The diagram below was created circa 2002 and is the product of someone decrying the alleged efforts of "Establishment Left's alternative media gatekeepers / censors" to silence 9/11 conspiracy theorists/analysts.


I have looked at the evidence put forth to support the claim that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolition. My conclusion is that this theory is unsupported by the evidence. That is, I think the evidence supports the claim that the Twin Towers (and WTC 7) collapsed as a result of the fires caused by airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers.  Frankly, I often wonder if the controlled demolition claims weren't concocted as a form of, what was later termed by Cass Sunstein, "cognitive infiltration" to discredit more reasonable scrutiny of the official 9/11 conspiracy narrative.

There is much in the story of 9/11 that has been hidden or distorted. At the most basic level, Americans have been fed a misleading narrative that the 9/11 perpetrators were driven by a blind Islamic-inspired hatred of America and its freedoms. In my view, it is more accurate to see the perpetrators' particularized interpretation of Islam, Salafi jihadism, as an organizing ideology used to help mobilize people to fight in response to grievances over US wars and other actions in support of the repressive Jewish state and repressive Arab regimes. Moreover, I find it interesting that, apparently, no US official was ever held accountable for the glaring intelligence and defense failures leading up to and on 9/11.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the "Gatekeepers" diagram but I can vouch for the curious, overzealous "conspiracy theory" bashing that prevails in certain Left circles. Noam Chomsky would be a good example of this. It is, for instance, accurately asserted that he "uses an institutional analysis as opposed to conspiracy theory to reach his conclusions."

Arguably, "institutional analysis" and "conspiracy analysis" are far from mutually exclusive and the existence of proven conspiracies concocted by high US government officials, e.g. Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, etc., is well-established. Readers interested in this subject are advised to read Lance deHaven-Smith's Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Pr., 2013).

Another thing I can vouch for is the linkage in the diagram between uber-activist and self-described "socialist" Leslie Cagan and the CIA. The CIA was/is closely tied to the Ford Foundation (FF) and has long maintained a coterie of well-connected elite movers and shakers in its leadership. For example, its current president, Darren Walker, among other things, "was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation" and "had a decade-long career in international law and finance at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and UBS" and "is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations."

The Rockefeller Foundation and the CFR are both enmeshed in the Deep State (see also here). Walker's old law firm had its own ties to the intelligence community with one of its attorneys serving as General Counsel for the Security Affairs Support Association. The firm was disciplined in 2007 for misconduct in a major Congolese corruption case. UBS is a notorious Swiss bank and these institutions have long had a reputation for serving "as sanctuaries for the wealth of dictators and despots, mobsters and arms dealers, corrupt officials and tax cheats of all kinds".

The FF was a major donor to Astraea during the period when Cagan claimed to be on the Astraea board of directors (I have not been able to verify her Astraea board service). For example, Astraea's 2007 annual report touts a $3.5 million grant "over 3 years from the Ford Foundation". Leslie Cagan did serve on the board of Pacifica, which received its "first major foundation grant" in 1951 from the Ford Foundation. In sum, there is enough evidence in support of the relationships alleged in the diagram to give it careful consideration.

As an aside, in a 2003 fluff piece on Cagan in the NY Times Chris Hedges wrote:

LESLIE CAGAN is willing to count many things. She will count the billions the United States will spend if it goes to war in Iraq. She will count the dead. She will count the oil companies that line up for the spoils. She will count the nations that turn their backs on this country in anger. And she will, on Feb. 15, count the demonstrators who are to gather in Manhattan and three dozen cities around the globe to rally to stop the war. She will count all this. She is counting now.

Two things Cagan (and Hedges) apparently weren't counting were the number of highly placed Zionist neo-conservatives pushing for the war and the number of Zionist shills (such as Cagan) in the peace movement pushing the bogus "war for oil" narrative and ensuring little attention was drawn to the primary driver—support for Israel.

Labels: 9/11, Cagan, Chris Hedges, conspiracy, critical thinking, Ford Foundation, Iraq, Islam, Israel, media, Neoconservatives, Zionism

US resident and Turkish expatriate Fethullah Gülen has been fingered as a coup plotter by the Turkish regime. It's hard to know exactly who was behind the events in Turkey earlier this month but Gülen certainly has an interesting background. In 2012, when Gülen was still reckoned as an ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he was discussed at length in a New Yorker profile of Erdoğan. Citing the work of indicted Turkish journalist Ahmet Şık, author Dexter Filkins writes:

Gülen is considered one of Erdoğan’s most powerful allies but is reviled and feared by much of Turkey’s population. Born in either 1938 or 1941—publications distributed by his organization cite both dates—Gülen fled to the United States in 1999, as Turkish authorities were preparing to arrest him, for “trying to undermine the secular system.” He now lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and has emerged as the leader of one of the world’s most important Islamic orders, surpassed only by the Muslim Brotherhood in its reach and influence. His public message, in the books and glossy pamphlets his acolytes distribute, is almost entirely apolitical, but his critics suspect that his ambitions are deeply political.

Gülen’s followers operate a network of schools in a hundred and thirty countries. They also run a network of for-profit college-prep courses, which some Turks say earns tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. (A prominent Gülenist in Turkey told me that the courses were not that profitable.) Turkish businessmen donate money to build Gülenist schools in countries whose markets they are trying to enter, and the schools serve as beachheads of good will. According to the movement’s followers, Turkish businessmen who are Gülenists often make deals with one another, sometimes in Turkey, sometimes in faraway lands that have nonexistent or weak governments. In person, Gülenists often come across as amalgams of Dale Carnegie and Christian missionaries: clean-cut, polite, and relentlessly cheerful.

In Turkey, Gülen’s followers own the newspaper Zaman and the TV channel Samanyolu, which editorialize on behalf of the A.K. Party and the Ergenekon prosecutions. (While Erdoğan himself is not believed to be a Gülenist, President Gül is said to be one, as are several other senior members of the government.) Gülen is thought to have between two and three million followers in Turkey, including as many as sixty members of parliament—about ten per cent of the total.

The Gülenists insist that the organization is too diffuse to function as a political movement. But many Turks say that the Gülenists have ambitions and that these may or may not include Erdoğan. A former member of parliament who was once a confidant of Erdoğan’s told me that, in 1999, he met Gülen in Pennsylvania. Gülen, he said, told him that he had a twenty-five-year plan to take control of the Turkish state, and that this would be accomplished by a group of followers he referred to as “the Golden Generation.” “There isn’t any question that Gülen wants political power,” the former legislator told me. (A spokesman for Gülen denied that he had ever advocated “regime change.”)

The most widely held perception in Turkey is that the Gülenists have taken control of the Turkish National Police—and that they are behind the arrests in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases. James Jeffrey, a former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that at least part of that proposition appeared to be true: “The assertion that the T.N.P. is controlled by the Gülenists is impossible to confirm, but we have found no one who disputes it.”

Gülen has cultivated some powerful friends in the United States. When U.S. officials were trying to expel him to face criminal charges in Turkey, he was able to call on Graham Fuller, a former senior official in the C.I.A., to help him remain. When he applied for permanent residency, Morton Abramowitz, another former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote a letter on his behalf. Fuller’s relationship with Gülen, in particular, has prompted conspiracy theories in Turkey about the C.I.A.’s involvement in Gülen’s rise.

(Abramowitz also teamed up with neo-con Eric S. Edelman, another Jewish former US ambassador to Turkey, to rise to Gülen's defense in 2014 in a Washington Post op-ed). In 2013, The Economist also took note of a possible Israeli dimension in the Gülen-Erdoğan split: "A source of enduring speculation is why Mr Erdogan has chosen this moment to go after the Gulenists. The most likely answer is that Mr Erdogan wanted them to show their hand well before the presidential elections. An increasingly paranoid prime minister is said to believe that a 'Gulen-Israel axis' is bent on unseating him. His suspicions were fuelled by Mr Gulen’s very public criticism of Turkey’s rupture with Israel in 2010."

Earlier this month, just days after the attempted coup, Raphael Ahren wrote a piece in the Times of Israel mentioning Gülen at length. He writes:

[Efrat] Aviv, who teaches at Bar-Ilan’s Middle Eastern studies department and is a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, has done extensive research into the moderate Islamic Gülen movement and its connection to Israel and the global Jewish community.

In an article she published in Turkish Policy Quarterly six years ago, she researched Fethullah Gülen’s interfaith outreach, which included meetings with several Jewish groups both in Turkey and the US.

“Gülen sees great importance in disseminating tolerance because of the fact that the world is a global village, and it is imperative to lay the foundation for communication without making distinctions between Christians, Jews, Atheists or Buddhists,” she wrote.

“Because of this approach, of perceiving dialogue as both a religious and a moral-national-social obligation, Gülen met with countless leaders and key people from the three religions during the 1990s. He met with Jewish leaders, both secular and religious, inside and outside of Turkey, in order to promote dialogue between Judaism and Islam.”

In the late 1990s, the reclusive imam met at least twice with senior delegations from the Anti-Defamation League, which at the time was headed by Abraham Foxman, according to Aviv.

“Gülen talked about his moderation regarding Islam, the Jews, Israel, and expressed reasonable and non-extremist views,” Kenneth Jacobson, who currently serves as the ADL’s deputy national director, recalled in 2005 about his first personal encounter with Gülen in New Jersey. “It was a very good meeting, very friendly.”

Jacobson’s second meeting with Gülen took place in 1998 at Gülen’s initiative — and at his Istanbul residence — and was also attended by then-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Leon Levy, Aviv writes.

“We met, and it was another pleasant encounter. We were given gifts,” Jacobson recalled, adding that Gülen reiterated his message of moderation. “He presented himself as someone that cares about moderation in Turkey and cares about a moderate Islam and as someone interested in good relations with Israel and the Jews.”

In 1998, Gülen met with Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi Doron in Istanbul, a televised visit that came about at the initiative of the cultural attaché in the Israeli consulate. “This was the first time that a chief rabbi came on an official visit from Israel to Turkey, and the second visit of a chief rabbi in a Muslim country,” according to Aviv.

Israel’s consul-general to Istanbul at the time, Eli Shaked, participated in the meeting.

“The Israeli Foreign Ministry thought that a meeting with Gülen could help quell the hatred and resistance to Israel and/or Jews, and therefore they authorized it,” Aviv wrote.

More recently, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, also writing in the Times of Israel, says:

Israelis consider the Mavi Marmara a watershed point in Israeli-Turkish relations, despite gradual difficulties that had set in the relationship up to that point. Israel has recently patched things up with Turkey, more or less. But one relationship was permanently damaged and the Mavi Marmara played a major part in its unraveling. This is the relationship of Prime Minister, now President, Erdogan and Gulen. The two had been close in terms of political collaboration, even though Gulen was all the while in the United States and even though he does not represent a political party but a broad social and educational movement. When asked by a journalist about the Mavi Marmara and the Gaza flotilla, Gulen condemned the initiative, arguing for Israel’s sovereignty and urging that support for Gaza ought to be channeled through the state authority ...

He also recognizes Israel, enough to have distanced himself from Erdogan’s position on Gaza and the flotilla ... I believe Israel owes a debt of gratitude to a principled Muslim voice that recognized its sovereignty, at severe cost.

Given Fethullah Gülen's pro-Israel bona fides is it any wonder that his star seems to be rising in the West and the New York Times has given him a platform for him to profess his innocence and to critique Erdoğan as "an autocrat who is turning a failed putsch into a slow-motion coup of his own against constitutional government"? You can read Gülen's 2010 remarks on the Mavi Marmara massacre in the Wall Street Journal.

P.S. Gülen also likes Hillary Clinton.

Labels: Clintons, Islam, Israel, Turkey, United States, Wikileaks

I wish people would promote policies that truly address the real threat we face, instead of ones that promote bigotry and prejudice. It's extremely disturbing to see people take advantage of a national tragedy to score political points or to make a profit at the expense of dividing our nation. I do believe that gun ownership is seen as a central part of American identity for a large group of people, and so by excluding Muslims from that, it reinforces the idea of Muslims as the "other." And that's a big problem. Owning guns is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution either protects all of us or none of us. Our position is that you can't let our enemies win by allowing us to divide ourselves as Americans.

Source: Hassan Shibly as quoted in "This Is What It's Like to Be a Muslim-American Gun Owner" on The Trace, July 29, 2015.

See also:  "Blood, faith unite Muslims, LGBT and others after rampage" by Bethany Rodgers in the Orlando Sentinel, June 12, 2016.

Labels: civil liberties, guns, Islam

There are many ways to deceive—one is the lie by omission. Critics of Islamic militants often use this tactic. One common example is to highlight suicide attacks and then to strip the acts of their larger context and ascribe purely or mostly carnal motives to the attackers.

One prime example of this is the "Martyrs rewarded with 72 Virgins" trope. The most effective lies often have a kernel of truth and that is the case here but the hadith at issue says rather more:

That the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: "There are six things with Allah for the martyr. He is forgiven with the first flow of blood (he suffers), he is shown his place in Paradise, he is protected from punishment in the grave, secured from the greatest terror, the crown of dignity is placed upon his head - and its gems are better than the world and what is in it - he is married to seventy two wives along Al-Huril-'Ayn of Paradise, and he may intercede for seventy of his close relatives."

Here's a different translation of that passage:

It was reported in the hadeeth of al-Miqdaam ibn Ma'di Karb that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said:

"The martyr (shaheed) has seven blessings from Allaah: he is forgiven from the moment his blood is first shed; he will be shown his place in Paradise; he will be spared the trial of the grave; and he will be secure on the Day of the Greatest Terror (the Day of Judgement); there will be placed on his head a crown of dignity, one ruby of which is better than this world and all that is in it; he will be married to seventy-two of al-hoor al-'iyn; and he will be permitted to intercede for seventy of his relatives."

In English, Al-Huril-'Ayn/al-hoor al-'iyn is the term usually transliterated as "houris" and translated as "virgins". At least two more things are worth pointing out: First, it's not transparently evident that the marriage depicted in Paradise is a physical one consummated sexually. By analogy, the New Testament describes the Church—the collective body of believers—as the virginal Bride of Christ (see e.g. 2 Corinthians 11:2 and Ephesians 5:22-32). Second, there is reason to believe that this alleged motivation is exaggerated or even fabricated.

To be clear, it may very well be that the 72 houris are widely understood by Muslims as a carnal reward for the shahid in Paradise. Muslims are no less capable than Jews or Christians of ignorance or dissimulation in defense of their faith. In any case, the Western media have generally chosen to decontextualize the (rather infrequent) act of the Muslim suicide bomber and to emphasize a salacious explanation to the detriment, in my opinion, of all except those want to add fuel to the fires of conflict. For a discussion of the larger context of suicide attacks I recommend Jacqueline Rose's "Deadly Embrace" in the London Review of Books.

Labels: Christianity, critical thinking, Islam, media, religion, resistance, violence

Islam, he [Khomeini] would always claim, was "the religion of militant individuals who are committed to faith and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism."

Source: Ayatollah Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini (from Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist) as quoted in Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong (New York: Knopf, 2014) p. 332.

Labels: Empire, Iran, Islam, Karen Armstrong, quotations, religion, resistance

Fundamentalism ... differs from traditionalism or orthodoxy or even a mere revivalist movement. It differs in that it is a movement in conscious, organized opposition to the disruption of those traditions and orthodoxies.

Tradition, orthodoxy, and revival exist within an ongoing, stable system. Fundamentalism exists in the midst of change. Clifford Geertz describes this difference in Islamic societies he has studied as the difference between "being held by" one's beliefs and "holding" those beliefs, between having faith and having reasons. In a culture in which there is a great deal of stability and agreement on the way life should proceed, beliefs are part of the fabric of life. To be part of one's culture and to affirm those beliefs are inseparable. In such situations, one is held by beliefs about ultimate reality. But once that culture is disturbed by change or outside intrusion or mobility, beliefs lose their taken-for-granted character. They must be consciously held.

Source: Nancy T. Ammerman, "North American Protestant Fundamentalism" in Fundamentalisms Observed (Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1991) by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., pp. 14-15.

Labels: Christianity, Islam, quotations, religion, sociology

Jürgen Todenhöfer is the only known Western journalist to openly enter ISIS-controlled territory and return alive. His views are largely unheard in the US media; I learned about him via the BBC. Below are a few excerpts from him or articles about his visit to ISIS/ISIL territory.

"During the last 200 years an Arabic country has never attacked the West. We must explain why we fought wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Libya. And if we are looking for a reason why this horrible organisation ISIL exists, we must have a look at its history. ISIL was founded some weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq. The organisation is the baby of George W. Bush. And the violence, that we face now is the fallout or boomerang effect of our own wars."

-Euronews. "ISIL is the baby of George W Bush."January 16, 2015.

Once within Isis territory, Todenhöfer said his strongest impression was "that Isis is much stronger than we think here". He said it now has "dimensions larger than the UK", and is supported by "an almost ecstatic enthusiasm that I have never encountered in any other warzone".

"Each day, hundreds of willing fighters arrive from all over the world," he told tz. "For me it is incomprehensible."

...

Todenhöfer says that this ultimately means Isis cannot be beaten by Western intervention or air strikes – despite US claims last week that they have proven effective. "With every bomb that is dropped and hits a civilian, the number of terrorists increases," he said.

Speaking in a TV interview with RTL's Nachtjournal programme two days after his return to Germany last week, Todenhöfer said Isis has worked hard to establish itself as a functioning state. He said it has "social welfare", a "school system", and that he was even surprised to see it has plans to provide education to girls.

-Adam Withnall. The Independent. "Inside Isis: The first Western journalist ever to be given access to the 'Islamic State' has just returned – and this is what he discovered." December 21, 2014.

See also Jürgen Todenhöfer's website.

Labels: Bush, Iraq, Islam, Syria, terrorism, video, war tax resistance

For if the Vikings were the pioneers, the princes of Europe, or some of them, were the middlemen in the new slave-trade. They licensed it and they profited by it, though they left the direct traffic in it to the Jews, who could move most easily across the frontiers of the two societies. We have plenty of evidence of this trade and its routes ... Liutprand of Cremona, the ambassador of the West who, in the tenth century, stood agog before the kaleidoscope pageantry of the Byzantine court, tells us that it was the merchants of Verdun who, for the immense profit of the trade, made boys into eunuchs and sold them through Moorish Spain to the rich Moslem world ... The trade has left its mark in the languages of both Christendom and Islam. Sclavi, 'Slavs', has formed, in every European language, the word for slaves; and the same word, Sakaliba, has provided the Arabic word for eunuchs.

Source: Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Rise of Christian Europe. (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965) p. 92.

Labels: history, Islam, Jews, slavery, White folks

How do you turn Muslim children into Zionists? One recipe can be derived from pages 32-33 of a 2007 UK report entitled, Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19:

As with other key stages, emotional engagement is necessary to challenge mindsets. The rigour of historical methods of enquiry is essential, but not powerful enough in themselves to necessarily overcome prejudice and stereotyping. Emotional engagement forms a significant partner in the structuring of activities. The use of local history, reconstructions, a focus on child labour and making deliberate links to the present is how one history department seeks to hook pupils' personal engagement.

As part of the teaching of Arab-Israeli coursework at Abraham Moss School in Manchester, students take on the role of UN commissioners given the task of dividing Palestine in the late 1940s. They are reminded of the horrors of the Holocaust and the likely impact on world opinion. The students also consider how the survivors of the Holocaust would respond to the question Why did I survive? and how that might have impacted on the desire for a Jewish state. A timeline of events and information about who lived in the area and attitudes of different organisations, states and peoples are provided to help pupils consider the division of land. Given the predominance of Muslim pupils in the School and the existence of potential anti-Jewish sentiment or ignorance of Jewish culture, this task presents a complex challenge. The results are very interesting. The vast majority of students partition the land evenly between Arabs and Jews, even though the Jewish population was far smaller, and they establish Jerusalem as a neutral zone. The reasons pupils give for their decisions vary, but they are predominantly associated with the following: issues of fairness, acknowledgement of the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, a recognition that Jews had lived in the region for centuries before the Arabs, and a desire to find a solution where both sides could live in peace.

Boiling it down, after establishing your authority as a 'teacher,' the first task is to set the agenda: Don't raise the question of whether it is/was right for UN commissioners to divide another people's land, just simply give your subjects students the "task of dividing Palestine." Then to make sure they divide it and divide it properly, drill them in the catechism of "the Holocaust" while studiously ignoring Zionist collaboration with the Nazis (beginning in 1933). Encourage them to emotionally identify with victims of "the Holocaust" (Zionist Jewish victims only, please; I mean, does anyone else really matter?). Don't encourage them to identify with or consider partition from the perspective of "Arabs" (not Palestinians). Don't encourage them to consider the inherent injustice of forcibly taking away one people's land to give it to another group of people allegedly on account of the crimes of a third party. Don't encourage them to consider more just alternatives. Don't let them know that Jewish designs on Palestine long predate "the Holocaust." Do teach them the Jewish narrative/Orientalist perspective as if it were uncontested historical fact, e. g. "Jews had lived in the region for centuries before the Arabs." Follow these simple do's and dont's and you, too, can brainwash the "vast majority of students" (Christian children, too, undoubtedly) into becoming Zionists.

See also: The "General Eisenhower Warned Us" Hoax

Labels: children, critical thinking, hasbara, holocaust, Islam, Palestine, Zionism

CIA reaches out to Muslims

Dinner in Dearborn will come on 'wrong night' amid Ramadan

Paul Egan / The Detroit News

Dearborn -- CIA Director Leon Panetta plans to visit Dearborn on Sept. 16 for an invitation-only dinner and speech with 150 leaders of the Arab and Muslim communities, officials confirmed Tuesday.
The visit comes amid an unprecedented outreach effort by the Central Intelligence Agency and as Panetta seeks to double the number of CIA analysts who are proficient in Arabic and other Mideast languages.
But the date chosen for the meeting -- the 27th night of Ramadan or "night of power," when many devout Muslims and imams spend the entire night worshiping in the mosque -- is drawing criticism.

"They picked the entirely wrong night on this," said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "This is our leading intelligence agency who doesn't know this."
Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, acknowledged the sensitivity of the night but said he and other community leaders, not the CIA, should take any blame because the agency consulted with the community before choosing the date. [the community does deserve blame because it should have scheduled the CIA visit a week later, on Eid, a joyous celebration during which sacrifices are made to whomever you worship.]
"It's a simple miscall," said Hamad, who added that most Muslims would break their fast before going to the mosque on the night of power. [If the CIA wants us to skip prayer on the night of power, surely God will understand]
Once among the most secret of agencies, the CIA has been setting up booths at events in Dearborn and Detroit and spending tens of thousands of dollars annually sponsoring galas and other events and scholarships. CIA spokesman George Little said Tuesday the agency's outreach to "first- and second-generation Americans" in Dearborn and elsewhere began about five years ago.
"These individuals have the kinds of skills, knowledge and experiences that can strongly advance our vital intelligence mission and protect the nation's security," Little said. "The number of job applications from the Detroit area has risen steadily over that time period."
The CIA was a platinum sponsor -- representing a contribution of at least $10,000 -- to the ADC's 29th annual fundraising gala in December, according to the committee's Web site. The CIA also contributes about $10,000 to the annual gala of the Arab American and Chaldean Council, said Executive Director Radwan Khoury. The agency also is a sponsor of the Arab International Festival and the Arab American Scholarship Foundation, according to the Web site of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce and Hamad.
In March, the CIA hosted an appreciation dinner for leaders of the Arab American and Chaldean communities at the Westin Hotel in Southfield. Top CIA officials, but not the director, attended.
Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, said the CIA also spends money on image and recruitment advertisements in his newspaper. [and boasting about it]
"I don't know that they're recruiting people, but I know that they're making a great effort," Siblani said.
Walid said his organization has never sought sponsorship money from the CIA and would not accept it. "We would lose our credibility as an advocacy agency," he said. "We've criticized openly some of the tactics of the CIA, particularly under the previous administration."
Hamad said the CIA's outreach shows his community is as valued and as American as apple pie. ["and as Israeli as falafel"]
"We'd rather have the CIA, like the FBI or other government agencies, do their work in the open," he said. "The CIA did its job years and years ago, and we didn't meet any of them one to one." [did you get that, Lynndie? Torture Iraqis on an outdoor plaza in downtown Dearborn, not behind the walls of Abu Ghraib]

Labels: Islam, Khawla, quislings, religion

Do a Google search on the phrase "we love death" and you will get more than 37,000 hits, many of them describing a purportedly essential feature of Islam. But consider that it is primarily Christian nations that have the world's largest nuclear and conventional arsenals. Further, the predominantly Christian United States has likely been responsible for the violent and other premature deaths of more people than any other country in the last sixty years--including half-a-million children under the age of five in Iraq during the 1990s.

In the last seven years, the predominantly Christian US has invaded and occupied two predominantly Muslim countries: Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of more than a million dead Afghanis and Iraqis. Over the last sixty years, the predominantly Christian US has been the most important backer of Israel which displaced the predominantly Muslim Palestinian people and continues to visit murder and mayhem upon them. The Christian President-elect Barack Obama has spoken openly about attacking another predominantly Muslim country, Pakistan.

In "The Spirit of Disobedience," Curtis White eloquently ties these threads together:

In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to "duty" that masks unspeakable violence and injustice. In the end, the Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. He understands far better than we do how the two become one at the end of the torturer's rod. The Predator missile, product of American scientific ingenuity, that homes in on his head is both self-righteously and arrogantly evangelical and meanly pragmatic. It is the empire that the rest of the world reads in George Bush's smirk. As John Ruskin understood 150 years ago, "The only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?"

If we live in a "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the opposition of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as "workers" is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's "freedom," its "reasonable" need to make itself "competitive," and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, put it, "They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay." Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of "protecting freedom," no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses. The grotesque violence of video games and Hollywood movies, doing God knows what to the "individual morality" of teenagers, is legal and somehow now a protected part of our freedom of expression. Even, as the more thoughtful anti-abortionists complain with some justice, the legality of abortion at times covers over an attitude toward human life that subjects life to the low logic of efficiency and convenience. The idea of abortion as a minor "medical procedure" becomes Orwellian in its intense determination not to "know what we do." Or, perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the ownership of private property. This legality formalizes and empowers our famous "unalienable right" to property (especially that most peculiar form of private property known as the corporation), the exercise of which will profoundly alienate those on whom this right is inflicted: workers, children, foreign enemies, and animals. In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the deader the social and natural worlds become.

So, just who is it that demonstrably loves death, even if it is not articulated clearly? An American and/or Christian culture of death is abundantly evident. But what got me thinking about this subject was part of a post on the ZionistsOut blog about the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor. It says:

The new JFGAA Executive Director is David Shtulman, a dual US-Israeli citizen, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) veteran, and, in all likelihood, a current IOF reservist. ... in his weekly shabbat message--wittily entitled "The New Year Enters with a Bang!"--Herr Shtulman refers to the Israeli attacks as an "Israeli counter-attack on Hamas."

Shtulman next pulls a predictable role reversal of the Judaic culture of death with the unsourced claim: "Hamas has often responded with the mantra, 'We will win because we love death and Israel loves life.' " If Hamas uses this "mantra" frequently then it is pretty strange that it is not attributed to Hamas in the New York Times even once. In fact, in searches using two different databases, the phrase "we love death" turns up in the NYT archives only three times between 1851 and the present. The "mantra" never made it onto the news pages of the NYT.

In two instances, it appears in editorials by Jewish neoconservative pundit David Brooks. In March 2004, Brooks attributed it to Al Qaeda and by September of that year he had expanded it to the "fringes of the Muslim world." The third instance, was just five days before Brooks' second invocation of the "mantra." At the invitation of the NYT "Op-Ed page," in his proposed "conclusion to President Bush's [2004 RNC] address," former Bush I speech writer Daniel McGroarty attributed the phrase "to the statement the terrorists released to claim responsibility for the carnage ... in Madrid."

Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide by Burns and Peterson (Greenwood, 2005), which includes Hamas, has only one documented reference to terrorists loving death and that is a statement attributed to "al-Qaeda in Europe" in connection with the Madrid bombings. It says: "You love life and we love death." There are two problems, though.

First, this is one of at least two statements claiming responsibility for the 2004 Madrid bombings. The apparently first alleged claim of responsibility by al-Qaeda does not say anything about loving death. It was discredited by the pro-Israel group, MEMRI. More importantly, a "two-year investigation into the attacks has found no evidence that al-Qa'ida helped plan, finance or carry out the bombings, or even knew about them in advance," which would indicate that both of the claims of responsibility are fabrications.

It is plausible that Shtulman's claim began as an Israeli false flag operation to smear Islam (see also the "Gil Affair" and "Israeli Psyops Against EU and US"). If that is the case, then it is awfully helpful to have someone to discredit the competing claim of responsibility. In this case the guy doing the discrediting, author of the MEMRI analysis, was Yigal Carmon, an IOF Colonel who served at least twenty years (1968-88) in the Israeli intelligence service. In sum, there is nothing credible linking Shtulman's "mantra" to Hamas. But since when have supporters of Israel ever cared about the truth?

One other example of a Muslim claiming a love of death is, perhaps, more credible than the claims attributed to al-Qaeda in 2004. A 2001 story by the Telegraph (UK) quotes a veteran Afghan fighter:

Maulana Inyadullah, who began fighting the Soviet invasion in 1982 at the age of 16, declared that his fellow Afghans relish the prospect of an American attack.

"War is our best hobby. The sound of guns firing is like music for us. We cannot live without war. We have no other way except jihad," he said. ...

Mr Inyadullah, 35, said: "The Americans would be easier to defeat than the Russians. The Americans lead lavish lives and they are afraid of death. We are not afraid of death. The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death."

But only an idiot or a liar would read this as a broad cultural embrace of death or a statement of theological principle. Rather, it is not a desire to die but an express willingness to do so, if need be, in the service of home and hearth with a good dose of braggadocio mixed in for good measure.

A willingness to die is similarly expected of American combat troops. And if Americans put greater stress on killing the enemy then, perhaps, it is simply because they ruthlessly put a premium on killing others and because the commanders know overcoming the normal human aversion to kill is the more difficult task unless, perhaps, you live in America where we are programmed to kill.

The willingness to sacrifice oneself, even in battle, is more humane and noble than the willingness to kill. As Jesus Christ said, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." But this is an ethos that Christianity turned against centuries ago when it joined with the Roman Empire--the very empire that carried out the death sentence of Jesus. The "Constantinian moment" marks the key point in the transformation of the cross from a symbol of love, self-sacrifice, and hope into a symbol of death, empire, and greed. In the wake of this transformation came forced conversions, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the like. Whatever lip service they may pay to the older, nobler meanings, it is clear that for most Americans (and their victims) the deeper, lived reality is that the cross is a symbol of death and devout American Christians are largely "guilty bystanders," if not active participants, in the crimes of empire.

See also:

• "Judaism's Culture of Death"
• "Ralph Peters on Pax Americana & American Culture"
• "The 'General Eisenhower Warned Us' Hoax"
• Women Leaders in Muslim & Christian States

Labels: abortion, Christianity, critical thinking, Curtis White, Empire, Hollywood, Islam, Islamophobia, United States, violence

In recognition of International Hijab Solidarity Day I am posting a resolution adopted by the Huron Valley Greens of Ann Arbor, Michigan last year.

HURON VALLEY GREENS
a local chapter of the Green Party of Michigan
548 S. Main St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104
http://www.hvgreens.org ph. (734) 663-3555

Resolution on the Hijab and Solidarity with Muslims

Adopted by consensus at the regular business meeting of the Huron Valley Greens on September 24, 2007, and amended on October 3, 2007, by direction of the local Coordinating Committee.

WHEREAS on September 8, 2007, a person identifying her/himself as Ann Arbor City Council member Joan Lowenstein posted comments on a popular local blog, Arborupdate. This person characterized the hijab–the traditional Muslim headscarf–worn in solidarity with Muslims by a non-Muslim "as a Halloween costume since she is not a Muslim" and later declared "If I were a Muslim woman who wore the hijab out of respect for the religion and a sense of spritituality [sic], I would be offended by a non-Muslim who used it as a daily costume for purely political reasons"; and,

WHEREAS in 1993, after windows in Jewish homes displaying menorahs were broken, thousands of Christian residents of Billings, Montana, placed paper menorahs in the windows of their homes in solidarity with Jews and those menorahs were not Halloween decorations; and,

WHEREAS in October 2001–in the wake of 9/11 and after the US government summarily rounded up thousands of Muslims and Arabs and many Arabs and Muslims were the targets of hate crimes–students, including at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, and others donned the hijab as part of a worldwide "Scarves for Solidarity" event; and,

WHEREAS, in 2004, after the French government banned the wearing of hijabs and other religious articles in public schools, which law Human Rights Watch criticized as falling "disproportionately on Muslim girls, and thus violat[ing] antidiscrimination provisions of international human rights law," the Assembly for the Protection of Hijab proclaimed September 5th as International Hijab Solidarity Day; and,

WHEREAS, in November 2006, scores of people in Fremont, California wore hijabs and turbans in solidarity with Muslim women and Sikh men about three weeks after a stranger walked up to Alia Ansari and shot her in the head, while she was walking with her three-year-old daughter in Fremont, for no apparent reason other than the fact that she was wearing hijab; and,

WHEREAS, in 2006, the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 143 complaints of civil rights violations against Muslims and triggered by the wearing of hijab; and,

WHEREAS, according to a 2007 Pew Research Center poll, just over half of all American Muslims are very or somewhat worried that Muslim women who wear the hijab will be treated poorly because it identifies them as Muslim; and,

WHEREAS, the offensive comments attributed to Council member Lowenstein demeaned and trivialized an act of solidarity in the context of a racist climate of fear against Arabs and Muslims created as part of President Bush's "War on Terror"; and,

WHEREAS, whether it is worn as an expression of cultural self-determination, political solidarity, or religious devotion the hijab is never a "Halloween costume"; and,

WHEREAS, characterizing the hijab as a "Halloween costume" is evidence of, at worst, bigotry and intolerance and, at best, insensitivity and ignorance.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Huron Valley Greens call upon Ann Arbor City Council member Lowenstein to state publicly whether she was the author of the remarks attributed to her on Arborupdate; and,

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the Huron Valley Greens urge other concerned individuals and organizations to join us in this call and to consider filing a formal complaint with the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission, whose duties include: "Investigate, study, hold hearings and make recommendations to city council regarding complaints from any class or group protected under the human rights ordinance."


See also:

• "Hijab: lifting the veil." Anarkismo.net. 7/18/2005.
• "Students rally to expose the appeal of the hijab." Jakarta Post. 09/05/2007.

Labels: Islam, religion, solidarity

The recent howls of protest over the remarks last week by the head of my church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, shed light on Anglo-American attitudes toward Islam. The controversy is all over the air waves and printed page in the UK and on Saturday, Williams was even heckled at a memorial for his former tutor. On this side of the Atlantic, the "conservative" Islamophobes are outraged, too. Michelle Malkin's blog post on the matter is titled "Resign, Archbishop of Dhimmitude" and on Slate Christopher Hitchens froths:

For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.

But what did the Archbishop actually say? Here are some excerpts from his lecture on "Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective":

Among the manifold anxieties that haunt the discussion of the place of Muslims in British society, one of the strongest, reinforced from time to time by the sensational reporting of opinion polls, is that Muslim communities in this country seek the freedom to live under sharia law. And what most people think they know of sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments; just a few days ago, it was reported that a 'forced marriage' involving a young woman with learning difficulties had been 'sanctioned under sharia law' – the kind of story that, in its assumption that we all 'really' know what is involved in the practice of sharia, powerfully reinforces the image of – at best – a pre-modern system in which human rights have no role. The problem is freely admitted by Muslim scholars. 'In the West', writes Tariq Ramadan in his groundbreaking Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 'the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam ... It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word' (p.31). Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes. As such, this is not only an issue about Islam but about other faith groups, including Orthodox Judaism; and indeed it spills over into some of the questions which have surfaced sharply in the last twelve months about the right of religious believers in general to opt out of certain legal provisions – as in the problems around Roman Catholic adoption agencies which emerged in relation to the Sexual Orientation Regulations last spring.

... But it is important to begin by dispelling one or two myths about sharia; so far from being a monolithic system of detailed enactments, sharia designates primarily – to quote Ramadan again – 'the expression of the universal principles of Islam [and] the framework and the thinking that makes for their actualization in human history' (32). Universal principles: as any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be 'actualized', not a ready-made system. If shar' designates the essence of the revealed Law, sharia is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur'an and Sunna and in the hadith recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' sharia. And when certain states impose what they refer to as sharia or when certain Muslim activists demand its recognition alongside secular jurisdictions, they are usually referring not to a universal and fixed code established once for all but to some particular concretisation of it at the hands of a tradition of jurists. In the hands of contemporary legal traditionalists, this means simply that the application of sharia must be governed by the judgements of representatives of the classical schools of legal interpretation.

... recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question [the inheritance rights of widows] would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.

To put the question like that is already to see where an answer might lie, though it is not an answer that will remove the possibility of some conflict. If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights. This is in effect to mirror what a minority might themselves be requesting – that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land, to the common benefits of secular citizenship – or, better, to recognise that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal belonging but involving them all. ...

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism; and what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety. If the paradoxical idea which I have sketched is true – that universal law and universal right are a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject – theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that.

It should be clear from the above that the Archbishop understands that Western, non-Muslim understandings of sharia are usually simplistic, at best, but moreover that he thinks critically, as do many Muslims, about sharia and, finally, that he is, by no means, advocating the establishment of a separate, parallel judicial system for Muslims in the UK. All of that is, however, too much for those who want to pigeonhole sharia as an oppressive system generated by a terroristic cult that is unworthy of any thoughtful consideration whatosever.

Labels: Christianity, Islam, Islamophobia, religion

VFP Dissident was kind enough to invite me to contribute to this blog. Like many, I'm incensed by what's going on towards my sisters and brothers in places under the heel of US and Israeli oppression. This will be my little corner on the internet to rant about it.

My inspiration for this name: a courageous Arab woman who embraced Islam in its early days, Khawla was a knight and poet. She earned a "reputation of immense bravery, and her legendary personna is still well remembered in Arabia up to this day."

And who said Islam oppresses women?

Labels: Islam, Khawla, resistance

I meant to post the statement below before Christmas but I didn't have the time and energy to track it down and when I did it wasn't real easy to find but here it is. You can find the text with the list of signers here (PDF).

Labels: Christianity, Christmas, Islam

This is post is an edited version of a message I sent a while ago to a seminar I am part of.

B. asked me about some things I said last night about one of the wives (although even her spousal status is, apparently, disputed) of Mohammed. She was known as Marya al-Qibtiyya (or Mariya/Maria the Copt) , i.e. a Coptic Christian, and is believed by some scholars to have played a role in the origin of Islamic reverence for Isa, a.k.a. Jesus. I can't remember where I first learned about this but I'll provide a couple of sources for anyone interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. For one brief (pro-Western) Islamic perspective, see "Maria The Copt" . Another brief Islamic perspective can be found here.

For an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist, anti-Roman Catholic, fringe, evangelical Christian perspective that mentions Marya, see Jack Chick's comic/graphic novel The Prophet which is described as follows: "Part VI of Alberto Rivera's testimony. Learn how the papacy helped start Islam, only to have this new daughter rebel against her. You'll understand the Arab's place in Bible prophecy." Chick's stuff is nothing if not interesting and you can learn a lot from it but it's poison, too. So, be careful.

Using a search engine you can find other online sources. Google turns up two scholarly articles that may or may not bear on the influence of Marya on the Qur'an: "A Possible Coptic Source for a Qur'anic Text" by Wilson B. Bishai and a review of Women in the Quran, Traditions, and Interpretation by Barbara Freyer Stowasser. These are both in JSTOR.

I may have learned about Marya in The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam by Fatima Mernissi but I doubt it. I can say for sure that I recommend the book to anyone interested in Islam and feminist perspectives on Islam from an Islamic and feminist point-of-view. Yes, there are feminists in Islam and Mernissi's book has some wonderful stuff in it about A'isha, another wife of Mohammed and another remarkable Muslim woman, Sukayna, who married five or six husbands and "never pledged ta'a (obedience, the key principle of Muslim marriage) to any of them." I also heartily recommend Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left by Susan Buck-Morss.

Correction: Jack Chick's comic/graphic novel The Prophet does not mention Marya. According to the narrator, Alberto Rivera, Mohammed's first wife Khadijah, not Marya, was a devout Roman Catholic who was sent on a mission to influence Mohammed.

Addendum: FWIW, there appears to be no widely-accepted standard English-language encyclopedic reference work on Islam. The 17-volume Encyclopaedia of Islam is apparently edited exclusively by Western non-Muslims (?) and, according to one review, it is "In many ways ... a quintessential expression of traditional European orientalism, with all that it implies for both good and bad." In any case, the Encyclopedia of Islamic Doctrine (2:163) lists Marya among the wives of Mohammed with the following after her name: "suriyya (concubine)". This is the only mention of her in the 7-volume work.

Last revised: 01/05/2008

Labels: Christianity, Islam

In the wake of her recent assassination, Benazir Bhutto is being touted in the West as the first woman to lead a predominantly Muslim country and so on. Typical is the remark of Joe Pascal on the US N&WR web site: "the first woman leader in the Muslim world" or at feministing.com: "Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim country." The only problem is that it's not true.

Long before Bhutto came on the scene there was Shagrat al-Durr, who became the Sultan of Egypt in 1250 AD and I'm sure that more knowledgable people could cite other early female leaders of predominantly Muslim countries. A'isha, the wife of the Prophet Mohammed, was an amazing leader of Muslim people although she never had formal authority like Shagrat al-Durr or Benazir Bhutto. To learn more about A'isha, I recommend The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam by Fatima Mernissi.

Bhutto was, of course, the first elected female national executive of a modern Muslim majority nation-state. And it is interesting to me that, arguably, Muslim countries have a rather better track record in this regard than Christian majority countries. See the table below. This is my original research and I welcome corrections.

Elected Female National Executives in the Five Most Populous Christian and Muslim Majority Nation-States
Nation-State	Population	Name of Female Executive	Year Elected
United States+	301,139,947	None	NA
Indonesia*	234,693,997	•Megawati Sukarnoputri	2001
Brazil+	190,010,647	None	NA
Pakistan*	164,741,924	•Benazir Bhutto	1988, 1993
Bangladesh*	150,448,339	•Khaleda Zia •Sheikh Hasina Wazed	1991, 2001 1996
Russia+	141,377,752	None	NA
Mexico+	108,700,891	None	NA
The Philippines+	91,077,287	•Corazon Aquino •Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo	1986 2001
Egypt*	80,335,036	None	NA
Turkey*	71,158,647	•Tansu Çiller	1993
Notes: 1. The plus symbol (+) indicates that the country has a Christian majority population while the asterisk (*) indicates a Muslim majority. 2. All population figures are from the CIA's World Factbook.

Labels: Benazir Bhutto, Christianity, gender, Islam

Labels: Islam