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Islamophobia has a long history in US

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson's comments on Muslims in US political life made headlines, but scholar Khaled Beydoun says such comments don't happen in a vacuum - but rather are rooted in a legal tradition of suspicion towards Muslims.

Earlier this month, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson told US media he would "not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation," in response to a question about whether "Islam is consistent with the Constitution".

Carson's statement galvanised defenders on the extreme right and prompted critical responses spanning from scorn to constitutional critique.

But Carson's statement was neither an isolated nor novel attitude. In June, a poll by Gallup found 38% of Americans would not vote for a "well-qualified" Muslim presidential candidate.

The root of his comments are found both in America's legal history and today's policing of Muslim communities.

"Islamophobia" is what it's called today. But the rising fear, hate and discrimination that currently threatens eight million Muslim Americans stems from a long and established American tradition of branding Islam as un-American, and demonising Muslim bodies as threat.

Denied citizenship

On the morning of 19 April 1995, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was rocked by a bomb. The domestic terrorist attack killed 168 people and injured 680 more. Minutes after, media reports speculated that "Islamic extremists" or "Arab radicals" were the culprits.

Ninety minutes after the explosions, Timothy McVeigh - a white, Christian male - was arrested and later linked to the attack. There had been no evidence to support the idea Muslims had anything to do with the bombing.

Despite people with similar ideologies to McVeigh were responsible for the majority of domestic terrorist attacks in 1995 - a figure still true today - the legislation that followed the Oklahoma city bombing did not place its focus there.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) was the beginning of policing of Muslim subjects and communities. One part of this legislation led to the disparate investigation of Muslim American political and social activity, while another led to the deportation of Muslims with links - real or fictive - to terrorist activity.

This policing was broadened and intensified after the 9/11 terrorists attacks. More recently, US Homeland Security's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programme, as well as political demagoguery, further expands the suspicious focus on Muslims.

Until 1944, American courts used Muslim identity as grounds to deny citizenship. Even Christians perceived to be Muslims or feared to be "of mixed Muslim ancestry" were denied.

One Supreme Court ruling discussed the "[t]he intense hostility of the people of Moslem faith [toward Christian civilization]". Other courts issued rulings based upon the idea there was an inherent menace and threat to American life" posed by Muslims and Islam.

The courts looked beyond the genuine contours of Islam as faith, and mutated it into a political ideology, and most saliently, a homogenous race - instead of a multi-ethnic and multi-racial religion.

From 1790 until 1952 whiteness was a legal prerequisite for naturalised American citizenship. And Islam was viewed as irreconcilable with whiteness.

In a 1913 decision called Ex Parte Mohreiz, the court denied a Lebanese Christian immigrant citizenship because they associated his "dark walnut skin" with "Mohammedanism".

And in 1942, a Muslim immigrant from Yemen was denied citizenship because, writing about "Arabs" the court noted: "it cannot be expected that as a class they would readily intermarry with our population and be assimilated into our civilization."

In this case, the court conflated "Arab" with "Muslim" identity. The courts too believed that such an identity was "inconsistent with the Constitution", and said so in public rulings.

These legal baselines, rooted in old case law, are part of the rhetoric used by both Mr Carson and Donald Trump. But they also form the foundation of a current breed of state-sponsored Islamophobia.

The 'logic' of targeted policing

Fear of Islam is tightly knit into the American fabric, and deeply rooted in its legal, political and popular imagination. Whenever a domestic terrorist attack takes place in America, many quickly turn to tropes of an "Islamic menace" or "violent foreigner". While these tropes have taken on new forms and frames, they are conceptually identical to their predecessors.

Where evidence is lacking, both political rhetoric and national security policing apparatuses will justify their scrutiny of Muslims by using these tropes.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or more recently, the Boston bombings (which spawned CVE policing), proponents of state-sponsored Islamophobia will justify disproportionate policing of Muslim Americans and the communities they live in on the grounds of isolated attacks involving Muslim culprits.

Although Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics show that only 5% of domestic terrorist attacks involve a Muslim culprit, CVE is a programme functionally tailored to prevent and police Muslim Americans.

Steered by the conflation of Islam with national security threat, CVE policing was piloted in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis - cities with sizable Muslim American communities.

And even before the emergence of CVE, New York Police Department had its own programme of systematic policing and surveillance of Muslim Americans. It was ultimately abandoned because of its brazen violation of civil liberties.

CVE is built upon the same old and embedded stereotypes of Muslims injected into the American psyche centuries ago. Such policing links benign and routine religious, political and social activity with "radicalisation".

Making the Islamophobia dragnet local chills and erodes the constitutionally protected activities of Muslim Americans, and marks them as threats to their neighbours. Suggesting Muslim Americans need to be under special investigation endorses and emboldens the Islamophobic rhetoric among presidential hopefuls.

This combination stirs anti-Muslim fervour on the ground in America. If the state associates Islam with threat, then surely, that will influence political and media perceptions.

Such rising fear and animus toward Muslims ensures that America may not see a Muslim president anytime in its near future. But it does forecast no end to anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail.

By Khaled A Beydoun; assistant professor at the Barry School of Law and an affiliated professor of the University of California-Berkeley Islamophobia Project.. bbc.com

More: http://islamphobia.wordpress.com 

How One Man Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Crisis in the Middle East

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.” Reading the diplomatic record, it’s hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with Pahlavi, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. “Let’s see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.” During another prep, Kissinger was told that “the shah wants to ride in an F-14.” Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. “We can say,” he began, “that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the president would feel easier if he didn’t have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The shah will be flattered.” Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the shah and his wife. The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran, and his recent opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger’s criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up against Shia Iran. “We will live in a proliferated world,” he said in testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as the region “trends toward sectarian upheaval” and “state collapse,” the “disequilibrium of power” might likely tilt toward Tehran. Of all people, Kissinger knows well how easily the best-laid plans can go astray and careen toward disaster. The former diplomat is by no means solely responsible for the mess that is today’s Middle East. There is, of course, George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which Kissinger supported). But he does bear far more responsibility for our proliferated world’s disequilibrium of power than anyone usually recognizes. Some of his Middle East policies are well known. In early 1974, for instance, his so-called shuttle diplomacy helped deescalate the tensions that had led to the previous year’s Arab-Israeli War. At the same time, however, it locked in Israel’s veto over US foreign policy for decades to come. And in December 1975, wrongly believing that he had worked out a lasting pro-American balance of power between Iran and Iraq, Kissinger withdrew his previous support from the Kurds (whom he had been using as agents of destabilization against Baghdad’s Baathists). Iraq moved quickly to launch an assault on the Kurds that killed thousands and then implemented a program of ethnic cleansing, forcibly relocating Kurdish survivors and moving Arabs into their homes. “Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise,” noted a congressional investigation into his sacrifice of the Kurds. Less well known is the way in which Kissinger’s policies toward Iran and Saudi Arabia accelerated the radicalization in the region, how step by catastrophic step he laid the groundwork for the region’s spiraling crises of the present moment. Guardian of the Gulf Most critical histories of US involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-US coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran. He was the one who began a policy of unconditional support for the shah as a way to steady American power in the Persian Gulf while the US extracted itself from Southeast Asia. As James Schlesinger, who served as Nixon’s CIA director and secretary of defense, noted, if “we were going to make the Shah the Guardian of the Gulf, we’ve got to give him what he needs.” Which, Schlesinger added, really meant “giving him what he wants.” What the shah wanted most of all were weapons of every variety—and American military trainers, and a navy, and an air force. It was Kissinger who overrode State Department and Pentagon objections and gave the shah what no other country had: the ability to buy anything he wanted from US weapons makers. “We are looking for a navy,” the shah told Kissinger in 1973, “we have a large shopping list.” And so Kissinger let him buy a navy. By 1976, Kissinger’s last full year in office, Iran had become the largest purchaser of American weaponry and housed the largest contingent of US military advisers anywhere on the planet. By 1977, the historian Ervand Abrahamian notes, “the shah had the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the largest air force in Western Asia, and the fifth-largest army in the whole world.” That meant, just to begin a list, thousands of modern tanks, hundreds of helicopters, F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, dozens of hovercraft, long-range artillery pieces, and Maverick missiles. The next year, the shah bought another $12 billion worth of equipment. After Kissinger left office, the special relationship he had worked so hard to establish blew up with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the flight of the shah, the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the taking of the US Embassy in Tehran (and its occupants as hostages) by student protesters. Washington’s political class is still trying to dig itself out of the rubble. A number of high-ranking Middle East policymakers and experts held Kissinger directly responsible for the disaster, especially career diplomat George Ball, who called Kissinger’s Iran policy an “act of folly.” Kissinger is deft at deflecting attention from this history. After a speech at Annapolis in 2007, a cadet wanted to know why he had sold weapons to the shah of Iran when “he knew the nature of his regime.” “Every American government from the 1950s on cooperated with the Shah of Iran,” Kissinger answered. He continued: “Iran is a crucial piece of strategic real estate, and the fact that it is now in adversarial hands shows why we cooperated with the shah of Iran. Why did we sell weapons to him? Because he was willing to defend himself and because his defense was in our interest. And again, I simply don’t understand why we have to apologize for defending the American national interest, which was also in the national interest of that region.” This account carefully omits his role in greatly escalating the support provided to the shah, including to his infamous SAVAK torturers—the agents of his murderous, US-trained secret police cum death squad—who upheld his regime. Each maimed body or disappeared family member was one more klick on the road to revolution. As George Ball’s biographer, James Bill, writes, considering the “manifest failure” of Kissinger’s Iran policy, “it is worthy of note that in his two massive volumes of political memoirs totaling twenty-eight-hundred pages, Kissinger devoted less than twenty pages to the Iranian revolution and US-Iran relations.” After the shah fell, the ayatollahs were the beneficiaries of Kissinger’s arms largesse, inheriting billions of dollars of warships, tanks, fighter jets, guns, and other materiel. It was also Kissinger who successfully urged the Carter administration to grant the shah asylum in the United States, which hastened the deterioration of relations between Tehran and Washington, precipitating the embassy hostage crisis. Then, in 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, beginning a war that consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. The administration of Ronald Reagan “tilted” toward Baghdad, providing battlefield intelligence used to launch lethal sarin gas attacks on Iranian troops. At the same time, the White House illegally and infamously trafficked high-tech weaponry to revolutionary Iran as part of what became the Iran/Contra affair. “It’s a pity they can’t both lose,” Kissinger is reported to have said of Iran and Iraq. Although that quotation is hard to confirm, Raymond Tanter, who served on the National Security Council, reports that, at a foreign-policy briefing for Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan in October 1980, Kissinger suggested that “the continuation of fighting between Iran and Iraq was in the American interest.” Having bet (and lost) on the shah, Kissinger now hoped to make the best of a bad war. The United States, he counseled Reagan, “should capitalize on continuing hostilities.” Saudi Arabia and the Petrodollar Fix Kissinger’s other “guardian” of the Gulf, Sunni Saudi Arabia, however, didn’t fall, and he did everything he could to turn that already close relationship into an ironclad alliance. In 1975, he signaled what was to come by working out an arms deal for the Saudi regime similar to the one he had green-lighted for Tehran, including a $750 million contract for the sale of 60 F-5E/F fighters to the sheiks. By this time, the United States already had more than a trillion dollars’ worth of military agreements with Riyadh. Only Iran had more. By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a “highly advantageous mutual bargain” between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Such a “bargain,” as others then began to argue, might solve a number of problems, creating demand for the US dollar, injecting needed money into a flagging defense industry hard hit by the Vietnam wind-down, and using petrodollars to cover mounting trade deficits. As it happened, petrodollars would prove anything but a quick fix. High energy prices were a drag on the US economy, with inflation and high interest rates remaining a problem for nearly a decade. Nor was petrodollar dependence part of any preconceived Kissingerian “plan.” As with far more of his moves than he or his admirers now care to admit, he more or less stumbled into it. This was why, in periodic frustration, he occasionally daydreamed about simply seizing the oil fields of the Arabian peninsula and doing away with all the developing economic troubles. “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?” he wondered in November 1973, fantasizing about which gas-pump country he could knock off. “How about Abu Dhabi?” he later asked. (Imagine what the world would be like today had Kissinger, in the fall of 1973, moved to overthrow the Saudi regime rather than Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.) “Let’s work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil if we want,” Kissinger said. Such scimitar rattling was, however, pure posturing. Not only did Kissinger broker the various deals that got the United States hooked on recycled Saudi petrodollars, he also began to promote the idea of an “oil-floor price” below which the cost per barrel wouldn’t fall. Among other things, this scheme was meant to protect the Saudis (and Iran, until 1979) from a sudden drop in demand and provide US petroleum corporations with guaranteed profit margins. Stephen Walt, a scholar of international relations, writes: “By the end of 1975, more than six thousand Americans were engaged in military-related activities in Saudi Arabia. Saudi arms purchased for the period 1974-1975 totaled over $3.8 billion, and a bewildering array of training missions and construction projects worth over $10 billion were now underway.” Since the 1970s, one administration after another has found the iron-clad alliance Kissinger deepened between the House of Saud’s medieval “moderates” and Washington indispensable not only to keep the oil flowing but as a balance against Shia radicalism and secular nationalism of every sort. Recently, however, a series of world-historical events has shattered the context in which that alliance seemed to make sense. These include: the catastrophic war on and occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Syrian uprising and ensuing civil war, the rise of ISIS, Israel’s right-wing lurch, the conflict in Yemen, the falling price of petroleum, and, now, Obama’s Iran deal. But the arms spigot that Kissinger turned on still remains wide open. According to The New York Times, “Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion on weaponry last year—the most ever, and more than either France or Britain—and has become the world’s fourth-largest defense market.” Just as they did after the Vietnam drawdown, US weapons manufacturers are compensating for limits on the defense budget at home by selling arms to Gulf states. The “proxy wars in the Middle East could last for years,” write Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper of the Times, “which will make countries in the region even more eager for the F-35 fighter jet, considered to be the jewel of America’s future arsenal of weapons. The plane, the world’s most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has been marketed heavily to European and Asian allies. It has not yet been peddled to Arab allies because of concerns about preserving Israel’s military edge.” If fortune is really shining on Lockheed and Boeing, Kissinger’s prediction that Obama’s deescalation of tensions with Tehran will sooner or later prompt Saudi-Iranian hostilities will pan out. “With the balance of power in the Middle East in flux, several defense analysts said that could change. Russia is a major arms supplier to Iran, and a decision by President Vladimir Putin to sell an advanced air defense system to Iran could increase demand for the F-35, which is likely to have the ability to penetrate Russian-made defenses,” the Times reports. “This could be the precipitating event: the emerging Sunni-Shia civil war coupled with the sale of advanced Russian air defense systems to Iran,” said one defense analyst. “If anything is going to result in F-35 clearance to the Gulf states, this is the combination of events.” Into Afghanistan If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam. In July 1973, after a coup in Afghanistan brought to power a moderate, secular, but Soviet-leaning republican government, the shah, then approaching the height of his influence with Kissinger, pressed his advantage. He asked for even more military assistance. Now, he said, he “must cover the East with fighter aircraft.” Kissinger complied. Tehran also began to meddle in Afghan politics, offering Kabul billions of dollars for development and security, in exchange for loosening “its ties with the Soviet Union.” This might have seemed a reasonably peaceful way to increase US influence via Iran over Kabul. It was, however, paired with an explosive initiative: via SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), extremist Islamic insurgents were to be slipped into Afghanistan to destabilize Kabul’s republican government. Kissinger, who knew his British and his Russian imperial history, had long considered Pakistan of strategic importance. “The defense of Afghanistan,” he wrote in 1955, “depends on the strength of Pakistan.” But before he could put Pakistan into play against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he had to perfume away the stink of genocide. In 1971, that country had launched a bloodbath in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with Nixon and Kissinger standing “stoutly behind Pakistan’s generals, supporting the murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments,” as Gary Bass has detailed. The president and his national security adviser, Bass writes, “vigorously supported the killers and tormentors of a generation of Bangladeshis.” Because of that genocidal campaign, the State Department, acting against Kissinger’s wishes, had cut off military aid to the country in 1971, though Nixon and Kissinger kept it flowing covertly via Iran. In 1975, Kissinger vigorously pushed for its full, formal restoration, even as he was offering his tacit approval to Maoist China to back Pakistan whose leaders had their own reasons for wanting to destabilize Afghanistan, having to do with border disputes and the ongoing rivalry with India. Kissinger helped make that possible, in part by the key role he played in building up Pakistan as part of a regional strategy in which Iran and Saudi Arabia were similarly deputized to do his dirty work. When Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had backed the 1971 rampage in East Pakistan, visited Washington in 1975 to make the case for restoration of military aid, Kissinger assured President Gerald Ford that he “was great in ’71.” Ford agreed, and US dollars soon started to flow directly to the Pakistani army and intelligence service. As national security adviser and then secretary of state, Kissinger was directly involved in planning and executing covert actions in such diverse places as Cambodia, Angola, and Chile. No available information indicates that he ever directly encouraged Pakistan’s ISI or Iran’s SAVAK to destabilize Afghanistan. But we don’t need a smoking gun to appreciate the larger context and consequences of his many regional initiatives in what, in the 21st century, would come to be known in Washington as the “greater Middle East.” In their 1995 book, Out of Afghanistan, based on research in Soviet archives, foreign-policy analysts Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison provide a wide-ranging sense of just how so many of the policies Kissinger put in place—the empowerment of Iran, the restoration of military relations with Pakistan, high oil prices, an embrace of Saudi Wahhabism, and weapon sales—came together to spark jihadism: ‘‘It was in the early 1970s, with oil prices rising, that Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran embarked on his ambitious effort to roll back Soviet influence in neighboring countries and create a modern version of the ancient Persian empire…. Beginning in 1974, the Shah launched a determined effort to draw Kabul into a Western-tilted, Tehran-centered regional economic and security sphere embracing India, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf states…. The United States actively encouraged this roll-back policy as part of its broad partnership with the Shah.… SAVAK and the CIA worked hand in hand, sometimes in loose collaboration with underground Afghani Islamic fundamentalist groups that shared their anti-Soviet objectives but had their own agendas as well… As oil profits sky-rocketed, emissaries from these newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene with bulging bankrolls.’’ Harrison also wrote that “SAVAK, the CIA, and Pakistani agents” were involved in failed “fundamentalist coup attempts” in Afghanistan in 1973 and 1974, along with an attempted Islamic insurrection in the Panjshir Valley in 1975, laying the groundwork for the jihad of the 1980s (and beyond). Much has been made of Jimmy Carter’s decision, on the advice of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, to authorize “nonlethal” aid to the Afghan mujahedeen in July 1979, six months before Moscow sent troops to support the Afghan government in its fight against a spreading Islamic insurgency. But lethal aid had already long been flowing to those jihadists via Washington’s ally Pakistan (and Iran until its revolution in 1979). This provision of support to radical Islamists, initiated in Kissinger’s tenure and continuing through the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, had a number of unfortunate consequences known all too well today but seldom linked to the good doctor. It put unsustainable pressure on Afghanistan’s fragile secular government. It laid the early infrastructure for today’s transnational radical Islam. And, of course, it destabilized Afghanistan and so helped provoke the Soviet invasion. Some still celebrate the decisions of Carter and Reagan for their role in pulling Moscow into its own Vietnam-style quagmire and so hastening the demise of the Soviet Union. “What is most important to the history of the world?” Brzezinski infamously asked. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” (The rivalry between the two Harvard immigrant diplomats, Kissinger and Brzezinski, is well known. But Brzezinski by 1979 was absolutely Kissingerian in his advice to Carter. In fact, a number of Kissinger’s allies who continued on in the Carter administration, including Walter Slocombe and David Newsom, influenced the decision to support the jihad.) Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan would prove a disaster—and not just for the Soviet Union. When Soviet troops pulled out in 1989, they left behind a shattered country and a shadowy network of insurgent fundamentalists who, for years, had worked hand-in-glove with the CIA in the agency’s longest covert operation, as well as the Saudis and the Pakistani ISI. It was a distinctly Kissingerian line-up of forces. Few serious scholars now believe that the Soviet Union would have proved any more durable had it not invaded Afghanistan. Nor did the allegiance of Afghanistan—whether it tilted toward Washington, Moscow, or Tehran—make any difference to the outcome of the Cold War, any more than did, say, that of Cuba, Iraq, Angola, or Vietnam. For all of the celebration of him as a “grand strategist,” as someone who constantly advises presidents to think of the future, to base their actions today on where they want the country to be in five or 10 years’ time, Kissinger was absolutely blind to the fundamental feebleness and inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. None of it was necessary; none of the lives Kissinger sacrificed in Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, East Timor, and Bangladesh made one bit of difference in the outcome of the Cold War. Similarly, each of Kissinger’s Middle East initiatives has been disastrous in the long run. Just think about them from the vantage point of 2015: banking on despots, inflating the shah, providing massive amounts of aid to security forces that tortured and terrorized democrats, pumping up the US defense industry with recycled petrodollars and so spurring a Middle East arms race financed by high gas prices, emboldening Pakistan’s intelligence service, nurturing Islamic fundamentalism, playing Iran and the Kurds off against Iraq, and then Iraq and Iran off against the Kurds, and committing Washington to defending Israel’s occupation of Arab lands. Combined, they’ve helped bind the modern Middle East into a knot that even Alexander’s sword couldn’t sever. Bloody Inventions Over the last decade, an avalanche of documents—transcripts of conversations and phone calls, declassified memos, and embassy cables—have implicated Henry Kissinger in crimes in Bangladesh, Cambodia, southern Africa, Laos, the Middle East, and Latin America. He’s tried to defend himself by arguing for context. “Just to take a sentence out of a telephone conversation when you have 50 other conversations, it’s just not the way to analyze it,” Kissinger said recently, after yet another damning tranche of documents was declassified. “I’ve been telling people to read a month’s worth of conversations, so you know what else went on.” But a month’s worth of conversations, or eight years for that matter, reads like one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays. Perhaps Macbeth, with its description of what we today call blowback: “That we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” We are still reaping the bloody returns of Kissinger’s inventions.

How One Man Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Crisis in the Middle East by Greg Grandin, thenation.com

Read: http://aftabkhan-net.blogspot.com/2014/10/plan-to-carve-up-muslim-world.html?m=1

The latest tragedy at Mecca highlights Saudi Arabia's core problem

The far deeper problem: a monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia without any airing of criticism of the regime or tradition of accountability. No one knows yet precisely why a stampede of pilgrims during the hajj in Saudi Arabia turned so deadly. The reports of 769 deaths and at least 934 wounded, with horrific images of bodies strewn about, as well as eyewitness accounts, suggest that panic ensued amid pushing and shoving, leading to the worst hajj disaster in 25 years. Granted, it was extremely hot, about 114 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pilgrims may have been easily thrown into uncertainty. But the responsibility for this catastrophe lies with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and a closed political system that cannot learn the lessons of previous failures. Sadly, the pain of a hajj stampede is not a new story. In 2006, 364 pilgrims died in a crush; in 1997, 340 died in a fire-related incident; another 270 perished in 1994; and in 1990, 1,426 pilgrims died in a stampede in an overcrowded tunnel leading to holy sites. After these disasters, Saudi Arabia has each time spent millions to improve the facilities, vowing that it would not happen again. And it happens again. It is not unreasonable to ask why one of the wealthiest nations on the planet cannot seem to get right the basic infrastructure to handle the safety of so many people, a journey known well in advance in a place for which the Saudi regime holds the title of "custodian." This time, the deaths occurred in Mina, about four miles from Mecca, near a place where pilgrims throw seven stones at pillars called Jamarat, marking the location where Satan is believed to have tempted the Prophet Abraham. REUTERS/Ali Al Qarni An aerial view shows Muslim worshippers praying at the Grand mosque, the holiest place in Islam, in the holy city of Mecca during Ramadan July 14, 2015, on Lailat al-Qadr, or Night of Power, on which the Koran was revealed to Prophet Mohammad by Allah. The BBC reported that two massive lines of pilgrims converged at an intersection close to the Jamarat Bridge. Immediately after the carnage, King Salman said he had "instructed concerned authorities to review the operations plan [and] to raise the level of organization and management." Saudi Arabia's health minister blamed the pilgrims, saying they failed to follow instructions. Both of these narrow responses mask the far deeper problem: a monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia without any airing of criticism of the regime or tradition of accountability. When failures occur or crises threaten public safety, there is no unbridled media around to identify those responsible and expose errors to the public. Decision-making is obscure and shrouded in secrecy. The consequences of this misrule were amply evident when the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, a severe coronavirus, began to sweep through the kingdom in 2012-2013. For a long time, the authorities assured people everything was all right, but it wasn't, in part because of a breakdown in infection control at some hospitals. This sounds like a story that a good blogger or activist might expose. But in Saudi Arabia today, bloggers and others who dissent are violently punished for speaking out. The disaster at the hajj is a bell tolling not only for the horrible loss of life, but also for the intolerant, closed system of Saudi rule.

The Washington Post , REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

Cover up of Tragedy at Mina on pretext of Will of God: Islam’s Tragic Fatalism

Earlier this month, on the Muslim holy day of Friday, a horrible accident took place in Mecca near Islam’s holiest site — the Kaaba. A huge crane fell on the mosque that encircles the cube-shaped shrine, killing 118 pilgrims and injuring almost 400. This tragedy was the deadliest crane collapse in modern history, and thus it begged for an investigation. Yet, in a highly religious country, the technicians that operated the crane, the Saudi Binladen Group, had an easy way out. One of them spoke to the press and simply said: “What happened was beyond the power of humans. It was an act of God.”

To their credit, the Saudi authorities did not buy this argument. King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud immediately suspended the company from work, ordered an investigation, and offered compensation for the families of victims. The investigators soon concluded that the company was responsible for the accident, because it did not “respect the rules of safety” and violated the manufacturers’ operating instructions.
(But latercin the stempede at Mina, in which ovet 1100 pilgrimage have been reported dead and hundreds injured... the Saudi officials and grand Mufti says its will of God, destiny.... ???? )

While this factual investigation is a step forward, we must still ask why the technicians publicly absolved themselves of responsibility, and probably in their own minds as well, by evoking “fate.”

This is not the first time that this metaphysical excuse has come up in such circumstances. Worse accidents have happened near the Kaaba before, during the overcrowded season of pilgrimage, the Hajj, and the blame was reflexively placed on the divine. In 1990, 1,426 pilgrims died in a stampede caused mainly by a lack of ventilation. Nonetheless, the king at the time, Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, then argued: “It was God’s will, which is above everything.” “It was fate,” he added.

This isn’t just a Saudi problem; it is a global Muslim problem. Fatalism is constantly used as an excuse for human neglect and errors. Even in Turkey, which is much more modern and secular than Saudi Arabia, “fate” has frequently been invoked by various officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as an explanation for colossal accidents on railroads, in coal mines and on construction sites.

In almost every case, however, closer scrutiny has revealed the cause to be Turkey’s poor work safety standards and the government’s sluggishness in improving them. Only in February 2015, after hundreds of tragic accidents that killed more than 13,000 workers in 12 years, did Turkey become a party to the International Labor Organization’s conventions on work safety, which were drawn up more than two decades ago and adopted long ago by many other nations.

Accidents, of course, happen everywhere. Yet in the Muslim world, fatalism often serves as a cover for inadequate safety measures or greedy bosses unwilling to pay for them. That is why Turkey’s top cleric, Mehmet Gormez, an erudite theologian, felt the need to warn fellow Turks that “Producing excuses about ‘divine power’ for human guilt and responsibility is wrong,” after a Dickensian mine fire killed 301 workers in 2014.

“The laws of nature are the laws of God. God has given us the ability to understand these laws and asked from us to act accordingly,” Mr. Gormez declared. “What is suitable for God’s will is to take the necessary precautions against the physical causes for disasters.”

This important statement was unmistakably grounded in certain medieval Islamic schools of thought, such as the Maturidis and the Mutazilites, who believed human beings possessed free will and could be “the creator of their own deeds.” They also believed that humans could use reason to interpret scripture and establish moral truths.

But such rationalist Muslim schools had powerful rivals, such as the Asharites and the even more rigid Hanbalis, the precursors of today’s Salafis. These dogmatists played down human free will by emphasizing God’s predestination, and discredited human reason. They also denied the existence of natural laws, assuming that causality is an infringement on God’s omnipotence.

Today most Muslims have little knowledge about these old debates, but they live within cultural codes largely defined by the dogmatists, who gained the upper hand in the war of ideas in early Islam. In these codes, human free will is easily sacrificed to fatalism, science and reason are trivialized, and philosophy is frowned upon.

Consequently, “God’s will” becomes an easy cover for intellectual laziness, lack of planning, and irresponsibility. Muslims in positions of power often refer to “fate” to explain away their failures, while never hesitating to take pride in their successes.

Colossal accidents in Mecca and elsewhere must be taken as alarm signals for Muslims to purge our societies of this problematic mentality and seek the great intellectual revival we need. Using oil money to import Western (or Far Eastern) technology is not a solution. What matters is gaining the skills to use that technology proficiently, with all the necessary precautions — and maybe one day inventing such technology ourselves.

Ironically, there was once a time when Muslims were the greatest inventors in the world, with towering mathematicians such as Al Khwarizmi (from whose name comes the term “algorithm”), physicians such as Avicenna (the father of modern medicine), or philosophers such as Averroes (who introduced Europe to Aristotle and rational theology). Taking pride in them today, as we sometimes do, is a start.

But the real question is why these thinkers’ ideas have had a greater impact on Western culture than on Islamic thought? And why have they been marginalized or branded heretical in the lands where they originated? Our past heresies could be exactly what we need to open our minds today.
Islam’s Tragic Fatalism: nytimes.com
More:
Free Will & Predestination: Discord or Concord:
https://faithforum.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/will-of-god-astray/

Does the military still control Pakistan?

The army is hugely powerful in Pakistan
Some call it military rule by stealth. Others prefer to describe it as the generals and the politicians working harmoniously in the national interest. But however you look at it, there's no denying the Pakistan army's political power is growing.
It all dates back to the Peshawar school attack of 16 December 2014 when the Pakistani Taliban murdered 132 schoolboys.
Within days the civilian leadership had formulated a 20-point National Action Plan to confront the militants, curb their hate speeches, control their religious seminaries and cut their finances.
Aware that the civilian courts are generally reluctant to convict Jihadists, the parliament then passed a constitutional amendment to establish military courts.
The army then announced new "apex committees" that brought together senior politicians, bureaucrats, intelligence officials and military officers.

As many as 50,000 suspected militants have been detained or arrested and in another sign of the state's resolve, Malik Ishaq, the leader of a formidable sectarian group, Lashkar e Jhangvi, was shot dead by police in what is widely believed to be an extra-judicial killing.
The crackdown has led to sharply reduced levels of militant violence.
And with media highlighting the role of the army chief General Raheel Sharif, the army is enjoying a surge of public support.
But for all the hopes that the Peshawar School attacks might have marked a significant turning point, some wonder whether the National Action Plan will bring lasting change.
After all, Pakistanis could be forgiven for thinking they have seen it all before.
Tens of thousands of suspected militants were detained by General Musharraf's regime in 2007, only to be released a few months later.
Since the state lacks the capacity to investigate the detainees the same could well happen again.
When he announced the National Action Plan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif stated that Pakistan would no longer distinguish between the "good" Taliban (who fight Pakistan's enemies) and the "bad" Taliban (who attack targets in Pakistan itself).
Selective targets
But in reality the state is still being selective about which groups it targets.
Pakistani-based Jihadist groups with a history of fighting Indian forces in the disputed territory of Kashmir are being left alone.
So too are the Afghan Taliban and the Afghan-facing Haqqani Network which stands accused of mounting recent attacks in Kabul.
Injured school girl being carried following an attack by Taliban gunmen on the Army Public School in Peshawar, December 2014Image copyrightGetty Images
Image caption
Plans were drawn up to combat militants following the Peshawar school attack
Perhaps most controversially of all Lashkar e Toiba (or as its renamed itself, Jamaat ud Dawa), the group accused of mounting the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has not been confronted.
The group's leader Hafeez Saeed is frequently quoted in the Pakistan press.
And no-one is expecting further legal action against, for example, LSE graduate Omar Sheikh who has been convicted of involvement in the 2002 murder of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. His appeal has been pending since 2002.
Nor is there likely to be any resolution of the case of Mumtaz Qadri who in 2011 killed the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer.
Qadri, who objected to Taseer's calls for reform of the blasphemy laws, enjoys hero status in Pakistan.
Neither the army nor the government will want to risk undermining public support for the National Action Plan by including Qadri in its net.
Privately officials say they have to prioritize militants who attack targets within Pakistan.
But even that claim is questionable. Fearing a violent backlash, the state has hesitated to confront militants in their strongholds in Southern Punjab.
The risks are real. Within three weeks of Malik Ishaq's death, for example, Lashkar e Jhangvi hit back with a suicide bomb attack that killed the Home Minster of Punjab, Shuja Khanzada.
There are also questions about the impact of the National Action Plan on Pakistan's notoriously volatile civil/military relations.
Elected representatives both in the national parliament and provincial assemblies complain that they have been cut out of decision-making.
Cult of personality
Some also express fears about an emerging cult of personality around Army Chief General Raheel Sharif.
Posters of him have appeared on billboards throughout Pakistan's biggest city Karachi.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (L) walks past army chief Raheel SharifImage copyrightGetty Images
Image caption
There are tensions between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and army chief Raheel Sharif
Mysterious websites, which seem to have access to images sourced from the military, praise him to the skies.
After decades of very poor PR, the army is now producing emotive, patriotic rock songs to bolster support for the anti-Jihadist campaign.
While Pakistani liberals worry about these developments, they simultaneously concede that if the counter narrative to the Jihadists has a militaristic air, its only because the civilians have failed to come up with an effective information strategy of their own.
The contest for public support has had an impact on Pakistan's previously irrepressible TV news channels.
Many have become so nervous about upsetting the army that they are making use of a 30-second delay on live broadcasts so that the sound can be muted before it's transmitted.
Originally brought in to stop uncritical interviews of Jihadists, the mechanism is now being used to protect the army's reputation.
One prime time TV host described how her voice was muted as soon as she used the word "military".
The person controlling the mute button did not know if she was going to say something supportive or critical of the men in uniform - so decided to play it safe.
The army's ascendency means that despite his strong electoral mandate Nawaz Sharif is unable to pursue some of his objectives.
His desire to improve relations with India has run up against the army's insistence that the intractable Kashmir issue should be at the forefront of any talks process.
General Raheel Sharif
Received his military commission in 1976
Studied military leadership in Germany, Canada and Britain
Commanded several infantry units, some on the disputed Line of Control in Kashmir
His brother, Shabbir Sharif, received two of the country's highest military awards after he was killed during the 1971 India-Pakistan war
Previous appointments include inspector-general of training and evaluation at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, and head of the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul, Abbottabad.
Thought to have played a key role in switching the focus of the army from confronting India to fighting militancy.
Wary embrace
Mr Sharif has also been blocked from pursuing legal action against the man who removed him from power last time round, General Musharraf.
The army is unwilling to see a former chief on trial for treason.
For now the government and the army are locked in a wary embrace.
They are working together but in part that is because the civilian politicians fear that if they allow a gap to emerge between them and the military there will be another coup.
Some wonder how long the current situation can last.
"Let me tell you what I have learnt from history," said Pakistan's most prominent human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir.
"Our army doesn't want power. It wants absolute power."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34333470

20 Quotes That Will Inspire You To Truly Be Yourself

How often have you heard someone telling you to “just be yourself”? In reality, being ourself in a world that is constantly trying to make us everything but ourself is far from being an easy task. It is a tremendous endeavor!

Our current society is playing on our insecurity to sell us products that will give us a false sense of belonging. It doesn’t sell us products, it sells us values like freedom, power, fame or beauty.

However, do these products help you be yourself ? Ins’t being true to yourself the only real freedom and beauty of life?

My sincere hope is that the following quotes will inspire to truly be yourself, not the person your parents, friends, colleagues or society want you to be. It is not easy, but it is definitely worthy.

Here are the 20 that will inspire you to be truly yourself:

1) Be Yourself, everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde

2) I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. – Mahatma Gandhi

3) I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself. – Rita Mae Brown

4) If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else? – RuPaul

5) Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are. – Quentin Crisp

6) Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. – Oscar Wilde

7) Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs

8) You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years

And get pats on the back as you pass

But your final reward will be heartaches and tears

If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass – Dale Wimbrow

9) Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind. ― Bernard M. Baruch

10) Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. ― Marilyn Monroe

11) If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it. ― Frank Zappa

12) When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

13) Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.” ― Henry David Thoreau

14) The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.” ― Leo Buscaglia

15) Let others determine your worth and you’re already lost, because no one wants people worth more than themselves.” ― Peter V. Brett

16) Imitation is suicide. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

17) Strive to become the best version of you instead of the best copy of someone else’s life.” ― Edmond Mbiaka,

18) Don’t compromise even if it hurts to be yourself. – Toby Keith

19) I’ve finally stopped running away from myself. Who else is there better to be? – Goldie Hawn

20) To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. – E.E. Cummings

Here is a special bonus for you

Why not go one step further in your personal development journey? If you like this article you will greatly benefit from my free e-book. You can download it below:

The 5 Commandments of Personal Development

Thibaut Meurisse is the founder of whatispersonaldevelopment.org. Obsessed with improvement, he dedicates his life to finding the best possible ways to durably transform both his life and the lives of others. Check out his free e-book “The 5 Commandments of Personal Development” or order his new book “Goal Setting: The Ultimate Guide To Achieving Goals That Truly Excite You” now on Amazon.

Read more at http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/20-quotes-will-inspire-truly/#PFClikGvy4KsBZ1r.99
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/20-quotes-will-inspire-truly/

Hajj crush: Saudi Arabia issues over 1,000 images suggesting death-toll rise

Saudi Arabia has given foreign diplomats over 1,000 photographs of the dead from last week’s hajj crush and stampede, Indian and Pakistani authorities said, in an indication of a significantly higher death toll than previously offered by the kingdom.

Saudi officials could not be immediately reached for comment about the discrepancy surrounding the death toll of the disaster in Mina.

Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, an MP from Pakistan’s governing PML-N political party who is leading his country’s response to the disaster, said Saudi officials gave diplomats “1,100 photos” of the dead. Chaudhry told journalists during a news conference broadcast nationwide on Monday night that the photos could be viewed at Saudi embassies and missions abroad.

“This is the official figure of martyrs from Saudi officials given for the identification process,” Chaudhry said.

Iranian women protest at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Tehran. Photograph: Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua Press/Corbis
His comments echoed those of India external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, on Sunday. “Saudi authorities have released photos of 1,090 pilgrims who have died in (the hajj) stampede,” Swaraj wrote on Twitter.

Indian diplomats and government officials declined to discuss or elaborate on Swaraj’s tweet on Monday.

Saudi authorities have said at least 769 people died when two large waves of pilgrims converged on a narrow road last Thursday during the final days of the annual hajj in Mina near the holy city of Mecca. Survivors say the crowding caused people to suffocate and eventually trample one another.

Iran has criticised the kingdom over the hajj disaster, in which many Iranian Shia Muslims died, and daily protests have taken place near the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

Related: The Guardian view on the hajj deaths: a test for the regime | Editorial

Iranian state media has also suggested the death toll was far higher, without providing any corroboration. Iranian state television has said 169 Iranian pilgrims died, while more than 300 remained missing and 100 were injured.

The hajj this year drew some 2 million pilgrims from 180 countries, though in previous years it has drawn more than 3 million without any major incidents.

Able-bodied Muslims are required to perform the five-day pilgrimage once in their lifetime, and each year poses a massive logistical challenge for the kingdom.

Hajj crush: Saudi Arabia issues over 1,000 images suggesting death-toll rise
theguardian.com
Read more from The Guardian

Moderate Islam is the solution

Islam is being associated with the evil we witness around us. People in areas controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are pushed to flee and seek refuge from this evil that has befallen them. Islam has been hijacked by an evil group that speaks in the name of Muslims and dictates its religious interpretations on them.

However, religions came for the good of everyone, and for the sake of expelling evil from people’s lives. Islam came as a mercy to people, and it was the persecuted - slaves, the poor and the vulnerable - who first converted to it after it became well-known for its justice.

Political Islam
Islam has been politicized during the last three decades. The big transformation began with the Islamic revolution in Iran. It expanded after the concept of jihad was introduced in Afghanistan. It expanded further due to the use of religion as a political tool. At this point, extremists emerged and the status of moderates, who were the religious leaders of society, declined.

To save Muslims and the world, the solution is moderate Islam - that is a bigger and more important project than fighting ISIS and the cancer of extremism

Abdulrahman al-Rashed
Even today’s Salafism, which is characterized as a source of extremism and a cause of our current crisis, has nothing to do with the traditional Salafism that in the past dealt with worship and behavior.

As a result of the struggle in the Islamic arena, hardliners dominated over the moderates, then extremists dominated over the hardliners. We are now in the phase of ultra extremists. ISIS represents pure evil, which previously appeared at the beginning of Islamic history 14 centuries ago, and Muslims successfully fought it.

However, Muslims today will not win unless they fight extremists’ concept of Islam, which is pushing them to clash with the world and become enemies with Islam's different sects. The crisis will be prolonged if Muslim leaders do not adopt moderate Islam, which reformulates the life of people and society, and restores the balance that religion created to fight evil. To save Muslims and the world, the solution is moderate Islam - that is a bigger and more important project than fighting ISIS and the cancer of extremism.

This article was first published in Asharq al-Awsat on Sept. 28, 2015.

US at war with an imaginary Islam: Lies, propaganda and the real story of America and the Muslim world

American propaganda exaggerates the power and moral depravity of the Islamic enemy, in the service of our empire

Excerpted from "One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds: Spirituality, Identity and Resistance Across Islamic Lands"

The United States is at war with a very different, mythic Islam of its own making that has nothing at all to do with this Islam of the Qur’an. To make sense of that conjured threat, scholarly studies of Islam or Islamic movements are of no help at all. Even the examination of the real-world history and practice of empire has limited value, unless the perceived Islamic dimension is considered. The American imperial project cannot be brought into clear view without assessment of the distinctive rationale that the Islamist Imaginary provides. The task is not an easy one. The Islamist Imaginary has no simple and unitary existence. Rather, it is a complex amalgam that shapes both the delusions of empire and a conjured threat to imperial power into a co-evolving composite. It is a “difficult whole,” in the helpful language of complexity theory. The Islamist Imaginary, unlike Islam itself and political movements of Islamic inspiration, does not exist outside of the imperial interests that shape it. It has no independent cultural or historical reality, outside its role as predatory threat to Western global interests. The American empire, in turn, requires a hostile and threatening enemy, which today takes the form of Islam of its imagination, to realize and rationalize its expansionist project that must remain unacknowledged and unspoken. The two elements of the imaginary and empire co-evolve. The needs of a threatened empire as vulnerable victim change over time. The Islamist Imaginary transforms itself to meet those needs. Imaginary and empire circle one another in a dance of predator and prey. Their roles are interchangeable, a clear sign that they are not entirely real. The predator is prey; the prey is predator. They develop in tandem in a complex process of mutual adaptation. Boundaries give way between the real and the imagined. In the end it is the imagined that haunts our imaginations and drives our policies.

The idea of the co-evolution of Islam and empire in the Islamist Imaginary is not as strange as it might at first seem. Scholars know that the entanglement of Islam and empire has an intricate chain of precedents. Edward Said provided a useful starting point for analyzing these complex linkages with his frequently quoted assertion that ours is an age of “many Islams.” It is also the time of the singular American empire. He pointed out that Islam and empire have an intricate history of connections.

The dominant notion of civilizational conflict between the Islamic world and the West rightly highlights the Islamic ideological roots of the most persistent resistances to American global dominance, provided that we recognize that the conflict has political and economic causes. However, this same notion obscures an important history of instrumental cooperation between Islam and the United States. American assertions of imperial power have had a consistent and often compliant Islamic dimension. It is now rarely acknowledged, though, that the cooperative dimension is at least as important for understanding the relationship today of the Islamic world and the West as the contrary record of oppositions to American hegemony of Islamic inspiration.

Of the “many Islams,” America has for decades actively fostered and manipulated its own useful preferences. These “preferred Islams” of earlier periods are part of the story of the Islamist Imaginary of our own. The consequences of the manipulations of these preferred Islams have not always been those intended, at least not in the long run. They have often entailed violence that in the end was turned back first on U.S. clients and then on the United States itself. Yet, for all these qualifications, it remains true that the preferred Islams, cultivated and shaped by the United States, have been critical to the post–World War II projections of American power.

At the end of World War II, President Roosevelt made an historic agreement with the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia. In exchange for privileged access to oil, the United States guaranteed the royal family’s hold on power, declaring the defense of Saudi Arabia a vital U.S. interest. The eighteenth-century origins of the current Saudi regime in the alliance between Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud, a local chieftain, and Ibn Abdul Wahhab, a puritanical and ultraconservative Islamic reformer, proved no obstacle.

U.S. material support for all the usual instruments of repression enabled the Saudi royals to impose themselves on “their” people, despite Islam’s deeply rooted antipathy to monarchy. It also allowed the interpretation of Islam to take firm hold in Saudi Arabia and, through Saudi oil revenue funding, make itself felt worldwide as a powerful reactionary tradition. The royal family’s self-appointed role as guardian of Islam’s most holy sites, Mecca and Medina, provided the requisite religious cover for the U.S.-backed repression that secured their hold on power. This critical Saudi connection ensured American triumph over its European rivals for control of Middle Eastern oil. It also ensured a linkage between American empire and one of the most reactionary forces in the Islamic world, if not the world at large.

Complicit Saudi Islam played a critical role in the subsequent geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States knowingly used the retrograde Wahhabi Islam of the Saudis as a counterweight to progressive Arab nationalisms. These nationalisms had shown themselves willing to open doors to the Soviets in exchange for support for their projects of independent national development. By doing so, they threatened to challenge American hegemony over the Middle East and its precious oil resources.

Personified most effectively by Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, Arab nationalists threatened to chart the kind of independent path of development that is intrinsically anathema to any imperial power. A combination of external blows and internal manipulations brought these nationalist assertions to an end by the late 1960s. In the wake of the collapse of the nationalist project, the United States saw no problems when a state-controlled Islam provided ideological cover for the compliant Egyptian successor military regimes. Egypt after Nasser was effectively brought within the American orbit and voided of all genuine nationalist content. For such regimes, the threat to their hold on power came from the left and the memories among the masses of the material and social advances registered under progressive Arab nationalist banners. Such successor regimes were no less repressive in pursuing their regressive aims than their predecessors had been in advancing more progressive objectives of autonomous development and improvement of mass welfare. Once again, Egypt provided the prototype, with Anwar al Sadat as the “believing President” who expelled the “Godless” Soviets, opened Egypt to American penetration, and welcomed disciplined Islamists back into public life as a counter to the “atheist left.” The Americans embraced both Sadat and the domesticated Islam in which he draped himself. In the end, however, Sadat’s cynical manipulation of Islamic symbols as a cover for policies of alignment with America and capitulation to Israel on the issue of Palestine incited the anger of Islamic extremists. Khalid al Islambouli assassinated Sadat on October 6, 1981, shouting “Death to Pharaoh!”

When an already weakened Soviet Union blundered into Afghanistan in 1979, the United States turned to yet another variety of politicized Islam to hasten Soviet defeat. U.S. intelligence services, with assistance from their regional counterparts, actively and effectively mobilized the resources of Islamic militants, drawn from all over the Islamic world and including the Saudi Osama bin Laden. Enormous levels of funding were provided from American and Saudi sources, variously estimated but certainly in the billions. They aimed to take advantage of Soviet vulnerability in occupied Afghanistan. The strategy worked: Defeat in Afghanistan helped precipitate the demise of the Soviet Union.

That direct contribution to unchallenged American hegemony was neither the last nor the most significant by the violent transnational Islamic networks the United States helped finance and train for work in Afghanistan. As a result of the successful American-sponsored guerrilla war against the Soviet Union, violent extremist groups proliferated. They created havoc, everywhere not least in New York City on September 11, 2001. These terrible events were reprisals for American Middle East policies and the work of assassins, whom the United States initially encouraged and even in some cases trained.

The crime against humanity committed on September 11, 2001, had the unintended consequence of serving the breathtaking expansionist plans of the neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration. Only a plausible enemy was lacking to make their execution possible. From the storehouse of the Western historical imagination, age-old images of a hostile Islam were retrieved. Islamic terrorists conjured up in a believable form for a frightened America the “threat to civilization” that every empire requires to justify its own violent acts of domination.

The Islamist Imaginary in the service of the neoconservative version of empire was born. The administration used all the resources of media control at its disposal to make sure that no links were made between the 9/11 crime and unjust U.S. Middle Eastern policies and the bloody instrumentalities the United States forged to enforce them. Plans for the United States to topple the Taliban and occupy Iraq, and for the Israelis to “resolve” the Palestinian issue by force, were all in place before 9/11. The most expansive version of the neoconservative agenda to advance U.S. and Israeli interests found forthright expression in a position paper written for the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party in 1996. It is entitled “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” and was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The document calls for a “clean break from the peace process,” the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the elimination of Saddam’s regime in Iraq, as prelude to regime changes in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The authors all became influential players in the second Bush administration.

President Bush’s elaboration of a more comprehensive strategy of global hegemony came in the fall of 2002 in a document called “National Security Strategy of the United States.” The United States would never again allow a hostile power to approach parity with U.S. military capabilities. The United States would take the offensive to ensure its continued “full spectrum” dominance. Endlessly repeated images of 9/11 provided the backdrop for a doctrine of “preventive” wars that would give a defensive coloration to what were, in reality, projections of American imperial power. The president rallied a cowed Congress to a strategy of endless wars to ensure global hegemony under the cover of a worldwide War on Terrorism whose features, while murky, were still recognizably Islamic.

An innocent and wounded America recast its public role in the Middle East as the champion of democracy and the bulwark against the Islamic wellsprings of irrationalism that ostensibly fed global terrorism. The stage was set for the full-blown evocation of the Islamist Imaginary. There was already an established American practice of manipulating Islam, including the most backward-looking and violent versions, for imperial ends. This time, however, strategic planners for the Bush administration departed from the established pattern with a breathtaking innovation.

At each prior critical strategic moment, America had made use of an existing form of Islam that could be reshaped to serve its needs. The Saudi connection yielded a royal, reactionary, and repressive Islam with which America cooperated without complaints for decades. The American-backed jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in contrast, called forth an assertively violent rather than simply repressive Islam. America enthusiastically assembled, funded, and trained its transnational advocates. At the same time, the subservient successor regime in Egypt needed a domesticated “house Islam” that would support the right-leaning, authoritarian government. The Sadat regime would preside over the deindustrialization of Egypt and facilitate the ruthless pacification of the Palestinians. The United States had little good to say about Nasser and his Arab socialist policies. It did, however, welcome his efforts to “modernize” the venerable mosque-university of al Azhar. Nasser pursued a strategy of enhancing the role of Islam in Egyptian life while at the same time bringing al Azhar under firm state control. The number of mosques doubled and Islamic broadcasts from Cairo, supported by the government, reached to countries across Dar al Islam. Sadat, for his part, sought to manipulate official Islamic figures and institutions to support his right-wing domestic policies and global realignment into the American orbit. The Americans welcomed Sadat’s self-interested efforts to wrap his pro-American policies with whatever legitimacy a domesticated Islam could provide.

In each of these instances, the Islamic dimension derives from a “found Islam” that originated to meet the needs of local actors. It had its own independent roots in the soil of the Islamic world and served, in the first instance, identifiable aims of already existing regimes or movements. The Bush administration sought to pioneer a distinctive variant on this general pattern, in ways that would clarify the new cultural and intellectual dimensions of its exercise of global power. Iraq was made the case in point.

The Islamist Imaginary: America’s Preferred Islam

The preferred Islam of the Bush administration comes into view most clearly and authoritatively in a Rand Corporation study. For that reason, rather than any scholarly value, Cheryl Benard’s work merits very close attention. I know of no other source as revealing about the way Islam was understood by the circle of neoconservative intellectuals to which Benard belonged in these critical years of assertions of American imperial power. The book carries the engaging title Civil, Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies. It was prepared with the imprimatur of Rand’s National Security Research Division in 2003. Benard’s assessment of the Islamic world quiets the apprehensions that resistance in the name of Islam raised for America’s neoconservative strategic planners.

The worries of the Bush team were not entirely misplaced. There was an Islamic threat, not to America per se but rather to American empire. There still is. To be sure, American propaganda exaggerates both the power and moral depravity of the Islamic enemy. The idea that hostility toward America in the Islamic world springs from frustration with the obvious and inherent failings of the Islamic world and envy at the equally obvious success and innate superiority of the West is sheer nonsense, no matter how frequently and portentously repeated. It parrots the message of every expansionist imperial power that history has known. It does so for all the obvious reasons. The colonized are at fault and their failings invite, even demand, colonization. There is no better way to exculpate the West for the consequences of its historical record of violent occupation and exploitation of Islamic lands. Attention is shifted from any serious evaluation of American dominance of the Middle East and its destructive policies in Palestine, Afghanistan, and most dramatically Iraq.

Benard takes the reality of an Islamic threat as a premise of her argument. Her analysis begins with a presentation of the self-imposed predicaments of the Arab Islamic world that threaten to spill over and endanger others. In Benard’s formulation the entire world, and not just the United States, is the innocent and vulnerable witness to the tumultuous internal disorders in the Islamic world. “What role,” she asks, “can the rest of the world, threatened and affected as it is by this struggle, play in bringing about a more peaceful and positive outcome?” Benard states clearly that these dangerous predicaments of the Islamic world are entirely self-imposed. She writes that “Islam’s current crisis has two main components: a failure to thrive and a loss of connection to the global mainstream. The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness; many different solutions, such as nationalism, pan-Arabism, Arab socialism, and Islamic revolution, have been attempted without success, and this has led to frustration and anger.” To conclude, Benard gravely notes that “at the same time, the Islamic world has fallen out of step with contemporary global culture, an uncomfortable situation for both sides.”

Benard’s assessment eliminates any reference to the West’s colonization of the Islamic world, and of the physical and psychological damage those violent assaults caused. There are no hints at all of an American imperial presence in the Islamic world through an impressive and constantly expanding network of bases. There is no consideration of the ways that presence constrains autonomous development. There are no references to the awkward facts of consistent American political and economic interventions, often violent and consistently aimed at undermining economic and political autonomy. Israel, heavily armed with all forms of weapons of mass destruction, a cruel occupying force, and the regional superpower, mysteriously disappears from view. These awkward realities are overshadowed by the Islamist Imaginary.

Only with these erasures can Benard take for granted the irrational grounding of the Islamic threat. Her analysis highlights the ways that the usual state-based threats to the national security exemplified by the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War have been replaced by the challenge of nonstate actors, operating below the nation-state horizon. To face this threat, she argues that American strategic planners must make Islam itself a resource. In short, like her predecessors Benard is in the business of strategic manipulations of Islam to serve American economic and political ends. She evokes a malleable Islam that can be turned into an instrument to confront the Islams of resistance, while obediently serving America’s ends. However, Benard does so with a difference.

Excerpted from “One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds: Spirituality, Identity and Resistance Across Islamic Lands” by Raymond William Baker. Published by Oxford University Press.
We are at war with an imaginary Islam: Lies, propaganda and the real story of America and the Muslim world
by Raymond William Baker, salon.com

http://flip.it/DdIGD

Makkah tragedy: Failure of the Custodian of the Holy Sites

The tent city at Mina, six miles east of Mecca, is a maze of 160,000 identical fiberglass cones — bright white, air-conditioned, and spread beyond sight over the Holy City’s eastern plains. Immediately to its west stand three pillars, known as the jamaraat, which represent Satan. As one of the final rituals of hajj, pilgrims symbolically stone the pillars, tossing pebbles to represent their rejection of sin.

On Thursday morning, two opposite waves of pilgrims on their way to and from the stone-throwing ritual collided in the bottlenecked footpaths between the holy sites. In the ensuing chaos, hundreds suffocated or were trampled underfoot. As one pilgrim told the Associated Press: “I saw someone trip over someone in a wheelchair and several people tripping over him. People were climbing over one another just to breathe.” Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defense Directorate first reported 100 dead, then 220, then 310. By mid-morning, it became clear that the hajj, Islam’s holy pilgrimage, was facing its gravest disaster in 25 years.

The deaths of these worshipers, 717 at last count in addition to over 800 injured, is a shocking human tragedy, bewildering and heartbreaking in equal measure. But it is also a case of bitter déjà vu — and an undeniable disgrace upon the kingdom, which has spent billions of dollars and over a decade on construction efforts to convince Muslims worldwide that it can be trusted to safeguard the teeming masses of the faithful who go, year after year, to the holy sites around Mecca. Saudi Arabia has failed.

The pathways between Mina’s tent city and the jamaraat have now hosted seven deadly stampedes since 1990. The stampede on Thursday morning occurred just within the tent city’s boundaries. The disasters have been almost identical: crushes and collisions of unguided masses of people. Damningly, Thursday’s tragedy also occurred after the Saudis spent roughly $1.2 billion on safety measures and upgraded capacities at the site following the last crush there, when 360 pilgrims were killed in 2006.

Against such exorbitant expenditures, the arithmetic of the stampede’s lethality is bitterly simple: The spaces are still too small, and the faithful are too many. As the loss of life reverberates throughout the Muslim world, Saudi Arabia’s construction priorities appear woefully out of touch with the needs of pilgrims.

Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has focused over $40 billion on expansion and construction at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The luxury hotel suites and shopping centers at the Abraj al-Bait and Makkah Clock Royal Tower cost over $15 billion. And the Saudis have allocated $26.6 billion to expanding the mosque itself, announcing its intentions to increase capacity past 3 million worshipers.

This policy is misguided: The Grand Mosque is not where capacity and transit of pilgrims are in desperate need of repair. And until the expansion project itself led to a deadly crane collapse earlier this month, the Grand Mosque had never even been the site of a major disaster, despite the masses of worshipers seemingly ever-present within its walls.

Meanwhile, the Abraj al-Bait complex and an upcoming 10,000-room mega-hotel adjacent to the Grand Mosque similarly miss the point. In fact, these projects could compound the problem by furnishing the illusion that the hajj can accommodate even more people than the 2.5 million-plus who attend every year, a number that has more than doubled since 1997 as cheaper transportation, a growing middle class, and booming commercial hajj travel enterprises have made the pilgrimage accessible to far more Muslims worldwide.

Meanwhile, the nearest hospital to the Grand Mosque has only 52 beds. And while medical staffs and facilities are augmented for the hajj season — Saudi Arabia has established eight medical centers at the holy sites around Mecca — Thursday’s disaster demonstrates how little those measures mean without proactive safety guidance for pilgrims.

Health and safety protocols, including mandatory safety education standards for pilgrims, are necessary for a movement of people as large as the hajj. The Saudi government has spent a reported $35.5 billion on real estate for the Grand Mosque expansion but does not have an effective system for simply ushering the faithful through high-traffic areas at the holy sites. Almost 3 million pilgrims must traverse the narrow pathways to and from Mina and the jamaraat in a single day. After repeated tragedies, that passage demanded careful planning and decisive action to prevent further injury and death. Thursday’s senseless disaster showed that it received neither.

Funding must now be focused toward safety education and guidance for the massive population of worshipers that arrives every year at the holy sites around Mecca for hajj. Such guidance must be an integral part of the hajj protocol, as fundamental as receiving a visa. Research suggests that human behavior is subject to change in such panicked, claustrophobic conditions: Pilgrims must receive better instruction on how to prevent such scenarios from occurring and how to proceed safely within massive crowds. And just as urgently, Saudi authorities must train officers and ushers on how to safely guide pilgrims through high-traffic areas and how to defuse potential crushes before their momentum becomes unstoppable. These efforts are far more pressing than funding new hotels or a larger mosque.

Coming on the heels of the devastating crane collapse on Sept. 11 of this year that killed more than 100 worshipers at the Grand Mosque, this hajj was a crucial moment for Saudi Arabia to make good on its title as “Custodian of the Holy Sanctuaries” at Mecca and Medina. The moment was missed, and hajj counts another deadly disaster that Saudi Arabia’s lavish wealth and misguided spending could do nothing to avert.

https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/26728170/816850639

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The Warrior Prophet


A recent Pew Research poll found that almost half of U.S. adults think that the Islamic religion is more likely to encourage violence than other religions, a figure that has almost doubled since 2002.  A clear majority of conservative Republicans (66%), white Evangelicals (60%), and Tea Baggers (67%) believe Islam is more violent than other religions, with a plurality of whites (44%) and older folks (42-46%) also thinking this.  (Of note is that blacks, Hispanics, and liberal Democrats are significantly less bigoted towards Islam.)  The idea that Islam is more violent than other religions–held most strongly by old white conservatives–is a key pillar to the edifice of Islamophobia.
Who was the most violent prophet in history? Most readers will immediately assume it was the Prophet Muhammad, thanks to a decades long wave of Islamophobia and a sustained campaign of anti-Muslim propaganda.   But here’s a tip: it wasn’t Muhammad.  Not by a long shot.  In fact, Moses had Muhammad beat by far. But it wasn’t even Moses.  In fact, it was Joshua–a Jewish prophet of Israel.  Today, he is regarded by Jews as “a mighty warrior” of the faith, a victorious hero, and a righteous prophet after Moses: [Keep reading http://peace-forum.blogspot.com/2011/03/most-violent-prophet-in-history.html]

The Suicide Bomber Prophet: 
Prof. Philip Jenkins writes: In the minds of ordinary Christians – and Jews – the Koran teaches savagery and warfare, while the Bible offers a message of love, forgiveness, and charity. Worse, the Quran is said to be a book of terrorism.  It was in this vein that Bill O’Reilly invoked an analogy between the Quran and terrorism and Mein Kampf and Nazism.  It must be the Quran that compels these Islamic radicals to engage in suicide bombing and terrorism.
Prof. Jenkins responds:
In fact, the Bible overflows with “texts of terror,” to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery.
Samson the Suicide Bomber Glorified in the Bible: One of the Israelite judges is worthy of special mention: the Jewish prophet Samson.  According to the Bible, Samson was responsible for killing thousands of Philistines (the indigenous population of southern Canaan).  Eventually, the Philistines successfully used a ruse to capture Samson, who was then taken to a temple where he was to be given as a sacrifice to one of the Philistine gods.  Instead, Samson leaned against the pillars of the temple, and brought the temple down, killing himself along with 3,000 men and women: [http://peace-forum.blogspot.com/2011/03/suicide-bomber-prophet.html]
Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] 
After initially refusing to accede to requests by his followers to fight the Meccans for continued persecution and provocation, he eventually proclaimed the revelations of the Quran:
"Permission to fight is given to those who are fought against because they have been wronged -truly Allah has the power to come to their support- those who were expelled from their homes without any right, merely for saying, 'Our Lord is Allah'..." (Quran, 22:39-40)"
After the first battle of Badr against the Quraysh, he is reported as having said "We have returned from the lesser Jihad to the greater Jihad (i.e. the struggle against the evil of one's soul)." John Esposito writes that Muhammad's use of warfare in general was alien neither to Arab custom nor to that of the Hebrew prophets, as both believed that God had sanctioned battle with the enemies of the Lord.[Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_career_of_Muhammad]

The Muslims fought only when attacked, or in the context of a wider war of self-defense. They argue that Muhammad was the first among the major military figures of history to lay down rules for humane warfare, and that he was scrupulous in limiting the loss of life as much as possible.
Following aspect be kept in view:

1-Muhammad, pbuh himself was under siege by 10,000 arabian soldiers in his Madina and he had onlyt 3,000 soldiers!
2-Muhammad in the 1st 6 years in Madina was attacked 3 times each time by a massive force more than his army at least 3 time and he won! - Deffensive wares
3-All the dead soldiers from both sides in Muhammad’s campaign was 270 soldiers.

http://www.historynet.com/muhammad-the-warrior-prophet.htm