Arab News Blog

I received some snarky message after the Shahzad attempted bombing in Times Square, asking if I were still standing behind the idea of Islam as a religion of peace. It was a stupid comment. Classical Islamic law forbids murder and forbids terrorism, and it forbids aggression. Whether that makes it a religion of peace is a matter for debate; it isn’t my diction. Medieval Islam, like medieval and even modern Christianity (cf. the Portuguese and Spanish Empires’ ‘God, glory and gold’), was used as an imperial ideology, sometimes for conquest states– but that use of it was contrary to the verses of the Qur’an instructing believers not to commit aggression and to agree to peace treaties with others who seek them.

But in any case, no contemporary Muslim-majority country I can think of would launch a war of naked aggression purely on an Islamic basis. In fact, few wars of naked aggression have been initiated by Muslim-majority countries in the past few decades. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 was an act of aggression on a self-proclaimed Islamic state by a secular Arab nationalist one, and premised on Arab nationalism, not Islam. Violence in the Levant is usually at least framed as a response to Israeli aggression. The issue of Morocco in the Western Sahara is national and territorial, and both parties are Muslim.

That is, few self-consciously “Islamic” polities have behaved as illegally and wrongly as did George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq on false pretenses and in the absence of an attack by Iraq on the US.

The people who say that “Islam” authorizes aggressive violence are a fringe of cultists and typically non-state actors. Those kind of people, you have in any society. The Hutaree in Michigan are a Christian sect that allegedly makes similar assertions. And you have the Christian fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

So the snarky question was a stupid and uninformed question. But it looks even stupider in the light of the revelation that it was a Senegalese Muslim, Alioune Niass, who discovered the smoking SUV in Times Square and urged a friend to call 911. That is, New Yorkers were saved from that bombing by a Muslim. See this MPAC article. (MPAC is a really great group and non-Muslims worried about bigotry against Muslims really should join it (membership link here).

Niass was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, which noted that he got no recognition for his heroism.

And, the snarky question would look even more stupid in light of the announcement by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander in charge of the Greater Middle East and of the struggle against the Pakistani Taliban that Shahzad acted as a lone wolf, not as part of an organized plot. Shahzad is a Pashtun from an elite family (his father had been the equivalent of a two-star general in the Pakistani air force). He had not been a student activist of the Jamaat-i Islami, the fundamentalist party in Pakistan. If he did plot the bombing, he is as likely to have been motivated by Pashtun nationalism as Islam. Pashtuns are an ethnic group in northwest Pakistan, and often feel disadvantaged by the policies of the Punjabi-dominated central government in Islamabad. Even nationalist Pashtuns like the Awami National Party, which now rules the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) initially objected to Pakistani military attacks on Pashtun Pakistani Taliban because of ethnic solidarity, not religious.

And, everybody in Pakistan is upset by the continued US Predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil by covert operatives and sometimes by Blackwater-Xe contractors. (President Obama unwisely joked about the Predators last Saturday; it is not a joking matter in Pakistan). I have long worried about the unforeseen consequences of the Predator strikes, which are illegal in international law and done as a covert operation and so outside the US democratic framework. None of this in any way excuses the bloody-minded terrorism plot against civilians in Times Square. But to simple-mindedly equate such violence with “Islam,” the religion of 1.5 billion people or nearly a sixth of humankind, and to blame it on the Qur’an, is, well, I’ll say it again: uninformed and stupid.

PS For Pakistani-American anxieties over being tarred with this brush, see this report from Aljazeera English:

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I was just watching the discussion that Amy Goodman (video here) recently moderated between Omar Barghouti of the Global BDS Movement and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, over the utility and ethics of the BDS campaign.

Waskow criticized the BDS movement without reservation. I thought his arguments were kind of sad: often inaccurate, and off-the-mark, and extremely US-centric. A big part of his argument had to do with the ways in which the situations of White-dominated Apartheid South Africa and today’s Israel are similar, or different. Waskow tried to argue that whereas the Apartheid government got its foreign support mainly from corporations, Israel gets its support mainly from the US government… Ergo, while boycotting or taking other actions against Chase Manhattan Bank were appropriate and useful in the 1970s/80s, over South Africa, today what’s needed is to build a broad coalition of peace-loving Americans to change the policy of the US government.

He also argued that BDS “seeks to demonize an entire people, with a culture and life of their own, etc.” in Israel… (As if the Afrikaners who dominated Apartheid SA had no culture or life of their own?? I’m still not sure what the difference was there.)

I thought Barghouti made the counter-arguments excellently, and was particularly effective when, a number of times, he pointed out that Waskow’s way of arguing seemed to completely ignore the Palestinians’ own agency and the demand for BDS that is so widely supported among Palestinian civil society of all stripes. Waskow really did come across very isolated and arrogant. It was sad, really to see this person who historically did play a good role in U.S. social movements now engaging in special pleading on behalf of the Jewish state.

Dressing up like Tolstoy does not, it turns out, mean you end up acting with Tolstoyan detachment and universalist ethics.

Anyway, it’s great that Amy Goodman hosted this important discussion. It’s a topic we need to discuss a lot more in the US– and also, to put into action.

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It was worse.

Back in the bad old days of Bush’s corrupt gang, we on the left were pilloried for suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism-related news in order to win the 2004 elections. But when Tom Ridge says it . . .

In fact, I argued in summer, 2004, that when Ridge did raise the terrorism alert, it had the unfortunate effect of outing an al-Qaeda double agent who had been turned by the Pakistani government and was helping set a trap for al-Qaeda in the UK. In turn, that caused the British government to have to move against the people it had under surveillance prematurely, harming the case.

Ridge is alleging he was pressured on the eve of the election. But I still wonder about the circumstances of the summer announcement. He might have been being used then, too, and not known it.

And if any of us had said that Dick Cheney was setting up civilian mercenary assassination squads (at least 007 works for the British government), and set things up so that perhaps neither the CIA director nor the president even knew about it, we would have been branded moonbats. But well, that is today’s story

You shudder to think what hasn’t come out yet.

If Bush and his gang falsely put up the terror alert or even tried to, for partisan political gain, that is a sort of treason. If they thereby ruined a British surveillance operation, they recklessly endangered US and NATO security. If they were arranging for civilian mercenaries to murder people . . . well you’d have to say that they were at least planning to be murderers. (The wingnuts will say that Xe was only being contracted to kill al-Qaeda types; but the wingnuts wouldn’t be able to tell a Barelvi from an al-Qaeda supporter if their lives depended on it, and I wouldn’t exactly trust Mr. Prince to be fair to Muslims.)

The horrible thing is that Wolf Blitzer on CNN assembled David Frum and Frances Townsend, former members of the Bush administration, to sit around on his afternoon news and analysis program on Thursday afternoon and more or less either call Ridge a liar or pooh-pooh the significance of what he is saying. There wasn’t a single centrist or left of center voice to show any outrage. I mean, I know that Time Warner is not made up of people who necessarily care about the little person or social justice or anything. But a little bit of shame?

It isn’t enough that the corporate media lied to us for Bush for 8 years, they are continuing to do it. Give money to Amy Goodman.

End/ (Not Continued)

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