Israel's Subjugation of the Palestinians Must End Now

Israel pounded Gaza strip in retaliation for rockets fired at its Southern borders, killing over 280 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, over half of whom were civilians, and bringing destruction to the already deteriorating Palestinian infrastructure. Israel used F16 bombers against an essentially defenseless population. The greatest weapon in the Palestinian arsenal is inaccurate makeshift rockets with extremely short range that often miss their targets.

The Battle for Accountability in Malaysia and Turkey

Politics is a central aspect of social organization as it represents the activities that aim at coordinating the interests and concerns of citizens. Politics presupposes an agreement on a set of rules to ensure representation of citizens in decision making and governance, and to facilitate peaceful transition of power. In most functional democracies, elected officials are replaced whenever they lose popular support in national elections.

Palestine: From Prophecies to Prophetic Principles

The conflict in Palestine threatens to destabilize world politics and embolden fundamentalist demands for religiously exclusive political states. The principle of rule of law has suffered immensely under the climate of fear that followed the terrorist attacks on the American homeland on September 11, 2001. Extremists in both the East and the West are working hard to deepen the divide, and turn a political conflict into a religious war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being used by the far right in both Muslim and Western countries to justify bigotry and to demonize people on the other side of the divide.

Interfaith Dialogue a Moral Duty to Finding Common Ground

Extreme voices in the three religions that claim the monotheist heritage of Prophet Abraham--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are busy sowing the seeds of confrontation and hate. They have recently taken the advantage of the politically rooted tensions between western and Middle Eastern countries to develop misunderstanding and mistrust among the followers of these religions.

Quoting selectively from Islamic sources, they have painted Islam as an intolerant religion that urges its followers to hate people of other faiths. This depiction belies both the historical record of Muslims dealing with the followers of other faiths, and, most importantly, the Qur'anic message itself.

Hijab: Personal Choice Not State Law

Hijab, the head cover Muslim women wear in keeping with their religious traditions, has become in modern times a politically charged issue in several Muslim countries, and more recently in Europe. In the early eighties, Iran imposed hijab on its female citizens, while Syria banned it from schools during the same period. Syria gradually came to term with hijab, as the number of Syrian women who chose to wear it increased drastically during the nineties. Hijab is enforced today in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and banned in Tunisia and Turkey. France banned the hijab in 2004, and far right politicians and pundits are calling for similar ban in other European countries, and have already succeeded in doing so in the Belgium city of Antwerp.

Undermining Civil Liberties at Home

Civil liberties are always precious for free people, but particularly so during times of turbulence when the future seems uncertain and society struggles to gain its balance and move in the right direction. These are, sadly, times when opportunists try to advance their fortune without regard to other people's rights, bigots hide behind the language of patriotism, and freedom is curtailed in the name of security. It is under such conditions that civil liberties and the right to dissent become exceedingly important, as free and open debate becomes essential for pursuing the best course of action.

Gaza Exodus Symptom of Grave Situation

The Palestinians of Gaza have been under a tight blockade since June 2007 when Hamas consolidated its control over Gaza's security. The blockade, aims at forcing Hamas out of power, has been strongly supported by the Bush administration, and reluctantly by the Mubarak's government in Egypt. After Israel decided to tighten the blockade last week, by cutting the supply of fuel used to generate electricity, Palestinians broke out of the walls that separate the Gaza's portion from Egypt's portion of Rafah. Deprived of life's essentials, including food, medicine, and fuel, Palestinians desperately flooded the stores of Egyptian Rafah to buy every thing they could lay hands on.

End the Disgrace of Guantanamo

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King Jr.

Amnesty International has embarked on a campaign to close Guantanamo detention facilities, adding an important voice to the rising demands to end Guantanamo disgrace. For years, Americans have been reluctant to criticize the Bush administration's efforts to keep the detention of terrorism suspects outside the purview of both American and International law. However, with the disturbing revelations of abuse and violation of detainees' human rights, and with recent reports of the ways several unsuspecting bystanders ended up in the ranks of Guantanamo detainees, anyone who cares about justice and the rule of law must join the call to close the infamous facilities, and end the moral and legal excesses committed under the veil of secrecy, and in the name of promoting freedom and the rule of law.

Steve Emerson's Fantastic Obsession

What would an investigative reporter turned director of a private intelligence operation, who is increasingly obsessed with proving that mainstream Muslim American organizations are radical, do when he fails to find evidence to support his obsession? Human decency and ethical conduct dictate that he give up his obsession and admit that he was wrong. Steve Emerson, the director of the shadowy Investigative Project, thinks otherwise. Rather than doing the right thing and give up his bigoted endeavor, he decides to use fantasy to forge evidence and prolong his compulsive obsession.

Myopic Builders and Elusive Moderates

Building Moderate Muslim Networks is RAND Corporation's second attempt at devising a strategy to help prevent "some Muslim societies [from] falling back even further into patterns of intolerance and violence." And to do that RAND reassigns Caryl Benard, the author of the first report Civil Democratic Islam, to join three more scholars for preparing its new report.

The present report makes little improvements over the previous one, and suffers from the same faulty assumptions and flawed analysis. The new report moves away from overtly relying on "lifestyle" for distinguishing friends from foes, and shifts the emphasis to a set of political values. RAND's new research team uses a list of 10 criteria to separate moderate and radical Muslims. The emphasis is less focused on religious practices, as attention turns to ideology and commitment to free and open society.

The current study recognizes that the entrenched authoritarian governments and the decline of civil-society institutions in much of the Muslim world "have left the mosque as one of the few avenues for the expression of popular dissatisfaction with prevailing political, economic, and social conditions." Yet the authors seem less concerned with the need to withdraw support from authoritarian regimes responsible for destroying civil society in much of the Muslim world. Rather, the authors are exceedingly obsessed with the goal of marginalizing social groups, even the most moderate of them, that appeal to Islamic values as the basis for sociopolitical reform. I have already discussed at length in my response to RAND's early report why this obsession is counterproductive and will only feed into political radicalization, and have nothing to add to this point here.

One cannot help but notice that the report consistently places the blame on Muslim societies. It refuses to assign any responsibility for the radicalization of Muslim politics to the cynical strategies advocated by foreign policy experts. These strategies call for freedom and democracy simultaneously as they continue to urge support to friendly authoritarian regimes.

In discussing the Danish cartoon saga, for instance, the report directs the blame for this sad and unfortunate episode to the "Danish imams," who the report asserts "caused the cartoon controversy to spiral into an international conflagration." No blame is placed at the door of the newspaper that published the offensive cartoons, despite the fact that the newspaper was implicated in deliberate efforts to demonize the emerging Danish Muslim community. Blaming the Danish imams is the equivalent of blaming the Rutgers University women's basketball team for complaining about Don Imus’s racial slur and abuse, and for making their indignations known to the public, leading to his ousting from his job.

Among the many faulty assumptions on which the report builds its recommendations is that the Muslim World's Moderates, defined as secularist and liberal Muslims, lack the resources they need to dominate Muslim societies. Moderates, the report asserts, "do not have the resources" they need to create viable networks to counter the radicals. They lack the skills to do that themselves and require an "external catalyst." The United States can, the report continues, serve in the role of catalyst by utilizing the experience it gained "during the Cold War to foster networks of people committed to free and democratic ideas. The United States "critical role" consists in leveling the playing field for moderates."

The reality is that radicals in most Muslim countries constitute small and fringe groups whose impact far exceeds their numbers because they are willing to employ shocking violence in pursuing their goals. Further, many of the Middle Eastern regimes are ruled by elites who are socially secular and liberal, but politically autocratic and authoritarian.

The radicalization of politics in Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq was the result of deliberate efforts by Muslim secularists to impose modern practices on Muslim societies. The reliance on force and iron fist policies to impose “modern” institutions and practices by socially "moderate" but politically radical secularists, who held and continue to hold power in many Muslim countries, has led to the destruction of public debate, the disappearance of civil society, and the radicalization of politics. For instance, the use of violence by state security agencies to silence opposition during Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt has paved the way to the rise of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The report's efforts to take a principled approach to defining the "moderate" proved to be elusive. For even though the report acknowledges that some Islamists satisfy the "moderate criteria," it eventually sides with those who counsel against engaging Islamists. Moderate Islamists, the report contends, should only be engaged as "interlocutors," but never supported even when they espouse democratic values.

The report concludes by giving several examples of moderate Muslims, and surprisingly they include prominent Islam bashers. The list includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, Irshad Manji, Basam Tibi, etc. Ultimately, it is not commitment to democratic values and practices, but proximity to Islam, that sets moderates and radicals in the eyes of the authors of the recent RAND report on moderate Islam.

It is not surprising, therefore, that RAND's recommendations feed into the arrogant and unilateralist policies advanced by the neoconservatives in the last six years, policies that resulted in more chaos on the world stage and misery within Muslim societies.

This artricle has appeared in the following publications: Media Monitor Network, Aljazeera.com, Middle East Online, Official Wire, Middle East Time, The American Muslim, iView.com, Milli Gazatte, Islamonline.com, and others