In all the reporting on this typical controversy in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, centered on the question of “is it over the top?” — no one seems to have noticed that the hotel is in a conservative Muslim sheikhdom and still wants a Christmas tree. Seems like the strictures put about by some conservatives and radicals against Muslims putting up Christmas trees are not taken seriously in Abu Dhabi. Many Muslims in the West decorate Christmas trees so that their children will not feel left out, on the grounds that Muslims believe in Jesus of Nazareth as a true prophet of God and so can celebrate his birth in this way.
The problem is that, while the article on this matter is clear and largely accurate, the headline: “Pope wanted Muslim Turkey kept out of EU” is grossly incorrect.
In 2004, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) spoke out against allowing Turkey to join the European Union. This position was not that of the Church as a whole. Indeed, a cable from that year says that “Acting Vatican Foreign Minister equivalent Monsignor Pietro Parolin told Charge August 18 that the Holy See remained open to Turkish EU membership.”
Contrary to what The Guardian implied, then, it seems clear to me that until he became pope, Ratzinger’s views on Turkey were not reflective of Vatican policy, and after he became Pope his stance changed dramatically in Turkey’s favor.
Ussama Makdisi writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:
In the tragic story of U.S-Arab relations, no era has been as violent as our own. And yet when President Obama began his presidency, he initiated a series of highly-anticipated gestures to the Muslim world. His interview with the Arabic satellite channel Al-Arabiyya was followed by positive speeches in Turkey and Egypt. He insisted there was no clash of civilizations; he alluded to America’s long-standing philanthropic and cultural engagement with the Arab world, and he acknowledged that American actions in Iraq and inaction regarding Palestinian-Israeli peace had undermined faith in America. Above all, he spoke frankly of having to be judged on his actions and not his words. If nothing else, it was a hopeful beginning. Yet midway through his presidential term, the signs are ominous. Rather than signaling a bold change of direction, Obama has chosen half-measures to tweak an untenable status quo. Rather than securing a legacy based upon undoing George W. Bush’s calamitous wars, Obama has ironically deepened his predecessor’s imprint on the Middle East.
On Iraq, President Obama is ostensibly reversing the decision made by Bush to invade a sovereign nation. His address on Iraq to an American public tired of the Iraq war sought to make that clear. The infamous phrase “weapons of mass destruction” was not once mentioned, nor the indecent pretext of spreading democracy in a region rife with American supported and sustained autocrats (including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who was in the United States recently with his son and heir-apparent Gamal).
Obama did, however, declare that “we [Americans] have met our responsibility.” But several million Iraqi civilians have been displaced and countless hundreds of thousands Iraqi civilians have been killed and maimed over the past seven years of U.S. occupation, during which sectarianism reached a paroxysm of murderous violence—to say nothing of the terrible consequences of the U.S.-led sanctions regime and U.S. bombings of Iraqi infrastructure during the decade that preceded the invasion. The partial relaxation of overt U.S. domination of Iraqi politics and society cannot simply erase responsibility, nor can the disingenuous, patronizing notion that it is now up to the Iraqis to take up their own responsibilities as if the war had been waged for them in the first instance.
But Obama has at least acknowledged that the Iraq war was the wrong war. Rather than end it outright, however, his solution has been to withdraw many but not all U.S. troops for Iraq—some 50,000 remain in addition to thousands of private military contractors. Far more dangerously, he has expanded another unwinnable war in Afghanistan. And just like Bush who began the Afghan campaign in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Obama insists that terrorism and national security considerations are paramount as he lurches forward in Afghanistan and bombs parts of Pakistan. He has “surged” in Afghanistan as Bush had done in Iraq.
The logic that Obama has used to withdraw combat troops from Iraq could also have been applied to Afghanistan: a war without end serves neither Americans nor Afghanis. It alienates far more people than it pacifies and it will undoubtedly end in an American withdrawal without any appreciable gains for America. The real question is at what point and at what cost. How many more innocent lives are to be wasted before reality sets in? In any event, it should be clear by now that the resolution of anti-Americanism in the region lies in politics, not military conquests.
Obama, therefore, is making a show of kick-starting the moribund Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” to resolve the problem that has haunted America’s standing in the Middle East longer than any other issue. Far more than Bush or Clinton, Obama appears to understand that a resolution to the Palestinian question is important to American national security—for that was one of the principal messages that General David Petraeus conveyed in his recent congressional testimony and that is why Obama spent so much time at the outset of his presidency criticizing Israeli settlement construction.
But rather than move forward on the issue with new ideas, Obama now seems determined to recycle old failed ones from the Clinton era. He has already capitulated to the rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of settlements. And for the second time in recent memory, a U.S. president is attempting to browbeat a corrupt, weak and now illegitimate Palestinian Authority (Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential term expired in 2009) into surrendering Palestinian rights in the name of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The same dynamic that was at work during the failed Camp David Summit of 2000 is again evident: an Israeli leadership openly unwilling to make peace on the basis of genuine reciprocity, let alone justice or equality is meeting a Palestinian leadership utterly dependent on an American ability to pressure Israel into significant concessions, under the aegis of an American administration with the same kind of pro-Israel mentality and frame of reference that oversaw the last failed round.
One wonders why Obama is orchestrating this futile exercise at all—for the outcome of such lack of imagination will surely not be a strengthening of the U.S. position in the Middle East. Let us recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous stand on the Suez crisis of 1956. Taken by surprise by the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt, Eisenhower then faced considerable domestic pressure to go easy on Israel. He also faced strident British appeals for solidarity during the Cold War. Yet Eisenhower compelled the invading nations to withdraw, not for the sake of Egypt, but because he understood that U.S. interests could not be served by ill-conceived colonial wars and by a rigidly pro-Israel policy. Obama seems unable and unwilling to level with the American people about the need to delink Israel’s putative interests from America’s real ones. Without such a delinking, and in the context of ongoing war in Afghanistan that is fast becoming Obama’s war, Obama will surely snuff out what little hope there was when he first came to power, and when he addressed the Muslim world directly.
Obama’s presidency is shaping up to be another missed opportunity to rebuild America’s broken relationship to the Middle East. Americans may be tired of the Middle East, but they can’t afford to ignore it. The status quo no longer afflicts the people of the Middle East alone. It costs Americans as well.
On the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is clear that al-Qaeda was a tiny fringe terrorist movement, not a globe-straddling threat to Western societies. The organization has been decisively disrupted and now lacks command and control. Its leader, Usama Bin Laden, has not been seen in a video since 2004, and is either dead or horribly disfigured. Its number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is dangerous only in the way that any other terrorist crank is, firing off crackpot messages to his dwindling band of followers from time to time. With the startling rise of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States, fanned in large part by Republican Party fear mongering, it is worthwhile underlining the ways in which September 11 contravened Islamic values and Islamic law. (For a modernist, liberal interpretation, see this pdf file, “Jihad and the Islamic Law of War.”
1. It is forbidden to attempt to impose Islam on other people. The Qur’an says, “There is no compulsion in religion. The right way has become distinct from error.” (-The Cow, 2:256). Note that this verse was revealed in Medina and was never abrogated by any other verse of the Quran. Islam’s holy book forbids coercing people into adopting any religion. They have to willingly choose it.
2. Islamic law forbids aggressive warfare. The Quran says, “But if the enemies incline towards peace, do you also incline towards peace. And trust in God! For He is the one who hears and knows all things.” (8:61) The Quran chapter “The Cow,” 2:190, says, “Fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! God loveth not aggressors.”
3. In Islamic war, not just any civil engineer can declare or launch a war. It is the prerogative of the duly constituted leader of the Muslim community that engages in the war. Nowadays that would be the president or prime minister of the state.
4. The killing of innocent non-combatants is forbidden. According to Sunni tradition, ‘Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, gave these instructions to his armies: “I instruct you in ten matters: Do not kill women, children, the old, or the infirm; do not cut down fruit-bearing trees; do not destroy any town . . . ” (Malik’s Muwatta’, “Kitab al-Jihad.”)
5. Muslim commanders must give the enemy fair warning that war is imminent. The Prophet Muhammad at one point gave 4 months notice. Sneak attacks are forbidden.
The World Trade Center had a mosque in it, which Bin Laden destroyed, and he killed dozens of innocent Muslims in the attack along with thousands of others. All of this is an abomination in Islamic law.
Al-Qaeda can legitimately be seen as not a Muslim group at all. Usama Bin Laden openly said of the hijackers that ‘those young men had no fiqh [Islamic law]‘– i.e. they were lawless secret operatives rather than proper Muslims. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad when in the Philippines lived like James Bond, going to nightclubs with a pure silver cigarette lighter. Several of the hijackers frequented strip clubs. Ziad Jarrah was from a secular family and had a Turkish live-in girlfriend. Many of these operatives simply were not fundamentalists but rather an odd sort of Muslim nationalist. Bin Laden did not target the US because of its way of life, but because he said it imposed a boycott on Iraq in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, because it encouraged the Saudi regime to pump more oil than it should so as to keep the price low, because it stationed troops in the kingdom. Even if Bin Laden hadn’t been a crackpot with conspiracy theories, these points are not civilizational or religious issues. They are just politics.
Bin Laden wanted a big fight between the Muslim world and the United States. He wanted the US mired in Afghanistan. He is a nobody, leading a tiny group of cells now mostly disrupted. But the US has sunk itself into a quagmire of wars in a vast over-reaction to a terrorist attack. Without the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, al-Qaeda might well have just disappeared even further into insignificance than it did. And now, instigated by the Republican Party, US society is moving toward an Islamophobia that could well set it at odds with 1.5 billion Muslims.
Bin Laden is not a proper Muslim, and his actions contravened Islamic law. He is a Jim Jones-type cultist with a fringe, violent People’s Temple. Americans need to stop blaming Islam, and to recognize that most Muslims in the world are their friends, and that American Muslims are patriots and contributors to our well-being.
Every time Americans tear down Islam, Bin Laden gets a little bit of what he wanted.
The horrible era of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States yielded a one-day silly season on Thursday, covered wall-to-wall by the US cable news channels. The weird cultist Terry Jones, fired from his church in Cologne, Germany last year for abusing his congregants, preaching hate-filled sermons, and demanding absolute obedience, was favored by an unprecedented telephone call from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asking him not to burn the Quran, the Muslim scripture, on Saturday. Jones, who can’t seem to get even 50 people to follow him in Gainesville and is a nobody with a nasty stunt, is nevertheless getting millions of dollars worth of free advertising for his lunacy courtesy Time Warner, Newscorp, etc. If there were any responsible adults left in the producers offices of the major television news shows, they would have long since pulled the plug on this non-story. Then Imam Mohammad Musri of central Florida came out and announced that he and Jones would be flying to New York to see Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on Saturday. Jones seemed to be under the impression that he was in a position, by calling off the Quran-burning, to force Abdul Rauf to move his proposed inter-faith community center. Then Abdul Rauf came out and said he’d had no contact with Musri or Jones and though he was glad the book-burning had been called off, he wasn’t going to have the issue toyed with. Jones replied that he had been lied to and was only suspending the Quran burning and reserved the right to go ahead with it.
Abdul Rauf didn’t want to come out and say it, but I will. Terry Jones is deploying the tactics of terrorism without actually harming anyone, a sort of psy-ops terrorism. He is attempting to coerce people by threatening symbolic violence. And that is the answer to the mystery of why anyone is paying attention to him, including the Secretary of Defense. He has them over the barrel because he is prepared to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater. Everyone knows that his book-burning would have been filmed, and the video would have been played over and over again by Muslim radicals. Hate speech and incitement to violence on Jones’s web site led his internet service provided to yank his site on Thursday.
Then yet another egotistical exhibitionist, Donald Trump, announced he was willing to buy the Park 51 property where Abdul Rauf plans his community center, for the fair market price plus 25%. The developer was reported to have better offers, and Trump’s grandstanding appears to have changed nothing.
This hydra-headed story about, like 100 unbalanced people, was sliced and diced by the television gossip-pundits all afternoon and evening for millions of viewers. I mean, is this the last days of Rome and are these our bread and circuses?
Here are some stories of infinitely more consequence that cable news mostly did not cover much or even wholly ignored on Thursday:
3. In keeping with their historical charge of ‘healing the world,’ many American Jewish communities commemorated the beginning of their high holy days (the ‘days of awe’) by condemning the rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry in the US. Read, for instance, the words of Rabbi Ira Flax of Alabama. Rabbi Michael Lerner is leading a Quran reading on Saturday in the Bay Area. These many heroes are countering the actions of a handful of hateful, well-heeled neocons who have joined with Christian supremacists in promoting Islamophobia in apparent ignorance of the simple fact that no Western country that came after the Muslims has ever not also come after the Jews. LeShana Tova, friends.
4. UN envoy Angelina Jolie, on a trip to Pakistan, underlined the country’s enormous aid needs in the wake of the unprecedented deluge that put a fifth of the country under water. Another 40 villages have been drowned in Sindh in recent days, and only 1.5 million of the 8 million people made homeless by the deluge have received shelter. This is a massive ongoing tragedy to which no in the outside world seems to be paying attention except Jolie. Why hasn’t Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gone there personally and toured the camps and brought aid? Does Washington not understand what that would mean to Pakistanis? Such visible acts of American solidarity with the flood victims would help bury the minor news stories generated in Pakistan by American Islamophobes. (See my piece on the Pakistani floods in Tomdispatch.com).
I could go on with stories more important than the minor kook Terry Jones, because all of them are.
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