Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Women stand in a doorway of a home in the village of Magrihawa in the Shravasti district of Uttar Pradesh. (Christie Johnston for the International Herald Tribune)

In India’s north, the worst place to be born a girl - International Herald Tribune, November 30, 2007

In India’s north, the worst place to be born a girl
By Amelia Gentleman
Published: November 30, 2007

MACHRIHWA, India: The birth of a boy in Machrihwa is celebrated with the purchase of sweetmeats, distributed with joy to fellow villagers.

The birth of a girl is, for the most part, not celebrated at all.

Women in this village are not eager to dwell on the subject, but many of those with daughters grudgingly admit that worse than the pain of childbirth was the misery of realizing that they had delivered a girl.

Juganti Prasad, 30, remembers the reproachful silence that settled over the room where she gave birth to her third daughter. Her mother-in-law handed her the child, and said curtly, “It’s a girl, again,” before leaving her.

“There was no one even to give me a glass of water,” Prasad said. “No one bothered to look after me or feed me because it was a girl.”

Bin Laden: Europe must quit Afghan war - Terrorism- msnbc.com, November 29, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on the Europeans to stop helping the United States in the war in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new audiotape broadcast Thursday on Al-Jazeera television.

Bin Laden said it was unjust for the United States to have invaded Afghanistan for sheltering him after the 9/11 attacks, saying he was the “only one responsible” for the deadly assaults on New York and Washington.

“The events of Manhattan were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance’s aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, and I am the only one responsible for it. The Afghan people and government knew nothing about it. America knows that,” the al-Qaida leader said.

Charles Onians/AFP — Getty Images

Protesters in Khartoum today demanded the execution of a teacher convicted of insulting Islam after her students named a teddy bear “Muhammad.”

Calls in Sudan for Execution of Briton, AP, New York Times, November 30, 2007

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear ”Muhammad.”

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation. She avoided the more serious punishment of 40 lashes.

They massed in central Martyrs Square outside the presidential palace, where hundreds of riot police were deployed. They did not try to stop the rally, which lasted about an hour.

”Shame, shame on the U.K.,” protesters chanted.

They called for Gibbons’ execution, saying, ”No tolerance: Execution,” and ”Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

The women’s prison where Gibbons is being held is far from the square.

Several hundred protesters, not openly carrying weapons, marched about a mile away to Unity High School, where Gibbons worked. They chanted slogans outside the school, which is closed and under heavy security, then marched toward the nearby British Embassy. They were stopped by security forces two blocks away from the embassy.

The protest arose despite vows by Sudanese security officials the day before, during Gibbons’ trial, that threatened demonstrations after Friday prayers would not take place. Some of the protesters carried green banners with the name of the Society for Support of the Prophet Muhammad, a previously unknown group.

Many protesters carried clubs, knives and axes — but not automatic weapons, which some have brandished at past government-condoned demonstrations. That suggested Friday’s rally was not organized by the government.

A Muslim cleric at Khartoum’s main Martyrs Mosque denounced Gibbons during one sermon, saying she intentionally insulted Islam. He did not call for protests, however.

”Imprisoning this lady does not satisfy the thirst of Muslims in Sudan. But we welcome imprisonment and expulsion,” the cleric, Abdul-Jalil Nazeer al-Karouri, a well-known hard-liner, told worshippers.

”This an arrogant woman who came to our country, cashing her salary in dollars, teaching our children hatred of our Prophet Muhammad,” he said.

Michael Gerson - Thorns in the Congo - washingtonpost.com, November 30, 2007

Perhaps 4 million people have died in Congo from violence, hunger and preventable disease during the current conflict. Yet, unlike in Darfur, the cameras of the American media have seldom rolled.

However complex this war, there seems to be one ultimate cause. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, many of the authors of those atrocities — Hutu soldiers and militia members — fled to eastern Congo behind a shield of French peacekeepers. These forces came to be known as the FDLR, which now counts between 6,000 and 10,000 troops, who are tightly organized, well funded by mining operations within Congo and as heartless as ever.

A Congolese children’s rights advocate estimates that thousands of FDLR troops are child soldiers. “All of their children are combatants,” he told me. And the FDLR’s ideology of mass murder is unchanged. Occupied villages are intimidated with mutilations and systematic rape — sexual violence so terrible the damage is sometimes beyond repair.

In the past, the governments of Congo and neighboring Rwanda have often been part of the problem — supporting one brutal militia or the other when it served their political purposes. But both nations seem to have tired of this game. This month, Congo and Rwanda signed a joint statement promising to oppose the warlords, with the goal of making eastern Congo a peaceful buffer zone instead of a source of instability.

High Court orders state to delay power cuts to Gaza - Haaretz, November 30, 2007

The High Court of Justice on Sunday ordered the state to delay its reduction of power supplies to the Gaza Strip by at least a week, pending a full presentation detailing the proposed operation.

The court’s interim decision follows petitions by 10 human rights groups against the state’s plan to reduce supplies of electricity, gasoline and diesel fuel to the coastal territory.

Nevertheless, the justices upheld the state’s plan to reduce fuel transfers to the Strip, as long as the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s residents were given primary consideration.

The Mascot - Mark Kurzem - Book Review - New York Times, November 30, 2007

To begin with, Alex now tells Mark, he is Jewish, something he has never revealed, even to his wife, a Roman Catholic. He remembers — he was probably 5, but doesn’t know his birth date — witnessing Nazi troops shooting his mother and bayoneting his baby brother and sister near their village in Belarus. To keep from screaming, he bit his hand. Believing his father dead, he fled into the forest but was caught — probably by the very soldiers who had murdered his family. They were about to shoot him, he said, when he begged for a piece of bread. One of them pitied him, and he was saved.

It is an anguished tale set in the morally gray zone between culpability and survival. The soldier discovered that the boy was Jewish — he was circumcised — and warned him to hide it. The others thought he was Russian and named him Uldis Kurzemnieks. They made him their mascot, a miniature soldier with a uniform decorated with Nazi insignia. As he traveled with them, he said, he witnessed atrocities, including hundreds of Jews being herded into a synagogue and burned alive. He became a propaganda tool, the Reich’s youngest Nazi, the subject of newspaper articles and a documentary.

Turkey Takes Publisher to Task Over Book Questioning God - New York Times, November 30, 2007

ISTANBUL, Nov. 29 — Turkish prosecutors on Thursday questioned the Turkish publisher of the book “The God Delusion,” by a British author, Richard Dawkins, after a young reader complained that it was offensive, the publisher said.

Erol Karaaslan, whose publishing house is Kuzey Publications, does not face formal charges at this point for bringing out the book, which is a best seller in the United States. But he was informed by prosecutors that a young reader from the neighborhood of Kadikoy filed a complaint against him under a law prohibiting “inciting hatred,” Mr. Karaaslan said in a telephone interview.

In Turkey, the government can open cases against authors or publishers based on complaints about content filed by private citizens, a far-reaching power that sharply limits freedom of expression and is an enduring part of Turkey’s rigid state-controlled past.

The rules have led to the prosecution of authors including Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for literature. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is working to soften these rules as part of Turkey’s effort to join the European Union.

The book, which argues against the existence of God, upset the reader, who argued that it meets the criteria of “inciting hatred,” because it insults God and is offensive to Muslims, Christians and Jews in Turkey.

This is a short article I published in the ISIM Newsletter in 2002. Ironically, it was posted online by “CampusWatch,” a site created by Daniel Pipes, whose views I criticize in it. Presumably someone at CampusWatch posted the article because, although I am critical of the neoconservative view of the Middle East, I am also critical of some of my fellow Middle East experts who seem determined to ignore the more odious aspects of militant Islamic movements.

It should be obvious that it is unethical to object to the antisemitism lite of a Pat Robertson or an Ann Coulter while ignoring the more obvious antisemitism that pervades many Islamist texts. One can be, and should be, outraged by both the simplistic neoconservative cant about “Islamofascism” and much of what is said and done by Islamists. One can be, and should be, outraged by what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. But this does not entail portraying Hamas as the innocent victim of “Islamophobia.” One can be, and should be, outraged by the neoconservative effort to induce the government of the United States to attack Iran. But this not entail ignoring the vile Holocaust denial of Ahmedinejad.

By failing to condemn that which deserves condemnation, many prominent Middle East experts unintentionally help the neoconservatives portray all critics of Israel as antisemites. Analyzing the nationalistic and anti-imperialist dimensions of Islamic militancy is legitimate. Ignoring the reactionary and xenophobic dimensions of Islamic militancy is not.

There is a middle path between demonization and idealization. And that is the path that should be taken by serious analysts of Islamic militancy.

Henry Munson, Between Pipes and Esposito, ISIM Newsletter, July 2002

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a short book (137 pages) by Martin Kramer entitled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Kramer is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, a journal founded by Daniel Pipes and others who feel that the discipline of Middle Eastern Studies, as practised in the United States, has become too pro-Arab and too ‘dovish’. Kramer, a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, shares Pipes’s views, though he has generally been less strident in expressing them. Ivory Towers on Sand is primarily a critique of scholars dealing with issues related to American foreign policy in the Middle East. Kramer is not especially troubled by current trends in the study of Sufi poetry.

Both Kramer and Pipes, like their intellectual mentor Bernard Lewis, view the Muslim world as inherently irrational, violent, and above all, anti-Semitic. The Arabs in particular only understand force. They will behave only if they are beaten mercilessly. The American government should not waste time trying to address their alleged grievances, or those of Muslims in general, because these all boil down to primitive hatred of the infidel and resentment that the infidel now dominates the believer instead of the other way around (Lewis 1990).This view of the Islamic world underlies the policies of the Sharon government in Israel and the policies favoured by at least some members of the American administration. So the issues at stake are by no means strictly academic.

British Teacher Found Guilty in Sudan - New York Times, November 29, 2007

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 29 — The British teacher in Sudan who let her 7-year-old pupils name a class teddy bear Muhammad was found guilty on Thursday of insulting Islam and sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation.

Under Sudanese law, the teacher, Gillian Gibbons, could have spent months in jail and been lashed 40 times.

Munson: Condoleeza Rice did not foresee that invading Iraq would strengthen the very Islamists the invasion was supposed to weaken and for years she ignored the critical importance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even now that she has begin focusing on this issue, the Annapolis conference she organized was poorly timed and unproductive. Moreover, her statement that “like the Israelis,” she knows what it is like to be “afraid to go to your church,” was remarkably naive. All of this notwithstanding, however, it is clear that Rice understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that President Bush never has.

Rice, Israeli Official Share Perspectives - washingtonpost.com, November 29, 2007

Rice began by saying she did not want to draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective, but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Ala., “at a time of separation and tension.”

She noted that a local church was bombed by white separatists, killing four girls, including a classmate of hers.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

But, she added, as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”

Olmert to Haaretz: Two states, or Israel is done for - Haaretz, November 29, 2007

WASHINGTON - “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.

Munson: Beers, Goldenberg and Barry are right to say that the term “Islamofascism” is often used in ways that obscure fundamental differences. They are wrong, however, to suggest that conservatives are generally unaware of this. The truth is that conservatives like Andrew Bacevich and Leon Hadar have been among the most insightful critics of the neoconservative tendency to obscure the very different goals of different Islamist movements.

The Myth of “Islamofascism” | National Security Network, November 14, 2007

The Myth of “Islamofascism”

By Rand Beers, Ilan Goldenberg and Patrick Barry

“Violent, radical jihadists want to replace all the governments of the moderate Islamic states, replace them with a caliphate. And to do that, they also want to bring down the West, in particular us. And they’ve come together as Shi’a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.” – Mitt Romney, 5/15/07

“The first step toward a realistic peace is to be realistic about our enemies. They follow a violent ideology: radical Islamic fascism, which uses the mask of religion to further totalitarian goals and aims to destroy the existing international system.” – Rudy Giuliani 10/07.

“Islamic fascism has declared war on us and the Western world. Their intent is to bring down Western civilization,” – Fred Thompson 10/30/07

Since 9/11 conservatives have continually lumped various groups and countries together including Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran into one threat that they term “Islamofascism.” The reality is much complicated. These various groups and countries have different intentions and capabilities, often work at cross purposes and are in some cases ideologically opposed to each other. In fact, Shi’a-Sunni tension across the Middle East is at an all time high, only further reinforcing the fact that these groups are different.

The simplistic term “Islamofascism” undermines America’s national security. By confusing these various threats, conservatives make it impossible to pursue effective policies. This ideological approach has caused the United States to miss numerous opportunities, where it could have played these groups off of each other to America’s benefit. Moreover, the term “Islamofascism” creates the perception that the United States is fighting a religious war against Islam, thus alienating moderate voices in the region who would be willing to work with America towards common goals. Dividing these groups and dealing with them separately is a far better policy than lumping them together.

Ignatius, The Spy Who Wants Israel to Talk, WP, Nov. 11, 2007

JERUSALEM — Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs “Man in the Shadows.” But now that he’s out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries.

Halevy is a legendary figure in Israel because of his nearly 40 years of service as an intelligence officer, culminating in his years as Mossad’s director from 1998 to 2003. He managed Israel’s secret relationship with Jordan for more than a decade, and he became so close to King Hussein that the two personally negotiated the 1994 agreement paving the way for a peace treaty. So when Halevy talks about the utility of secret diplomacy, he knows whereof he speaks.

Of course, Halevy looks like the fictional master spy George Smiley — thinning hair, wise but weary eyes, the rumpled manner of someone who might have been a professor in another life. And Halevy has the gift of anonymity: You would look right past him in a crowded room, never imagining that he was the man who had conducted daring secret missions. After he appeared here with former CIA director George Tenet at a conference sponsored by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, Halevy agreed to sit down for an interview.

Halevy suggests that Israel should stop its jeremiads that Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. The rhetoric is wrong, he contends, and it gets in the way of finding a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.

“I believe that Israel is indestructible,” he insists. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may boast that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, but Iran’s ability to consummate this threat is “minimal,” he says.

Tom Segev, The 29th of November, then and now - Haaretz, November 29, 2007

On Saturday night, November 29, 1947, many of the Jews in the Land of Israel went out to dance in the streets of the cities. They were celebrating the United Nations decision to establish a Jewish state in part of the country. The Arabs were also supposed to get a state, but they went to war.

In his new book, Yoav Gelber, a professor of history at the University of Haifa, ponders what would have happened had the Arabs agreed to the Partition Plan adopted by the UN 60 years ago today. “We can only guess,” writes Gelber cautiously.

Such guessing fires the imagination: It is possible that everything would have happened as it did, from one war to the next. The Zionist movement invested great efforts into attaining a majority in favor of partition, but the borders proposed by the UN were far from being an answer to its yearnings. Had the Arabs agreed to those lines, the Zionists might have rejected them.

In any case, everyone knew that it was not the UN that would determine the borders of the country, but rather the outcome of the war. Israel today controls an area about twice the size of the area it was allotted on November 29, 1947. The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the “road map.”

In recent months, we have marked a number of significant dates that offered an opportunity for similar pondering: the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the 70th anniversary of Lord Peel’s partition plan, the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the 30th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit.There is no point in asking who is to blame, the questions which usually dominate such discussions. There is a point to trying to understand why it is so difficult for the two sides to end the conflict, and where they erred.

It is not easy to understand why so many Israelis still believe that a large Israel without peace is better than a small Israel with peace, and why Israeli patriotism is usually identified with expanding borders rather than with the desire for Jewish and democratic borders. But the really important question is this: Who has more to lose in the present situation? The answer is clear: Israel. Not only because of Iran, Hamas and the weakness that was revealed in the Second Lebanon War. With every settler who moves to the territories and with every Palestinian child who is killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, Israel loses some of the moral justification that led to the decision on the 29th of November 60 years ago. The Palestinians have already lost almost everything they had.

AFP / Getty
Newly graduated Iraqi soldiers parade at Bismaya military camp in the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad.

Charles Crain, The Mahdi Militia: Quiet But Not Gone, TIME, Nov. 27, 2007

In the east Baghdad neighborhood patrolled by Capt. Mike Juarez and the men of Charlie Company, 1-8 Cavalry, Iraq’s most feared militia is keeping its head down. Since Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army declared a unilateral cease-fire at the end of August, the Americans have been able operate freely in some of Baghdad’s worst areas, and have faced very few serious attacks. But in Juarez’s neighborhood, as elsewhere, the militia retains an insidious weapon: a presence within the Iraqi government’s security forces.

On a recent night patrol Juarez and his men went door to door, discussing everything from electricity to security with residents. One home had a picture of Sadr, the militia chieftain, on display in the living room. It turned out that the man of the house was a member of the Iraqi security forces.

In the back-and-forth that followed, the man told the Americans that he did not work with the militia, and did not have any colleagues who did either. Eventually, though, he said he might know a few cops or soldiers whose loyalties lie with the Mahdi Army (”Jaish al-Mahdi” in Arabic, “JAM” in the parlance of U.S. soldiers). The Americans left the man with a phone number to call so he could leave anonymous tips.

Talking about the exchange outside the man’s house, the Americans were skeptical. “He’s probably in the JAM,” said Lt. Michael Shevcik. The next day Juarez concurred. “Yes, one hundred percent. He’ll never call.”

With the Mahdi Army’s cease-fire mostly holding up, it’s hard to say exactly how much influence the militia still retains within Iraqi police and army units. Officers in 1-8 say the problem has declined over the course of the year. But on the streets of east Baghdad the signs are less reassuring. Juarez and his men noted that the perpetrators of a recent rocket attack on their base had to pass through an Iraqi Army checkpoint, raising the possibility that Iraqi soldiers turned a blind eye.

American commanders acknowledge that men affiliated with the militia are still working within Iraqi police and army units. But in areas like the one patrolled by 1-8 Cavalry — which borders the militia stronghold of Sadr City — anyone of any consequence is affiliated, at least to some extent, with the militia or Sadr’s political organization.