The Road From Damascus
June 21, 2008
 |
 |
My brief visit to London over the past weekend was a memorable one. Besides attending the award ceremony where my friend Dahr Jamail received the Martha Gellhorn Prize, dinner with John Pilger, meeting M. Shahid Alam, befriending Ghada Karmi, spending time with my friend and ever-generous host Paul de Rooij, I also had the pleasure of meeting Fanonite editor Robn Yassin-Kassab in person for the first time. Robin’s debut novel has just been published by Penguin, and has been garnering rave reviews. Here are a select few:
The Road From Damascus
by Robin Yassin-Kassab
350pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
Beyond Belief
Robin Yassin-Kassab’s ambitious debut of faith and faithlessness, The Road From Damascus, impresses Maya Jaggi.
The Guardian
“Unbelief itself is a religion”, says an epigraph to this ambitious and topical debut novel. The words of the 12th-century Sufi sage Ahmad Yasavi, coupled with a Pascal pensée on the limitations of atheism, open a book that satirises a kind of secular fundamentalism that can, it suggests, be as blinding as dogma.
In early 21st-century Damascus, Sami Traifi, a 31-year-old “failed academic and international layabout” born in Britain to Syrian parents, truffles among ancestral roots for a credible thesis for his stalled doctorate. Instead he stumbles on a family secret, an uncle broken by 22 years in a Syrian torture jail. Back in London, Sami’s marriage to a teacher, Muntaha, crumbles as the astute, educated daughter of a refugee from Saddam’s Iraq resolves to wear a hijab.
J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’
January 18, 2008
Michael Gorra on J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’
Halfway through J.M. Coetzee’s 11th novel there’s a chapter called “On music,” a series of elegantly phrased pensées that moves from bird songs to the heroic narrative of the 19th-century symphony before it ends by marking the difference between two masters of the German Baroque. For Bach, we read, it seems that “any musical germ …[contains] endless possibilities for development,” but with Telemann the work “sounds like the execution of a plan rather than the exploration of a potential.” “Diary of a Bad Year” is not precisely a self-reflexive novel, the kind of book in which the writer pulls himself out of his own hat; it’s nothing so simple. It does, however, provide an implicit set of instructions for reading, and none more pregnant than these words about music. No one will doubt either this book’s intelligence or its artfulness. A final judgment, however, will depend on which composer one thinks it most resembles.
Eat Your Heart Out, Homer
January 6, 2008
William Dalrymple reviews The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, 948 pp. The Modern Library).
Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction
In the summer of 2002, as Pentagon strategists were planning the invasion of Iraq, a short distance away, on the National Mall in Washington, the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery was showing one of the most interesting exhibitions of Islamic art seen in the United States for years. The show illustrated a story largely set in the Iraqi cities that would shortly become the targets of the Pentagon’s munitions.On display was a single work of art: a painted manuscript of the “Hamzanama,” a spectacular illustrated book commissioned by the sympathetic and notably tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605). To the delight of art historians, the Sackler brought together the long-dispersed pages of what is probably the most ambitious single artistic undertaking ever produced by the atelier of an Islamic court: no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations were commissioned. More than anything else, it was the project that created the Mughal painting style, and in the illustrations one can see two artistic worlds — that of Hindu India and of Persianate Islamic Central Asia — fusing to create something new and distinctively Mughal.
Beyond the Veil
November 24, 2007
Commenting on Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, Norma Finkelstein had once said that what they call a ‘charlatan’ in the rest of the world, in France are known as ‘philosophers’. But of course these two are more than mere charlatans — they are also front-line warriors in the Zionist ideological war. It is curious that whenever you pick up any of these manufactured controversies — head scarf, danish cartoons, the veil etc — you will invariably find the instigator a Zionist Jew (Flemming Rose, Levy, Finkielkraut, Steyn, Straw), which is rather sad given the Jews own very recent experience of European persecution.
Here is Laila Lalami on Joan Wallach’s The Politics of the Veil.
“A kind of aggression.” “A successor to the Berlin Wall.” “A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism.” “An insult to education.” “A terrorist operation.” These descriptions–by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann–do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman’s headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.
In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that “medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans” were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.
Occupied Iraq: A Horizontal View
September 9, 2007
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Dissident Voice, 10 September 2007; Atlantic Free Press, 10 September 2007; Indymedia UK, 10 September 2007; Spinwatch, 11 September 2007
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books, pp 240, $20
Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. [1]
In 1937 George Steer’s report on Guernica in the Times (London) turned what would have otherwise been a footnote in history into a metaphor for naked aggression against a defenceless civilian population. While Guernica was not the worst of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis assisting Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the vivid account of the savagery conjured up in Steer’s descriptive reportage brought home for many horrors of a conflict hitherto deemed distant and insular. A comparable role was played by Seymour Hersh in 1969 exposing the massacre and subsequent cover up at My Lai, turning public opinion at home decisively against the war. In 2004, an account of a similar tragedy, albeit on a much larger scale, was dispatched to the Inter Press Service from the ruins of Fallujah by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist of exceptional courage, except no publication in the mainstream picked up the story as nationalist (or perhaps commercial) imperatives trumped journalistic responsibilities. The news however percolated in the farther reaches of cyberspace for a year; meanwhile several other Fallujah-scale catastrophes were inflicted on the people of Iraq with a similar media reaction. Only when a documentary on the Italian RAI TV corroborated the reports of the use of chemical weapons with footage and soldiers’ testimony, could the story no longer be suppressed and newspapers in Britain finally had to publish it.
Fallujah is but one in the stream of episodes recounted in Dahr Jamail’s exceptional new book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Had these reports been published in a timely fashion a very different reaction could have been expected possibly generating a public outcry.
“Humanitarian Wars” and Associated Delusions
August 14, 2007
Today’s guest editorial is an excellent review of Jean Bricmont’s new book Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (Monthly Review Press, 2007) by my friend Paul de Rooij.
Most inhabitants of Western countries are afflicted by nefarious delusions about the nature of their societies and government policy; the public at large is led to believe that their societies are superior, and their governments’ policies are noble and generous. The illusions have to do with the dissonance between the fabricated image and the reality of state power, especially when it entails wars waged against third world countries. Awful wars are waged for crass motives, yet they are sold on the basis that they are driven by benevolent intent. Promotion of democracy, freedoms, human rights, women’s rights, and even religious tolerance are some of the purported motives for current interventions, subversion or wars. Since the 1990s, in the lead-up to the wars against former Yugoslavia, the primary justification offered to wage war was that it was necessary to safeguard human rights or to improve the humanitarian conditions of the target population. If the blatant hypocrisy wasn’t bad enough, the Left’s delusions regarding the stated humanitarian rationale for wars has had a distinctly deleterious effect on the Left as a movement and the organized opposition to the depredations of their states. Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is an extensive analysis of the “humanitarian war” rationale, and how its twisted arguments should be countered and its rationale for war rejected. One of the defining aspects of the Left of yesteryear was an opposition to imperialism and its consequent wars; Bricmont’s important contribution aims to resurrect the principled opposition to the new imperial wars waged primarily by the United States and Britain.
Subversion of International Law
Perhaps the most important point addressed in this book is that the “humanitarian intervention” rationale served as a cynical means to sideline international law; it is usually presented as one requiring utmost speed to avert further disaster and therefore there is no time for formalities such as observing the UN Charter or international law in general. For at least two decades, the US has been itching to emasculate the UN even further and to undermine the basis of international law; the means to obtain this objective has been to promote “humanitarian wars” or even “humanitarian bombing” (it is difficult to concoct a nicer oxymoron) [1]. What is disconcerting is that this Trojan horse wasn’t repelled by the principal human rights organizations, the so-called public intellectuals, or groups on the Left. The acceptance of the justification for wars has undermined the anti-war movement and it seems that few are aware of the stark implications of a debilitated international legal framework, i.e., a world afflicted with incessant wars and ruled by the law of the jungle. Those seeking to resist imperial wars or obtain a modicum of justice ought to defend the principle of international law, and certainly not allow it to be undermined by disingenuous appeals for war.
Kissing your SUV goodbye
If the US and its allies wage wars on the basis of false justifications, then the question arises what their real motives are. Another important section of Bricmont’s book analyzes the nature of state power and the real reasons for wars or interventions. His analysis suggests that one of the reasons wars are waged is to guarantee access to raw materials and markets [2]. It is also fair to say that most western societies owe their economic development very much to the access to cheap resources, and most interventions seek to continue to guarantee such access. Even the tiniest/poorest third world countries are whipped into compliance — no deviation is tolerated. If one rejects the notion of wars to guarantee cheap resources then there are serious implications for our societies; our economies will have to be weaned from such cheap supplies entailing costly restructuring. To change our societies so that they are less destructive to others requires rejecting delusions about our states, it demands rejecting interventionist wars, and certainly confronting specious justifications for such wars.
Clearing up arguments
Bricmont provides a lengthy analysis of the pro-war humanitarian arguments, and, in order to do so, also addresses the ineffective anti-war arguments used by some on the Left. Maybe it is fair to suggest that the Left in western countries has sometimes engaged in less-than-clear thinking. In the past Leftist groups opposed wars against third world countries as a matter of principle, but beginning in the late 1990s some succumbed to the humanitarian interventionist ideology; what is surprising is how effective this ploy has been. Others reject wars, but do so using weak, confusing or even contradictory arguments. In countering the pro-war arguments, Bricmont provides analysis suggesting the strongest counter-arguments, and how the twisted historical analogies used to sell wars are best dealt with (e.g., appeasement, or confronting Hitler early on). Bricmont’s analysis of the Second World War analogies — a favorite with the human rights crusaders — should certainly be studied by anyone opposing wars.
What is missing
While the book deals with pro-war humanitarian arguments, it doesn’t mention that some humanitarian disasters haven’t elicited the same reaction. For human rights crusaders some cases deserve the intervention imperative, yet others are neglected. While they demand intervention in Darfur they are mysteriously silent about Congo; Palestine is perhaps the most neglected issue. Since part of the book deals with exposing the hypocrisy in the way wars are sold, maybe the book could have highlighted the cases where the vocal advocates for war apply a double standard.
The book is perhaps best read in conjunction with Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade (Johnstone is also the translator of Bricmont’s book). While Humanitarian Imperialism deals with the humanitarian war topic in general, Fools’ Crusade deals with a case history of this issue, i.e., the war against Yugoslavia, a particularly important chapter for the humanitarian war rationale and the origins of this ideology. Her book provides a historical background of the way the wars against Yugoslavia were deliberately and cynically planned. Kirsten Sellars’ The Rise and Rise of Human Rights is another important book providing additional context. Sellars presents a history of how human rights have been exploited by the United States and Britain, and it also provides an unflattering history of the principal human rights organizations. Human Rights Watch in particular has been a key organization pushing for humanitarian wars, and a proper appreciation of such organizations is necessary to counter their influence. Finally, while Bricmont refers to a few of the principal proponents of humanitarian wars, the so-called public intellectuals or Liberals, more of these human rights crusaders need to be taken to task about their positions [3]. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson have compiled a list of these operators and it is also worth reading in conjunction with Bricmont’s book [4]. One of the listed crusaders is Bernard Kouchner, the recently appointed French Foreign Minister, and his interventionist proclivities may well explain the changing French policy aligning itself closer to US policy.
Applying the lessons to Darfur
Bricmont’s book doesn’t deal with Darfur in any great detail, but one should apply its lessons to this case in rejecting calls for intervention. There are several reasons for this, and the primary one is that it has been a stated objective of the neocons to “take out” Sudan [5], and if this rotten gang bays for intervention, it behooves one to reconsider joining the chorus. The US has stepped up its presence in the region by organizing an invasion of Somalia, establishing a military presence in Chad, arming some Sudanese rebel groups, etc. The US seeks to undermine Sudan for reasons unrelated to the humanitarian situation, e.g., denying oil resources to its competitors. The US has also used the Darfur issue to deflect attention from its own depredations in Iraq or Afghanistan. Furthermore, several US-based zionist groups have taken up the Darfur issue for equally cynical ends. Pushing the Darfur issue is viewed among some of these groups as a means of deflecting attention from Israel, suggesting that the situation in Darfur is worse and therefore “why single out Israel”. Divestment from companies doing business in Sudan serves the similar purpose of undermining efforts in the US to launch a divestment from Israel or boycott campaign. The situation in Darfur was also exploited after the Israeli war of aggression against Lebanon in 2006; as soon as the war ended, the media focus shifted immediately and preponderantly to cover the Darfur situation in order to deflect attention from a criminal war by US/Israel. There is also the question of focus as a humanitarian catastrophe of a much higher magnitude in Congo has barely elicited a peep. Finally, it is also clear that much of the conflict has to do with population dislocations due to environmental change, and it is likely that armed interventions aren’t the best solution.
If we reject intervention as Bricmont urges us to do, there is an issue about what must be done. According to Jonathan Steele, negotiations among local groups will likely result in accommodation and conflict resolution [6]. Armed intervention on the other hand could only make matters worse.
Just like the chickenhawks, but more likely useful fools
The neocon chickenhawks are best known for urging the US military to go to war while they remained safely ensconced in their think tanks. The leftists or Liberals who have jumped on the humanitarian war bandwagon engage in very much the same hypocrisy. When anyone today prescribes “intervention”, they are really only urging the military of their state to attack other countries, while they themselves are sitting pretty. Someone else will die for the positions they propound, and it is certainly a very different attitude compared to those who joined the International Brigades in Spain — no chickens then. What makes matters worse is that the military was really not established to further humanitarian aims, but is meant to impose the interests of state power. Recently, the British military was concerned that “increasing emotional attachment to the outside world” had led the British public to expect humanitarian interventions [7]. The UK military sought to shape public attitudes so that military activities wouldn’t be constrained or, let alone, face demands to have the military be used in legitimate peacekeeping! When the military are actually used for “humanitarian intervention” this means that the rationale has been exploited by state power to sell its wars and they have even managed to get some Lefty or Liberal dupes on board. Alternatively, if a state doesn’t care to intervene in a given country, it will simply ignore the humanitarian appeals. When the British government’s hypocrisy is exposed, e.g., with the “genocide” in Darfur, it simply states that it will “consider joining multilateral action” and, of course, it has been wringing its hands about what to do [8]. The first indication that a state doesn’t want to use its military for humanitarian ends is when there are references to “multilateral action”; translation: do nothing or simply provide token forces subject to stringent “rules of engagement”. Anyone opposed to the imperialist trends of the US and its faithful poodles should reject calls for direct military intervention in the third world; there already have been too many interventions.
Tony Judt wrote: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There is no other difference between them” [9]. His article’s apt title is “Bush’s Useful Idiots”. When jumping on the same bandwagon as the neocons, human rights crusaders might consider whether they are being jerked around.
Conclusion
The adoption of the humanitarian war rationale has had a particularly damaging effect on what remains of the Left in Western countries; one of the basic tenets for Leftists should have been to oppose imperial wars, and it has been disconcerting to witness the adoption of the human rights lingo to either co-cheerlead wars, accept portions of the rationale for war or simply to demonstrate unreflective muddled thinking. Jean Bricmont’s book, Humanitarian Imperialism, is a clearly written guide through this moral maze, an unmasking of tendentious interpretation of history, and an antidote to the principal malaise afflicting our times: hypocrisy. It is an important contribution to help the Left to assess critically history, and to break through an intellectual logjam surrounding the so-called humanitarian wars.
Paul de Rooij is a writer living in London. He can be reached at proox@hotmail.com (NB: all emails with attachments will be automatically deleted.) Paul de Rooij © 2007Notes
- See Alexander Cockburn, How the US State Dept. Recruited Human Rights Groups to Cheer On the Bombing Raids: Those Incubator Babies, Once More?, CounterPunch Newsletter, April 1999.
- Of course, there are other reasons too — some of them irrational, others to favor Israel, etc. For further discussion see: Jean Bricmont, The De-Zionization of the American Mind, 12 August 2006.
- Public intellectuals are only public or “celebrity” in so far as they present a serviceable rationale for state power. As soon as their message deviates from the interests of the state, they are quickly demoted to the ranks of relegated intellectuals.
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Morality’s Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders, Znet, 30 August 2005.
- Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander stated on DemocracyNow: “… And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, *Sudan* and, finishing off, Iran.” Amy Goodman interviewed Wesley Clark, “Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: “I Think About It Everyday“ , 2 March 2007.
- Jonathan Steele, Unseen by western hysteria, Darfur edges closer to peace, 10 August 2007.
- Mark Curtis quoted in David Miller (ed.), Tell me lies: Propaganda and Media distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Pluto Press 2004.
- Statement by Mike Gapes MP, member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Compass Conference, London, 2006.
- Tony Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots”, London Review of Books, 21 Sept. 2006.
By M. Shahid Alam,
Islamic Publications International, 272 pp., 2007, 978-1889999458
Early in the 12th century, the Crusaders rampaged through Islamic lands with little initial resistance; the emirs and sultans were more concerned with their own internecine feuds. At this point, Ibn al-Khashab, an Imam from Aleppo, took it upon himself to jolt the Islamic world out of its suicidal stupor. His passionate, eloquent and incessant exhortations eventually shamed the would-be defenders of Islamic lands into confronting the aggressors, and laid the ground for an effective resistance that culminated in the crusader’s eventual ejection from the Levant.
Since the foundation of Israel in 1948, and later after 1967, the Islamic world has been under renewed assault – this time from United States and Israel (at times joined by lesser European powers). This aggression also incorporates an ideological assault – an ideological Crusade, as it were. The twin objectives of the Zionists – to demonise those it sought to dispossess and the need to bring the imperial powers on board its colonial enterprise – led them to revive an ideologically driven discourse, Orientalism, which by end of the Second World War had become increasingly irrelevant. In its Zionist incarnation, however, Orientalism is far more virulent.
A sad legacy of prolonged Western domination has been that few people read in Muslim world; fewer still do so critically. This has left the field wide open for Orientalists to extend their pernicious influence. They have taken liberties with the history, culture, traditions and beliefs of the Islamic world and with the notable exception of Edward Said, they have encountered little resistance. In the tradition of Said, and in the spirit of al-Khashab, then, Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the “War Against Islam” is M. Shahid Alam’s bracing riposte to the New Orientalists.
Alam covers expansive intellectual territory in this collection of essays: from Islamic history to global economics; Orientalist dogma to anti-Imperialist activism; wars to Human Rights. His message is universal: whether one is a historian, political scientist, sociologist, economist, activist, member of an ethnic minority, or a Muslim, the book has plenty to offer. Its passionate, at times lyrical, rendering makes this a highly readable book.
The New Orientalism, the first of the book’s three sections, deals with the proliferation of literature on the Muslim world by Orientalists – mostly of Zionist provenance – whose scholarly pretences barely conceal their deep-seated prejudice towards their subject. While the earlier Orientalists had produced tracts that aided the colonization of the Orient by furnishing ideological pretexts; the new version of Orientalism has taken on unabashedly political overtones. Their Manichean view posits an unchanging, retrograde, totalitarian Islam in perpetual conflict with an enlightened, democratic, egalitarian and free West. Alam’s broadside against the most influential protagonists of this project – Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington – is trenchant as it is lucid; he shows up a theoretical edifice that has weak empirical foundations, one that is barely held together by specious arguments and defective logic.
With advances in gunnery and shipping providing a decisive military advantage and the Industrial Revolution helping replace the feudal order, Europe’s colonial venture soon established and consolidated the global capitalist system. This was dominated by Core capital, comprising of Europe and America (and Japan to a lesser degree), that lorded over a Periphery whose markets and resources it relied on for profits. Like the rest of the countries that comprise the Periphery, the Islamic world was caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoliberal economics and neocolonial politics. Far from being a proof of Islam’s resistance to modernity, aversion to science and hostility to the West, the relative decline of Islamic societies vis-à-vis the West is attributable to the same economic, political, social and technological factors that have contributed to the lag in the rest of the Periphery. In fact, Egyptian, Ottoman and Persian attempts at modernization and democratic reform were crushed right at their inception by European colonial powers.
Palestine and Israel, the second section of the book, addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time. The essays in the section range from the history of the conflict, contemporary political realities, to the misconceptions and fallacies sown through a systematically skewed media representation. Alam argues that the advent of a colonial-settler state, Israel, and the discovery of oil have fuelled the resurgence of interest in the region which has culminated in myriad interventions, contributing to its continued instability. By aligning with the hegemonic ambitions of the reigning powers (first Britain, then France and now America), Israel has appropriated their military and financial strength to further its own regional goals. In this, it has been assisted by a powerful lobby in Washington, which not only exercises inordinate influence over American foreign policy, but also confronts dissent in order to suppress critical voices. Alam ‘s personal experience in this regard is instructive: signing a petition in support of an Academic Boycott of Israel – a legitimate, popular and non-violent mode of protest – made him the target of a smear campaign headed by Zionist extremists at Campus Watch (a McCarthyite project which aims to discredit and intimidate critical dissenters) with accusations of “encouraging terrorist murderers”. From there, the story was relayed on to right-wing media and Alam found himself the centre of much unwelcome attention.
While Alam has weathered this storm with courage, not everyone has his fortitude; if the fraudulent Zionist narrative still prevails in the American mainstream discourse, it is because most choose silence over jeopardizing their careers.
The War Against Global Terrorism, the last section of the book, addresses the historical provenance of September 11, which Alam situates in the dynamics of political-economic interactions between the West and the Periphery in general, and the Islamic societies in particular, rather than any claimed cultural-ideological proclivities of the latter for murder. Alam proceeds to dispel the ideological fog that envelops the events and causes of the tragedy. The roots of this conflict lie not in profound hostility of Islam to modernity, freedom and democracy, as the ideological cheerleaders of the so called “war on terror” suggest; but in mundane realities of imperial excess and a deeply iniquitous economic system that sustains the neocolonial grip of Core capital over the Periphery. Alam exposes how the events of September 11 have been instrumentalized in the pursuit of global hegemonic ambitions. Afghanistan was merely a first step. With a pretext established, unchecked imperial ambitions soon opened the way for American conquest of Iraq, urged on all the way by the neocon vanguard of the Zionist lobby. The fall of Baghdad, an event with painful historical connotations for most Muslims, is the spark for one of the book’s most searing essays. The concise, charged rhetoric of “Iraq is Free” has an almost poetic quality to it.
Alam next dissects the semantics of Empire; the corrupted discourse that presages – and rationalizes – wars of aggression; the language that reduces adversaries to mere labels and statistics. The purveyors of violence have their propaganda agents in the media and academia, who substitute the sensory reality of war and occupation with a mythical reality imbued with benevolence and high minded ideals. Alam tackles the question of identity in imperial USA; what it is like being a Muslim in the age of war and terror – of being prejudged and demonized by the likes of Thomas Friedman; of being the centre of every bigot’s leery attention; of paying the price for departing from doctrinal orthodoxy.
September 11 complicated things for many Muslims. The majority chose to weather the storm quietly; some accepted the role of native informers. Only a rare few refused to accept the dominant narrative and challenge the doctrinal assumptions. Prominent in this latter group, Alam has had to bear a heavy toll.
Alam ends the book with a topical essay on the escalations in the Gulf that threaten a new war, this time against Iran. He traces the roots of this planned aggression to 1979 when the Islamic Revolution brought down one of the pillars of American power in the region: the regime of the Shah of Iran. The revolution was a serious setback for US-Israeli hegemonic ambitions; therefore Iraq was tasked with neutralizing this potential threat. The Zionists, on the other hand, had more ambitious plans; as articulated by Oded Yinon in Kivunim, the World Zionist Organization’s main publication, they aimed to break Iraq into ethnic-sectarian statelets and neutralize regional challengers to Israel’s dominance one at a time. In the wake of the US conquest of Iraq in 2003, Zionists immediately started recycling the same falsehoods used to justify the war against Iraq to sell the new war – against Iran this time.
The endgame in the case of US-Israeli aggression against Iran is uncertain, but Alam’s essay does an admirable job of exposing the source and trajectory of this policy.
As with any collection of essays dealing with broadly similar topics, repetition is inevitable and in that respect this book is no exception. However, that also means that each essay is self-contained and offers complete context and analysis. My only objection is with the use of the term “Islamicate” [1], which is obscure and lacks linguistic resonance; for instance, there is no comparable word for other similar societal configurations.
In his later years, Aldous Huxley had complained about the trend towards excessive specialization in academia, which produces knowledge that does little to improve the human situation. He emphasized a need for bridges to rescue knowledge from the sterile confines of academic exclusion back into the service of human endeavour. In Alam ‘s writings one finds that rare amalgamation of depth and breadth, of scholarly rigor and activist zeal. An accomplished economist, he is also an erudite political scientist, engages complex sociological debates, has a keen eye for textual analysis, and writes with the passion of a poet.
At a time when authentic narratives of the Islamic world are being submerged under a vast proliferation of Orientalist dogma, Challenging the New Orientalism offers an invaluable antidote. Alam’s insights are indispensable; this book deserves to be widely read.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch. His regular commentaries appear on The Fanonite
_____________________________
Notes
[1] A terms coined by Marshall Hodgson which refers “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims”
Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist
February 27, 2007
J.M. Coetzee on The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer’s rendering of Hitler.
In his dual biography of the two bloodiest butchers and worst moral monsters of the twentieth century, Stalin and Hitler (but is Mao not up there with them? and does Pol Pot not get a look-in?), Alan Bullock reprints side by side class photographs of young Iosif and young Adolf taken in 1889 and 1899 respectively, in other words, when each was about ten.[*] Peering at the two faces, one tries to descry some quiddity, some dark halo, some sly intimation of the horrors to come; but the photographs are old, definition is poor, one cannot be sure, and besides, a camera is not a divining tool.
The class photograph test—What will be the destinies of these children? Which of them will go the furthest?—has a particular pointedness in the cases of Stalin and Hitler. Is it possible that some of us are evil from the moment we leave our mother’s womb? If not, when does evil enter us, and how? Or, to put the question in a less metaphysical form, how is it that some of us never develop a restraining moral conscience? In regard to Stalin and Hitler, did the fault lie in the way they were reared? With educational practices in Georgia and Austria of the late nineteenth century? Or did the boys in fact develop a conscience, and then at some later time lose it: were Iosif and Adolf, at the time they were photographed, still normal, sweet lads, and did they turn into monsters later, as a consequence perhaps of the books they read, or the company they kept, or the pressures of their times? Or was there nothing special about them after all, early or late: did the script of history simply demand two butchers, a Butcher of Germany and a Butcher of Russia; and had Iosif Dzhugashvili and Adolf Hitler not been in the right place at the right time, would history have found another pair of actors, just as good (that is, just as bad), to play the roles?
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
January 18, 2007
by Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., November 2006, 978-0743285025
Review by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States is no stranger to controversy. As the first American President to speak of a Palestinian “homeland”, to encourage Israel to give up occupied lands, to force Israel from captured territory[1], to establish contacts with the PLO, it was inevitable that Carter should draw the wrath of the Israel lobby. Menachem Began and Ed Koch – the Prime Minister of Israel and Mayor or New York respectively — were soon exposed plotting Carter’s defeat in the upcoming presidential elections.[2] Andrew Young, the UN Ambassador who met Arafat and a longtime friend of the President’s, was made to resign, and Carter lost his reelection, receiving only 48 percent of the Jewish vote.
Despite his departure from public office, Carter’s engagement in the region continued in the form of peacemaking initiatives and election monitoring through the Carter Center. The Center monitored last year’s elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that brought Hamas to power; Carter’s certification of the election’s fairness, and his subsequent encouragement for the US and Israel to engage in dialogue with the elected Palestinian government got a cold reception in the implacably rejectionist US-Israeli camp.
Faced with these disappointments, Carter has embarked on a new project — to appeal directly to the people of the United States and Israel.
A prolific writer, Carter has penned more than twenty books, including poetry and fiction, on subjects ranging from politics, religion, history to ethics. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, his latest, is perhaps the most controversial — not because of anything he says, but rather because of who he is. Since leaving office, Carter’s name has become synonymous with human rights, peace making and democracy promotion (before the term was stripped of its meaning by the Reaganites and neo-Reaganites); the facts in the book may not be new or controversial, but Carter’s name carries prestige and credibility that threatens to bring the facts to a mass audience, hitherto denied the unadulterated truth. The fact that the book is topping Best Seller lists, despite the carefully orchestrated campaigns to defame Carter and discredit his book, may explain why the Israel lobby is so concerned.
With plenty of interesting anecdotes and details from nearly three decades of involvement in the region’s politics, Carter’s book is highly readable. While the history of the conflict may not be Carter’s purpose or forte, it is the sections of the book dealing with the present situation in Palestine that bear notice. Here Carter is forthright and graphic in his depiction of the daily humiliations and oppression meted out to the Palestinians by Israel’s brutal Apartheid regime. The use of the South African analogy is deliberate, as Carter seeks to spark a debate by using a word with an ugly historical resonance. A proof of its effectiveness is the sheer venom directed at Carter by the Israel lobby and its minions in the congress and media.
There is hardly anything novel about Carter’s use of the Apartheid analogy; many in Israel itself, including its former Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni, its preeminent Human Rights organization, B’Tselem have used the word, while outside, a figure no less than Bishop Desmond Tutu has likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to how Apartheid South Africa treated its Blacks. But in the United States, where Israel has heretofore escaped criticism, this analogy is hitting raw nerve; for the main argument in Israel’s defense has always been that the historical suffering endured by Jews – the persecution, the discrimination — entitles them to special exemption. The Jewish State itself shown to be implementing a system of Apartheid — a vile form of institutionalized racial discrimination — could easily cost it the special exemption.
The glimpse that Carter presents of Palestinian life under occupation makes for harrowing reading. A matrix of control that includes checkpoints, Jewish-only roads and the Wall corrals Palestinians into smaller and smaller ghettoes as Israel’s march towards the completion of its land grab continues unimpeded. Water and agricultural resources are confiscated, olive groves destroyed — all in the continuing shadow of house demolitions, closures and curfews.
The population of Gaza, more than half which is less than fifteen years of age, is “being strangled since the Israeli ‘withdrawal’”, Carter says, with Israel retaining control of its land, sea and air exits. With police, teachers, nurses, and social workers deprived of salaries the poverty rate has reached 70 percent and acute malnutrition is at a record high with ”more than half of Palestinian families eating only one meal a day”. (p.176)
Carter points out that “more than 630,000 Palestinians…have been detained at some time by the Israelis” since ’67 including many women and children. Children aged twelve to fourteen “can be sentenced for a period of up to six months, and after the age of fourteen Palestinian children are tried as adults, a violation of international law”. (pp.196-7)
Carter dismisses the “security” rationale for what he calls Israel’s “imprisonment Wall”,
The wall ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians. In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples, and very near Bethany, where they often visited Mary, Martha, and their brother, Lazarus. There is a church named for one of the sisters, Santa Marta Monastery, where Israel’s thirty-foot concrete wall cuts through the property. The house of worship is now on the Jerusalem side, and its parishioners are separated from it because they cannot get permits to enter Jerusalem. Its priest, Father Claudio Ghilardi, says, “For nine hundred years we have lived here under Turkish, British, Jordanian, and Israeli governments, and no one has ever stopped people coming to pray. It is scandalous. This is not about a barrier. It is a border…The Wall is not separating Palestinians from Jews; rather Palestinians from Palestinians.” …The 2,000 Palestinian Christians have lost their place of worship and their spiritual center. (pp.194-5)
Carter also exposes the history of Israeli rejectionism sustained by unswerving US support which has preculded any possibility of a just peace; more than forty US vetoes have provided Israel special immunity from censure at the United Nations, even as the whole world, with the exception of the United States, is unanimous in its condemnation of Israeli brutalities. Carter also dispatches the popular myth of Barak’s “generous offer” at Camp David — popularized, amongst others, by Clinton’s envoy and former (and present) Israel lobbyist Dennis Ross. As Carter reveals, once one looks at the details of the offer, it doesn’t appear generous at all. In fact,
There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat.
Contrary to the popular myth, Carter states, the Palestinian have always been willing to negotiate. From Oslo, Camp David, to Bush’s Roadmap, the Palestinians have made major concessions which went unreciprocated by Israel, even as it keeps insisting it does not have a partner for Peace. It will come as a surprise to Carter’s audience that Hamas, as he reveals, has honoured an 18 month unilateral ceasefire even as Israeli attacks go on unabated. The Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, Carter writes, has already accepted the ”prisoners document”, a proposal for a peaceful settlement with broad support amongst the Palestinians.
Where Carter fails, however, is in insisting that the label applies to the Occupied Territories only; perhaps in an effort to mollify critics, he insists Israel within its own borders is a “vibrant democracy” with “equal voting rights” for all. If voting rights were all that mattered, then Carter’s claims would be valid, but people don’t live to vote. There are more immediate needs, such as shelter, health, community, and the citizenship that ensures these rights. The Arab citizens of Israel, through various legal and informal means, are denied the same health, education and economic opportunities available to its Jewish citizens. Unlike Apartheid South Africa, where 87% of the land was off limits to its non-White citizens, in Israel nearly 93% of the land is unavailable for lease or purchase to its Arab citizens through a sophisticated sytem of Basic Laws and quasi-governmental institutions like Jewish National Fund. There are nearly 350 unrecognized villages with an Arab population exceeding 150,000 and various Bedouin villages have been demolished altogether. One Israeli law prohibits a Palestinian citizen of Israel to bring a spouse to live with him in Israel from anywhere in the world, except from the Occupied Territories. In short, the system that obtains within Israel’s borders can be described as anything but a “vibrant democracy” for its Arab citizens.
The book, to be sure, has some inaccuracies, but none of these impinge on the main thesis of the book. For instance, in the historical overview we are told that Israel launched the ’82 invasion ”in response to terrorist attacks” (p.7). In reality, there were no attacks against Israel in the preceding year; Israel, according to the analyst Avner Yaniv, launched the assault to avert PLO’s “peace offensive”. Carter also suggests the United States has acted as an honest broker until recently (p. 16). With the exception of rare initiatives by Carter and James Baker, in fact, the United States, since 1962, has alone sustained Israel’s continued rejectionism. Carter states Israel appeared “vulnerable to punishing Arab attacks” until ’67 (p.22). This is a curious statement, as Israel had already invaded and occupied Egyptian territory in ’56 and its border raids against its neighbours had continued unabated since its creation (see Israel’s Border Wars, by Benny Morris). Carter refers to Yitzhak Rabin as one of the “heroes” of the ’67 war (p.22). In fact, Rabin suffered a nervous breakdown and his participation in the war was minimal. In another place Carter blames Palestinians for the “single-mindedness amounting to tunnel vision” with which they see “the restoration of their rights, defined by international law, as the key to peace throughout the broader Middle East, including the Gulf states” (p.187). Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, we are told, came as a response to the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants (p.197). To his credit, Carter in his media appearances has expounded on the context and the reason for the Palestinian operation — to secure the release of the nearly 9200 civilians, including a 100 women and 293 children.
The shortcomings, nevertheless, are minor compared to the great service Carter has rendered. He is the first President of the United States to dare speak the unvarnished truth about Palestine; and his opinions carry the weight and credibility of his achievements. He has ensured that the issue receive a national platform as a corrective to the “powerful political, economic and religious forces in the United States” which ensure that “Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned”. “[V]oices from Jerusalem dominate in our media” he maintains.(p.209) He has since braved the vituperative – and always vicious — assaults of these powerful forces without giving an inch. For this, Carter — “the only American president approaching sainthood”, in Fisk’s words — deserves unreserved support and respect. [3]
– References –
[1] In the wake of “Operation Litani” — Israeli invaded Lebanon during which it killed 2,000 civilians — Carter demanded Israel withdraw from the captured territory, in accord with UN resolutions. When Israel delayed, Carter threatened to cut all aid within 24 hours, forcing a hasty Israeli retreat.
[2] The plot was uncovered in an NSA evesdropping operation. Earlier, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had similarly exposed the secret meeting between Andrew Young and Arafat through a wiretap.
[3] Under pressure from the Israel Lobby, Amazon.com recently put a hatchetjob by an Israeli military veteran, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the space reserved for editorial reviews. A petition campaign that gathered more than 18,000 signatures within a matter of days soon brought Amazon to heel, and the defamatory review was withdrawn.
– Acknowledgement –
Some of the important quotes from Carter’s book were already extracted by Norman G. Finkelstein in his review, which I have reproduced here.
US Foreign Policy in the Middle East
January 18, 2007
The Role of Lobbies and Special Interest Groups
by Janice J. Terry
Pluto Press, 168pp, July 2005, 978-0745322599
Review by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy has broken what Edward Said had referred to as “America’s last taboo” by opening the debate on the influence of the Israel lobby over US foreign policy. What they left out, however, is the political architecture that allows this and other highly motivated and organized formation of special interests to skew the country’s foreign policy in their desired direction. In a book published a year before the celebrated Walt & Mearsheimer paper — U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East – Janice J. Terry had already provided a detailed and accessible analysis of structure and processes central to the formulation of foreign policy in the United States.
The book received little attention at the time, as its thesis went against the Leftist conventional wisdom of Israel as a “strategic asset” to the US imperial project. A lot changed in the year since: the Mearsheimer & Walt paper encouraged people to start taking this issue head on without having to fear the inevitable labelling and smears. The two authors, however, focused mainly on the effects of the lobby’s machinations, while the causes, including the structural context within which special interests thrive, remained unexplored. These are the issues Terry addresses with admirable acuity in this very important book.
Using an opera metaphor, Prof. Terry introduces us to the disparate elements that blend seamlessly into a successful production. Starting with the structure – the architecture of the US government where, since WWII, foreign policy has remained largely within the purview of the executive branch – Terry proceeds to identify agency: the various lobbies and special interests that seek to influence US foreign policy in the interests of their respective constituencies. Terry illustrates the flaws in the electoral system that allow a well organized activist minority to influence policy in areas, such as the Middle East politics, to which the larger part of the population remain indifferent. This success, however, is only possible if the policies are seen to be in the nation’s best interests. This is where the other elements of the opera, such as the score – media and pop culture; and the stage – images and attitudes, come into play. Given the history of bias against Arabs and Muslims and the prevalent stereotypes reinforced through the media, most Americans are predisposed to see them with suspicion, whereas the Jewish character always receives a positive representation. These stereotypes are magnified and projected onto the whole groups, and in the case of the Arabs and Muslims, they are mostly seen as undifferentiated masses, who frequently serve as the bulk of clumsy victims to a Hollywood protagonist’s righteous rage. Policy makers are no more immune to these impulses. Within this cultural backdrop it is always easier for them to make decisions in accord with existing predispositions. This explains why the pro-Israel and Greek lobbies have been far more successful than their Arab counterparts.
The composition, motivations and tactics of the various lobbies offer other clues to their relative success or failures. By juxtaposing the activities of the different lobbies during key episodes in the Carter and Ford administrations Terry illustrates why the Israel lobby has been so much more effective than its counterparts. With ample documentation from the Ford and Carter libraries Terry provides us a glimpse into the different pressures and considerations that policy makers have to contend with routinely. The clout of the Israel lobby is already in evidence with the enormous access that it is afforded through financiers and sympathetic staffers. Fear of the very active Jewish voting block concentrated in populous urban states further diminishes the desire of shrewd politicians to take any decisions that might antagonize them. Many developments have taken place since, which have further enhanced the power of this lobby, prominent among them is the network of think tanks that the lobby has spawned. With Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off from AIPAC, established to counter the more moderate Brookings Institution, the lobby now directly engages in policy formulation. Similar policy prescriptions published by other think-tanks with ties to the lobby, such as the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and more recently, even the Brookings Institution with its Saban Center, create an illusion of a consensus, resulting in hard-line policies invariably favouring Israel. While many former professional lobbyists for Israel were already part of the Clinton administration, the ascendance of the Neocons has placed them key decision making posts. Security of Israel was declared one of the key motivations behind the invasion of Iraq.
While the book does an admirable job of vulnerabilities of the system which are exploited by the lobbyists and the processes which constitute a successful lobbying campaign, all the examples herein are dated. Things have evolved considerably since the time Carter left office, and the lobbying processes have grown more sophisticated. Some of Carter’s more famous encounters with the Israel Lobby, such as the machinations of New York mayor Ed Koch in foiling Carter’s re-elections are absent in this volume.
This book provides an excellent introduction to an issue that still confounds many. Perhaps what would be invaluable at this moment is a study of the lobby’s advances in the past decade, as the unchecked influence of this lobby is sending the world in a trajectory which could easily end in nuclear annihilation. In the coming days when people start looking for answers as to how this lobby came to dominate US foreign policy in the Middle East, Professor Terry’s book will prove indispensable.
