled it over in my hand three or four times, looked left and right
and finally threw it at the police with full force.

I was scared.

But nobody was looking.

It was lost in a barrage of stones coming from inside the college.
Probably it did not hit anyone. Apparently my first act of defiance
went unnoticed. But I felt relieved.

Friends,

A painful anniversary has come and gone. The day the Pakistan Army
hanged ZA Bhutto. It was a strategic regime change by the Americans
that had a profound effect on the course of history. April 4, 1979 was
a dark day for democracy. The CIA and its Islamist allies killed an elected
Prime Minister.

Funny, how Islamic fundamentalists who rejoiced in 1979 at the American
backed coup of General Ziaul Haq, are now troubled that their former
masters are turning their guns on them. Even now, Pakistani Islamists
rejoice the US backed coup that toppled ZA Bhutto. It seems the Bin Ladens
of this world have no problem with US imperialism as long as it serves
their own interests

I had the privilege of travelling and covering ZA Bhutto as a TV
Reporter for three years. I had no love for his egotistic and
arrogant rule, but he was popular; very popular. Millions would turn
out to hear him speak; and he would not disappoint them.

Here is an article by Anwar Iqbal, correspondent in Washington for
the Karachi newspaper DAWN and the United Press International news
agency.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
—--------------------------------------------
When Pakistan Hanged Its Prime Minister

By Anwar Iqbal
MuslimWakeUp.Com
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000685.php#more

April 4th came and went quietly. I am separated by more than 20
years and thousands of miles, so the day Pakistanis hanged their
prime minister was like any other April day in Washington. It was
chilly but pleasant.

But it was different when former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto was hanged on April 4, 1979. That year the summer came
fast in Pakistan, and by the end of April the heat was intolerable.

I lived in a nameless street of an old Pakistani city in those days.
It was the nameless men and women of these nameless streets who
loved Bhutto and later his daughter, Benazir. They remained loyal to
the Bhutto family as long as the Bhuttos were loyal to them, and
perhaps longer: some of them still love the Bhuttos.

So this old man of our story looks around helplessly at the stubborn
night that sits on the roof and refuses to come down. Perhaps it is
scared of the dusty streets and battered mud houses that burn all
day in the scorching sun and never cool. Now they were breathing the
heat out. People prepare to endure another sleepless night.

The old man lights his cigarette, takes a deep, bitter drag, coughs
and spits under his charpoy (bed) in utter disgust. He curses the
night and hits his dreaming child for talking in his sleep. The
boy's cries wake up an old mangy dog sleeping under the charpoy who
drags out his weak, hungry body, stares angrily at the man and barks
a short, feeble rebuff, which impresses no one.

An old woman throws a stone at the dog but misses. She curses the
old man for ruffling the uneasy calm. The little row has no effect
on the night, which stays on the roof, still refusing to come down.
Nothing moves except the heat, the cruel, over-powering, vengeful
heat that stirs the low-blowing wind. It picks up slowly and soon
the subcontinent's notorious loo wind starts to blow. It hisses in
the streets like a snake, infusing poison in everything it touches.
It seems to be coming from the nostrils of the gods of wrath.

A fight breaks out near the corner shop where scores of jobless
young men gather every evening, escaping their low-ceiling homes
that heat up like ovens by the time the sun sets. With nothing else
to do, they often fight. They always find a reason: a cricket match
that the national team lost, local politics, ethnic differences. And
when it is a religious dispute, the fight assumes a holy garb.

When they fight, they really fight. All their inner hatreds—caused
by unemployment, deprivation and sexual frustration—come out with a
vengeance. An altercation leads to a scuffle, a scuffle to a
stabbing and then the guns come out. Only stick pools of blood
searing the street can cool their tempers.

The fight raises a ruckus in the narrow streets where hundreds of
half-naked bodies—mainly of old men and children—sleep out in the
open. Women sleep on the roofs. Teenage girls stare at the wild,
angry men from inside the narrow streets. The girls, unable to vent
their own frustration, fight with their mothers who curse them
loudly. But the night still refuses to cool.

Bats come out of hiding from the old banyan tree in the community
graveyard. They fly over the heads of naked humans lying half-
conscious in the streets.

"They like sucking blood, especially of young women sleeping on the
roof," says the old woman in a voice that betrays a strange passion
for the blood-sucking bats.

An owl hoots. "The bird brings bad luck. We are doomed," says the
old man.

But both the night and the owl ignore him. The owl continues to hoot
and the night remains as hot and oppressive as ever.

"Haven't you noticed, it is only May and it is already so hot," he
says again.

"It is all because of the hanging," says his wife. "You don't hang a
king," she says.

"He was not a king, only a prime minister," reminds the old man.

"It is the same, it is the same," she says.

The wind blows hard, stirring dust, horse dung and dried leaves.
Every body falls silent. The loo wind reaches the banyan tree in the
nearby graveyard. The tree groans a long, agonizing groan.

"Don't you see, the man has not died. He lives, on old trees and
deserted places. On a night like this you can hear him," says the
woman.

The tree groans again. All remain silent. The wind magnifies the
groan and the owl's hoot.

"I can never forget what I saw in the graveyard," says the old
man. "It was a day after they hanged him. I went to the graveyard to
see what those who live on the banyan tree were doing."

People in this neighborhood have always believed that spirits lived
on this tree, which was so old that nobody knew its age. Even during
the day it was dark under the tree as its thick green leaves and
hanging roots prevented the sun from reaching there. People said
spirits of all those buried in that graveyard visited the tree at
night and during hot summer afternoons.

By now the old man had the attention of all those lying within his
hearing.

"It was already past midnight and the tree-dwellers were having
their little meeting," he says. "Among them I saw a new spirit. He
was wearing a golden necklace that shone in the dark. When I looked
closely, it looked like the marks you see around the neck of a
hanged man. It was clearly he.

"He was addressing the spirits as he addressed us when alive. As he
looked at me, the sadness in his eyes sent a chill through my spine.
I ran away."

I was listening to them from my window. I lived in a small room in
an old dilapidated building built during the British Raj. It was hot
and stuffy. When the heat became intolerable, I lifted my charpoy
and came down in the street.

By now another man, a police constable on duty outside the prison
the night Bhutto was hanged, starts telling his version of the
hanging. He claims he heard the eyewitness account of the hanging
from his senior officers who watched the execution.

"He was a brave man. When they came to take him to the gallows, he
asked those army and police officers to salute him first because, he
said, he was still an elected prime minister. Then he shaved, put on
new clothes and walked straight to the gallows without any signs of
weakness. He died peacefully, no screaming, no shouting for help as
other condemned prisoners do. And when he died a very pleasant
aroma, like that of spring flowers, spread all around. The officers
were so impressed, they saluted his dead body."

This was May of 1979. Bhutto was hanged in April and was still very
much a martyr and a saint. So nobody suspected this story. Years
later, after Bhutto's daughter, twice voted to office, disappointed
them, people would question all such stories.

But in those days they rejected any other version that did not
portray Bhutto as a martyr. There were those who said Bhutto could
not walk when brought out of his cell and had to be carried to the
gallows on a stretcher. They said he looked very nervous and shaky
and died quietly. Nobody saluted him. But people paid little
attention to such blasphemy.

As the constable stopped his story, an eerie silence prevailed,
broken only by occasional coughs and groans. But the silence had
little effect on the wind, which wailed on through the streets
throughout the night. When it blew harder, those of the banyan tree
joined the wailing. Then the sun came out, a deep red spilled over
the sky.

The day came suddenly. The sun wasted no time baking an already
subdued city. The mangy old dog crept out of the charpoy, looked
around for shadow and hid himself behind the nearby bushes.

The women came down from the roofs and looked into their pots and
pans for pieces of bread saved from last night's dinner to prepare
breakfast for their men still tossing and turning on their charpoys.
But it was difficult to ignore the sun for long so they woke up and
ate the leftover breads with weak, watery chai or tea. Some went to
work but most stayed at home.

A group of Bhutto's supporters was holding a rally to protest his
hanging, and they wanted to take part.

"I will go, yes, I will," said the old man when I asked him if he
was also going.

Why?

"I can never forget those eyes. They were so hollow, so empty and
yet full of complaints. They seem to be complaining that we did
nothing to save him. I want to do my part now," he said.

Memories of that summer still haunt me. They always will. I had just
started my career in journalism as an apprentice at a new newspaper,
The Muslim, in Islamabad. We were still running free trial issues
when on April 4, 1979 General Zia ul Huq hanged his former boss and
prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The event was so big that the paper sent its entire editorial staff
to the field. So, although an apprentice, I found myself covering
the biggest story that I, perhaps, ever shall.

I still remember the night Bhutto was hanged. I was among dozens of
journalists waiting for the news outside Rawalpindi's central prison
where Bhutto was jailed. Most people believed that Zia would hang
him. They said there was one grave and two bodies and one of them
had to go in. If Zia did not hang him, Bhutto would hang Zia when he
got the chance. Still, everybody was shocked when he was hanged.

From where we stood we could see the former presidential palace
where Bhutto lived first as president and then as the prime minister
of Pakistan. Although the government had not formally announced the
date of execution, on April 3 the word got around that the prison
authorities were making unusual security arrangements while troops
cordoned off the entire area. So we journalists rushed to the
central prison.

It was not a public hanging, but we hoped to see the dead body when
brought out of the prison and handed over to his relatives. But we
were not allowed to do so.

Soon after the sunset an army truck came, collected the journalists
and took us to a nearby camp where we were asked to spend the night.
Afraid of a violent public reaction, the government did not want the
news of the hanging out until it was over. So the army officers made
a pact with the journalists that they would be told the news as soon
as Bhutto was hanged if they sat quietly and enjoyed their
hospitality.

Just before the dawn they were told that Bhutto had been hanged and
his body had been flown to his native town of Larkana in the
southern province of Sindh. They sent the information to the
newspapers where people had been waiting for it all night.

Until then it all looked very mechanical, just like any other story.
Later, some of us went to a roadside tea-stall as we often did after
filing our stories, and ordered cups of thick, milky tea and buns.
It was while sipping the tea in that café that the enormity of the
event hit us.

It felt like being cut by a razor blade, no blood or pain for a
while—not until the sweat seeps in the cut. But we still did not
know how to react. Some of us did not even admire Bhutto. We thought
he was a man who could have done a lot for the country but did not.

But that morning we remembered him as someone we had elected to
rule, not to be hanged. We were not sorry for him but for ourselves.
We felt cheated, deceived, slighted. Those in power hanged an
elected prime minister, and did not even consult those who had
elected him. It seemed as if our votes and opinion had no
importance. We felt helpless.

Later in the day, while returning home, we saw a small group of
students fighting a pitched battle with police near a college. The
students were inside the college and were throwing stones at the
policemen. Police responded with tear gas shells. We stopped to
watch.

While watching those students I felt a strong urge to join them. I
wanted to shout insults at the police, throw stones at them, chant
anti-government slogans. But I was a journalist, aware of the rules
of the game. I could report what I saw, but I could not take part. I
knew that it would compromise my neutrality. Still I had this strong
desire to show my anger, to vent out my frustration.

Shall I pick up a stone and throw it at the police? Shall I join the
crowd and chant anti-government slogans with them? Or shall I simply
watch them, go back to my office and write my story, I wondered.

It seemed like hours before I bent down and picked up a stone. Now I
had the stone in my right hand. I could feel its sharp corners. I
rolled it over in my hand three or four times, looked left and right
and finally threw it at the police with full force.

I was scared.

But nobody was looking.

It was lost in a barrage of stones coming from inside the college.
Probably it did not hit anyone. Apparently my first act of defiance
went unnoticed. But I felt relieved.

April 9, 2004

Tariq Ali: What's next in Iraq?

Socialist Worker
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/494/494_07_TariqAli.shtml

TARIQ ALI is a veteran political activist since the 1960s, and a filmmaker,
novelist and author. His most recent books include The Clash of
Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq. Tariq spoke
to Socialist Worker's ERIC RUDER about the aims of the U.S. occupation and
the growing Iraqi resistance.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Q: WHAT ARE the motives for the U.S. occupation? The Bush administration, of
course, claims that it has removed an evil dictator and is promoting
democracy and freedom.

Tariq Ali: I DON'T think that very many people outside the U.S. believe
this. Even in countries that have troops there, the population is against
the war and occupation.

With every passing day, it becomes clear that the principal aim of the U.S.
in invading and occupying Iraq had very little to do with democracy or even
toppling a dictator, and a great deal to do with exercising imperial power,
showing both the region and the rest of the world that this is how modern
imperialism works--that the U.S. cannot be defied, and if it is defied, it
reserves the right to punish defiance.

Iraq was meant to be the country where this would be demonstrated. Another
principal reason was to grab the Iraqi market--to grab Iraqi oil and divide
it among the West, as used to be the case long years ago when Iraq was ruled
by the British.

This occupation takes place now in a very changed international context.
This is a 21st century occupation. It takes place in the context of
neoliberal economics and a global offensive by corporate capitalism.

And another feature of this global offensive is a continuing effort on the
part of the U.S. not to allow countries in different parts of the world to
develop regional alliances, but to deal bilaterally with the U.S. That's
what they've done in the Far East, that's what they've done in South Asia,
that's what they've done in the Middle East, that's what they impose on
Latin America.

Any attempt to create a strong regional alliance that could challenge
neoliberal hegemony, they will crush. Iraq was a country outside their
control economically and politically, and they wanted to "set it right."

There is a subsidiary reason, though I don't think that it's a main reason.
The Israeli regime wanted Iraq out of the way because it felt that this was
the only country that had the potential to stop Israeli atrocities against
Palestine. Not that Iraq would have done this, but it could have done this,
and why not remove the risk altogether?

These were the principal reasons for the U.S. entry into Iraq. If you look
on the economic level, what's going on is very straightforward. The entire
Iraqi economy has been privatized. The American corporations are in.

The South Koreans and the Japanese have been promised concessions and
contracts if they commit troops. The South Korean president more or less
said that. After Korea won 100 odd contracts, he said, "You see, if we did
not send troops, we would not have gotten this contract." He's honest. But
that is the reason that a number of these countries sent troops--apart from
the East Europeans who had just wanted to be U.S. satellites.

But the Polish president is getting cross now--pretending to be irritated,
and saying that he didn't know there were no weapons of mass
destruction--because Poland got very tiny contracts. Even the British, who
backed Bush to the hilt, haven't gotten many contracts.

It's interesting that the British got the contract to redo the sewage
system, which is quite appropriate because that's the role that Blair
plays--as the sewage cleaner of the American Empire. It's quite
funny--whoever decided that in the Pentagon must have had a sense of humor.

This is the process that's now underway. Iraq's health system, Iraq's
housing, Iraq's educational system are all being privatized. They are
waiting to implant a puppet government, which they hope to do after the
"handover" on June 30. Then they'll start dealing with the oil as well.

There's no doubt that one of the big demands on Ahmed Chalabi and the
puppets will be to make the oil accessible to foreign companies. And the
argument that the puppets and the U.S. will use is that the amount of
investment needed to clear up the backlog in Iraqi oil and the mess in the
Iraqi oilfields can't come from an Iraqi state devastated by war, but can
only come from foreign companies.

This is the plan. But the question is: Is the plan being implemented in an
effective way? And you can read every day on the front page of the Los
Angeles Times and the New York Times that this plan is not effective. The
resistance is now targeting foreign businesses. This is going to pose
problems for political, military and economic planning by the U.S.

Militarily, they're in a mess. If the leaders of the southern part of the
country decide to go into rebellion openly, then that would be, in my view,
the end of the first phase of the occupation and the emergence of a big
national liberation movement. It hasn't happened as of yet, but all the
indications are that it could.

Q: THE BUSH administration said that the resistance was made up of Saddam
loyalists, and then foreigners, and then Islamists, and then foreign
Islamists. It also claimed that the capture of Saddam Hussein would
disorient the resistance. What's the reality?

Tariq Ali: THE RESISTANCE, as some of us argued, was there from the
beginning of the occupation. If you compare the Iraqi resistance--its scale,
its size, its effectiveness--to the resistance in France or Belgium against
German occupation during the Second World War, or in Italy against the
fascist dictatorship, there's no comparison.

It took a number of years for the French resistance to reach the stage that
the Iraqi had reached from week one. The Iraqi resistance to pre-emptive
wars and foreign occupation has been on a much higher level in terms of
military planning than the French, Italian and Belgian resistance were
during the Second World War against German occupation.

I think the principal mistake that the U.S. made was to believe--if, in
fact, they believed it--that the resistance was being masterminded by
Saddam. All the information from Iraq right from the beginning showed that
Saddam was out of it--that essentially the resistance was decentralized,
based in individual cities, villages and sections of the country. There's no
way that any single person could control it.

I remember arguing, well before Saddam's capture, with Christoper Hitchens
on the Democracy Now! radio program, and I said the notion that the capture
of Saddam will end the resistance is just not serious. Hitchens actually
agreed with me on that, but most other supporters of the Bush regime didn't.
They thought that once Saddam was captured, that would be it.

Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential contender, who said at the
time that Saddam's capture would not solve the problem, was denounced by the
mainstream press for having dared to say it. But he was right on that
particular question.

And so were all of us who argued that, in fact, Saddam's capture might
enhance the resistance, because lots of people who might not have wanted to
come forward, fearing that Saddam's wing of the Baath Party might emerge
again, would now do so. That's exactly what happened.

The resistance has grown, and we see attacks on occupation forces every
day--and not just the U.S. forces. In southern Iraq, there's been a growth
in the resistance, relatively speaking. British soldiers have come under
fire. They've been attacked on the streets of Basra by kids.

There's a real connection now with the occupation of Palestine and the
occupation of Iraq. The Israelis are advising the Pentagon to do what the
Israelis do--stay in their own military bases, and go out and hit when they
want to hit.

We'll see if the U.S. follows the Israeli model in punishing Falluja for
what happened last week, when the American contractors were ambushed. If the
U.S. follows Israel's advice, they will bomb Falluja and kill people to
punish them. But this would be very foolish--just totally counterproductive.


This is what happens in a colonial situation--you're attacked, you go and
punish people who attacked you, lots of innocent people are killed, the
killing of Iraqi innocents then creates more anger, and more people join the
resistance. This is the iron law of resistance movements. So if the U.S.
follows Israeli advice and Israeli patterns, I'm afraid the situation will
escalate very rapidly.

Q: WHAT DO the killings in Falluja attack say about developments within the
resistance?

Tariq Ali: BASICALLY, THE number of resistance groups is growing. There are
two forms of resistance in Iraq today. There's an unarmed resistance, which
is being waged by Shiite religious leaders in the south.

The key leader here is Ayatollah Sistani. He is fighting politically and
sending messages--this is what we want, this is what we don't want. He is
demanding free elections to a constituent assembly, which he is not going to
get. So far, he asks for these things, some concessions are made, and he
retreats. But there's a limit to how long this can go on.

The U.S. handover at the end of June will be--to be perfectly frank--a total
charade. The U.S. will hand over power to people they trust, appoint the
prime minister of the new Iraq, retreat to eight or nine key
bases--essentially the old bases of the Iraqi army--and let the puppets do
the bidding of the U.S. The very weak police and army units of the puppet
government will take the hits from the resistance.

But this is not going to change anything, in my opinion. The only thing that
could change is that Sistani and some of the religious parties in the South
would see that the handover is a complete fraud and demand immediate
elections.

If these elections are denied, they could break from the governing council,
and if these groups break, there will be mayhem in Iraq--have no doubt about
that. The U.S. is fearful of permitting an election because they know that
the puppets that they have brought over--the "house Arabs" they've
transported from the U.S.--will not win these elections.

The elections will be won by parties that want the U.S. out and that want
Iraqi control of Iraqi oil. Given that this wasn't the aim of the invasion
and occupation of Iraq, there's no way that the U.S. is going to accept
that.

So what I foresee is a continued struggle until there is a large antiwar
movement in the U.S., which puts sufficient pressure on senators and
congressional representatives to pull out of Iraq, like happened in Vietnam.
These are very different times, and it won't be exactly the same.

But nonetheless, what is argued in the U.S. is of enormous significance. The
tragedy is that the Democrats have picked a leader to run for president who
changes his mind every second day and who is not credible as a candidate. He
hasn't come out staunchly against the war. He says that the war was wrong,
but instead of saying that they should pull out, he wants more troops to be
sent to shore up the occupation.

In this situation, until the election is over, the antiwar movement, I
think, will be on tenterhooks. But once the election is over, regardless of
who wins, the goal has to be to really up the pressure on the White House
and the officialdom in the U.S. to demand an end to the occupation.

I mean, you have a big growth in Iraqi civilian casualties, and you have
American soldiers and others being killed. There's no reason on earth why
these soldiers or Iraqi civilians should be killed. That is why an end to
the occupation is absolutely necessary.

And the notion that the Iraqi people are incapable of determining their own
future is a total joke. They are perfectly capable of doing deals with each
other--they've done so in the past, and they'll do so again.

And you can't exclude the Ba'ath Party from this. Purged of Saddam and his
factions, which were totally degenerated, the Ba'ath is a legitimate party,
just like the religious parties, just like the Iraqi Communist Party--both
the collaborationist wing that supports the U.S. occupation and the
non-collaborationist wing.

If these people get together at a convention--and there are signs that this
could happen--the U.S. won't be able to keep control of the country. And it
will be in the interest of Kurdish leaders to go along with this, because if
the Kurds isolate themselves, there will be no one to defend them against
any Turkish intrusions.

Q: HAS THE U.S. attempt to win support for their plans from Shiite leaders
failed?

Tariq Ali: I THINK it's on the verge of failure in my opinion. I think that
once the handover takes place, you will have a jockeying for power. And if
Sistani and the groups that are allied to him are denied what they want,
they will break.

Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in public, "We want
to change the Iraqi mind." This is a pretty disgusting statement actually.
It's a sort of semi-fascist statement. What she is saying is that we want
the Iraqis to support the occupation, and if they don't, we'll denounce them
as supporters of Saddam.

What this completely fails to understand--and this is what I argued at
length in my book Bush in Babylon--is that there are large numbers of people
in Iraq who loath Saddam Hussein and his regime and everything it stood for,
but who are equally, if not even more, hostile to the U.S. for occupying
their country.

The notion that Iraqi politics can only be divided into two--either you're
for Saddam, or you're for the occupation--is a joke. It's the same thing
that Bush said after 9/11--if you're not with us, you're for the terrorists.
It's a completely false dichotomy. It was wrong in relation to 9/11, and
it's totally wrong in relation to Iraq.

The fact is that the war is going badly for them--and that's why you see
serious splits within the ruling elite itself--as you saw with Paul
O'Neill's departure as treasury secretary and now Richard Clarke walking out
of the White House and basically denouncing the regime in quite sharp
language for invading Iraq. This would not have happened had there not been
a resistance in Iraq.

Q: THE MEDIA is playing up the killings of the U.S. contractors in Falluja
as evidence of the barbarism of the Iraqi "insurgents." How do you think we
should respond to this?

Tariq Ali: FIRST, IT'S very interesting that in the press conference about
Falluja given by the U.S. Brigadier Gen. Mark Kimmit, he said that there are
two different sorts of violence in Iraq. One is that used by terrorists who
carry out suicide bombings, and this is largely the work of al-Qaeda--and
incidentally, I don't think that's totally true.

The second form of violence that he distinguishes from terrorism is
"insurgence." "Insurgence" is the code word that the American military uses
to describe the resistance. This is the word that they've instructed the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the American media to use.


Kimmit said very clearly that what took place in Falluja was an act by
insurgents. Obviously, what took place was pretty horrific, there's no
denying that. It was very brutal, which is not something I defend.

But what is equally interesting is that none of the real footage was shown
in the Western media. It was shown on the Arab networks, but not the Western
media. They showed a car being blown up, but they didn't show the
atrocities.

The reason that they don't show it is that they don't want to demoralize
American public opinion. Because even people who support the war would say,
"My God, we didn't realize it was as bad as this."

I've always argued that when you have ugly occupations, you cannot have a
pretty resistance. It's the character and form of the occupation that
determines the nature of the resistance.

Friends,

Today's Boston Globe carries an article by Craig Unger, author of the book,
"House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's
Two Most Powerful Dynasties".

In the piece, Unger wonders why no one on the commission has asked about the
"evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11." He
discloses that this group of Saudi evacuees included 24 members of the Bin
Laden family.

The writer goes on to speculate, "Is it possible that the long relationship
between President Bush's family and the House of Saud led Bush to turn a
blind eye to the Saudi role in Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? Rather than
aggressively seeking justice for the victims of 9/11, did the president
instead authorize the departure of rich Saudi royals without even subjecting
them to interrogation?"

One question the 9/11 Commission did not ask Condi Rice, and is not raised
by Craig Unger either, is this: Why didn't US Air Force fighter jets take
off once it was clear four jetliners had been hijacked?

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
----------------------
Sunday, April 11, 2004

Unasked questions:
The 9/11 commission should ask who authorized the evacuation of Saudi
nationals in the days following the attacks

By Craig Unger
The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/04/11/unasked_questions
/

IN ITS TOUGH QUESTIONING of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice, the 9/11
commission has already shown itself to be more resolute than some skeptics
predicted. Many Americans now realize that multiple warnings of an Al Qaeda
attack on American soil crossed the desks of Bush administration officials
in the months leading up to 9/11. The administration's previously
unchallenged narrative has begun to unravel.

But when hearings resume on Tuesday, we may learn exactly how tough the
commission is prepared to be. This time the stars will be Attorney General
John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, among others. When
they testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the
commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious
security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140
Saudis just two days after 9/11.

This episode raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration.
Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a
close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his
father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have
traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from
the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes
and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton,
and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself
played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What
did he know and when did he know it?

Let's go back to Sept. 13, 2001, and look at several scenes that were taking
place simultaneously. Three thousand people had just been killed. The toxic
rubble of the World Trade Center was still ablaze. American airspace was
locked down. Not even Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who were out of the country,
were allowed to fly home. And a plane bearing a replacement heart for a
desperately ill Seattle man was forced down short of its destination by
military aircraft. Not since the days of the Wright Brothers had American
skies been so empty.

But some people desperately wanted to fly out of the country. That same day,
Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the
United States and a long-time friend of the Bush family, dropped by the
White House. He and President George W. Bush went out to the Truman Balcony
for a private conversation. We do not know everything they discussed, but
the Saudis themselves say that Prince Bandar was trying to orchestrate the
evacuation of scores of Saudis from the United States despite the lockdown
on air travel.

Meanwhile, a small plane in Tampa, Fla. took off for Lexington, Ky.
According to former Tampa cop Dan Grossi and former FBI agent Manny Perez,
who were on the flight to provide security, the passengers included three
young Saudis. Given the national security crisis, both Grossi and Perez were
astonished that they were allowed to take off. The flight could not have
taken place without White House approval.

The plane taking off from Tampa was the first of at least eight aircraft
that began flying across the country, stopping in at least 12 American
cities and carrying at least 140 passengers out of the country over the next
week or so. The planes included a lavishly customized Boeing 727 airliner
that was equipped with a master bedroom suite, huge flat-screen TVs, and a
bathroom with gold-plated fixtures. Many of the passengers were high-ranking
members of the royal House of Saud. About 24 of them were members of the bin
Laden family, which owned the Saudi Binladin Group, a multibillion-dollar
construction conglomerate.

All this occurred at a time when intelligence analysts knew that 15 of the
19 hijackers were Saudi, that Saudi money was one of the major forces behind
Al Qaeda, and that the prime suspect -- Osama bin Laden -- was Saudi as
well.

For its part, the Bush administration has erected the proverbial stone wall
on the topic of the Saudi evacuation. The White House told me that it is
"absolutely confident" the Sept. 13 flight from Tampa did not take place.
The FBI said "unequivocally" it played no role in facilitating any flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that the Tampa-to-Lexington flight
was not in the logs and did not take place.

But they are all wrong.

How can I be sure? I have interviewed not only Dan Grossi and Manny Perez,
but also sources who helped orchestrate the flights. I tracked down photos
of the interior of one of the planes. Former counterterrorism czar Richard
Clarke told me, and later the 9/11 commission, about discussions in the
White House that allowed the flights to begin.

Clarke says his advice was that the Saudis should be able to leave only
after they had been vetted by the FBI. A basic procedure in any crime
investigation is to interview friends and relatives of the primary suspect.
When I talked to FBI special agents who participated in the Saudi
evacuation, however, they said that they identified the passengers boarding
the flights but did not have lengthy interviews with them.

"Here you have an attack with substantial links to Saudi Arabia," says John
L. Martin, a former Justice Department official who supervised investigation
and prosecution of national security offenses for 18 years. "You would want
to talk to people in the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government,
particularly since they have pledged cooperation."

Robert Mueller had taken over at the FBI just one week before 9/11 and
cannot be held responsible for the bureau's shortcomings before the attacks.
But he should be asked about the departure of the Saudis. How is it possible
that this could have happened? Did the White House order the evacuation --
and thereby interfere in an investigation into the murder of nearly 3,000
people?

If such interviews had taken place, investigators might have uncovered a
trove of intelligence. During the summer of 2001, just a few months before
9/11, several of the bin Ladens attended the wedding of Osama's son in
Afghanistan, where Osama himself was present. Carmen bin Laden, an estranged
sister-in-law of the Al Qaeda leader, has said she suspects many family
members have continued to aid and abet him. Could the bin Ladens have shed
light on these assertions? Two relatives, Abdullah and Omar bin Laden, had
been investigated by the FBI as recently as September 2001 for their ties to
the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which has allegedly funded terrorism.
The 9/11 commission should ask Mueller if they were on board. I have also
obtained documents showing that Abdullah and Omar were being investigated by
the FBI in September 2001. Mueller should be asked about the status of that
investigation.

The Clinton administration had attempted to crack down on the Saudi funding
of Islamic charities that funneled money to terrorists. More recently we
have since had one revelation after another about Saudi royals who
"inadvertently" funded terrorists. The Commission should ask Mueller if the
Saudis who were allowed to leave were involved in financing terrorism. How
could the FBI be sure without seriously interrogating them?

In addition, I have obtained passenger lists for four of the Saudi
evacuation flights. (The documents can be seen at my website,
www.houseofbush.com.) Out of several dozen names on those lists, the most
astonishing is that of the late Prince Ahmed bin Salman.

A prominent figure in the Saudi royal family, Prince Ahmed is best known in
this country as the owner of War Emblem, winner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby.
But his name is of interest for another reason. As reported last year by
Gerald Posner in "Why America Slept," Prince Ahmed not only had alleged ties
to Al Qaeda, but may also have known in advance that there would be attacks
on 9/11. According to Posner, Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative who was
part of Osama bin Laden's inner circle and was captured in 2002, made these
assertions when he was interrogated by the CIA. The commission should ask
Mueller about Zubaydah's interrogation. They should also ask whether the FBI
interrogated Prince Ahmed before his departure.

But Prince Ahmed will never be able to answer any questions because not long
after the CIA interrogation, he died of a heart attack at the age of 43. Yet
we do know that he was on one of the flights.

That leaves the question of the White House's participation in expediting
the departure of so many Saudis who may have been able to shed light on the
greatest crime in American history.

Is it possible that the long relationship between President Bush's family
and the House of Saud led Bush to turn a blind eye to the Saudi role in
Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? Rather than aggressively seeking justice
for the victims of 9/11, did the president instead authorize the departure
of rich Saudi royals without even subjecting them to interrogation?

That may be the most difficult question of all for the commission to tackle.
If the commission dares to confront this issue, it will undoubtedly be
accused of politicizing the most important national security investigations
in American history -- in an election year, no less. If it does not, it
risks something far worse -- the betrayal of the thousands who lost their
lives that day, and of the living who want answers.

Friends,

Today, i.e., Friday, April 16, the Noor Centre in Toronto will host a
session on the controversial introduction of Shariah in Canada.

If you don't live in the Toronto area, one more incentive to move here :-)

The Noor Centre is an amazing meeting place for Muslims, run by bright,
progressive and enlightened people, and led by a dynamic woman, Roshan Jamal.
This centre has provided a safe and harmonious environment to Muslims of all
types (Yes, we come in all shades). It is located at 123 Wynford Drive (The
old Japanese Cultural Centre) on the east side of the DVP.

The session on Sharia at Noor begins at 7.30pm.

The presenters are Faisal Kutty, a Toronto Lawyer and Reem Meshal a PhD
student at McGill University. The session will be facilitated by Faisal
Bhabha also a lawyer.

The organizers have included me as the third panelist on the discussion.

The discussion will address the definition and historical development and
application of Sharia and address also the proposed introduction of Sharia
in Canada.

See you tonight at the Noor Center at 123 Wynford Drive at 7:30 PM

Tarek Fatah

Friends,

Dr. Mohja Kahf is a Syrian American who teaches literature at the University
of Arkansas, while Asra Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal
correspondent. Together these two Muslim women broach a subject few
Muslims, men or women, dare deal with--sex.

Despite our obvious obsession with sexuality, manifested in how we view
ourselves as pure while looking down on the so called west as evil, the
subject barely ever gets discussed.

Well, Ms. Mohja Kahf and Ms. Asra Nomani have done the unthinkable. They
talk about sex in Ahmed Nassef's brilliant on-line magazine,
MuslimWakeup.Com

The story recently caught the attention of the New York Daily news.

Read and reflect

Tarek Fatah
---------------------
Muslim women talk sex

By Lloyd Grove
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/182084p-157965c.html


Never mind the question - Mohja Kahf and Asra Q. Nomani are the American
Muslim world's answer to "Sex and the City."
And if they're hoping to shock, they just might get their wish.

Today, in the online magazine muslimwakeup.com, the Syrian-born Kahf, a
literature professor at the University of Arkansas, launches the mag's first
Islamic sex column, "Sex & the Umma." ("Umma" means "Muslim community.")
[http://www.muslimwakeup.com/sex/]

Her subject: "Do women get to have sex in paradise, too?"

In today's installment, an Islamic scholar at a New Jersey mosque says
dryly: "Any woman who wants such a thing is not likely to make it to
paradise." Later on in the column - written in the form of a short story - a
group of Muslim women shares their fantasies and frustrations.

When I asked Kahf yesterday how her fellow Muslims will react to such
musings, she answered breezily: "I think they will be thrilled, darling!"

But won't the traditionalists be scandalized?

"They will be smiling under their beards," replied the 36-year-old married
mother of three.

The Bombay-born Nomani, a 38-year-old single mom and former Wall Street
Journal reporter, will alternate with her own column starting next month.

"We're writing for people who are willing to challenge the status quo and
mainstream Muslim thinking," Nomani told me. "We're doing it from an Islamic
perspective, but we'd like to have a sense of humor about it."

The sex column was the brainchild of Mount Kisco resident Ahmed Nassef, the
Egyptian-born editor in chief of the year-old Web site.

"We started the online magazine to address the challenges of being a
progressive Muslim," the 37-year-old Nassef, a U.S. citizen, told me
yesterday. "Ninety percent of Muslims in the United States and North America
are very conservative. Most of the mosques are highly conservative. After
9/11, the Muslims speaking for the community on television reflect the
conservative side. But we're giving expression to another point of view."

The Web site summarizes the column's goals: "To address modern day Muslim
sexual experiences even if they do not match Islamic prescriptions for
sexual conduct."

And "to affirm the sexual drives of women as much as those of men."

Friends,

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has an article by Max
Rodenbuck reviewing many recent books on Islam. They include books by Omid
Safi and Carl Ernst, but dismisses Irshad Manji's contributions as merely "A
less scholarly expression of dismay."

In the introduction Rondebuck writes, "Why has Islam, unlike its close
cousins Christianity and Judaism, not undergone a reformation?" In the
dilemma facing Muslims, he quotes the Moroccan philosopher Abdou
Filali-Ansary who stated, "faith becomes a matter of individual choice and
commitment, not an obligation imposed on the community."

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
---------------
April 29, 2004

Islam Confronts Its Demons

By Max Rodenbeck
The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17054?email

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

The Malady of Islam
by Abdelwahab Meddeb, translated from the French by Pierre Joris and Ann
Reid
Basic, 241 pp., $24.00

Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation
edited by B.A. Roberson
London: Frank Cass, 262 pp., £49.94; $20.56 (paper)

Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World
by Carl W. Ernst
University of North Carolina Press, 244 pp., $24.95

Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim
Tradition
by Yohanan Friedmann
Cambridge University Press, 232 pp., $65.00

The Future of Political Islam
by Graham E. Fuller
Palgrave Macmillan, 227 pp., $29.95; $16.95 (paper)

Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists
by Raymond William Baker
Harvard University Press, 309 pp., $29.95

Islam and Democracy in the Middle East
edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg
Johns Hopkins University Press, 322 pp., $45.00; $17.95 (paper)

Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender, and Pluralism
edited by Omid Safi
Oneworld, 351 pp., $25.95 (paper)

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out
edited by Ibn Warraq
Prometheus, 471 pp., $28.00
-----------------

1. "And once again wars of religions are ready to devastate Europe. Boheman,
leader and agent of a new sect of "purified" Christianity, has just been
arrested in Sweden, and the most disastrous plans were found among his
papers. The sect to which he belonged is said to want nothing less than to
render itself master of all the potentates of Europe and their subjects. In
Arabia new sectarians are emerging and want to purify the religion of
Mahomet. In China even worse troubles, still and always motivated by
religion, are tearing apart the inside of that vast empire. As always it is
gods that are the cause of all ills."
—Diary of the Marquis de Sade, quoted by Abdelwahab Meddeb in The Malady of
Islam

Why has Islam, unlike its close cousins Christianity and Judaism, not
undergone a reformation? The question may sound reasonable. Yet often as
not, those who pose it forget that in the Christian case, at least,
reformation was a painfully long procedure. They tend to neglect the gory
episodes, and the intricate debates about doctrine, and think instead of the
end result that Westerners live with today, something that the Moroccan
philosopher Abdou Filali-Ansary aptly calls a state of "disenchantment" with
pure religious dogma in favor of the ethical principles that underlie it,
such that "faith becomes a matter of individual choice and commitment, not
an obligation imposed on the community."[1] And that, of course, is as much
a product of the Enlightenment as of the Reformation.

Those who know Islamic history have even better reason to find the question
puzzling. The fact is that since its inception fourteen centuries ago, Islam
has undergone bursts of reformation. Like other religions, it has splintered
into myriad sects and sub-sects, each claiming to be the properly "reformed"
variant of the faith. The biggest division is that between Sunnis and Shias,
which, although its origins lie in the conflict over succession to the
Prophet Muhammad's rule, soon took on doctrinal dimensions that grew
increasingly hard to resolve. But while Shiism continued up until the
nineteenth century to sprout esoteric offshoots (such as the Alawites in
Syria or the Bahai in Iran), the much larger Sunni branch has maintained a
surface unity, even as vying factions within it have periodically laid claim
to being truer believers than their rivals.

Within Sunni Islam, reformers have always chosen one of two paths. Followers
of the first trend might be described as literalists, meaning they have
sought a return to the letter of Islam's founding texts, namely, the Koran,
the hadiths, or recorded sayings of the Prophet, and the sunna, or recorded
doings of the Prophet. The other trend could be called proto-humanist,
meaning that they have sought to break free of the texts, reinterpreting
them or filtering them in search of a presumed essence that may be more
appropriate to temporal or spiritual needs.


Such attempts at reform through more flexible interpretation have often
proved shallow and short-lived. A good example is the Mu'tazelite movement
of eighth- and ninth-century Iraq, whose ideas of free will, rationalism,
and the need to understand the Koran within its historical context were
ultimately rejected by the Muslim mainstream as too dangerous a departure.
Their analytical methods remained influential, however, as did those of
other Greek-inspired Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes,
whose liberalizing notions were, in the end, similarly dismissed by more
powerful orthodox schools. Sufism, with its emphasis on spiritual content
rather than ritual form, was an early but enduring application of such
efforts to exalt individual appreciation of the faith over legalistic norms.

Appealing more to elites than to the masses, and lacking a defined program
or coherent leadership, such reformist currents never captured the political
initiative that would have enabled them to sustain themselves. Subtly,
however, their skepticism has periodically challenged the rigidity of
institutional Islam. That influence could be seen, for example, in the
enlightened manners of Muslim Spain, in the relative tolerance shown to
non-Muslim subjects by the Ottoman Turks, or in the playful, ribald
subversiveness that characterizes much of medieval Islamic literature. The
more relaxed and eclectic variants of the faith practiced today in places
such as Indonesia, West Africa, and the major cities of the Middle East also
bear the stamp of a more outward-looking take on the faith.

More often than not, though, "reform" in Islam has pushed in the other
direction, toward the reassertion of the primacy of founding texts and early
theologians over later accretions or interpretations. Such atavistic
literalism derives particular power from the fact that the Koran itself is
generally understood by Muslims to be the unaltered word of God. Charging
others with having strayed from God's evident commands is thus a potent
political instrument. At the same time, reversion to the historical model of
early Islam necessitates a recasting of the faith as an aggressive,
expansionary force that must struggle for survival amid a sea of enemies,
whether these be infidels or Muslim "hypocrites." At times when the faith
has seemed to be in peril, such as during the terrible Mongol invasions of
the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, this worldview was adopted as a
matter of instinct.

Puritan reformers have repeatedly used this double-barreled power—the sword
and the book, so to speak—to launch jihad-minded movements, such as the
Almoravid and Almohad dynasties that swept across Morocco and Spain from the
eleventh to thirteenth centuries, or the dynasty founded by Saladin, which
not only defeated the Christian Crusaders but also effectively stamped out
Shia influence in Egypt and the Levant. Other examples include the
Wahhabists, who rose in central Arabia in the late eighteenth century and
still exercise power in Saudi Arabia today, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Although such movements have been geographically disparate, periodic purges
by them have had the cumulative effect of reducing the accepted Sunni canon
to a narrow range of sources and interpretations. As an Arabic phrase puts
it, they have "closed the door of ijtihad," or speculative reasoning,
enabling traditionalist scholars to posit a utopian vision of Islam as a
closed system that only awaits firm application by a just ruler. In other
words, this type of "reform" has repeatedly marched the faith into a
philosophical cul-de-sac.

Twenty-five years into Islam's fifteenth century, the faith is again in a
state of unusual ferment. Its many would-be reformers are again pushing in
opposite directions. Across the extremely broad Islamic spectrum, the same
essential split can be found between humanists and literalists, or, to frame
the rivalry in a more modern way, between what the Dutch historian Rudolph
Peters has categorized as those who would subordinate Islam to "progress"
and those who would subordinate progress to "Islam."[2]

Quotation marks are appropriate, because the very breadth of the Islamic
spectrum renders difficult the adoption of a common vocabulary. In the wake
of an imperialist age that saw nine in ten Muslims fall under non-Muslim
rule, old meanings have strayed onto new territory, and new realities have
subtly altered understandings of what many Muslims (and all too many Western
scholars) still take to be fixed concepts. In particular, the frequent
imposition of Western political ideas—of "democracy" and "republic," for
example—onto self-consciously Islamic terminology has created a species of
verbiage that lends itself to easy distortion.

At the same time, the political setting of this Muslim century has lent
itself to a certain overheating of the debate. To put the problem simply,
the world looks rather threatening as seen from the Muslim perspective. It
is not merely a question of the legacy of colonialism, or of the fighting
taking place on what Samuel Huntington describes as the present "bloody
borders" of Islam—what most Muslims view as liberation conflicts in places
such as Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Palestine, and now, some would say, Iraq.
Like many smaller religious communities that have turned inward, traditional
Islam feels itself mortally challenged by a dominant global culture that is
ebulliently hedonistic and irreverent.

Fear being a fertile theme for politicians, Muslim politics has grown to be
dominated by the language of resistance, whose physical manifestations range
from disturbingly romanticized "martyrdom operations" to the defiant wearing
of the headscarf. In the words of Muhammad Charfi, a Tunisian liberal,
Muslim educational systems now tend to present Islam as "irreducibly opposed
to other kinds of self-identification or of social and political
organization, and as commanding certain specific attitudes regarding
political and social matters." It has become as much an -ism as a religious
faith.

Yet much of the new, exclusivist Islamist discourse rests on tenuous
grounds. The notion of an Islamic state, for instance, has become something
of a touchstone for movements that promote Islam as central to political
identity, such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood or the Ayatollah Kho-meini's
adherents in Iran. But as Carl Ernst points out in Following Muhammad, his
thoughtful and finely balanced primer on contemporary Islam, the simple use
of a label does not resolve the question of whether it is Islam that is to
define the state or the state that is to define Islam. Judging from the
experience of revolutionary Iran, Ernst concludes that in effect, a small,
unelected group of conservative scholars determines what is to be "Islamic"
about the Iranian state.

Similarly, proponents of a politically powerful Islam commonly assert that
the application of Islamic law, or sharia, should be the defining
characteristic of an Islamic state. Yet there is disagreement about what
sharia actually means. Many Islamists, influenced, perhaps unwittingly, by
European models of law, seem to believe that it is a sort of all-embracing
rulebook, not unlike France's Napoleonic code. But sharia was never a
comprehensive system. It simply implied a "way," a path, a striving to apply
God's will, as interpreted by scholars following at least five different
major schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

Seeing sharia as a blanket solution to modern problems also involves a
dangerous measure of forgetfulness. Even before they were colonized by
European powers, Muslim countries such as Tunisia and Egypt freely chose to
adopt Western-style statutes, in recognition of the modern world's essential
need for predictability in the application of law. As do most Muslim
countries now, they limited the scope of sharia to the few matters covered
by specific Koranic injunctions, such as laws regarding inheritance. And
then there are those, such as the Egyptian judge Said Ashmawi, who assert
that sharia should simply be understood as any law made by Muslims.

Jihad has become a similarly vexed concept. In Professor Ernst's apt
definition, jihad simply means a quest for virtue, and it is certainly in
this sense that all but a small minority of Muslims practice it. Terrorism
in the name of Islam has, inevitably, made the word fearful to non-Muslims.
Yet the idea that jihad should be synonymous with holy war has infected not
only Western understanding but also some strains of Muslim thought. Militant
Web sites with evocative names such as 'Azf al Rusas ("The Music of the
Bullet") promote the notion that fighting the infidel is a primal duty of
every Muslim, to the exclusion of virtually all else. And leaders such as
Osama bin Laden have turned this understanding of jihad into a furious
passion play.

Obviously, there is much more to the Islamist lexicon than these few words,
but the selection offers a glimpse of the complexities involved in trying to
modernize it. This complexity is something of which ordinary, practicing
Muslims, convinced only that their faith is good and right, remain but dimly
aware. The idea, popular in the West and among Westernized Muslims, that
Islam suffers currently from a malady—to borrow a phrase from the Moroccan
critic Abdelwahab Meddeb—or that it is in need of fixing, simply does not
occur to the pious faithful.

The fact is that, stripped of its current, politically charged character,
the religious populism that is sweeping the Muslim world might not appear so
very different from kindred evolutions in Western history. America's Second
Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, for example, generated
fervid revival meetings not unlike the mass prayers now common in the Muslim
world. Celebrity evangelists, lushly bearded fellows with quavering voices
and piercing eyes, were of a kind with the tele-sheikhs whose sermonizing
takes up 40 percent of Saudi Arabia's airtime. Ostentatious piety became the
norm in much of the US. Just as Riyadh's censors scour imported magazines
today, the prim ladies of Cincinnati in the 1820s painted over an
advertisement for the public rose garden that showed a girl holding a
bouquet, because the bare flesh of her ankles showed. Christian missionary
societies were not so different from Saudi charities that profess to sponsor
the Call.

Even the misbegotten ventures of some American revivalists, such as John
Brown's brief but bloody holy war against slavery, suffered from the same
doomed zeal as today's jihadist extremism. And in the same way that the
exposing of Christian moral excess —think of The Scarlet Letter, for
example—propelled many to question their faith, the horror of what some
Muslims do in the name of Islam is generating renewed doubts among their
fellows.

------------------------

2. Such, then, is the background to the current debate on reform, a debate
which, as noted ominously by Graham Fuller, an ex-CIA analyst whose
excellent survey of political Islam is notably free of either cant or
apologetics, may only just be warming up. To clarify the reformist spectrum,
we can identify, at one end, the blinkered frenzy of al- Qaeda, and at the
far opposite end, a growing number of Muslims who question, and in some
cases reject, the fundamental tenets of belief. The great mass of Muslims
stand, with increasing discomfort, in the middle, repelled by the violence
of some coreligionists, but also fearful that Islam risks dissolving—as it
may be argued that the faith of many nominal Christians also dissolved—into
a mix of vestigial folklore and personal belief.

It may sound odd to classify a terrorist group as reformist, but a radical
remake of the faith is indeed the underlying intention of bin Laden and his
followers. Attacking America and its allies is merely a tactic, intended to
provoke a backlash strong enough to alert Muslims to the supposed truth of
their predicament, and so rally them to purge the faith of all that is alien
to its essence.[3] Promoting a clash of civilizations is merely stage one.
The more difficult part, as the radicals see it, is convincing fellow
Muslims to reject the modern world absolutely (including such aberrations as
democracy), topple their own insidiously secularizing quisling governments,
and return to the pure path. It is this latter part of his project that bin
Laden shares with a wider radical and reactionary trend, which is sometimes
referred to as Salafist (derived from the Arabic salaf, meaning forebears,
i.e., returning to the way of the founding fathers of Islam).

The imagined political destination of this path is the recreation of a
pan-Islamic caliphate, such as existed for a few short years after the
Prophet's death. (The question of who is to fill the office of caliph has
been left conveniently vague by bin Laden and the other extreme radicals.)
Reaching this goal would necessitate the elimination of such impurities as
Shiism, Sufism, and so on, and the imposition of a supranational, tribal
identification with Islam. So far as personal behavior is concerned, the
ultra-radicals would like to see the Salafist version of Islam applied in
detailed, prescriptive form. There would be hand-chopping for theft, and
death by stoning for adultery. But there would also be a thicket of lesser
rules to regulate everything from how to greet an infidel (a Muslim may
respond to but not initiate hellos)[4] to how to bury the dead (in unmarked
graves).

This "reform" agenda has met with a certain amount of success. Like-minded
groups, often of a violent, jihadist bent, have sprouted from Algeria to the
Philippines. They have proved particularly strong in regions of conflict,
such as Iraq's Sunni Triangle and Pakistan's Northwest Frontier. Yet in
places where their fighting message has run its course, recruitment has
fallen off rapidly, both in response to the ugliness of their methods and,
ultimately, to the radical utopianism of their aims. Countries such as
Afghanistan, Algeria, and Egypt have already passed, with varying degrees of
pain, through the historical gauntlet of extremist militancy. The experience
was brutalizing, but although some violence persists there, it is no longer
a mortal threat to the weary social order. Even Saudi Arabia, where members
of the ruling establishment retain strong ties to Salafism, is experiencing
a growing wave of public impatience with their excessive zeal. The more
enduring influence of such radicals can be seen, perhaps, in the shift to
more virulent styles of rhetoric and more strident ways of marking a
distinct Islamic identity. Even government-salaried clerics in Saudi Arabia,
for example, have taken to referring to America as "the enemy." Yet these
things, too, may prove to be passing fashions.[5]

Closer to the Muslim center are those who make use of fundamentalist
rhetoric (the Islamic state, "resistance" to perceived Western hegemony) in
pursuit of more realistic goals. This is a very broad trend, and one that
has succeeded in mobilizing popular activism in many countries. It embraces
much of the institutional clergy, who see it as a vehicle for regaining lost
prestige, as well as intellectual flotsam from the left: professional
oppositionists who have found a neoconservative refuge in Islamism. It also
includes mainstream Islamist political parties such as Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood, or the Islamist "Reform" parties of Morocco, Algeria, and
Yemen.

In general, the centrist-fundamentalist idea of reform has less to do with
stripping down religious doctrine, or overthrowing governments, than with
superimposing "Islamic" forms upon existing structures. It is these groups
that speak of "Islamizing" economics, governance, education, culture, and so
on. Islamists in Kuwait, for example, have succeeded in segregating sexes in
the national university. In less coercive fashion, Muslim financial
institutions now offer a range of "Islamic" alternatives for saving,
lending, and in- vestment. The centrist fundamentalists say they would like
to have democracy, but within a frame that protects Islamic values.
Underlying all this is a vague notion that Islam is not merely a faith but
an all-embracing social system. What it lacks is simply a means of getting
state power.

Some Western observers of Islam credit the followers of this trend with
being modernizers. In the view of Raymond Baker, for example, the cultural
authenticity of what he terms the New Islamists, combined with their
relative political moderation, marks them as the wave of the Muslim future.
Yet Baker's own book, Islam Without Fear, which concentrates on the centrist
trend in Egyptian Islamism, is largely a summary of ideas that are decades
old. In some contexts, it is true, the view of the centrist fundamentalist
on such issues as the right of women to education and jobs might look
modern. More often, though, Egypt's Islamist centrists seem to be engaged in
an elaborate effort to ascribe a cultural particularism to what are really
universal precepts and fashions.

This effort may well bear political fruit. In the Arab world, especially,
the level of public disgust with existing governments is extremely high. The
appropriation of Islamic symbols by opposition movements makes them very
difficult for discredited state leaders to challenge. Moreover, the
jacket-and-tie-wearing, "capital-friendly" figureheads of this trend have
little animus against the West, so long as specific issues are excluded,
namely, Palestine and the Bush administration's perceived neo-imperialist
intent. That said, the centrist fundamentalists also like to make use of the
West as a construct against which to posit "Islamic" values: the West is
materialist, aggressive, morally loose; we are spiritual, peaceful, chaste.

To be fair, however, this trend embraces a range of shades, including some,
for example, who oppose the veiling or segregation of women, and some who
assert that charging fixed interest on loans is not necessarily equivalent
to usury, and therefore need not be abolished by "Islamic" states. It is
also true that the centrist fundamentalists' critique of more extreme
radicals has been particularly effective at curtailing their influence. As
Baker notes, long before September 11, Muhammad al-Ghazali, a widely revered
Egyptian sheikh, was ridiculing extremists as "men in long beards...who
would drive the country backwards by their preoccupation with issues
irrelevant to life on earth." Under the influence of such contempt, a slow
tide of radicals has moved toward the Muslim mainstream, including the
once-militant Gamaa Islamiya group in Egypt (whose members were responsible
for a rash of terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s), and, more recently,
many Salafist intellectuals in Saudi Arabia. Malaysia's ruling party
trounced radical Islamist rivals in recent elections, by itself adopting a
milder-mannered Islamist platform.

Yet what Baker describes as the "clear and compelling" answers that these
more moderate Islamists offer to contemporary issues often prove, on closer
inspection, to be fudges. The application of Islam "rightly understood,"
along with democracy "within an Islamic civilizational framework," he says,
would "provide the twin engines of the long-term process of cultural and
social transformation." But who and what are to define this understanding,
and this "framework"—hallowed Islamic texts, or modern-day Muslims? The New
Islamists extol the value of empirical science, but squirm at the mention of
Darwin. They favor freedom of expression, but only so long as it promotes
"an aesthetic of belonging" to Islam.[6] For all the veneer of liberalism,
such reservations begin to echo the style of a traditional sheikh: yes,
music is permissible, but on the condition that it does not make you want to
dance (as was declared in a fatwa once issued by a senior Egyptian sheikh).

In other words, what this "centrist" trend represents is not modernism
itself, but a transitional phase, a kind of regrouping in order to confront
the implications of modernism. The more authentic Muslim modernists are
those who have already taken a step across the historical threshold toward
an enlightened skepticism of the whole Islamic tradition. There are many
Muslim intellectuals who have done this, some of them contributors to the
collection Islam and Democracy in the Middle East. They cannot yet be called
a school, and they currently carry little political weight—excluding,
perhaps, the reformist camp in Iran, which is, incidentally, the only Muslim
country where core philosophical issues are loudly aired.

Yet this trend, which might be termed progressive, is intellectually far
more dynamic than the centrist-fundamentalist or Salafist movements. It is
particularly active on the peripheries of the Muslim world, in countries
such as Morocco and Indonesia, and among the twenty-million-strong Muslim
diaspora in the West—among them millions of Algerians in France, Turks in
Germany, Pakistanis in England, and Iranians and Palestinians in the US.
This may reflect the fact that these are places with access to different
ways of seeing and thinking, and also places where the traditional Islamic
worldview is challenged by the simple fact of the religion's minority
status.

Different conceptions of science and methods of interpretation, and perhaps
also a certain distance from the Arabic language, allow for a more critical
view of the Koran's text. It is not surprising that Nasr Abu Zeid, a
linguistics professor who applies his discipline to the Koran, was hounded
out of Egypt by Islamists, and now teaches in Holland. His crime was to have
suggested that some parts of the holy book might better be understood as
allegories, rather than literal fact. In the eyes of traditionalists, such
ideas are not merely blasphemous, but represent a foot in the door for a
potential fifth column of deconstructionists.[7]

The Egyptian thinker Gamal al-Banna may be a more typical example of the
progressive trend. Ironically, he happens to be the brother of Hassan
al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and was assassinated in
1949. Though raised in the same traditional environment, the younger
al-Banna has long been sharply critical of the Brotherhood, accusing it of
intellectual poverty and political opportunism. Rather than shun secularism,
as they and many of Raymond Baker's New Islamists tend to do, he argues that
the lack of a structured "church" in Sunni Islam should actually make the
faith more capable of a flexible and pertinent understanding of the modern
world. Among his dozens of published works is a three-volume study of fiqh,
or Islamic jurisprudence. He summed up his argument in a recent interview.
"We are not here as Muslims to put ourselves in the service of fiqh, but to
put fiqh in the service of life," he said.[8]

Other leading intellectuals of this tendency include Harun Nasution, an
Indonesian scholar who has tried to reintroduce relatively open-minded
Mu'tazelite ideas of eighth- and ninth-century Iraq, the liberal Iranian
thinker Abdel Karim Soroush, the Moroccan philosopher Muhammad Abed
al-Jabri, and the Tunisian historian Abdelmajid Charfi.[9] All have put
forward critiques of present-day Islamism that derive their intellectual
force from a firm grounding in traditional Islamic scholarship. Their
prescription is essentially to strip Muslim thought of ahistorical
dogmatism, and to embrace the full range of modern paths to philosophical
inquiry. Instead of seeing such receptiveness to modern thought as
submission or defeat, they argue that there is no reason why Islam should
not provide an ethical basis for freedom.
-------------------------

3. Abdou Filali-Ansary's three contributions to the collection Islam and
Democracy in the Middle East are a particularly cogent and forceful
exposition of such views. Concluding a survey of enlightened Muslim thought,
he suggests a solution to Islam's discomfort with modernism:

The realization that Islam...is not a system of social and political
regulation frees up space for cultures and nations—in the modern sense of
these words—to lay the foundations of collective identity. This opens the
way, in turn, to acceptance of a convergence with other religious traditions
and universalistic moralities.

As the experience of Nasr Abu Zeid and others has shown, progressive Muslims
remain easy targets for the traditionalists who have gained power over
educational and religious institutions. Yet the dissident strain in Islam
appears to be growing. It may be a micro-phenomenon, but there have been
notable cases in recent years of Salafist radicals crossing the full
spectrum of Muslim doctrines toward liberalism. In his memoir Earth Is
Prettier Than Heaven, Khaled al-Birri, a former member of Egypt's Gama'at
Islamiya, recounts his recruitment, violent activism, and subsequent
disillusionment with radicalism.[10] The Saudi columnist Mansour
an-Nogaidan, who once torched a Riyadh video store in an act of youthful
zeal, now professes admiration for Martin Luther rather than Osama bin
Laden. "Religion has grown into a Frankenstein," he told me in a recent
interview. "Our current religious thought has nothing to offer without a
complete rethinking."[11]

Yet the full shock of progressivist argument has yet to be felt in the
Muslim heartlands, largely because much of it appears in English and French,
and has yet to be translated into Arabic, say, or Urdu. Even the most
mild-mannered of Egypt's New Islamists, for instance, would find it
difficult to stomach the contention of Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, who
teaches at Swarthmore, that traditional Islam's disapproval of homosexuality
is largely the result of erroneous exegesis.

His essay is one of sixteen contributions, most from American Muslim
academics, to the volume Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender, and
Pluralism. Taken together, these voices represent a sort of cri de coeur for
more tolerant, life-affirming interpretations of the faith. The same
passionate exasperation, topped with a tinge of nostalgia and a whiff of
Gauloises, emerges from The Malady of Islam, by the Franco-Tunisian writer
Abdelwahab Meddeb. Though packed with erudition, his howl at the perceived
loss of beauty in Islamic civilization is marred by fashionable Gallic
disdain for the supposedly equally dire plague of Americanization engulfing
the earth.[12]

Which brings us full circle to an even rarer new species of Muslim, those
who have abandoned the faith altogether. Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out
is probably the first book of its kind—a compendium of testimonies from
former Muslims about the reasons for their estrangement from the Islamic
faith itself. This is, obviously, a dangerous venture. The agreed penalty
for apostasy in sharia is death. Not surprisingly, the editor of this volume
uses a pseudonym, and most of the contents were sent long-distance to the
Internet site he runs, www.secularislam.org.

The personal stories recounted in Leaving Islam range from the tragic to the
trite. More useful are sections that trace the long and illustrious history
of Muslim doubt, including this verse by the tenth-century Syrian poet Abul
'Ala al Ma'arri:

We mortals are composed of two great schools-Enlightened knaves or else
religious fools.
The question is not whether Islam is to be reformed. The question is which
of these schools will do the job.

Notes
[1] See Abdou Filali-Ansary, "Muslims and Democracy," in Islam and Democracy
in the Middle East, edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel
Brumberg.

[2] "From Jurists' Law to Statute Law or What Happens When Shari'a Is
Codified," in Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation, edited by B.A.
Roberson.

[3] A statement from al-Qaeda following the Madrid bombings clarified this
intent. It said the organization hoped George Bush would win reelection,
"because he acts with force rather than wisdom or shrewdness, and it is his
religious fanaticism that will rouse our (Islamic) nation, as has been
shown. Being targeted by an enemy is what will wake us from our slumber."
Quoted on the Arabic news Web site www.elaph.com: "Bayaan lil qa'ida
yuhhammal tawqi' kataib abu hafss al massri," March 17, 2004.

[4] A thorough investigation of the jurisprudence upon which such ideas are
based can be found in Yohanan Friedmann's Tolerance and Coercion in Islam:
Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition. While Friedmann's scholarship
is unimpeachable, his focus on early Islamic practices may leave the unwary
with the impression that Islam is basically an intolerant faith. As
practiced in most times and places, this has been less true of Islam than
of, say, Christianity. Until reforms introduced this year, however, Saudi
schools promoted this brusque sectarian etiquette of greetings.

[5] A survey conducted in February 2004 by the Pew Research Center found
that 65 percent of Pakistanis and 55 percent of Jordanians had a favorable
view of Osama bin Laden. But it is probably safe to say that while many
Muslims admire the rebel figure who stands up to the superpowers, far fewer
are aware of his longer-term political project.

[6] Sheikh Ghazali, for instance, refrained from clearly condemning the
assassins of the Egyptian secularist Farag Foda when asked to do so at their
trial.

[7] See Max Rodenbeck, "Witch Hunt in Egypt," The New York Review, November
16, 2000.

[8] Quoted in the Arabic newspaper al-Hayat, February 28, 2004, p. 16. Some
of Gamal al-Banna's ideas can be found in English on his Web site: www
.islamiccall.org.

[9] A fuller listing of liberal Islamic thinkers can be found at
www.etudes-musulmanes.com.

[10] Ad-dunya ajmal min al-janna (Beirut: Dar an-Nahar, 2001).

[11] Interview, Riyadh, February 13, 2004. See also Elizabeth Rubin, "The
Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why," The New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2004.

[12] A less scholarly expression of dismay can be found in Irshad Manji's
The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (St.
Martin's, 2003).

Friends,

My prediction that Saudi inspired Muslim groups will support George Bush in
the next elections is often dismissed as alarmist speculation. However, as
the November date approaches, I am even more convinced that these groups
will do exactly what they have historically done; support the very people
who screw them.

Three things will be presented as justification to support Bush.

1. Bush is against same-sex marriages
2. Bush is religious man. He is dishing out money to Muslim groups and
intellectuals under his 'faith based initiative'
3. John Kerry is a Jew. This nonsense is already making the rounds on
Internet and e-mail lists.

If there was any doubt how the Muslim Mosque leadership will urge its
followers to vote, read what their masters, the Saudis, are up to. Bob
Woodward, one of the most respected journalists in the world, claims that
the Saudi ruling gang will enhance oil production to lower gas prices at
American pumps just in time for the election, to help Dubya.

Shame on them.

Tarek Fatah
----------------------------------------
April 19, 2004: 7:09 AM EDT

Saudis said to boost oil output
No. 1 oil exporter will reportedly increase production before election in
effort to help Bush.

CNN Special Report
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/19/news/international/election_saudi/index.htm?
cnn=yes

NEW YORK (CNN) - A top Saudi official has assured President Bush that his
country will increase oil production to lower gas prices before November to
help the president's re-election prospects, according to a broadcast report
Sunday.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, discussing his new book on the
run-up to the Iraq war on CBS' '60 Minutes,' said Prince Bandar bin Sultan,
the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a long-time friend of the Bush
family, has given the pledge that "certainly over the summer, or as we get
closer to the election, they could increase production several million
barrels a day and the price would drop significantly."

Earlier this month, the Saudi ambassador publicly said his country wants to
stabilize world oil prices because of the effect a price spike might have on
economies around the world, including Saudi Arabia. He did not link the
effort to the U.S. election.

Record-high gas prices have become an issue in the presidential race between
Bush and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry.

Kerry has criticized Bush for not doing more to bring high prices under
control, while the Bush campaign has run ads noting that Kerry once
supported a 50-cent per gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax, which
would have meant even higher prices.

Amid concerns that plans by OPEC to cut oil production could raise prices
even further, Prince Bandar went to the White House April 1 to meet with
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and to deliver a message to Bush
from Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler.

Afterward, he told reporters that Saudi Arabia is committed to heading off
any shortages in the world energy market.

"We will not allow shortages in the market because that will hurt the world
economy," he said. "Saudi Arabia does not live on the moon. When the world
economy gets hurt, we get hurt also."

He also said that the president and the crown prince "have been in touch on
this subject for a while now."

"Both leaders feel strongly that higher energy prices have a negative impact
on the world economy and on the recovery of the world economy," Prince
Bandar said. "We will not allow shortage of the markets of oil in the market
to increase the prices."

The ambassador said Saudi Arabia would like to see the price of oil, which
now tops $33 a barrel, to be between $22 and $28 a barrel.

OPEC has said it plans to cut production by as much as 1 million barrels per
day in April, which would further increase prices. However, Saudi Arabia, as
OPEC's most influential member and largest producer, could thwart those
plans.

Friends,

The word NGO has assumed a sort of respectability that deserves some
critique. Who are these NGOs and who are they accountable to?

From Palestine to Pakistan, those who used to turn to politics, now turn to
NGOs. As if changing society's ills is possible through charity and grants
from 'funding agencies'; almost always from West Europe or North America.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are today corrupting the Left and
undermining the sovereignty of developing nations.

Here is an article written just after the US-backed coup in Georgia that
overthrew the government of Edward Shevardnadze. For many Muslims, who have
been conned into believing that NGOs, not political parties, is the answer,
here is an eye-opener. Maybe they know the implications, but choose to look
the other way to keep the funding in good standing.

BTW, this was overheard in Karachi. An uncle visiting from overseas asked
his 10-yeald old nephew the perennial question: "What do you want to be when
you grow up?". The nephew raised his fist and said, "NGO". The kid's mum
sighed, "Inshallah".

As the Abba song said, "Money, money, money...its a rich man's world"

Tarek Fatah
----------------
December 6, 2003

When NGOs Attack
Implications of the Coup in Georgia

By JACOB LEVICH
CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/levich12062003.html

Nongovernmental organizations--the notionally independent, reputedly
humanitarian groups known as NGOs--are now being openly integrated into
Washington's overall strategy for consolidating global supremacy.

Events surrounding last month's coup in post-Soviet Georgia, read in light
of recent State Department documents, suggest that seemingly innocuous NGOs
now play a central role in the policy of US-engineered "regime change" set
forth in the notorious National Security Strategy of the United States.

The November 24 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of
Eduard Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of
non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western
foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young,
English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were
instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.

Astute commentators have correctly noted connections between these
provocateur NGOs and mega-philanthropist George Soros, but the billionaire
speculator did not act independently. Georgia's so-called "Velvet
Revolution" appears to have been a textbook case of regime change by
stealth, carefully planned and centrally coordinated by the US government.

Thanks to first-rate reporting by Mark McKinnon in the Toronto Globe & Mail
and Mark Ames in the Moscow-based online journal The Exile <www.exile.ru>,
the Georgian coup can be understood as a virtual scene-for-scene rerun of
the overthrow of Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic--right down to the role of
US Ambassador, played in both cases by spooky career diplomat Richard Miles.

But while foreign-funded NGOs played a significant minor part in the
Yugoslavian operation, in Georgia they were granted star billing. This bold,
all but overt, deployment of NGOs in service of US imperialism represents a
new wrinkle in regime change, reflecting adjusted post-9/11 priorities at
State and in the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Illuminating background is available in a watershed USAID report, Foreign
Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security and Opportunity,
released in January 2003 but ignored by a press swept up in pre-invasion
hysteria. In the report, USAID vows that development programs will no longer
be directed primarily toward alleviating human misery, but will be committed
to "encouraging democratic [i.e., US-friendly] reforms." This policy shift
is explicitly linked to the National Security Strategy of the United States,
the 2002 White House blueprint for a new, openly aggressive phase of US
imperialism.

Henceforward, the report promises, only friendly regimes will be rewarded
with development money, while hostile (or merely independent) states will be
punished by NGO-driven "reform" programs that sound suspiciously like
old-fashioned destabilization ops.

The document notes with approval the explosive growth of NGOs worldwide and
points to the NGO network as an attractive conduit for the strategic
distribution of dollars. Of course, not every NGO is controlled by the US
foreign policy establishment, and many rank-and-file aid workers continue to
perform thankless but essential relief work in countries decimated by
capitalism and war. But there's no mistaking which way the wind is blowing
in the development community: "NGOs used to work at arm's length from donor
governments," the USAID report smugly observes, "but over time the
relationship has become more intimate."

To be sure, the vast global network of privately-funded foundations and NGOs
has done enormous damage in its own right over the past two decades. With or
without direct US assistance, NGOs continue to prop up immiserating
neoliberal reforms, abet the schemes of transnational finance and
agribusiness, and thwart the struggles of Third World people to claim better
lives as of right. (The broader case against NGOs has been exhaustively set
forth by James Petras, among others, and is powerfully advanced in the
current issue of Aspects of India's Economy.)

But USAID's new emphasis on "building strategic partnerships" with
humanitarian groups promises far worse to come. In thinly coded language,
Foreign Aid in the National Interest touts NGOs and other private donors for
their ability to lay groundwork for coups d' état: "Assistance can be
provided to reformers to help identify key winners and losers, develop
coalition building and mobilization strategies, and design publicity
campaigns. . . . Such assistance may represent an investment in the future,
when a political shift gives reformers real power."

As summarized by Hoover Institute fellow Larry Diamond, a self-described
"specialist on democratic development and regime change" who contributed to
the report: "Where governments are truly rotten, the report suggests
channeling assistance primarily through nongovernmental sources, working
with other bilateral aid donors and multilateral aid agencies to . . .
coordinat[e] pressure on bad, recalcitrant governments."

Shevardnadze, for many years a reliable US client, seems to have become
truly rotten at around the time of his perceived tilt toward Russia, a
development which potentially threatened US military access to the region
and control of the $2.7 billion Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

Per script, coordinated pressure began immediately. An interlocking network
of development-oriented foundations, think tanks, and NGOs was mobilized to
disseminate propaganda, recruit opposition leaders, and fund an ex nihilo
"student resistance movement" modeled on Yugoslavia's CIA-connected Otpor.
Meanwhile, NGOs like the Liberty Institute--a USAID subcontractor managed by
Mikhail Saakashvili, the US-approved candidate for Georgian
leadership--worked hand-in-glove with the US Embassy (and presumably the
CIA) to destabilize civil society.

Even the coup's immediate pretext--allegations of electoral fraud --
conveniently emerged from an "election support" operation run by USAID in
consort with a Soros-connected NGO, Open Society Georgia Foundation.
TV-friendly street demos and orchestrated international outcry followed in
due course. Shevardnadze accepted the inevitable and agreed to go quietly.
Within two weeks, Donald Rumsfeld was in Tbilsi as guest of the coup
leaders, discussing a timetable for Russian troop withdrawals.

In the near future, the smashing success of the Georgia operation may be
expected to lead to similarly coordinated attempts on independent-minded
governments worldwide--Cuba, now doing its best to cope with an invasion of
foreign-sponsored "reform" organizations, is an especially likely candidate.

Meanwhile, as the US continues to assimilate worldwide humanitarian
endeavors to its imperial ambitions, the heavy hitters of the NGO
establishment are preening for another round of mediagenic self-celebration
at the upcoming World Social Forum. Suggested new slogan: "Another Coup is
Possible."

Friends,

Ahmed Nassef is a Muslim American writer of Egyptian ancestry who
edits the popular on-line magazine, MuslimWakeUp.Com.

In this piece for the Christian Science Monitor, he argues that the
voices of the vast majority of Muslims is being shut out by the
mainstream media and politicians because this silent majority does
not fit the stereotype of the so-called authentic Muslim. He quotes
the recent RAND Corporation study that said social conservative
Muslims "present a better photo-op, so the media tend to choose them
when they need a pictorial illustration for a story about American
Muslims."

Ahmed Nassef's opinion is valid in Canada as well, where even the
Left bends over backward to associate and be seen with the most
social conservative minority among Canadian Muslims.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
—-------------------
April 21, 2004

Listen to Muslim silent majority in US

By Ahmed Nassef
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0421/p09s02-coop.html

NEW YORK – When Americans think of a Muslim American, most probably
envision a bearded man or veiled woman, speaking accented English
and holding traditional, conservative views of the world.
Although the reality is much different - most of the nation's
Muslims are American-born converts or second-generation immigrants,
not particularly religious, and liberal - you'd be hard-pressed to
learn this by watching most Muslim spokespeople in the media.

Most Muslim American institutions today, from local mosques to
national advocacy groups, reflect an ultraconservative Muslim agenda
not shared by most within their community, which at an estimated 6
million now equals the size of the American Jewish community.

The Washington-based Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR),
the most prominent Muslim American civil rights organization, spends
much of its time and money defending the rights of female students
to wear veils in public schools.

However, when confronted with the rabid misogynistic policies common
in most mosques - such as limited access to main prayer halls or
bans on women serving on mosque boards - CAIR makes no such efforts
on behalf of Muslim women's rights.

Not only are Muslim organizations out of touch with their supposed
constituency, they're far removed from the realities of American
life.

Often this can reach the level of the absurd. For example, last
month, the nation's biggest American Muslim group, the Islamic
Society of North America, which represents a quarter of the nation's
mosques, hosted the annual conference for the National Temperance
and Prohibition Council, a Christian-based group working to ban the
sale and manufacture of alcohol in the US.

The reluctance of the Muslim American leadership to deal honestly
and directly with the important issues within their community is
causing a major crisis in American Islam.

Today, most Muslim Americans are so disaffected by their existing
institutions that they have dropped out of the community altogether.

A survey of Detroit mosquegoers and officials released last month by
the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding shows that half of
those attending mosque are recent immigrants, many of whom intend to
return to their homeland. When asked if they thought America is an
immoral society, more than half said yes. Such views - certainly
radical in the context of mainstream American culture - are probably
a major reason less than 7 percent of American Muslims attend mosque
regularly (compared with 38 percent of Americans who attend church
weekly).

The dismally low level of attendance at US mosques is not something
Muslim organizations like to discuss, especially when they're busy
presenting their ideologically charged agendas as representative of
the larger American Muslim community.

Studies confirm that the majority of Muslims living in the West
don't share the fundamentalist agenda of their self-appointed
leaders. Yet conservatives are still most likely to be called upon
by the media and policymakers to represent the Muslim community
because they fit a convenient stereotype of what a Muslim should
look and act like. As a recent RAND Corporation study points
out, "They present a better photo-op, so the media tend to choose
them when they need a pictorial illustration for a story about
American Muslims."

So Americans are often left with two extreme views on Islam - one
promoted by Muslim ultraconservatives and the other, an equally
dangerous one, represented by professional anti-Muslim bigots.

The challenge for the millions of Muslims excluded by these groups
is that they don't have the financial and institutional backing
enjoyed by the fundamentalist organizations, many of which are
financed by rich donors from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Most Muslim Americans are well assimilated into the mainstream of
American life. And because there are few organized spiritual and
cultural outlets for them, the moderate and progressive Muslim
American majority is harder to find than the vocal conservative
minority.

But there are definite signs that the silent majority is beginning
to coalesce into a movement to reclaim its faith. Books calling for
a progressive reinterpretation of Islam, such as Omid
Safi's "Progressive Muslims," are being widely discussed by American
Muslims, although you're unlikely to find them at mosque bookstores.

MuslimWakeup.com, a progressive online magazine I edit, now has a
monthly readership surpassing 70,000 - more than any other
publication specifically catering to North American Muslims.

Even some Muslim organizations are beginning to wake up. Recently,
the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a lobbying group connected with
the largest mosque in Los Angeles, invited two progressive Muslim
scholars to participate in their annual conference. That is an
important step.

But American media and policymakers also need to step up to the
plate to defeat Muslim extremism at home. Instead of encouraging the
most conservative fringes within the Muslim American community, it's
time to give voice to the moderate majority.

Friends,

William Blum, the author of "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower," will be speaking this Friday in Toronto at 6:00 PM.

Blum is also author of another book exposing the US titled, "Killing Hope:
U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II."
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/qid=1082634892/sr=2-1/ref
=sr_2_1/002-2050797-6338452]

His lecture titled, "The New World Order" will be preceded by a documentary
"Uncovering the Whole Truth about Iraq War"

The event is being organized by Carvan Forum, a group of progressive
Pakistanis led by radio broadcaster Tariq Naseem.

Date: Friday April 23, 2004
Time: 6:00 PM
Place: International Muslim Organization (IMO)
        65 Rexdale Blvd., Etobicoke
Ticket: $10

Seems to be an exciting place to spend your Friday evening. If you don't
live in the Toronto area, one more reason to move here :-)

Tarek Fatah

Friends,

We have all read and heard about the infamous madrassas in the Muslim world
that produce 'holy warriors' for the Bin Laden types. Well, here is a
madrassah of a different type; one that produces 'holy warriors' of a
different type.

Meet Mrs. Ashcroft and her College that produces bible-thumping Christian
Taliban.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
------------------
21 April 2004

The Bible college that leads to the White House
The campus is immaculate, everyone is clean-cut and cheerful. But just what
are they teaching at Patrick Henry College? And why do so many students end
up working for George Bush?

By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent, UK
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=513495

It is worth making clear from the outset that Patrick Henry College in rural
Virginia is not your average American university. At Patrick Henry, the
students - about 75 per cent of whom have been taught at home rather than in
schools - are required to sign a statement of faith before they arrive,
confirming (among other things) that they have a literal belief in the
teachings of the Bible. At Patrick Henry, students must obey a curfew. They
must wear their hair neatly and dress "modestly".

Students must also obey a rule stating that if they wish to hold hands with
a member of the opposite sex, they must do so while walking: standing while
holding hands is not permitted. And at Patrick Henry, students must sign an
honour pledge that bans them from drinking alcohol unless under parental
supervision.

Yet these things alone do not make the college special. There are, after
all, a number of Christian establishments across the United States that
enforce such a strict fundamentalist code for their students.

No, what makes Patrick Henry unique is the increasingly close - critics say
alarmingly close - links this recently established, right-wing Christian
college has with the Bush administration and the Republican establishment as
a whole. This spring, of the almost 100 interns working in the White House,
seven are from Patrick Henry. Another intern works for the Bush-Cheney
re-election campaign, while another works for President George Bush's senior
political adviser, Karl Rove. Yet another works for the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Over the past four years, 22 conservative
members of Congress have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns. Janet
Ashcroft, the wife of Bush's Bible-thumping Attorney General, is one of the
college's trustees.

And this is no coincidence. Rather, it is the very point. Students at
Patrick Henry are on a mission to change the world: indeed, to lead the
world. When, after four years or so of study, they leave their neatly-kept
campus with its close-mown lawns, they do so with a drive and commitment to
reshape their new environments according to the fundamentalist, right-wing
vision of their college.

Critics say that Patrick Henry's system cannot help but produce
narrow-minded students with extremist views, but the college's openly stated
aim is to train young men and women "who will lead our nation and shape our
culture with timeless biblical values".

Nancy Keenan, of the liberal campaign group People for the American Way,
says: "The number of interns [from Patrick Henry] going into the White House
scares me to death. People have a right to choose [where their children are
educated], but we are concerned that they are not exposed to the kind of
diversity this country has. They are training people with a very limited
ideological and political view. If these young people are going into
positions of power, they have to govern with all people in mind, not just a
limited number."

It is also worth making clear that the staff and students at Patrick Henry
College are extraordinarily pleasant. The campus itself lies in the small
town of Purcellville, about 90 minutes' drive west of Washington DC, amid
rolling hills and anonymous commuter communities. The campus is small -
there are currently only 240 students, all of them white - and dominated by
one large building that houses the classrooms, library and cafeteria where
the students and staff take their meals. On one wall is a copy of a famous
painting of the revolutionary war hero after which the college is named, 10
years before he made the "Give me liberty or give me death" speech for which
he is best known. Students are required to attend "chapel" every morning.

The college was established in 2000 by Michael Farris, who runs the Home
School Legal Defence Association, itself set up in 1983 to promote the
values of Christian home-schooling as an alternative to what he and others
considered the increasingly secular and irreligious culture taking hold in
America's public schools. Farris - a lawyer who, with his wife,
home-schooled their 10 children - is a protégé of Tim LaHaye, well known in
the American Christian community as a veteran conservative evangelical
author and preacher.

The association has since grown in numbers and influence. It now has 81,000
families, each paying dues of $100. Last year, when George Bush signed
legislation banning so-called "partial-birth abortion", Farris was one of
five Christian conservatives invited to witness the act in the Oval Office.
The college gets so much money from right-wing Christian donors that it
operates without debt and yet charges just $15,000 (£8,300) a year for
tuition - about $10,000 less than comparable institutions.

Farris, who is also the president of Patrick Henry, was unavailable for an
interview when we visited his establishment, but he has told The New York
Times: "We are not home-schooling our kids just so they can read. The most
common thing I hear is parents telling me that they want their kids to be on
the Supreme Court. And if we put enough kids in the system, some may get
through to the major leagues."

The man entrusted with the education of Patrick Henry's students is Paul
Bonicelli, a former staffer on the House of Representatives international
relations committee and now the college's dean of academic affairs. He, too,
is terribly pleasant. "I am just sorry that the most important thing we do
did not get mentioned," he says, referring to an article in an American
newspaper that focused on the strict behaviour code. "And that is to provide
a very good liberal arts education." He adds: "I think the most important
thing is our academic excellence, [and that we] combine it with a serious
statement about our faith and values."

Before being hired by Patrick Henry, all members of the teaching faculty,
too, have to sign a pledge stating that they share a generally literalist
belief in the Bible. Oddly, only staff teaching biology and theology have to
hold a literal view specifically of the six-day creation story. And what is
Bonicelli's own view? He smiles. "I am basically persuaded by the young
Earth. I believe in six literal days, but I remain open to someone
persuading me otherwise."

Internships or apprenticeships, which all students are required to do in
their final year, form a major part of their courses. Many spend time
working for Republican members of the House or Senate, or in the White
House. Only one student has interned for a Democrat. "Most students' values
don't link up with [those of] the Democrats," Bonicelli says.

"Values" are something the students here seem to think about an awful lot -
values and focus. Indeed, it must be rare to find a group of students so
apparently focused as those at Patrick Henry. (Perhaps they are mindful that
the admissions document they sign warns that "Satan exists as a personal,
malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser".)

"It's a very focused campus," confirms Marian Braaksma, 21, a charming,
third-year creative and professional writing student, who was home-schooled
by her parents in Arizona until the age of 18. "We know why we are here and
we want to learn everything we can here. The professors give us a great
opportunity to learn. We do work awfully hard; more than most colleges."

But what about student life? What about having fun, what about those usual
student experiences that one might struggle to enjoy while obeying the rule
about hand-holding and walking? What about those aspects of student life
that I, frankly, felt a little too embarrassed to ask about directly? "We do
have fun, but it is not the sort of student life of a normal college,"
insists Braaksma. "There are no heavy parties, we have a curfew. But there
are sports and games. It is a very musical college. We have a drama team. We
also have a debate team that does very well. Mr Farris has said the debate
team is our college sports team. Often we will stay up to welcome them back
if they have been away debating against another college."

On a tour of the campus, we bumped into a bright young man called Jordan
Estrada, from Pennsylvania. Estrada, 18, carried a book entitled Systematic
Theology. He had played the part of Creon in Sophocles' Greek tragedy
Antigone when it was performed recently by the drama team. He said he was
interested in science fiction and wanted to be a writer.

Why had he wanted to study at Patrick Henry? "A lot of what they teach in
public schools is not based in reality. I am a believer in creation," he
says. Did that belief lead to a conflict with his pursuit of science? "None
whatsoever. I have discussed this and spoken to many scientists and I found
that there is no contradiction."

A little further on we stopped to speak to Leeann Walker from San Diego, a
20-year-old due to be among the college's first students to graduate next
month. Unlike most of the students, Walker had not been homeschooled, but
she had nothing but praise for her friends who had. "I have found them to be
some of the most responsible, most hardworking people I have ever met," she
says.

Walker says she feels the college has prepared her for the real world, and
that she is looking to work for one of the many conservative think tanks in
Washington. "The mindset of most students is of denial of reality. They want
to stay in their own, self-centred world for as long as possible."

It was at this point, walking past the single-sex dormitories and the
campaign posters of suited students running for college office, towards the
main building with its classrooms of attentive students, that one was struck
with a sense of being on a film set. One could not help but recall the 1998
film Pleasantville, in which two teenagers are transported back to their
parents' 1950s town of bland, unquestioning niceness.

The staff and students at Patrick Henry may laugh at this - if, that is,
they have seen the film. The MTV and VH1 pop-culture channels are blocked
from campus televisions, because their contents are considered
inappropriate. The students' computers are set up with a program called
Covenant Eyes, which monitors the websites they visit.

For all the warm welcomes, for all the smiles, for all the openness, there
is something a little unsettling about Patrick Henry and the cultish
devotion of its students. This is, after all, an establishment that claims
to challenge its students to think for themselves, and yet establishes a
fixed, rigid framework - both culturally and intellectually - in which they
are to operate.

But, to its critics, what is perhaps most striking about this small,
influential college with its self-confidence and focus, and its links with
America's neoconservative political elite, is its utter transparency.
Patrick Henry College is an institution devoted to spreading its word,
spreading its view of the world, and helping to place its students in
positions of authority and influence. And it does so in plain view.

Friends,
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program
airing on over 140 stations in North America. Its website describes it as
pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S.
Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public
Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite
television (on Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of the DISH Network), shortwave
radio and the internet.
Here is British-Pakistani author-activist, Tariq Ali talking to Ian Williams
about the latest situation in Iraq.
Read and reflect.
Tarek Fatah
-----------------------------------------------
Friday, April 23rd, 2004
With the June 30 Handover Approaching, Neocons Try To Sabotage UN Role in
Iraq
Radio Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/23/1448249

UN reporter Ian Williams exposes how the neocons are trying to turn an Iraq
scandal over the oil-for-food program into a reason why the UN should stay
out of Iraq. Tariq Ali examines the growiing anti-occupation resistance in
Iraq.
Today in Basra, Iraq some 800 supporters of Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr held a demonstration in which they alleged that the British were
responsible for the multiple suicide bombings in Basra earlier this week. In
those bombings, 68 people were killed including 20 young children whose
school bus was blown up as they traveled to school. The protesters carried
signs saying that the people and the police are united under a religious
imperative. Meanwhile, as fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah has
intensified in recent days, it also appears that US forces are gearing up
for a major offensive in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, which is a stronghold
of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army.
The Associated Press today quotes senior military officers saying the order
to attack Najaf will be made "at the very highest levels of the U.S.
government," an indication that President Bush may have the final word on
whether soldiers there begin an offensive.
Meanwhile, there are rumors that Bush himself made the decision that
Fallujah would have to be massively punished for the desecration of the
bodies of the US mercenaries killed there, and that Gen. John Abizaid
strongly agreed. The Marines have now reportedly given the people of
Fallujah just "days" to negotiate a final settlement, with an implied "or
else."
As the killings continue in Iraq, a controversy is brewing at the United
Nations over allegations of corruption within the so-called oil-for-food
program. The former head of that program, Benon Sevan, has been accused of
taking payment in the form of an oil allotment from Saddam Hussein's
government. Sevan denies the allegation. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
said yesterday that if U.N. staff are found to be guilty "we will deal with
them very severely."
These allegations come as the deadline approaches for what the Bush
administration calls the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30th.
This week, senior State Department and Defense officials told the Senate and
House Armed Services Committees that the new Iraqi interim government
scheduled to take control on July 1 will have only 'limited sovereignty' and
no authority over United States and other military forces already there.
* Tariq Ali , author of several books including Bush in Babylon: The
Recolonization of Iraq and Clash of Fundamentalisms.
* Ian Williams, UN correspondent for The Nation and author of the
forthcoming book Deserter: George Bush, Soldier of Fortune.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! the "War and Peace Report."
democracynow.org. I'm Amy Goodman broadcasting from St. Louis. Juan Gonzalez
is in New York. Today in Basra, Iraq, some 800 supporters of Iraqi Shiite
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held a demonstration in which they alleged that the
british were responsible for the multiple suicide bombings in Basra earlier
this week. In those bombings, 68 people were killed, including 20 school
children. Their bus blown up as they traveled to school. Protesters carried
signs saying the people and the police are united under a religious
imperative. Meanwhile, as fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah intensified
over recent days, it also appears U.S. forces are gearing up for a major
offensive in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, which is a stronghold of al-Sadr
and his Mahdi army. The Associated Press today quotes senior military
officers saying the order to attack Najaf will be made, quote, "at the very
highest levels of the U.S. government - an indication president Bush may
have the final word on whether soldiers will begin an offensive there."
Meanwhile, there are rumors Bush himself made the decision that Fallujah
would have to be massively punished for the desecration of the bodies of
U.S. mercenaries killed there, and that General John Abizaid strongly
agreed. The Marines have now reportedly given the people of Fallujah just
days to negotiate a final settlement with an implied "or else." We'll start
with Tariq Ali who is here in St. Louis for the conference that is being
sponsored by the Union for Democratic Communications. Tariq Ali, the author
of many books on the middle east and Iraq, coming from Britain. Your
response to this latest news. And welcome.
TARIQ ALI: Hi, Amy. Well, it's very grim news. Basically the United States
and the citizens of the United States should now be aware that the number of
people who want the West to carry on occupying Iraq are a tiny minority.
Most of them are collaborating with the occupation. The rest of the people
want the United States out of Iraq. And as long as foreign troops remain in
Iraq, you will have a resistance which will become increasingly violent. It
was very interesting just before I left Britain, it was very interesting
hearing Brigadier Carter, senior British officer in southern Iraq, saying
that if 150,000 demonstrators marched outside our barracks, we would not
open fire. That would be time to pack up our bags and leave. But I think
this time has now come. It's obvious that the occupation has become
untenable. What is rarely reported here is the number of American soldiers
coming back with nervous breakdowns. That's very -- you know, we've been
talking about the photographs. But the numbers were coming back seriously
wounded or mentally ill because of what they're being made to do is hardly
reported. And those numbers are higher than they were in Vietnam for the
first four years.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Tariq Ali here in St. Louis. In New York,
we're joined by Ian Williams, and we also want to discuss, as the killings
continue in Iraq, a controversy that's brewing in the United Nations over
allegations of corruption with the so-called Oil-For-Food Program. The
former head of that program, Benon Sevan, has been accused of taking payment
in the form of an oil allotment from Saddam Hussein's government. Sevan
denies the allegation. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday if
U.N. staff are found to be guilty, "we will deal with them very severely."
These allegations come as the deadline approaches for what the Bush
administration calls the handover of sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. This
week, senior State Department and Pentagon officials told the Senate Armed
Forces Services Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, that the new
Iraqi interim government scheduled to take control on July 1 will have only
limited sovereignty and no authority over the United States and other
military forces already there. Ian Williams, you have written about this in
The Nation magazine and you have a book coming up called "Deserter: George
Bush, Soldier of Fortune." Can you talk about the Oil-For-Food Program
discussion, how it's being framed?
IAN WILIAMS: Well, of the actual ones -- not even solid piece of evidence,
but the one allegation which is that one person in the U.N. Oil-For-Food
program, Benon Sevan, got some money is something that needs looking into.
Personally I know the guy, so I think it's unlikely. He may have a price,
all of us do, but I would have thought his was higher than this. The real
issue is that the -- sort of the people that have been making these
allegations are trying to dump the whole of the $10 billion that Saddam
Hussein got from oil smuggling on the U.N. I would -- I think if you looked
at the contrast between the Financial Times on Saturday morning and the New
York Times, the Financial Times referred it to as the Iraqi Oil-For-Food
Scandal, whereas the American press, taking the cue from the Wall Street
Journal, which did the running on this originally, always refers to it as
the U.N.-For-Food Scandal. And really I think if you look at the sources of
this, it's Ahmed Chalabi, who will almost certainly be ousted in any
U.N.-brokered deal that comes out on June 30, regardless of anything else,
and secondly the Wall Street Journal and the people who are writing it, you
suspect that this is the neocons who 12 months ago said that the U.N. is
dead and they cheered for it. And now they're very peeved. But they can't
come out publicly in the Pentagon because, of course, the administration
wants the U.N. to succeed in some form on June 30 for electoral reasons. But
these neocons have got a pathological hatred of the organization, and I
think that's really what we're seeing now, it's sort of an internal fight in
the administration that's spilling over into the public.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Ian, you also raise in your article that this may also be
the first big move in terms of challenging Kofi Annan for re-election as
U.N. Secretary, can you talk a little bit about that?
IAN WILLIAMS: Well, he's due for a third term. By many people's lights, he
is certainly possibly the most successful Secretary-General ever. We're
measuring by different terms for most other things. He's annoyed fewer
people and managed to walk the tightrope that the job needs. And there are
some people in the U.N. administration who would very much like him to run
for a third term. Once again, those same people we're talking about have
very strong ideas about this. Kofi Annan is the man who didn't put himself
behind the coalition invasion of Iraq. He's the guy who actually said it was
illegal on several occasions. And although George Bush seems not to have
noticed, the neocons have thinner skins and are not going to forgive him for
it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: When will that vote occur at the U.N.?
IAN WILLIAMS: The election campaign will really set up next year.
Technically, the way -- the Asians say "their turn" next. But I think most
of the council would be pragmatic. Kofi Annan is not going to say I want the
job. That would be a mistake. If he is at all considering it, it will be
because the delegation comes to him and says, please, please, Kofi, will you
stay on? And what's happening in Iraq is going to impinge on that a lot
because there's so many different shades there. Kofi Annan does not want to
be handed the job of being Viceroy of Iraq or being held responsible for it.
Yet the reason that the U.S. administration wants the U.N. in there is that
from June 30 they will be blaming any casualties in Iraq on the United
Nations, not on the administration's policy. Our boys will be there dying
for the United Nations, which, of course, annoys the neocons, but provides a
good excuse for George Bush.
AMY GOODMAN: I was just talking to a reporter who had come out of Iraq
investigating Iraqi business and mainly U.S. corporation business corruption
in Iraq. And he was saying how this whole Oil-For-Food corruption story is
not very tough to get. In fact, it is being spoon fed to reporters by the
U.S. government and the Iraqi National Congress, the I.N.C. He was saying
that everywhere you turn, they'll give you so-called secret documents that
are proving that the U.N. was corrupt. Tariq Ali, your response to that?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I think Ian's right on this. It's Chalabi who's been
responsible for most of the misinformation that we've had on the Iraq war.
Journalists have now admitted, senior journalists who should have known
better that they were spoon fed stuff by Chalabi and this gang in order to
convince a skeptical public that they needed to go to war, and they've now
caught on to this when I'm sure there are far worse corruption stories in
Iraq taking place even as we speak. This is a colonial occupation taking
place in a neo-liberal world, where the Iraqi merchants, traders,
capitalists, are not being given the chance as foreign companies are going
in. I don't know whether you noticed, Amy, but Britain which certainly could
have expected more, given Blair's loyalty, has been handed the contract for
doing the sewage works in Iraq, which indicates that someone in the Pentagon
has a sense of humor. They've given Blair the job he really has been doing
for Bush ever since they decided to go to war. So, there are real stories to
be tracked down in Iraq. This I don't think is one of them. The real story
for me, leaving corruption aside for a moment, is who carried out the
killings in Karbala. Who is responsible for some of the attacks which are
taking place in Iraq, which are being denied by everyone? Attacks which are
designed to divide Shias from Sunnis, Shias from each other, etc. And that's
the story which someone should be tracking down, who is doing it? I don't
think it's the British. I think Muqtada al-Sadr is wrong on that. But there
is someone, because every single group in Iraq is denying it and normally
they don't deny these stories.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Tariq Ali, I'd liking to ask you, in terms of the
apparent ability of the U.S. occupation forces to create greater unity
between the Shiites and the Sunnis, and sort of a National Resistance Front
against the occupation, any thoughts on that?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I think the -- all the attempts to divide them failed
because of what they did in Fallujah. I mean, basically the punishment of a
town because of resistance groups inside it goes back to the Second World
War. It's the Germans, the Third Reich that started this whole thing of
punishing a whole town for what some of the civilians or members of the
resistance did. This was then carried through in Vietnam. If you remember
the famous episode where that Major of the Marines said the only way we can
save the town was to destroy it. Not even realizing the irony of what he was
saying. And we have similar rhetoric now coming out of Iraq and, of course,
the effect it has on Iraqis is exactly the opposite. When Fallujah was
bombed and 700 people were killed, including quite a few women and children,
according to reports coming out of the Arab world, on television, Shia and
Sunni mosques in Baghdad united and sent joint convoys, similarly when you
have the bombings in Najaf and Karbala, citizens in Fallujah lined up to
give blood. So, the attempt to divide the Shias and Sunnis and shiias from
each other is not working so far, and all the indications are that they're
getting closer together, which is not good for a colonial-style occupation.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen right now, Tariq Ali?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I think that the only reason to bring the U.N. in, I think
Ian's right. Bush wants it to save his bacon. To say that we handed over
power, the U.N. is now in charge, where as it will not be in charge. It will
be the armies on the ground that will be in charge. I think the U.N. could
play a useful role as a face-saving device for the Americans and the West --
the occupying countries to organize an orderly transition to a total pullout
of all foreign troops. That's got to happen so that the Iraqis can actually
exercise their own sovereignty. Now this might mean that they might elect a
government which, in fact, is now quite likely, which will demand Iraqi
control of Iraqi oil and will demand its own foreign policy. It will
probably have close relations and ties with the Iranians, and why not,
that's their right to do it. It's what Sam Huntington has started calling
the "democratic paradox", and the paradox being that sometimes democracy can
produce governments you don't like. But I thought that was the whole point
of democracy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Ian Williams, I'd like to ask you in terms of what you
see in covering the United Nations or the U.N. role in helping to broker or
create this transitional government that would take over on June 30.
IAN WILLIAMS: I think the role is almost symbolic. The U.N.'s role is to
provide what one diplomat this week called a "virgin birth" for the new -
whatever the new regime, whatever the new government is. It has to have a
virgin birth, free of the taint of occupational sin. And the U.N. is one of
the few organizations that can do this, that can kosher it. And, of course,
if it had been more actively involved in the beginning, instead of being
held off, it might have been more effective. But now Rahimi has to pull a
rabbit out of his hat by June 30, he has to get it past the U.N. Security
Council, many of whose members will have precisely the same type of
arguments that we've just heard from Tariq about the command and control of
the multinational force, and so it's far from being a done deal. In the
background of this, we have the rabbit that Rahimi did pull out of the hat
in Afghanistan is getting skinned and boiled alive because the U.S. has
refused to put any backing with the central government in Kabul against the
war lords that it won the war with originally. It doesn't auger well. But
hovering over all of this, I think apart from any geo-strategic points of
view, I think that Karl Rove and the White House will be looking at how this
plays out for November, regardless of what happens to the Iraqis.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about right now? The uprising that is taking place in
Iraq, in Fallujah, now we see Basra, Baghdad. Both the uprising and the
mercenaries.
TARIQ ALI: Well, the mercenaries are a way now in which wars are going to be
fought, Amy. They will not want their own soldiers to take so many hits. So,
they hire people privately to go in and act as so-called security guards.
This is another name for mercenaries. Mercenaries in a near-liberal age.
Other countries are being asked also to send in more troops to take the
hits. I was in Spain last -- I was in Spain last week and the mood in Madrid
and Barcelona was buoyant because the Spanish leader had been elected. In
his first speech in Parliament as Prime Minister he said our troops are
coming out. We're not waiting until June 30. The whole country was
celebrating a politician who is going to do what he said he would do. And I
wish John Kerry, instead of attacking him, would learn from that. That if
you offer the American people a choice, which on foreign policy is no
different, some of them might not turn up to vote. I mean, Iraq and
Palestine are two key issues. And on these issues, Kerry is essentially
backing Bush, making very half-hearted criticism. Last night, I heard a
democratic senator saying the key is to get Germany and France on side, I
don't care a toss about the United Nations. Fair enough if that's what he
believes. But it could lose the democrats the election if they don't put up
a stronger fight on foreign policy, which they don't seem to be doing.
AMY GOODMAN: I really want to thank you. Go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZALEZ: No, I just want to ask quickly, Ian Williams, at the United
Nations the response of some of the diplomats you talked to about Kerry's
very strange positions on Iraq.
IAN WILLIAMS: Well, it's America. They just raise their eyes to have -- it's
not so much Iraq. There's a whole set of fuzzy logic there. A lot of U.N.
diplomats will accept the fact that until the Iraqi security forces are
built up, there will be a need for foreign troops, and that's the message
they're getting from a lot of Iraqis as well. The real question is the
command and control of those troops and as we've seen, in Fallujah, would
the United Nations or the interim Iraqi government in whatever form it takes
counter against the type of collective punishment we're talking about? And
one that - I think a disturbing story is following on Kerry's other
proclivities this week, is that the U.S. military has been getting aid and
support from the Israeli defense forces for how to conduct this type of
warfare. If you could look at one group of people that has been
spectacularly unsuccessful in ending an occupation, of winning the hearts
and minds of the population, then it has to be the Israeli defense forces,
and that explains a lot for what is being carried out in Fallujah now.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Ian Williams, for joining us, U.N.
correspondent for The Nation and author of the upcoming book "Deserter,
George Bush: Soldier of Fortune" and Tariq Ali, author of many books
including "Bush in Babylon: The Reclonization of Iraq." Thank you for
joining us.

Friends,

Shashi Tharoor is a prize-winning novelist and the author of the biography
"Nehru: The Invention of India". In this commentary for the LA Times, he
writes about the recent Indian cricket tour of Pakistan. He touches on the
political implications of the tour and how one Muslim playing for India has
thumbed his nose at the Hindu fundamentalists who wish to re-define India on
their own narrow terms.

He writes about Indian pace bowler Irfan Pathan, a Muslim from Gujarat who
brought glory to his country and shame to people "like Pravin Togadia of the
fiercely anti-Muslim Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council - who
took the opportunity to redefine Indianness on their own terms."

Shashi Tharoor goes on to write:
"Neither Pathan's religion nor his ethnicity would have qualified him as
Indian enough in the ()World Hindu) council's eyes. He is not just a Muslim,
but the son of a muezzin, one whose waking hours are spent calling the
Islamic faithful to prayer. Worse still, he is a Pathan, whose forebears
belong to a land that is no longer part of Indian territory. To be a
Gujarati Muslim Pathan is a triple disqualification in the eyes of Togadia."

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
--------------------
April 16, 2004

A Subcontinental Rivalry Where Tolerance Wins
Indian cricket players' warm reception in Pakistan bodes well for all.

By Shashi Tharoor
The LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-tharoor16apr16,0,536968
9.story?coll==la-news-comment-opinions

The current Indian cricket tour of Pakistan is reaching a climax after a
long and closely fought series. The four weeks that have preceded this one
have done wonders for India-Pakistan relations off the field: The thousands
of Indian tourists who received "cricket visas" to attend the games have
been welcomed with such warmth in Pakistan that the Indian media have been
overflowing with tales of the hospitality and generosity of their hosts.

So many Indian visitors have found themselves receiving "friendship
discounts" at stores (and free food and drink) that a popular joke has local
Pakistanis pretending to be Indian tourists in order to enjoy some of the
same benefits. This has been such a far cry from the bitterness and
hostility between the two countries in recent years that cricket has entered
the diplomatic lexicon as the most effective of "Track Two"
confidence-building measures. It hasn't hurt, either, that the cricket
played has been exceptionally memorable.

But the Indian performance in Pakistan may have important consequences for
Hindu-Muslim relations within India as well. Few events have been as
emblematic of the deterioration between the two major religious communities
of the subcontinent as the horror of the Gujarat massacres in 2002, when
upwards of 1,000 Muslims were murdered in retaliation for the burning alive
of 59 Hindus on a train by a Muslim mob.

Now, just two years later, one of the newest stars of the Indian team in
Pakistan is a 19-year-old Indian Muslim from Gujarat, Irfan Pathan, playing
only his second tour at the senior level.

The sight of this telegenic young man bounding down to hurl his well-placed
thunderbolts at the Pakistani batsmen has been filling Indian hearts with a
potent mixture of pride and awe. The Indian team, one of the best of all
time, is full of players of great achievement, and Pathan is still too young
and too raw to be mentioned in the same breath. Yet what he has brought to
the squad is far more than the vigor of his youth and his fresh-faced good
looks, far more than the energy and enthusiasm that animate his exceptional
skill as a fast bowler. It is that his performance is testament, also, to
the indestructible pluralism of India.

Many Muslims have played cricket for India; three have even captained the
country. But the violence in Gujarat had brought to the forefront many
rabble-rousers - like Pravin Togadia of the fiercely anti-Muslim Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council - who took the opportunity to
redefine Indianness on their own terms.

Neither Pathan's religion nor his ethnicity would have qualified him as
Indian enough in the council's eyes. He is not just a Muslim, but the son of
a muezzin, one whose waking hours are spent calling the Islamic faithful to
prayer. Worse still, he is a Pathan, whose forebears belong to a land that
is no longer part of Indian territory. To be a Gujarati Muslim Pathan is a
triple disqualification in the eyes of Togadia.

But Pathan has not just shrugged off this treble burden, he has broken
triumphantly through it. And he has done so without apology for his identity
or his faith. Interviewed after one match-winning performance, Pathan spoke
of his happiness that India had won "after" (not "because of") his bowling,
and attributed this success to his maker. "God is with me. I knew with God's
help I'll bowl well. I had that confidence in God."

The muezzin's son had invoked Allah's blessings on his predominantly Hindu
team, seemingly oblivious to the fact that its opponents were playing under
the green banner of an Islamic republic. What a wonderful reinvention of
Indian secularism.

So when Pathan beams his dazzling smile after taking yet another wicket for
the India he so proudly represents, he makes Indians feel more than
cricketing pride. He reminds us that India is a country where it is possible
for a 19-year-old from a beleaguered minority to ascend to the peak of the
nation's sporting pantheon; and, even more, that he represents an idea, an
immortal Indian idea that some have allowed themselves to forget: that the
country is large enough and diverse enough to embrace everyone who chooses
to belong to it, whatever their caste, creed, color, costume or custom. The
pluralist palimpsest of Indianness can never be diminished by the killers of
Gujarati Muslims and the evil men who incited them. Irfan Pathan is their
standing, leaping, glorious repudiation.

*

Friends,

This week's TIME Magazine in Canada has a cover story on "Islam and Canada."
The 10-page report concludes with an essay by yours truly, titled, "It's
Time to End the Silence. Canadian Muslims must combat the encroaching threat
of fundamentalism."

Here is the full report from TIME's website. For some unexplained reason, my
essay is not yet available on-line.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
-------------------
May 3 2004

Islam And Canada
Muslims are growing in numbers and political clout. But is the country too
soft on Islam’s radicals?

By Steven Frank
TIME Magazine
http://www.timecanada.com/index.adp

On a gray Sunday morning outside Toronto’s North York City Center,
librarygoers meander to and from the otherwise quiet underground shopping
mall. But inside a hall in the concrete complex, a frightening vision of
Canada is being conjured up. Some 300 fired-up members of Toronto’s Muslim
community have gathered to debate a proposal to establish a Shari‘a court.

In Canada? When she first heard about it last year, women’s rights activist
Azar Majedi thought the idea of a tribunal in Canada based on Islamic
jurisprudence was a joke. “I was overwhelmed, shocked,” Iran-born Majedi
told the audience. “To see the seeds of an Islamic republic being sown here
in Canada is terrifying.”

Her fears were repeated by a succession of speakers during the conference.
Many expressed concern that women would be pressured to appear before the
Shari‘a court. Azam Kamguian, founder of the London-based Committee to
Defend Women’s Rights in the Middle East, worried that Canada’s tendency
toward tolerance would make people turn a blind eye to a system that would
allow “Islamists to impose their agenda” on Canadian Muslims. “We cannot let
multiculturalism become the last refuge of oppression,” she said. Another
speaker said Shari‘a law is racist and misogynist. “The Shari‘a court is an
extension of that movement that stones women and hangs apostates from cranes
in the streets of Iran,” human rights activist Maryam Namazie said,
eliciting wild applause. “Enough is enough.”

Proponents of the court disagree. They say adjudicators would mediate only
civil and family disputes, would not hand out penal punishments, and their
decisions would be subject to appeal to a Canadian court. But if the system
of Islamic justice, which could be instituted this year, would not be vastly
different from Canadian legal norms, why create it? Because, Mubin Shaikh, a
Shari‘a proponent, said during a break in the debate, it is a tenet of
Muslim belief that Islamic law is superior to “man-made law.” Canada’s
Muslims want to live in a secular, parliamentary democracy, he told Time.
But, Shaikh claimed, they also want to be judged by fellow Muslims, not
white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. “How can these people relate to any of [Islam
’s] cultural nuances?” he asked.

The past few years have seen unprecedented growth and prosperity in the
Canadian Muslim community, and also the rumblings of a political awakening.
But it has been a time of tension. The debate over a Shari‘a court is only
the latest flashpoint for a community strained by disputes over how to
integrate into Canadian society while maintaining its Muslim identity. There
is a small but vocal group that would like to see Islamic principles play a
larger part in all aspects of their lives. There is also an extremist group,
probably tiny, with views that would not be out of place in the
ultraconservative circles of Iran or Saudi Arabia. All this has created
unease among the more moderate majority, who want a clear separation between
mosque and state and have concerns about some of the cultural baggage being
dragged into Canadian society, especially regarding attitudes toward women.
The debate has raised alarms for non-Muslims, who fear that Canada’s liberal
tolerance is being stretched to the breaking point in the name of
multiculturalism.

Complicating the debate has been the single most traumatic event in the
Canadian Muslim experience: the terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington in 2001. Leaders of the Muslim community condemned the attacks at
the time and have since repeated their condemnation. But many Muslims have
been adversely affected by the fallout of Sept. 11, 2001. Some have suffered
from the immediate rise in hate crimes directed against Muslims; others have
had difficulties traveling to or through the U.S. Still others have been
under increased surveillance by Canadian officials—or, at the very least,
have lived with a perception of increased government scrutiny. While the
number of hate crimes has subsided, the surveillance has not. Officials
insist that the threat of terrorists using Canada as a safe haven remains
real. The arrest in late March of a Canada-born Ottawa man, Mohammad Momin
Khawaja, on terrorism charges served to further vex both those worried about
terrorists finding refuge in their streets and mosques and those who say
authorities are unfairly targeting Muslims.

The effect of these countervailing forces on Canadian Muslims has been both
infuriating and instructive. Many in the silent majority have become
politically engaged for the first time; others have asserted their rights
and reached out to the rest of Canadian society. Hadeel al-Shalchi, 23, a
spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada (Cair-Can),
sums up the mood: Terrorists, she says, “pushed a lot of us to say, I am a
Muslim Canadian and this is how I live, and I won’t allow my faith to be
hijacked by extremists.”

The new activism has awakened the rest of Canada to the growing Muslim
presence. The first Muslims arrived in Canada in the late 19th century; most
were traders from Syria and Lebanon. Turbulence in Lebanon, Iran, Somalia,
the Balkans and Iraq led to a new wave of immigration in the late 1980s and
’90s. Because Canadian Muslims have a higher-than-average birthrate and
because an estimated 3,000 Canadians convert to Islam annually, in the ’90s
Islam surpassed Judaism to become Canada’s second largest religion. Between
the last two censuses, in 1991 and 2001, the number of Canadian residents
who identify themselves as Muslim more than doubled, to 580,000—a number
that is expected to double again by 2011.

Canadian Muslims come from more than 50 ethnic groups around the globe.
“There is a huge risk of trying to pigeon-hole Muslims as some sort of
homogeneous group that acts and thinks alike,” says Tarek Fatah, co-founder
of the grass-roots Muslim Canadian Congress. Taken as a whole, though,
Muslims are among the most highly educated of all Canadians. Among young
men, for instance, Muslims are second only to Jews in the percentage with a
high school or university education.

If you live in a big city today, it’s difficult to miss Muslims’ impact on
Canadian society. Everything from religious schools to Islamic clothing
shops has sprouted across the country. The Toronto area has more than 50
mosques, with perhaps 50 more elsewhere in Ontario. Retailers such as Ikea
and the Bay have begun targeting advertising to coincide with Islamic
holidays. In January, the first minaret rose into the skyline in Ville
Saint-Laurent to cater to the growing Muslim population in that Montreal
suburb. As in scores of other schools, a private girls-only sports club
started up in October in Beaconsfield, west of Montreal. In a quintessential
Canadian moment, several young women spread a sheet on a corner of a
gymnasium before a recent floor hockey game, removed their shoes and bowed
their foreheads to the ground. “First we pray, then we play,” says Aaliya
Ahmad, 18, a social-sciences student.

The quiet and steady integration of Muslims into Canadian life suffered
after the attacks on New York City and Washington. In the fallout, Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (R.C.M.P.) commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli saw “a
backlash of violence and of vandalism” directed against Muslims. In Toronto,
where almost half the Canadian Muslim population lives, police say the
number of reported hate crimes against Muslims spiked from one case in the
year 2000 to 57 in 2001.

And Riad Saloojee, executive director of cair-can, says 90% of hate
incidents go unreported. In the wake of the increased surveillance, the
introduction of tough new antiterrorism legislation in December 2001 and a
number of highly publicized cases in which officials appear to have targeted
people unjustifiably, says Saloojee, many Muslims don’t want to get involved
with the police. “The fear is that many people can be linked somehow, some
way,” to terrorists, he says. Charitable donations to Islamic groups are way
down because Muslims are afraid their association with a particular
organization may come back to haunt them, says Faisal Kutty, a lawyer who
works with the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association. Mobina Jaffer,
Canada’s first Muslim Senator, has held cross-country hearings on racial
profiling. “I think that [Canadian] Muslims felt very welcome and very
integrated before Sept. 11,” Jaffer says. But since then, she contends,
continual police scrutiny has made all Canadian Muslims feel as if they are
being viewed as terrorists. “These people are just feeling very much under
siege,” she says.

It can feel that way at the Muslim Non-Profit Housing Corp. of
Ottawa-Carleton, an all-Muslim housing co-op a stone’s throw from Parliament
Hill. Before 2001, the building’s garage was watched by three security
cameras to prevent car theft. Now there are 16 cameras, reflecting tenants’
fears that their building presents a tempting target for anti-Islamic goons.
“We always worry about backlash,” says the co-op’s executive director, Kemal
Ally. The r.c.m.p. and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS)
are also watching the building, residents say.

Trouble is, there is reason to think that some terrorists have taken
advantage of Canada’s liberal traditions. Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside
Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, says terrorist groups base themselves in
Canada so that they can develop “support networks” to generate propaganda,
raise funds, recruit new members and procure materials for struggles
elsewhere. A 2002 CSIS report echoes other Western intelligence assessments:
“With the possible exception of the United States, there are more
international terrorist organizations active in Canada than anywhere in the
world.”

Some Canadian Muslims are skeptical. Aly Hindy, who is the self-described
“fundamentalist” imam of the Salaheddin mosque in eastern Toronto, has
decried the constant surveillance of members of his mosque by CSIS agents.
He believes that Canadian officials have passed on misleading information to
foreign governments and that as a consequence some Salaheddin congregants
have been falsely arrested and tortured abroad. Even Hindy was surprised,
however, when members of the Khadr family, Canadian citizens who attended
the mosque in the 1990s, admitted to the CBC in a March documentary that
they were “an al-Qaeda family.” Two of the Khadrs have since returned to
Canada from Pakistan, leading to a public outcry that they be stripped of
their citizenship. “Every society has people with extreme views,” Hindy
says. “We can’t take their nationality because of that.”

There’s no doubt that some Muslims have expressed extreme views in Canada.
In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, according to the Toronto Star, an imam
speaking at the Islamic Society of Toronto accused the Western media of
spreading “false propaganda” by blaming Muslims for the attacks on New York
City and Washington. At the time, the mosque’s president, Abdul Ingar, said
he doubted that such words were spoken. But more than two years later, he
told Time that he is still not sure who was behind the attacks. “I don’t
know. I’m not part of the intelligence of any country,” he says. Just over a
year ago, a mosque in the western Toronto suburb of Etobicoke warned on its
Internet message service that wishing someone a Merry Christmas is like
congratulating a murderer. Mosque leaders quickly apologized and blamed the
message on a junior employee who had acted without the administration’s
permission.

The power held by ultraconservative mosques in Canada worries moderate
Muslims. Immigration consultant Ali Naqvi thinks some hard-line leaders
wield too much influence over congregants. “It’s fine to go to the mullahs
for advice about religion, but people go to them for advice about education,
their careers,” Naqvi says. “If there is an incident of domestic violence,
people say, Let’s go to the mullah. But what kind of marriage counseling is
he going to give if the woman is not even allowed to speak?” The Muslim
Canadian Congress’s Fatah says he is uneasy about fundamentalist leaders who
denounce certain lifestyles as non-Muslim and who insist that “if it is not
acceptable in Saudi Arabia, it is not acceptable elsewhere.”

How deeply have the more extreme forms of Islam penetrated Canada? Carl
Sharif El-Tobgui, a Ph.D. student at McGill University’s Institute for
Islamic Studies, estimates that as many as 10% to 20% of Canada’s Muslims
adhere to the principles of Wahhabism, practiced by the strict orthodox
Sunni Muslim sect founded in Arabia more than 200 years ago. Those figures
are disputed by others, including Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim
Council of Montreal, who dismisses them as “nonsense.” But certainly, the
bookstore at the Assuna Annabawiyah mosque, Montreal’s busiest, offers a
range of Wahhabist teachings. Yet though the Saudis have funded Canadian
mosques for decades, Elmenyawi says their influence is on the wane. “Since
September 11, the Saudi government has completely shut down” funding, he
says.

While condemning extremism, the silent majority has taken a
live-and-let-live stance toward the radical groups. Some find that approach
dangerous, however. Irshad Manji, author of the best-selling The Trouble
with Islam, says “30 years of official multiculturalism have fostered a
noninterference pact between groups in Canada.” Manji says young Muslims who
would otherwise publicly criticize the status quo have been silenced by
threats of persecution. “I’ve engaged enough of these supporters to know
that they mean physical retaliation against themselves and their families if
they go public,” she says.

Some non-muslim observers are uneasy about developments. John Stackhouse,
professor of religion at the University of British Columbia, expects a
cultural clash for which he thinks that the country is ill-prepared. “We
have used multiculturalism as a slogan to congratulate ourselves on our
broadmindedness since 1972,” he says. “But it didn’t cost us much because
the majority of us were then, and now, Christians or ex-Christians.” It’s
only when there’s a vocal minority that wants “to diverge from assumed
norms,” he says, “that it gets politically interesting.”

Are interesting times ahead? The fact that women are partitioned off in the
back of some mosques has not made many waves; ultra-Orthodox synagogues have
been doing the same thing for decades. Efforts to segregate Muslim boys and
girls have been more controversial. The issue hit home for Iran-born Homa
Arjomand, a Toronto social worker, when her daughter, now 16, was shunned by
other children in her elementary school because she had male friends.
Arjomand says a more orthodox form of Islam has been taking hold in Canada
since the early 1990s. “Multiculturalism feeds [this orthodox group], and
they are using it and misusing it,” she says.

One likely source of conflict will come over headwear. Last September a girl
was expelled from a private Catholic high school in Montreal for wearing a
hijab. The Quebec Human Rights Commission is now considering whether private
schools should have the right, denied to public schools, to ban the head
scarf. Michèle Asselin, president of the Federation of Women in Quebec, says
the issue is complicated. Her group argues that hijabs should not be banned
from any schools—as they have been in France—because doing so might
jeopardize girls’ educational opportunities. But, Asselin insists,
multicultural tolerance has limits. In this case, hers would be when women
or girls are forced to wear a veil or hijab. “It must be their personal
decision,” Asselin says. Other feminists have drawn a line in front of the
proposed Shari‘a court in Ontario. “I think the idea that religious courts
can have the power of law is very bad,” says women’s-rights activist Judy
Rebick. “In general, religious institutions are very patriarchal
institutions. We have a separation between church and state for a reason.”

There’s no reason to doubt that most Canadian Muslims understand and support
the justifications for that separation. They love Canada’s liberal
traditions as much as anyone else, and since 2001 have become much more
politically engaged. In last fall’s provincial elections in Ontario, 11
Muslims were on the ballot and two won seats (compared with five who ran,
all unsuccessfully, in 1999). Other Muslims are planning to run in the next
federal election, among them Monia Mazigh, who gained national prominence by
fighting to help her husband Maher Arar clear his name after he was secretly
accused of being an al-Qaeda operative in 2002. “There is this feeling that
people want their voice to reach politicians and they want someone who
represents them,” says Mazigh, who will run as a candidate for the New
Democratic Party in an Ottawa riding.

Others are finding different ways to step up to the national microphone. In
1998, three Iraq-born university students from Montreal formed the hip-hop
band Euphrates. “Hip-hop came out of a need of young blacks and Hispanics to
talk about their situations and stories,” says band member Nawaf Al-Rufaie.
“We’re in the same position as they were 20 or 30 years ago.” He says
Euphrates’ goal is to convince other Canadians that not all Muslims are
U.S.-hating extremists. “We’re trying to deconstruct the stereotype,”
Al-Rufaie says.

That’s a worthy goal. All Canadians need to know more about the growing
number of Muslims within their nation—their beliefs, their traditions, their
aspirations. And, for that matter, Canadians need to know about the
struggles within the Muslim community. Will the moderate majority gel into a
cohesive force and help shape an agenda not just for Canadian Muslims but
for Canada as a whole? In the next 10 years, there will be few more
important questions facing the country.

—With reporting by Joan Bryden/Ottawa, Melanie Collison/Edmonton, Moira
Daly, Christopher Shulgan and Leigh Anne Williams/Toronto, Deborah
Jones/Vancouver and Eileen Travers/Montreal

Friends,

Natasha Fatah is a recent journalism graduate from Toronto's Ryerson
University. She is a regular columnist for CBC On-Line's Viewpoint.

In this piece, she argues against the introduction of Sharia law in Canada.
Addressing the proponents of the Shariah law, she writes:

"If Shariah is the system you want then I challenge you to live in Saudi
Arabia. I challenge you to give up all the freedoms you enjoy here. No more
freedom of movement, to go and live where you please. No more freedom to
read or write or say what you like in public. No right to challenge
authority. Yes, Saudi Arabia is an example of Shariah gone horribly awry but
what is the guarantee that it won't happen here?"

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
---------------
April 1, 2004

One law for all

By Natasha Fatah
CBC News Viewpoint
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_fatah/20040401.html

A few years ago, a good friend of mine living in Pakistan lost her father to
cancer. She is the eldest sibling in the family and as she had done her
whole life, she managed all the responsibilities for the family including
the funeral arrangements.

However, my friend got a rude awakening when her father's inheritance was
handed out and she found that everything – the business, the jewelry, the
money and all the family assets – had been distributed to her younger
brother. She got nothing. Why? Because under certain interpretations of
Shariah law, men are entitled to more inheritance then their sisters or
wives.

Today Shariah is finding a new home in Canada. In 1991, an amendment was
made to Ontario's Arbitration Act, allowing parties to settle disputes
outside the courts. This was supposed to ease the overly-burdened court
system and save Ontario taxpayers some money.

What it also did was open the gates in Canada for Shariah law, and a small
group of Muslims in Toronto has set up a Shariah arbitration court where the
arbiters will make judgments on civil matters such as divorce, inheritance
and child custody. After they come to a decision they'll send the finding to
a provincial judge for a stamp of approval.

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on Shariah but, this is the most widely
agreed upon definition: Shariah is a set of principles that a Muslim should
use to guide decisions and affairs in his or her life. It's based on the
Qur'an, Islam's holy book, and the Sunnah, sayings of Prophet Muhammad. This
sounds OK – ease up the pressure on the provincial courts and promote
freedom of religion, right? Wrong. There is something not quite kosher here.

These supposed arbiters of justice in the Shariah court – what
qualifications do these men have to make decisions on legal matters in
Canada? Absolutely none. This is a self-appointed House of Lords. They don't
need to know the law, they don't need to know the rules, hell, they may not
even need to know the Qur'an, because they are accountable to no one.

Furthermore, if these arbiters will send their rulings to a provincial judge
for a stamp of approval, isn't that admitting that the Canadian system is a
better measurement of justice? Sure, there are flaws in the Canadian
judicial system but at least you can challenge the politicians that make the
laws and the police and judges who enforce them.

There is no formal system through which you can challenge religious clerics,
the masters of the Shariah universe. And if you do challenge them, get ready
to be called a blasphemer.

Of course, I understand that for some people they feel better discussing
difficult personal problems with those who share a common cultural
background and common values. But, Alia Hogben from the Canadian Council of
Muslim Women offers this suggestion, "Why can't it be just informal
mediation? Why does it have to be a binding arbitration? A binding
arbitration using Shariah law can, and has been historically detrimental to
women. What is there that they can solve with Shariah that they can't with a
secular Canadian court?"

Hogben conducts counselling and mediation for Muslim women but she insists
that if it comes to legal matters, the women should turn to the Canadian
justice system.

Besides, whose version of Shariah law are we going to accept? Afghanistan's?
Where women are shrouded their whole lives. Saudi Arabia's? Where they cut
off your body parts if you get caught stealing. Nigeria's? Where they'll
stone you to death for committing adultery. These are extreme examples but
they are the reality.

You see, there is no agreed upon interpretation of Shariah because in every
country where it is practised, the interpretation is based on the opinion of
the individual religious cleric. There are no international standards, there
are no safeguards, and the system is too insecure. Without consensus on the
interpretation how can anyone feel safe going to these religious courts?

Raheel Raza of the Muslim Canadian Congress wrote in the Toronto Star last
year: "Since Shariah has always been interpreted by men, they spend more
time telling women how to be proper women, thus losing sight of the actual
message."

I've lived in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two countries that practise Shariah
law. I love the country of my birth, and the country of my youth, and now
Canada, the country of my choice. And with that choice I've agreed to live
by the laws of this land.

If Shariah is the system you want then I challenge you to live in Saudi
Arabia. I challenge you to give up all the freedoms you enjoy here. No more
freedom of movement, to go and live where you please. No more freedom to
read or write or say what you like in public. No right to challenge
authority. Yes, Saudi Arabia is an example of Shariah gone horribly awry but
what is the guarantee that it won't happen here?

I'm not saying that Shariah is bad or wrong. It's not about good and bad or
right and wrong. This is not about religious freedom and tolerance. This is
about the struggle for power and the privatization of a public institution.
The people who would have you believe that a separate religion-based legal
system is a form of freedom of choice are the same people who want to have
private religious schools, and yes, they want them funded with public money.

The saddest part of this whole thing is the level of divisiveness it's going
to cause – divisiveness within the Muslim community about interpretation,
and further divisiveness between Muslims and mainstream Canadians about
equality.

There's a lot of debate whether Muslim values are compatible with western
democracies. I say that they are compatible, but Shariah is the wrong way to
go. If we are equal citizens in this country, then let us all be equally
accountable under the law.

Friends,

When you feel things cannot go from bad to worse, and hope that Muslims
would figure out a way not to embarrass themselves, some group or the other
is bound to emerge and prove you wrong.

Now a Toronto Muslim group is organizing a "Muslim Fest" where they say
Muslim song, music, and art will be celebrated, but with one catch; the
festival will be conducted "compliant to the boundaries of Shariah" law.

The entry regulations state that no women will be allowed to sing; no
musical instruments will be permitted; and no art depicting human faces will
be displayed; "no hand drawn faces".

The organizers appear to be youth of Indian-Pakistani ancestry mimicking an
ethnicity and culture that exists only in the mindset of the wahabbi
teachers, not their own heritage.

How could the sons and daughters of Amir Khusrau have contempt for the
sitar? What sort of Muslims are ashamed of Umm Kulsoom, Nur Jehan or Khanum
Gugoosh,? What mindset would it take to de-bar the all-Muslim rock band
Junoon from performing?

Last month the great Muslim musician, Ustad Vilayat Ali Khan died. Born in
1928 in what is now Bangladesh, Ustad Vilayat Khan re-defined the playing of
the sitar. Will the organizers of Muslim Fest honour him? I doubt it. The
New York Times did; all of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh did, but not the
young men and women who feel obliged to re-define their heritage and reject
their own culture.

Thank goodness for the US on-line magazine, MuslimWakeup.Com for bringing
these issues to the forefront and exposing this charade of a festival; a
funfest draped in the flavour of a funeral.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
---------------
April 28, 2004

Muslim Art Festival: No Women Allowed
MuslimWakeup.Com
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/archives/000754.php

Organizers of MuslimFest 2004, an arts event planned for August 7 in
Mississauga, Canada, claim that the festival will celebrate "the best in
Muslim art, music and film."

But if you happen to be a woman who wants to perform, don't even think about
applying. As their application guidelines  state, "songs performance can be
male voices only." [http://muslimfest.com/CallForTalent.pdf]

And if you are an artist, make sure not to have any hand-drawn faces in your
artwork--that's not allowed either.

For everyone else, you have to make certain that your art conforms with the
shari'a, Islamic law. If you're not sure, just go to your bookshelf and
consult the book entitled "Shari'a." You DO have it don't you?

According to the enlightened people behind this Muslim arts festival, much
of Persian and Mughal Islamic art would be disqualified (too many hand-drawn
faces). And of course Umm Kulthum is strictly off limits.

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker Magazine
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was
one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions,
and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no
accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in
twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge
prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be
removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had
the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a
new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of
the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including
women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in
random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three
loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected
of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected
“high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named
commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military
prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war
zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served
with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a
prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions,
and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no
training in handling prisoners.

General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a
business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new
job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said
that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now
are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they
wouldn’t want to leave.”

A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly
suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system,
authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in
Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker,
written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release,
was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional
failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba
found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous
instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.
This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was
perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by
members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to
the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade
headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle
and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military
police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being
slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical
light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten
and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance
actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—
“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic
photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the
abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because
of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last
week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to
assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II,
known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A.
Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina
Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on
charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward
prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect,
Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after
becoming pregnant.

The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling
from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the
genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head,
as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown,
hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his
hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist
Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of
perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other
in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners,
again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms
crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too,
is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female
soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows
a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from
the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on
another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so
in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is
humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a
professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained.
“Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in
front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.

Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men.
There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of
another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a
photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.

The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life
that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32
hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against
Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses,
Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he
and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the
so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates
who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused
of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not
think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and
CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG
Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The
prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its
mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was
right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what
these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC
England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed
that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part
of anything that looked criminal.”

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M.
Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip
Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member
of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court,
according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation
started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across
pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an
anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn
statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”

Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his
colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware
of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police
duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of
2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick,
at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural
leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia
Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:

What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put
in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how
things were supposed to be run.

Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one
occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee
almost went into cardiac arrest.”

At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys,
Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two
dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of
Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after
exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far
away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to
engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with
a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the
presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to
convene a court-martial against Frederick.

Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai
prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense
will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in
particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really
think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?
Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have
them walk around nude?”

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that
the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and
linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors,
were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January,
he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving
inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing
them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how
military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us
to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no
toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three
days.

The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,
’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote.
“CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate
prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he
pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the
commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of
prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what
the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies—that is,
the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for
questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They
put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately
twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put
his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The
dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system,
Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”

Frederick’s defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints
in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army
reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer,
Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.

Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq
and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder’s report, filed on November 5th,
concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower
issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed
serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military
police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted
to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the
M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib.

There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report
said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable
conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of
prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a
detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and
docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been
directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI
interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for
the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police
soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the
military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were
put on notice.

Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had
not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said,
he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate
confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst
a coverup.

Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general.
“Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s]
assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this
investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees
occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report
continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that
personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed
to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI
  interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private
contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental
conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to
Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused
M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one
hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers,
toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner
and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to
  talk.”

Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told
C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . .
being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were
told that they had different rules.” Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that
he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked
what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’‘Make sure he has a bad
night.’‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’” Military intelligence made these
comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. “The MI staffs to my
understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like,
‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They
’re giving out good information.’”

When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse,
Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things
out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said
something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it
appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing,
said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses,
sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to
do this “they needed to give me paperwork.”) Taguba also cited an interview
with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian
contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as
a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner
and Frederick.

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence
officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas,
the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive
non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the
former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be
relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian
contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his
Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the
investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not
trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting
conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army
regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,”
Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI
employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had
“received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel
“were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu
  Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from
senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba
noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving
escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were
investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents
had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a
series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski
invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in
day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing
nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he
added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”

General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and
that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of
resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions,
escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences,
Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number
officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many
innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some
cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian
inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which
should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said,
was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations
regarding the release of such prisoners.

Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running,
Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems,
including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.”
The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to
deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and
throughout the mission.”

General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he
described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in
her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept
that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or
exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both
establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”

Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers
and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No
criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of
promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough
punishment.

After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major
General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had
arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the
Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an
investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian
interrogators.

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President
Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the
military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study
of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest
levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations
and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the
day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army
military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating
prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture,
was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American
intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as
a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners
is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear,
truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I
know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians
who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular
procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security
threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment
decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in
custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib
had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had
enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had
nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army;
and for the United States’ reputation in the world.

Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at
the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to
have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers,
Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the
court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client.
“I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian
contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army
relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.”

Sunday, April 25, 2004

Poking Fun, In Good Faith
Muslim Comics Laugh In the Face of Intolerance

By Caryle Murphy
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39975-2004Apr24.html

Sporting a bushy beard and black skullcap, Azhar Usman bounded onto the
stage. "I'm Osama bin Laden's cousin," he declared. "They call me 'Bin
Laughin.' "

His audience chuckled, clearly ready for more. They were seated at banquet
tables in a Rockville office building. It was a family crowd, immigrant
parents with American-born children. Some wore the traditional dress of
their native lands in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Others dressed
Western.

But they all were there on this Saturday night to laugh -- at Usman, at
themselves and at the tricky predicament of being Muslim in post-9/11
America.

"I get some dirty looks walking down the street," the Chicago comedian
protested, in feigned amazement. "People looking at me as if I was
responsible for 9/11.

"Can you believe that?

"Me responsible for 9/11?

Pause

"7-Eleven maybe?"

Across the country, Muslim comedians are hitting their stride. Like their
Jewish, Irish and African American predecessors, they are embracing ethnic
humor, not just to draw laughs but also to promote Muslim acceptance into
mainstream American society. By entertaining, they say, they aim to dispel
discriminatory stereotypes held by non-Muslims and make Muslims aware of
their own, sometimes self-defeating, foibles.

"My goal as a comedian is to make people laugh. But if I can also make them
think, then that's an added bonus," said Tissa Hami, 31, an Iranian-born
stand-up comic in Boston, whose Web site jokes that "people who disapprove
of her act will be taken hostage."

"I want to show we're not all terrorists, we're not all fanatics. That not
all Muslim women are oppressed and voiceless," Hami said.

The new prominence of Muslim-oriented comedy is evident in many ways. Muslim
stand-up comics are increasingly in demand by both Muslim and non-Muslim
groups. Canadian filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz produces what she calls "terrodies,"
or comedies about terrorism, and has named her company FUNdamentalist Films.

And next month, a new comedy tour -- organized by an African American Muslim
who grew up in Lanham -- will debut. "Allah Made Me Funny, The Official
Muslim Comedy Tour" was put together by Bryant Reginald Moss, 37, who has
specialized in black-themed humor for years under his stage name, Preacher
Moss.

The new tour, Moss said, is a way to highlight the diversity of Muslims and
the fact that African Americans make up one of the largest groups of Muslims
in the United States. The show, which will be at the D.C. Improv comedy club
in early June, gives Moss a forum to banter about both his race and
religion.

With John D. Ashcroft as attorney general, mused Moss, who now lives in Los
Angeles: "I'm worried they're going to put race and religion on driver's
licenses. . . . So when I get pulled over . . . I get two tickets!"

Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African studies at Howard University and a
scholar of Islamic issues, said the emergence of American Muslim comedians
is a sign that this community has "assimilated into the American way of
self-lampooning or satirizing, which is part of the society."

Muslims say their comics help them by easing the stresses they have faced
since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Which is why a young, hip crowd of
mostly Muslims -- many of them of Arab and Iranian descent -- filled the
Improv one night to laugh at what is normally not a laughing matter: airport
security.

Maysoon Zayid, one of five Muslim stand-ups that night, described how she
hates flying out of the Newark airport.

"I have cerebral palsy," said Zayid, 27, who was born in New Jersey of
Palestinian parents. "So when I walk in, security doesn't just see an Arab.
They see a shaking Arab. 'She's nervous!'

"And I'm afraid of flying so I'm crying. So now, I'm a crying, shaking Arab.
'She's guilty!' "

As the crowd roared laughter, Zayid said that, to make matters worse, her
father always drives her to the airport and "he looks like Saddam Hussein.
Before the hole!"

In his routine, Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed lamented that "it's a bad time to
be named Ahmed." Once, the 33-year-old comedian from California joked, a
ticket agent was skeptical about his occupation. "Oh, you're a comedian,'"
the agent purportedly said. "'Say something funny.'"

Pause.

"Ah-h-h . . . I just graduated from flight school?"

Ahmed, who with two other California-based Muslim comedians forms a comedy
team called Arabian Knights, described his idea for a new reality television
show: "It's called 'Mideastern Eye for the Midwestern Guy.' . . . Five Arabs
. . . bust into a white guy's house and teach him how to make bombs and hate
women." (Pause amid laughter) "I'm kidding. Midwestern guys already know how
to do that."

Jamilah Shami, 33, a program manager of Palestinian descent who lives in
McLean and was at the Improv that night, said that with all the "heavy
issues" that are in the news, "we really do need to . . . kick back and have
a little bit of fun and laugh."

Several comics said they stopped performing after Sept. 11, 2001, but
eventually felt a new fervor for their work, partly because of the new wave
of discrimination against Muslims.

Boston's Hami, who does not normally wear a headscarf, uses one in her act.
"I thought it would be so funny to see a veiled woman cracking jokes about
airport security," she said. "But I also did it to counter people's image of
what a veiled woman is . . . to counter that stereotype."

Muslim comedians range from the very secular-minded to the rigorously
observant. Reflecting Moss's religious practices, for example, alcohol will
not be served when "Allah Made Me Funny" plays in such venues as the Improv.

Hami, on the other hand, calls herself an "irreverent Muslim" and recently
learned that her act was dropped from a program organized by a Muslim
student group at the University of Massachusetts. "They decided I was not
appropriate," Hami said. "I was really dismayed."

Usman, 28, a law school graduate and a strictly observant Muslim, does not
use foul language in his routine, which was recently cited as "praiseworthy"
by a Muslim religious scholar discussing whether "stand-up comedy is
permissible in the Shariah," or Islamic law. He ruled that stand-up is
allowed if it is "to make people laugh" and "accompanied by noble
intentions."

Though the prophet Muhammad is said to have liked smiling and jokes, Usman
said, "there are a lot of very conservative Muslims" who don't approve of
having fun.

By contrast, American Muslims "are finally feeling comfortable laughing at
themselves and . . . at their fellow Muslims around the world," he said.

Usman's appearance in Rockville, which was organized by the nonprofit
Montgomery County Muslim Council and elicited a standing ovation, skewered
some widely recognized types in the Muslim community. His skit on "Uncle Let
Me 'Splain You" mocked older immigrants who want to explain Islam to a
national television audience, even though they haven't quite mastered
English.

These self-critical jokes, and ones from what Usman calls his "Muslim
shtick," got some of the night's biggest laughs. The requirement that
Muslims wash their face, arms and feet before making their five daily
prayers, for example, set the stage for Usman to declare that "the scariest
moment in the life of any Muslim employee" is "getting busted by your boss
with one foot in the sink" of the office restroom.

"We can relate to what he's saying. . . . He makes us seem more human," said
Mufazzalul, 21, an information technician at the U.S. Department of Labor
who was in the audience. "Muslims can have fun too," said the Potomac
resident, who uses only one name.

Muslims laughing at themselves, however, is not the same as laughing at
one's daughter. Hami said her parents have seen her perform on stage.

And?

"They think it's not too late for me to go to medical school."

Friends,

The experience of racism is ubiquitous in the lives of many of us. However,
racism doesn't always manifest itself in the form of the "White" man
practicing it against a person of colour. Many times, it is "us" mistreating
other people who we consider "inferior".

In this piece for the Denver Post, Pius Kamau, a Kenyan immigrant physician
now living in the US, talks about his experience with Indians; those who
lived with him in Kenya and the new ones who have come to Colorado to
practice medicine.

His is a painful observation for all of us. We who seep ourselves in the
hierarchy of ethnicities; a racist belief system that forces us to shun the
'other'. Pius Kamau says racism is not necessarily overt in nature.
Sometimes it is silent. He writes, "Sometimes a gesture or a look can
trigger a flood of memories. Like their kin in Africa, these new arrivals
walk and talk together, alone. They look past us, meaning "Expect nothing
from us," referring to the Indian doctors at his hospital who avoid him.

How many Pakistanis feel they are superior to Arabs and vice versa; how many
Iranians think they are actually Europeans unlucky to be born next to
Afghanistan and Pakistan; how many Arabs think they are the real McCoy,
whereas non-Arab Muslims are cheap flea-market imitations?

Racism is a cancer that finds fertile ground not just among the Indian
expatriates in the story below, but also the hearts, minds and culture of
the Muslim today.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
--------------
April 28, 2004

A history of racial tension

By Pius Kamau
The Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E418%257E2111916,00.html

Some new Indian doctors have been arriving in Colorado, the "whitest"
medical community in America. A small nest of East Indian physicians has
steadily grown around me. It's significant since, for more than two decades,
I was one of just three black surgeons and one of about 20 black physicians
in a huge community of white doctors. They say misery loves company; perhaps
the new arrivals will help dilute the vitriol that chokes so many hearts.

Dark foreigners have distinct pedigrees. Some Indians are Brahmins, others
Warriors; to Hindus, blacks are a rung below Untouchables. Medically, we're
poles apart. We say little to each other to unthaw a natural chill. Every
time we cross paths, the past bubbles up. Like the world's many competing
tribes, we suspiciously eye each other from positions defined by history.

Ours is a relationship that mirrors my colonial past. In East Africa, we
lived side by side. Africans were always Indians' servants. Indians were
second-class citizens. (Europeans were first and Africans third.) Mahatma
Gandhi may have led his nation's fight against British rule, but Kenya's
Indians never joined Africans in their struggle for independence;
colonialism was just fine.

Sometimes a gesture or a look can trigger a flood of memories. Like their
kin in Africa, these new arrivals walk and talk together, alone. They look
past us, meaning "Expect nothing from us."

Certain religions govern their followers' behavior, controlling every
motion, emotion and thought. Hindus can't help themselves. Humanity exists
in a rigid chamber in Hinduism; one's caste never changes. Brahmins are
empowered; lower castes enslaved. Blacks fit nicely within this group.

After living with Hindu culture for decades, I've found only two Indian
luminaries worthy of admiration: Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of love and
patience; and Gandhi, who was assassinated for his reconciliatory teachings.
Any religion whose gods consign a large number of its children to slavery
and bondage is suspect and odious. With due respect to mythologist Joseph
Campbell, I find Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, Krishna and other Hindu gods
unconvincing.

Sometimes we're our father's sons, slavish practitioners of the tribe's
customs and our history's reflection pond. Aurora's Hindus resemble others
in my Africa.

While attending the first multiracial college in Kenya, many of my Indian
classmates came from wealthy families. Our Patels, Sharmas, Shahs and
Mistris had little time for Africans. To them we'd always be inferior, even
though Kenya was "free."

For decades, they had lived privileged lives. Even though blacks had seats
in Parliament, Indians owned banks and commerce. My classmates knew that
true power lay with those who pay. They shared little with the rest of us;
they held on to their commercial spoils until blacks pried them from their
hands.

There were exceptions, though; an Indian Christian friend became my roommate
all through medical school. Christianity, it seems, releases the Hindu mind
from its rigid shackles, unraveling the tight coils of dogma. Like the
monotheist Muslims, Christians are more accessible because charity and love
of neighbor are the central tenets of their creeds.

In 1972, Uganda's Idi Amin expelled 52,000 Indians from his country. It
wasn't a smart move, but it expressed the frustration, anger and envy that
many Ugandans felt.

In Aurora, we run into each other in corridors and the past is unfurled
before us. But there's no bitterness in me, only a wish they would open
their minds to a world that's fluid and not always divided into rigid
castes. I wish they could be convinced that we're not Untouchables. We're
only trying to make our way through life the best we can.

I'm glad these dark people are among us. I know they'll help relieve some of
our misery.

Friends,

East Asian Muslims seem to be a forgotten part of the broader Muslim
world. What happens over there, barely causes a ripple among most of
us. Late last month, the killings of over 100 young Thai Muslims by
government troops got into the headlines for a moment, but then
disappeared as if the killings never happened.

Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights
activist. He teaches at Institute for Islamic Studies, Frie
University of Berlin and is also, associate fellow at the Institute
for Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), Malaysia.

In this article for MuslimWakeup.Com, Dr. Farish Noor outlines a
history of the Muslims of southern Thailand and suggests that the
killing of the hundred young Muslims by Thai troops is no different
than General Musharraf's military actions in Northern Pakistan. He
writes that "The Thais simply have to look to their distant
neighbours in Pakistan to see that any government that rides along
on the `anti-terror' bandwagon can get away with practically
anything.'

Just last week we read of the incident in Macedonia where 5
Pakistani immigrants were shot dead in cold blood to please the US
and demonstrate Macedonia's commitment to the so called war on
terrorism.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
—------------------------------
The Killings in Southern Thailand:
A Long History of Persecution Unrecorded

By Farish A. Noor
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000760.php#more

The killing of more than a hundred young Thai Muslims by Thai
security forces over the past few days have sent shockwaves across
the ASEAN region. Though ASEAN officials have been busy trying to
mend the torn façade of stability and peace in the region, it is
clear that things are far from normal in the Southern provinces of
Patani, Yala and Satun in southern Thailand.

Thus far the international community has been relatively quiet about
the killings and violence in Southern Thailand. The Thai government –
  now designated as a major non-NATO ally in the so-called `War
Against Terror' by the Bush administration – knows very well that it
can literally get away with murder under the present climate of fear
and anxiety in the region. The Thais simply have to look to their
distant neighbours in Pakistan to see that any government that rides
along on the `anti-terror' bandwagon can get away with practically
anything.

President Musharraf's dealing with the so-called `terror' supporters
and sympathisers in the tribal region of Waziristan in the northern
tribal belt has set a precedent for many other Asian leaders to
follow. Now Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (who has
declared his intention to be the new `Mahathir of ASEAN') is simply
following the model set by other pro-American leaders like Musharraf
of Pakistan, Megawati of Indonesia and Aroyyo of the Philippines.

Dirty, Convoluted History

But Thailand's troubles in the Southern provinces go back to its own
past and the imperial legacy of the Thai kingdom. Though Thailand
was and remains a predominantly Buddhist country, it should be
remembered that the people of Thailand are culturally diverse and
that the Thai community happens to be just one of many ethnic groups
in present-day Thailand. In the south, the population has always
been predominantly Malay and history will show that the Malays of
the South have had a history and identity of their own.

The Malays of Southern Thailand are concentrated in the provinces of
Patani, Yala, Satun and Narathiwat. These provinces were all part of
what was known as Patani Raya (Greater Patani), which covered the
domain of the earlier Sultanate of Patani, which was itself derived
from the ancient kingdom of Langkasuka (mentioned in the Chinese
texts as Lang-Ya-Hsiu).

Since the 18th century, successive Thai rulers have sought to
subjugate these Malay states and bring them within the domain of the
Siamese empire. In 1901 the Thai ruler King Chulalongkorn broke the
peace treaty with the Malay states and launched a military campaign
against them. His centralisation programme (thesaphiban) regrouped
the seven provinces of Patani under one unit called the Boriween
chet huamuang (Area of the Seven Provinces). Siamese administrators
were appointed by the King to rule the Malay provinces directly from
the royal capital of Krungtheep (Bangkok). In 1906 the seven Malay
provinces were brought closer together under a single administrative
unit called Monthon Patani. It was only in 1909 that the Malay
kingdoms of Kelantan, Trengganu, Kedah and Perlis were taken over by
the British colonial power with the signing of the Anglo-Siamese
treaty. Despite the division created by the Anglo-Siamese treaty,
the Malay kingdoms of Patani were similar to their mainland
counterparts in every respect: Patani society was Islamic and Malay
in character. They shared the same language, political culture,
social structures, customs and values. Cross-border contact between
the kingdoms remained high, despite various attempts by the British
and Siamese to police the boundary between them.(1)

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the Malays of
Greater Patani resented having to live under the yoke of Thai
imperial dominance. Soon enough the Malays of Southern Thailand rose
in revolt: Patani resistance to Siamese hegemony began almost as
soon as Bangkok tried to re-establish its grip on the Malay
kingdoms. In 1903 the Patani Malay aristocrat Tengku Abdul Kadir
Qamaruddin revolted against Bangkok. He was defeated and imprisoned
for nearly three years as a result. As soon as he was released he
planned another insurrection against Siamese rule. The Patani Malays
were angry with Bangkok for trying to impose Thai laws on them and
Bangkok's refusal to recognise traditional Malay and Islamic laws in
the region. After another failed revolt in 1915, Tengku Abdul Kadir
Qamaruddin retreated to Kelantan (which was under British indirect
rule) and attempted to regroup his forces with the help of the
Sultan of Kelantan, Sultan Muhammad IV.

In 1922, Tengku Abdul Kadir launched his biggest campaign against
the Siamese government, in response to the new education policy
introduced by Bangkok which made it compulsory for all Patani Malays
to attend Thai government schools and learn the Siamese language.
Tengku Abdul Kadir regarded this as a deliberate and calculated
attempt to erase Patani-Malay identity and to convert the Patani
Malays to Buddhism.(2) But Tengku Abdul Kadir's rebellion ended in
failure and a number of prominent Malay rulers were either killed or
captured. Despite the fact that they managed to defeat the
insurgents, the Thai government realised that it needed to revise
its own policy towards the Patani Malays. King Vajiravudh introduced
new guidelines in order to help assimilate the Patani Malays into
the local administrative structure in the region, in order to give
them a sense of commitment and investment in Thai policies. In time,
Bangkok began to offer limited concessions to the local Malay
rulers, and attempted to co-opt them into the administrative
framework of the Patani government.

From Conquest to Co-optation

Due in part to the geo-political realities of the time, the lot of
the Patani Malays was not about to improve. British colonial rule in
Malaya meant that an entente cordial had been struck between the
kingdom of Thailand and Britain – both of which were imperial
powers, it should be noted. The British were prepared to turn a
blind eye to the developments in Southern Thailand as long as the
Thai government recognised the borders of British Malaya that had
been set by the Anglo-Thai treaty.

Throughout the 20th century successive Thai governments and rulers
have sought to co-opt and pacify the Patani-Malay communities of
Southern Thailand by the use of financial inducements as well as the
threat of force and violence. More often than not, these policies
were directed towards the goals of assimilation and absorption of
the Malay community into the Thai-Buddhist mainstream.

Prior to the Second World War Thailand experienced a change of
political leadership which led to the rise of General Phibun
Songkhram. General Phibun was an extreme right-wing nationalist who
was very much influenced by the neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist
ideas of Nazi Germany and Japan at the time. Under his rule, Thai
society was forced to undergo many radical changes to its political
system and social values. In 1939 General Phibun's government
introduced the Thai Ratthaniyom (Thai Customs Decree) which forced
all Thai citizens to conform to a set of common cultural norms and
which forced all minority groups to follow the model set by the
government. This caused considerable outrage in the Malay provinces
of Patani, and the Patani Malays regarded it as yet another attempt
to erase their cultural and religious identity.

Under General Phibun's decree Patani Malays were not allowed to
dress according to their Malay customs, were forced to use the Thai
language, and in some cases even forced to participate in the public
worship of Buddhist idols.(3) Phibun's policy led to an immediate
response from the Patani Malays who rebelled against the government.
But the government's response was equally harsh: the army was used
to quell the rebellion, leading to the arrest and killing of many
Patani leaders. Thousands of Patani Malays fled south to join their
fellow Malays in Malaya.

During the post-war years the southern regions became the hotbed of
militant anti-state and communist activities, and by the 1970s was
the hideout of the Malaysian Communist Party (MCP) that had been
forced to go underground. Southern Thailand also became the base for
a number of Malay separatist groups such as the Barisan Nasional
Pembebasan Patani (BNPP- National Liberation Front of Patani) (4),
Pertubuhan Perpaduan Pembebasan Patani (PULO- Patani United
Liberation Organisation) (5) and the the Barisan Revolusi Nasional
(BRN- National Revolutionary Front) (6).

Between 1968 to 1975 the Thai government launched a series of
military operations in the south that were aimed at destroying the
networks of Patani liberation movements and underground
organisations. `Operation Ramkamhaeng' and the `Special Anti-
Terrorist Campaign' that lasted nearly seven years resulted in 385
violent armed clashes between Thai security forces and Patani
militant groups. A total of 1,208 detentions and arrests were made,
while 329 Patani fighters were killed. 250 militia camps were
destroyed and 1,451 weapons were captured. But despite the scale of
the counter-insurgency programmes and operations, the Patani region
remained tense. In December 1975 Thai security forces killed five
Patani youths, leading to the largest anti-government rallies in the
history of the region that were carried out in front of the Patani
central mosque. To complicate matters even further, the killing of
the Patani youths sparked off protests by Malays in the neighbouring
state of Kelantan as well, and prompted the leader of the Pan-
Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), Asri Muda, to raise the matter in the
Malaysian Parliament.

Islamisation and Radicalisation of Patani Resistance Groups

In the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Patani resistance
movements in Southern Thailand also experienced a shift towards a
more radical Islamist register. While some of the more `secular'
Patani liberation movements like BRN and PULO would gradually pale
into insignificance (the BRN and PULO offices in Saudi Arabia were
practically inoperative by the mid-1980s), other movements like the
BNPP would move closer to the global current of Islamist radicalism.
In 1979 the BNPP upgraded its military training programme and
expanded the scope of its guerrilla activities against Thai security
forces in the region. In 1985 the more radical and militant elements
of the BNPP, led by its vice-chairman Wahyuddin Muhammad, broke away
from the parent organisation to form the Barisan Bersatu Mujahideen
Patani (BBMP- United Mujahideen Front of Patani). Later in 1986 the
BNPP renamed itself the Barisan Islam Pembebasan Patani- (BIPP-
Islamic Liberation Front of Patani) in order to underline its
stronger commitment to Islamist politics.

The developments in Southern Thailand point to a similar trend
across the Muslim world in the late 20th century. All over the world
disaffected and marginalised Muslim minorities began to clamour for
equal rights and equal citizenship, and when these demands were not
met they inevitably turned to some form of popular resistance or
another. Groups like the PLO in Palestine, PULO and MNLF in ASEAN
and others of their ilk were all fighting on secular-democratic
platforms, but were defeated due to their secular-leftist
orientation. With the Cold War at its height and American power on
the ascendant, these groups were summarily labelled as `terrorist'
or `Leftist'.

The failure of the secular-democratic resistance groups in turn
contributed to the shift to the Islamist register and the growing
appeal of Islam as a marker of common solidarity and identity among
persecuted minority communities. Following the Islamic revolution in
Iran in 1979, political Islam became the political tool of choice
and this led to the emergence of splinter groups with a more Islamic
image and leaning in the 1980s. In the Philippines the MNLF was
overtaken by the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), in Palestine
the PLO was eclipsed by Hamas, in Thailand PULO, BRN and BNPP were
overtaken by the Barisan Bersatu Mujahideen Patani (BBMP- United
Muhajideen Front of Patani) (est. 1985). The rest, as they say, is
history – and what a bloody, sordid, shameful history it is too.

`Anti-Terror' or Business as Usual?

Thus far the Thai and international public has been fed a steady
stream of undiluted hogwash about the possible causes for the
insurgency in the region. Prime Minister Thaksin has claimed
that `criminal gangs' may be behind it all. Thailand's Chief of
Armed Forces General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra has claimed that
these `fanatical bandits' may have been `under the influence of
drugs'. The region's so-called `terror experts' have pontificated
about the alleged links to foreign Islamist militant groups. While
Thai government officials insist that this is a local problem that
needs to be handled domestically.

None of these lame and flaccid excuses actually help to explain the
developments taking place in Southern Thailand at present. To label
such groups as `fanatics', `terrorists' and `criminals' is to take a
page out of the propaganda book of the Cold War when legitimate
autonomy and freedom movements were criminalised and pathologised by
the cold warriors of the past. Lest it be forgotten, it was the
Southern provinces that voted for the democratic party at the past
few elections – proof, if any was needed, that the Southerners still
believed in the democratic process until not too long ago. But the
failure of the government to deliver on their much-lauded reform
programmes – coupled with Bangkok's failure to deal with issues like
local corruption, nepotism, police brutality and violence meted out
by the Thai army – has ended up alienating vast sections of Patani
society who may now feel that the democratic process simply doesn't
work and have turned back to radical religio-politics as they did in
the 1980s.

Prime Minister Thaksin may well think that he has the green light to
go on with his policies vis the South of Thailand. Indeed, with
Thailand being declared a major ally of the US at the moment, the
geopolitical winds seem to be blowing his way. But the Thai
government would be naïve and foolish to think that Washington's
endorsement and support for its policies is a fixed factor that will
not shift in the future. Likewise Thaksin should consider the fate
of other pro-US despots and tyrants of ASEAN, such as Ferdinand
Marcos and Soeharto of Indonesia, who were ultimately let down and
abandoned by their erstwhile American allies when push came to shove.

In the end, no amount of bogus anti-terror rhetoric or propaganda
will alter the fact that Thailand's troubles in the southern
provinces are rooted in the internal politics of Thai society
itself. The people of Southern Thailand feel themselves to be the
victims of Bangkok's uneven development policies and like their
counterparts in the northeastern province of Phaak Isaan, they feel
that they have been left out and cast aside in the nation's march
towards development. In the end, it is this simple economic and
political factor that will shape the future development of relations
between Bangkok and the outer provinces. Talk of `militant Islamist
groups' and `war on terror' should be exposed for what it is: A
shallow and facile disguise for a divisive form of politics that has
thus far torn apart Thai society, at the cost of the country and its
neighbours.

Endnotes:

(1) See: Re: W. K. Che Man, Muslim Separatism: The Moros of Southern
Philippines and the Malays of Southern Thailand. Ateneo de Manila
University Press, Manila. 1990.

(2) See: Che Wan, 1990. pp. 63-64.

(3) See: Che Wan, 1990. pg. 65.

(4) The Barisan Nasional Pembebasan Patani (BNPP- National
Liberation Front of Patani) was formed in 1959 by the ex-leaders of
the Gabungan Melayu Patani Raya (GAMPAR-United Greater Patani Malays
Movement) and the Patani People's Movement (PPM). Its founder Tengku
Abdul Jalal (@ Adul Na Saiburi), was himself the ex-Deputy Leader of
GAMPAR. The original leaders of the BNPP were mostly members of the
traditional Patani Malay elite and religious functionaries like the
Ulama and Imams of mosques and madrasahs in Patani. In the 1960s the
BNPP opted for guerrilla warfare against the Thai security forces,
working with rebels as well as criminal elements within Patani
society. One of the BNPP guerrilla leaders was Idris Mat Diah (@ Pak
Yeh), who was himself the leader of a local Patani criminal gang.
Pak Yeh recruited other bandits and outlaws in order to expand the
militia arm of the BNPP. Because its ideology was unclear at the
time, the BNPP also managed to attract a large number of followers
from a broad spectrum of Patani society. But the BNPP's main
weakness was its apparent lack of direction and ideological
coherence. Its goal of national liberation remained vague, and many
of its members were concerned about the dominance of traditional
elites and aristocrats.

(5) The Pertubuhan Perpaduan Pembebasan Patani (PULO- Patani United
Liberation Organisation) was the only Patani liberation movement
founded outside Patani itself. It was formed in 1968 in India by
Tengku Bira Kotanila (@ Kabir Abdul Rahman) who was himself a
graduate of Aligarh Muslim university. Tengku Bira was helped by a
group of Patani students who were studying with him at Aligarh. Soon
after the launching of PULO, Tengku Bira transferred himself and the
group's main headquarters to Mecca, where he hoped to attract more
support from Patani Muslims who were studying there. PULO's
ideological orientation was largely secular from the start: it aimed
at national liberation in the broadest sense, like the PLO and MNLF.
PULO rejected the neo-feudal and traditionalist ideology of the BNPP
and the `Islamic-Socialism' of the BRN. Its main recruitment grounds
were the Arab states and Malaysia. Like the BNPP (est. 1959) and BRN
(est. 1963), PULO collected most of its funds from Patani Malays
working overseas, particularly in countries like Saudi Arabia. Like
the BNPP, PULO was also at ease with the use of militant and
guerrilla tactics. It recruited local gang members and bandits to
help it with its military operations in the region. It was also more
comfortable with militant Muslim states like Syria, Libya, Iran and
Algeria (Che Wan, 1990. pg. 106).

(6) The Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN- National Revolutionary
Front) was formed in March 1963 as a result of a split within the
BNPP (Barisan Nasional Pembebasan Patani). By then the BNPP had
emerged as the most important Patani-Malay national liberation
organisation fighting for the liberation of the Malay states of
Patani, Yala, Satun and Narathiwat. But the BNPP's leadership was
dominated by Malay aristocrats and religious leaders, and some
members of the organisation feared that the BNPP's true agenda was
to re-establish the Malay Sultanate of Patani with the ruler of
Patani as its head of state. The BRN was formed by Ustaz Abdul Karim
Hassan and his group aimed to create an independent Republic of
Patani instead. Che Wan (1990) described the BRN's ideology
as `Islamic-Socialism' (Che Wan, 1990. pg. 109) and the group
actively courted the support of other Muslim states like Algeria,
Syria and Libya. Between 1963 to 1968, the BRN concentrated mainly
on penetrating the local pondok and madrasah networks, in order to
recruit more members to its cause. Its activities were severely
curtailed in the 1970s after a wave of arrests of BRN leaders by
Thai security forces. The BRN's only fighting unit was effectively
destroyed in 1977 when its leader Cikgu Din Adam was killed by Thai
soldiers.

Dear friends,

Monia Mazigh is the wife of Maher Arar, the Canadian who was
kidnapped by US law enforcement officials to Syria, where he was
tortured and imprisoned for nearly a year.

Monia is now running for a seat in the Canadian Parliament from
Ottawa, on the ticket of the NDP.

Tomorrow, Friday, May 7, she will be having dinner in Toronto as
guest of the Muslim Canadian Congress. This is an informal affair
with limited seating that will also be attended by Jack Layton,
Leader of the NDP.

If you would like to meet with Monia and join us for dinner, please
send me an e-mail at tarekfatah@... for directions to the
restaurant. The cost of the dinner event is $20.00, inclusive of
taxes and gratuity.

Thanks

Tarek Fatah
PS. Apologies to those who do not live in Toronto

May 10, 2004

China and Islam in the Northwest Chinese Region

by Sascha Matuszak
AntiWar.Com
http://www.antiwar.com/matuszak/?articleid=2535

Kingdoms have risen and fallen in China's Xinjiang region for the past 2000
years. In the early 20th century, foreign archaeologists were surprised and
delighted to find Muslim communities built upon Tang dynasty ruins built
upon Tibetan villages built upon Han forts built upon Indian Buddhist
monasteries – with Roman and Bactrian frescos thrown in for good measure.

The Silk Road brought two of the world's most influential religions, Islam
and Buddhism, together, and the two struggled with each other for hundreds
of years – Buddhists reigning supreme up until the Tang Dynasty, and Islam
wresting away control after the Mongol period.

Eventually, Islam came to dominate the western half of this region and
reached past Dunhuang (Blazing Beacon) in Gansu Province – long China's gate
to the west – while Buddhism retreated back into India, Tibet, and China's
heartland.

The people of the region retain the traces of the past in their buildings,
mode of life, and faces – local Uighur populations range from dark and
heavily bearded to green-eyed and pale. Kazakhs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Han, Hui,
and Mongolians have carved out niches and held on to cultural traditions
strong enough to withstand any onslaught. Even the cultural menace
modernization.

Tension

Much has been written about China's Xinjiang policy. By most accounts, China
is considered a repressive and destructive influence on local culture and
religion but an energetic and positive force in terms of economic
development.

Take for instance the Uighur Muslims and the Han – probably just about the
least compatible cultures in the world. But in the provinces east of
Xinjiang, especially Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia, the Hui Muslim minority
has managed to live in peace with the Han and still visit the mosques and
refrain from various sins.

But many Uighurs look down upon Hui and never resist a chance to crack a
joke about the alleged duplicity and lack of character of the average Hui.
According to more prejudiced Uighur, Hui are donkeys – bastard offspring of
Han and Muslim. According to the less prejudiced, Hui are bad Muslims who
have been corrupted by the Han.

The Hotan region is a good example of what happens when Han and Uighur are
thrown together. Hotan was and still is a center of Islam in Xinjiang – the
tomb of Imam Asim, one of the first missionaries of Islam in the region is a
pilgrimage spot and site of a festival and market every Thursday, pretty
much year round.

The gates to the festival, which I visited, are manned by Han and Uighur
opportunists, who charge five yuan per person. On Wednesday, 138 buses full
of Muslims bounced down the road through the fields and into the desert
where the imam's tomb lies. A banner hangs above the entrance proclaiming
"The greatest threat to Xinjiang stability are the splittists" in Uighur
Arabic script.

Uighur police stroll through the sands with an eye out for suspicious
foreigners. One displayed his loyalty to the center by calling in my
presence and demanding my passport number.

But the overall atmosphere of the festival is relaxed and religious –
musician-preachers strut up and down aisles formed by sitting Muslims and
bark out wisdom from the Quran and "the University of Life." Beggars line
the path toward the tomb and benefit from the generosity of Muslims
attending a holy event.

Uighur don't have much of a chance of gaining a passport from the
government, so this is as close to Mecca as any of them will get .…

Uighur children in front of a mosque in Kashgar's old city

In Hotan city center a recently finished plaza that knocked out most of the
ancient wall boasts a large statue of Mao Zedong meeting Durban Tulum, a
local farmer who made his way to Beijing in the 1950's. The other night
children sat around a stage built around the statue, accompanied by local
Public Security Bureau (PSB) and waited for a government-sponsored dance and
song show to begin. While they waited, Cultural-Revolution-era ballads about
"beloved Chairman Mao" blasted across the square.

The city displays the benefits of development, a medical and teachers'
university, paved roads and a surplus of goods – but also the dark side –
Sichuan and Hunan prostitutes have shown up, and public drunkenness under
neon lights makes the beard of an old Uighur tremble.

Get 'em While They're Young

Children in Xinjiang are not allowed to attend Islamic school until the age
of 18, and they do not have leave to attend prayers on Friday due to school.
This grates on locals who see Islam as the core of their culture.

In Kashgar, the former palace of King Said, one of the last kings of
Kashgaria, is now the Communist Party headquarters, and the Islamic school
he founded is now the site of a "Patriotic Religious Training Center." This
training center meets ten times a year, and Imams from around the Kashgar
area gather to learn how to pray, when to pray, and what new laws have been
established to enforce the Party line.

Teaching Islam at home is a crime in Xinjiang, and many have been arrested
in southern Xinjiang since 1995 when the police began enforcing the law.
Schoolchildren spend much of their time learning Party theory (Mao, Deng,
Jiang) by rote. Clerks in the Executive Administration – a puppet government
subordinate to the Party – also spend at least six hours a week studying
Party Policy and are required to monitor the mosques every Friday. Names are
taken and ages are checked and any mistake by the clerk means their job.

Who Is Native?

Han who came here in the 1960's and have lived here and had children tend to
speak a little Uighur and have reached an agreement with their Muslim
neighbors. There is mutual respect, business, and even friendship – but
people eat, drink, and play separately. Han who arrived in the past 30 years
refer to themselves as natives.

There is a Uighur part and a Han part of the city – the separation is as
clear as the "Peace Wall" that divided Ireland's Falls and Shankhill
neighborhoods. The Uighur part of town tends to be poorer and less
developed, but a swath of locals have taken advantage of Xinjiang's
importance to Beijing to make themselves rich and powerful. There are as
many Uighur police as there are Han patrolling the streets and for every ten
soldiers living at the base between Hotan and Kashgar, one is a Uighur.

Two boys I talked to near the tomb of Mahmood Kashgaria, a scholar of the
10th century who translated the Quran into Uighur, hail from Hunan and
Sichuan. But they were born here, their parents live here, they speak in the
Xinjiang dialect with but a smidgeon of their grandparents' mode of speech
to be detected.

Are they natives? Most of their friends are Han, but they play in the
deserts and fields of Xinjiang. They eat lamb and bread as much as they eat
rice and pork, and they have no desire to return to a home they have never
known.

Uighur farmers and small time entrepreneurs say they do not have the same
access to loans as the Han. When money from the center arrives in Urumqi and
is dispersed throughout the regions, Han businessmen flock to the small
towns and gobble up the loans, acting on tips from Party and bank officials.

Justification?

How can China justify prohibiting children from visiting the mosques? What
possible purpose could Cultural Revolution songs blasted into the ears of
the populace serve? Why occupy the center of Kashgar's old city, unless you
are a conqueror?

The answer is simple – China aspires to superpower status. And if China has
learned anything from superpowers past and present, it has learned that
there can only be one power in a nation.

The only other culture as diametrically opposed to Islam as the Han is
American culture. For China, to tolerate a Muslim enclave is to tolerate the
Black Panthers. To consider any other status for Xinjiang would be to
reconsider the US's southwest.

But unlike the US, China's policy is to take Islam away from the children
and replace it with desire – desire for wealth, desire for love in a
"non-traditional" sense, and desire to assimilate into the nation as a
whole. Not unlike the US, desire in Xinjiang is combined with a healthy fear
of prison and death at the hands of the PSB.

America's policy is purely to conquer in the classical sense – to replace
Islam with fear and submission. Both nations intend to destroy the religion
and plunder the resources – but what China has in its favor is that Xinjiang
lies within its borders.

Friends,

From May 25 to May 30, an International Citizen's Inquiry into 9/11 will be
held in Toronto . The Citizens’ Inquiry brings together a broad coalition of
people who question the US Government’s version of the events of 9/11.

Among the questions this inquiry says it will investigate include:

·Why did the Air Force fail to scramble jet interceptors for a period of
nearly two hours?
·Why did President Bush, after being told “America is under attack”,
continue to stay for 20 minutes while a student talked about her pet goat?
·Why has the White House so strenuously resisted truly open public
investigation into these events?

For further information, contact Barrie Zwicker or Phil Gillies in Toronto
at (416) 963-5562 or, Toll Free at 1-866-234-7438 or through e-mail to
pg@... or visit their website at www.911inquiry.org

In the meantime, this New York Times story about the destruction of audio
tapes made by Air Traffic Controllers, gives even more reason to support
Barry Zwicker's initiative.

Read and reflect.

Tarek Fatah
-------------
May 6, 2004

F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Statements

By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/national/06CND-TAPE.html

WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two
of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same
day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor
without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the
Transportation Department said in a report today.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic
Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in
a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a
microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours
earlier.

But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence,
and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as
a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his
hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans
around the building, according to a report made public today by the
inspector general of the Transportation Department.

The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be
destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the
controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the
quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a
violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the
report said.

The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that the officials' keeping the
existence of the tape a secret and the decision by one to destroy it had not
served "the interests of the F.A.A., the department or the public" and could
foster suspicions among the public.

Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who
is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the
aviation agency had cooperated with what is widely known as the 9/11
commission, a bipartisan, independent panel investigating the terror
attacks.

On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on
the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar, gave statements
of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.

The tape's value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what
was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the
controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken at the time
by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did
not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not
spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)

One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the
F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A
tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given
later, could help establish that.

A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead's
report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very
conscientious senator." He said the commission would not comment now on the
content of the report but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're
interested in."

The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the
standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the
magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident,
according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved
are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar
tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had
seen, heard and done.

People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that
procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers' shift was ending
and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.

The center manager's idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case
the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next
day, according to people involved.

"It was never meant as a permanent record," said Mark DiPalmo, the president
of the local chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association,
who made the deal with the center manager.

He said the session was informal, and that sometimes more than one person at
a time was speaking. "We sat everyone in a room, went around the room, said,
`What do you remember?" Mr. DiPalmo said in an interview.

Mr. Mead's report said that it was conceivable that without that deal, the
tape would not have been made at all.

The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the
tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls
for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not
in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping"
because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.

Neither the center manager nor the quality-assurance manager disclosed the
tape's existence to their superiors at the F.A.A. region that covers New
York, nor to the agency's Washington headquarters, according to the report,
which identified none of the officials or controllers by name.

Other tapes were preserved, including conversations on the radio frequencies
used by the planes that day, and the radar tapes. In addition, the
controllers later made written statements to the F.A.A., per standard
procedure, and in this case, to the F.B.I. as well.

The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape between December 2001 and
February, 2002. By that time, he and the center manager had received an
e-mail message sent by the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all
records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain
data, RETAIN IT."

The inspector general attributed the tape's destruction to "poor judgment."

"The destruction of evidence in the government's possession, in this case an
audiotape particularly during times of a national crisis, has the effect of
fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public,"
the inspector general's report said. "We do not ascribe motivations to the
managers in this case of attempting to cover up, and we have no indication
that there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that
they had something to hide or that the controllers did not carry out their
duties."

The inspector general also noted that the official who destroyed the tape
had no regrets or second thoughts: "The quality-assurance manager told us
that if presented with similar circumstances, he would again take the same
course of action."

Mr. Mead wrote that this attitude was "especially troubling" and that
supervisors should take "appropriate administrative action."

Although the matter had been referred to the Justice Department, the Mead
report added, prosecutors said they had found no basis for criminal charges.

An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that his agency had cooperated with
the 9/11 commission and that that was how the tape's existence had become
known at the agency's headquarters.

"We believe it would not have added in any way to the information contained
in all of the other materials that have already been provided to the
investigators and the members of the 9/11 commission," he said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary
action" against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said,
he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees
involved.