The treatment of captives in Islam set it on a higher moral level than every other system that preceded it. The prophet Muhammad (S) ensured that they be treated with kindness. So, we find that captives of the Battle of Badr were better fed than those who were entrusted to hold them. Many of those poor companions of the Prophet (S) remained hungry while they fed those captives. So overwhelming was the influence of kind treatment of the non-Muslim captives that many of those former captives quickly embraced Islam, let alone renouncing violence against the nascent Islamic state. This tradition continued throughout the Caliphate of the righteous companions.
During his rule, Caliph Umar made it illegal to separate related prisoners of war from each other, after a captive complained to him for being separated from her daughter.[Naqvi (2000), pg. 456]
These principles were also honoured during the Crusades, as exemplified by sultans such as Saladin and al-Kamil. For example, after al-Kamil defeated the Franks during the Crusades, Oliverus Scholasticus praised the Islamic laws of war, commenting on how al-Kamil supplied the defeated Frankish army with food:
"Who could doubt that such goodness, friendship and charity come from God? Men whose parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, had died in agony at our hands, whose lands we took, whom we drove naked from their homes, revived us with their own food when we were dying of hunger and showered us with kindness even when we were in their power." [Judge Weeramantry, Christopher G. (1997). Justice Without Frontiers. Brill Publishers. pp. 136.]
As hinted above, upon capture, the prisoners must be guarded and not ill-treated.[Nigosian, S. A. (2004). Islam. Its History, Teaching, and Practices. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 115.] Islamic law holds that the prisoners must be fed and clothed, either by the Islamic government or by the individual who has custody of the prisoner. This position is supported by the verse [Qur'an 76:8] of the Quran. The prisoners must be fed in a dignified manner, and must not be forced to beg for their subsistence.[Maududi (1967), introduction of Ad-Dahr, "Period of revelation", pg. 159] Muhammad's early followers also considered it a principle to not separate prisoners from their relatives.[Naqvi (2000), pg. 456]
After the fighting is over, prisoners are to be released, with some prospect of survival, or ransomed. The freeing or ransoming of prisoners by Muslims themselves is highly recommended as a charitable act.[Nigosian, S. A. (2004)] The Qur'an also urges kindness to captives ([Qur'an 4:36], [Qur'an 9:60], [Qur'an 24:58]) and recommends, their liberation by purchase or manumission. The freeing of captives is recommended both for the expiation of sins ([Qur'an 4:92], [Qur'an 5:92], [Qur'an 58:3]) and as an act of simple benevolence.([Qur'an 2:177], [Qur'an 24:33], [Qur'an 90:13])
Muslim scholars hold that women and children prisoners of war cannot be killed under any circumstances, regardless of their faith.
Muslim scholars prohibit altogether the killing of prisoners and hold that this was the policy practiced by Prophet Muhammad. The 20th century Muslim scholar, Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi states that no prisoner should be "put to the sword" in accordance with a saying of Muhammad.
Yusuf Ali, another 20th century Muslim scholar, while commenting on verse [Qur'an 9:6], writes, "Even those the enemies of Islam, actively fighting against Islam, there may be individuals who may be in a position to require protection. Full asylum is to be given to them, and opportunities provided for hearing the Word of Allah...If they do not see their way to accept Islam, they will require double protection: (1) from the Islamic forces openly fighting against their people, and (2) from their own people, as they detached themselves from them. Both kinds of protection should be ensured for them, and they should be safely escorted to a place where they can be safe." [Ali, Abdullah Yusuf (1991). The Holy Quran. Medina: King Fahd Holy Qur-an Printing Complex.]
Maududi further states that Islam forbids torturing, especially by fire, and quotes Muhamad as saying, "Punishment by fire does not behoove anyone except the Master of the Fire [God]."
According to a French author, "By guaranteeing them [male POWs] humane treatment, and various possibilities of subsequently releasing themselves, it ensured that a good number of combatants in the opposing armies preferred captivity at the hands of Muslims to death on the field of battle." [Wikipedia]
Saturday, April 9, 2011
America’s Bankruptcy – not just limited to its failing economy
Working late hours on Friday, the congressional and White House negotiators finally agreed on a plan to pay for U.S. government operations through the end of September while trimming $38.5 billion in spending. Lawmakers then approved a measure to keep the government running for a few more days while the details of the new spending plan are written into legislation. Actual approval of the deal is expected in the middle of next week.
In the end, all sides claimed victory. For Republicans, it was the sheer size of the spending cuts. For President Obama and Senator Reid, it was casting aside Republican policy initiatives that would have blocked environmental rules and changed a program that provides family planning services. The deal came together after six grueling weeks as negotiators virtually dared each other to shut down the government.
Although the U.S. still remains the world's largest economy, and has the most powerful military, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate, its infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. It is dying like a dinosaur. The signs of decay are everywhere. Economy is usually the first of such major signs that become so obvious when the empire is sinking. Americans today have the largest amount of debt in the world.
Yesterday on the doorsteps to my local mosque I noticed a young mother begging for donation holding an umbrella stroller in one hand and a cardboard in the other hand that said she and her husband had lost jobs, and that she needed help to support her two kids. It was an odd scene, especially considering the fact that the mosque is located in an affluent neighborhood and that it was not a pleasant afternoon. The young mother had to risk her dignity and endure the unpleasant weather to come out of her home and seek help. Her little baby, lying in the stroller, was crying – probably because of hunger or from raindrops.
Over the last 22 years of my residence in the Greater Philadelphia area, I have once in a while seen elderly people standing near highway entrances with placards or cardboards in their hands that said they would work for food, which was another way of begging or saying that they needed financial help. But never before do I recall seeing a young mother begging in front of a mosque.
With millions of lost jobs and the ever growing budget deficit it does not take a genius to know that the USA is a debtor nation today. The two wars – started by Bush Jr. – have broken the back of the American camel. Not only were these unnecessary, their consequences were not even thought out properly. The merchants and promoters of the war forgot the lessons of history, the basic reasons why empires fall, and more importantly the thematic cause and effect so richly imbued throughout the Qur’an and the Bible. Funny that these warmongers portrayed themselves as deeply religious people, even getting directives from God to invade and commit massacre of innocent civilians!
So the American people should feel good about the debate on economy that has been taking place in the Capitol Hill. After all, these elected reps own the problem and they must fix it now. As pundits would tell you, if it had not been for their policies, we could have possibly avoided those wars (and the ensuing economic crisis), stopped outsourcing of jobs to China and India, and put higher priorities on developing human capital that would benefit the U.S. economy and guarantee its prosperity on a long-term.
In spite of all the claims as to their objectivity, outside the Congressman Dennis Kucinich there seems no one really serious about curtailing funding to Israel. We are told that such cuts (which are less than 1 percent of the deficit) won’t put a dent in the budget deficit. True. But when the same Republican politicians voted 228-192 to bar National Public Radio (NPR) from receiving any more federal funds last month it is not difficult to fathom their naked hypocrisy. It is worth noting here that the total federal funding to NPR amounts to only 2% of its overall revenues of $180 million, i.e., less than 4 million dollars. If a $4 billion yearly handout to the government of Israel can’t put a dent, why should a mere $4 million grant to the NPR? Whom are these Israel-firsters trying to fool? Such an over-protectionist attitude towards Israel is unsustainable.
As I noted many times, the American politicians are failing their people. Many are openly behaving like fascists. Many others are closet fascists who would reveal their true ugly self when push comes to shove. If they are serious about finding intelligent solutions to our fiscal problems, they better carryout the recommendations made by the Simpson-Bowles commission proposing $4 trillion in savings mostly through cuts in some of the largest drivers of the long-term deficit, e.g., Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The treatment of prisoners is a defining characteristic that separates great nations from others that are not. No nation can legitimately claim greatness when demeaning abuses and horrendous tortures are approved by its highest authority. Such practices show that it is bereft of moral higher values that define our humanity. And we had more than some random snapshots of such unspeakable displays committed by the American occupation forces in prisons of Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. We wondered how such evil acts could have been practiced by highly professional forces of a liberal democracy like the U.S.A. that has been so vociferous with the rule of law, democracy and human rights in the rest of the world! We were told that Abu Ghraib should not define America; it was an aberration. Then we found out that the abuses and tortures of Muslim detainees were actually authorized at the highest echelon of power within the White House. The torture of the prisoners and detainees were systemic and no random affair. The former president and vice president of the U.S.A. still remain boastful of the justification of torture practices.
Years ago in my after-work spare times I had volunteered to work as a social worker towards behavior modification of prisoners in a couple of prisons (or what are called correction centers) in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I learnt then that some prisoners would be confined to solitary cells for bad behavior. They would be denied pillow, mattress and other privileges. Sexual abuses were not uncommon either. It was a very depressing environment for everyone: the prisoners - who had little chance of becoming better or correcting their errors and crimes, the employees and volunteers – who worked there. Once imprisoned those prisoners were treated like worthless scum; they were simply dehumanized. Once released after serving their time, they could not fit in or adjust to their freedom. No wonder that there were many repeat offenders or prisoners to the prison system. It was like revolving doors for most of them.
I was told how some prisoners would be body-cavity checked every time they had outsider visitors, including lawyers. Short of sexual abuses, nothing could be more dehumanizing and painful experience for those unfortunate prisoners. Unable to cope with the traumatic experience that they suffered, many would plead their loved ones, including their lawyers, not to come for a face to face meeting.
Recently, news reports surfaced that the Wikileaks whistleblower Private First Class Bradley Manning is being tortured in a US military prison. Manning is subjected to utter isolation that can drive many people insane, with short periods each day where he is stripped naked and abused by jeering inmates. Manning’s attorney David Coombs revealed last month that for at least two nights in row, the Army private had been "stripped naked" for as long as seven hours at a time. In the mornings, he was left without clothes and forced to stand at attention. "This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification," he added. "It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. No other detainee at the Brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation."
You may remember that Manning is awaiting trial for releasing secret military documents to Wikileaks – including a video of US soldiers massacring Iraqi civilians. He was able to expose the war crimes of some American soldiers (much like the Mi Lai massacre), something that the U.S. government tried to hide from its citizens. And his brutal treatment appears to be part of an intimidation campaign to silence whistleblowers and crack down on Wikileaks. The US government is split on this issue, with diplomats publicly criticizing the military for Manning's treatment. However, the White House sees nothing wrong with the treatment of Manning.
Apparently, speaking out publicly against your government’s near-torture of a prisoner convicted of no crime is worse than the actual abuse itself. State Department chief spokesman P.J. Crowley resigned after publicly bashing the Pentagon’s treatment of jailed soldier Bradley Manning. Crowley, appearing at a journalism event at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology called the US military’s abusive treatment of Manning “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
But does American government care about its tainted pattern of abuses and tortures? If it does, it ought to know that the exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with her laws and values. It cannot say all the good things and do just the opposite. Today’s internet-savvy population will not settle for such hypocrisy, not even in communist China.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder backed down from his original intention of trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), the man accused of planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, in civilian courts. In the early days of the Obama administration he had said that trying KSM in civilian courts would be the "defining event" of his time as attorney general. After some ten years, it seems that like the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, KSM will also be tried under military tribunal.
What does it say about a government that locks up hundreds of detainees indefinitely in the most abject way known to mankind and then denies them the right to have fair trial? We are told that as part of a compromise with the Republicans, the Obama administration has agreed not to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center. All that moral preening that Obama made when he was on the campaign trail has been revealed to be just that - a posture that earned him later a Nobel Prize and nothing good! Are we surprised with such flip-flops? I am not.
As I see, all these are signs of moral bankruptcy of this nation. No nation can be taken seriously about its hollow claim to greatness when it is rotting from within.
In the end, all sides claimed victory. For Republicans, it was the sheer size of the spending cuts. For President Obama and Senator Reid, it was casting aside Republican policy initiatives that would have blocked environmental rules and changed a program that provides family planning services. The deal came together after six grueling weeks as negotiators virtually dared each other to shut down the government.
Although the U.S. still remains the world's largest economy, and has the most powerful military, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate, its infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. It is dying like a dinosaur. The signs of decay are everywhere. Economy is usually the first of such major signs that become so obvious when the empire is sinking. Americans today have the largest amount of debt in the world.
Yesterday on the doorsteps to my local mosque I noticed a young mother begging for donation holding an umbrella stroller in one hand and a cardboard in the other hand that said she and her husband had lost jobs, and that she needed help to support her two kids. It was an odd scene, especially considering the fact that the mosque is located in an affluent neighborhood and that it was not a pleasant afternoon. The young mother had to risk her dignity and endure the unpleasant weather to come out of her home and seek help. Her little baby, lying in the stroller, was crying – probably because of hunger or from raindrops.
Over the last 22 years of my residence in the Greater Philadelphia area, I have once in a while seen elderly people standing near highway entrances with placards or cardboards in their hands that said they would work for food, which was another way of begging or saying that they needed financial help. But never before do I recall seeing a young mother begging in front of a mosque.
With millions of lost jobs and the ever growing budget deficit it does not take a genius to know that the USA is a debtor nation today. The two wars – started by Bush Jr. – have broken the back of the American camel. Not only were these unnecessary, their consequences were not even thought out properly. The merchants and promoters of the war forgot the lessons of history, the basic reasons why empires fall, and more importantly the thematic cause and effect so richly imbued throughout the Qur’an and the Bible. Funny that these warmongers portrayed themselves as deeply religious people, even getting directives from God to invade and commit massacre of innocent civilians!
So the American people should feel good about the debate on economy that has been taking place in the Capitol Hill. After all, these elected reps own the problem and they must fix it now. As pundits would tell you, if it had not been for their policies, we could have possibly avoided those wars (and the ensuing economic crisis), stopped outsourcing of jobs to China and India, and put higher priorities on developing human capital that would benefit the U.S. economy and guarantee its prosperity on a long-term.
In spite of all the claims as to their objectivity, outside the Congressman Dennis Kucinich there seems no one really serious about curtailing funding to Israel. We are told that such cuts (which are less than 1 percent of the deficit) won’t put a dent in the budget deficit. True. But when the same Republican politicians voted 228-192 to bar National Public Radio (NPR) from receiving any more federal funds last month it is not difficult to fathom their naked hypocrisy. It is worth noting here that the total federal funding to NPR amounts to only 2% of its overall revenues of $180 million, i.e., less than 4 million dollars. If a $4 billion yearly handout to the government of Israel can’t put a dent, why should a mere $4 million grant to the NPR? Whom are these Israel-firsters trying to fool? Such an over-protectionist attitude towards Israel is unsustainable.
As I noted many times, the American politicians are failing their people. Many are openly behaving like fascists. Many others are closet fascists who would reveal their true ugly self when push comes to shove. If they are serious about finding intelligent solutions to our fiscal problems, they better carryout the recommendations made by the Simpson-Bowles commission proposing $4 trillion in savings mostly through cuts in some of the largest drivers of the long-term deficit, e.g., Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The treatment of prisoners is a defining characteristic that separates great nations from others that are not. No nation can legitimately claim greatness when demeaning abuses and horrendous tortures are approved by its highest authority. Such practices show that it is bereft of moral higher values that define our humanity. And we had more than some random snapshots of such unspeakable displays committed by the American occupation forces in prisons of Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. We wondered how such evil acts could have been practiced by highly professional forces of a liberal democracy like the U.S.A. that has been so vociferous with the rule of law, democracy and human rights in the rest of the world! We were told that Abu Ghraib should not define America; it was an aberration. Then we found out that the abuses and tortures of Muslim detainees were actually authorized at the highest echelon of power within the White House. The torture of the prisoners and detainees were systemic and no random affair. The former president and vice president of the U.S.A. still remain boastful of the justification of torture practices.
Years ago in my after-work spare times I had volunteered to work as a social worker towards behavior modification of prisoners in a couple of prisons (or what are called correction centers) in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I learnt then that some prisoners would be confined to solitary cells for bad behavior. They would be denied pillow, mattress and other privileges. Sexual abuses were not uncommon either. It was a very depressing environment for everyone: the prisoners - who had little chance of becoming better or correcting their errors and crimes, the employees and volunteers – who worked there. Once imprisoned those prisoners were treated like worthless scum; they were simply dehumanized. Once released after serving their time, they could not fit in or adjust to their freedom. No wonder that there were many repeat offenders or prisoners to the prison system. It was like revolving doors for most of them.
I was told how some prisoners would be body-cavity checked every time they had outsider visitors, including lawyers. Short of sexual abuses, nothing could be more dehumanizing and painful experience for those unfortunate prisoners. Unable to cope with the traumatic experience that they suffered, many would plead their loved ones, including their lawyers, not to come for a face to face meeting.
Recently, news reports surfaced that the Wikileaks whistleblower Private First Class Bradley Manning is being tortured in a US military prison. Manning is subjected to utter isolation that can drive many people insane, with short periods each day where he is stripped naked and abused by jeering inmates. Manning’s attorney David Coombs revealed last month that for at least two nights in row, the Army private had been "stripped naked" for as long as seven hours at a time. In the mornings, he was left without clothes and forced to stand at attention. "This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification," he added. "It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. No other detainee at the Brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation."
You may remember that Manning is awaiting trial for releasing secret military documents to Wikileaks – including a video of US soldiers massacring Iraqi civilians. He was able to expose the war crimes of some American soldiers (much like the Mi Lai massacre), something that the U.S. government tried to hide from its citizens. And his brutal treatment appears to be part of an intimidation campaign to silence whistleblowers and crack down on Wikileaks. The US government is split on this issue, with diplomats publicly criticizing the military for Manning's treatment. However, the White House sees nothing wrong with the treatment of Manning.
Apparently, speaking out publicly against your government’s near-torture of a prisoner convicted of no crime is worse than the actual abuse itself. State Department chief spokesman P.J. Crowley resigned after publicly bashing the Pentagon’s treatment of jailed soldier Bradley Manning. Crowley, appearing at a journalism event at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology called the US military’s abusive treatment of Manning “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
But does American government care about its tainted pattern of abuses and tortures? If it does, it ought to know that the exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with her laws and values. It cannot say all the good things and do just the opposite. Today’s internet-savvy population will not settle for such hypocrisy, not even in communist China.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder backed down from his original intention of trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), the man accused of planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, in civilian courts. In the early days of the Obama administration he had said that trying KSM in civilian courts would be the "defining event" of his time as attorney general. After some ten years, it seems that like the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, KSM will also be tried under military tribunal.
What does it say about a government that locks up hundreds of detainees indefinitely in the most abject way known to mankind and then denies them the right to have fair trial? We are told that as part of a compromise with the Republicans, the Obama administration has agreed not to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center. All that moral preening that Obama made when he was on the campaign trail has been revealed to be just that - a posture that earned him later a Nobel Prize and nothing good! Are we surprised with such flip-flops? I am not.
As I see, all these are signs of moral bankruptcy of this nation. No nation can be taken seriously about its hollow claim to greatness when it is rotting from within.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Terry Jones – the hateful provocateur
Remember Christian pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida? He caused an international uproar last year by threatening to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an, the Muslim Holy Scripture, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Among others, the overall commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, had warned at that time that such an action could provoke violence in Afghanistan and could endanger American troops. Jones subsequently promised not to burn the Qur’an.
Last month, on March 20, however, with only 30 worshipers attending, Terry Jones held a self-styled mock trial of the Qur’an in which he presided from the pulpit as a judge. Sitting in judgment was a jury of 12 members of his church. Punishment was determined by the results of an online poll. Besides burning, the options included shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad. Jones said voters had chosen to set fire to the book, according to a video of the proceedings. So the Qur’an was burned.
The hateful act drew little publicity inside the USA, but provoked angry condemnation in the Af-Pak region, where it was reported in the local media and where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan condemned the burning in an address before the Parliament, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Thursday called on the United States to bring those responsible for the Qur’an burning to justice. A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the influential Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Terry Jones in the Qur’an burning.
Obviously, the U.S. government will not take any action against the Christian pastor. There is absolute freedom in this country to trash a religion, its founder and its holy book, although Tomahawks may be fired and bombs dropped to kill anyone considered hostile to the USA. The U.S. government doesn’t have to put the suspect into a lengthy trial process; it is easier this way to simply vaporize him, his family and tribe, and the neighborhood he lived!
I am sure many westerners would see no problem with such a politically secular and chauvinistic attitude, considered so outlandish, one-sided or hypocritical by so many in the East. They forget that every freedom that we enjoy has its limitations. When the rights of others are violated, it is no longer deemed freedom but can be an abuse or a crime. Many of these bigots and self-righteous nuts like Jones forget that we live in a highly connected world in which information flies instantly. So the provocation here can trigger a political-diplomatic tsunami elsewhere. And we have witnessed plenty of such occurrences in recent years.
Consider for instance, the reaction to the demolition of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan. In the days following the Taliban insanity, scores of Muslim houses of worship were burned down in many Buddhist majority countries in south and south-east Asia. The same was the consequence in Nepal during the height of Iraqi occupation when thousands of Nepalese Hindus burned at least two mosques including the "Jamaa" mosque, the largest mosque in the capital Katmandu, in protest against the killing of 12 Nepalese who had been working as cooks and cleaners for the occupation forces by an Iraqi insurgent group in August 31, 2004. In Nepalgunj, Nepal's western capital, nine houses inhabited by Muslims were burnt down. At least three Muslims were killed; several Muslim shops and businesses were also destroyed by the angry mob.
And who can forget the post-9/11 backlash in the USA — the steady stream of more than 800 cases of violence and discrimination suffered by American Muslims at the hands of know-nothing abusers? (It is worth nothing that while Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, they are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases. These range from homicides and mosque burnings to job, school and zoning law abuses, according to the Justice Department.)
Afghanistan is not impervious to information either. Its people had more than its share of troubles since the 1970s with foreign occupation forces and their stooges. Deeply religious and reflexively volatile, it has long been highly reactive to perceived insults against Islam. Thus the provocative desecration of the Qur’an in Gainesville was not lost in its information radar screen. Last Friday some 20,000 protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern Afghan city, during which 12 people died. The dead included at least seven United Nations workers, and five Afghans. The top U.N. official in Afghanistan blamed Taliban infiltrators for the killings. Violent protests against the burning continued on Saturday in Kandahar where 9 people got killed and 81 injured.
The attack once again underscored the latent hostility toward the nine-year foreign presence here, even in a city long considered to be among the safest in Afghanistan. The indiscriminate NATO bombing campaigns and drone attacks that have killed thousands of civilians have only reinforced the perception amongst most Afghans, including the western-back government of Karzai, that these western forces and their mercenaries have no respect for Afghan lives. They want them out.
Terry Jones, the provocateur responsible for triggering this latest episode, was well aware of the consequences of his sacrilegious action. He remains unrepentant and says that given the chance he would do it all over again. He audaciously demanded that the United States and United Nations take “immediate action” against Muslim nations in retaliation for the deaths. “The time has come to hold Islam accountable,” he said.
Such deranged talks from a bigoted Christian pastor should not surprise us. In the post-9/11 era these Christian zealots have been trying everything possible to expand the West’s war against the Muslim world. Knowing very well that they are protected by laws, these provocateurs have abused the notion of freedom of speech to incite violence, thereby endangering the lives of too many innocent people. And one death is too many!
It is high time for the U.S. government to understand that their nonchalant attitude against these ‘terrorists’ sends out a very incoherent message to the rest of the world when they see the same government justifying their bombing campaigns against hideouts of a radical Muslim cleric for inciting violence against occupation forces in a Muslim land. They call it the pinnacle of hypocrisy! It is simply inexcusable.
Last month, on March 20, however, with only 30 worshipers attending, Terry Jones held a self-styled mock trial of the Qur’an in which he presided from the pulpit as a judge. Sitting in judgment was a jury of 12 members of his church. Punishment was determined by the results of an online poll. Besides burning, the options included shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad. Jones said voters had chosen to set fire to the book, according to a video of the proceedings. So the Qur’an was burned.
The hateful act drew little publicity inside the USA, but provoked angry condemnation in the Af-Pak region, where it was reported in the local media and where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan condemned the burning in an address before the Parliament, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Thursday called on the United States to bring those responsible for the Qur’an burning to justice. A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the influential Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Terry Jones in the Qur’an burning.
Obviously, the U.S. government will not take any action against the Christian pastor. There is absolute freedom in this country to trash a religion, its founder and its holy book, although Tomahawks may be fired and bombs dropped to kill anyone considered hostile to the USA. The U.S. government doesn’t have to put the suspect into a lengthy trial process; it is easier this way to simply vaporize him, his family and tribe, and the neighborhood he lived!
I am sure many westerners would see no problem with such a politically secular and chauvinistic attitude, considered so outlandish, one-sided or hypocritical by so many in the East. They forget that every freedom that we enjoy has its limitations. When the rights of others are violated, it is no longer deemed freedom but can be an abuse or a crime. Many of these bigots and self-righteous nuts like Jones forget that we live in a highly connected world in which information flies instantly. So the provocation here can trigger a political-diplomatic tsunami elsewhere. And we have witnessed plenty of such occurrences in recent years.
Consider for instance, the reaction to the demolition of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan. In the days following the Taliban insanity, scores of Muslim houses of worship were burned down in many Buddhist majority countries in south and south-east Asia. The same was the consequence in Nepal during the height of Iraqi occupation when thousands of Nepalese Hindus burned at least two mosques including the "Jamaa" mosque, the largest mosque in the capital Katmandu, in protest against the killing of 12 Nepalese who had been working as cooks and cleaners for the occupation forces by an Iraqi insurgent group in August 31, 2004. In Nepalgunj, Nepal's western capital, nine houses inhabited by Muslims were burnt down. At least three Muslims were killed; several Muslim shops and businesses were also destroyed by the angry mob.
And who can forget the post-9/11 backlash in the USA — the steady stream of more than 800 cases of violence and discrimination suffered by American Muslims at the hands of know-nothing abusers? (It is worth nothing that while Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, they are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases. These range from homicides and mosque burnings to job, school and zoning law abuses, according to the Justice Department.)
Afghanistan is not impervious to information either. Its people had more than its share of troubles since the 1970s with foreign occupation forces and their stooges. Deeply religious and reflexively volatile, it has long been highly reactive to perceived insults against Islam. Thus the provocative desecration of the Qur’an in Gainesville was not lost in its information radar screen. Last Friday some 20,000 protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern Afghan city, during which 12 people died. The dead included at least seven United Nations workers, and five Afghans. The top U.N. official in Afghanistan blamed Taliban infiltrators for the killings. Violent protests against the burning continued on Saturday in Kandahar where 9 people got killed and 81 injured.
The attack once again underscored the latent hostility toward the nine-year foreign presence here, even in a city long considered to be among the safest in Afghanistan. The indiscriminate NATO bombing campaigns and drone attacks that have killed thousands of civilians have only reinforced the perception amongst most Afghans, including the western-back government of Karzai, that these western forces and their mercenaries have no respect for Afghan lives. They want them out.
Terry Jones, the provocateur responsible for triggering this latest episode, was well aware of the consequences of his sacrilegious action. He remains unrepentant and says that given the chance he would do it all over again. He audaciously demanded that the United States and United Nations take “immediate action” against Muslim nations in retaliation for the deaths. “The time has come to hold Islam accountable,” he said.
Such deranged talks from a bigoted Christian pastor should not surprise us. In the post-9/11 era these Christian zealots have been trying everything possible to expand the West’s war against the Muslim world. Knowing very well that they are protected by laws, these provocateurs have abused the notion of freedom of speech to incite violence, thereby endangering the lives of too many innocent people. And one death is too many!
It is high time for the U.S. government to understand that their nonchalant attitude against these ‘terrorists’ sends out a very incoherent message to the rest of the world when they see the same government justifying their bombing campaigns against hideouts of a radical Muslim cleric for inciting violence against occupation forces in a Muslim land. They call it the pinnacle of hypocrisy! It is simply inexcusable.
The Dying Days of a Dinosaur
It takes long time for carcass of an elephant to decay compared to small animals like a rat. The signs are all too visible these days that the United States of America is dying or decaying. It is not as strong economically as it used to be some two decades ago. However, contrary to conservative right-wing claims, the process of its downfall did neither start with the bailout of the Wall Street moguls in 2008 or 2009 nor with the election win of Obama.
Pinpointing a definitive time for this beginning of decline in super status is not an easy one since pundits will differ for a plethora of reasons. I would like to believe that it started with Bush Jr.’s two wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). By all counts these American wars have been pyrrhic wars for this giant nation, the same way it was for King Pyrrhus of ancient Epirus in 279-80 BCE. In both of Pyrrhus's victories against the Romans, the latter suffered greater casualties than Pyrrhus did. However, the Romans had a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Pyrrhus's casualties did to his.
GW Bush’s wars -- the first two of the 21st century – have been quite similar. With unmatched lethal power and raw brutality, his American forces were able to replace two unfriendly regimes and devastate those countries – turning the clock back to the pre-modern era. The casualties on the American side have been rather small – only some 6000 dead while it has managed to kill nearly a million – mostly unarmed civilians. And yet, the Afghan war shows no signs that it would end without a viable political solution allowing the Taliban to share power with the Karzai regime. Like the defeated Romans, the Taliban have a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Bush's casualties did to his. The Afghan war – now continued by President Obama, is costing ordinary Americans more than a trillion dollar.
The US economy is on the brink of bankruptcy. If the Arab and Chinese investors pull their money away today, the entire economy would collapse like a deck of cards. It is not surprising that in spite of hundreds of billions of dollars of economic stimulus, some 10 to 14 million people are still out of job. The only jobs found are those seemingly linked with the Homeland Security Department, responsible for keeping America safe from outside terror attacks with insane measures that do very little towards quashing any real threat from a suicide attacker if it so chooses. Thus, the beneficiaries of the war have been those linked with the national/business/personal safety and war industries. The price of every consumer item - from bread to butter to oil - has skyrocketed. So have the education and insurance costs.
When I went to graduate school at the University of California some 30 years ago, as a foreign student I was paying a tuition fee of only $1700 per trimester (or a total of $5100 per year). The yearly cost for room and board was no more than $6000. Now my son is a sophomore at the U Penn, and it costs me nearly $60,000 a year for his education expenses. Even the tuition fees in state-run universities have grown several folds in the last three decades.
Optimism is in short supply these days within the USA. Most of the jobs now created or available for jobless Americans are not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living. Young people today will have to settle for a much worse future than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
As I noted earlier, Bush’s wars were the last straws that broke the American camel’s back. From that time onward, the US has been on a downward roller-coaster ride with little chances of recovering its past glory. Its uncontested status in the post-WW II era created the nostalgia for greatness. Unfortunately, its metric for greatness was wrong. It glorified war and invested on war machines that perfected the art of large-scale killing with pin-point precision rather than on its human capital to sustain the prosperity that was once the envy of the world. Instead of funding schools and colleges, research and development it chose to do the reverse. In the Pennsylvania state run university system, where my wife is a chairwoman and professor of a science department, the newly elected Republican governor has proposed 50% reduction of state appropriation of the budget for college education. Even the school programs are affected by such cost cutting measures. Last week, I got a similar message of reduced state funding from the superintendent of my school district.
It is no wonder that the contribution of American scientists and engineers in major peer-reviewed journals is now below 25 percent. This figure should be a sufficient wakeup call for America given the fact that it continues to host most of the best schools in our world with its unrivaled graduate school programs providing the most comprehensive education possible and that over the years the country has successfully absorbed some 90 percent of foreign students who had come for their doctoral studies. Only ten percent, mostly from the prosperous Arab world, Malaysia and South Korea would return to their native countries. [I remember when I was a student in a Canadian university, how I was repeatedly told by professors and graduate students that my education would be incomplete without a Ph.D. from a good American university.]
So scarce is the job market today that on the average there are ten applicants for each job. In certain sectors this ratio is unbelievably high. There may be hundreds of job applicants for a skilled position in science and engineering. With so much job outsourced in the last two decades, there are not too many left inside today for skilled jobless applicants.
As noted by Bob Herbert in his last op/ed column for the New York Times, income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. The current mal-distribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent. Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year. And it is the nation’s largest corporation. What a mockery of tax laws!
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income has inevitably resulted in enormous imbalances of political power. So while the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well the employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
Welcome to new America! It is dying like a dinosaur. But just like those in a big ship that is slowly drowning, its inhabitants are still unaware of it.
Pinpointing a definitive time for this beginning of decline in super status is not an easy one since pundits will differ for a plethora of reasons. I would like to believe that it started with Bush Jr.’s two wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). By all counts these American wars have been pyrrhic wars for this giant nation, the same way it was for King Pyrrhus of ancient Epirus in 279-80 BCE. In both of Pyrrhus's victories against the Romans, the latter suffered greater casualties than Pyrrhus did. However, the Romans had a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Pyrrhus's casualties did to his.
GW Bush’s wars -- the first two of the 21st century – have been quite similar. With unmatched lethal power and raw brutality, his American forces were able to replace two unfriendly regimes and devastate those countries – turning the clock back to the pre-modern era. The casualties on the American side have been rather small – only some 6000 dead while it has managed to kill nearly a million – mostly unarmed civilians. And yet, the Afghan war shows no signs that it would end without a viable political solution allowing the Taliban to share power with the Karzai regime. Like the defeated Romans, the Taliban have a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Bush's casualties did to his. The Afghan war – now continued by President Obama, is costing ordinary Americans more than a trillion dollar.
The US economy is on the brink of bankruptcy. If the Arab and Chinese investors pull their money away today, the entire economy would collapse like a deck of cards. It is not surprising that in spite of hundreds of billions of dollars of economic stimulus, some 10 to 14 million people are still out of job. The only jobs found are those seemingly linked with the Homeland Security Department, responsible for keeping America safe from outside terror attacks with insane measures that do very little towards quashing any real threat from a suicide attacker if it so chooses. Thus, the beneficiaries of the war have been those linked with the national/business/personal safety and war industries. The price of every consumer item - from bread to butter to oil - has skyrocketed. So have the education and insurance costs.
When I went to graduate school at the University of California some 30 years ago, as a foreign student I was paying a tuition fee of only $1700 per trimester (or a total of $5100 per year). The yearly cost for room and board was no more than $6000. Now my son is a sophomore at the U Penn, and it costs me nearly $60,000 a year for his education expenses. Even the tuition fees in state-run universities have grown several folds in the last three decades.
Optimism is in short supply these days within the USA. Most of the jobs now created or available for jobless Americans are not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living. Young people today will have to settle for a much worse future than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
As I noted earlier, Bush’s wars were the last straws that broke the American camel’s back. From that time onward, the US has been on a downward roller-coaster ride with little chances of recovering its past glory. Its uncontested status in the post-WW II era created the nostalgia for greatness. Unfortunately, its metric for greatness was wrong. It glorified war and invested on war machines that perfected the art of large-scale killing with pin-point precision rather than on its human capital to sustain the prosperity that was once the envy of the world. Instead of funding schools and colleges, research and development it chose to do the reverse. In the Pennsylvania state run university system, where my wife is a chairwoman and professor of a science department, the newly elected Republican governor has proposed 50% reduction of state appropriation of the budget for college education. Even the school programs are affected by such cost cutting measures. Last week, I got a similar message of reduced state funding from the superintendent of my school district.
It is no wonder that the contribution of American scientists and engineers in major peer-reviewed journals is now below 25 percent. This figure should be a sufficient wakeup call for America given the fact that it continues to host most of the best schools in our world with its unrivaled graduate school programs providing the most comprehensive education possible and that over the years the country has successfully absorbed some 90 percent of foreign students who had come for their doctoral studies. Only ten percent, mostly from the prosperous Arab world, Malaysia and South Korea would return to their native countries. [I remember when I was a student in a Canadian university, how I was repeatedly told by professors and graduate students that my education would be incomplete without a Ph.D. from a good American university.]
So scarce is the job market today that on the average there are ten applicants for each job. In certain sectors this ratio is unbelievably high. There may be hundreds of job applicants for a skilled position in science and engineering. With so much job outsourced in the last two decades, there are not too many left inside today for skilled jobless applicants.
As noted by Bob Herbert in his last op/ed column for the New York Times, income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. The current mal-distribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent. Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year. And it is the nation’s largest corporation. What a mockery of tax laws!
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income has inevitably resulted in enormous imbalances of political power. So while the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well the employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
Welcome to new America! It is dying like a dinosaur. But just like those in a big ship that is slowly drowning, its inhabitants are still unaware of it.
Monday, March 21, 2011
What’s Next in the Arab World?
As the uprising in Libya turned into a full-scale civil war with the Libyan pro-regime forces regaining control of most of the towns lost earlier to the rebels, the UN has imposed a ‘no-fly zone’ over the Libyan airspace to protect civilians. To the anti-regime rebels and their supporters – home and abroad - the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 is a much desired one although it seemed to have come so late.
From the very start it was a foregone conclusion that the Libyan revolutionaries demanding the ouster of the strongman Gaddafi won’t be able to cakewalk -- slogans and the Internet won’t do what it had achieved for two of their neighboring states; it would require lots of sacrifice to topple the brutal regime. They also needed international support to neutralize the overwhelming lethal superiority of the regime. This resolution is, thus, a serious moral booster for them. As part of the phase 1 of the Operation Odyssey Dawn towards the implementation of the UNSC resolution, hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles have already been launched from the Mediterranean to knockout Libya’s Air Defense sites.
The permanent members of the UNSC needed lots of soul-searching before passing the resolution. After all, the UN was previously duped and misused by the Bush regime for invasion of Iraq, deemed illegal by its own Secretary General. Its reluctance to stop the Rwanda genocide and prolonged foot-dragging in Bosnia and Kosovo that saw the genocide of hundreds of thousands of unarmed Muslims, let alone the selective amnesia with all crimes committed by the Zionist regime in Israel and the overzealous attitude to punish Iran, the old boys’ club has lost the credibility within the Muslim world.
Not to be forgotten in this context is the fact that not too long ago many of these UNSC members had a very gainful relationship with the Gaddafi regime, in spite of the latter’s not-so-secret crimes against its own people. Some members were not sure how to react to the changes happening across the Arab world. Some bigotedly questioned as to how mature the Arabs were to handle democracy? Their experts have warned against regime changes saying that the opposition groups are led by the so-called Islamists, the West’s mortal enemies. What if Libya becomes another Congo, if Bahrain becomes an Iranian satellite, if Egypt, Jordan and Syria become controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood? It was not the people’s interest in those affected places that mattered prime to these western leaders. It was their self-interest that governed their decision. Thus, President Sarkozy of France wanted to bolster the falling Mubarak regime in its dying days. Even the USA had opted for a peaceful regime change there. And they have been rather muted when it came to pro-democracy protests in friendly countries like Yemen, Jordan, Oman and Bahrain. Interestingly, while the Obama administration has frozen Libyan assets inside the USA, it has failed to take similar measures against hidden treasures of Mubarak and Zine ben Ali. It has no problem with the Saudi and UAE forces now deployed to protecting the unpopular, autocratic regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, respectively.
Revolution is contagious. And the Saudis are genuinely worried and so are the other monarchs in the region whose reliance has always been to foreign masters like the USA, France and the UK – rather than God and their own people. Thanks to their billions and propaganda machines, they were successful before in the post-Shah era to stem the flood of Islamic revolution sweeping from Iran. They are now gravely serious to stop this Tsunami, all happening in the Sunni-ruled Arab world. As Tariq Ali has pointed out in the Guardian the Arab Revolution of 2011 is like 1848 of Europe when revolution first erupted in France, then hit the Italian states and German principalities, and eventually reached the remote outposts of the Austrian empire – engulfing some 50 local and national uprisings, all in the name of liberty.
Syria is the latest country to join the Arab revolution wagon. Syrians have long lived with a constant fear that they are being monitored, and will be punished for behavior regarded as dissenting or unpatriotic. Public discussion of domestic politics remains taboo. Maintaining that fear is helped by a heavily censored media and 50-year-old emergency laws that allow activists and dissidents to be routinely rounded up and imprisoned on vague charges such as “weakening national sentiment.”
A few days ago some school children in Deraa, south of Damascus - influenced by the protests in Tunisia and Egypt - wrote the popular revolutionary slogan on the wall: “The people want the fall of the regime”. Fifteen school children were arrested. Several families later gathered to demand their release. A ‘day of rage’ has now been held in several cities - Damascus, Homs, Banyas, and Deraa. Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the southern city of Deraa after Friday prayers on March 18 chanting ‘God, Syria and freedom -- that’s enough!’ The security forces opened fire on the protesters and have killed five people and injured hundreds of others since March 18. Fears of the regime and its pervasive leather-jacket-clad mukhabarat are still helping to quell any revolutionary aspirations.
In Yemen, three senior army commanders have recently defected to a movement calling for the ouster of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, leaving him with virtually no support among the country’s most powerful institutions. They all belong to Saleh's Hashid tribe. Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, commander of the army's powerful 1st Armored Division, who has defected, told reporters that he “will order his troops to protect protesters demonstrating against the country’s longtime president.” Meanwhile, Yemen’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia has sided with the protesters and Yemen’s ambassador to Syria has resigned. More members of the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) have resigned in the last few days in condemnation of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters outside Sana’a University last Friday, including Yemen’s ambassador to the UN, Abdullah Al-Saidi.
In Syria, like Yemen, it is not the Facebook or Twitter generation that is taking to the streets. It is the ordinary people who are tired of poverty and decades of repression. Like Libya, here, too, the struggle won’t be an easy one. The armed forces, drawn almost exclusively from the minority Nusayri sect that has been ruling the country for more than four decades, will not hesitate to repeat the crimes of 1982 in Hama when some 40,000 Syrians were massacred there by the murderous Assad regime. No Arab leader in our time has been as brutal as Hafez al-Assad was to his own countrymen! As clearly evident from the latest heavy-handed tactics, when threatened by unrest, his son Bashar who now rules Syria, will not be any less evil.
We won’t be surprised either if President Bashar al-Assad, like Gaddafi and many Arab leaders, would use the bogeyman of Islam – the threat of a Muslim takeover by extremists — to win sympathy from a United States that is prone to seeing Islamic revolutions, al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamists at every corner. Will he be able to arrest the tide of revolution now knocking on his door? That would depend how serious the Syrians are for liberty.
Liberty, like revolution, is, however, exhilarating. Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat, wrote what are probably the most profound words about liberty’s promise and its perils: “The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the urge to walk.” For decades, the Arabs -- brutalized and maimed by their leaders -- were afraid to walk, let alone wishing to ride or run. Now that fear is gone. They are willing to take liberty’s ride and die for it. No false propaganda is going to derail their genuine movement.
Soon after the missile attack on Libya, Gaddafi and his spokesman, while condemning the strike from western governments as a crusading act, still tried to shift the blame of current internal unrest on the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, formed by the veterans who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, which has endorsed the Libyan uprising. As, however, noted by Mr. Abud al-Jeleil, a former minister with Gaddafi who defected to the rebel side, in an interview with Al Jazeera: “We want one country — there is no Islamic emirate or Al Qaeda anywhere. Our only goal is to liberate Libya from this regime and to allow the people to choose the government that they want.”
Very few autocrats, unless threatened by more menacing powers, would let go of their power. Years of unopposed dictatorship had made them behave like demigods. Thus, revolutions against such dictators are seldom won without sacrifice. If a brutal regime has no bite of conscience from its own brutality, very little could an unarmed resistance do to bring about the desired change! No MLK singing: ‘we shall overcome’ – would change the status quo. It is here that the notion of ‘the best revolutions are completely organic’ falls flat on its face. As much as the American Revolution had foreign help, so did the Maoists in China before coming to power. It is sometimes absolutely necessary to have that outside help when the vast majority inside have no other way to save themselves from a brute.
The events in Libya over the last few weeks have shown that the vast majority of the people are against the Gaddafi regime and they want a change. With the newly passed UN Resolution and the air strikes inside Libya now they know that they have friends outside who would not allow them to die like the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. While appreciative of such moral and material support, they nevertheless ought to guard their own revolution in such a way that when, and if, victory knocks on their doors, it is not hijacked or dictated by foreign masters who came in sheepskins to rob it altogether.
From the very start it was a foregone conclusion that the Libyan revolutionaries demanding the ouster of the strongman Gaddafi won’t be able to cakewalk -- slogans and the Internet won’t do what it had achieved for two of their neighboring states; it would require lots of sacrifice to topple the brutal regime. They also needed international support to neutralize the overwhelming lethal superiority of the regime. This resolution is, thus, a serious moral booster for them. As part of the phase 1 of the Operation Odyssey Dawn towards the implementation of the UNSC resolution, hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles have already been launched from the Mediterranean to knockout Libya’s Air Defense sites.
The permanent members of the UNSC needed lots of soul-searching before passing the resolution. After all, the UN was previously duped and misused by the Bush regime for invasion of Iraq, deemed illegal by its own Secretary General. Its reluctance to stop the Rwanda genocide and prolonged foot-dragging in Bosnia and Kosovo that saw the genocide of hundreds of thousands of unarmed Muslims, let alone the selective amnesia with all crimes committed by the Zionist regime in Israel and the overzealous attitude to punish Iran, the old boys’ club has lost the credibility within the Muslim world.
Not to be forgotten in this context is the fact that not too long ago many of these UNSC members had a very gainful relationship with the Gaddafi regime, in spite of the latter’s not-so-secret crimes against its own people. Some members were not sure how to react to the changes happening across the Arab world. Some bigotedly questioned as to how mature the Arabs were to handle democracy? Their experts have warned against regime changes saying that the opposition groups are led by the so-called Islamists, the West’s mortal enemies. What if Libya becomes another Congo, if Bahrain becomes an Iranian satellite, if Egypt, Jordan and Syria become controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood? It was not the people’s interest in those affected places that mattered prime to these western leaders. It was their self-interest that governed their decision. Thus, President Sarkozy of France wanted to bolster the falling Mubarak regime in its dying days. Even the USA had opted for a peaceful regime change there. And they have been rather muted when it came to pro-democracy protests in friendly countries like Yemen, Jordan, Oman and Bahrain. Interestingly, while the Obama administration has frozen Libyan assets inside the USA, it has failed to take similar measures against hidden treasures of Mubarak and Zine ben Ali. It has no problem with the Saudi and UAE forces now deployed to protecting the unpopular, autocratic regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, respectively.
Revolution is contagious. And the Saudis are genuinely worried and so are the other monarchs in the region whose reliance has always been to foreign masters like the USA, France and the UK – rather than God and their own people. Thanks to their billions and propaganda machines, they were successful before in the post-Shah era to stem the flood of Islamic revolution sweeping from Iran. They are now gravely serious to stop this Tsunami, all happening in the Sunni-ruled Arab world. As Tariq Ali has pointed out in the Guardian the Arab Revolution of 2011 is like 1848 of Europe when revolution first erupted in France, then hit the Italian states and German principalities, and eventually reached the remote outposts of the Austrian empire – engulfing some 50 local and national uprisings, all in the name of liberty.
Syria is the latest country to join the Arab revolution wagon. Syrians have long lived with a constant fear that they are being monitored, and will be punished for behavior regarded as dissenting or unpatriotic. Public discussion of domestic politics remains taboo. Maintaining that fear is helped by a heavily censored media and 50-year-old emergency laws that allow activists and dissidents to be routinely rounded up and imprisoned on vague charges such as “weakening national sentiment.”
A few days ago some school children in Deraa, south of Damascus - influenced by the protests in Tunisia and Egypt - wrote the popular revolutionary slogan on the wall: “The people want the fall of the regime”. Fifteen school children were arrested. Several families later gathered to demand their release. A ‘day of rage’ has now been held in several cities - Damascus, Homs, Banyas, and Deraa. Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the southern city of Deraa after Friday prayers on March 18 chanting ‘God, Syria and freedom -- that’s enough!’ The security forces opened fire on the protesters and have killed five people and injured hundreds of others since March 18. Fears of the regime and its pervasive leather-jacket-clad mukhabarat are still helping to quell any revolutionary aspirations.
In Yemen, three senior army commanders have recently defected to a movement calling for the ouster of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, leaving him with virtually no support among the country’s most powerful institutions. They all belong to Saleh's Hashid tribe. Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, commander of the army's powerful 1st Armored Division, who has defected, told reporters that he “will order his troops to protect protesters demonstrating against the country’s longtime president.” Meanwhile, Yemen’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia has sided with the protesters and Yemen’s ambassador to Syria has resigned. More members of the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) have resigned in the last few days in condemnation of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters outside Sana’a University last Friday, including Yemen’s ambassador to the UN, Abdullah Al-Saidi.
In Syria, like Yemen, it is not the Facebook or Twitter generation that is taking to the streets. It is the ordinary people who are tired of poverty and decades of repression. Like Libya, here, too, the struggle won’t be an easy one. The armed forces, drawn almost exclusively from the minority Nusayri sect that has been ruling the country for more than four decades, will not hesitate to repeat the crimes of 1982 in Hama when some 40,000 Syrians were massacred there by the murderous Assad regime. No Arab leader in our time has been as brutal as Hafez al-Assad was to his own countrymen! As clearly evident from the latest heavy-handed tactics, when threatened by unrest, his son Bashar who now rules Syria, will not be any less evil.
We won’t be surprised either if President Bashar al-Assad, like Gaddafi and many Arab leaders, would use the bogeyman of Islam – the threat of a Muslim takeover by extremists — to win sympathy from a United States that is prone to seeing Islamic revolutions, al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamists at every corner. Will he be able to arrest the tide of revolution now knocking on his door? That would depend how serious the Syrians are for liberty.
Liberty, like revolution, is, however, exhilarating. Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat, wrote what are probably the most profound words about liberty’s promise and its perils: “The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the urge to walk.” For decades, the Arabs -- brutalized and maimed by their leaders -- were afraid to walk, let alone wishing to ride or run. Now that fear is gone. They are willing to take liberty’s ride and die for it. No false propaganda is going to derail their genuine movement.
Soon after the missile attack on Libya, Gaddafi and his spokesman, while condemning the strike from western governments as a crusading act, still tried to shift the blame of current internal unrest on the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, formed by the veterans who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, which has endorsed the Libyan uprising. As, however, noted by Mr. Abud al-Jeleil, a former minister with Gaddafi who defected to the rebel side, in an interview with Al Jazeera: “We want one country — there is no Islamic emirate or Al Qaeda anywhere. Our only goal is to liberate Libya from this regime and to allow the people to choose the government that they want.”
Very few autocrats, unless threatened by more menacing powers, would let go of their power. Years of unopposed dictatorship had made them behave like demigods. Thus, revolutions against such dictators are seldom won without sacrifice. If a brutal regime has no bite of conscience from its own brutality, very little could an unarmed resistance do to bring about the desired change! No MLK singing: ‘we shall overcome’ – would change the status quo. It is here that the notion of ‘the best revolutions are completely organic’ falls flat on its face. As much as the American Revolution had foreign help, so did the Maoists in China before coming to power. It is sometimes absolutely necessary to have that outside help when the vast majority inside have no other way to save themselves from a brute.
The events in Libya over the last few weeks have shown that the vast majority of the people are against the Gaddafi regime and they want a change. With the newly passed UN Resolution and the air strikes inside Libya now they know that they have friends outside who would not allow them to die like the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. While appreciative of such moral and material support, they nevertheless ought to guard their own revolution in such a way that when, and if, victory knocks on their doors, it is not hijacked or dictated by foreign masters who came in sheepskins to rob it altogether.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Despicable Hypocrisy of Congressman Peter King
In the post-9/11 era, bigotry and xenophobia against Islam and Muslims have become a rewarding profession for some people. Peter King, the New York Congressman who now chairs the powerful Homeland Security Committee, is a hawkish card-carrying member of that dastardly group of zealots, xenophobes, intellectually disadvantaged retards and low-lives who have been using the bogeyman of Islam to make a filthy living. He has been an anti-Islamic Christian crusader for quite some time. His book ‘Vale of Tears’, though presented as a work of fiction, is a sufficient testimony of how low he would sink in an attempt to attain publicity. As noted by many reviewers, it takes an enormous amount of evil in someone’s heart to write such a book. Fortunately, the book was a total flop with harsh reviews.
Last Thursday, King opened the first of a series of committee hearings into the so-called threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots. As much as you can’t teach an old dog new tricks so is the case with perennial bigots like Peter King. No matter how abundant the evidences are to prove otherwise, like his more notorious spiritual mentor - fellow Republican, former Attorney General Ashcroft (who violated the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens by using material-witness laws as a pretext for arresting and detaining suspects without probable cause), King behaves like a drooling, fixated hound-dog on scent: other crucial disasters may be happening all around him, but his eyes and nose are locked onto the imaginary American Muslim radicals.
To King, almost every American Muslim is a suspected radical. In 2004, King claimed in an interview with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity that ‘no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,’ and that ‘80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. . . . I’ll stand by that number of 85 percent. This is an enemy living amongst us.’ In a September 2007 interview with the website Politico.com, Congressman King said that “There are too many mosques in this country... There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.” It is, therefore, no shocker that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim rights group, had called King’s comments ‘Islamophobic bigotry.’
So what’s new with King’s demonic agenda against American Muslims? The New York Times editorial stated that in this hearing, King offered not a scintilla of substantiation for his charges that more than 80 percent of American mosques are run by radicals — ‘an enemy living amongst us.’ Nor did he offer an iota of evidence to support his assertions that “law enforcement officials throughout the country told me they received little or — in most cases — no cooperation from Muslim leaders and imams.” He ignored a study conducted last month from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security which indicated that in a hefty 40 percent of domestic extremist plots that were thwarted, law enforcement had help from Muslims. He disingenuously hides the fact that the father of the teenage ‘underwear bomber’ had warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria about his son. Nor does he mention that the first person to alert the police of a suspected SUV belonging to Faisal Shahzad, parked in the Time Square of Manhattan, containing bomb materials, was a Muslim street vendor.
Despite his claims of insider law enforcement knowledge, King didn’t call a single police witness to testify. The Democratic minority did, allowing Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles to tell that there was nothing to support King’s false claims of non-cooperation by American Muslims. Bennie Thompson, the ranking member of the committee which Congressman King heads, has responded by saying that none of these [law enforcement and intelligence] officials have backed King’s assertions that the Muslim community has not been helpful in thwarting terrorist attacks. The Triangle Center’s work also debunks King’s assertion that Muslim leaders are not speaking out against terrorism. They are. The reason that such activities fly below the news radar is because Muslims have no national leader and no media channel. Muslim community voices are often ignored.
As expected, King did not call any large established Muslim American organization to testify. He preferred to feature two aggrieved witnesses offering anecdotal tales about radicalized relatives, as if that proved his case. By the end of hearing, King only proved that there is nothing courageous about pandering or sowing hatred and fear. There is a name for this dangerous obsession – it’s called McCarthyism. He has only proved what a bigoted moron he has become, and nothing else. Simply said, the hearing was an abuse of his public office.
This Congressional hearing is rather absurd given the fact that not too long ago Peter King was a fervent, unapologetic supporter of the terrorist group, the IRA, responsible for killing thousands - including hundreds of civilians in random bombings in bars and department stores. In 1982, speaking at a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County, New York, King said: “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who, this very moment, are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.” In 1985, he convened a press conference before the start of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade (for which he was the Grand Marshal), and offered a defiant defense of the IRA: “As we march up the avenue and share all the joy,” he declared, “let us never forget the men and women who are suffering and, most of all, the men and women who are fighting.” Regarding the 30 years of violence during which the IRA killed over 1700 people, including over 600 civilians, King said, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it.” King compared IRA leader Gerry Adams to George Washington and asserted that the ‘British government is a murder machine.’
King was friendly with Michael McKevitt, a senior leader of the IRA in charge of arms acquisition, esp. those from the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi during the mid-1980’s. He was also very close to the IRA’s former Operations Officer in Belfast, Anto Murray, who was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping a suspected British spy. As Belfast Operations Officer, Murray planned or authorized every IRA bombing, shooting and killing in the city. King became involved with NORAID, an organization financing IRA activities and providing them with weapons.
So, King’s bogus allegations against American Muslims show what an evil hypocrite he is. He should be tried in the International Court for sponsoring terrorism that has killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
Congressman King opposed Senator John McCain’s calls for an end to torture methods used during terrorist suspect interrogations. King has supported the Iraq War since 2002. As The New York Times pointed out King was “the Patriot Act’s most fervent fan.” Six weeks after September 11, 2001, King told WABC radio that the military should use tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan if it was believed that Muslim terrorists would deploy chemical weapons on American soil.
King criticized the activities of WikiLeaks and in December 2010 suggested that they be designated a “terrorist organization” and treated as such by U.S. agencies. King opposes the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He voted for the Wall Street bailout and has been a vocal opponent of illegal immigration. Yet in 2008, King spoke in defense of bail for a fugitive IRA member, Pól Brennan, who had escaped from prison in the UK and been detained in Texas 15 years later. The IRA member, who had broken out of prison during the Maze Prison escape and entered America illegally, was being held without bail after his work permit expired.
As can be seen, King’s is a psychotic case that requires serious psychiatric help.
The American Muslim community is genuinely concerned about personal safety and security as any other Americans are. They are doing their best to erase the stigma now so conveniently labeled against them by bigots and xenophobes for the insane activities of a few misguided folks. It is not the mosques that have produced the likes of Faisal Shahzad and Major Nidal but the Internet with global reach. It would be foolish to ignore the latter’s impact on how information is gathered and absorbed.
It would be foolish to say that no terrorist threat exists in the USA. Surely, they do exist. However, the more complex and worthy issue of threats to the nation come not from radical American Muslims but from a wide array of homegrown militants that law enforcement officials must deal with -- from neo-Nazi militias to wannabe Christian jihadists.
As rightly pointed out in the New York Times editorial of March 11, not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. Congressman King demeaned the crucial issue of homeland security — building a Congressional hearing around his foolish, provocative and hurtful claims of widespread radicalization of Muslim Americans. He should be censured by the Congress for his evil McCarthy-like tactics that tried to demonize a small peaceful community.
Last Thursday, King opened the first of a series of committee hearings into the so-called threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots. As much as you can’t teach an old dog new tricks so is the case with perennial bigots like Peter King. No matter how abundant the evidences are to prove otherwise, like his more notorious spiritual mentor - fellow Republican, former Attorney General Ashcroft (who violated the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens by using material-witness laws as a pretext for arresting and detaining suspects without probable cause), King behaves like a drooling, fixated hound-dog on scent: other crucial disasters may be happening all around him, but his eyes and nose are locked onto the imaginary American Muslim radicals.
To King, almost every American Muslim is a suspected radical. In 2004, King claimed in an interview with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity that ‘no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,’ and that ‘80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. . . . I’ll stand by that number of 85 percent. This is an enemy living amongst us.’ In a September 2007 interview with the website Politico.com, Congressman King said that “There are too many mosques in this country... There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.” It is, therefore, no shocker that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim rights group, had called King’s comments ‘Islamophobic bigotry.’
So what’s new with King’s demonic agenda against American Muslims? The New York Times editorial stated that in this hearing, King offered not a scintilla of substantiation for his charges that more than 80 percent of American mosques are run by radicals — ‘an enemy living amongst us.’ Nor did he offer an iota of evidence to support his assertions that “law enforcement officials throughout the country told me they received little or — in most cases — no cooperation from Muslim leaders and imams.” He ignored a study conducted last month from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security which indicated that in a hefty 40 percent of domestic extremist plots that were thwarted, law enforcement had help from Muslims. He disingenuously hides the fact that the father of the teenage ‘underwear bomber’ had warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria about his son. Nor does he mention that the first person to alert the police of a suspected SUV belonging to Faisal Shahzad, parked in the Time Square of Manhattan, containing bomb materials, was a Muslim street vendor.
Despite his claims of insider law enforcement knowledge, King didn’t call a single police witness to testify. The Democratic minority did, allowing Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles to tell that there was nothing to support King’s false claims of non-cooperation by American Muslims. Bennie Thompson, the ranking member of the committee which Congressman King heads, has responded by saying that none of these [law enforcement and intelligence] officials have backed King’s assertions that the Muslim community has not been helpful in thwarting terrorist attacks. The Triangle Center’s work also debunks King’s assertion that Muslim leaders are not speaking out against terrorism. They are. The reason that such activities fly below the news radar is because Muslims have no national leader and no media channel. Muslim community voices are often ignored.
As expected, King did not call any large established Muslim American organization to testify. He preferred to feature two aggrieved witnesses offering anecdotal tales about radicalized relatives, as if that proved his case. By the end of hearing, King only proved that there is nothing courageous about pandering or sowing hatred and fear. There is a name for this dangerous obsession – it’s called McCarthyism. He has only proved what a bigoted moron he has become, and nothing else. Simply said, the hearing was an abuse of his public office.
This Congressional hearing is rather absurd given the fact that not too long ago Peter King was a fervent, unapologetic supporter of the terrorist group, the IRA, responsible for killing thousands - including hundreds of civilians in random bombings in bars and department stores. In 1982, speaking at a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County, New York, King said: “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who, this very moment, are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.” In 1985, he convened a press conference before the start of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade (for which he was the Grand Marshal), and offered a defiant defense of the IRA: “As we march up the avenue and share all the joy,” he declared, “let us never forget the men and women who are suffering and, most of all, the men and women who are fighting.” Regarding the 30 years of violence during which the IRA killed over 1700 people, including over 600 civilians, King said, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it.” King compared IRA leader Gerry Adams to George Washington and asserted that the ‘British government is a murder machine.’
King was friendly with Michael McKevitt, a senior leader of the IRA in charge of arms acquisition, esp. those from the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi during the mid-1980’s. He was also very close to the IRA’s former Operations Officer in Belfast, Anto Murray, who was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping a suspected British spy. As Belfast Operations Officer, Murray planned or authorized every IRA bombing, shooting and killing in the city. King became involved with NORAID, an organization financing IRA activities and providing them with weapons.
So, King’s bogus allegations against American Muslims show what an evil hypocrite he is. He should be tried in the International Court for sponsoring terrorism that has killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
Congressman King opposed Senator John McCain’s calls for an end to torture methods used during terrorist suspect interrogations. King has supported the Iraq War since 2002. As The New York Times pointed out King was “the Patriot Act’s most fervent fan.” Six weeks after September 11, 2001, King told WABC radio that the military should use tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan if it was believed that Muslim terrorists would deploy chemical weapons on American soil.
King criticized the activities of WikiLeaks and in December 2010 suggested that they be designated a “terrorist organization” and treated as such by U.S. agencies. King opposes the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He voted for the Wall Street bailout and has been a vocal opponent of illegal immigration. Yet in 2008, King spoke in defense of bail for a fugitive IRA member, Pól Brennan, who had escaped from prison in the UK and been detained in Texas 15 years later. The IRA member, who had broken out of prison during the Maze Prison escape and entered America illegally, was being held without bail after his work permit expired.
As can be seen, King’s is a psychotic case that requires serious psychiatric help.
The American Muslim community is genuinely concerned about personal safety and security as any other Americans are. They are doing their best to erase the stigma now so conveniently labeled against them by bigots and xenophobes for the insane activities of a few misguided folks. It is not the mosques that have produced the likes of Faisal Shahzad and Major Nidal but the Internet with global reach. It would be foolish to ignore the latter’s impact on how information is gathered and absorbed.
It would be foolish to say that no terrorist threat exists in the USA. Surely, they do exist. However, the more complex and worthy issue of threats to the nation come not from radical American Muslims but from a wide array of homegrown militants that law enforcement officials must deal with -- from neo-Nazi militias to wannabe Christian jihadists.
As rightly pointed out in the New York Times editorial of March 11, not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. Congressman King demeaned the crucial issue of homeland security — building a Congressional hearing around his foolish, provocative and hurtful claims of widespread radicalization of Muslim Americans. He should be censured by the Congress for his evil McCarthy-like tactics that tried to demonize a small peaceful community.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Arab Revolt – Time for Qaddafi to Leave
September 1, 1969 marks the coming to power of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi – the man who was destined to rule Libya for more than four decades. Aided by Army officers and conspirators he upended a feeble but tolerant monarchy. He was not the only one that grabbed power in what we call today as an unconventional way in the Arab world where by then military coups had become rather common. Egypt had already shown the path some seventeen years ago when in 1952 her corrupt but tolerant monarchy was overthrown by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup.
Originally all of these political changes had noble goals like republicanism and getting rid of the vestiges of colonialism, which even allowed people to rally behind these new rulers. However, by the 1980s Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Yemen transformed themselves into repressive “national security states” with awesome means of control and terror. The new rulers were merciless. They re-ordered the political world, and killed abundantly to further solidify their grip on power. Truly without checks and balances, required in any civic society, with unbridled power they evolved into authoritarian regimes behaving as if they owned the country; they were no longer servants of the state but rather the masters. As the rulers aged they entertained dynastic ambitions and in Syria, Hafez al-Assad even succeeded in turning the republic into a monarchy in all but name by bequeathing it to one of his sons. To these new rulers, the very idea of willingness to relinquish power was an alien concept.
As noted in a recent article by Prof. Fouad Ajami of the Johns Hopkins University, a world of cruelty settled upon the Arabs. Fear was now the glue of politics. Average men and women made their accommodation with things, retreating into the privacy of their homes. In the public space, there was now the cult of the rulers, the unrestrained power of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, Hafez al-Assad in Syria and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. The traditional restraints on power were swept away and new social contract between the ruler and the ruled emerged. These new rulers, being half-educated themselves and coming mostly from the lower middle class of the society, had no love for education and talented people, and thus surrounded themselves with equally ignorant and incompetent people who were happy to be the new class of sycophants which allowed them to munch the bones thrown at them by their new benefactors.
The goodwill of the ordinary citizens was not something that these regimes cared about. Their national wealth was utterly mismanaged and a huge fraction spent in buying weapons that were used mostly against them. Such arms deals also allowed huge commissions that were often stashed away by the ruling family and their cronies in foreign accounts.
None of these regimes tolerated political dissension. The only protests allowed were against a remote enemy (most notably Israel) but not their own. Soon the prisons got filled with the members of the dissenting parties. The worst victims of such state terrorism were the moderate Muslims – the social democrats, especially those affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or its sister organizations that had refused, unlike the secular parties, to cave into submission. Worse still, Islamic piety came to be seen as a crime and the pious Muslims the greatest threats to the stability of the regime. And the pattern was same everywhere. As much as the pro-western regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdullah II used the bogeyman of these so-called Islamists to curry favor and justify their tyranny against the Egyptian and Jordanian peoples, respectively, so did their counterparts in anti-western regimes of Libya, Iraq (during Saddam era) and Syria.
Overall, the modern Arab world is a history of shame and betrayal.
Today’s Arab rebellions are fueled by a desire of the Arab people to erase that stain of shame and betrayal. They want to cleanse themselves of the guilt of having given in to the despots for too long. And no one craved for this change more than its young ones. To them, the old slogans of Arab nationalism, secularism, socialism and republicanism meant nothing more than mumbo-jumbo bankrupt fallacies that had failed to better their lives by offering freedom and equal opportunities. Economics mattered. However, all the doors to economic prosperity seemed to proceed from the palaces and mansions of the rulers and their lackeys. There was nothing left for ordinary citizens. And this deprivation, albeit a forced one, in spite of the enormous natural resources that these countries were blessed with, notably the oil wealth, was simply inexcusable and unbearable. They had to rebel and demand fairness. They were done with the politics of acquiescence, fear and silence. They are not looking out for regime changes that are done at the behest of vultures waiting in the sideline. They want the change solely for themselves, unadulterated by foreign masters – no matter how supportive they may sound today.
And Libya is no aberration in this general scheme of state repression and the ensuing rebellion that has followed. For the last 42 years the Libyan people have been forced to chant words of praise to their leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi. He was a pan-Arab hero, a powerful voice for African unity. Forgotten were his crimes against their own kind, let alone against others -- near and abroad.
Who would have imagined of such brutality in Qaddafi’s Libya! After all, the ‘brother leader’ – the perennial revolutionary (often touted as the Che Guevera of the age) had financed revolutionary causes all around the world – from the African National Congress to the IRA! He also supported oppressed groups like the Native American Indians. He once promoted pan-Arab unity, and in 1977 changed Libya’s form of government from a republic to a ‘jamahiriya’ – ‘government by the masses.’ Unfortunately, behind the veneer of all such high-sounding, and probably, well-meaning causes, he created a police state where some 10 to 20 percent of the population worked in surveillance for the revolutionary committees.
Qaddafi’s security apparatuses were brutal. They picked anyone suspected of opposing the regime - young and old, and put them to prisons, including underground dungeons (and there were too many of these living hells inside the Libyan soil), and were never to be heard back. Prisoners were almost routinely denied medical care, and many died while in prison. Once imprisoned, no matter for what duration and under what charges, they were blacklisted for life and thus, denied government jobs. They were continuously monitored and interrogated to check any affiliation with Islamic politics. Even those who managed to leave Libya were no safe. When deemed a threat to the regime, they were pursued by hit squads as ‘stray dogs’ to shoot down. As a matter of fact, by the 1970s, the regime had managed to eliminate all opposition systematically. Any activity construed as political opposition was punishable by death. Even the influence of the tribes, once an important factor in defeating Italian colonialism, was feared as they might coalesce into groups opposing the Qaddafi regime. Thus, during the first two decades of the coup the regime tried to erase their influence. However, as their power seemed unwavering, Qaddafi co-opted the tribal leaders into his Social Leadership People’s Committee to control the tribes.
Qaddafi’s Green Book – a set of slim volumes published in the 1970s containing his political philosophy -- was thrust upon as the most important book purporting to have answers to all problems. While Qaddafi sent his sons for studies abroad, he removed foreign languages from school curriculum, further isolating Libyans from the rest of the world. As one protester recently said, Qaddafi kept his people ignorant and blind-folded. Libya became the most censored country in the Middle East. While he lavishly spent on supporting revolutionary causes and minority rights – as long as these aligned with his anti-imperialist goals, his own people remained hungry. Always apprehensive of a military coup, he kept his armed forces ill-trained and ill-prepared, and instead, continued to rely heavily on the foreign mercenaries to further his objectives.
Qaddafi’s is a difficult personality to analyze. The son of a Bedouin, his moods and aims also changed like the shifting sand-dunes of the Sahara. He supported Slobdan Milosevic – the Butcher of the Balkans responsible for committing genocide against the Muslim population. His regime is responsible for the disappearance in 1978 of Imam Musa Sadr, the founder of the Amal, a liberal-Shi’ite resistance movement in Lebanon.
In the post-9/11 era, Qaddafi dropped his controversial nuclear program and became a bulwark against al-Qaeda’s influence in Africa. He became a good friend of the West. As rightly noted by David Blair of the Daily Telegraph, “In his four decades as Libya's 'Brother Leader', Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has gone from being the epitome of revolutionary chic to an eccentric statesman with entirely benign relations with the West."
Libya is now burning with fury. Qaddafi disingenuously blames the rebellion on ‘drugged’ youth, al-Qaeda and refuses to confess that Libyans had enough with his four decades of brutal experiment. He mismanaged the country’s economy and humiliated its citizens. His pro-government forces, including foreign mercenaries, are now using lethal weapons against those demanding his ouster. In so doing, his regime has lost all credibility to rule. Lately, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to refer Libya to the International Criminal Court following its crackdown on protesters. A continuation of his unpopular regime would only bring more suffering to his people and would not salvage his tarnished image. As enfeebled and ill-equipped his opponents may appear today, history is on their side.
And yet in his recent speeches, like Mubarak of Egypt before him, Qaddafi sounds defiant. He even tried to present himself as a modern-day Umar Mukhtar, the Libyan national hero – the Lion of the Desert -- who fought against Italian colonialism that had savagely killed half the population of Cyrenaica, Libya’s eastern province. The claim of Qaddafi is ludicrous. He is neither Umar Mukhtar nor are his goals honorable and Islamic. And if he has any wisdom left in him, he should bow to people’s verdict and quit. Otherwise his fate may not be any better than that awaited his buddy – the late Milosevic of Serbia.
Originally all of these political changes had noble goals like republicanism and getting rid of the vestiges of colonialism, which even allowed people to rally behind these new rulers. However, by the 1980s Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Yemen transformed themselves into repressive “national security states” with awesome means of control and terror. The new rulers were merciless. They re-ordered the political world, and killed abundantly to further solidify their grip on power. Truly without checks and balances, required in any civic society, with unbridled power they evolved into authoritarian regimes behaving as if they owned the country; they were no longer servants of the state but rather the masters. As the rulers aged they entertained dynastic ambitions and in Syria, Hafez al-Assad even succeeded in turning the republic into a monarchy in all but name by bequeathing it to one of his sons. To these new rulers, the very idea of willingness to relinquish power was an alien concept.
As noted in a recent article by Prof. Fouad Ajami of the Johns Hopkins University, a world of cruelty settled upon the Arabs. Fear was now the glue of politics. Average men and women made their accommodation with things, retreating into the privacy of their homes. In the public space, there was now the cult of the rulers, the unrestrained power of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, Hafez al-Assad in Syria and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. The traditional restraints on power were swept away and new social contract between the ruler and the ruled emerged. These new rulers, being half-educated themselves and coming mostly from the lower middle class of the society, had no love for education and talented people, and thus surrounded themselves with equally ignorant and incompetent people who were happy to be the new class of sycophants which allowed them to munch the bones thrown at them by their new benefactors.
The goodwill of the ordinary citizens was not something that these regimes cared about. Their national wealth was utterly mismanaged and a huge fraction spent in buying weapons that were used mostly against them. Such arms deals also allowed huge commissions that were often stashed away by the ruling family and their cronies in foreign accounts.
None of these regimes tolerated political dissension. The only protests allowed were against a remote enemy (most notably Israel) but not their own. Soon the prisons got filled with the members of the dissenting parties. The worst victims of such state terrorism were the moderate Muslims – the social democrats, especially those affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or its sister organizations that had refused, unlike the secular parties, to cave into submission. Worse still, Islamic piety came to be seen as a crime and the pious Muslims the greatest threats to the stability of the regime. And the pattern was same everywhere. As much as the pro-western regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdullah II used the bogeyman of these so-called Islamists to curry favor and justify their tyranny against the Egyptian and Jordanian peoples, respectively, so did their counterparts in anti-western regimes of Libya, Iraq (during Saddam era) and Syria.
Overall, the modern Arab world is a history of shame and betrayal.
Today’s Arab rebellions are fueled by a desire of the Arab people to erase that stain of shame and betrayal. They want to cleanse themselves of the guilt of having given in to the despots for too long. And no one craved for this change more than its young ones. To them, the old slogans of Arab nationalism, secularism, socialism and republicanism meant nothing more than mumbo-jumbo bankrupt fallacies that had failed to better their lives by offering freedom and equal opportunities. Economics mattered. However, all the doors to economic prosperity seemed to proceed from the palaces and mansions of the rulers and their lackeys. There was nothing left for ordinary citizens. And this deprivation, albeit a forced one, in spite of the enormous natural resources that these countries were blessed with, notably the oil wealth, was simply inexcusable and unbearable. They had to rebel and demand fairness. They were done with the politics of acquiescence, fear and silence. They are not looking out for regime changes that are done at the behest of vultures waiting in the sideline. They want the change solely for themselves, unadulterated by foreign masters – no matter how supportive they may sound today.
And Libya is no aberration in this general scheme of state repression and the ensuing rebellion that has followed. For the last 42 years the Libyan people have been forced to chant words of praise to their leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi. He was a pan-Arab hero, a powerful voice for African unity. Forgotten were his crimes against their own kind, let alone against others -- near and abroad.
Who would have imagined of such brutality in Qaddafi’s Libya! After all, the ‘brother leader’ – the perennial revolutionary (often touted as the Che Guevera of the age) had financed revolutionary causes all around the world – from the African National Congress to the IRA! He also supported oppressed groups like the Native American Indians. He once promoted pan-Arab unity, and in 1977 changed Libya’s form of government from a republic to a ‘jamahiriya’ – ‘government by the masses.’ Unfortunately, behind the veneer of all such high-sounding, and probably, well-meaning causes, he created a police state where some 10 to 20 percent of the population worked in surveillance for the revolutionary committees.
Qaddafi’s security apparatuses were brutal. They picked anyone suspected of opposing the regime - young and old, and put them to prisons, including underground dungeons (and there were too many of these living hells inside the Libyan soil), and were never to be heard back. Prisoners were almost routinely denied medical care, and many died while in prison. Once imprisoned, no matter for what duration and under what charges, they were blacklisted for life and thus, denied government jobs. They were continuously monitored and interrogated to check any affiliation with Islamic politics. Even those who managed to leave Libya were no safe. When deemed a threat to the regime, they were pursued by hit squads as ‘stray dogs’ to shoot down. As a matter of fact, by the 1970s, the regime had managed to eliminate all opposition systematically. Any activity construed as political opposition was punishable by death. Even the influence of the tribes, once an important factor in defeating Italian colonialism, was feared as they might coalesce into groups opposing the Qaddafi regime. Thus, during the first two decades of the coup the regime tried to erase their influence. However, as their power seemed unwavering, Qaddafi co-opted the tribal leaders into his Social Leadership People’s Committee to control the tribes.
Qaddafi’s Green Book – a set of slim volumes published in the 1970s containing his political philosophy -- was thrust upon as the most important book purporting to have answers to all problems. While Qaddafi sent his sons for studies abroad, he removed foreign languages from school curriculum, further isolating Libyans from the rest of the world. As one protester recently said, Qaddafi kept his people ignorant and blind-folded. Libya became the most censored country in the Middle East. While he lavishly spent on supporting revolutionary causes and minority rights – as long as these aligned with his anti-imperialist goals, his own people remained hungry. Always apprehensive of a military coup, he kept his armed forces ill-trained and ill-prepared, and instead, continued to rely heavily on the foreign mercenaries to further his objectives.
Qaddafi’s is a difficult personality to analyze. The son of a Bedouin, his moods and aims also changed like the shifting sand-dunes of the Sahara. He supported Slobdan Milosevic – the Butcher of the Balkans responsible for committing genocide against the Muslim population. His regime is responsible for the disappearance in 1978 of Imam Musa Sadr, the founder of the Amal, a liberal-Shi’ite resistance movement in Lebanon.
In the post-9/11 era, Qaddafi dropped his controversial nuclear program and became a bulwark against al-Qaeda’s influence in Africa. He became a good friend of the West. As rightly noted by David Blair of the Daily Telegraph, “In his four decades as Libya's 'Brother Leader', Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has gone from being the epitome of revolutionary chic to an eccentric statesman with entirely benign relations with the West."
Libya is now burning with fury. Qaddafi disingenuously blames the rebellion on ‘drugged’ youth, al-Qaeda and refuses to confess that Libyans had enough with his four decades of brutal experiment. He mismanaged the country’s economy and humiliated its citizens. His pro-government forces, including foreign mercenaries, are now using lethal weapons against those demanding his ouster. In so doing, his regime has lost all credibility to rule. Lately, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to refer Libya to the International Criminal Court following its crackdown on protesters. A continuation of his unpopular regime would only bring more suffering to his people and would not salvage his tarnished image. As enfeebled and ill-equipped his opponents may appear today, history is on their side.
And yet in his recent speeches, like Mubarak of Egypt before him, Qaddafi sounds defiant. He even tried to present himself as a modern-day Umar Mukhtar, the Libyan national hero – the Lion of the Desert -- who fought against Italian colonialism that had savagely killed half the population of Cyrenaica, Libya’s eastern province. The claim of Qaddafi is ludicrous. He is neither Umar Mukhtar nor are his goals honorable and Islamic. And if he has any wisdom left in him, he should bow to people’s verdict and quit. Otherwise his fate may not be any better than that awaited his buddy – the late Milosevic of Serbia.
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