'Pain has become the remedy'
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
NAWA PASS, Pakistan border with Afghanistan - While I was waiting in a village mud mosque, several motorbikes emerged from the evening darkness along a dirt track.
Four strongly built men stopped in front of me and alighted, their faces flushed from their ride. They each gave me a hug, and their traditional Punjabi greeting was music to my ears after listening to a lot of Pushtu.
I asked the obvious question: "Are you Punjabi?" The concern on their faces was immediately noticeable. "No! We belong to this land and like many Afghans we were settled in Punjab [in Pakistan] and therefore learnt Punjabi and forgot Pashtu, but now we are back in our land and have learnt our language again," one of the men explained.
This is perhaps somewhat romantic. Although such Punjabis might have romantic ties with Afghanistan, they actually come from Pakistani Punjab. Before the partition of British India in 1947, Punjab was seen as a loyal colony of the British and their recruits fought against the Afghans. After partition, Punjabis were seen as usurpers who divided the Pashtun tribes in the name of a new country called Pakistan. To many Afghans, Punjabis are opportunists and while they claim to be Muslims, their culture is a blend of Hinduism and Sikhism.
Sadiq is not a commander: he cannot be, because whatever he might say about his ethnicity, for Afghans he is a Punjabi. I watched as he spoke fluent Pashtu to his Afghan comrades, moving from one group to another with a permanent smile on his face. Clearly, he is the natural leader of the diaspora of Punjabi guerrillas now in Afghanistan.
Sadiq was in the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani jihadi group focused on the struggle to regain Indian-administered Kashmir. He was trained by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to conduct guerrilla operations all across India. He knows how to generate resources and lead sorties.
He joined the Taliban in late 2004 as an ordinary fighter, but because of his skills he quickly rose through the ranks. He became a trainer and honed his men's battle skills. And although he is not a commander, he is more respected and important than many of them. He is the mastermind of all guerrilla operational plans in Afghanistan's Kunar Valley.
An emirate in the making
I said my final prayers of the day and had my dinner. It was tolerably cold, and I sat back and by the light of a gas lamp watched and listened to tired guerrillas discussing their day.
"I was thinking before coming here, how do you say your Friday prayers in the battlefield - I noticed you did not say any today?" I started the conversation with Sadiq.
"First, we are all travelers, so Friday prayers are not compulsory. But most importantly, this region has been declared darul harb [enemy country], so Friday prayers are suspended until it becomes darul Islam [abode of Islam]," Sadiq replied.
I continued this discussion with Sadiq on prayers and the circumstances in which they are suspended and restored, and soon all the people in the mud hut had gathered around and the conversation turned to the new dynamics of the Afghan resistance.
So I launched a series of questions. "It is still not clear who is in whose command. What is the command of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [leader of the Hezb-i-Islami]? Is [veteran Afghan resistance figure] Jalaluddin Haqqani under [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar, or is he commanding separately? Who do the Pakistan Taliban answer to? To Mullah Omar? And what are Pakistani jihadis up to?
Sadiq smiled at the barrage of questions and responded with some breaking news, "Mullah Omar, the Taliban shura [council], al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban have resolved this issue once and for all. Soon the mujahideen will announce the revival of a [region-wide] Islamic emirate, and after this - like all fighting groups gathered under a single command in Iraq - all commanders in Afghanistan will fall under the umbrella of the Islamic emirate.
"The Islamic emirate will govern [operations in] Afghanistan and Pakistan, and whether it is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or any other, they will be under a single command and will not be able to defy the emirate because this is Islam," Sadiq said.
The pronouncement of an emirate would be a major development, and I jumped to my feet. "Are you sure that an Islamic emirate will be announced soon?"
"Yes, indeed," said Sadiq smiling.
"Sadiq, you know what this means? It would challenge both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Are the Taliban capable of doing this?" I asked.
"Of course we are," Sadiq replied calmly.
"How?" I asked.
"Three years ago, it was actually a dream, but now circumstances have enabled such an environment. Apart from North Waziristan and South Waziristan [tribal areas in Pakistan], the mujahideen used to move in Bajaur [Agency] and Mohmand Agency as if they were moving in [the Pakistani cities of] Karachi or Lahore. We were terrified of being arrested and of the fact that somebody would be spying on us.
"We used to make secret trips to Afghanistan to conduct occasional raids. On the one side the Americans were after us, and on the other side our own Pakistani army was tracking us. We didn't want to fight the Pakistan army, after all, they are Muslims. We tried our best to avoid fighting them, and still hardly 3% of the mujahideen are fighting against them. However, Pakistan did not think the way we were thinking. They were more cruel and gruesome than the Americans.
"We had a companion who had fought alongside us in Kashmir. His name was Umer, and he was dead against fighting the Pakistani army. Whenever the military conducted operations, he used to desert his companions, saying he could not fight against Muslims.
"One day, he was arrested by the ISI. They hung him by one hand from a roof, and carved stars on his thighs with daggers. They humiliated him in all manners. When he was released, it was thought he would be a broken person.
"But now he is an advocate of jihad against the Pakistani army, bigger than anybody else. These sorts of incidents have turned the mujahideen into our camp. They understand they have been fooled in the name of jihad in Kashmir," said Sadiq, referring to Islamabad's de-escalation of fighting in the Kashmir Valley.
"In 2003, a gathering in Muredkey [the LeT's Pakistani headquarters] was an eye-opener to sincere jihadis. Hafiz Mohammed Saeed [chief of the LeT] introduced us to one Abdullah, a person wearing a prayer cap and a small beard. Many among us knew he was the head of the ISI's Kashmir cell.
"He addressed the gathering and made the point that the Kashmiri jihad could not achieve its objectives and that it was a lame duck. He advised the mujahideen to sit quietly at home until new circumstances developed. This sort of advice turned people into our camp, but the real revolution came because of al-Qaeda," Sadiq said.
"[Senior al-Qaeda leader] Abu Marwan al-Suri was killed [in May 2006] by the Khasadar force in Bajaur Agency. This is a force of peons. Had Marwan been killed by any elite commando force of the Pakistani army, we would not have been so saddened, but for a person like him to be killed by a third-rate force like the Khasadars, it was bad.
"He was traveling in bus when he was identified as an Arab and was asked to descend. He took out his revolver and warned the Khasadars that he was a mujahid and did not want to kill any Muslims, so they should let him go. The Khasadars did not listen to him. You know Arabs, they do not escape - they fight until their last - but he tried to flee to avoid fighting Muslims, and was killed.
"His body was photographed and the pictures were presented to the Americans with pride and the people responsible received medals. Every mujahid felt humiliated. Brother ... our blood is not so cheap to be played around with by any third-rate person. Mujahideen were full of rage. They rose from their hideouts.
"Marwan's body became an inspiration. The aroma from his blood was a legend in Bajaur and his graveyard became a holy site. Reaction swept through Bajaur and in a matter of days the Khasadars' posts were wiped out and blown up. The army came to conduct operations, but was defeated.
"Our victories gathered all tribes around us. You know our biggest commander in Bajaur, Maulana Faqir Muhammad, was trained by the Pakistani army to resist the Soviets [in the 1980s] but after September 11 his brother was detained by the army. He was beaten to death.
"In 2005 the Taliban were limited to South Waziristan and North Waziristan and in Mohmand Agency there were only a few dozen of them, but now we number 18,000, thanks to the operations of the Pakistani army," Sadiq said, his face full of emotion.
"You asked me what makes us think we can establish an Islamic emirate," Sadiq said, and then recited famous Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan, who went under the pen name of Ghalib: "Pain has crossed its limits and has become the remedy."
"We have braved all their tyrannies. They cannot be more tyrannical than that. We are hardened and they are tired and now it is our turn and I promise that we will turn the tables on them soon," Sadiq said.
We were all tired, and went to bed, but my brain was racing so much it was a while before sleep came.
The next morning at breakfast we pick up on the same topic.
"Sadiq, whether it is right or wrong, don't you think that the new Taliban plans will create problems within the Pakistani army?" I asked.
"That does not matter. This battle cannot stop now. The mujahideen have been deceived so many times that now they have decided to fight the Pakistani army at all costs," Sadiq said, sipping his tea.
After a long pause, he continued, "You know, the Taliban are blamed for all the problems, but in actual fact it is America which will never allow a ceasefire between the Pakistani army and the mujahideen. The Americans will force the Pakistani army to fight against us and therefore this battle will continue," Sadiq said.
"Man, you are fighting against the army and blaming America," I taunted him.
"I will tell you why. The Americans know exactly how near we are to Islamabad and they are aware of defections in the Pakistani army, and they are also aware that only one or two defections at the level of colonel will mean that the mujahideen will get their hands on some batteries of missiles which can carry nuclear warheads.
"And they [Americans] know the moment the mujahideen get that, the game will turn in favor of the mujahideen both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then nobody will be able to stop our march. So the Americans want a big battle between the army and the mujahideen so that the end game will be that they can step in and destroy Pakistan's nukes under the pretext that the Pakistani army cannot protect them from the mujahideen," Sadiq said.
Shortly after breakfast, the Taliban said goodbye to me. On my way home, as I passed deserted checkpoints in Bajaur, I cast my mind back to the origins of the US-led "war on terror", the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Al-Qaeda carried these out with a particular aim - to invite the wrath of the American "cowboys" who would beat up Muslims to such an extent that a severe backlash would be generated.
Six years have passed, and we have had the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (maybe Iran in the offing). Yet it might be in the tribal areas of Pakistan that the real showdown begins. I can just imagine the dance of jubilation Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will do on the news of a fresh grand operation by the Pakistani army there - it will only breed more Taliban.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
Original article posted here.
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Friday, November 02, 2007
Dummy Rummy's memos reveal warmongering and stereotyping
From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld.
In Sometimes-Brusque 'Snowflakes,' He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."
In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual." Pessimistic news reports -- "our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost" -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.
People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just keep taking hits."
The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice -- as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary -- Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a long war," he wrote. "Iraq is only one battleground."
Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. "Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran," he wrote in his April 2006 memo.
Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."
"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."
In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.
Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."
If radicals "get a hold of" oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have "an enormous national security problem."
The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is "getting run out of Central Asia" by the Russians, who are doing a "considerably better job at bullying" than Washington is doing to "counter their bullying."
As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
"I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters' op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible," he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried "chronic troop shortages in Iraq" while the Pentagon buys "high-tech toys that have no missions."
On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a "better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard." A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven "mistakes" columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay -- which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had "gone sour."
"Please have someone find precisely when I said 'dead-enders' and what the context was," he ordered Smith in September 2006.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined "is disgraceful," Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that "one welcome dividend" of Rumsfeld's departure was that the United States would "now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down."
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, "I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been." He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. "We need to get that story out," he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.
Original article posted here.
In Sometimes-Brusque 'Snowflakes,' He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."
In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual." Pessimistic news reports -- "our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost" -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.
People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just keep taking hits."
The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice -- as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary -- Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a long war," he wrote. "Iraq is only one battleground."
Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. "Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran," he wrote in his April 2006 memo.
Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."
"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."
In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.
Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."
If radicals "get a hold of" oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have "an enormous national security problem."
The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is "getting run out of Central Asia" by the Russians, who are doing a "considerably better job at bullying" than Washington is doing to "counter their bullying."
As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
"I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters' op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible," he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried "chronic troop shortages in Iraq" while the Pentagon buys "high-tech toys that have no missions."
On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a "better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard." A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven "mistakes" columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay -- which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had "gone sour."
"Please have someone find precisely when I said 'dead-enders' and what the context was," he ordered Smith in September 2006.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined "is disgraceful," Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that "one welcome dividend" of Rumsfeld's departure was that the United States would "now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down."
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, "I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been." He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. "We need to get that story out," he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.
Original article posted here.
Monday, August 20, 2007
The (fabricated) enemy within
NYPD's Homegrown Hysteria
An influential report by two New York Police Department counterterrorism analysts crosses a dangerous threshold in recasting the “war on terror” as primarily a struggle that requires increased domestic surveillance and pre-emptive action against American Muslims who might become “homegrown terrorists” by visiting Internet sites.
Written by Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt, the Aug. 15 report recommends increased police attention “to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks.” The report was promptly hailed in the U.S. news media. (Newsweek called it “insightful.”)
What makes the report troubling to civil libertarians, however, is that it lowers the bar for fighting terrorism to simply the possibility that some domestic Muslims might be influenced by jihadist Web sites, and it applies lax standards to target Americans of a specific religious faith as prospective terrorists.
Yet – except for the fact that Muslims have become all-purpose political whipping boys – there is little indication that disaffected American Muslims represent any more significant threat than, say, alienated white males, right-wing Cuban-Americans or inner-city gangs, and quite possibly less.
Arguably, there has been more reason to fear right-wing militia types like Timothy McVeigh (who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing) or Cuban terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles (now protected from deportation by the Bush administration despite his role in repeated terror attacks).
Yet, after angry white male McVeigh car-bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, there was no talk of suspending the Constitution or rounding up right-wing militia members for pre-emptive detention. Law enforcement simply tracked down the conspirators and punished them through the normal criminal justice system. (McVeigh was executed and his co-conspirators were sentenced to prison terms.)
Many right-wing extremists also have their hatreds fueled not just by like-minded Web sites but by talk radio and TV personalities, such as Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, who flippantly use hostile, even threatening, language against political enemies.
Indeed, if Silber and Bhatt based their report on actual killings by domestic terrorists – rather than concentrating on a handful of thwarted Muslim plans and even theoretical threats – they would have written a report that not only took aim at violent jihadist Web sites but at hate talk on right-wing radio and TV shows.
Destructive Weapons
The NYPD report also misses the vital point that the justification for the Bush administration’s over-the-top actions in the “war on terror” – including use of torture, detention without trial, and suspension of constitutional liberties – is that a foreign terrorist group like al-Qaeda might get its hands on a nuclear bomb or other WMD and inflict mass casualties inside the United States.
Without connections to such an external group, the potential destructiveness from a homegrown terrorist – whether an angry white male, a right-wing Cuban or a disaffected Muslim – is far less dangerous, meaning that normal police strategies within traditional legal standards should be enough to do the job.
Yet, even as the NYPD report downplays the danger from overseas terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, it refocuses special police attention on young American Muslims who – despite no direct communications with foreign terrorists – are deemed a threat because they might gain access to pro-jihadist Web sites.
“During the Indoctrination phase, when individuals adopt this virulent ideology,” the report said, “the Internet allows the aspiring jihadist to view the world and global conflicts through this extremist lens.”
The NYPD report also suggests that since it is so difficult to determine which Muslims may become “radicalized,” police agencies need much greater surveillance capabilities, a recommendation that fits in well with what is known about recent Pentagon strategies.
A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an “active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to “transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the … U.S. homeland.”
The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”
Spy Satellites
With the latest news that limits have been lifted on the ability of domestic law-enforcement agencies to use imagery from military spy satellites, it looks like the Pentagon’s strategy for homeland defense is being put into practice.
In May, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell approved in a memorandum to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff a plan that would put some of the nation’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials as early as this fall.
But the plan has drawn sharp criticism from privacy advocates who say the government is improperly using military technology for domestic surveillance.
“It potentially marks a transformation of American political culture toward a surveillance state in which the entire public domain is subject to official monitoring,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
Concerns also have been raised over whether the plan would violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits active-duty military forces from conducting law-enforcement missions on American soil.
Despite these concerns, the NYPD report lends credibility to the notion that this sort of surveillance capability is precisely what is needed to counter an allegedly growing threat of homegrown terrorism.
The report also purports to analyze why young Muslims might be drawn to radical ideologies. In doing so, however, it ignores the impact of U.S. policies such as the Iraq War, arbitrary detention of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay and the Bush administration’s use of torture.
Instead, the report depicts American Muslims as “looking for an identity and a cause,” not reacting to genuine cases of oppression and injustice.
“Much different from the Israeli-Palestinian equation,” the report said, “the transformation of a Western-based individual is not triggered by oppression, suffering, revenge, or desperation.”
However, what’s missing from this psychoanalysis are first-hand accounts from those being psychoanalyzed. Nowhere in the report is there an indication that its authors actually asked young Muslims why some are attracted to jihadist Web sites.
Indeed, in the report’s “methodology” section, there is no mention of interviews with any suspected terrorists, even though many of the Muslims being analyzed are in custody often on charges of conspiracy to commit crimes that were never actually committed.
Instead of speaking with these alleged jihadists, “the NYPD dispatched detectives and analysts” to cities, which were the supposed targets of thwarted terrorist attacks, “to meet with law enforcement, intelligence officials and academics,” the report said.
Even the choice of those academics and intelligence officials must have been highly selective, however, because no reference is made to the growing consensus that the Bush administration’s policies are a key factor in development of radical jihadist ideology.
Contrary Intelligence
By insisting that American Muslims are being radicalized by their internal identity crises (rather than anger over the Iraq War, for instance), Silber and Bhatt seem to contradict some of the latest analysis of the U.S. intelligence community.
In 2006, the New York Times disclosed an official National Intelligence Estimate, which stated that the Iraq invasion has worsened the global terrorist threat.
The NIE, representing the consensus view of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, for the first time recognized the obvious: that the invasion of Iraq has spawned a new generation of Islamic extremists who are determined to strike at the West, that Iraq has served as both a recruitment poster and a training ground for jihadists.
“The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse” since Sept. 11, 2001, summarized one U.S. intelligence official in referring to the NIE, which was completed in April 2006. [NYT, Sept. 24, 2006]
The NYPD report also made no mention of a 2006 survey of over 100 of America’s top terrorism experts, which found an overwhelming agreement that the world is more dangerous for the American people than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, and that Islamic animosity over the Iraq War is a primary factor in the deteriorating security situation.
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who ran the now-disbanded al-Qaeda task force, has said Osama bin Laden knows that his ragtag band of terrorists can’t do much in taking on the awesome power of the U.S. military, but bin Laden hopes that his call to arms can inspire people even inside the United States to take up his cause.
So, if the goal is to reduce the appeal of this extremist message, a logical strategy would seem to be removal of the reasons for anger, such as the Iraq War, the Guantanamo Bay detentions and the appearance of anti-Muslim prejudice in the U.S. legal system.
Instead, Silber and Bhatt essentially absolve the Bush administration of any responsibility for the rise in Islamic anger, at least among American Muslims, putting the onus almost entirely on their supposed psychological shortcomings and irrationality.
Rather than taking seriously the anger that Muslims feel about the Iraq War – which by some estimates has killed over 600,000 Iraqis and created millions of refugees – the NYPD report suggests that the war issue is raised mostly as a propaganda device.
“A political crisis is sometimes brought about by some of the ‘moral shock’ tactics used by extremists in spewing out political messages, arguments, and associated atrocities that highlight some particular grievance that Islam has with the West,” the report said.
“Chronic exposure to these extremist political campaigns (e.g. … Iraq) may initiate feelings of moral outrage” which in turn leads some Muslims to be “born again” as jihadists, the report said.
Police Repression
The NYPD report also insists that anti-Muslim bias in American society plays little role in the radicalizing process. Again, this contradicts many accepted realities of so-called homegrown terrorism in Western societies.
A 1999 government report called “Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why,” for instance, notes that “the person who becomes a terrorist in Western countries is generally both intellectual and idealistic. … Often, violent encounters with police or other security forces motivate an already socially alienated individual to join a terrorist group.”
By overlooking this factor in its report, Silber and Bhatt omit a useful policy prescription for averting homegrown terrorism, that politicians and police should make every effort to create a climate of fairness that reduces the sense among minority groups that they are facing persecution or bigotry.
Over the past several years, however, the NYPD has earned a reputation of doing the opposite, ranking among the most repressive police agencies in the country. This is the case both when it comes to general policing of the community and the policing of political demonstrations against the Iraq War and other U.S. policies.
The police department came under criticism last year for the killing of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old African-American, outside of a strip club in Jamaica, Queens. In a hail of 50 bullets, five plain-clothes NYPD officers shot and killed the unarmed man on Nov. 25, 2006, hours before he was to be married.
The incident drew comparisons to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea. Four officers shot 41 rounds at Diallo as he attempted to enter his apartment.
The NYPD also has been faulted for its heavy-handed tactics in dealing with political demonstrations. Over two decades, the NYPD has refined use of “protest pens” to herd protesters like cattle, long before the term “free-speech zone” was coined.
On Feb. 15, 2003, a day of worldwide protest against the looming invasion of Iraq, the NYPD declared that due to “security threats,” no marching would be permitted in the city. Nevertheless, about 60 unauthorized “feeder marches” took place, prompting police on horseback to charge protesters and detain some without charges for hours.
During the 2004 Republican National Convention, the NYPD arrested over 1,800 peaceful protesters and sent them to an old bus depot that had been converted to a makeshift detention center.
The depot, known as Pier 57, was contaminated with asbestos and lead, which was apparently known several months before the convention, according to documents obtained by journalist Drew Poe.
Bike Protests
Besides these high-profile cases of police repression, the NYPD has also waged a concerted campaign against Critical Mass bike rides, in which bicycle enthusiasts ride through the streets of New York to highlight cycling as an environmentally friendly alternative to driving.
In responding to these monthly bike rides, the NYPD has consistently engaged in mass arrests and has recklessly endangered public safety.
“Police vehicles have driven the wrong way down busy Midtown streets and have cut at sharp, brake-screeching angles across Greenwich Village avenues,” the New York Times reported in February 2006. “They have climbed onto sidewalks to skirt traffic jams near Grand Central Terminal, according to witnesses. Officers have been filmed driving a large sport utility vehicle along the Hudson River bicycle and jogging path” – all in an attempt to prevent the monthly bike rides.
With videotape evidence of these aggressive tactics, activists have won battles in court against the NYPD. On Feb. 15, 2006, a state judge rejected the city’s attempt to shut the bike rides down, calling the city’s legal strategy against the ride “highly irregular” and “as unnecessary as it is inappropriate.”
Now, the NYPD “homegrown terrorism” report suggests a plan to infringe on freedom of speech by targeting information on the Internet.
The report’s highlighting of Web sites as a principal concern also fits with earlier Defense Department recommendations about “fighting the net” as part of the “war on terror.”
A secret Pentagon “Information Operations Roadmap,” approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, included a strategy for taking over the Internet and controlling the flow of information.
In a speech on Feb. 17, 2006, to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration’s perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the “global war on terror.”
“Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place,” Rumsfeld said.
It could be said that in singling out the Internet in its report on domestic terrorism, the NYPD report has leant its support and credibility to Rumsfeld’s thoughts about countering both “the enemy” and “news informers.” Silber and Bhatt mentioned the Internet 42 times in their 90-page report.
But the larger threat from the NYPD report may be that -- by whipping up a public hysteria about "homegrown terrorism" -- it demonstrates the very anti-Islamic bias that drives young Muslims toward extremism. In that sense, the report may become more a part of the problem than part of any solution.
Nat Parry is co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, which can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His e-mail address is ndtparry@gmail.com.
Ideological confusion
It must be the end of secularism
By Spengler
Secular liberalism stands helpless before a new century of religious wars, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla concedes in "The politics of God", a despairing vision of the political future published in the August 19 New York Times Magazine. [1] It is one of those important statements, like the "end of history", that will repeat on us indefinitely, like a bad curry. It comprises most of the Times weekend magazine, presented with all the pomposity the newspaper can summon.
For the few of us who asked not how to avoid religious war, but rather how best to fight it, Lilla's essay provides double validation. Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning. Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims, particularly to Professor Tariq Ramadan. If that sounds strange, it is not my fault. It is all there in black and white, as I will report below. But first, here is Lilla's de profundis:
For more than two centuries, from the American and French revolutions to the collapse of Soviet communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity - these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
That is well enough, and Exhibit 1 for the prosecution is the president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Lilla quotes his May 2006 letter to the US president at some length, eg, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems ... Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice, and the will of God will prevail over all things."
Yet by wink and nudge, Lilla conjures us to believe that the true problem is not resurgent fanaticism in the Muslim world at all, but rather the new ascendance of Christian faith in the West. He presents not a shred of evidence for this outlandish charge. The reader will peruse the essay in vain for a word of explanation concerning the origins of Muslim fanaticism. Instead, the entire content is devoted to presenting the history of a Christian fanaticism that does not exist, and has not existed for a century or more. It may be that Lilla, a follower of Leo Strauss, is trying his hand at what Strauss called esoteric writing - concealing a message for adept readers. Whatever the motive, his argument is inconsequential and silly. Fascism, communism, neo-orthodox Protestantism, Zionism - any movement that elicited passion and commitment - all are summoned to the prisoner's box to hear Lilla's bill of indictment.
The generation that survived World War I, he writes, "craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse - one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine." Karl Barth, the anti-Nazi Swiss theologian, and the young Zionist Martin Buber are just as guilty as Marxists and Nazis.
Before all these dreadful people brought faith back into politics, Lilla avers, 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had saved civilization from religious wars by changing the subject of political thought to tolerance and compromise:
Over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.
Precisely how Hobbes accomplished all of this is a mystery known only to political scientists who take themselves far too seriously. The masses, after all, did not rally in the public squares waving little books of quotations from Chairman Hobbes. Never mind that the United States, which defined the modern democratic state, was founded by radical Protestant refugees from Europe who set out to build a New Jerusalem, and that impassioned religious faith has characterized American discourse from its founding. Lilla desires us to believe that an elite of political scientists much like himself managed to re-engineer the social order during the 18th century, before those awful fanatics came back. He reminds one of the scientists on the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who wander with their noses in the air and must be hit on the nose with inflated pig's bladders to prevent them falling over the edge.
And so we come to the first decade of the 21st century, Lilla argues, over which a terrible shadow lies: man's desire for redemption:
The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason ... It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his Leviathan.
Does Professor Lilla seriously believe that nothing has changed since the 17th century, when religious wars killed off half the population of central Europe? Christian America confronted the atheistic Soviet Union during the 1980s, and without a shot fired in anger, the Soviet Union collapsed. Where was the fanaticism, the rancor, the bloodlust on the part of the West? The greatest danger to central Europe today, which over the next century will suffer population declines comparable to those of the 17th century, is the absence of a notion of redemption. Secular Europe has lost its will to live and its desire to reproduce, a malady most prominent in the former communist countries where religious faith was most suppressed.
For that matter, where has Lilla uncovered a streak of religious fanaticism in the West? The previous pope did penance for the murder of the 15th-century Protestant rebel Jan Hus, and worshipped at the synagogue in Rome as well as the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Except for Northern Ireland, the Europeans long have ceased to quarrel about religious issues; in the US, the biblical religious always got along, more or less, and get along today better than they ever have. Toward what end does this messianic urge for redemption manifest itself, and what danger does it pose to the West? Again, there is not a line of argumentation, let alone a shred of evidence, to support the charge that man's desire for redemption has taken us to the brink of religious wars.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The adept readers of Professor Lilla's essay, the diehards of liberal secularism, know that Christianity is the enemy, no matter how docile, peaceful, quiescent and non-threatening it might appear. Christianity is guilty until proven innocent; the peaceful intentions of all Christian denominations toward one another and to non-Christian religions merely disguise an irrepressible urge toward violence, in the perverse view of the Lilla-Putans.
Don't bother to try to liberalize Islam, Lilla intones: "A number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a 'liberal' Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand."
The only hope lies in "renovators" rather than "liberalizers" on the Islamic side, Lilla concludes, such as Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Given the admitted bankruptcy of his position, it is to these Islamists that Lilla proposes to surrender the broken sword of secularism.
Regarding Ramadan's terrorist connections and totalitarian ideology, I summarized the principal issues in a June 12 essay (The faith that dare not speak its name). Lilla is not stupid; he knows that Ramadan and his co-thinkers offer a radically conservative version of Islam steeped in the doctrine of religious conquest.
Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology ... like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan ... whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien "abode". To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.
In the full light of day and in recognition of this danger, Lilla nonetheless proposes that the grandson of the founder of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood is the last best hope for religious peace in the world:
Perhaps for this reason, Ramadan [has] become [an object] of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like ... Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation - and we cannot - we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease co-existence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.
It is as if the High Priest of Reason had ascended its Temple to offer himself as a sacrifice to the Goat God. Professor Ramadan personifies everything that Lilla hates, and Lilla knows it. But Ramadan has one redeeming virtue. He is not a Christian. Lilla does not love Reason; he simply hates Christianity with all his heart, and will make alliance with whichever of her enemies might be available.
Lilla's essay summarizes a book to be released this month. Don't bother.
Note
1. The politics of God, New York Times Magazine, August 19.
Original article posted here.
By Spengler
Secular liberalism stands helpless before a new century of religious wars, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla concedes in "The politics of God", a despairing vision of the political future published in the August 19 New York Times Magazine. [1] It is one of those important statements, like the "end of history", that will repeat on us indefinitely, like a bad curry. It comprises most of the Times weekend magazine, presented with all the pomposity the newspaper can summon.
For the few of us who asked not how to avoid religious war, but rather how best to fight it, Lilla's essay provides double validation. Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning. Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims, particularly to Professor Tariq Ramadan. If that sounds strange, it is not my fault. It is all there in black and white, as I will report below. But first, here is Lilla's de profundis:
For more than two centuries, from the American and French revolutions to the collapse of Soviet communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity - these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
That is well enough, and Exhibit 1 for the prosecution is the president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Lilla quotes his May 2006 letter to the US president at some length, eg, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems ... Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice, and the will of God will prevail over all things."
Yet by wink and nudge, Lilla conjures us to believe that the true problem is not resurgent fanaticism in the Muslim world at all, but rather the new ascendance of Christian faith in the West. He presents not a shred of evidence for this outlandish charge. The reader will peruse the essay in vain for a word of explanation concerning the origins of Muslim fanaticism. Instead, the entire content is devoted to presenting the history of a Christian fanaticism that does not exist, and has not existed for a century or more. It may be that Lilla, a follower of Leo Strauss, is trying his hand at what Strauss called esoteric writing - concealing a message for adept readers. Whatever the motive, his argument is inconsequential and silly. Fascism, communism, neo-orthodox Protestantism, Zionism - any movement that elicited passion and commitment - all are summoned to the prisoner's box to hear Lilla's bill of indictment.
The generation that survived World War I, he writes, "craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse - one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine." Karl Barth, the anti-Nazi Swiss theologian, and the young Zionist Martin Buber are just as guilty as Marxists and Nazis.
Before all these dreadful people brought faith back into politics, Lilla avers, 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had saved civilization from religious wars by changing the subject of political thought to tolerance and compromise:
Over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.
Precisely how Hobbes accomplished all of this is a mystery known only to political scientists who take themselves far too seriously. The masses, after all, did not rally in the public squares waving little books of quotations from Chairman Hobbes. Never mind that the United States, which defined the modern democratic state, was founded by radical Protestant refugees from Europe who set out to build a New Jerusalem, and that impassioned religious faith has characterized American discourse from its founding. Lilla desires us to believe that an elite of political scientists much like himself managed to re-engineer the social order during the 18th century, before those awful fanatics came back. He reminds one of the scientists on the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who wander with their noses in the air and must be hit on the nose with inflated pig's bladders to prevent them falling over the edge.
And so we come to the first decade of the 21st century, Lilla argues, over which a terrible shadow lies: man's desire for redemption:
The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason ... It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his Leviathan.
Does Professor Lilla seriously believe that nothing has changed since the 17th century, when religious wars killed off half the population of central Europe? Christian America confronted the atheistic Soviet Union during the 1980s, and without a shot fired in anger, the Soviet Union collapsed. Where was the fanaticism, the rancor, the bloodlust on the part of the West? The greatest danger to central Europe today, which over the next century will suffer population declines comparable to those of the 17th century, is the absence of a notion of redemption. Secular Europe has lost its will to live and its desire to reproduce, a malady most prominent in the former communist countries where religious faith was most suppressed.
For that matter, where has Lilla uncovered a streak of religious fanaticism in the West? The previous pope did penance for the murder of the 15th-century Protestant rebel Jan Hus, and worshipped at the synagogue in Rome as well as the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Except for Northern Ireland, the Europeans long have ceased to quarrel about religious issues; in the US, the biblical religious always got along, more or less, and get along today better than they ever have. Toward what end does this messianic urge for redemption manifest itself, and what danger does it pose to the West? Again, there is not a line of argumentation, let alone a shred of evidence, to support the charge that man's desire for redemption has taken us to the brink of religious wars.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The adept readers of Professor Lilla's essay, the diehards of liberal secularism, know that Christianity is the enemy, no matter how docile, peaceful, quiescent and non-threatening it might appear. Christianity is guilty until proven innocent; the peaceful intentions of all Christian denominations toward one another and to non-Christian religions merely disguise an irrepressible urge toward violence, in the perverse view of the Lilla-Putans.
Don't bother to try to liberalize Islam, Lilla intones: "A number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a 'liberal' Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand."
The only hope lies in "renovators" rather than "liberalizers" on the Islamic side, Lilla concludes, such as Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Given the admitted bankruptcy of his position, it is to these Islamists that Lilla proposes to surrender the broken sword of secularism.
Regarding Ramadan's terrorist connections and totalitarian ideology, I summarized the principal issues in a June 12 essay (The faith that dare not speak its name). Lilla is not stupid; he knows that Ramadan and his co-thinkers offer a radically conservative version of Islam steeped in the doctrine of religious conquest.
Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology ... like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan ... whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien "abode". To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.
In the full light of day and in recognition of this danger, Lilla nonetheless proposes that the grandson of the founder of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood is the last best hope for religious peace in the world:
Perhaps for this reason, Ramadan [has] become [an object] of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like ... Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation - and we cannot - we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease co-existence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.
It is as if the High Priest of Reason had ascended its Temple to offer himself as a sacrifice to the Goat God. Professor Ramadan personifies everything that Lilla hates, and Lilla knows it. But Ramadan has one redeeming virtue. He is not a Christian. Lilla does not love Reason; he simply hates Christianity with all his heart, and will make alliance with whichever of her enemies might be available.
Lilla's essay summarizes a book to be released this month. Don't bother.
Note
1. The politics of God, New York Times Magazine, August 19.
Original article posted here.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Europe's Hypocrisy about "freedoms" revealed yet again
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Cologne, known for its Gothic cathedral, has been jarred by divisions over plans for a mosque, to be one of Germany’s largest, for the city’s largely Turkish Muslim population. It has grown into a hot national debate.
COLOGNE, Germany — In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.
Skip to next paragraph 
Marcus Gloger for The New York Times
Bekir Alboga, top, an imam, with a model of the mosque, which he supports. Manfred Rouhs, center, opposes it as a sign of a parallel Muslim society and Ralph Giordano, a writer, sees it as “creeping Islamization.”
Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.
Predictably, an extreme-right local political party has waged a noisy, xenophobic protest campaign, drumming up support from its far-right allies in Austria and Belgium.
But the proposal has also drawn fierce criticism from a respected German-Jewish writer, Ralph Giordano, who said the mosque would be “an expression of the creeping Islamization of our land.” And he does not want to see women shrouded in veils on German streets, he said.
Mr. Giordano’s charged remarks, first made at a recent public forum here, have catapulted this local dispute into a national debate in Germany over how a secular society, with Christian roots, should accommodate the religious yearnings of its growing Muslim minority.
Mosques have risen in recent years in Berlin, Mannheim and Duisburg, each time provoking some hand-wringing among residents. But the dispute in Cologne, a city Pope Benedict XVI once called the Rome of the north, seems deeper and more far-reaching.
When Turkey itself is debating the role of Islam in its political life, Germans are starting to ask how — or even if — the 2.7 million people of Turkish descent here can square their religious and cultural beliefs with a pluralistic society that enshrines the rights of women.
Mr. Giordano, a Holocaust survivor, has been sharply criticized, by fellow Jews, among others, and has even received death threats. But others say he is giving voice to Germans, who for reasons of their past, are reluctant to express misgivings about the rise of Islam in their midst.
“We have a common historical background that makes us overly cautious in dealing with these issues,” said the mayor of Cologne, Fritz Schramma, who supports the mosque but is not without his qualms.
“For me, it is self-evident that the Muslims need to have a prestigious place of worship,” said Mr. Schramma, who belongs to the center-right Christian Democratic Union. “But it bothers me when people have lived here for 35 years and they don’t speak a single word of German.”
Cologne’s Roman Catholic leader, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, is similarly ambivalent. Asked in a radio interview if he was afraid of the mosque, he said, “I don’t want to say I’m afraid, but I have an uneasy feeling.”
These statements rankle German-Turkish leaders, who have been working with the city since 2001 to build a mosque on the site of a converted drug factory, which now houses a far smaller mosque, a community center and the offices of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs.
“The 120,000 Muslims of Cologne don’t have a single place they can point to with pride as the symbol of our faith,” said Bekir Alboga, leader of interreligious dialogue at the union, which is known as Ditib. “Christians have their churches, Jews have their synagogues.”
Mr. Alboga, a 44-year-old Turkish imam who immigrated here at 18 and speaks rapid-fire German, said the mosque would be a “crowning moment for religious tolerance.” Given Germany’s dark history, he added, “German politicians need to be careful about what they say.”
Mr. Alboga said he was particularly dismayed by Cardinal Meisner, because the Catholic Church, along with Germany’s Protestant churches, has long supported the mosque. Ditib, he said, is a moderate organization that acts as a “bulwark against radicalism and terrorism.” It plans to finance the project, which will cost more than $20 million, entirely through donations.
The group must obtain a building permit before it can break ground, but Mr. Alboga said he was confident the mosque would not be blocked. Ditib has agreed to various stipulations, including a ban on broadcasting the call to prayer over loudspeakers outside the building.
Public opinion about the project seems guardedly supportive, with a majority of residents saying they favor it, though more than a quarter want its size to be reduced.
Cologne, with one of the largest Muslim populations of any German city, already has nearly 30 mosques. Most are in converted factories or warehouses, often tucked away in hidden courtyards, which has contributed to a sense that Muslims in Germany can worship only furtively.
The new mosque would put Islam in plain sight — all the more so because the design calls for a domed building with glass walls. Showing off a model designed by a German architect who specializes in churches, Mr. Alboga said, “Our hearts are open, our doors are open, our mosque is open.”
In some ways, the mosque seems calculated to avoid touching nerves. It would not be built near a church or loom over its neighbors, like the new mosque in Duisburg. It would be flanked by multistory office buildings and a giant television tower, which would dwarf its minarets. At 180 feet tall, they would be only one-third the height of the cathedral’s spires.
Yet the Turkish community has run into fervent and organized opposition. The far-right party Pro Cologne, which holds 5 of the 90 seats in the city council, collected 23,000 signatures on a petition demanding the halting of the project. The city says only 15,000 of them were genuine.
On June 16, Pro Cologne mobilized 200 people at a rally to protest the mosque. Among those on hand were the leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by Jörg Haider, and the extremist party Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, from Antwerp. Both advocate the deportation of immigrants.
Cologne’s deputy mayor, Elfi Scho-Antwerpes, a Social Democrat, appeared with Turkish leaders at a counterdemonstration across the street. Mayor Schramma, she noted, did not attend.
Manfred Rouhs, a leader of Pro Cologne, said the mosque would reinforce the development of a parallel Muslim society, and encourage the subjugation of women, which he said was embedded in Islam. “This is not a social model that has any place in the middle of Europe,” he said.
In this, he has found common ground with Mr. Giordano, an 84-year-old Jew who eluded the Nazis in World War II by hiding in a cellar. Mr. Giordano, who dismisses Pro Cologne as a “local chapter of contemporary National Socialists,” nonetheless agrees that the mosque is a threat.
“There are people who say this mosque could be a step toward integration,” Mr. Giordano said in an interview. “I say, ‘No, no, and three times no.’ Mosques are a symbol of a parallel world.”
Mr. Giordano said Germany needed to face the fact that, after three generations of Turkish immigration, efforts to integrate the Turkish minority had failed. Immigrants, he said, sought the privileges of membership in German society but refused to bear the obligations.
Germany’s “false tolerance,” he said, enabled the Sept. 11 hijackers to use Hamburg as a haven in which to hatch their terrorist plot. Cologne, too, has struggled with radical Islamic figures, most notably Metin Kaplan, a militant Turkish cleric known as the caliph of Cologne.
“I don’t want to see women on the street wearing burqas,” said Mr. Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. “I’m insulted by that — not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins.”
Such blunt language troubles other German Jews, who say a victim of religious persecution should not take a swipe at another religious minority. Henryk M. Broder, a Jewish journalist who is a friend of Mr. Giordano’s, said he should have avoided the phrase “human penguins.”
But Mr. Broder said that his underlying message was valid, and that his stature as a writer gave him the standing to say it. “A mosque is more than a church or a synagogue,” he said. “It is a political statement.”
For Mr. Alboga, though, the line between frank debate and racist demagoguery is not so clear. “This is like thinking from the Middle Ages,” he said, “and it is sending the racists to the barricades.”
Thursday, May 31, 2007
What is the chance that Sheik Feiz is an intelligence asset saying stupidity just to serve as a caricature of a Muslim threat?
More absolute bullshit, charlatanism, and grounds to be afraid. Very afraid.
Monday, December 25, 2006
Worship life, use technology and scrap the three major mythmaking doctrines (and ask the Pope to prosecute the child molesters in his "flock")
Pope: Worship God not technology
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Pope Benedict said in his Christmas message on Monday that mankind, which has reached other planets and worships technology, cannot live without God or turn its back on the hungry.
It was shameful that in "this age of plenty and unbridled consumerism" many remained deaf to the "heart-rending cry" of those dying of hunger, thirst, disease, poverty, war and terrorism.
In his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message, he made a heartfelt appeal for peace and justice in the Middle East, an end to the "brutal violence" in Iraq and a solution to fratricidal conflicts in Darfur and other parts of Africa.
"Does a 'Saviour' still have any value and meaning for the men and women of the third millennium?" he asked in his address to tens of thousands of people in a sunny St. Peter's Square.
"Is a 'Saviour' still needed by a humanity which has reached the moon and Mars and is prepared to conquer the universe; for a humanity which knows no limits in its pursuit of nature's secrets and which has succeeded even in deciphering the marvelous codes of the human genome?"
"Is a Saviour needed by a humanity which has invented interactive communication, which navigates in the virtual ocean of the Internet and, thanks to the most advanced modern communications technologies, has now made the Earth, our great common home, a global village?"
The Pope, marking the second Christmas season of his pontificate, said that while 21st century man appeared to be a master of his own destiny, "perhaps he needs a saviour all the more" because much of humanity still suffered.
"People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and of unbridled consumerism," he said from the central balcony of Christendom's largest church.
"Some people remain enslaved, exploited and stripped of their dignity; others are victims of racial and religious hatred, hampered by intolerance and discrimination, and by political interference and physical or moral coercion with regard to the free profession of their faith," he said.
"Others see their own bodies and those of their dear ones, particularly their children, maimed by weaponry, by terrorism and by all sorts of violence, at a time when everyone invokes and acclaims progress, solidarity and peace for all," he said.
In his address, the Pope also made a reference to the controversial case of Piergiorgio Welby, a paralyzed Italian man who was denied a Catholic service because he had asked to die.
"What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?" he said.
Welby, an advocate of euthanasia, died on Wednesday after a doctor gave him sedatives and detached a respirator that had kept the victim of advanced muscular dystrophy alive for years.
In his midnight mass for some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica earlier on Monday, he said the image of the baby Jesus in a manger should remind everyone of the plight of poor, abused and neglected children the world over.
At that mass a member of the congregation read a prayer in Arabic asking God to encourage "a spirit of dialogue, mutual understanding and collaboration" among followers of the three great monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Original article posted here.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Pope Benedict said in his Christmas message on Monday that mankind, which has reached other planets and worships technology, cannot live without God or turn its back on the hungry.
It was shameful that in "this age of plenty and unbridled consumerism" many remained deaf to the "heart-rending cry" of those dying of hunger, thirst, disease, poverty, war and terrorism.
In his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message, he made a heartfelt appeal for peace and justice in the Middle East, an end to the "brutal violence" in Iraq and a solution to fratricidal conflicts in Darfur and other parts of Africa.
"Does a 'Saviour' still have any value and meaning for the men and women of the third millennium?" he asked in his address to tens of thousands of people in a sunny St. Peter's Square.
"Is a 'Saviour' still needed by a humanity which has reached the moon and Mars and is prepared to conquer the universe; for a humanity which knows no limits in its pursuit of nature's secrets and which has succeeded even in deciphering the marvelous codes of the human genome?"
"Is a Saviour needed by a humanity which has invented interactive communication, which navigates in the virtual ocean of the Internet and, thanks to the most advanced modern communications technologies, has now made the Earth, our great common home, a global village?"
The Pope, marking the second Christmas season of his pontificate, said that while 21st century man appeared to be a master of his own destiny, "perhaps he needs a saviour all the more" because much of humanity still suffered.
"People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and of unbridled consumerism," he said from the central balcony of Christendom's largest church.
"Some people remain enslaved, exploited and stripped of their dignity; others are victims of racial and religious hatred, hampered by intolerance and discrimination, and by political interference and physical or moral coercion with regard to the free profession of their faith," he said.
"Others see their own bodies and those of their dear ones, particularly their children, maimed by weaponry, by terrorism and by all sorts of violence, at a time when everyone invokes and acclaims progress, solidarity and peace for all," he said.
In his address, the Pope also made a reference to the controversial case of Piergiorgio Welby, a paralyzed Italian man who was denied a Catholic service because he had asked to die.
"What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?" he said.
Welby, an advocate of euthanasia, died on Wednesday after a doctor gave him sedatives and detached a respirator that had kept the victim of advanced muscular dystrophy alive for years.
In his midnight mass for some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica earlier on Monday, he said the image of the baby Jesus in a manger should remind everyone of the plight of poor, abused and neglected children the world over.
At that mass a member of the congregation read a prayer in Arabic asking God to encourage "a spirit of dialogue, mutual understanding and collaboration" among followers of the three great monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Original article posted here.
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