The New York Times published an article today entitled: “Saudi Arabia’s Top Cleric Forbids Chess, but Players Maneuver”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabias-top-cleric-forbids-chess-but-players-maneuver.html?_r=0
To summarize: the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia recently issued a fatwa declaring that the game of chess was forbidden, saying that it was "the work of Satan," like alcohol and gambling, and a waste of time and money that creates hatred between players. The response from Saudi chess players indicates that the fatwa will be as effective and command the same obedience that similar bans on coffee and tobacco did centuries ago.
By way of background, early forms of chess were developed in India and made their way to Persia in the 7th century – just in time for it to be adopted when the Muslim Arabs conquered Persia. Unlike most of the areas conquered by the Muslim Arabs in their initial conquests, the Persians were not assimilated by their Arab rulers but retained their Persian identity and language (although they did adopt many aspects of Arab civilization and culture, notably the Arabic alphabet, which they modified for their own use).
In one of the unintended consequences of the Arab conquest of Persia, the Persians also eventually largely adopted their own form of Islam – Shi’ism – which has been in opposition, more or less over the centuries, to the majority Sunni form of Islam.
I’m going to skip over a lot of history now. That includes the fact that the Abbasid Empire, centered in Baghdad during the Middle Ages (and primarily known in the West for the legendary glories of the reign of Caliph Harun Al-Rashid and the 1001 Nights), was founded by Persian Shi’ites who overthrew the first Arab Muslim empire – the Umayyad Empire, whose capital was in Damascus – although the Abbasid Empire eventually became very orthodox Sunni. My point here – and I’m greatly simplifying – is that there is a long-standing rivalry and competition between the Arab Muslims (and later the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which conquered and absorbed the Arab lands) and the Persian Muslims that dates back to the first centuries of Islam. This rivalry and animosity contributed to periodic wars between the Arabs and Turks, on the one hand, and the Persians (or Iranians) on the other hand. The animosity is reflected in the Arabic and Persian languages by their respective synonyms for Arabs and Persians which mean barbarian, uncivilized, uncultured, uncouth, ill-spoken, illiterate, etc.
For example, some of you may remember the late Professor Fouad Ajami, who taught at Johns Hopkins University, and who was frequently on TV and published numerous articles and books. A Shi’ite Arab originally from Lebanon, his family name in Arabic means “Persian” and, in fact, his family originally migrated to the part of Syria now known as Lebanon around six centuries ago. Despite their centuries-long residence in Syria and the complete Arabization of his family, Professor Ajami was the target of many insults over the years by Arab intellectuals who didn’t like (or loathed) his political views and theories (he frequently criticized and skewered Arab intellectuals and Arab politics and he later supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq). Some of those “intellectuals” took particular aim at the “fact” that he wasn’t even a “real Arab,” as "evidenced" by his name – and therefore he had no right or justification (or worse, he had “hidden” motives) for his criticisms. Long before Professor Ajami became identified with the George W. Bush administration, these Arab intellectuals and semi-intellectuals justified their animosity, in part, on the fact that `ajami, in Arabic, means Persian, barbarian, uncivilized, uncultured, etc.
Love or loath him – so much for cool and reasoned academic objectivity and contemplation.
In any case, the current dispute between Saudi Arabia and Iran has very deep roots. And one has to look at the Saudi Grand Mufti’s ban on the “Persian” game of chess as part of that dispute. (The term “checkmate” comes from the Persian “shah mat,” which means the “king is dead.” Note, on the other hand, that “mat” is an Arabic word.)
HOWEVER – and this is my point, however much I meandered in getting to it – the Saudi Grand Mufti’s ban on chess will most certainly end up in the garbage heap with similar bans on coffee and tobacco that Muslim theologians tried to impose back in the Middle Ages after coffee was introduced from Africa, and later tobacco was introduced from America. Because of their stimulative and addictive properties, the theologians concluded that coffee and tobacco were analogous to alcohol and therefore were forbidden (although not even mentioned in the Quran).
Anyone who has been in Muslim countries, particularly in Arab countries, can see that these bans were completely ignored. Moreover, since alcohol is forbidden under Islam (and public consumption is generally banned or illegal), the huge numbers of coffee houses in Arab countries fulfill the same social and cultural functions that pubs, taverns, and bars do in Western countries – with caffeine and nicotine replacing alcohol. The ISIS rulers have also banned cigarettes as anti-Islamic (and are reportedly having as much success at enforcing the ban as their medieval predecessors since smuggled cigarettes are much in demand in the territories controlled by ISIS).
This raises another point – that despite the inflexibility and conservatism of religious leaders, sometimes they are just ignored on issues small, and sometimes large. Moreover, we too often have the tendency to think – even demand – that the members of a religion MUST belong to the most extreme form of that religion, e.g., all Christians must be fundamentalist evangelicals, all Jews must be ultra-Orthodox Hasids or Satmars, and all Muslims must be followers of ISIS and the Taliban – and those who aren’t or don’t are either not true Christians, or true Jews, or true Muslims – or they’re lying.
When we accept the definitions of extremists as being the only legitimate or true definitions – then are we not actually giving them aid and comfort and legitimacy?
Friday, January 22, 2016
Friday, January 16, 2015
My Interview on CCTV-America on the Islamic State's Use of Child Soldiers
I was interviewed on CCTV-America on Wednesday, Jan. 14, about the recruitment and training of child soldiers by the Islamic State (ISIS). Hopefully this link will stay for a while, since the CCTV-America producer sent it to me. (Hear that, Google?)
Unfortunately, I don't see much hope of a solution to the problem without the total defeat of ISIS. And, of course, ISIS has found all sorts of "Islamic" justifications for their use of child soldiers, despite the explicit prohibitions of such practices in Islamic law and Islamic history. But that has never stopped them from engaging in innovation (bid'a), which they're supposedly fighting against to impose a "pure" Islamic state on a "barbaric" world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7yF3SyoZk&feature=youtu.be
Unfortunately, I don't see much hope of a solution to the problem without the total defeat of ISIS. And, of course, ISIS has found all sorts of "Islamic" justifications for their use of child soldiers, despite the explicit prohibitions of such practices in Islamic law and Islamic history. But that has never stopped them from engaging in innovation (bid'a), which they're supposedly fighting against to impose a "pure" Islamic state on a "barbaric" world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7yF3SyoZk&feature=youtu.be
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
German Humor
It's been a very long time but I couldn't resist posting the following from a fascinating March 2, 2014 New York Times book review, written by Barry Gewen, of "Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood," by Joachim Fest, the historian.
Shortly after World War II, one German exile returning to the city of Berlin asked the taxi driver on the ride from the airport how things had been under the Nazis. Gesturing at the bombed-out ruins all around them, the driver replied: "You actually didn't miss much!"
Shortly after World War II, one German exile returning to the city of Berlin asked the taxi driver on the ride from the airport how things had been under the Nazis. Gesturing at the bombed-out ruins all around them, the driver replied: "You actually didn't miss much!"
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
My Interview on Al-Jazeera English TV, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011
I was interviewed on Al-Jazeera English TV on October 1, 2011 about U.S. foreign policy making and implementation in Pakistan and Afghanistan. (I received the video clip only a few days ago, which is why I'm putting it on the blog now instead of much earlier.)
The lead-in by the interviewer was the killing of a high-ranking Al-Qa'ida-linked commander in Pakistan by a U.S. missile strike — undoubtedly fired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) — and whether this, as well as the arrest of a senior Haqqani network leader, would “help” the Obama administration or have no impact. I answered that it would give a very short-term boost but their impact would fade very quickly — and it would have no impact on Obama’s re-election chances, which would be determined by the state of the economy in a year.
I emphasized in the interview that the Obama administration’s policies were not so different, in many ways, from the previous Bush administration’s policies, and I hopefully explained the reasons for this. I also tried to give some insights into how U.S. foreign policy decisions are made in the real world, which involve imperfect and conflicting information and where the choices are usually not between good, better, and best but between bad, worse, and worst. In the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the choices are usually between worse and worst. Right-wing and left-wing ideologues take note.
The lead-in by the interviewer was the killing of a high-ranking Al-Qa'ida-linked commander in Pakistan by a U.S. missile strike — undoubtedly fired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) — and whether this, as well as the arrest of a senior Haqqani network leader, would “help” the Obama administration or have no impact. I answered that it would give a very short-term boost but their impact would fade very quickly — and it would have no impact on Obama’s re-election chances, which would be determined by the state of the economy in a year.
I emphasized in the interview that the Obama administration’s policies were not so different, in many ways, from the previous Bush administration’s policies, and I hopefully explained the reasons for this. I also tried to give some insights into how U.S. foreign policy decisions are made in the real world, which involve imperfect and conflicting information and where the choices are usually not between good, better, and best but between bad, worse, and worst. In the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the choices are usually between worse and worst. Right-wing and left-wing ideologues take note.
Monday, September 5, 2011
My Interview on Al-Jazeera English TV, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011
I was interviewed by Al-Jazeera English TV this past Sunday, September 4, 2011, about 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community. The call came late on Sunday afternoon on the Labor Day three-day weekend so I'm sure I wasn't the first person they called. Be that as it may, I discussed the reasons why the 9/11 attack took the intelligence community by surprise, some of the reforms that have been implemented in the past 10 years, and whether the United States is consequently "safer" than it was 10 years ago.
Bearing in mind that the entire interview lasted 3 minutes, I emphasized that even if the intelligence agencies had been sharing information with each other and even if they had been connecting the dots ― they still would not have anticipated the 9/11 attacks. This was due to ― first of all ― a failure of imagination, as pointed out in the 9/11 Commission report. It was also because of preconceptions and perceptions, and because of bureaucratic and cultural inertia.
The interviewer threw me a curveball at the end of the interview when he asked me if the U.S. was less free as a result of the increased surveillance of Americans because of the intelligence “reforms.” He did have a point but I ended the interview by pointing out that part of the problem was bureaucratic ― and anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy should know that the U.S. intelligence “community” is far from being a monolithic, agile, omnipotent entity (despite the fevered imaginings and conspiracy theories of both the left and the right on the political spectrum). Another part of the problem is that Congress has not done anything about one of the most important reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission ― to reform itself.
Ten years ago there were approximately 85 Congressional committees and subcommittees that had some oversight function for homeland security. The Commission report emphasized that this state of affairs actually undermined the security of the United States and it decreased ― not increased ― oversight. It recommended that this be reduced to something like a dozen committees and subcommittees at the most. Instead, in one of its few bipartisan efforts in the past 10 years, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has increased the number of committees to around 92 at last count.
I feel so much safer. NOT!
My interview is introduced by a report by an Al-Jazeera reporter on 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community, with an emphasis on questioning whether the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has really helped to reform the intelligence community. I referred to that report several times during my interview.
Bearing in mind that the entire interview lasted 3 minutes, I emphasized that even if the intelligence agencies had been sharing information with each other and even if they had been connecting the dots ― they still would not have anticipated the 9/11 attacks. This was due to ― first of all ― a failure of imagination, as pointed out in the 9/11 Commission report. It was also because of preconceptions and perceptions, and because of bureaucratic and cultural inertia.
The interviewer threw me a curveball at the end of the interview when he asked me if the U.S. was less free as a result of the increased surveillance of Americans because of the intelligence “reforms.” He did have a point but I ended the interview by pointing out that part of the problem was bureaucratic ― and anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy should know that the U.S. intelligence “community” is far from being a monolithic, agile, omnipotent entity (despite the fevered imaginings and conspiracy theories of both the left and the right on the political spectrum). Another part of the problem is that Congress has not done anything about one of the most important reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission ― to reform itself.
Ten years ago there were approximately 85 Congressional committees and subcommittees that had some oversight function for homeland security. The Commission report emphasized that this state of affairs actually undermined the security of the United States and it decreased ― not increased ― oversight. It recommended that this be reduced to something like a dozen committees and subcommittees at the most. Instead, in one of its few bipartisan efforts in the past 10 years, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has increased the number of committees to around 92 at last count.
I feel so much safer. NOT!
My interview is introduced by a report by an Al-Jazeera reporter on 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community, with an emphasis on questioning whether the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has really helped to reform the intelligence community. I referred to that report several times during my interview.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A modest proposal (and my comments)
I want to emphasize that the following article is supposed to be satirical (the author emphasizes that point several times during the article), though many of the points he makes are not satirical.
This article is also a reminder to conspiracy mongers who believe that the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent CIA is behind everything that goes on in the world — or at least in your part of the world — well, forget about it. Satire and reality are not part of your universe.
I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.
Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.
On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
But remember — the following article is a satire...
Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate.com
January 22, 2010
It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"
So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.
Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."
That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.
Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.
I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?
I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.
And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.
These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.
Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).
Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)
Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.
Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")
You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!
Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?
Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."
You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.
Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.
And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.
They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."
The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.
A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?
My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.
Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.
But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."
"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.
My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.
That's my modest proposal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
This article is also a reminder to conspiracy mongers who believe that the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent CIA is behind everything that goes on in the world — or at least in your part of the world — well, forget about it. Satire and reality are not part of your universe.
I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.
Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.
On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
But remember — the following article is a satire...
Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate.com
January 22, 2010
It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"
So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.
Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."
That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.
Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.
I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?
I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.
And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.
These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.
Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).
Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)
Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.
Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")
You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!
Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?
Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."
You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.
Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.
And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.
They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."
The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.
A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?
My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.
Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.
But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."
"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.
My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.
That's my modest proposal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The curse of Muslim lands (and my comments)
Too much innocent blood has been spilled in the name of Islam. It is time the madness came to an end, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
21-27 January 2010
Terrorism, they say, is the weapon of the weak. But in our case it has become the weapon against the weak. The use of suicide is not something invented by Muslims. It's perhaps as old as homicide. Japan's harakiri comes to mind. But perhaps no people have suffered from it, and because of it, as much as Muslims have in recent years.
So what drives a suicide bomber? And what kind of cause, however noble, makes you kill innocent people peacefully going about their day-to-day business — people who haven't harmed anyone and pose no threat to anyone? And how can these faceless men, whatever their motives, ever think they would be forgiven, let alone rewarded, in the next life for their despicable acts against the defenceless?
Is this what Islam really preaches and stands for? If not — as we all know it doesn't — why aren't our religious scholars, leaders and wise men raising a storm and doing more to stop these mad men bent on tarnishing the image of a noble faith and its billion plus followers?
I have struggled with these questions every time innocent people are killed in a terror attack or suicide bombing. And these questions have been troubling me again since the mind-numbing attacks on a Muharram procession in Karachi and a volleyball match in Pakistan's north last week.
The unparalleled scale of the attack on the Ashura procession in Karachi — Pakistan's financial/commercial capital and political nerve centre — has shaken a country that has long been used to daily mayhem of this kind. Nearly 50 people were killed and 500 injured in the Karachi attack. But more than the loss of lives, it is the devastation wreaked on the country's biggest city that day that will haunt Pakistan for a long time to come.
Thousands of businesses, shops and commercial establishments were destroyed in no time, incurring losses worth billions of dollars. And the attack on the heavily attended volleyball match in the troubled Northwest killed 75 villagers, and left scores maimed.
None of those watching the match or attending the Muharram procession had anything to do with the Western wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan or Iraq. They had no sympathy or affiliation whatsoever with the United States and the West. Then why have they been targeted? More importantly, what have the planners and perpetrators of these devastating attacks against unsuspecting bystanders achieved?
But whoever said there is any higher purpose or noble objective behind all this madness? There's no method in the madness. This is an all-consuming monster that does not distinguish between friends and foes. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed in macabre attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
As regular readers would know, this humble hack has been doing his bit — for what it's worth — to question, critique and confront the big powers have been playing in the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world for centuries, and has gone to great lengths to point out repeatedly why US and Western policies are to blame for much of the mess you see in the Muslim world today, from Palestine to Pakistan.
I have also religiously underscored the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda have been birthed and fuelled by Western double standards and unjust, callous policies in the Muslim world. And that even in the face of increasing threats from extremist groups and evidence of a clear link between cause and effect, the West has tenaciously refused to address, review and change its fundamental policies in the greater Middle East region. But that's another story altogether.
Western actions cannot be an excuse for the kind of extremist violence that is being visited on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Why are innocent people — almost all of them Muslims — being made to pay for Western policies and sins? And how does it help the "cause" of these so-called defenders of Islam when they target innocent Muslims, and non-Muslims for that matter? This death cult is the ultimate injustice and calumny against a faith that celebrates peace, reason, moderation and justice in all spheres. Why, Islam literally means peace!
So what kind of Islam do these lunatics think they believe in when they send young, impressionable 13-year-olds who haven't even experienced what life is to die? The Karachi attack and the terror strike on the volleyball match are only the most recent instances of crimes committed in the name of a great faith. Pakistan's recent history, and that of the Middle East, is replete with such vile and craven crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims — and non-Muslims — have died in this mindless violence targeting bazaars, mosques, schools, hospitals... you name it. True, the self-styled "coalition of the willing" has visited a great deal of horror on Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are not any less injured by nihilists who kill and murder with impunity in our name.
Let's face it: Some of the worst crimes against Muslims have been committed in the name of Islam by people who claim to be our defenders and champions. In fact, they are worse than the West because they pretend to be our friends and allies before they hunt us from within.
If the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our friends, the folks who live in our midst to kill us from within like a cancer are not our friends either. This is the reality Muslims have to confront, and confront it now, before it's too late. And this is the message we have to send across Muslim lands and around the world.
I do not know how many people, especially Muslims, paid attention to this year's hajj sermon. Addressing the white sea of three million pilgrims from around the world in Mecca, and by extension the larger Muslim world, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Sheikh used unusually strong language to draw attention to the issue that has become the bane of the Islamic world.
While Islamic scholars, including those leading prayers at the most sacred mosque on the planet, have been talking about the growing cult of the suicide bomber and warning against extremism, this is the first time anyone has condemned the menace with such force and in such unequivocal terms. Warning Muslims around the world against the extremists, the grand mufti termed the spectre of terror and suicide attacks as "the curse of Muslim lands". He singled out the extremism and the death cult of suicide attacks as the "most serious problem" facing the Muslim community today.
This is the message that has to be taken far and wide with the force and conviction with which it was delivered. This is a matter of life and death, literally. Religious scholars, politicians, intellectuals, the media and ordinary Muslims have to come together, deploying all resources and means at their disposal to free ourselves of this stigma distorting the real, pristine image of Islam before the world.
Too much innocent blood has been spilled and too many innocents have died in the name of our faith. It's time to say enough is enough! Please, not in our name! For God's sake, not in our name!
Aijaz Zaka Syed is opinion editor of Khaleej Times (Dubai, UAE).
Mark says:
The attack in Karachi, Pakistan on an ‘Ashura (Shi’ite holy day) procession was attributed to Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, two of the most extremist Sunni Salafi (fundamentalist) groups in Pakistan. Their attack on Shi'ites was part of the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world — between extremists and those whom they regard as apostates (non-extremists) and between Sunni extremists and those they regard as infidels (Shi'ites). I'm simplifying here, but I could write an article or a book (many have already done so) on these conflicts.
In any case, members of groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi consider Shi'ites to be worse than Christians and even worse than Jews. In fact, some of their ideological rants claim that Shi'ites are either crypto-Jews or allied with Jews in the "World Jewish Conspiracy" to control the world and destroy Islam. The bottom line is that, unlike Aijaz Zaka Syed (who is originally from India), they do not consider Shi’ites to be Muslims and, therefore, they are prime targets.
With all due respect to Mr. Syed, I have to take issue with his assertion that “Islam literally means peace!” It is true that the root of Islam — S-L-M — is also the same root as the word SaLāM, which means peace in Arabic. However, the word Islām — as a word — literally means “submission or resignation or surrender to the will of God” and one who does so is a muSLiM.
The implication that Islām means peace comes from classical Islamic law, which divided the world into dār al-Islām (the house or abode of Islam) and dār al-harb (the house or abode of war). Dār al-Islām was the part of the world that was under Islamic rule or control. It was assumed as a matter of course by the theologians and jurists that, by definition, anyplace that came under Islamic rule or control would be an “abode of peace,” which is how the implication that Islam “literally means peace” developed. Even a cursory survey of Islamic history demonstrates that peace was more often the exception than the rule.
In classical Islamic law, dār al-harb was, by definition, in a state of ignorance and chaos that must be brought under Islamic control to bring peace. It justified the initial Arab conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires which, in another context, were nothing more than imperial and colonialist conquests similar to those that had preceded them (see, e.g., the Greeks and Romans) and which succeeded them (see, e.g., the British and the French). It justified conquests of the Arab Muslim kingdoms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa by the Turks (first the Seljuks and then the Ottomans). It justified the Mughal conquest of much of India. And it justified the wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar Empires.
Discussions about dār al-Islām and dār al-harb are an obsession of the Salafists and those who sympathize with some or many of their aims. But, as Mr. Syed implies, it is not of great concern to the majority of Muslims, who have less esoteric concerns and more basic priorities.
It should have been obvious when suicide bombers or “martyrdom operations” started in the early 1980s against Israeli, U.S., and then other Western targets (and which started out as a Shi’ite weapon before it was later adopted by Sunni Muslim extremists) that it would eventually — and inevitably — be turned against fellow Muslims. Of course, those “fellow Muslims” would be regarded as “heretics” or “apostates” or “collaborators” — so they weren’t really “fellow Muslims.” It’s a problem when theology is turned into ideology.
Finally — just so you don’t forget — my point in posting this article was to bring to my readers’ attention an example of a Muslim naysayer — and not an obscure one — to the violence that is going on in the Muslim world, and the growing realization — as exemplified by the Grand Mufti of Mecca's hajj sermon, that the djinn (genie) must be put back in the bottle before it destroys the Muslim world. There is a great danger when we generalize — that includes what I have written here.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
21-27 January 2010
Terrorism, they say, is the weapon of the weak. But in our case it has become the weapon against the weak. The use of suicide is not something invented by Muslims. It's perhaps as old as homicide. Japan's harakiri comes to mind. But perhaps no people have suffered from it, and because of it, as much as Muslims have in recent years.
So what drives a suicide bomber? And what kind of cause, however noble, makes you kill innocent people peacefully going about their day-to-day business — people who haven't harmed anyone and pose no threat to anyone? And how can these faceless men, whatever their motives, ever think they would be forgiven, let alone rewarded, in the next life for their despicable acts against the defenceless?
Is this what Islam really preaches and stands for? If not — as we all know it doesn't — why aren't our religious scholars, leaders and wise men raising a storm and doing more to stop these mad men bent on tarnishing the image of a noble faith and its billion plus followers?
I have struggled with these questions every time innocent people are killed in a terror attack or suicide bombing. And these questions have been troubling me again since the mind-numbing attacks on a Muharram procession in Karachi and a volleyball match in Pakistan's north last week.
The unparalleled scale of the attack on the Ashura procession in Karachi — Pakistan's financial/commercial capital and political nerve centre — has shaken a country that has long been used to daily mayhem of this kind. Nearly 50 people were killed and 500 injured in the Karachi attack. But more than the loss of lives, it is the devastation wreaked on the country's biggest city that day that will haunt Pakistan for a long time to come.
Thousands of businesses, shops and commercial establishments were destroyed in no time, incurring losses worth billions of dollars. And the attack on the heavily attended volleyball match in the troubled Northwest killed 75 villagers, and left scores maimed.
None of those watching the match or attending the Muharram procession had anything to do with the Western wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan or Iraq. They had no sympathy or affiliation whatsoever with the United States and the West. Then why have they been targeted? More importantly, what have the planners and perpetrators of these devastating attacks against unsuspecting bystanders achieved?
But whoever said there is any higher purpose or noble objective behind all this madness? There's no method in the madness. This is an all-consuming monster that does not distinguish between friends and foes. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed in macabre attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
As regular readers would know, this humble hack has been doing his bit — for what it's worth — to question, critique and confront the big powers have been playing in the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world for centuries, and has gone to great lengths to point out repeatedly why US and Western policies are to blame for much of the mess you see in the Muslim world today, from Palestine to Pakistan.
I have also religiously underscored the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda have been birthed and fuelled by Western double standards and unjust, callous policies in the Muslim world. And that even in the face of increasing threats from extremist groups and evidence of a clear link between cause and effect, the West has tenaciously refused to address, review and change its fundamental policies in the greater Middle East region. But that's another story altogether.
Western actions cannot be an excuse for the kind of extremist violence that is being visited on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Why are innocent people — almost all of them Muslims — being made to pay for Western policies and sins? And how does it help the "cause" of these so-called defenders of Islam when they target innocent Muslims, and non-Muslims for that matter? This death cult is the ultimate injustice and calumny against a faith that celebrates peace, reason, moderation and justice in all spheres. Why, Islam literally means peace!
So what kind of Islam do these lunatics think they believe in when they send young, impressionable 13-year-olds who haven't even experienced what life is to die? The Karachi attack and the terror strike on the volleyball match are only the most recent instances of crimes committed in the name of a great faith. Pakistan's recent history, and that of the Middle East, is replete with such vile and craven crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims — and non-Muslims — have died in this mindless violence targeting bazaars, mosques, schools, hospitals... you name it. True, the self-styled "coalition of the willing" has visited a great deal of horror on Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are not any less injured by nihilists who kill and murder with impunity in our name.
Let's face it: Some of the worst crimes against Muslims have been committed in the name of Islam by people who claim to be our defenders and champions. In fact, they are worse than the West because they pretend to be our friends and allies before they hunt us from within.
If the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our friends, the folks who live in our midst to kill us from within like a cancer are not our friends either. This is the reality Muslims have to confront, and confront it now, before it's too late. And this is the message we have to send across Muslim lands and around the world.
I do not know how many people, especially Muslims, paid attention to this year's hajj sermon. Addressing the white sea of three million pilgrims from around the world in Mecca, and by extension the larger Muslim world, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Sheikh used unusually strong language to draw attention to the issue that has become the bane of the Islamic world.
While Islamic scholars, including those leading prayers at the most sacred mosque on the planet, have been talking about the growing cult of the suicide bomber and warning against extremism, this is the first time anyone has condemned the menace with such force and in such unequivocal terms. Warning Muslims around the world against the extremists, the grand mufti termed the spectre of terror and suicide attacks as "the curse of Muslim lands". He singled out the extremism and the death cult of suicide attacks as the "most serious problem" facing the Muslim community today.
This is the message that has to be taken far and wide with the force and conviction with which it was delivered. This is a matter of life and death, literally. Religious scholars, politicians, intellectuals, the media and ordinary Muslims have to come together, deploying all resources and means at their disposal to free ourselves of this stigma distorting the real, pristine image of Islam before the world.
Too much innocent blood has been spilled and too many innocents have died in the name of our faith. It's time to say enough is enough! Please, not in our name! For God's sake, not in our name!
Aijaz Zaka Syed is opinion editor of Khaleej Times (Dubai, UAE).
Mark says:
The attack in Karachi, Pakistan on an ‘Ashura (Shi’ite holy day) procession was attributed to Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, two of the most extremist Sunni Salafi (fundamentalist) groups in Pakistan. Their attack on Shi'ites was part of the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world — between extremists and those whom they regard as apostates (non-extremists) and between Sunni extremists and those they regard as infidels (Shi'ites). I'm simplifying here, but I could write an article or a book (many have already done so) on these conflicts.
In any case, members of groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi consider Shi'ites to be worse than Christians and even worse than Jews. In fact, some of their ideological rants claim that Shi'ites are either crypto-Jews or allied with Jews in the "World Jewish Conspiracy" to control the world and destroy Islam. The bottom line is that, unlike Aijaz Zaka Syed (who is originally from India), they do not consider Shi’ites to be Muslims and, therefore, they are prime targets.
With all due respect to Mr. Syed, I have to take issue with his assertion that “Islam literally means peace!” It is true that the root of Islam — S-L-M — is also the same root as the word SaLāM, which means peace in Arabic. However, the word Islām — as a word — literally means “submission or resignation or surrender to the will of God” and one who does so is a muSLiM.
The implication that Islām means peace comes from classical Islamic law, which divided the world into dār al-Islām (the house or abode of Islam) and dār al-harb (the house or abode of war). Dār al-Islām was the part of the world that was under Islamic rule or control. It was assumed as a matter of course by the theologians and jurists that, by definition, anyplace that came under Islamic rule or control would be an “abode of peace,” which is how the implication that Islam “literally means peace” developed. Even a cursory survey of Islamic history demonstrates that peace was more often the exception than the rule.
In classical Islamic law, dār al-harb was, by definition, in a state of ignorance and chaos that must be brought under Islamic control to bring peace. It justified the initial Arab conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires which, in another context, were nothing more than imperial and colonialist conquests similar to those that had preceded them (see, e.g., the Greeks and Romans) and which succeeded them (see, e.g., the British and the French). It justified conquests of the Arab Muslim kingdoms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa by the Turks (first the Seljuks and then the Ottomans). It justified the Mughal conquest of much of India. And it justified the wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar Empires.
Discussions about dār al-Islām and dār al-harb are an obsession of the Salafists and those who sympathize with some or many of their aims. But, as Mr. Syed implies, it is not of great concern to the majority of Muslims, who have less esoteric concerns and more basic priorities.
It should have been obvious when suicide bombers or “martyrdom operations” started in the early 1980s against Israeli, U.S., and then other Western targets (and which started out as a Shi’ite weapon before it was later adopted by Sunni Muslim extremists) that it would eventually — and inevitably — be turned against fellow Muslims. Of course, those “fellow Muslims” would be regarded as “heretics” or “apostates” or “collaborators” — so they weren’t really “fellow Muslims.” It’s a problem when theology is turned into ideology.
Finally — just so you don’t forget — my point in posting this article was to bring to my readers’ attention an example of a Muslim naysayer — and not an obscure one — to the violence that is going on in the Muslim world, and the growing realization — as exemplified by the Grand Mufti of Mecca's hajj sermon, that the djinn (genie) must be put back in the bottle before it destroys the Muslim world. There is a great danger when we generalize — that includes what I have written here.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Traitor, Bomber, Soldier, Spy (and my comments)
Stop crying "terrorism" every time we're attacked.
By William Saletan
Slate.com
January 11, 2010
Two weeks ago, a Jordanian suicide bomber blew up seven CIA employees at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The CIA called it a "terrorist attack." So did the Associated Press in a report published in dozens of news outlets. Other journalists, analysts, commentators, and TV news anchors followed suit. In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said of the fallen officers, "When you are fighting terrorists, there will be risks."
Terrorists? No, sir. The bombing of the CIA base, like the November massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was an act of war. It was also espionage. But it wasn't terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians. The CIA officers killed at the Afghan base, like the soldiers shot down at Fort Hood, were not civilians. They were running a war.
According to the U.S. Code (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f), "the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That's the definition we apply to other countries when we designate them as state sponsors of terrorism.
The Sept. 11 attacks, which used planes full of civilians to hit the World Trade Center, fit this definition. So did the attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. So did the Taliban's 2008 bombing of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The Afghan base bombing doesn't fit the pattern. The CIA personnel who died in the attack were combatants. In interviews with multiple newspapers and wire services — for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that the personnel at the Afghan base were closely engaged in selecting drone targets in Pakistan and orchestrating special-operations attacks on the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. In the Afghan theater, the CIA is becoming a paramilitary agency. It runs our drone war in Pakistan, and the Afghan base struck on Dec. 30 is "a targeting center for Predator strikes and other operations inside Pakistan."
That's why the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, targeted the base. Read the accounts of his will and his farewell video. "This is a message to the enemies of the [Islamic nation], to the Jordanian intelligence and the CIA," he says in the video. "We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud." He vows to "retaliate" for the death of Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban boss who was killed in August by a CIA drone strike. In his will, al-Balawi reportedly names other militants blown away by the agency's unmanned aerial vehicles. He wants to kill the drone masters.
And because the officers at the Afghan base were drone masters, they let him in. He was offering them hot intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's deputy leader. They hoped his information would lead them to al-Zawahiri. They were going to do to al-Zawahiri what they'd done to other al-Qaida commanders: wipe him from the face of the earth. If they'd been ordinary intelligence analysts, they never would have whisked al-Balawi into their base for an urgent meeting. They did it, and they died, because they were fighting a war.
Al-Balawi was a jihadist. He wrote nasty, crazy stuff about martyrdom and killing Americans. But those were just words. He was, as one terrorism expert put it, a "cyber-activist." Presumably, that's one reason the CIA took a chance on him: He had never actually tried to kill anybody.
Well, now he has. But his victims weren't civilians. Neither were the victims of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. Read the job titles of the Fort Hood casualties: major, sergeant, captain, specialist, specialist, sergeant, private, private, captain, private, lieutenant, private. Then check out the video of Hasan calmly buying coffee at a 7-Eleven before the shooting. He didn't target civilians. He targeted soldiers.
Within days of the Fort Hood massacre, everybody and his brother was calling Hasan a terrorist. As Slate's Juliet Lapidos noted, even Sen. Joe Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who should know better, said it was terrorism. Lieberman cited evidence "that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act."
Therefore? You mean, anybody who kills anybody in the name of Islamic extremism is a terrorist? If that's all we mean by terrorism, then our enemies are right: It's just a code word for people whose religion we don't like.
This isn't what we meant by terrorism when we went to war against it. But one of war's perils is forgetting your principles. You torture, you lie, you change the meaning of your commitments. You win the war by losing your bearings.
Al-Balawi's father understands what terrorism means. Two days ago, he said of his dead son, "Had he killed innocent civilians I would have denounced him." But his son hadn't done that. He had killed intelligence agents. And the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the father argued, was "a war of intelligence agencies."
He's right about that. In the skies over Pakistan, our agents have the means to incinerate al-Balawi's masters. And I hope they succeed.
But imagine the reverse scenario: an armada of Afghan drones hunting American militia leaders in the United States. Would you retaliate by slaughtering Afghan civilians? Or would you identify the drone masters, infiltrate their intelligence network, and kill them? Does it matter which path you choose?
It certainly does. And if we can't tell the difference anymore — if we need lessons in the meaning of terrorism from the father of a suicide bomber — then it's time to remind ourselves what we're fighting for.
Mark says:
We need to be more careful in how we use language — although I'm not going to hold my breath that that's going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
One way we should take care is to not label or characterize attacks on military targets as "terrorism." And yet...
I know, in some quarters, all enemy targets are "military" targets, "by definition," simply because they are occupied or used by "the enemy." And in other quarters, the enemy, "by definition," are terrorists and everything they do are acts of terrorism.
When combatants hide or position themselves and their equipment among civilian populations while engaging in fighting, is that an act of terrorism? Or are the attacks of their opponents on those combatants hiding among civilians, and which cause civilian casualties, acts of terrorism? It's easy to make judgment calls sitting behind a desk or watching TV but it's much harder when you're in the combat zone and bullets, mortar shells, and RPGs are flying around you.
Although the times and circumstances were different, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was called many things — including infamy and treachery — but never terrorism, because it was an attack against a military target. I don't think anyone is going to go back and relabel it either.
Maj. Nidal Hassan did not commit an act of terrorism — he committed, inter alia, high treason and murder. He will be tried by court martial in a military court and, if found guilty of those charges, he will be subject to the death penalty under military law.
By William Saletan
Slate.com
January 11, 2010
Two weeks ago, a Jordanian suicide bomber blew up seven CIA employees at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The CIA called it a "terrorist attack." So did the Associated Press in a report published in dozens of news outlets. Other journalists, analysts, commentators, and TV news anchors followed suit. In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said of the fallen officers, "When you are fighting terrorists, there will be risks."
Terrorists? No, sir. The bombing of the CIA base, like the November massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was an act of war. It was also espionage. But it wasn't terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians. The CIA officers killed at the Afghan base, like the soldiers shot down at Fort Hood, were not civilians. They were running a war.
According to the U.S. Code (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f), "the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That's the definition we apply to other countries when we designate them as state sponsors of terrorism.
The Sept. 11 attacks, which used planes full of civilians to hit the World Trade Center, fit this definition. So did the attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. So did the Taliban's 2008 bombing of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The Afghan base bombing doesn't fit the pattern. The CIA personnel who died in the attack were combatants. In interviews with multiple newspapers and wire services — for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that the personnel at the Afghan base were closely engaged in selecting drone targets in Pakistan and orchestrating special-operations attacks on the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. In the Afghan theater, the CIA is becoming a paramilitary agency. It runs our drone war in Pakistan, and the Afghan base struck on Dec. 30 is "a targeting center for Predator strikes and other operations inside Pakistan."
That's why the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, targeted the base. Read the accounts of his will and his farewell video. "This is a message to the enemies of the [Islamic nation], to the Jordanian intelligence and the CIA," he says in the video. "We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud." He vows to "retaliate" for the death of Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban boss who was killed in August by a CIA drone strike. In his will, al-Balawi reportedly names other militants blown away by the agency's unmanned aerial vehicles. He wants to kill the drone masters.
And because the officers at the Afghan base were drone masters, they let him in. He was offering them hot intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's deputy leader. They hoped his information would lead them to al-Zawahiri. They were going to do to al-Zawahiri what they'd done to other al-Qaida commanders: wipe him from the face of the earth. If they'd been ordinary intelligence analysts, they never would have whisked al-Balawi into their base for an urgent meeting. They did it, and they died, because they were fighting a war.
Al-Balawi was a jihadist. He wrote nasty, crazy stuff about martyrdom and killing Americans. But those were just words. He was, as one terrorism expert put it, a "cyber-activist." Presumably, that's one reason the CIA took a chance on him: He had never actually tried to kill anybody.
Well, now he has. But his victims weren't civilians. Neither were the victims of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. Read the job titles of the Fort Hood casualties: major, sergeant, captain, specialist, specialist, sergeant, private, private, captain, private, lieutenant, private. Then check out the video of Hasan calmly buying coffee at a 7-Eleven before the shooting. He didn't target civilians. He targeted soldiers.
Within days of the Fort Hood massacre, everybody and his brother was calling Hasan a terrorist. As Slate's Juliet Lapidos noted, even Sen. Joe Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who should know better, said it was terrorism. Lieberman cited evidence "that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act."
Therefore? You mean, anybody who kills anybody in the name of Islamic extremism is a terrorist? If that's all we mean by terrorism, then our enemies are right: It's just a code word for people whose religion we don't like.
This isn't what we meant by terrorism when we went to war against it. But one of war's perils is forgetting your principles. You torture, you lie, you change the meaning of your commitments. You win the war by losing your bearings.
Al-Balawi's father understands what terrorism means. Two days ago, he said of his dead son, "Had he killed innocent civilians I would have denounced him." But his son hadn't done that. He had killed intelligence agents. And the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the father argued, was "a war of intelligence agencies."
He's right about that. In the skies over Pakistan, our agents have the means to incinerate al-Balawi's masters. And I hope they succeed.
But imagine the reverse scenario: an armada of Afghan drones hunting American militia leaders in the United States. Would you retaliate by slaughtering Afghan civilians? Or would you identify the drone masters, infiltrate their intelligence network, and kill them? Does it matter which path you choose?
It certainly does. And if we can't tell the difference anymore — if we need lessons in the meaning of terrorism from the father of a suicide bomber — then it's time to remind ourselves what we're fighting for.
Mark says:
We need to be more careful in how we use language — although I'm not going to hold my breath that that's going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
One way we should take care is to not label or characterize attacks on military targets as "terrorism." And yet...
I know, in some quarters, all enemy targets are "military" targets, "by definition," simply because they are occupied or used by "the enemy." And in other quarters, the enemy, "by definition," are terrorists and everything they do are acts of terrorism.
When combatants hide or position themselves and their equipment among civilian populations while engaging in fighting, is that an act of terrorism? Or are the attacks of their opponents on those combatants hiding among civilians, and which cause civilian casualties, acts of terrorism? It's easy to make judgment calls sitting behind a desk or watching TV but it's much harder when you're in the combat zone and bullets, mortar shells, and RPGs are flying around you.
Although the times and circumstances were different, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was called many things — including infamy and treachery — but never terrorism, because it was an attack against a military target. I don't think anyone is going to go back and relabel it either.
Maj. Nidal Hassan did not commit an act of terrorism — he committed, inter alia, high treason and murder. He will be tried by court martial in a military court and, if found guilty of those charges, he will be subject to the death penalty under military law.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Fort Hood: What the right and the left have gotten wrong about Hasan
The tragic shooting has spawned plenty of hysteria but little discussion about what we should do about potential Islamic terrorists in our midst.
By Jonathan Zimmerman
The Christian Science Monitor
November 6, 2009
New York - Can we talk?
That is, can Americans really communicate? The word means, literally, "To make common." And at times like this, I wonder if it's possible.
I didn't hear about the Fort Hood shootings until several hours after the news broke, but when I did, much of what I heard wasn't true. Some people told me that the suspect, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan was a "convert" to Islam; others, that he had several Muslim accomplices; still others, that he had links to Al Qaeda.
False. False. False.
I got home to find the Internet aflame with vitriol, much of it directed at Islam itself. "Hasan is a BLACK MUSLIM," read a typical blog post. "This was a sleeper Muslim cell terrorist attack ... WITH MORE TO FOLLOW.... Unite AGAINST Islam now people!"
But I also found posts defending Hasan, who was reportedly facing overseas deployment. "They wanted to send him away to kill his own brothers and sisters in Iraq," one post screamed. "I would have done the same thing!"
Finally, others argued that any discussion of Hasan's ethnic or religious background was itself a form of discrimination. "I think giving out the Middle Eastern sounding name of the perpetrator is hate speech," a blogger argued. "No doubt this will give ammunition to patriotic Americans who value national security over diversity."
But that's precisely the discussion that we need to have: how to balance security and diversity, unity and freedom. How can we keep our country safe, but still respect the cultures of its different peoples? How can we join hands as a nation, but remain free as individuals?
And it's the same debate we've been having since 1776, when a Congressional committee suggested e pluribus unum — "out of many, one" — for our new national seal. But this discussion — like any real dialogue — requires agreement on a few basic ground rules: civility, reason, and tolerance.
During wartime, to be sure, Americans have often lost sight of these values. Consider attacks on German-Americans during the World War I, when several states banned the speaking of German in schools and on the streets. Or think of the internment of Japanese-Americans — and the confiscation of their property – during World War II.
The Internet attacks on "Islam" since Thursday's tragedy lie firmly within this tradition of nativism, bigotry, and hysteria. The shooter was Muslim, and what else do you need to know? Apparently, not much.
But irrationality and bad faith are hardly exclusive to the political right. The Fort Hood shootings have also triggered bouts of left-wing hysteria.
An extreme variation takes the form of the old syllogism, "My enemy's enemy is my friend." You don't like the war in Iraq; neither did Hasan; ergo, he must be OK in your book.
Never mind that Hasan gunned down more than three dozen innocents, or that he reportedly defended suicide bombers in Web postings. He's against all the right things, so you're for him.
More commonly, left-wing posters have refused to acknowledge any tension between freedom and security — or any threat to the United States from radical Islam. Hence the bizarre attacks on news organizations for noting Hasan's ethnic and religious background, as if any such information is irrelevant.
It isn't. There are people living here who want to commit acts of terror, and more than a few of them are radical Muslims. And Texas has seen its fair share.
In 1993, Kuwaiti immigrant Eyad Ismoil was living in Dallas when he was recruited to drive a bomb-laden van into a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Five years later, Lebanese-born Wadih el Hage — Osama bin Laden's personal secretary – was arrested in Tarrant County, Texas, for his involvement in the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.
After 9/11, a federal jury convicted five members of a Texas-based Islamic charity of funneling money to terrorists. And just last month, authorities arrested a 19-year-old Jordanian immigrant, Hosam Smadi, for allegedly attempting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.
None of that means that Hassan was part of a terrorist conspiracy, of course, or that we should view every Islamic immigrant with suspicion. But it does mean that we have a serious security problem on our hands. And it's simply irrational to deny it.
Indeed, by wishing the problem away, we put off the discussion that we so urgently need. What should we do about potential Islamic terrorists in our midst? How can we protect national security and individual liberty, all at the same time?
These are tough questions, as old as the republic itself. But we'll never get good answers unless we really talk about them. So far, it's not clear that we can.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."
By Jonathan Zimmerman
The Christian Science Monitor
November 6, 2009
New York - Can we talk?
That is, can Americans really communicate? The word means, literally, "To make common." And at times like this, I wonder if it's possible.
I didn't hear about the Fort Hood shootings until several hours after the news broke, but when I did, much of what I heard wasn't true. Some people told me that the suspect, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan was a "convert" to Islam; others, that he had several Muslim accomplices; still others, that he had links to Al Qaeda.
False. False. False.
I got home to find the Internet aflame with vitriol, much of it directed at Islam itself. "Hasan is a BLACK MUSLIM," read a typical blog post. "This was a sleeper Muslim cell terrorist attack ... WITH MORE TO FOLLOW.... Unite AGAINST Islam now people!"
But I also found posts defending Hasan, who was reportedly facing overseas deployment. "They wanted to send him away to kill his own brothers and sisters in Iraq," one post screamed. "I would have done the same thing!"
Finally, others argued that any discussion of Hasan's ethnic or religious background was itself a form of discrimination. "I think giving out the Middle Eastern sounding name of the perpetrator is hate speech," a blogger argued. "No doubt this will give ammunition to patriotic Americans who value national security over diversity."
But that's precisely the discussion that we need to have: how to balance security and diversity, unity and freedom. How can we keep our country safe, but still respect the cultures of its different peoples? How can we join hands as a nation, but remain free as individuals?
And it's the same debate we've been having since 1776, when a Congressional committee suggested e pluribus unum — "out of many, one" — for our new national seal. But this discussion — like any real dialogue — requires agreement on a few basic ground rules: civility, reason, and tolerance.
During wartime, to be sure, Americans have often lost sight of these values. Consider attacks on German-Americans during the World War I, when several states banned the speaking of German in schools and on the streets. Or think of the internment of Japanese-Americans — and the confiscation of their property – during World War II.
The Internet attacks on "Islam" since Thursday's tragedy lie firmly within this tradition of nativism, bigotry, and hysteria. The shooter was Muslim, and what else do you need to know? Apparently, not much.
But irrationality and bad faith are hardly exclusive to the political right. The Fort Hood shootings have also triggered bouts of left-wing hysteria.
An extreme variation takes the form of the old syllogism, "My enemy's enemy is my friend." You don't like the war in Iraq; neither did Hasan; ergo, he must be OK in your book.
Never mind that Hasan gunned down more than three dozen innocents, or that he reportedly defended suicide bombers in Web postings. He's against all the right things, so you're for him.
More commonly, left-wing posters have refused to acknowledge any tension between freedom and security — or any threat to the United States from radical Islam. Hence the bizarre attacks on news organizations for noting Hasan's ethnic and religious background, as if any such information is irrelevant.
It isn't. There are people living here who want to commit acts of terror, and more than a few of them are radical Muslims. And Texas has seen its fair share.
In 1993, Kuwaiti immigrant Eyad Ismoil was living in Dallas when he was recruited to drive a bomb-laden van into a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Five years later, Lebanese-born Wadih el Hage — Osama bin Laden's personal secretary – was arrested in Tarrant County, Texas, for his involvement in the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.
After 9/11, a federal jury convicted five members of a Texas-based Islamic charity of funneling money to terrorists. And just last month, authorities arrested a 19-year-old Jordanian immigrant, Hosam Smadi, for allegedly attempting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.
None of that means that Hassan was part of a terrorist conspiracy, of course, or that we should view every Islamic immigrant with suspicion. But it does mean that we have a serious security problem on our hands. And it's simply irrational to deny it.
Indeed, by wishing the problem away, we put off the discussion that we so urgently need. What should we do about potential Islamic terrorists in our midst? How can we protect national security and individual liberty, all at the same time?
These are tough questions, as old as the republic itself. But we'll never get good answers unless we really talk about them. So far, it's not clear that we can.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The CIA’s Bureaucracy Problem (and my comments)
By Ishmael Jones
National Review
November 5, 2009
An Italian court recently sentenced 23 CIA employees in absentia for their role in the 2003 Abu Omar rendition.
We should capture terrorists anywhere, any time, but we should get the job done right and with a minimum of bureaucracy. Real spying is inexpensive and requires few people. The basic act of espionage is a single CIA officer meeting a single source — a person with access to secrets on terrorists or nuclear proliferators, for example — in a dingy hotel room in a dysfunctional country.
Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public, however, shows these telltale signs: The operation looks busy, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent. Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. However, risk aversion is a complex concept. The CIA will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. In the Abu Omar operation, 21 Agency employees flew to Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect — as an eminent scholar put it, “21 people to get one fat Egyptian!” — who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. The 21 people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and awful tradecraft. The number of people managing the operation from headquarters was enormous. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIA’s willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that the organization is risk averse by pointing to risky operations that went wrong. This darker, more complex, passive-aggressive aspect of risk aversion seems to say: We can certainly do risky operations, but here’s what happens when you make us get off our couch and do them.
Take a look at any CIA activity that is revealed in the future and ask yourself: Was this a traditional, inexpensive intelligence operation involving a meeting between a CIA officer and a human source to gather intelligence? Or was this an operation designed to spend a lot of money, to make a lot of people look busy, and to give the appearance that the CIA is willing to take risk?
Whenever we see CIA employees released from bureaucracy, we see success. The tactical intelligence production within Iraq is excellent; the early Afghan campaign, featuring no offices and a flat chain of command, just a few guys and bags of money, was extraordinary.
“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.
Mark says:
I post this article for several reasons. First, I highly recommend Jones' book, referenced above. At the very least, it provides insights into the fact that that the CIA is, probably before anything else, another large bureaucratic government agency.
Second, this article illustrates how bureaucratic politics, organizational drivers (rewards and punishments), and risk aversion can be as important, if not more important, than the goals and objectives of the organization, i.e., the CIA. Or, perhaps the stated public goals and objectives of the organization do not necessarily match or coincide with the bureaucratic goals and objectives of the organization?
Third, this article stands as a retort to the conspiracy mongers who think the CIA is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity responsible for everything that happens. Then again, the fact that the article was written by a former CIA agent would just be proof that it's another example of CIA disinformation to confuse and blind the naive public. Right?
National Review
November 5, 2009
An Italian court recently sentenced 23 CIA employees in absentia for their role in the 2003 Abu Omar rendition.
We should capture terrorists anywhere, any time, but we should get the job done right and with a minimum of bureaucracy. Real spying is inexpensive and requires few people. The basic act of espionage is a single CIA officer meeting a single source — a person with access to secrets on terrorists or nuclear proliferators, for example — in a dingy hotel room in a dysfunctional country.
Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public, however, shows these telltale signs: The operation looks busy, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent. Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. However, risk aversion is a complex concept. The CIA will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. In the Abu Omar operation, 21 Agency employees flew to Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect — as an eminent scholar put it, “21 people to get one fat Egyptian!” — who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. The 21 people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and awful tradecraft. The number of people managing the operation from headquarters was enormous. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIA’s willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that the organization is risk averse by pointing to risky operations that went wrong. This darker, more complex, passive-aggressive aspect of risk aversion seems to say: We can certainly do risky operations, but here’s what happens when you make us get off our couch and do them.
Take a look at any CIA activity that is revealed in the future and ask yourself: Was this a traditional, inexpensive intelligence operation involving a meeting between a CIA officer and a human source to gather intelligence? Or was this an operation designed to spend a lot of money, to make a lot of people look busy, and to give the appearance that the CIA is willing to take risk?
Whenever we see CIA employees released from bureaucracy, we see success. The tactical intelligence production within Iraq is excellent; the early Afghan campaign, featuring no offices and a flat chain of command, just a few guys and bags of money, was extraordinary.
“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.
Mark says:
I post this article for several reasons. First, I highly recommend Jones' book, referenced above. At the very least, it provides insights into the fact that that the CIA is, probably before anything else, another large bureaucratic government agency.
Second, this article illustrates how bureaucratic politics, organizational drivers (rewards and punishments), and risk aversion can be as important, if not more important, than the goals and objectives of the organization, i.e., the CIA. Or, perhaps the stated public goals and objectives of the organization do not necessarily match or coincide with the bureaucratic goals and objectives of the organization?
Third, this article stands as a retort to the conspiracy mongers who think the CIA is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity responsible for everything that happens. Then again, the fact that the article was written by a former CIA agent would just be proof that it's another example of CIA disinformation to confuse and blind the naive public. Right?
An Uncomfortable Truth (and my comments)
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times "At War: Notes From the Front Lines" Blog
November 10, 2009
JURM, Afghanistan – I got a lesson on a recent reporting trip in northern Afghanistan in what not to say to a mullah.
I will admit my guard was down. I had been talking to extremely reasonable Afghans at a school in an impossibly beautiful landscape, above a blue river with mountains on all sides. I was not expecting a lecture on jihad and the sins of the West.
But there it was, shot like a rocket from the mouth of Shamsullah, a 36-year-old mullah, who had been trained in a madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan.
He began with the familiar refrain that one of my Iraqi colleagues once famously termed “the answering machine,” because the message of the hard core never varies (with some regional differences). The colonialist West is trying to enslave Islam. Pakistan is an infidel state because its day of rest is Sunday, not Friday. It calls its capital Islamabad, but its courts are not Islamic. All bad.
He asked why I was not able to speak Dari, and then he snidely remarked, “They are all like that.” He meant that colonialists like me always have minions to assist. True, sort of.
“We not only hate Americans,” he said, squinting at the sun, “We hate all foreigners.”
But he made clear his opinion that it was American imperialists who unlawfully controlled Afghanistan and propped up a puppet, President Hamid Karzai.
Fine, but who did he vote for?
“Karzai,” he said with a smile.
But wasn’t he an American puppet?
“He refused to obey the orders of America,” he said, unsure of where this was going.
The real reason, in his own words, is that he, Shamsullah, is loyal to a rich former warlord who is Mr. Karzai’s ally, and he voted exactly how that man told him. He said this with pride.
By now we were driving him home to his village in our S.U.V. Walking would normally take him two hours. We sat in silence for a while. He took the front seat. We were two women in the back, and negotiating seating arrangements would have been tricky.
Suddenly he turned around to face us and said brightly: “If they held the election tomorrow, Hekmatyar would win.”
He was referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Afghan leader who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, a man who is a living lesson for the United States. Once an American ally — the C.I.A. funneled millions of dollars in weapons and aid to him through Pakistan’s intelligence service – he is now on American wanted lists for his support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He is believed to live in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city where Shamsullah lived for two years.
“Do you know who Hekmatyar is?” he asked me, grinning.
I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of answering machines messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.
“He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.,” I said loudly over the hum of the car’s engine.
As I spoke, Shamsullah’s face cracked. His grin vanished. He swung his head away angrily and glared out the window, his body rigid. It was as if his brain had simply rejected the information. But the process had made him very angry.
My colleagues were pinching me. Their eyes were big and alarmed. The C.I.A. is the most despised institution in this part of the world, and everybody knows that you should never utter its acronym to anyone, never mind a militant mullah.
Soon after, we reached his village. I tried to make up for my mistake, but he was not buying it. Somehow the exchange had felt secretly exhilarating. He got out stiffly, thanked us for the ride and walked up the hill away from us. He did not look back or wave. We drove away as fast as we could.
Militant mullahs do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It happens in all faiths. But in recent years the world I have inhabited has been here, and every once in a while I reserve the right to leave the script.
Mark says:
I can understand her frustrations and the feelings that were pent up for so long and the need to respond just once to puncture someone's hypocrisy in such circumstances. I've been in similar situations, though I hasten to qualify that by emphasizing that it was not in Afghanistan and it was not with people who could kidnap or kill me (or at least I didn't think so at the time on a few of those occasions back in my youth).
But I think she was lucky this time to get away with it. It made her feel better, but I'm very sure that his views were not changed one iota. If anything, he will look for an opportunity the next time he may encounter her to get his revenge for her one upmanship.
I might suggest that, rather than challenging him so directly by stating, "He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," she could have phrased it as a question. Then again, maybe not.
The New York Times "At War: Notes From the Front Lines" Blog
November 10, 2009
JURM, Afghanistan – I got a lesson on a recent reporting trip in northern Afghanistan in what not to say to a mullah.
I will admit my guard was down. I had been talking to extremely reasonable Afghans at a school in an impossibly beautiful landscape, above a blue river with mountains on all sides. I was not expecting a lecture on jihad and the sins of the West.
But there it was, shot like a rocket from the mouth of Shamsullah, a 36-year-old mullah, who had been trained in a madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan.
He began with the familiar refrain that one of my Iraqi colleagues once famously termed “the answering machine,” because the message of the hard core never varies (with some regional differences). The colonialist West is trying to enslave Islam. Pakistan is an infidel state because its day of rest is Sunday, not Friday. It calls its capital Islamabad, but its courts are not Islamic. All bad.
He asked why I was not able to speak Dari, and then he snidely remarked, “They are all like that.” He meant that colonialists like me always have minions to assist. True, sort of.
“We not only hate Americans,” he said, squinting at the sun, “We hate all foreigners.”
But he made clear his opinion that it was American imperialists who unlawfully controlled Afghanistan and propped up a puppet, President Hamid Karzai.
Fine, but who did he vote for?
“Karzai,” he said with a smile.
But wasn’t he an American puppet?
“He refused to obey the orders of America,” he said, unsure of where this was going.
The real reason, in his own words, is that he, Shamsullah, is loyal to a rich former warlord who is Mr. Karzai’s ally, and he voted exactly how that man told him. He said this with pride.
By now we were driving him home to his village in our S.U.V. Walking would normally take him two hours. We sat in silence for a while. He took the front seat. We were two women in the back, and negotiating seating arrangements would have been tricky.
Suddenly he turned around to face us and said brightly: “If they held the election tomorrow, Hekmatyar would win.”
He was referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Afghan leader who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, a man who is a living lesson for the United States. Once an American ally — the C.I.A. funneled millions of dollars in weapons and aid to him through Pakistan’s intelligence service – he is now on American wanted lists for his support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He is believed to live in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city where Shamsullah lived for two years.
“Do you know who Hekmatyar is?” he asked me, grinning.
I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of answering machines messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.
“He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.,” I said loudly over the hum of the car’s engine.
As I spoke, Shamsullah’s face cracked. His grin vanished. He swung his head away angrily and glared out the window, his body rigid. It was as if his brain had simply rejected the information. But the process had made him very angry.
My colleagues were pinching me. Their eyes were big and alarmed. The C.I.A. is the most despised institution in this part of the world, and everybody knows that you should never utter its acronym to anyone, never mind a militant mullah.
Soon after, we reached his village. I tried to make up for my mistake, but he was not buying it. Somehow the exchange had felt secretly exhilarating. He got out stiffly, thanked us for the ride and walked up the hill away from us. He did not look back or wave. We drove away as fast as we could.
Militant mullahs do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It happens in all faiths. But in recent years the world I have inhabited has been here, and every once in a while I reserve the right to leave the script.
Mark says:
I can understand her frustrations and the feelings that were pent up for so long and the need to respond just once to puncture someone's hypocrisy in such circumstances. I've been in similar situations, though I hasten to qualify that by emphasizing that it was not in Afghanistan and it was not with people who could kidnap or kill me (or at least I didn't think so at the time on a few of those occasions back in my youth).
But I think she was lucky this time to get away with it. It made her feel better, but I'm very sure that his views were not changed one iota. If anything, he will look for an opportunity the next time he may encounter her to get his revenge for her one upmanship.
I might suggest that, rather than challenging him so directly by stating, "He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," she could have phrased it as a question. Then again, maybe not.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Together for peace
American Arabs and Jews, while deft at attacking each other at times, have proven they can cooperate to build a vision of a better future, writes James Zogby*
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
29 October - 4 November 2009
On Sunday, 25 October, representatives of over three dozen Arab American and American Jewish community organisations met in Washington to make clear their shared commitment to comprehensive Middle East peace. Hosted by J Street, which calls itself the US's "pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby", and the Arab American Institute, "the research and policy arm of the Arab American community", the event was joined by Tina Tchen, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
The message that the leaders and activists who gathered hoped to send, via this summit, was that despite their different starting points, both agree on the goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and are supportive of President Obama's peace making efforts, to date.
This is not the first time Arab Americans and American Jews have joined forces. I personally will never forget how after the September 1993 Rabin-Arafat signing ceremony on the White House lawn, president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore brought together the leaders of both communities urging them to support peacemaking. Despite the euphoria of the moment, joint effort was difficult for some, requiring, as it did, a break with long-established patterns of behaviour.
Organisations in both communities knew how to oppose each other, but learning how to work together was new. However, as we were to discover, if peacemaking was our goal, then learn we must, as for peace to succeed there has to be a constituency that supports peace.
For his part, Gore launched Builders for Peace, a private sector initiative that brought together 150 Arab American and American Jewish business leaders who were given the challenge of working together in an effort to grow the Palestinian economy in support of peace. As Gore would often say, while economic progress was no substitute for peace, without improvement in the daily lives of people it would be impossible to sustain the work of peace.
To lead the effort, Gore asked former Congressman Mel Levine and myself to serve as co-chairs. In some ways we were an odd couple, since before that time we had only come together when we clashed during my testimony before his congressional committee, or when we appeared opposite one another, on Crossfire-style TV shows, debating US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as Mel would note, while he and I might not have agreed on the past, we did agree on where we needed to go in the future. And that was sufficient to build our effort and our working relationship.
Because of a myriad of problems, ranging from Israeli-imposed impediments to economic development and Palestinian problems with corruption, Builders for Peace didn't succeed as we had hoped. But what did work was the experience of joint Arab American and American Jewish cooperation. Friendships were developed that have stood the test of time.
The intervening 16 years have not been kind to peacemaking. Thousands have died. Terrorism and repression have taken a bloody toll. Settlements and new barriers to peace have been erected and Israeli and Palestinian attitudes have been hardened. Extremists on both sides have gained ground while the hopes of many for peace have been dashed.
What hasn't changed, however, is the imperative for peace and the commitment of many to make it real. No doubt, conditions today are more difficult than they were 16 years ago. But we have a new US president who appears committed, despite overwhelming odds, to unravel this knot and find a way forward. He has noted that he is mindful of the fact that advancing towards peace "is important to Arab Americans, important to American Jews, and important to me" and has added that it is "important to the national security interests of the US".
While the prospects for peace, in fact, appear dim, the Arab American and American Jewish leaders who gathered in Washington agreed that it is worth the effort. We are both cognizant of the reality that our commitment to joint action in support of the president and peacemaking is not shared by all in our communities. Given the prevailing mood, there are some on both sides who look with suspicion on such cooperation. Some of us have been called "traitors" or "sell-outs", but such rhetoric misses the point.
Those of us who come together, in fact, remain faithful to the different historical narratives told by our respective communities. But we are not willing to let the story end there. We know that a way forward must be found, in order to reconcile these competing histories and to replace the current reign of terror and oppression with peace and justice. We are unwilling to be condemned by the scourge of the past, but seek a way to create a better future. And we know that in the end, our two communities, the people of the Middle East and our country will be better served by peace than by the continuing conflict.
That is why we came together, and why we will remain together, until, God willing, there is a just and lasting peace.
* The writer is president of the Arab American Institute.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
29 October - 4 November 2009
On Sunday, 25 October, representatives of over three dozen Arab American and American Jewish community organisations met in Washington to make clear their shared commitment to comprehensive Middle East peace. Hosted by J Street, which calls itself the US's "pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby", and the Arab American Institute, "the research and policy arm of the Arab American community", the event was joined by Tina Tchen, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
The message that the leaders and activists who gathered hoped to send, via this summit, was that despite their different starting points, both agree on the goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and are supportive of President Obama's peace making efforts, to date.
This is not the first time Arab Americans and American Jews have joined forces. I personally will never forget how after the September 1993 Rabin-Arafat signing ceremony on the White House lawn, president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore brought together the leaders of both communities urging them to support peacemaking. Despite the euphoria of the moment, joint effort was difficult for some, requiring, as it did, a break with long-established patterns of behaviour.
Organisations in both communities knew how to oppose each other, but learning how to work together was new. However, as we were to discover, if peacemaking was our goal, then learn we must, as for peace to succeed there has to be a constituency that supports peace.
For his part, Gore launched Builders for Peace, a private sector initiative that brought together 150 Arab American and American Jewish business leaders who were given the challenge of working together in an effort to grow the Palestinian economy in support of peace. As Gore would often say, while economic progress was no substitute for peace, without improvement in the daily lives of people it would be impossible to sustain the work of peace.
To lead the effort, Gore asked former Congressman Mel Levine and myself to serve as co-chairs. In some ways we were an odd couple, since before that time we had only come together when we clashed during my testimony before his congressional committee, or when we appeared opposite one another, on Crossfire-style TV shows, debating US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as Mel would note, while he and I might not have agreed on the past, we did agree on where we needed to go in the future. And that was sufficient to build our effort and our working relationship.
Because of a myriad of problems, ranging from Israeli-imposed impediments to economic development and Palestinian problems with corruption, Builders for Peace didn't succeed as we had hoped. But what did work was the experience of joint Arab American and American Jewish cooperation. Friendships were developed that have stood the test of time.
The intervening 16 years have not been kind to peacemaking. Thousands have died. Terrorism and repression have taken a bloody toll. Settlements and new barriers to peace have been erected and Israeli and Palestinian attitudes have been hardened. Extremists on both sides have gained ground while the hopes of many for peace have been dashed.
What hasn't changed, however, is the imperative for peace and the commitment of many to make it real. No doubt, conditions today are more difficult than they were 16 years ago. But we have a new US president who appears committed, despite overwhelming odds, to unravel this knot and find a way forward. He has noted that he is mindful of the fact that advancing towards peace "is important to Arab Americans, important to American Jews, and important to me" and has added that it is "important to the national security interests of the US".
While the prospects for peace, in fact, appear dim, the Arab American and American Jewish leaders who gathered in Washington agreed that it is worth the effort. We are both cognizant of the reality that our commitment to joint action in support of the president and peacemaking is not shared by all in our communities. Given the prevailing mood, there are some on both sides who look with suspicion on such cooperation. Some of us have been called "traitors" or "sell-outs", but such rhetoric misses the point.
Those of us who come together, in fact, remain faithful to the different historical narratives told by our respective communities. But we are not willing to let the story end there. We know that a way forward must be found, in order to reconcile these competing histories and to replace the current reign of terror and oppression with peace and justice. We are unwilling to be condemned by the scourge of the past, but seek a way to create a better future. And we know that in the end, our two communities, the people of the Middle East and our country will be better served by peace than by the continuing conflict.
That is why we came together, and why we will remain together, until, God willing, there is a just and lasting peace.
* The writer is president of the Arab American Institute.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters
Interview by Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
November 3, 2009
Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.
I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:
Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?
Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.
JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?
HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable — but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.
JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.
HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.
JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?
HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.
Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.
JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.
HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.
JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts…
HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.
There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.
The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this. The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.
JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don't have a South Africa equation here.
JG: But they believe they do.
HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don't, certainly I don't think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.
JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It's very hard to picture.
HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn't understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there's another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.
JG: Right, Intel and Google…
HI: I'm talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don't understand any of this. And if you don't understand any of this, then you're living in a fantasy world. So here's the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places blame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the "temporary racist usurping entity." These are the ones, by the way, who won't talk about my book. There's a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I've nicknamed my book "the temporary racist usurping book."
These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You're talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn't recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that's emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states — Jordan and Egypt — that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it's a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they've missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and now Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations — all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.
JG: You've reached the Promised Land.
HI: Except that we haven't achieved the results.
JG: Yes, there's that. But you're on the road.
HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, 'Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it's not desirable, it's not acceptable, it's not enough, we want it all.'
JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?
HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.
JG: And you think they're succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it's very hard to separate out the dreams from…
HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It's an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don't agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, "Well if we're steadfast and we don't agree, then Israel will be reversed." Then it was, "Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories." Now the latest version is if we're just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.
JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.
HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it's useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won't be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here's the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It's possible we could get there, but it won't be a solution, it will be an outcome. There's a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don't think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state.
JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.
HI: Yes, it's obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we've had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it's going to go. We know the way it's going to go.
JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.
HI: And more religious. You'll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It's a nightmare.
JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we'll be like Belgium, where we don't have to really like each other but we'll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don't seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.
HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum — and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it's not; it's Palestinians preparing for independence.
Now with regard to Hamas, I definitely don't think it would be wise for the West to open up dialogue with Hamas under the present circumstances. I think that would simply reward them and it would benefit them in their competition with the PLO and there's a stark choice that Palestinians are facing between two strategies: an Islamist violent strategy and a secular nationalist negotiation strategy. I think it's very important to bolster the second and to make the first appear what it actually is: Non-functional.
The Atlantic
November 3, 2009
Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.
I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:
Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?
Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.
JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?
HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable — but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.
JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.
HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.
JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?
HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.
Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.
JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.
HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.
JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts…
HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.
There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.
The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this. The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.
JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don't have a South Africa equation here.
JG: But they believe they do.
HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don't, certainly I don't think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.
JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It's very hard to picture.
HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn't understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there's another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.
JG: Right, Intel and Google…
HI: I'm talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don't understand any of this. And if you don't understand any of this, then you're living in a fantasy world. So here's the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places blame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the "temporary racist usurping entity." These are the ones, by the way, who won't talk about my book. There's a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I've nicknamed my book "the temporary racist usurping book."
These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You're talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn't recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that's emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states — Jordan and Egypt — that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it's a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they've missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and now Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations — all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.
JG: You've reached the Promised Land.
HI: Except that we haven't achieved the results.
JG: Yes, there's that. But you're on the road.
HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, 'Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it's not desirable, it's not acceptable, it's not enough, we want it all.'
JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?
HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.
JG: And you think they're succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it's very hard to separate out the dreams from…
HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It's an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don't agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, "Well if we're steadfast and we don't agree, then Israel will be reversed." Then it was, "Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories." Now the latest version is if we're just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.
JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.
HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it's useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won't be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here's the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It's possible we could get there, but it won't be a solution, it will be an outcome. There's a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don't think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state.
JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.
HI: Yes, it's obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we've had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it's going to go. We know the way it's going to go.
JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.
HI: And more religious. You'll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It's a nightmare.
JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we'll be like Belgium, where we don't have to really like each other but we'll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don't seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.
HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum — and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it's not; it's Palestinians preparing for independence.
Now with regard to Hamas, I definitely don't think it would be wise for the West to open up dialogue with Hamas under the present circumstances. I think that would simply reward them and it would benefit them in their competition with the PLO and there's a stark choice that Palestinians are facing between two strategies: an Islamist violent strategy and a secular nationalist negotiation strategy. I think it's very important to bolster the second and to make the first appear what it actually is: Non-functional.
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