Sharia law may result in 'legal apartheid'
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:40pm GMT 10/02/2008
Senior religious leaders attack multiculturalism and sharia law today, warning that they are "disastrous", socially divisive and are destroying Britain's culture and values.
Leader: A defender of the faith needs better judgment
Lord Carey: Are we promoting harmony or Muslim ghettos?
Interview with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Lord Carey and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor rebut the call of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for Islamic law to be recognised in Britain.
Watch: Religious leaders criticise Dr Williams
Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said: "His acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation. He has overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes.
"His conclusion that Britain will eventually have to concede some place in law for aspects of sharia is a view I cannot share.
"There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights."
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that the Government's promotion of multiculturalism had destroyed the unity that used to hold society together. Immigrants must "obey the laws of this country".
advertisementWriting in this newspaper, Lord Carey condemns multiculturalism as "disastrous", blames it for creating Islamic ghettos and says that Dr Williams's support for sharia law will "inevitably lead to further demands from the Muslim community".
He suggests that such a move could embolden some Muslims to try to turn Britain into a country ruled by Islamic law which, he says, contradicts principles of human rights and allows the persecution of Christians.
Their comments will come as a blow to the embattled archbishop, who is experiencing the darkest days of his six years as leader of the Anglican Church, following his claim that the adoption of certain aspects of sharia law is "unavoidable".
It also marks a deepening of the rift between Dr Williams and leading church figures over his support for Islamic law. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said that it would be "simply impossible" to have two different legal systems.
Dr Williams sought to defend his comments yesterday, but is fighting to survive calls from politicians and members of his church demanding his resignation. The vast majority of the Church's ruling body believe he was wrong, a Sunday Telegraph poll shows.
Your View: Is Sharia law in Britain unavoidable?
Sharia in Britain: Unease in Oxford
Matthew d'Ancona: Britain must reject craven counsel of despair
The survey of the General Synod found that only three per cent agreed that aspects of Islamic law should be adopted. Four per cent said he should resign, but two thirds rejected claims that he had lost credibility. A number of bishops have spoken out against the attacks on the archbishop, but a far greater number, including the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, have chosen to distance themselves from the issue.
Dr Williams argued that Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty". However, Lord Carey says the potential damage of Dr Williams's idea of incorporating sharia courts into civil law "does not bear thinking about". He says that it would be dangerous and would encourage some Muslims to try to turn Britain into an Islamic state.
The former archbishop says that accommodating sharia law would lead to further demands. "This is absolutely inevitable, since questions to do with the separation of ‘church and state' are largely new to Islam. Sharia law trumps civil law every time."
He adds: "Many Muslim interpreters of sharia believe that it supersedes secular law and assume that its ‘God-given' status would lead to the point of eventually replacing civil law."
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor doesn't
agree with accomodating sharia law
According to Lord Carey, sharia law disadvantages women and minorities, contradicts principles of human rights and has led to the persecution of Christians in countries such as Nigeria, where churches have been burned down.
Dr Williams's endorsement of "a legal marketplace in which people opt in and out based on religious affiliation opens the door to a parallel system of justice", he writes. "The question which must be asked is whether the separate systems promote harmony or continue the creation of ghettos for Muslim communities — the result of disastrous policies of multiculturalism."
The archbishop had argued that the introduction of parts of Islamic law would help improve social cohesion, but Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor joined Lord Carey in attacking this idea and urged Muslims to do more to integrate.
"The extent to which multiculturalism has been encouraged recently has meant a lessening of the kind of unity that a country needs," he told this newspaper. "There are common values which are part of the heritage of this country which should be embraced by everybody.
"I don't believe in a multi-cultural society. When people come into this country they have to obey the laws of the land." He says that sharia law clashes with British culture and stresses that the Government must act to stop the acceptance of foreign practices. Last week, this newspaper revealed that men with multiple wives had been given the go-ahead by ministers to claim extra welfare benefits.
"The laws of this country don't allow forced marriages or polygamy," Lord Carey writes. "A government and a country has a right to make sure those laws are kept."
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion, said that setting up rival systems of law would alienate sections of society and may lead to legal apartheid.
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Amputation in islam, the religion of piece
Iran envoy defends amputation
By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Last Updated: 1:14am GMT 10/02/2008
Iran's ambassador to Spain has compared chopping off the hands of thieves to a "surgeon amputating a limb to prevent the spread of gangrene".
In a defence of Iran's tough implementation of Islamic law, Seyed Davoud Salehi called for "the traditions,
religion and economic development" of Iran to be taken into account by those monitoring human rights in the country. He also argued that the death penalty was necessary "to preserve the health of society as a whole".
advertisementMr Salehi said during a speech in Madrid that the highest court in Iran had decided to limit public executions to prevent images of hangings and stonings in public squares being broadcast around the world and used as propaganda against the regime.
"Our laws allow for the amputation of the hand that steals. This is not accepted by the West, but the field of human rights should take into account the customs, traditions, religion and economic development," he said in comments reported by the newspaper El Mundo.
"Some laws are needed to preserve the health of society, if not, it would be in danger."
Iran has the second highest number of recorded executions in the world after China, according to Amnesty International.
More than 300 people were condemned to death last year, an increase of more than 70 per cent on 2006.
So far this year 20 public executions have taken place and the hands or feet of at least five offenders have been amputated.
The ambassador criticised claims that Iran had a poor record in human rights and attributed it to "the arrogance of the West", which used the argument to harm the image of the country.
OMG
« Clearly A Case of Self-Defense — The German “Rathergate” »
Scare Tactics
In the Name of Tolerance is the (very non-sarcastic) header of an article at n-tv.de from last Sunday.
Guest contribute by the Editrix
“We will have to actively support that Muslims can live their faith here.” Because fundamentalism will find a breeding ground where people are made to think that they and their beliefs are not getting the necessary recognition.The Lutheran churches are clearly speaking out against any scare tactics against Islam and are outspoken supporters of the building of new mosques in Germany. The Protestant church must not become a tool of those who want to stoke fears of Muslims says the head of the bishops of the Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands (VELKD), the Landesbischof of Munich Johannes Friedrich at the VELKD General Synod [the inter-church “parliament”] in Goslar (Lower Saxony).
Well, as far as “scare tactics” are concerned, they have clearly worked on the good bishop because he is unable to see what is so obvious, namely that the most mollycoddled faith is reacting to that very mollycoddling with increasing violence whereas Christians, who have all reasons for complaining that “they and their beliefs are not getting the necessary recognition” are reacting with increasing timidity and signals of submission, which, in turn, leads to increasing violence by the followers of the “Religion of Peace” and I suppose you’ve got to be a Lutheran bishop or scared out of your wits or both not to realize that you’ve just jumped on a train on a direct line to hell.
Posted: October 25, 2007
Jihad in USA
PIG GOES TO WAR! | JIHAD: AMERICAN STYLE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recently, a PIGster wrote to tell us that we need to take the fight to America's Jihadikaze enemies with our own, American Jihad. As usual, that slammed our PIGish imaginations into high gear and this rant is one result. PIG decided that an American Jihadikaze is a patriotic defender of individual liberty who knows that the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is defined in our own Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness..." The sacred mission of American Jihadikazes is to beat the violence prone Jihadikaze pinheads over the head with our inalienable individual liberty until they slink off into their caves or their heads explode.
Before we can discuss what the American Jihad will do, we need to point out the differences between the standard issue Jihadikaze wingnut and our patriotic American Jihadikazes. Here are some important distinctions on certain essential points:
For Islamists, all knowledge starts with their holy book as explained in scholarly tomes written by learned individuals who made this task their life's work. American Jihadikazes don't have time for all that crap, so they cut to the chase. When an American Jihadikaze needs something explained they seek out Ziggy "Brainiac" Kowalski. What makes Ziggy number one with a bullet on our experts list? Ziggy is the only dude we know who can explain baseball's infield fly rule without putting us to sleep or making us want to shoot him.
When Islamikazes need some guidance, or some well chosen words to help them cope with one of objective reality's ubiquitous speed bumps, they, invariably seek out the wisdom of a mullah or cleric. Throw one of life's curveballs at an American Jihadikaze and they'll respond with the towering wisdom of Homer J. Simpson. Eloquence personified, Homer's two signature words arm us with an appropriate response for any occasion. If it's something good "Mmm" says it all. If it's bad "D'oh" gets the job done.
ALL-AMERICAN BURKA
Eat Your Heart Out,
Abdul
When it comes to women, Islamikaze males have so little control over their sexual impulses, they coerce women into wearing a head-to-toe moo-moo rig that makes it impossible to identify them as human, let alone female. American Jihadikazes know what they like to see and what they don't want to see. The two A.J. "Burkas" are constructed around this healthy regard for our vision. The orthodox A.J. burka is ideal for Natalie "Warthog" Maines or Rosie O'Donnell. To the untrained observer it looks suspiciously like a plain vanilla paper bag, but an expert can tell the difference. The regulation A.J. burka is the goodie the hottie is wearing, the gem that has all those dudely tongues hanging out.
Boldly going where Islamists are too gutless to go, American Jihadikazes also have a special male burka for certain alleged males like Michael Moore. You might call this outfit a straightjacket and a muzzle but we call it an idea whose time has come. If you picture Hannibal Lecter strapped to that stretcher in 'Silence of the Lambs', you get the big picture.
An aspiring Islamikaze like Little Abdul will probably get his first copy of the Koran, plus a tyke-class RPG for his birthday. On the other hand, future American Jihadikaze Billy-Bob will get an NRA membership and a 'can't we all get along' electronic game with a fuzz ball title like "Road Kill Rampage". While Little Abdul is busy learning verses from the Koran, Billy-Bob will be memorizing the Playmate of the Month's vital statistics. Billy-Bob is, all things considered, prime American Jihadikaze material.
Taking advantage of the rampant sexual repression that's the hallmark of Islamist cultures, the Islamikaze string pullers offer the eager young men an e-ticket to heaven where they get 72 virgins. Once again, American Jihadikazes are taken to a much higher, cultural plain. Instead of the booty that any American Jihad candidate can score on their own, the American Jihadikaze recruit is offered a free cell phone (teenage heaven) that comes with 72, prepaid, unrestricted VIRGIN hours to break in.
Islamikazes have absolutely no emotional control whatsoever. Almost anything can send these tantrum junkies on a street rampage. American Jihadikazes are a different breed entirely. The last verified A.J. street rampage happened when some pinhead at an American television network, switched from the critical moment in an (American style) football game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders to show a special presentation of "Heidi".
By now, you must be so eager to join this American Jihad your friends, neighbors and family are frantically searching for the phone number of the local stun gun shop. Tell them to take a chill pill, but don't mention PIG or they'll speed dial the local swat team. All kidding aside, there are some things you can do to thrill the towels off the heads of those pointy Islamikaze noggins. The first, and most important, task is to get on the damn phone the instant one of these lying rat bastards from CAIR pollutes the public airwaves - especially if it's a boom box show. Don't let them get away with their smoke and mirrors defense of Jihadikaze bovine excrement. Speak up whenever you read, see or hear someone spouting this Jihadikaze drivel. The unvarnished facts are the biggest weapon in your arsenal. Never forget that inalienable individual liberty is your ultimate weapon against Jihadikaze tyranny.
PIG's American Jihad is about the triumph of reason over irrationality. It's about ideas like liberty and free speech vs superstition. It's about ration adults who exercise self-control vs violence prone, tantrum-throwing morons who haven't got a single functioning synapse. Arm yourself with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Paine and other voices of reason then go forth to defend your nation against the Jihadikaze plague that seeks to destroy the very foundations of American liberty. Don't just sit there, get your butt in gear, American Jihadikaze Sparky.
Mousslimes are counting on converts
So the German public and media are “shocked” at the arrest of suspected Islamists who are said to have planned bomb attacks of yet unknown viciousness in this country.
Guest contribute by the Editrix
Reports that two of the three suspects held were German-born converts prompt soul-searching. Some commentators question whether integration problems can really be seen as a root cause of Islamist militancy.
Our dreaded, oh-so-right-wing minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, put it like that, I suppose he couldn’t help himself: “This shows that it’s not a matter of passport. Even religion is not crucial here, even though at the moment int’s mainly Islam, which is dangerous. Religions as such are peaceful, to begin with.”
As long as our leading politicians are spouting such euphemisms, terror will win. Violence is an integrated part of the political ideology that goes by the name “Islam”, one look at a serious translation would tell the apologists that, but they are either too dumb or too scared to acknowledge that.
In the same spirit, albeit presumably for different reasons, one Deniz Yücel writes in the leftist taz :
The fact that two of the bomb-makers are German converts makes it clear that Islamist terrorism is only partially linked to the integration of immigrants. Thus, the ubiquitous mingling of the two issues is not helping to the debate because jihadism is not some folklore imported by immigrants from Anatolia or the Atlas mountains. Those who decide to follow international jihad don’t do that because they don’t speak German very well or didn’t get an apprenticeship. Instead we are, in fact, dealing with a modern political phenomenon that cannot be understood by looking for bloodthirsty or Jew-hating bits in the Koran.
Yes and no. Of course Muslims don’t become terrorists because they don’t speak German very well or didn’t get an apprenticeship. It’s precisely the other way round. Djihad is a very time-consuming effort and a job or learning German would be clearly interfering with it (and what the heck, the German welfare-state is looking after their worldly needs anyway). And of course ONLY the bloodthirsty or Jew-hating bits in the Koran can help understanding those converts, as Yücsel ought to know. And their Muslim-born brethren, for that. And Yücel closes:
By the way, the success of the investigating authorities shows that the present law is obviously sufficient to prevent horrible attacks.
Obviously. And it is obviously sufficient to be a Muslim to acquire a licence from the main stream media to feed one’s Islamism light to an unsuspecting and only too willing German public.
Guest contribute by the Editrix
Reports that two of the three suspects held were German-born converts prompt soul-searching. Some commentators question whether integration problems can really be seen as a root cause of Islamist militancy.
Our dreaded, oh-so-right-wing minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, put it like that, I suppose he couldn’t help himself: “This shows that it’s not a matter of passport. Even religion is not crucial here, even though at the moment int’s mainly Islam, which is dangerous. Religions as such are peaceful, to begin with.”
As long as our leading politicians are spouting such euphemisms, terror will win. Violence is an integrated part of the political ideology that goes by the name “Islam”, one look at a serious translation would tell the apologists that, but they are either too dumb or too scared to acknowledge that.
In the same spirit, albeit presumably for different reasons, one Deniz Yücel writes in the leftist taz :
The fact that two of the bomb-makers are German converts makes it clear that Islamist terrorism is only partially linked to the integration of immigrants. Thus, the ubiquitous mingling of the two issues is not helping to the debate because jihadism is not some folklore imported by immigrants from Anatolia or the Atlas mountains. Those who decide to follow international jihad don’t do that because they don’t speak German very well or didn’t get an apprenticeship. Instead we are, in fact, dealing with a modern political phenomenon that cannot be understood by looking for bloodthirsty or Jew-hating bits in the Koran.
Yes and no. Of course Muslims don’t become terrorists because they don’t speak German very well or didn’t get an apprenticeship. It’s precisely the other way round. Djihad is a very time-consuming effort and a job or learning German would be clearly interfering with it (and what the heck, the German welfare-state is looking after their worldly needs anyway). And of course ONLY the bloodthirsty or Jew-hating bits in the Koran can help understanding those converts, as Yücsel ought to know. And their Muslim-born brethren, for that. And Yücel closes:
By the way, the success of the investigating authorities shows that the present law is obviously sufficient to prevent horrible attacks.
Obviously. And it is obviously sufficient to be a Muslim to acquire a licence from the main stream media to feed one’s Islamism light to an unsuspecting and only too willing German public.
Stefan Herre about the islamization of Germany
First of all, how many Muslims live in Germany? We don’t really know. The federal government says 3.1 to 3.4 million. This would mean about 4 percent of the total population. Similar estimates have been that until summer 2006 there were some 8 million people of immigrant background in Germany, of whom about 40% were Muslims. Yet the government admits that its figure is only an estimate, not based on verified statistics. Some observers, such as the Mideast expert Hans-Peter Raddatz, believe that the number is much higher.
A survey of the federal statistics authority in 2005, published June 2006, nearly doubled the 8 million number, to 15.3 million. The survey did not included religious affiliation. Thus the estimated absolute number of Muslims stayed the same. This implied halving the estimated percentage from 40 percent to 20 percent. This seems unrealistic, as immigration of Muslims never was lower than 40%, and their birthrate surely isn’t lower than that of non-Muslim immigrants. Therefore, Raddatz uses the 40 percent to estimate an absolute number of about 6 million Muslims in Germany. Yet even this number, although based on logic, is also unverified. The only thing we definitely know about the number of Muslims in Germany is that we don’t know it. Given the federal surveys lack of interest in the number of immigrant Muslims, analysis of the costs of Muslim immigration is very difficult.
How did this happen? In the 1950s the Federal Republic of Germany started to hire foreign workers, the so called Gastarbeiter or guest workers. First they came from Southern European countries such as Italy. From the early 1960s on this recruitment was expanded to Muslim countries, especially Turkey, and also to North African countries. Turkey faced a rapidly growing, poorly educated rural class, whom the Government there wanted to export. The majority of Turkish guest workers immigrated at a time when there was no more labour shortage in Germany. In fact, unemployment slowly increased.
Nevertheless, there is a growing myth circulating that Turks built up post-war Germany, but most Turks only came became Germany’s economy was already booming. The myths even imply that Turks brought development and culture to our country; for example, water toilets. Perhaps there is some classical Islamic mythologizing here, involving disdain for pre-or non-Islamic cultures or their technological achievements, and even to deny their very existence.
As the result of a massive German family reunion program — frequently directed into the German welfare system — a large Turkish community was rapidly established. In contrast to immigrants from Europe, its members withdrew into insular, parallel societies, especially in the big cities.
Additionally, there were refugees from troubled areas. While Turks make up the large majority of Muslims in Germany, substantial groups include Palestinians, often from Lebanon, and Muslims from former Yugoslavia. In summer 2006, the Federal Government announced, that some 3.000 German citizens with a Lebanese background were to be evacuated from Lebanon. The German embassy in Beirut only knew about 1.000 German citizens. Finally we accepted 6.000 refugees from Lebanon. The Government didn’t want to be too particular about passport controls for humanitarian reasons. How many of them were Hezbollah members, of course, is unknown. Once again, we find that official estimates about how many Muslims are in our country, to say nothing of important details, cannot be relied upon.
The problems caused by Muslim immigrants in Germany are the same as elsewhere. Perhaps at least in the beginning they might have been milder, as immigrants from Turkey had experience in a secular political system, compared to immigrants from more traditional Islamic countries. On the other hand kemalistic Turks cling to a very distinct nationalism, so that it is frequently difficult to separate nationalist Turkish demands from Islamic ones.
A few months ago the German parliament passed a new immigration law. It was not at all effective, but it least implied that people immigrating on behalf of family reunion laws — which mostly means young imported wives — have to be at least 18 years old and to know some 200 words of German. Not only Turkish and Islamic organizations in Germany protested and urged the Federal President, not to sign the law, but even Ankara tried to intervene.
In Germany there are currently 159 mosques, identifiable with cupola and minaret, 184 are being built. Additionally, there are some 2.600 less official-looking Muslim prayer houses. Many of them were or are being built by DITIB, a subsidiary organization of the Turkish government authority for religion, Diyanet. Diayenet also sends imams, who most often don’t speak German and are replaced on a regular basis. Thus Islamization in Germany is not only a question of an ideology but consists increasingly of an intervention of a foreign State — Turkey — in national sovereignty. During the world soccer championship in 2006, Germany’s biggest tabloid, BILD, published photos of young migrants waving a German flag with a Turkish white crescent in its red part. This was not criticized but praised as an example of successful integration. As in other countries, our media praises multiculturalism, whitewashes Islamist excesses, and demonizes critics of Islam as racists or at least blockheads.
Things used to be better. The first generation Muslim immigrants were more integrated than today’s third generation. Today, many Muslim children don’t speak any German when they start school. Immigrant youth often speak a strikingly rudimentary, grammatically simplified and generally incorrect German language, one that has even caught the attention of linguists. Poorly educated native German youths in Muslim quarters increasingly adopt this language maybe to avoid being seen as outsiders. Speaking such a language of course minimizes their chance for work.
Early in 2006 teachers of the Berlin Rütli school wrote a desperate open letter to the school authority, admitting that they had given up hope to cope with the increasing violence, especially by Arab youths, of whom even the slightly less violent Turkish youths are afraid, let alone German and other non-Islamic kids. They also complained that the migrants don’t show any interest in studying or attending school at all, and that parents just don’t care or even insult teachers. Especially female teachers were afraid of their students and didn’t enter classroom without a cellphone, in order to be able to call for help. This caused some public debate for a while, yet proposals tended to blame society alone for the problem. The “solution†then was hire Islamic social workers in schools, since infidel social workers would not be respected by Muslim kids. Another “solution†was to improve cooperation with imams.
Meanwhile, the police force in Germany’s biggest state, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is proceeding to reserve jobs for Muslims, whom they recruit in mosques. The establishment of exclusive Muslim police units is also debated, for better cooperation between the police and Muslim communities. When we define as an unreasonable demand that Muslims accept infidel police officers, we are starting to separate society into Islamic and non-Islamic enclaves.
But I think these are things that all of you know in your own countries. Therefore, I want to go into a subject which we thought was a German problem only, yet now seems more widespread, if not of equal intensity. This is the tactic of the promoters and defenders of Islamization, to conflate, what we might call, to deliberately mix up, critics of Islam and Nazis. You all surely know the accusations such as “racism,†“fascism, or “Nazism†usually are hurled at people who criticize Islam or even question the Islamization of Europe or the Eurabia concept. This is done by politicians, the media, clerics, academia and ordinary people, as well.
As Nazism is our own past, this is perhaps worse in Germany than elsewhere and surely it is more hurtful and intimidating. Sometimes this hysteria to see Nazis anywhere — except where their modern counterparts really are – is just grotesque. But for many people — critics of Islams not excluded — this doesn’t come only from outside but from inside as well, as it is rooted in modern Germans: a mixture of guilt, shame and a fear that one might possibly mutate into a Nazi without noticing it. This undermines the unity of the critics of Islam, causing us to distance ourselves from other people or groups, sometimes perhaps with good reason, yet probably most often, without.
Prospects, that a political party critical of Islamization and mass immigration of Muslims can be established in Germany or that the big conservative party, Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats, could develop in this direction, are poor. This is in part due to our national socialist past and the resulting fear of anything that could be considered xenophobic or nationalist or not sufficiently tolerant. It might as well result from a relatively widespread favorable opinion concerning the European Union. It also is conceivable that German fears of and dislike for any kind of nationalism influences the European Union.
In any case, there are some real neo-Nazis. There is a tiny political party, whose agenda is revisionist and decisively anti-Israeli and anti-American and therefore pro- Ahmadinejad. Yet it is opposed to immigration (not only Muslim) and Mosque-building. The leaders of this party would perhaps like to cooperate with Islamist organizations, and partly do so, but their ordinary members oppose it. Working with this party is out of the question for any reasonable and decent person. Its numbers and impact are both negligible, but the public is sensitive to its existence. Any of their positions which overlap with others undermines the others to the public.
The “Nazi†smears come partly from cynics who seek to silence any critic of their multicultural and pro-Islamic dogma, as well as from some who are sincere about it. Therefore, it makes sense to speak the truth, especially about the historical connections between Nazism and some Islamic authorities, as well as about their ideological similarity and compatibility, especially those concerning the hostility towards Israel and America - or put another way, Jews and devout Christians.
There are some 100.000 Jews living in Germany, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union and they are increasingly harassed, especially in public schools. This is horrific, appalling and sad. The harassments originate mainly from Islamic immigrants, but to be honest not only from them. Unfortunately, there is still some original anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism found within the native German population, though most often it is not open aggressive but rather, latent. People really do not want to be Nazis, but unfortunately many have strange ideas about what a Nazi is really like. Information about these dark times, as told by leftists, is especially peculiar. It masks the socialist parts, overestimating the conservative parts, and treats anti-Semitism simply as some kind of xenophobia where Jews just were random victims as they were available, and could easily be replaced today by any other group — such as Muslims. Those Muslims who do not deny the Holocaust — and most Turkish Muslims don’t – find this an easy-to-accept version of history. I think it is essential to never take for granted that the truth needs continuing affirmation. My co-authors and I on Politically Incorrect do so, regularly.
Many people feel a diffuse aversion towards some aspects of Islam, like the oppression of Muslim women, high crime rates, and dependence on welfare because of deliberate lack of education. There are a few prominent figures who speak out against Islamization, but none of them is a politician. There is former Federal President Roman Herzog, a former constitutional judge, who sharply criticized the antidemocratic European Union, but he was widely ignored. Most Germans support the European Union as a garantor of peace in Europe, and perhaps as a way to give up an embarrassing nationality, trading changing German for European. There is hardly any knowledge among Germans about its antidemocratic and Eurabian aspects, so they tend to consider information about it as some odd conspiracy theory. To sum it up, there is only very little resistance against Islamization in Germany.
Therefore, the work that all of you doing to speak the truth is crucial to saving our societies. So, I want to take this opportunity to thank Ms Bat Ye’Or for her precious and great work on the subject. Unfortunately her important book Eurabia is still not available in German. I want to thank all the authors attending the conference for providing us with priceless information and knowledge, which is really helpful to Politically Incorrect and our efforts to inform honestly and to constitute some kind of counterbalance to the biased media.
(Speech at the CounterJihad Brussels 2007 Conference, October 18 - 19)
A survey of the federal statistics authority in 2005, published June 2006, nearly doubled the 8 million number, to 15.3 million. The survey did not included religious affiliation. Thus the estimated absolute number of Muslims stayed the same. This implied halving the estimated percentage from 40 percent to 20 percent. This seems unrealistic, as immigration of Muslims never was lower than 40%, and their birthrate surely isn’t lower than that of non-Muslim immigrants. Therefore, Raddatz uses the 40 percent to estimate an absolute number of about 6 million Muslims in Germany. Yet even this number, although based on logic, is also unverified. The only thing we definitely know about the number of Muslims in Germany is that we don’t know it. Given the federal surveys lack of interest in the number of immigrant Muslims, analysis of the costs of Muslim immigration is very difficult.
How did this happen? In the 1950s the Federal Republic of Germany started to hire foreign workers, the so called Gastarbeiter or guest workers. First they came from Southern European countries such as Italy. From the early 1960s on this recruitment was expanded to Muslim countries, especially Turkey, and also to North African countries. Turkey faced a rapidly growing, poorly educated rural class, whom the Government there wanted to export. The majority of Turkish guest workers immigrated at a time when there was no more labour shortage in Germany. In fact, unemployment slowly increased.
Nevertheless, there is a growing myth circulating that Turks built up post-war Germany, but most Turks only came became Germany’s economy was already booming. The myths even imply that Turks brought development and culture to our country; for example, water toilets. Perhaps there is some classical Islamic mythologizing here, involving disdain for pre-or non-Islamic cultures or their technological achievements, and even to deny their very existence.
As the result of a massive German family reunion program — frequently directed into the German welfare system — a large Turkish community was rapidly established. In contrast to immigrants from Europe, its members withdrew into insular, parallel societies, especially in the big cities.
Additionally, there were refugees from troubled areas. While Turks make up the large majority of Muslims in Germany, substantial groups include Palestinians, often from Lebanon, and Muslims from former Yugoslavia. In summer 2006, the Federal Government announced, that some 3.000 German citizens with a Lebanese background were to be evacuated from Lebanon. The German embassy in Beirut only knew about 1.000 German citizens. Finally we accepted 6.000 refugees from Lebanon. The Government didn’t want to be too particular about passport controls for humanitarian reasons. How many of them were Hezbollah members, of course, is unknown. Once again, we find that official estimates about how many Muslims are in our country, to say nothing of important details, cannot be relied upon.
The problems caused by Muslim immigrants in Germany are the same as elsewhere. Perhaps at least in the beginning they might have been milder, as immigrants from Turkey had experience in a secular political system, compared to immigrants from more traditional Islamic countries. On the other hand kemalistic Turks cling to a very distinct nationalism, so that it is frequently difficult to separate nationalist Turkish demands from Islamic ones.
A few months ago the German parliament passed a new immigration law. It was not at all effective, but it least implied that people immigrating on behalf of family reunion laws — which mostly means young imported wives — have to be at least 18 years old and to know some 200 words of German. Not only Turkish and Islamic organizations in Germany protested and urged the Federal President, not to sign the law, but even Ankara tried to intervene.
In Germany there are currently 159 mosques, identifiable with cupola and minaret, 184 are being built. Additionally, there are some 2.600 less official-looking Muslim prayer houses. Many of them were or are being built by DITIB, a subsidiary organization of the Turkish government authority for religion, Diyanet. Diayenet also sends imams, who most often don’t speak German and are replaced on a regular basis. Thus Islamization in Germany is not only a question of an ideology but consists increasingly of an intervention of a foreign State — Turkey — in national sovereignty. During the world soccer championship in 2006, Germany’s biggest tabloid, BILD, published photos of young migrants waving a German flag with a Turkish white crescent in its red part. This was not criticized but praised as an example of successful integration. As in other countries, our media praises multiculturalism, whitewashes Islamist excesses, and demonizes critics of Islam as racists or at least blockheads.
Things used to be better. The first generation Muslim immigrants were more integrated than today’s third generation. Today, many Muslim children don’t speak any German when they start school. Immigrant youth often speak a strikingly rudimentary, grammatically simplified and generally incorrect German language, one that has even caught the attention of linguists. Poorly educated native German youths in Muslim quarters increasingly adopt this language maybe to avoid being seen as outsiders. Speaking such a language of course minimizes their chance for work.
Early in 2006 teachers of the Berlin Rütli school wrote a desperate open letter to the school authority, admitting that they had given up hope to cope with the increasing violence, especially by Arab youths, of whom even the slightly less violent Turkish youths are afraid, let alone German and other non-Islamic kids. They also complained that the migrants don’t show any interest in studying or attending school at all, and that parents just don’t care or even insult teachers. Especially female teachers were afraid of their students and didn’t enter classroom without a cellphone, in order to be able to call for help. This caused some public debate for a while, yet proposals tended to blame society alone for the problem. The “solution†then was hire Islamic social workers in schools, since infidel social workers would not be respected by Muslim kids. Another “solution†was to improve cooperation with imams.
Meanwhile, the police force in Germany’s biggest state, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is proceeding to reserve jobs for Muslims, whom they recruit in mosques. The establishment of exclusive Muslim police units is also debated, for better cooperation between the police and Muslim communities. When we define as an unreasonable demand that Muslims accept infidel police officers, we are starting to separate society into Islamic and non-Islamic enclaves.
But I think these are things that all of you know in your own countries. Therefore, I want to go into a subject which we thought was a German problem only, yet now seems more widespread, if not of equal intensity. This is the tactic of the promoters and defenders of Islamization, to conflate, what we might call, to deliberately mix up, critics of Islam and Nazis. You all surely know the accusations such as “racism,†“fascism, or “Nazism†usually are hurled at people who criticize Islam or even question the Islamization of Europe or the Eurabia concept. This is done by politicians, the media, clerics, academia and ordinary people, as well.
As Nazism is our own past, this is perhaps worse in Germany than elsewhere and surely it is more hurtful and intimidating. Sometimes this hysteria to see Nazis anywhere — except where their modern counterparts really are – is just grotesque. But for many people — critics of Islams not excluded — this doesn’t come only from outside but from inside as well, as it is rooted in modern Germans: a mixture of guilt, shame and a fear that one might possibly mutate into a Nazi without noticing it. This undermines the unity of the critics of Islam, causing us to distance ourselves from other people or groups, sometimes perhaps with good reason, yet probably most often, without.
Prospects, that a political party critical of Islamization and mass immigration of Muslims can be established in Germany or that the big conservative party, Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats, could develop in this direction, are poor. This is in part due to our national socialist past and the resulting fear of anything that could be considered xenophobic or nationalist or not sufficiently tolerant. It might as well result from a relatively widespread favorable opinion concerning the European Union. It also is conceivable that German fears of and dislike for any kind of nationalism influences the European Union.
In any case, there are some real neo-Nazis. There is a tiny political party, whose agenda is revisionist and decisively anti-Israeli and anti-American and therefore pro- Ahmadinejad. Yet it is opposed to immigration (not only Muslim) and Mosque-building. The leaders of this party would perhaps like to cooperate with Islamist organizations, and partly do so, but their ordinary members oppose it. Working with this party is out of the question for any reasonable and decent person. Its numbers and impact are both negligible, but the public is sensitive to its existence. Any of their positions which overlap with others undermines the others to the public.
The “Nazi†smears come partly from cynics who seek to silence any critic of their multicultural and pro-Islamic dogma, as well as from some who are sincere about it. Therefore, it makes sense to speak the truth, especially about the historical connections between Nazism and some Islamic authorities, as well as about their ideological similarity and compatibility, especially those concerning the hostility towards Israel and America - or put another way, Jews and devout Christians.
There are some 100.000 Jews living in Germany, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union and they are increasingly harassed, especially in public schools. This is horrific, appalling and sad. The harassments originate mainly from Islamic immigrants, but to be honest not only from them. Unfortunately, there is still some original anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism found within the native German population, though most often it is not open aggressive but rather, latent. People really do not want to be Nazis, but unfortunately many have strange ideas about what a Nazi is really like. Information about these dark times, as told by leftists, is especially peculiar. It masks the socialist parts, overestimating the conservative parts, and treats anti-Semitism simply as some kind of xenophobia where Jews just were random victims as they were available, and could easily be replaced today by any other group — such as Muslims. Those Muslims who do not deny the Holocaust — and most Turkish Muslims don’t – find this an easy-to-accept version of history. I think it is essential to never take for granted that the truth needs continuing affirmation. My co-authors and I on Politically Incorrect do so, regularly.
Many people feel a diffuse aversion towards some aspects of Islam, like the oppression of Muslim women, high crime rates, and dependence on welfare because of deliberate lack of education. There are a few prominent figures who speak out against Islamization, but none of them is a politician. There is former Federal President Roman Herzog, a former constitutional judge, who sharply criticized the antidemocratic European Union, but he was widely ignored. Most Germans support the European Union as a garantor of peace in Europe, and perhaps as a way to give up an embarrassing nationality, trading changing German for European. There is hardly any knowledge among Germans about its antidemocratic and Eurabian aspects, so they tend to consider information about it as some odd conspiracy theory. To sum it up, there is only very little resistance against Islamization in Germany.
Therefore, the work that all of you doing to speak the truth is crucial to saving our societies. So, I want to take this opportunity to thank Ms Bat Ye’Or for her precious and great work on the subject. Unfortunately her important book Eurabia is still not available in German. I want to thank all the authors attending the conference for providing us with priceless information and knowledge, which is really helpful to Politically Incorrect and our efforts to inform honestly and to constitute some kind of counterbalance to the biased media.
(Speech at the CounterJihad Brussels 2007 Conference, October 18 - 19)
Who are the druze
The Druze of Lebanon
Posted by Jim Down in Religion section
High up in the mountain ranges of southern Lebanon, south western Syria and northern Israel lie the villages of the enigmatic Druze community.
Proud and fierce fighters, intensely loyal to their semi-Islamic religion and to their community, they have survived a thousand years of turbulent Middle East history in the safety of their mountain fortresses, often under pressure from the hostile Sunni majority.
They are a small and tightly knit Arabic speaking community. They can be classified as a religio-national group with a clear sense of separate identity, culture, traditions and customs and with their own Druze flag.
Today they number some 750,000 people. In Syria there are 375,000 living mainly in the Jabal el-Druze area, in Lebanon there are 250,000 mainly in the Chouf mountains, and in Israel 100,000 mainly in Galilee and on Mt.Carmel. There are also small Druze communities in Jordan, the United States, Canada and in Latin America.
The Druze religion developed from the Shi'a Isma'ili movement a thousand years ago. To understand it one must be familiar with Islamic esoteric terminology and symbolism.
The strict Sunni Muslim rulers of the Middle East treated the Druze as heretics, which is why they have kept their religion as secret as possible. They maintained their identity and distinctive faith, settled mainly in the harsh mountain top areas for safety, and always sought autonomy for their community.
The Druze claim that they have always existed in the Near East. They highly esteem Jethro (Nabi Shu'ayb) whom they revere as a prophet and as an incarnation of the Universal Mind (one of the emanations of God). His tomb at the Horns of Hattin near Tiberias, Israel is a Druze holy place, second in importance only to their spiritual centre at Bayyada near Hasbaya in Lebanon.
The Druze faith was founded in Cairo in 1017 AD during the reign of the eccentric sixth Isma’ili Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985-1021).
According to Isma’ili doctrine the Caliph was also the Imam, the divinely appointed leader of all Muslims. He was seen as a manifestation of the Universal Mind, the first of the divine emanations or cosmic rulers. Al-Hakim however concluded that he was actually a manifestation of the Deity itself, and he gathered a group of disciples who accepted his claims and spread the new teaching.
The leader of these disciples was Hamzah ibn-’Ali, a Persian Isma’ili felt maker, who taught that al-Hakim was the embodiment of God, and that he, Hamzah, was his Imam. Hamzah taught that from al-Hakim in his divine mode had emanated five supreme cosmic rulers (Huddud) - Universal Mind, Universal Soul, The Word, The Pervading Light and The Follower - each of whom was embodied in an actual person. Opposed to these cosmic rulers are false Hudduds, likewise the creation of al-Hakim and manifested in human beings. The cosmic struggle between the true and the false is reflected in the struggle between good and evil we experience in this world and will be finally resolved at the end of time.
Muhammad al-Darazi was another early leader of Turkish origin from Bukhara, who taught that the divine light and spirit embodied in Adam had been transmitted to the Caliph ‘Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law revered by the Shi’a as his true successor), and through him and the Imams of his house to al-Hakim.
Al-Darazi was executed in 1019 AD. Though now regarded as a heretic, he gave the movement its name, and his many missionary travels especially in Syria where he spent much time in the Wadi-al-Taym area at the foot of Mt Hermon, prepared the way for the new religion to take hold amongst the people of that region.
In 1021 AD the Caliph al-Hakim mysteriously disappeared. Some say he was assassinated, but the Druze believe that he has vanished into hiding (occultation) and will one day return to inaugurate a messianic golden age.
The Druze religion has elements of many ancient religious ideas which had been channelled into Isma’ilism - Neo-Platonism, Gnosticsm, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism, besides Jewish and Christian mysticism. It was systematised by the teachings of Hamzah and his successors. Druze missionaries were active for a short while in Syria, Persia and even India.
Al-Hakim’s disappearance was followed by a time of persecution of the new faith in Egypt. Hamzah went into hiding, and his successor Baha al-Din al-Muqtana said he was in touch with him and predicted his return.
In less than three years since they first appeared, the two founding Druze teachers and al-Hakim himself had disappeared. But the new religion did not disappear. Instead it entered a period of canonisation. Baha al-Din al-Muqtana edited pastoral letters laying down the laws of Druze orthodoxy. This collection of 111 letters includes some written by al-Hakim himself, and others by Hamzah, al-Muqtana and Isma’il al-Tamimi (second in the cosmic hierarchy to Hamzah). It forms the Scriptures of the Druze, who call them Rasa’il al-Hikmah (Epistles of Wisdom).
Most members of the new sect lived in Syria where they became known as Durzi. When al-Muqtana withdrew in 1034 their missionary efforts ceased ("the gates were shut"),they developed a doctrine that there could be no further admission into their community of the Muwahhidun (declarers of the Oneness) as they now called themselves.
Initially there were Druze adherents in Egypt, Iraq, Persia and India, but they have survived only in Syria. The Druze missionaries found ready acceptance for their teaching among the peoples populating the foothills of Mt Hermon, many of whom had migrated to this area from Iraq and Persia in the 9th century (e.g. the Yamani Tanukh tribes from Hira on the Persian border who had been Nestorian Christians, but where then Islamicised after the Muslim conquests) and who were familiar with the Gnostic ideas forming the background of Druze teaching.
DOCTRINES AND LAWS
Hamzah taught that al-Hakim was the manifestation of the Godhead. Compared to him, ‘Ali and the Isma’ili Imams were but minor figures.
God is beyond comprehension, transcending language and thought, undefinable. This concept of an unknowable, transcendent and remote God (common to most Shi’a and Sufi groups), is coupled with the belief that this ultimate God, in order to bring himself nearer to human understanding, has appeared in a number of manifestations and revelations, the final one of which is al-Hakim. (Manifestation is deemed different to incarnation in that the human reflects the Deity as a mirror reflects an image, but the image is not incarnated in the substance of the mirror).
There were nine earlier manifestations of the Deity, but al-Hakim was the final and most perfect. There had also been earlier manifestations of the divine emanations (particularly the Universal Mind), in Jethro, the Messiah of True Justice in the days of Jesus, and Salman al-Farisi, the famous Persian companion of Muhammad.
Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were mere prophets, much inferior to the manifestations of Deity and it’s emanations.
The Druze doctrine of “Ghaybah” - the absence of their founder figures - is similar to that of the Shi’a. Al-Hakim did not die, he is unseen (in occultation) but still living on earth. He will one day return as the Messiah (Mahdi) to judge the world and to bring in a golden age of justice in which the Druze will be the universal rulers.
The laws given by Hamzah are binding on the Druze to this day. Amongst them are some that insist on equality in marriage and restrict divorce to weighty reasons. Seven commandments which form a moral code (rather than the external Sunni rituals), replace the five pillars of Islam:
1. The Druze must speak the truth amongst themselves. (Dissimulation to outsiders - Taqiya - is permitted to ensure Druze survival).
2. Druze must help and defend each other to the point of taking up arms.
3. Druze must renounce all beliefs that negate the oneness of God.
4. Druze must separate themselves from unbelievers.
5. Druze must recognise the absolute oneness (Tawhid) of the Lord manifested in al-Hakim.
6. They must be content with whatever the Lord does.
7. They must submit to the Lord’s will and commands.
Another important Druze belief is that the number of souls in the Druze community is fixed. Any Druze who dies is immediately reborn in another Druze.
The doctrine of Taqiya (dissimulation) requires that to preserve the secrecy of their faith and to ensure Druze survival they may pretend to accept the faith of the religious majority.
The Druze separated themselves from other religions, but they participate in the veneration of certain saints and prophets whose tombs are places of pilgrimage to other faiths.
Posted by Jim Down in Religion section
High up in the mountain ranges of southern Lebanon, south western Syria and northern Israel lie the villages of the enigmatic Druze community.
Proud and fierce fighters, intensely loyal to their semi-Islamic religion and to their community, they have survived a thousand years of turbulent Middle East history in the safety of their mountain fortresses, often under pressure from the hostile Sunni majority.
They are a small and tightly knit Arabic speaking community. They can be classified as a religio-national group with a clear sense of separate identity, culture, traditions and customs and with their own Druze flag.
Today they number some 750,000 people. In Syria there are 375,000 living mainly in the Jabal el-Druze area, in Lebanon there are 250,000 mainly in the Chouf mountains, and in Israel 100,000 mainly in Galilee and on Mt.Carmel. There are also small Druze communities in Jordan, the United States, Canada and in Latin America.
The Druze religion developed from the Shi'a Isma'ili movement a thousand years ago. To understand it one must be familiar with Islamic esoteric terminology and symbolism.
The strict Sunni Muslim rulers of the Middle East treated the Druze as heretics, which is why they have kept their religion as secret as possible. They maintained their identity and distinctive faith, settled mainly in the harsh mountain top areas for safety, and always sought autonomy for their community.
The Druze claim that they have always existed in the Near East. They highly esteem Jethro (Nabi Shu'ayb) whom they revere as a prophet and as an incarnation of the Universal Mind (one of the emanations of God). His tomb at the Horns of Hattin near Tiberias, Israel is a Druze holy place, second in importance only to their spiritual centre at Bayyada near Hasbaya in Lebanon.
The Druze faith was founded in Cairo in 1017 AD during the reign of the eccentric sixth Isma’ili Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985-1021).
According to Isma’ili doctrine the Caliph was also the Imam, the divinely appointed leader of all Muslims. He was seen as a manifestation of the Universal Mind, the first of the divine emanations or cosmic rulers. Al-Hakim however concluded that he was actually a manifestation of the Deity itself, and he gathered a group of disciples who accepted his claims and spread the new teaching.
The leader of these disciples was Hamzah ibn-’Ali, a Persian Isma’ili felt maker, who taught that al-Hakim was the embodiment of God, and that he, Hamzah, was his Imam. Hamzah taught that from al-Hakim in his divine mode had emanated five supreme cosmic rulers (Huddud) - Universal Mind, Universal Soul, The Word, The Pervading Light and The Follower - each of whom was embodied in an actual person. Opposed to these cosmic rulers are false Hudduds, likewise the creation of al-Hakim and manifested in human beings. The cosmic struggle between the true and the false is reflected in the struggle between good and evil we experience in this world and will be finally resolved at the end of time.
Muhammad al-Darazi was another early leader of Turkish origin from Bukhara, who taught that the divine light and spirit embodied in Adam had been transmitted to the Caliph ‘Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law revered by the Shi’a as his true successor), and through him and the Imams of his house to al-Hakim.
Al-Darazi was executed in 1019 AD. Though now regarded as a heretic, he gave the movement its name, and his many missionary travels especially in Syria where he spent much time in the Wadi-al-Taym area at the foot of Mt Hermon, prepared the way for the new religion to take hold amongst the people of that region.
In 1021 AD the Caliph al-Hakim mysteriously disappeared. Some say he was assassinated, but the Druze believe that he has vanished into hiding (occultation) and will one day return to inaugurate a messianic golden age.
The Druze religion has elements of many ancient religious ideas which had been channelled into Isma’ilism - Neo-Platonism, Gnosticsm, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism, besides Jewish and Christian mysticism. It was systematised by the teachings of Hamzah and his successors. Druze missionaries were active for a short while in Syria, Persia and even India.
Al-Hakim’s disappearance was followed by a time of persecution of the new faith in Egypt. Hamzah went into hiding, and his successor Baha al-Din al-Muqtana said he was in touch with him and predicted his return.
In less than three years since they first appeared, the two founding Druze teachers and al-Hakim himself had disappeared. But the new religion did not disappear. Instead it entered a period of canonisation. Baha al-Din al-Muqtana edited pastoral letters laying down the laws of Druze orthodoxy. This collection of 111 letters includes some written by al-Hakim himself, and others by Hamzah, al-Muqtana and Isma’il al-Tamimi (second in the cosmic hierarchy to Hamzah). It forms the Scriptures of the Druze, who call them Rasa’il al-Hikmah (Epistles of Wisdom).
Most members of the new sect lived in Syria where they became known as Durzi. When al-Muqtana withdrew in 1034 their missionary efforts ceased ("the gates were shut"),they developed a doctrine that there could be no further admission into their community of the Muwahhidun (declarers of the Oneness) as they now called themselves.
Initially there were Druze adherents in Egypt, Iraq, Persia and India, but they have survived only in Syria. The Druze missionaries found ready acceptance for their teaching among the peoples populating the foothills of Mt Hermon, many of whom had migrated to this area from Iraq and Persia in the 9th century (e.g. the Yamani Tanukh tribes from Hira on the Persian border who had been Nestorian Christians, but where then Islamicised after the Muslim conquests) and who were familiar with the Gnostic ideas forming the background of Druze teaching.
DOCTRINES AND LAWS
Hamzah taught that al-Hakim was the manifestation of the Godhead. Compared to him, ‘Ali and the Isma’ili Imams were but minor figures.
God is beyond comprehension, transcending language and thought, undefinable. This concept of an unknowable, transcendent and remote God (common to most Shi’a and Sufi groups), is coupled with the belief that this ultimate God, in order to bring himself nearer to human understanding, has appeared in a number of manifestations and revelations, the final one of which is al-Hakim. (Manifestation is deemed different to incarnation in that the human reflects the Deity as a mirror reflects an image, but the image is not incarnated in the substance of the mirror).
There were nine earlier manifestations of the Deity, but al-Hakim was the final and most perfect. There had also been earlier manifestations of the divine emanations (particularly the Universal Mind), in Jethro, the Messiah of True Justice in the days of Jesus, and Salman al-Farisi, the famous Persian companion of Muhammad.
Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were mere prophets, much inferior to the manifestations of Deity and it’s emanations.
The Druze doctrine of “Ghaybah” - the absence of their founder figures - is similar to that of the Shi’a. Al-Hakim did not die, he is unseen (in occultation) but still living on earth. He will one day return as the Messiah (Mahdi) to judge the world and to bring in a golden age of justice in which the Druze will be the universal rulers.
The laws given by Hamzah are binding on the Druze to this day. Amongst them are some that insist on equality in marriage and restrict divorce to weighty reasons. Seven commandments which form a moral code (rather than the external Sunni rituals), replace the five pillars of Islam:
1. The Druze must speak the truth amongst themselves. (Dissimulation to outsiders - Taqiya - is permitted to ensure Druze survival).
2. Druze must help and defend each other to the point of taking up arms.
3. Druze must renounce all beliefs that negate the oneness of God.
4. Druze must separate themselves from unbelievers.
5. Druze must recognise the absolute oneness (Tawhid) of the Lord manifested in al-Hakim.
6. They must be content with whatever the Lord does.
7. They must submit to the Lord’s will and commands.
Another important Druze belief is that the number of souls in the Druze community is fixed. Any Druze who dies is immediately reborn in another Druze.
The doctrine of Taqiya (dissimulation) requires that to preserve the secrecy of their faith and to ensure Druze survival they may pretend to accept the faith of the religious majority.
The Druze separated themselves from other religions, but they participate in the veneration of certain saints and prophets whose tombs are places of pilgrimage to other faiths.
Try to understand if you can
Hezbullah & Lebanese Christians Unite!
Author: MR Filed under: Islam, News Date: Dec 6,2006
I don’t know if this is good or bad, but Hezbullah and the Aoun Free Patriotic Movement (a Christian group in Lebanon) are uniting on one common ground to rebel against the government. What does this mean for Muslims? I have no idea. What does this mean for Israel? It means you get to kill Christians too along with Muslims, idiots!
May God have mercy on us all, protect the innocent and guide us all to heaven. Ameen!
Here is the article:
Why Hezbollah’s Al-Manar Television is broadcasting Sunday Mass
By Sophie McNeill
BEIRUT: A truck laden with yellow Hezbollah flags drives past the Christian neighbourhood of Gemayzeh early Sunday morning in downtown Beirut. There’s a picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on the windscreen, but it’s not his name that the young men on board are chanting. “General, General!” yell these young Shiite boys.
Their chant is for the leader of Hezbollah’s largest Christian ally, the former General Michel Aoun. And this van captures an important dynamic that many of the international and Lebanese press have omitted from their coverage of the last few days — that almost a quarter of the crowd at the huge anti-government protests have been Lebanese Christians.
The size and commitment of the Christian participation became clear Sunday, as thousands of Christians from Aoun’s ‘Free Patriotic Movement’ marched in from East Beirut to join their Shia allies in calling for the Prime Minister to resign.
“We are all Christians and we are against the government,” 45-year-old Joseph from East Beirut tells me as he walks past with his son, “We want our own Lebanese government with no Syrian influence, no American influence and not any influence from other Arab countries. ”
Umm* but haven’t we been told that Hezbollah are just Syrian agents? Why would nationalist anti-Syrian Christians want to be in a coalition with them?
“No! I’m not worried about Hezbollah working for the Syrians,” Joseph exclaims. “Maybe Hezbollah likes Syria’s words against Israel and in that they supports Syria*but in Lebanon they are Lebanese!”
For Joseph, the fact that his Shia allies have never been involved in his country’s many civil wars is proof enough of the party’s commitment to Lebanese nationalism. “Hezbollah has never used its weapons inside Lebanon against the Lebanese,” he explains, “Not like the other side; they all killed each other and ran militias.”
As the marchers walk on, they pass a TV crew they think is from ‘Lebanese Forces’ Television, a network that belongs to a pro-government Christian party firmly aligned against Hezbollah and Syria.
“The Christian people in Lebanon are different to what you are showing on TV!” yells one young man at the camera crew as others join in with, “Stop your lies!”
“We are yelling at them because they do not tell the truth,” explains 30-year-old Mona to me after party officials make the crowd march on. “They are saying that it is only Muslims who are here protesting. They say all Christians belong to the Lebanese Forces. But look, we are here demonstrating and we are not Shiite!” she says exacerbated.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sharden believes the media have been ignoring them on purpose. “We know all the media in the world, especially the Americans, are trying to make the picture that it is just the Shiites. They don’t want it to look like the Lebanese are united against the government,” he tells me.
It’s hard to tell exactly how many of Lebanon’s Christians belong to parties aligned with either Hezbollah or the government. Both will tell you that their numbers make up 70% of all Christians in Lebanon *and it’s a continuously argued figure that no one is this country seems to know the answer too.
“They’re not the majority of Christians,” scorns 26-year-old Hammad as he watches the crowds march past. “They might have used to be with Aoun, but not now he’s with Hezbollah.” A pro-government supporter, Hammad describes the coalition between Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah as just ‘a marriage of convenience.’
“Aoun just wants to be the President and Hezbollah has promised him this, so now he will do anything to reach that,” he accuses. “He would work with the devil just to be president!” interrupts Hammad’s friend Ziad.
To these government supporters, ‘the devil’ is Syria. And it’s a strange twist of Lebanese politics that Michel Aoun spent many of his years in exile in France lobbying against the Syrians and calling for their withdrawal from Lebanon — to now be in coalition with the Syrian backed Hezbollah; leaving many Lebanese to view this new coalition as disingenuous. “I believe he’s turned pro-Syrian,” charges Hammad. “I believe he’s even working for them now, the Syrians.”
Hezbollah’s keenness to highlight their Christian allies was obvious at Friday’s huge opposition rally, with Aoun given the role of key speaker rather than the crowd favourite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; and many pro-government supporters view these kind of tactical moves very cynically. “To make Aoun speak is to try and show people that the opposition is united. Hezbollah doesn’t really care about Aoun. They just want him now — to use him to say ‘the Christians are with us’,” alleges Hassan.
Whatever is behind this strange coalition between the hardline Shiite group and their Christian allies, it’s certainly producing some unique cultural mixes. As the march reaches downtown Beirut’s St Georges cathedral, Hezbollah TV vans are out the front transmitting Sunday mass live. “No we don’t usually have Sunday mass broadcast on Al-Manar,” one of the Fathers tells me inside, “but it’s still just normal mass, nothing political is said here.”
As I push my way out of the packed church, I pass a funny looking kid on the steps. He has an orange T-shirt and wristband in the colour of Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, but a yellow Hezbollah cap and a picture of Hassan Nasrallah hanging around his neck.
“Oh yes, I’m a Christian, I went to mass,” explains nineteen year old Josef… and um, why do you have a picture of the man the West sees as a terrorist leader hanging off you? “Because I love him,” says Josef simply, “He’s a good man, and he’s not bad like all the others.”
Later that afternoon, representatives from all Hezbollah’s allies are given the stage, but the crowd is told that the speeches won’t start until everyone puts down their party flags. After fifteen minutes of delay, a respectable amount of Lebanese flags dominates and Hezbollah TV is allowed to begin their broadcast.
Once again, the universal demand is for Siniora’s immediate resignation, but listening to the speeches from these opposition speakers, there is certainly unifying themes here that bring this seemingly mismatched coalition together.
Hezbollah’s Christian and Druz allies stand proudly with the party’s Shiite army, and they join in Hezbollah’s accusations that the government failed to adequately support them during the July war with Israel.
“During the Israeli invasion, the government stood on the sides if not against the resistance!’ cried the Druz opposition party leader Talal Erslan. “Maybe the execution of the resistance to Israel was executed by the Shiites, but I Talal Erslan, I am one of you!”
It had been a long day and it was growing cold, but the crowd responded enthusiastically to his calls. “We are ready to give our blood to this resistance, ” he declared to a cheering crowd. ” And we’re proud not to be called the allies of Israel*this government just follows the American and Zionist rule!”
The speeches end and the crowds slowly disperse, while those who are sleeping here dig in for another night. “Hezbollah are the best thing that happened to Lebanon,” 24-year-old Maurice, a Christian, tells me. “They are real Lebanese. Israel is our enemy too and we are with Hezbollah against Israel.”
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00097.htm
Author: MR Filed under: Islam, News Date: Dec 6,2006
I don’t know if this is good or bad, but Hezbullah and the Aoun Free Patriotic Movement (a Christian group in Lebanon) are uniting on one common ground to rebel against the government. What does this mean for Muslims? I have no idea. What does this mean for Israel? It means you get to kill Christians too along with Muslims, idiots!
May God have mercy on us all, protect the innocent and guide us all to heaven. Ameen!
Here is the article:
Why Hezbollah’s Al-Manar Television is broadcasting Sunday Mass
By Sophie McNeill
BEIRUT: A truck laden with yellow Hezbollah flags drives past the Christian neighbourhood of Gemayzeh early Sunday morning in downtown Beirut. There’s a picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on the windscreen, but it’s not his name that the young men on board are chanting. “General, General!” yell these young Shiite boys.
Their chant is for the leader of Hezbollah’s largest Christian ally, the former General Michel Aoun. And this van captures an important dynamic that many of the international and Lebanese press have omitted from their coverage of the last few days — that almost a quarter of the crowd at the huge anti-government protests have been Lebanese Christians.
The size and commitment of the Christian participation became clear Sunday, as thousands of Christians from Aoun’s ‘Free Patriotic Movement’ marched in from East Beirut to join their Shia allies in calling for the Prime Minister to resign.
“We are all Christians and we are against the government,” 45-year-old Joseph from East Beirut tells me as he walks past with his son, “We want our own Lebanese government with no Syrian influence, no American influence and not any influence from other Arab countries. ”
Umm* but haven’t we been told that Hezbollah are just Syrian agents? Why would nationalist anti-Syrian Christians want to be in a coalition with them?
“No! I’m not worried about Hezbollah working for the Syrians,” Joseph exclaims. “Maybe Hezbollah likes Syria’s words against Israel and in that they supports Syria*but in Lebanon they are Lebanese!”
For Joseph, the fact that his Shia allies have never been involved in his country’s many civil wars is proof enough of the party’s commitment to Lebanese nationalism. “Hezbollah has never used its weapons inside Lebanon against the Lebanese,” he explains, “Not like the other side; they all killed each other and ran militias.”
As the marchers walk on, they pass a TV crew they think is from ‘Lebanese Forces’ Television, a network that belongs to a pro-government Christian party firmly aligned against Hezbollah and Syria.
“The Christian people in Lebanon are different to what you are showing on TV!” yells one young man at the camera crew as others join in with, “Stop your lies!”
“We are yelling at them because they do not tell the truth,” explains 30-year-old Mona to me after party officials make the crowd march on. “They are saying that it is only Muslims who are here protesting. They say all Christians belong to the Lebanese Forces. But look, we are here demonstrating and we are not Shiite!” she says exacerbated.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sharden believes the media have been ignoring them on purpose. “We know all the media in the world, especially the Americans, are trying to make the picture that it is just the Shiites. They don’t want it to look like the Lebanese are united against the government,” he tells me.
It’s hard to tell exactly how many of Lebanon’s Christians belong to parties aligned with either Hezbollah or the government. Both will tell you that their numbers make up 70% of all Christians in Lebanon *and it’s a continuously argued figure that no one is this country seems to know the answer too.
“They’re not the majority of Christians,” scorns 26-year-old Hammad as he watches the crowds march past. “They might have used to be with Aoun, but not now he’s with Hezbollah.” A pro-government supporter, Hammad describes the coalition between Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah as just ‘a marriage of convenience.’
“Aoun just wants to be the President and Hezbollah has promised him this, so now he will do anything to reach that,” he accuses. “He would work with the devil just to be president!” interrupts Hammad’s friend Ziad.
To these government supporters, ‘the devil’ is Syria. And it’s a strange twist of Lebanese politics that Michel Aoun spent many of his years in exile in France lobbying against the Syrians and calling for their withdrawal from Lebanon — to now be in coalition with the Syrian backed Hezbollah; leaving many Lebanese to view this new coalition as disingenuous. “I believe he’s turned pro-Syrian,” charges Hammad. “I believe he’s even working for them now, the Syrians.”
Hezbollah’s keenness to highlight their Christian allies was obvious at Friday’s huge opposition rally, with Aoun given the role of key speaker rather than the crowd favourite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; and many pro-government supporters view these kind of tactical moves very cynically. “To make Aoun speak is to try and show people that the opposition is united. Hezbollah doesn’t really care about Aoun. They just want him now — to use him to say ‘the Christians are with us’,” alleges Hassan.
Whatever is behind this strange coalition between the hardline Shiite group and their Christian allies, it’s certainly producing some unique cultural mixes. As the march reaches downtown Beirut’s St Georges cathedral, Hezbollah TV vans are out the front transmitting Sunday mass live. “No we don’t usually have Sunday mass broadcast on Al-Manar,” one of the Fathers tells me inside, “but it’s still just normal mass, nothing political is said here.”
As I push my way out of the packed church, I pass a funny looking kid on the steps. He has an orange T-shirt and wristband in the colour of Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, but a yellow Hezbollah cap and a picture of Hassan Nasrallah hanging around his neck.
“Oh yes, I’m a Christian, I went to mass,” explains nineteen year old Josef… and um, why do you have a picture of the man the West sees as a terrorist leader hanging off you? “Because I love him,” says Josef simply, “He’s a good man, and he’s not bad like all the others.”
Later that afternoon, representatives from all Hezbollah’s allies are given the stage, but the crowd is told that the speeches won’t start until everyone puts down their party flags. After fifteen minutes of delay, a respectable amount of Lebanese flags dominates and Hezbollah TV is allowed to begin their broadcast.
Once again, the universal demand is for Siniora’s immediate resignation, but listening to the speeches from these opposition speakers, there is certainly unifying themes here that bring this seemingly mismatched coalition together.
Hezbollah’s Christian and Druz allies stand proudly with the party’s Shiite army, and they join in Hezbollah’s accusations that the government failed to adequately support them during the July war with Israel.
“During the Israeli invasion, the government stood on the sides if not against the resistance!’ cried the Druz opposition party leader Talal Erslan. “Maybe the execution of the resistance to Israel was executed by the Shiites, but I Talal Erslan, I am one of you!”
It had been a long day and it was growing cold, but the crowd responded enthusiastically to his calls. “We are ready to give our blood to this resistance, ” he declared to a cheering crowd. ” And we’re proud not to be called the allies of Israel*this government just follows the American and Zionist rule!”
The speeches end and the crowds slowly disperse, while those who are sleeping here dig in for another night. “Hezbollah are the best thing that happened to Lebanon,” 24-year-old Maurice, a Christian, tells me. “They are real Lebanese. Israel is our enemy too and we are with Hezbollah against Israel.”
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00097.htm
Honour killing in dishonoured islam
Ali Eteraz
Why Muslim Honor Killings Why
Posted in Islam, Law, Pakistan, Religion, Theology by eteraz on August 18th, 2006
ITALY — This, yes, Muslim psychotic slit his daughter’s throat for dating a non-Muslim and
the grave was dug in advance. Background? They are Pakistani. Her name was Hina Saleem. At this moment we should also remember Ghazala Khan who was killed in the name of honor in Denmark. As well as the countless other women around the world who have lost their lives for this butchery of honor, and those others who have had their faces scarred and their lives mutilated.
I have previously touched upon the general outlines of honor and its beauty, and then warned of its bestiality.
But that selfishness of honor can easily become “honor-killing” — or the equally sinister “honor-obsession” or “honor-culture.” From being a force of good and purity, honor can become a destructive monster when it starts to assume that another person has come to represent honor. It is for this reason I have never been a great fan of those romanticized visions of the past in which a man vows that his honor is connected to some great “lady.” For the same reason I have not been a fan of those other men who look upon their children and say “these are my honor” or look upon their wealth and say “this is my honor.” No, you fool: your honor is inside you, and you can’t delegate it to another, and you shouldn’t delegate it to another because another person should not be forced to bear the burden of your honor; each one of us must bear that burder on our own, in our own souls. If you want to connect your honor to anyone, connect it to those things that you know will never let you down (and if they will let you down, to things you cannot hurt). There are only two such beings: Nothing and God.
Having said all that, it should be absolutely clear that I think the “honor” that undergirds the murder of women like Ghazala Khan is a bastardization of honor. In a properly exercised act of honor, the only person who could judge Ghazala’s honor was Ghazala herself. Yet, instead, all around the Muslim world (and parts of India and China), we find others (usually men) judging the honor of everyone around them, ascribing what they think is an indequacy in another, to a loss of their own honor, and then, instead of exacting corrective behavior upon themselves (as a truly honorable person would do), they exact vengeance from those they find inadequate. It becomes a Darwinian pain cycle with the strongest (men) punishing others (women). Rushdie’s “Shalimar The Clown” — beneath its glorified veneer is really nothing more than a meditation on the fact that honor is supposed to be an inward exercise, not an outward manifestation of zeal. Read it.
But the issue is more than just about the broadstrokes of honor. People taking the law into their own hands is something precipitated by so many other things. One of those is obviously patriarchy. The other is that people, men, are not being taught, whether through force or persuasion, that to take the life of a woman for disobedience to you is wrong; and not just wrong, but punishable in the most severest way.
Muslim countries have been notoriously lax in their laws on the issue of gender. It was not until 2004 that Pakistan passed a law against honor killings. Nor should we be fooled by the fact that the “senate” ratified it. No, it took a strong armed dictator to shove the law down the Pakistani throat. This only means, to me, that large parts of the populace don’t really know or care about the law. Yet even this law is problematic because under the idea of qissas, killers can still pay “blood money” to the victim’s family and get off. There is something shameful in the idea of there being a price for a human life. But what’s doubly daming is the fact that in many cases the victim’s family is the perpetrator of the killing who often hire someone else to do the deed. So, in effect, the man a family hired to kill can “pay” the family who hired him to get off.
It isn’t just Pakistan which has not prosecuted honor killings sufficiently. In Jordan, sentences for honor killings range from three months to two years. The Jordan Times, July 22, 1999. The reason for such a slight punishment has to do with the fact that an honor killing is considered a form of ‘temporary insanity’ (which we know in the West), and therefore, the sentence is reduced, as if killing a woman is a blip on the radar of rationality, something minor, like petty larceny or embezzlement. Consider Jordan:
A man murdered his sister because he believed her “immoral” behavior had led to his own divorce. The court’s transcript says that on October 4, 1999, the defendant was hiding behind parked cars waiting for his sister. When he saw her walking in the street with two men, he “became enraged,” drew a gun, and shot her three times in the head. After the murder—when apparently he was not enraged anymore—he sat down next to his sister’s corpse, smoked a cigarette, and waited for the police. The court based itself on Article 98 and sentenced him to six months imprisonment because he committed his crime “in an act of fury.” The Jordan Times, Feb. 15, 2000.
A Middle Eastern Journal reports cases in numerous other places, and the confessions of the killers are chilling:
A Jordanian murdered his sister who was raped by another brother. The family tried initially to save its honor by marrying the victim to an old man, but this new husband turned her into a prostitute and she escaped from him. The murderer confessed that if he had to go through it all again he would not kill her, but rather would kill his father, mother, uncles, and all the relatives that pressured him to murder and led him to jail. Instead of killing his sister and going to jail, he said he should have “tied her with a rope like a goat and let her spend her life like that until she dies.”
An Egyptian who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter to death and then cut her corpse in eight pieces and threw them in the toilet: “Shame kept following me wherever I went [before the murder]. The village’s people had no mercy on me. They were making jokes and mocking me. I couldn’t bear it and decided to put an end to this shame.”
A 25-year-old Palestinian who hanged his sister with a rope: “I did not kill her, but rather helped her to commit suicide and to carry out the death penalty she sentenced herself to. I did it to wash with her blood the family honor that was violated because of her and in response to the will of society that would not have had any mercy on me if I didn’t… Society taught us from childhood that blood is the only solution to wash the honor.”
A young Palestinian who murdered his sister who had been sexually assaulted: “Before the incident, I drank tea and it tasted bitter because my honor was violated. After the killing I felt much better… I don’t wish anybody the mental state I was in. I was under tremendous mental pressure.”
Another Palestinian who murdered his sister: “I had to kill her because I was the oldest [male] member of the family. My only motive to kill her was [my desire] to get rid of what people were saying. They were blaming me that I was encouraging her to fornicate… I let her choose the way I would get rid of her: slitting her throat or poisoning her. She chose the poison.”
So we have talked about Honor, and we have talked about State, and the only thing we have not talked about is Islam. Where is our religion in all of this? All of these men are Muslim and yet none of them were stopped by their Islam. It is glaringly clear that while we may twiddle our thumbs and say, “well, Islam does not permit killing,” these so called Islamic societies are not really acting as a buffer against honor killing. Instead, they are permitting and celebrating these killings, as reported:
Jordanian society not only forgives the killing, it celebrates the killers. In 1998 Sarhan Abdullah murdered his sister because she had been raped—by her brother-in-law, as it turned out. “I shot her with four bullets in the head,” he told the Ottawa Citizen three years later. “I was treated as a hero in prison.” When Sarhan was released after six months, his family gave him a ceremonial sword and he rode home triumphantly on a horse. “My horse was white because I had cleansed my family’s honor.”
So, I ask, either the societies aren’t Islamic, or Islam is no longer an adequate protection for the lives of women. In fact, Islam has become a scourge. Which is it? Since there are many who will ‘protect’ Islam from this ‘merely cultural’ evil (”let’s not mix culture and Islam” they will say), I will say that every Muslim, practicing or not, who in any way stays silent in the face of this evil, is complicit. Therefore, I myself am guilty and I don’t know how to atone.
Frankly, I have no idea how I’ve managed to write even this far. I am disgusted and saddened and I want right now to have nothing to do with Muslims. Why should I agitate with my friends on helping a Jordanian or Pakistani gain asylum to this country when so many of them are bringing these kind of views to us? In this post I have no answers. The only thing I can do is guide you towards other places where you will be able to bury your pain.
The first place is a Jordanian activist who is collecting letters against honor killings. You can email Ms. Khouri here: honourcrimes@lycos.com (I don’t know how old this contact is).
You can also consult the brilliant (and sad) novel — based on a Pakistani love story — set in England. It is by Nadeem Aslam and it is called Maps For Lost Lovers.
Why Muslim Honor Killings Why
Posted in Islam, Law, Pakistan, Religion, Theology by eteraz on August 18th, 2006
ITALY — This, yes, Muslim psychotic slit his daughter’s throat for dating a non-Muslim and
the grave was dug in advance. Background? They are Pakistani. Her name was Hina Saleem. At this moment we should also remember Ghazala Khan who was killed in the name of honor in Denmark. As well as the countless other women around the world who have lost their lives for this butchery of honor, and those others who have had their faces scarred and their lives mutilated.
I have previously touched upon the general outlines of honor and its beauty, and then warned of its bestiality.
But that selfishness of honor can easily become “honor-killing” — or the equally sinister “honor-obsession” or “honor-culture.” From being a force of good and purity, honor can become a destructive monster when it starts to assume that another person has come to represent honor. It is for this reason I have never been a great fan of those romanticized visions of the past in which a man vows that his honor is connected to some great “lady.” For the same reason I have not been a fan of those other men who look upon their children and say “these are my honor” or look upon their wealth and say “this is my honor.” No, you fool: your honor is inside you, and you can’t delegate it to another, and you shouldn’t delegate it to another because another person should not be forced to bear the burden of your honor; each one of us must bear that burder on our own, in our own souls. If you want to connect your honor to anyone, connect it to those things that you know will never let you down (and if they will let you down, to things you cannot hurt). There are only two such beings: Nothing and God.
Having said all that, it should be absolutely clear that I think the “honor” that undergirds the murder of women like Ghazala Khan is a bastardization of honor. In a properly exercised act of honor, the only person who could judge Ghazala’s honor was Ghazala herself. Yet, instead, all around the Muslim world (and parts of India and China), we find others (usually men) judging the honor of everyone around them, ascribing what they think is an indequacy in another, to a loss of their own honor, and then, instead of exacting corrective behavior upon themselves (as a truly honorable person would do), they exact vengeance from those they find inadequate. It becomes a Darwinian pain cycle with the strongest (men) punishing others (women). Rushdie’s “Shalimar The Clown” — beneath its glorified veneer is really nothing more than a meditation on the fact that honor is supposed to be an inward exercise, not an outward manifestation of zeal. Read it.
But the issue is more than just about the broadstrokes of honor. People taking the law into their own hands is something precipitated by so many other things. One of those is obviously patriarchy. The other is that people, men, are not being taught, whether through force or persuasion, that to take the life of a woman for disobedience to you is wrong; and not just wrong, but punishable in the most severest way.
Muslim countries have been notoriously lax in their laws on the issue of gender. It was not until 2004 that Pakistan passed a law against honor killings. Nor should we be fooled by the fact that the “senate” ratified it. No, it took a strong armed dictator to shove the law down the Pakistani throat. This only means, to me, that large parts of the populace don’t really know or care about the law. Yet even this law is problematic because under the idea of qissas, killers can still pay “blood money” to the victim’s family and get off. There is something shameful in the idea of there being a price for a human life. But what’s doubly daming is the fact that in many cases the victim’s family is the perpetrator of the killing who often hire someone else to do the deed. So, in effect, the man a family hired to kill can “pay” the family who hired him to get off.
It isn’t just Pakistan which has not prosecuted honor killings sufficiently. In Jordan, sentences for honor killings range from three months to two years. The Jordan Times, July 22, 1999. The reason for such a slight punishment has to do with the fact that an honor killing is considered a form of ‘temporary insanity’ (which we know in the West), and therefore, the sentence is reduced, as if killing a woman is a blip on the radar of rationality, something minor, like petty larceny or embezzlement. Consider Jordan:
A man murdered his sister because he believed her “immoral” behavior had led to his own divorce. The court’s transcript says that on October 4, 1999, the defendant was hiding behind parked cars waiting for his sister. When he saw her walking in the street with two men, he “became enraged,” drew a gun, and shot her three times in the head. After the murder—when apparently he was not enraged anymore—he sat down next to his sister’s corpse, smoked a cigarette, and waited for the police. The court based itself on Article 98 and sentenced him to six months imprisonment because he committed his crime “in an act of fury.” The Jordan Times, Feb. 15, 2000.
A Middle Eastern Journal reports cases in numerous other places, and the confessions of the killers are chilling:
A Jordanian murdered his sister who was raped by another brother. The family tried initially to save its honor by marrying the victim to an old man, but this new husband turned her into a prostitute and she escaped from him. The murderer confessed that if he had to go through it all again he would not kill her, but rather would kill his father, mother, uncles, and all the relatives that pressured him to murder and led him to jail. Instead of killing his sister and going to jail, he said he should have “tied her with a rope like a goat and let her spend her life like that until she dies.”
An Egyptian who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter to death and then cut her corpse in eight pieces and threw them in the toilet: “Shame kept following me wherever I went [before the murder]. The village’s people had no mercy on me. They were making jokes and mocking me. I couldn’t bear it and decided to put an end to this shame.”
A 25-year-old Palestinian who hanged his sister with a rope: “I did not kill her, but rather helped her to commit suicide and to carry out the death penalty she sentenced herself to. I did it to wash with her blood the family honor that was violated because of her and in response to the will of society that would not have had any mercy on me if I didn’t… Society taught us from childhood that blood is the only solution to wash the honor.”
A young Palestinian who murdered his sister who had been sexually assaulted: “Before the incident, I drank tea and it tasted bitter because my honor was violated. After the killing I felt much better… I don’t wish anybody the mental state I was in. I was under tremendous mental pressure.”
Another Palestinian who murdered his sister: “I had to kill her because I was the oldest [male] member of the family. My only motive to kill her was [my desire] to get rid of what people were saying. They were blaming me that I was encouraging her to fornicate… I let her choose the way I would get rid of her: slitting her throat or poisoning her. She chose the poison.”
So we have talked about Honor, and we have talked about State, and the only thing we have not talked about is Islam. Where is our religion in all of this? All of these men are Muslim and yet none of them were stopped by their Islam. It is glaringly clear that while we may twiddle our thumbs and say, “well, Islam does not permit killing,” these so called Islamic societies are not really acting as a buffer against honor killing. Instead, they are permitting and celebrating these killings, as reported:
Jordanian society not only forgives the killing, it celebrates the killers. In 1998 Sarhan Abdullah murdered his sister because she had been raped—by her brother-in-law, as it turned out. “I shot her with four bullets in the head,” he told the Ottawa Citizen three years later. “I was treated as a hero in prison.” When Sarhan was released after six months, his family gave him a ceremonial sword and he rode home triumphantly on a horse. “My horse was white because I had cleansed my family’s honor.”
So, I ask, either the societies aren’t Islamic, or Islam is no longer an adequate protection for the lives of women. In fact, Islam has become a scourge. Which is it? Since there are many who will ‘protect’ Islam from this ‘merely cultural’ evil (”let’s not mix culture and Islam” they will say), I will say that every Muslim, practicing or not, who in any way stays silent in the face of this evil, is complicit. Therefore, I myself am guilty and I don’t know how to atone.
Frankly, I have no idea how I’ve managed to write even this far. I am disgusted and saddened and I want right now to have nothing to do with Muslims. Why should I agitate with my friends on helping a Jordanian or Pakistani gain asylum to this country when so many of them are bringing these kind of views to us? In this post I have no answers. The only thing I can do is guide you towards other places where you will be able to bury your pain.
The first place is a Jordanian activist who is collecting letters against honor killings. You can email Ms. Khouri here: honourcrimes@lycos.com (I don’t know how old this contact is).
You can also consult the brilliant (and sad) novel — based on a Pakistani love story — set in England. It is by Nadeem Aslam and it is called Maps For Lost Lovers.
Sunday, 3 February 2008
Chad's Future Taliban enters capital while the West is asleep
Chad's Future Taliban enters capital while the West is asleep
By Walid Phares
As Americans are debating who among their candidates for the primaries can best confront the Jihadists or at least preempt their offensives worldwide, future Jihadi forces have in one day invaded an African country (under European protection), a key location for the Darfur forthcoming Peace missions. In less than 12 hours the so-called armed opposition of Chad, crossed the entire country from its Eastern frontiers with Islamist-ruled Sudan to the capital N'Djamena across from Northern Nigeria. The latest reports mention fierce battles around the Presidential Palace and back and forth inside the city. But at this stage the geo-political consequences are crucial for the next stages locally, regionally and internationally. The bottom line is that in one day, what could become the future Taliban of Chad have scored a strategic victory not only against the Government of the country (which was supposed to back up the UN plans to save Darfur in Sudan) but also against the efforts by the African Union and European Union to contain the Sudanese regime and stop the Genocide. Today's offensive, regardless of the next developments, has already changed the geopolitics of Africa. Outmaneuvering the West and Africans, those regimes and forces standing behind the "opposition" have shown that they are restless in their campaign against human rights and self determination on the continent. But even more importantly the events of today shows how unprepared are Europeans and Americans in front of Jihadi regimes which seem weak on the surface but highly able to surprise and crumble Western efforts of containment.
On Saturday February 2, 2008, and as French President Nicolas Sarkozy was getting married in Paris and Americans were shopping for food to enjoy the "super Bowl" on Sunday, Jihadi-backed military forces launched a blitzkrieg across Chad using one thousand 4 X 4 armed trucks. They reached the capital in few hours and started battling the Chadian Army isolating the President in his Palace and declaring victory to the international media. This so-called "opposition" has a Unified "Military Command" and includes: The Union of Forces for Democracy (UFDD) led by Mahamat Nouri, Rally of Forces for Change (RFC) led by Timane Erdimi, and the UFDD-Fundamental led by Abdelwahid Aboud Mackaye. At first sight a non seasoned observer would conclude that this is yet another African troubled country with a bunch of "separatists," "rebels" and "insurgents." In fact it is not that simple. These forces have been backed by the Jihadi regime in Khartoum and some of its funding -according to the Chadian Government- has been sent from Saudi Arabia. At the center of the confrontation is Darfur. This Black Muslim province inside Sudan has been the victim of Genocide at the hands of Arab fundamentalist forces known as the Janjaweed, essentially backed by the regime of Sudan. The people of Darfur have resisted the forced "Arabization" -turned ethnic cleansing- at the hands of the Janjaweed. Both neighboring Chad and the United Nations came to the help of Darfur since 2005. In return, the Salafists and Wahabis of the region came to the support of Sudan's regime against the Africans and the West. France dispatched some military units to Chad and soon a "Eurofor" (European Force) was set under UN auspices to be dispatched on the borders between Chad and Sudan to help the Darfur refugees. The Islamists of Khartoum opposed the international initiative and seems to have enlisted -although discretely- the backing of the Wahabi circles in Saudi Arabia, but also the Syrian and Iranian regimes. Hence the battlefield for Darfur became a fault line between the international community and the strange bed fellows of the Jihadi axis.Using the classical doctrine of Khid'aa (or deception) the Khartoum regime bought as much time as it needed to allow the arming and training of the "rebels" inside Chad. The equipment used by the militias has been obtained in few months and "offices" were opened in several countries in the region. Oil dividends quickly poured on the future Taliban of Chad and their political and media training went very fast. All what the Sudanese regime had to do to abort the forthcoming Darfur UN operations was to collapse the basis from where these operations will be launched: Chad. The question is not about how did the Jihadists figure this out, it is rather how the strategists in Washington and Paris failed to predict it. Although it was very simple: Movements on the ground inside Chad and intense media activity in support on al Jazeera for months projected what was to come. How did the Atlantic allies fail to see the threat gathering is stunning? For Western and international defense systems to dramatically fail to monitor and detect the movement of thousands of armed men crossing an allied country from border to border is alarming. The US has just organized an African Command -backed by the highest technologies worldwide- and the French military have a presence in Faya Largau as well as a jet squadron in the capital ready to scramble. Was there an abandonment? Was there a deal cut on Darfur? We will see. However the most interesting development -along with the militia's blitzkrieg, was the preparedness of the Jihadi propaganda machine. Amazingly, as the "opposition" forces have reached N'Djamena the official minister of what could become the future Taliban regime in Chad, Jibrin Issa was comfortably seated in al Jazeera's studios in Qatar. Obviously he wasn't flown from Africa to the Gulf on the request of the booking Department of the Qatari funded network to "react" to the offensive. He was already at the station -or at least in Qatar-when the offensive began. Very interestingly, the man was wearing a classical Western business outfit and clean shaved. The PR strategy was to show the world, including France and the US, that the forces thrusting into their ally wasn't a sister of the Islamic Courts of Somalia or a Taliban "looking" militia. The game was to project this coup as "domestic" against "corruption" and the rest of the litany, thus boring for average Western public. Issa played the script very well until a point where reality surfaced abruptly. At first, as I was listening to his impeccable Arabic, I was wondering why did he have this Arabian Peninsula accent and utter those mechanical sentences. It was strange to hear an African "minister" of a future regime in Chad speaking excellent Arabic, but I gave it a pass. Until, at the end of his interview he made a troubling mistake. Out of the blue he started to thank the "brave commander of the Islamic Republic of Sudan" General Omar al Bashir (the head of the regime responsible for the Genocide in Darfur) for his help to the "movement" and started to praise his "highness the servant of the two shrines," (that is the Saudi Monarch) for his support (obviously to the movement). Suddenly, and despite the frustration of the al jazeera anchor that the game may have been exposed, I connected the dots. It was indeed a Sudanese-backed operation to change the regime in Chad, and backed by Wahabi circles, as a preemptive move to crumble the forthcoming humanitarian operation in Darfur. The Jihadists, kings of strategies, won another day. To preempt a UN move against one of their regimes (Sudan) they took out the Government which had agreed to help the UN and the West. In my sense this was highly predictable. But the failure of the West to predict is highly questionable. The days ahead may shape or reshape the ground in Chad and the direction of events could lead to more dramatic change in the political landscape in Africa. If Washington and Paris tergiversate, the future Chadian Taliban will consolidate their grip and thrust further into the Sahara. The Darfur operation will be doomed. If the Chadian Army resist and the international community intervene,the status quo ante could be restored.It is also predicted that the "opposition" will work hard on is image. It will try not to show the "Jihadi" identity immediately. Besides, not all components of the "opposition" are Taliban-type. When the opposition settles in the capital, the Islamists will slowly surge and strategically behead their allies a la Afghanistan. It is really too early to tell. For now, Americans are busy watching the game, electing nominees and questioning their candidates as to who has the best "credentials" to win the war on terror. In France the debate is about where will the Presidential couple spend their honeymoon. Let's admit it, the Jihadi strategists are having a blast. One more country has fallen on the way to Constantinople. ******Dr Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He is the author of the best seller Future Jihad and the recent War of Ideas.
February 2, 2008 07:50 PM
By Walid Phares
As Americans are debating who among their candidates for the primaries can best confront the Jihadists or at least preempt their offensives worldwide, future Jihadi forces have in one day invaded an African country (under European protection), a key location for the Darfur forthcoming Peace missions. In less than 12 hours the so-called armed opposition of Chad, crossed the entire country from its Eastern frontiers with Islamist-ruled Sudan to the capital N'Djamena across from Northern Nigeria. The latest reports mention fierce battles around the Presidential Palace and back and forth inside the city. But at this stage the geo-political consequences are crucial for the next stages locally, regionally and internationally. The bottom line is that in one day, what could become the future Taliban of Chad have scored a strategic victory not only against the Government of the country (which was supposed to back up the UN plans to save Darfur in Sudan) but also against the efforts by the African Union and European Union to contain the Sudanese regime and stop the Genocide. Today's offensive, regardless of the next developments, has already changed the geopolitics of Africa. Outmaneuvering the West and Africans, those regimes and forces standing behind the "opposition" have shown that they are restless in their campaign against human rights and self determination on the continent. But even more importantly the events of today shows how unprepared are Europeans and Americans in front of Jihadi regimes which seem weak on the surface but highly able to surprise and crumble Western efforts of containment.
On Saturday February 2, 2008, and as French President Nicolas Sarkozy was getting married in Paris and Americans were shopping for food to enjoy the "super Bowl" on Sunday, Jihadi-backed military forces launched a blitzkrieg across Chad using one thousand 4 X 4 armed trucks. They reached the capital in few hours and started battling the Chadian Army isolating the President in his Palace and declaring victory to the international media. This so-called "opposition" has a Unified "Military Command" and includes: The Union of Forces for Democracy (UFDD) led by Mahamat Nouri, Rally of Forces for Change (RFC) led by Timane Erdimi, and the UFDD-Fundamental led by Abdelwahid Aboud Mackaye. At first sight a non seasoned observer would conclude that this is yet another African troubled country with a bunch of "separatists," "rebels" and "insurgents." In fact it is not that simple. These forces have been backed by the Jihadi regime in Khartoum and some of its funding -according to the Chadian Government- has been sent from Saudi Arabia. At the center of the confrontation is Darfur. This Black Muslim province inside Sudan has been the victim of Genocide at the hands of Arab fundamentalist forces known as the Janjaweed, essentially backed by the regime of Sudan. The people of Darfur have resisted the forced "Arabization" -turned ethnic cleansing- at the hands of the Janjaweed. Both neighboring Chad and the United Nations came to the help of Darfur since 2005. In return, the Salafists and Wahabis of the region came to the support of Sudan's regime against the Africans and the West. France dispatched some military units to Chad and soon a "Eurofor" (European Force) was set under UN auspices to be dispatched on the borders between Chad and Sudan to help the Darfur refugees. The Islamists of Khartoum opposed the international initiative and seems to have enlisted -although discretely- the backing of the Wahabi circles in Saudi Arabia, but also the Syrian and Iranian regimes. Hence the battlefield for Darfur became a fault line between the international community and the strange bed fellows of the Jihadi axis.Using the classical doctrine of Khid'aa (or deception) the Khartoum regime bought as much time as it needed to allow the arming and training of the "rebels" inside Chad. The equipment used by the militias has been obtained in few months and "offices" were opened in several countries in the region. Oil dividends quickly poured on the future Taliban of Chad and their political and media training went very fast. All what the Sudanese regime had to do to abort the forthcoming Darfur UN operations was to collapse the basis from where these operations will be launched: Chad. The question is not about how did the Jihadists figure this out, it is rather how the strategists in Washington and Paris failed to predict it. Although it was very simple: Movements on the ground inside Chad and intense media activity in support on al Jazeera for months projected what was to come. How did the Atlantic allies fail to see the threat gathering is stunning? For Western and international defense systems to dramatically fail to monitor and detect the movement of thousands of armed men crossing an allied country from border to border is alarming. The US has just organized an African Command -backed by the highest technologies worldwide- and the French military have a presence in Faya Largau as well as a jet squadron in the capital ready to scramble. Was there an abandonment? Was there a deal cut on Darfur? We will see. However the most interesting development -along with the militia's blitzkrieg, was the preparedness of the Jihadi propaganda machine. Amazingly, as the "opposition" forces have reached N'Djamena the official minister of what could become the future Taliban regime in Chad, Jibrin Issa was comfortably seated in al Jazeera's studios in Qatar. Obviously he wasn't flown from Africa to the Gulf on the request of the booking Department of the Qatari funded network to "react" to the offensive. He was already at the station -or at least in Qatar-when the offensive began. Very interestingly, the man was wearing a classical Western business outfit and clean shaved. The PR strategy was to show the world, including France and the US, that the forces thrusting into their ally wasn't a sister of the Islamic Courts of Somalia or a Taliban "looking" militia. The game was to project this coup as "domestic" against "corruption" and the rest of the litany, thus boring for average Western public. Issa played the script very well until a point where reality surfaced abruptly. At first, as I was listening to his impeccable Arabic, I was wondering why did he have this Arabian Peninsula accent and utter those mechanical sentences. It was strange to hear an African "minister" of a future regime in Chad speaking excellent Arabic, but I gave it a pass. Until, at the end of his interview he made a troubling mistake. Out of the blue he started to thank the "brave commander of the Islamic Republic of Sudan" General Omar al Bashir (the head of the regime responsible for the Genocide in Darfur) for his help to the "movement" and started to praise his "highness the servant of the two shrines," (that is the Saudi Monarch) for his support (obviously to the movement). Suddenly, and despite the frustration of the al jazeera anchor that the game may have been exposed, I connected the dots. It was indeed a Sudanese-backed operation to change the regime in Chad, and backed by Wahabi circles, as a preemptive move to crumble the forthcoming humanitarian operation in Darfur. The Jihadists, kings of strategies, won another day. To preempt a UN move against one of their regimes (Sudan) they took out the Government which had agreed to help the UN and the West. In my sense this was highly predictable. But the failure of the West to predict is highly questionable. The days ahead may shape or reshape the ground in Chad and the direction of events could lead to more dramatic change in the political landscape in Africa. If Washington and Paris tergiversate, the future Chadian Taliban will consolidate their grip and thrust further into the Sahara. The Darfur operation will be doomed. If the Chadian Army resist and the international community intervene,the status quo ante could be restored.It is also predicted that the "opposition" will work hard on is image. It will try not to show the "Jihadi" identity immediately. Besides, not all components of the "opposition" are Taliban-type. When the opposition settles in the capital, the Islamists will slowly surge and strategically behead their allies a la Afghanistan. It is really too early to tell. For now, Americans are busy watching the game, electing nominees and questioning their candidates as to who has the best "credentials" to win the war on terror. In France the debate is about where will the Presidential couple spend their honeymoon. Let's admit it, the Jihadi strategists are having a blast. One more country has fallen on the way to Constantinople. ******Dr Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He is the author of the best seller Future Jihad and the recent War of Ideas.
February 2, 2008 07:50 PM
The Candidate Who Can See the Enemy, Can Defeat It
The Candidate Who Can See the Enemy, Can Defeat It
by Walid Phares
Posted: 02/01/2008
The post 9/11 era has changed the rules of engagement for national security experts and for those who can read the mind of the Jihadists, when it comes to US Presidential elections. While the principle was that the counter Terrorism community should let the voters chose their candidates and select their chief executive first, then offer the expert advice to the President later, unfortunately for that principle, things have changed.Indeed, since the attacks against New York and Washington and the engagement of the nation in the war with Jihadism since 2001, the selection of the US President can fundamentally affect the survival of the American People. Who would occupy the White House in 2009 will have to make decisions for four to eight years with cataclysmic consequences on the physical security and the freedom of 300 million citizens in this country and eventually on the free world as a whole: For the leader of the most powerful democracy in the world has to be able to know who the enemy is so that all resources are put into action. Short of this ability to be very clear and precise on the nature of the danger and the processes to address it, a next US President could cause a major disaster to this nation. American voters cannot afford to install a man or a woman who can’t identify and define the enemy. If you can’t see that enemy, you simply cannot defeat it.In the 2004 Presidential election, the real choice was not between Parties and socio economic platforms. It was between the option of resuming the war against what was called then “Terrorism,” and the option of retreating from the confrontation. Everything else was decoration. Americans were agonizing on the direction to adopt before their numerical majority resettled President Bush in the White House. Some argued that Americans do not change Presidents during a War. I think that the country was influenced by the two afore mentioned directions and chose one over the other; but at the same time I do think though that an overwhelming majority of voters wasn’t fully informed as to the real stakes. Less than half of the country was told that the war in Iraq was wrong, and that there was no war on terror, and more than half of the country was not even told who the enemy was or what it really wanted.
The 2004 Presidential elections took place in quasi popular ignorance. The sitting -- and fighting -- President was reelected by basic instincts not by enlightened citizens, which if compared to the opposing agenda were a sophisticated choice. In 2008, America is quite different and the outlook of the forthcoming confrontation is by far more dramatic. US forces are still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Jihadists -- of all types, regimes and organizations -- are still committed to reverse democracy in these two countries. The war there is not over rather the greater challenges are yet to begin. Al Qaeda got beaten badly in the Sunni Triangle and in Somalia but a younger generation of Jihadists is being put into battle across the region. Not one single Sunni country will escape the rise of Salafi Terror in the next US Presidential term. Iran’s regime is speeding up its strategic armament, testing American resolve when possible; Syria is surviving its isolation and bleeding our allies in Iraq and Lebanon; Hezbollah is about to seize Lebanon; Hamas has seized Gaza; Turkey’s Islamists are reversing secularism; and Pakistan’s Jihadists are eying the nuclear missiles. But worse, three generations of Jihadists have penetrated the social and defense layers of Western Europe and the United States. In few years from now, the next President may have to witness European cities burned by urban warfare in his (or her) first term, and could be forced to arm the doom day devices for the first time in this century by the following Presidential term. These images from a not so distant future may become the reality to face the leaders we will select in the primaries and the one who will be sitting in the oval office next January. The prospects are really serious. Thus the choice of the best candidate at Party and national levels is not a matter of routine or a regular exercise of US politics. Never as before Americans must scrutinize the agendas of their candidates and find out which platform is the best suited for what is to come, who among them can face off with the lethal enemy, shield the economy, manages the daily lives while building the vital coalitions the world has ever needed? Who can withstand the pressure, understand the nature of the enemy and bring into the decision making posts the men and women who can win the conflict. And it is from a simple reading of these platforms -- as posted and published -- as well as from the public speeches of the candidates that anyone among us can shop around for the best suitable of the candidates. At this point of US and world history, Party, gender, race, and social class affiliations only can’t offer the right choice for the forthcoming Presidential election. At the end it is a personal selection act for each citizen. In democracies and certainly in the United States this year one can make many choices and select the appropriate candidates:1. Decide to withdraw unilaterally from the war and let the next generation struggle with the consequences2. Think that if we mind our business as a nation the world as it exist today will simply comply.3. Commit to continue the confrontation by maintaining the status quo and awaiting for things to get better by themselves4. Engage the enemy deeper, smarter and wider and end the war faster. All depends on how we were educated about the conflict and what is it that we consider priorities in our lives. If we were misinformed about the events that have bled this country and will bring the world into dramatic times, before they recede, we would vote for the candidates who sees no threat to America and who practice politics as if Peace is secure. But if we know where we are in the world we’re living in, we’d look at survival first before we argue about everything else. I am among those who believe -- and see -- that this country (and other democracies) are marked for aggression and Terror. All our concerns about economy, social justice, cultural harmony, wealth, and technological advancement are dramatically pending on the ability of the rising menace to crumble this country’s national security and all what would collapse with that fall. Probably I am among the few who see the clouds gathering around the globe and thus have been urging leaders to act fast, decisively and early on to avoid the future Jihad –that has began already. Had what I see wasn’t there I would be fully excited -- like any citizen -- to argue forcefully about the crucial matters of our existence: health, environment, nutrition, scientific discoveries, animal protection, and why not space exploration. Had I not realized that all that debate was hinging on what Bin laden and Ahmedinijad were preparing, I would have been looking at a whole different roaster of Presidential candidates. But that is not the world I see ahead of us, in the immediate future. Hence, I’ll leave the debate about the best economic and technological directions to their experts and I would postpone the social and philosophical dreams to better times. Right now and right here I am interested in who among the candidates can simply understand the tragic equation we’re in and may be able to use the resources of this nation to cross the bridge ahead of us. President Bush was elected before 9/11 neither on the grounds of avoiding the Jihadi wars nor winning them. Very few even knew that we were already at war. He was reelected on the ground of being a better choice than the defeatist political alternative. This year I suggest that Americans deserve a more daring choice. They need to see and certify that the next occupant of the White House lives on this Planet, at this age, knows that we are at war and above all knows which war we are fighting. The margin of error is too slim to allow hesitations. By 2012 the Jihadists may recruit one million suicide bombers and could align two nuclear powers. By 2016 they would deploy 10 million suicide bombers and seize five regimes equipped with the final weapon. In the next eight years NATO’s European membership could be battling urban intifadas and US task forces lacking shelters worldwide. To avoid these prospects of apocalypse the offices on Pennsylvania Avenue must catch up with the lost opportunities as of next winter.Thus, and unlike traditional commentators in classical US politics I am not looking at who said what and who flipped flopped when. Frankly, it doesn’t matter at this stage if it is a he or a she, of this or other race, of this or other church, and if the President is single, has a large family or has divorced twice. The stakes are much higher than the sweet but irrelevant American usual personality debate. I want to know if the candidates are strong willed, smart, educated about the world, informed about the threat, can define it, can identify it, can fight it, are not duped by their bureaucracy, cannot be influenced by foreign regimes, have the right advisors, can run an economy while commanding a war and still see the threats as they handle daily crisis and take drastic measures as the hard times are approaching. I want to know if the candidates are very specific when they inform their public about the menace. Yes, it is indeed a vital function of national security that we need to insure for the next few years, so that all other issues can be addressed thoroughly. In short I don’t want to see the fall of Constantinople being repeated on these shores in the next decade or two. Humanity will not recover from such a disaster. And that potential hyper drama hinges on the mind and the nerves of the next President of this country. At this stage three men and a woman, all remarkable politicians, are the finalists (or so it seems) for the ultimate job. Their skills are rich, their past and present are colorful, their images are attractive to many and the dreams they inspire are equally powerful: A minority symbol, a successful woman, a war hero and a bright entrepreneur. If there was no Jihadi menace, meaning a different Planet, I would hardly be able to choose. Senator Obama would be an amazing choice to end the wounds of the past. Senator Clinton, as a woman, would break the gender taboo. Senator McCain, as a man who suffered for his country would epitomize the faithfulness of this nation. Governor Romney, the family man and the successful businessman can be the symbol of a hopeful America. As beautiful as these tales can be, my search for the best choice is not as dreamful as the descriptions the candidates inspire, unfortunately. I am looking at the scariest item on any Presidential agenda and check out if they are conscious about it: national security. Here is what I found so far.Senators Obama and Clinton, unlike their colleagues Edwards and Kucinich (before they quit the race) acknowledge that a “war on terror” is on. Both have pledged to pursue al Qaeda relentlessly instead of blaming their country as their mates have stated. Also, Obama and Clinton, to the surprise of their critics have enlisted good counter terrorism experts as advisors. But from there on, the findings gets darker. The Senator from Illinois wants to end the campaign in Iraq abruptly, which would lead to the crumbling of the democratic experiment and a chain of disasters from Afghanistan to Lebanon opening the path for a Khomeinist Jihadi empire accessing the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean: Too many sufferings and devastating results. Obama’s campaign need to radically transform its agenda on world view so that the voices of the oppressed peoples in that part of the world, can be heard. Maybe a trip to Darfur and Beirut can help rethinking his agenda. Unfortunately the latest news from the campaign isn’t encouraging. The Senator wants to shake the hands of Dictator Assad, authoritarian Chavez, apocalyptic Ahmedinijad and perhaps even the Khartoum bullies of Sudan’s Africans. No need for further evidence: such an agenda in the next White House is anathema to the sense of human history. Senator Clinton has a powerful political machine and happens to have enlisted top national security experts in her team. She will commit to stand by Israel and would not visit the oppressors of women in Tehran. But beyond these two red lines her foreign policy agenda (despite the knowledgeable expertise available to her) is (using ironically the words of Obama in other fields) “a bridge back to the twentieth century.” Indeed, the plan is to withdraw from Iraq without defeating the Jihadists, without containing the Iranians and without solidifying Democracy. It is an asphalted path to the Obama pull out, with some decorations and consolation prizes. A retreat from the Middle East will be paved with fabulous commitment not to let Israel down. A commitment which would lose its teeth, once the Pasdarans will be marching through Iraq and Syria and would install Armageddon’s Shahhab missiles in the hands of Hezbollah. On the Senator’s agenda there is no definition of the enemy or commitment to contain it, reverse it or defeat it. There are no policies of solidarity with oppressed peoples and there is no alliance with the democratic forces of the region. Mrs Clinton won’t befriend Ahmedinijad but it would let him -- and other Islamists -- crush her own gender across the continents. But more important perhaps, from an American perspective would the crisis to expect in Homeland Security if one or the other agendas advanced by the two Senators would enter the White House. If no drastic reforms would take place within their projected policies of non confrontation of Jihadism, an army of experts, activists and lobbyists is expected to invade all levels of national security and reinstall the pre 9/11 attitudes. In short Jihadophilia would prevail, even without the knowledge or the consent of that future White House. It already happened in the 1990s and led to what we know. The reading of political genomes has no margin for error. The electoral platforms of the two Senators are enemy-definition-free. Not identifying the enemy is equal to not defining the threat. Thus, and unless the good advisors rush to fill that gap before the national election, Democratic voters will lack their chance to bring in a solid defender of the nation. On the other side of the spectrum, Republicans are struggling with a different choice, nonetheless as challenging and with long term consequences. Aside from Congressman’s Paul isolationist program which calls for striking deals with bloody dictatorships, disengaging from any containment of Jihadi threats, abandoning peoples in jeopardy, and giving free ride to penetration and infiltration within the US homeland (all clearly and unequivocally stated in the open); aside from this anomalistic agenda, all other platforms had a minimum baggage of resistance to Terror forces, each one with a different rhetoric. McCain, Romney, Huckabee, as well as Giuliani and Thompson (before they pulled out) were all ready to engage battle with “the” enemy, pursue the so-called War on Terror and agreed on fighting al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their agendas attempted to define the threat, leaping ahead of their competitors on the other side of the aisle. Their statements and posted documents are irrefutable evidence that if they gain the White House there would neither surrender the country to domestic infiltration nor they would disengage from the confrontation overseas. On this ground alone, and unless the Democratic contenders and their final nominee change their counter Terrorism approach (which is not that likely), the final choice American voters will have to make -- on national security -- will be dramatically different and irreversibly full of consequences. But at this stage of the primaries the grand choices seems to have to be made by Republicans. Indeed, in what I consider the single most important ingredient in the War with Jihadism, the identification of the threat is at the heart of the success or the failure. All four leading Republican candidates were equal in fingering what they perceived as the enemy: They called it “radical Islam” and gave it different attributes, “Islamo-fascism,” “extremist Islamism,” “Islamic terrorism,” and other similar descriptions. In that regard they are at the opposite end of their Democratic contenders. But in my analysis, after more than 25 years of study and observations of the phenomenon, and seven years after 9/11, the term “radical Islam” is not enough when a US President (or other world leaders) wants to define the danger and build strategies against it: Without delving into the deeper layers of academic research (at least not in this article), the term used outside a doctrine is too general, doesn’t pin down the actual forces acting against democracies and can be easily overturned and manipulated by skilled operatives in the War of ideas. So, the slogan of “Radical Islam” could be a linguistic indicator to the direction from where the menace is coming from, but falls short of catching the actual threat doctrine: Jihadism. Hence in my judgment those candidates who take the ideological battle lightly are not equipped as those who have done their homework fully and offered the voters, and perhaps the public, a comprehensive doctrine on counter Jihadism. We’re not dealing with semantics here, but with keys to unlock the stagnation in the current conflict. Short of having a future President who knows exactly who the enemy is, how does it think, and how to defeat it, the conflict cannot be won. There can be no guesses, no broad drawings, no general directions, no colorful slogans, and no good intentions alone. This next President has to understand the Jihadist ideology by himself (herself as well) and not rely on advisors to place descriptions in the speeches, and change them at the wish of lobbyists. This nuance in understanding the threat and in articulating the rhetoric has gigantic consequences. All strategies related to fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in Iraq and within the West, and related to containing Khomeinist power in the region and beyond emanates from a US understanding of their ideologies, key elements of the foes global strategies. Hence when I examine the agendas of the Republican candidates and analyze their speeches I look at indicators showing the comprehension of the bigger picture. All four leaders, McCain, Romney, Giuliani and Huckabee have developed common instincts as to where it is coming from; but that is not enough. Americans need to see and know that their future President can man sophisticated rhetoric, is ready to go on the offensive, and move against the enemy before the latter jumps at American and allies targets. Being just tough and willing to strike back heavily is not anymore an acceptable threshold. We need the next President to be aware of what the other side is preparing, preempt it and do it faster than any predecessor. The next stage in this war is not about sitting in the trenches and increasing the level of troops wherever we currently are. It will be about moving swiftly and sometimes stealthily and reaching the production structure of the enemy. And to do this, our projected leaders need to identify and define the threat doctrine and design a counter doctrine, a matter the US Government has failed to achieve in the first seven years of the war.The two leading contenders on the Republican side, McCain and Romney, both recognize that there is an enemy, are committed to defeat it, but identify it in different intensities. Senator McCain says it is “Radical Islam,” and pledges to increase the current level of involvement. On Iraq, the former Navy Pilot says he will continue to fight till there are no more enemies to fight. To me that is a trenches battlefield: We’ll pound them till they have no more trenches. Governor Romney says the enemy is Global Jihadism, and it has more than the one battlefield of Iraq. And because the Jihadists are in control of regimes, interests and omnipresent in the region and worldwide, the US counter strategies cannot and should not be limited to “entrenchment” but to counter attacks, preemptive moves and putting allies forces on the existing and new battlefields. Besides not all confrontations have to be militarily. The difference in wording between the general term “radical Islam” and the focused threat doctrine “Jihadism” says it all. One leads to concentrate one type of power in one place, regardless of what the enemy is and wants to do, and the other concept lead to pinch the foe from many places on multiple levels and decide over the ending process of the conflict. I am sure Senator McCain can follow the same reasoning and catch up with the geopolitics of the enemy but so far Governor Romney has readied himself better in the realm of strategizing the defeat this enemy. The next stage of the war has to do with a mind battle with the Jihadists. The latter aren’t a just a bunch of Barbarians set to bloodshed. They have a very advanced strategy, projecting for decades, and they are ready to confront our next President and defeat the United States. This is why I have come to the conclusion that -based on what was provided to the public by the four leading candidates- Governor Romney has the capacity of managing the counter strategies against the Jihadists, only because he stated to the public that he sees the enemy as to who they are. And if a President can see them, he can defeat them. His Republican contender, now leading the polls, can sense them but haven’t shown them. The leading candidates on the other side are making progress in the opposite direction: One wants to end the War unilaterally and the other wants to make Peace with the oppressors. In short, if elected, Romney will try to destroy the mother ship, McCain will supply the trenches, Clinton will pull the troops back to the barracks and Obama will visit the foes’ bunkers. Hence, as is, I have recommended Governor Romney for the Republican Primaries as first among equals while considering Senator McCain as a genuine leader. If Romney is selected I believe America may have a chance to try new strategies. If his contender is selected, we will have four or eight more years of the past seven years. On the other side, I have suggested to counter-Terrorism experts to help Democratic candidates restructure their agendas on national security in line with the reality of the enemy: For I would like to see both Parties presenting a united vision of the threat while differing on how to confront it. That would be the ideal situation America can be in and a response to the deepest will of the American public. (PS: This analysis represents my personal views and not the views or position of any of the NGOs I am affiliated with.)
Dr Walid Phares, author of Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America, of The war of Ideas: Jihadism against democracy and of the forthcoming book, The Confrontation.
by Walid Phares
Posted: 02/01/2008
The post 9/11 era has changed the rules of engagement for national security experts and for those who can read the mind of the Jihadists, when it comes to US Presidential elections. While the principle was that the counter Terrorism community should let the voters chose their candidates and select their chief executive first, then offer the expert advice to the President later, unfortunately for that principle, things have changed.Indeed, since the attacks against New York and Washington and the engagement of the nation in the war with Jihadism since 2001, the selection of the US President can fundamentally affect the survival of the American People. Who would occupy the White House in 2009 will have to make decisions for four to eight years with cataclysmic consequences on the physical security and the freedom of 300 million citizens in this country and eventually on the free world as a whole: For the leader of the most powerful democracy in the world has to be able to know who the enemy is so that all resources are put into action. Short of this ability to be very clear and precise on the nature of the danger and the processes to address it, a next US President could cause a major disaster to this nation. American voters cannot afford to install a man or a woman who can’t identify and define the enemy. If you can’t see that enemy, you simply cannot defeat it.In the 2004 Presidential election, the real choice was not between Parties and socio economic platforms. It was between the option of resuming the war against what was called then “Terrorism,” and the option of retreating from the confrontation. Everything else was decoration. Americans were agonizing on the direction to adopt before their numerical majority resettled President Bush in the White House. Some argued that Americans do not change Presidents during a War. I think that the country was influenced by the two afore mentioned directions and chose one over the other; but at the same time I do think though that an overwhelming majority of voters wasn’t fully informed as to the real stakes. Less than half of the country was told that the war in Iraq was wrong, and that there was no war on terror, and more than half of the country was not even told who the enemy was or what it really wanted.
The 2004 Presidential elections took place in quasi popular ignorance. The sitting -- and fighting -- President was reelected by basic instincts not by enlightened citizens, which if compared to the opposing agenda were a sophisticated choice. In 2008, America is quite different and the outlook of the forthcoming confrontation is by far more dramatic. US forces are still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Jihadists -- of all types, regimes and organizations -- are still committed to reverse democracy in these two countries. The war there is not over rather the greater challenges are yet to begin. Al Qaeda got beaten badly in the Sunni Triangle and in Somalia but a younger generation of Jihadists is being put into battle across the region. Not one single Sunni country will escape the rise of Salafi Terror in the next US Presidential term. Iran’s regime is speeding up its strategic armament, testing American resolve when possible; Syria is surviving its isolation and bleeding our allies in Iraq and Lebanon; Hezbollah is about to seize Lebanon; Hamas has seized Gaza; Turkey’s Islamists are reversing secularism; and Pakistan’s Jihadists are eying the nuclear missiles. But worse, three generations of Jihadists have penetrated the social and defense layers of Western Europe and the United States. In few years from now, the next President may have to witness European cities burned by urban warfare in his (or her) first term, and could be forced to arm the doom day devices for the first time in this century by the following Presidential term. These images from a not so distant future may become the reality to face the leaders we will select in the primaries and the one who will be sitting in the oval office next January. The prospects are really serious. Thus the choice of the best candidate at Party and national levels is not a matter of routine or a regular exercise of US politics. Never as before Americans must scrutinize the agendas of their candidates and find out which platform is the best suited for what is to come, who among them can face off with the lethal enemy, shield the economy, manages the daily lives while building the vital coalitions the world has ever needed? Who can withstand the pressure, understand the nature of the enemy and bring into the decision making posts the men and women who can win the conflict. And it is from a simple reading of these platforms -- as posted and published -- as well as from the public speeches of the candidates that anyone among us can shop around for the best suitable of the candidates. At this point of US and world history, Party, gender, race, and social class affiliations only can’t offer the right choice for the forthcoming Presidential election. At the end it is a personal selection act for each citizen. In democracies and certainly in the United States this year one can make many choices and select the appropriate candidates:1. Decide to withdraw unilaterally from the war and let the next generation struggle with the consequences2. Think that if we mind our business as a nation the world as it exist today will simply comply.3. Commit to continue the confrontation by maintaining the status quo and awaiting for things to get better by themselves4. Engage the enemy deeper, smarter and wider and end the war faster. All depends on how we were educated about the conflict and what is it that we consider priorities in our lives. If we were misinformed about the events that have bled this country and will bring the world into dramatic times, before they recede, we would vote for the candidates who sees no threat to America and who practice politics as if Peace is secure. But if we know where we are in the world we’re living in, we’d look at survival first before we argue about everything else. I am among those who believe -- and see -- that this country (and other democracies) are marked for aggression and Terror. All our concerns about economy, social justice, cultural harmony, wealth, and technological advancement are dramatically pending on the ability of the rising menace to crumble this country’s national security and all what would collapse with that fall. Probably I am among the few who see the clouds gathering around the globe and thus have been urging leaders to act fast, decisively and early on to avoid the future Jihad –that has began already. Had what I see wasn’t there I would be fully excited -- like any citizen -- to argue forcefully about the crucial matters of our existence: health, environment, nutrition, scientific discoveries, animal protection, and why not space exploration. Had I not realized that all that debate was hinging on what Bin laden and Ahmedinijad were preparing, I would have been looking at a whole different roaster of Presidential candidates. But that is not the world I see ahead of us, in the immediate future. Hence, I’ll leave the debate about the best economic and technological directions to their experts and I would postpone the social and philosophical dreams to better times. Right now and right here I am interested in who among the candidates can simply understand the tragic equation we’re in and may be able to use the resources of this nation to cross the bridge ahead of us. President Bush was elected before 9/11 neither on the grounds of avoiding the Jihadi wars nor winning them. Very few even knew that we were already at war. He was reelected on the ground of being a better choice than the defeatist political alternative. This year I suggest that Americans deserve a more daring choice. They need to see and certify that the next occupant of the White House lives on this Planet, at this age, knows that we are at war and above all knows which war we are fighting. The margin of error is too slim to allow hesitations. By 2012 the Jihadists may recruit one million suicide bombers and could align two nuclear powers. By 2016 they would deploy 10 million suicide bombers and seize five regimes equipped with the final weapon. In the next eight years NATO’s European membership could be battling urban intifadas and US task forces lacking shelters worldwide. To avoid these prospects of apocalypse the offices on Pennsylvania Avenue must catch up with the lost opportunities as of next winter.Thus, and unlike traditional commentators in classical US politics I am not looking at who said what and who flipped flopped when. Frankly, it doesn’t matter at this stage if it is a he or a she, of this or other race, of this or other church, and if the President is single, has a large family or has divorced twice. The stakes are much higher than the sweet but irrelevant American usual personality debate. I want to know if the candidates are strong willed, smart, educated about the world, informed about the threat, can define it, can identify it, can fight it, are not duped by their bureaucracy, cannot be influenced by foreign regimes, have the right advisors, can run an economy while commanding a war and still see the threats as they handle daily crisis and take drastic measures as the hard times are approaching. I want to know if the candidates are very specific when they inform their public about the menace. Yes, it is indeed a vital function of national security that we need to insure for the next few years, so that all other issues can be addressed thoroughly. In short I don’t want to see the fall of Constantinople being repeated on these shores in the next decade or two. Humanity will not recover from such a disaster. And that potential hyper drama hinges on the mind and the nerves of the next President of this country. At this stage three men and a woman, all remarkable politicians, are the finalists (or so it seems) for the ultimate job. Their skills are rich, their past and present are colorful, their images are attractive to many and the dreams they inspire are equally powerful: A minority symbol, a successful woman, a war hero and a bright entrepreneur. If there was no Jihadi menace, meaning a different Planet, I would hardly be able to choose. Senator Obama would be an amazing choice to end the wounds of the past. Senator Clinton, as a woman, would break the gender taboo. Senator McCain, as a man who suffered for his country would epitomize the faithfulness of this nation. Governor Romney, the family man and the successful businessman can be the symbol of a hopeful America. As beautiful as these tales can be, my search for the best choice is not as dreamful as the descriptions the candidates inspire, unfortunately. I am looking at the scariest item on any Presidential agenda and check out if they are conscious about it: national security. Here is what I found so far.Senators Obama and Clinton, unlike their colleagues Edwards and Kucinich (before they quit the race) acknowledge that a “war on terror” is on. Both have pledged to pursue al Qaeda relentlessly instead of blaming their country as their mates have stated. Also, Obama and Clinton, to the surprise of their critics have enlisted good counter terrorism experts as advisors. But from there on, the findings gets darker. The Senator from Illinois wants to end the campaign in Iraq abruptly, which would lead to the crumbling of the democratic experiment and a chain of disasters from Afghanistan to Lebanon opening the path for a Khomeinist Jihadi empire accessing the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean: Too many sufferings and devastating results. Obama’s campaign need to radically transform its agenda on world view so that the voices of the oppressed peoples in that part of the world, can be heard. Maybe a trip to Darfur and Beirut can help rethinking his agenda. Unfortunately the latest news from the campaign isn’t encouraging. The Senator wants to shake the hands of Dictator Assad, authoritarian Chavez, apocalyptic Ahmedinijad and perhaps even the Khartoum bullies of Sudan’s Africans. No need for further evidence: such an agenda in the next White House is anathema to the sense of human history. Senator Clinton has a powerful political machine and happens to have enlisted top national security experts in her team. She will commit to stand by Israel and would not visit the oppressors of women in Tehran. But beyond these two red lines her foreign policy agenda (despite the knowledgeable expertise available to her) is (using ironically the words of Obama in other fields) “a bridge back to the twentieth century.” Indeed, the plan is to withdraw from Iraq without defeating the Jihadists, without containing the Iranians and without solidifying Democracy. It is an asphalted path to the Obama pull out, with some decorations and consolation prizes. A retreat from the Middle East will be paved with fabulous commitment not to let Israel down. A commitment which would lose its teeth, once the Pasdarans will be marching through Iraq and Syria and would install Armageddon’s Shahhab missiles in the hands of Hezbollah. On the Senator’s agenda there is no definition of the enemy or commitment to contain it, reverse it or defeat it. There are no policies of solidarity with oppressed peoples and there is no alliance with the democratic forces of the region. Mrs Clinton won’t befriend Ahmedinijad but it would let him -- and other Islamists -- crush her own gender across the continents. But more important perhaps, from an American perspective would the crisis to expect in Homeland Security if one or the other agendas advanced by the two Senators would enter the White House. If no drastic reforms would take place within their projected policies of non confrontation of Jihadism, an army of experts, activists and lobbyists is expected to invade all levels of national security and reinstall the pre 9/11 attitudes. In short Jihadophilia would prevail, even without the knowledge or the consent of that future White House. It already happened in the 1990s and led to what we know. The reading of political genomes has no margin for error. The electoral platforms of the two Senators are enemy-definition-free. Not identifying the enemy is equal to not defining the threat. Thus, and unless the good advisors rush to fill that gap before the national election, Democratic voters will lack their chance to bring in a solid defender of the nation. On the other side of the spectrum, Republicans are struggling with a different choice, nonetheless as challenging and with long term consequences. Aside from Congressman’s Paul isolationist program which calls for striking deals with bloody dictatorships, disengaging from any containment of Jihadi threats, abandoning peoples in jeopardy, and giving free ride to penetration and infiltration within the US homeland (all clearly and unequivocally stated in the open); aside from this anomalistic agenda, all other platforms had a minimum baggage of resistance to Terror forces, each one with a different rhetoric. McCain, Romney, Huckabee, as well as Giuliani and Thompson (before they pulled out) were all ready to engage battle with “the” enemy, pursue the so-called War on Terror and agreed on fighting al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their agendas attempted to define the threat, leaping ahead of their competitors on the other side of the aisle. Their statements and posted documents are irrefutable evidence that if they gain the White House there would neither surrender the country to domestic infiltration nor they would disengage from the confrontation overseas. On this ground alone, and unless the Democratic contenders and their final nominee change their counter Terrorism approach (which is not that likely), the final choice American voters will have to make -- on national security -- will be dramatically different and irreversibly full of consequences. But at this stage of the primaries the grand choices seems to have to be made by Republicans. Indeed, in what I consider the single most important ingredient in the War with Jihadism, the identification of the threat is at the heart of the success or the failure. All four leading Republican candidates were equal in fingering what they perceived as the enemy: They called it “radical Islam” and gave it different attributes, “Islamo-fascism,” “extremist Islamism,” “Islamic terrorism,” and other similar descriptions. In that regard they are at the opposite end of their Democratic contenders. But in my analysis, after more than 25 years of study and observations of the phenomenon, and seven years after 9/11, the term “radical Islam” is not enough when a US President (or other world leaders) wants to define the danger and build strategies against it: Without delving into the deeper layers of academic research (at least not in this article), the term used outside a doctrine is too general, doesn’t pin down the actual forces acting against democracies and can be easily overturned and manipulated by skilled operatives in the War of ideas. So, the slogan of “Radical Islam” could be a linguistic indicator to the direction from where the menace is coming from, but falls short of catching the actual threat doctrine: Jihadism. Hence in my judgment those candidates who take the ideological battle lightly are not equipped as those who have done their homework fully and offered the voters, and perhaps the public, a comprehensive doctrine on counter Jihadism. We’re not dealing with semantics here, but with keys to unlock the stagnation in the current conflict. Short of having a future President who knows exactly who the enemy is, how does it think, and how to defeat it, the conflict cannot be won. There can be no guesses, no broad drawings, no general directions, no colorful slogans, and no good intentions alone. This next President has to understand the Jihadist ideology by himself (herself as well) and not rely on advisors to place descriptions in the speeches, and change them at the wish of lobbyists. This nuance in understanding the threat and in articulating the rhetoric has gigantic consequences. All strategies related to fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in Iraq and within the West, and related to containing Khomeinist power in the region and beyond emanates from a US understanding of their ideologies, key elements of the foes global strategies. Hence when I examine the agendas of the Republican candidates and analyze their speeches I look at indicators showing the comprehension of the bigger picture. All four leaders, McCain, Romney, Giuliani and Huckabee have developed common instincts as to where it is coming from; but that is not enough. Americans need to see and know that their future President can man sophisticated rhetoric, is ready to go on the offensive, and move against the enemy before the latter jumps at American and allies targets. Being just tough and willing to strike back heavily is not anymore an acceptable threshold. We need the next President to be aware of what the other side is preparing, preempt it and do it faster than any predecessor. The next stage in this war is not about sitting in the trenches and increasing the level of troops wherever we currently are. It will be about moving swiftly and sometimes stealthily and reaching the production structure of the enemy. And to do this, our projected leaders need to identify and define the threat doctrine and design a counter doctrine, a matter the US Government has failed to achieve in the first seven years of the war.The two leading contenders on the Republican side, McCain and Romney, both recognize that there is an enemy, are committed to defeat it, but identify it in different intensities. Senator McCain says it is “Radical Islam,” and pledges to increase the current level of involvement. On Iraq, the former Navy Pilot says he will continue to fight till there are no more enemies to fight. To me that is a trenches battlefield: We’ll pound them till they have no more trenches. Governor Romney says the enemy is Global Jihadism, and it has more than the one battlefield of Iraq. And because the Jihadists are in control of regimes, interests and omnipresent in the region and worldwide, the US counter strategies cannot and should not be limited to “entrenchment” but to counter attacks, preemptive moves and putting allies forces on the existing and new battlefields. Besides not all confrontations have to be militarily. The difference in wording between the general term “radical Islam” and the focused threat doctrine “Jihadism” says it all. One leads to concentrate one type of power in one place, regardless of what the enemy is and wants to do, and the other concept lead to pinch the foe from many places on multiple levels and decide over the ending process of the conflict. I am sure Senator McCain can follow the same reasoning and catch up with the geopolitics of the enemy but so far Governor Romney has readied himself better in the realm of strategizing the defeat this enemy. The next stage of the war has to do with a mind battle with the Jihadists. The latter aren’t a just a bunch of Barbarians set to bloodshed. They have a very advanced strategy, projecting for decades, and they are ready to confront our next President and defeat the United States. This is why I have come to the conclusion that -based on what was provided to the public by the four leading candidates- Governor Romney has the capacity of managing the counter strategies against the Jihadists, only because he stated to the public that he sees the enemy as to who they are. And if a President can see them, he can defeat them. His Republican contender, now leading the polls, can sense them but haven’t shown them. The leading candidates on the other side are making progress in the opposite direction: One wants to end the War unilaterally and the other wants to make Peace with the oppressors. In short, if elected, Romney will try to destroy the mother ship, McCain will supply the trenches, Clinton will pull the troops back to the barracks and Obama will visit the foes’ bunkers. Hence, as is, I have recommended Governor Romney for the Republican Primaries as first among equals while considering Senator McCain as a genuine leader. If Romney is selected I believe America may have a chance to try new strategies. If his contender is selected, we will have four or eight more years of the past seven years. On the other side, I have suggested to counter-Terrorism experts to help Democratic candidates restructure their agendas on national security in line with the reality of the enemy: For I would like to see both Parties presenting a united vision of the threat while differing on how to confront it. That would be the ideal situation America can be in and a response to the deepest will of the American public. (PS: This analysis represents my personal views and not the views or position of any of the NGOs I am affiliated with.)
Dr Walid Phares, author of Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America, of The war of Ideas: Jihadism against democracy and of the forthcoming book, The Confrontation.
Friday, 1 February 2008
lefties are not totally morons; well a little bit though
Europe may be disappointed, whoever wins the US electionBy Joschka Fischer Commentary by Saturday, February 02, 2008
Deeply frustrated by the Bush administration's policies, many people and governments in Europe hope for a fundamental change in American foreign policy after the upcoming presidential election. But it would take a medium-sized political miracle for these hopes not to be disappointed, and such a miracle will not happen - whoever is elected.
The Bush administration made numerous foreign-policy blunders with far-reaching consequences. But Bush neither invented American unilateralism nor triggered the trans-Atlantic rift between the United States and Europe. To be sure, Bush reinforced both trends, but their real causes lie in objective historical factors, namely America's being the sole world power since 1989 and Europe's self-inflicted weakness. As long as America remains the sole world power, the next American president will be neither able nor willing to change the basic framework of America's foreign policy.
It will, of course, be important who wins the presidency: a candidate expected to continue Bush's foreign policy or someone ready for a new beginning. In the former case, the trans-Atlantic rift will deepen dramatically. Four, or even eight, more years of US policy a la Bush would inflict such damage on the substance of the trans-Atlantic alliance as to threaten its very existence.
But if America's next president is committed to a new direction, US foreign policy might again become more multilateral, more focused on international institutions and alliances, and willing to bring the relationship between military force and diplomacy back to within its historical proportions. That is the good news.
The bad news is that, even under such auspicious conditions, the US, as a world power, will not relinquish its "free-hand" policy or forget its strength and its claim to pre-eminence among nations.
Another piece of bad (or good?) news is that a more multilateral American policy will increase the pressure on Europeans to take on more responsibility for international crisis management and conflict resolution - in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Transcaucasia, and Russia, and with respect to Turkey's future. To this common agenda, the Europeans should add Africa, climate change, and reform of the United Nations and the world trading system.
For a long time, Europe has underestimated its weight and importance. Europe's geopolitical, economic and social weight is quite obvious. But Europe's integration of sovereign states' interests by means of common institutions could also be an example for much of the world.
In particular, the way Europe, in the process of its enlargement, has projected its power to achieve lasting peace across the whole continent, and fostered development by integrating entire economies, states and societies within its institutional framework, could become a model for shaping a cooperative world order in the 21st century.
This modern, progressive, and peaceful model is unique and superior to all other currently available approaches to the fundamental questions of political order.
But could doesn't mean will. Europe's global influence is feeble because of its internal quarrels and lack of unity, which render the European Union weak and limit its ability to act. Objectively strong, subjectively infirm - that is how the EU's present condition can be described.
The current moment of American weakness coincides with a substantially changed international political environment, defined largely by the limits of US power, Europe's ineffectiveness, and the emergence of new global giants like China and India. In light of these developments, does it still make sense to speak of "the West"? It does, more than ever, because the rift between Europe and America leaves both sides substantially weaker in global terms.
The unilateral overstretching of American power offers a chance for a new beginning in US-European relations. America, more than in the past, will depend on strong partners and will seek such partnerships.
So what are the Europeans waiting for? Why not start now to overcome the traditional tension between NATO and the EU - especially as French policy toward NATO under President Nicolas Sarkozy has been moving in the right direction? A regular mutual presence of the secretary general of NATO and of the head of EU foreign policy in the councils of both organizations doesn't require much time and effort.
Why not initiate EU-US consultations at a high political level (with the secretary-general of NATO participating in security matters) - for instance, by inviting the US secretary of state and other members of the administration, such as the treasury secretary or the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to sit several times a year on the appropriate EU Council meetings? Why not have routine annual meetings between the European Council and the US president?
Periodic meetings between the appropriate committees of the US Congress and the European Parliament would also be of great importance, as ultimately both bodies will have to ratify any international treaties. The fate of the Kyoto Protocol should be a lesson to all parties involved. No such US-EU consultations would require any new agreements, so they could start without any further preliminaries.
There is one certainty that Europeans can take home from the US election campaign even today: with a more multilaterally oriented US foreign policy, Europe won't be riding comfortably in the US world-political slipstream much longer. And that is a good thing. The new trans-Atlantic formula must be greater say in decision-making in exchange for a greater share of responsibility.
Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, led
Germany's Green Party for nearly 20 years.
Deeply frustrated by the Bush administration's policies, many people and governments in Europe hope for a fundamental change in American foreign policy after the upcoming presidential election. But it would take a medium-sized political miracle for these hopes not to be disappointed, and such a miracle will not happen - whoever is elected.
The Bush administration made numerous foreign-policy blunders with far-reaching consequences. But Bush neither invented American unilateralism nor triggered the trans-Atlantic rift between the United States and Europe. To be sure, Bush reinforced both trends, but their real causes lie in objective historical factors, namely America's being the sole world power since 1989 and Europe's self-inflicted weakness. As long as America remains the sole world power, the next American president will be neither able nor willing to change the basic framework of America's foreign policy.
It will, of course, be important who wins the presidency: a candidate expected to continue Bush's foreign policy or someone ready for a new beginning. In the former case, the trans-Atlantic rift will deepen dramatically. Four, or even eight, more years of US policy a la Bush would inflict such damage on the substance of the trans-Atlantic alliance as to threaten its very existence.
But if America's next president is committed to a new direction, US foreign policy might again become more multilateral, more focused on international institutions and alliances, and willing to bring the relationship between military force and diplomacy back to within its historical proportions. That is the good news.
The bad news is that, even under such auspicious conditions, the US, as a world power, will not relinquish its "free-hand" policy or forget its strength and its claim to pre-eminence among nations.
Another piece of bad (or good?) news is that a more multilateral American policy will increase the pressure on Europeans to take on more responsibility for international crisis management and conflict resolution - in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Transcaucasia, and Russia, and with respect to Turkey's future. To this common agenda, the Europeans should add Africa, climate change, and reform of the United Nations and the world trading system.
For a long time, Europe has underestimated its weight and importance. Europe's geopolitical, economic and social weight is quite obvious. But Europe's integration of sovereign states' interests by means of common institutions could also be an example for much of the world.
In particular, the way Europe, in the process of its enlargement, has projected its power to achieve lasting peace across the whole continent, and fostered development by integrating entire economies, states and societies within its institutional framework, could become a model for shaping a cooperative world order in the 21st century.
This modern, progressive, and peaceful model is unique and superior to all other currently available approaches to the fundamental questions of political order.
But could doesn't mean will. Europe's global influence is feeble because of its internal quarrels and lack of unity, which render the European Union weak and limit its ability to act. Objectively strong, subjectively infirm - that is how the EU's present condition can be described.
The current moment of American weakness coincides with a substantially changed international political environment, defined largely by the limits of US power, Europe's ineffectiveness, and the emergence of new global giants like China and India. In light of these developments, does it still make sense to speak of "the West"? It does, more than ever, because the rift between Europe and America leaves both sides substantially weaker in global terms.
The unilateral overstretching of American power offers a chance for a new beginning in US-European relations. America, more than in the past, will depend on strong partners and will seek such partnerships.
So what are the Europeans waiting for? Why not start now to overcome the traditional tension between NATO and the EU - especially as French policy toward NATO under President Nicolas Sarkozy has been moving in the right direction? A regular mutual presence of the secretary general of NATO and of the head of EU foreign policy in the councils of both organizations doesn't require much time and effort.
Why not initiate EU-US consultations at a high political level (with the secretary-general of NATO participating in security matters) - for instance, by inviting the US secretary of state and other members of the administration, such as the treasury secretary or the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to sit several times a year on the appropriate EU Council meetings? Why not have routine annual meetings between the European Council and the US president?
Periodic meetings between the appropriate committees of the US Congress and the European Parliament would also be of great importance, as ultimately both bodies will have to ratify any international treaties. The fate of the Kyoto Protocol should be a lesson to all parties involved. No such US-EU consultations would require any new agreements, so they could start without any further preliminaries.
There is one certainty that Europeans can take home from the US election campaign even today: with a more multilaterally oriented US foreign policy, Europe won't be riding comfortably in the US world-political slipstream much longer. And that is a good thing. The new trans-Atlantic formula must be greater say in decision-making in exchange for a greater share of responsibility.
Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, led
Germany's Green Party for nearly 20 years.
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