A Sceptical Islamist

Fareed Zakaria on Radical Islam

(Perspectives, Crescent International, April 2009.) 

In the March 9 issue of Newsweek magazine, Fareed Zakaria, the magazine's editor and formerly both an adviser to the Bush administration on US policy in the Middle East and a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, published a article under the heading "Learning to Live with Radical Islam" and the tagline "It's time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists". 

Thirty years after the Islamic revolution, US still a dangerous and implacable enemy

"As the Islamic State celebrates its 30th anniversary, there are some suggesting that the election of Barack Obama represents an opportunity for improved relations with the US. This is to profoundly misunderstand the reasons for the US's enmity... There can be no doubt that Obama will prove as dangerous a foe as Bush was before him, and all in Iran must remain on guard. Fortunately, Iran's successful countering of the neocons' machinations suggest that they are well-equipped to resist whatever Obama comes up with..."

Islamic movement needs to re-focus on key objectives post-Bush

"One can only hope, therefore, that the passing of the neo-con era in the US will contribute also to a decline in the undue profile and importance given to the salafi-jihadi movements who are in many ways — such as their crude and unsophisticated understandings of the processes of history, and political and social change, and their emphasis on military action to the exclusion of other forms of struggle – the Muslim equivalents of the neo-cons."

Muslim world awaits Obama's approach after failure of neo-cons

(Editorial, Crescent International, December 2008.)

The celebrations in large parts of the US and most of the rest of the world following the election of Barack Obama as next president of the USA were perhaps understandable, even though there was very little chance of his failing to be elected, given the totality of the failure of the neo-cons under George W. Bush over the previous eight years.  Such is the US system of government, however, that Obama will not take office until late January, so it will be some time before the change of leadership is seen in the US's actual policies around the world.  Meanwhile we have the twilight of the "transition" period, during which the out-going and in-coming administrations supposedly work together to ensure a smooth transfer of power, but which tends to be characterised more by last-minute legacy building on the part of the out-going administration than anything else; something Obama's camp is well-positioned to understand, considering how many former senior members of the Clinton administration he is promoting in his own administration-in-waiting, which hardly suggests the  change from the established ways of doing things in Washngton that he had promised.

For most Muslims in the world – American Muslims interested in his domestic policy being the obvious exception – the main concern will be in what changes, if any, he will make in US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.  That there will be changes is inevitable – the political hollowness of Obama's call for "change" notwithstanding – because it has been in this area that the Bush administration's failure has been the greatest.  The idea that the US can act as the sole superpower, using pure military might to intimidate the rest of the world into submission, needing to take no notice of what anyone else thinks, has been so discredited that even Sarah Palin refused to acknowledge it on the campaign trail.  Indeed, the first results of the change in Washington have probably already been seen in this area: the Iraqi cabinet's approval of the draft US-Iraqi treaty in mid-November probably owed much to the knowledge that it would be dealing with a new administration in Washington within a few weeks of the treaty coming into effect.

Only in Pakistan? -- a response to an article by Irfan Husain (Dawn, Nov. 8, 2008)

On November 8, Mr Irfan Husain published a column on the US presidential elections in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, under the title "Only in America" (click here to open article in new window).

This was picked up by some Muslims and circulated by email, which is how I came to see it.  Yesterday I wrote some comments on the article and circulated them on the same emailing lists.  A revised version of those comments is given below.

As this was originally part of an email discussion, the same format is used here.  Irfan Husain's original column is reproduced in full, in standard black text, with my comments inserted throughout in bold blue text.

The Jewel of Medina and the achievement of the Rushdie protests

[An earlier version of this article was published as my 'Perspectives' column in Crescent International, November 2008.]
 
The last few weeks have seen the stirrings of what may become the basis for another world-wide Muslim protest movement like those about the Rushdie fitna and the Danish cartoons insulting the Prophet (saw). Beaufort House, a minor publisher in the US, published a sleazy work of fiction called The Jewel of Medina, by an America author, Sherry Jones, which has been described as a work of "soft porn" set in the time of the Prophet and taking a bowdlerised version of the life of Hadhrat A'isha (r.a.) as its theme.* Mainstream publishers Random House had earlier decided against publishing the book, after taking advice from consulants who told them that it would cause immense offence to Muslims.

Reality behind the Obama bandwagon

Barack Hussain Obama's victory in the US presidential election has unleashed the long-anticipated celebrations, in America and around the world, of the end of the neo-con era; made all the more special, in the eyes of many, by the fact that it is marked also by the election of America's first black president. 

It is depressing to see how many Muslims, in America and elsewhere, have uncritically joined the celebrations with little sense of just how hollow they may be.  Eight years ago, a lot of American Muslims actively campaigned for George W. Bush, and celebrated his victory over Al Gore, on the basis that Bush could not possibly be worse than Bill Clinton, then regarded as the most anti-Muslim and pro-Israel president ever.  Most have long since repented their misjudgement and prefer not to be reminded of it, understandably enough.  It may not be long before Obama's Muslim supporters find themselves feeling similarly silly.

Defeat of neo-conservatism is not the end of US neo-imperialism

A friend emailed me today, reminding me of an editorial I had written two years ago, after the US mid-term elections in November 2006, and suggesting it would be a useful accompaniment to my recent piece on the US presidential elections.  So here it is...

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

Defeat of neo-conservatism is not the end of US neo-imperialism

(Editorial, Crescent International, December 2006.)

Even before the mid-term elections in the US last month, many Republicans had recognised that their president had become a liability rather than an asset, and had requested that he stay away from their pre-election campaigns. The perception that the mood in America had turned against Bush and the neo-conservatives was confirmed when the election results came in: the Democrats took control of the House of Congress for the first time in 12 years, and gained enough seats in the Senate to match the Republicans, with 409 seats each; two seats were won by independent candidates allied with the Democrats, giving them effective control of the Senate. The neo-conservative argument that the US could use its overwhelming military power to bulldoze the rest of the world into submission had been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan long ago; despite all the jingoistic right-wing propaganda in the American media, the election results confirm that the US public has got the message. One result is that the Republicans are unlikely to select a neo-conservative candidate for the presidential elections in two years' time, meaning that the corpse of neo-conservatism will be buried when Bush leaves office, regardless of who succeeds him.

Whoever succeeds George W. Bush, world still faces the problem of America

(Editorial, Crescent International, November 2008.)

By the time many readers see this issue of Crescent International, the US presidential elections will have taken place and the results known.  Failing some drastic turnaround in the last days of campaigning (after Crescent goes to press), Barack Obama is likely to be confirmed as the US's first black president, in what is already being widely anticipated  as a total and deliberate repudiation of the legacy of the presidency of George W. Bush.  Last month saw the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), on which Jews repent their sins and are supposedly cleansed of them. (The day was marked in Israel this year by pogroms against Arabs in Acre and other towns.)  In the US, the change of presidency will be treated by many Americans as having a similar effect: yes, the Bush administration has committed many errors in the last few years, but the (expected) anointment of a successor promoted as the precise opposite of everything the neo-cons stand for will be taken as wiping the slate clean and representing a new start.  This is a rewriting of history that Muslims must not make the error of accepting.

The US's political persecution of Muhammad Salah

While reading for a booklet that I am currently writing on Hamas, I have come across a number of interesting articles and papers on various aspects of the Palestinian situation. Among them is a must-read account of the case of Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian-American cleared last year after the longest-running terrorism trial in the US.

He was jailed in Israel in 1993, accused of being a "world commander of Hamas", on the basis of a confession extracted by torture; after his release from jail in Israel in 1997, he was accused in the US of knowingly financing terrorism through his donations to Palestinian charities. Under the Clinton administration, the department of justice ruled that he had no case to answer. The prosecution was later revived under the Bush administration after 9/11.