Category Archives: Religion

Transcendental vs. Old-School Politics

Barack Obama’s speech on race, whose honesty and nuance are all too rare in American politics, deserves to be read or watched in full. For the first time, I’m persuaded that Obama is a unique politician. He may be opportunistic like the rest, but his horizons are broader. He doesn’t accept the rules as written. He educates, broadens the debate.

We could quibble and say that Obama delivered this speech because he had to, after being forced into a corner by controversy over the words of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But what matters to me is that he seized the moment, transforming a corrosive political dispute into a teaching opportunity about what divides us in America.

Far from sugar-coating our differences as politicians tend to do, he proclaimed that black anger and white anger are both real, and have a legitimate source. Both blacks and whites have seen their dreams evaporate over the past generation. Powerful interests stir that anger, dividing us against each other, when in fact our problems are much the same. America is turning into a nation where the privileges of a few take priority over the common good. Rather than being divided by race, we should unite to overcome this crisis which is hurting everyone.

This is a fairly radical idea in American politics, and I’m not suprised that most commentators have passed over it in silence. Here is the core of Obama’s argument. Judge for yourself.

    A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family… all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. … For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it—those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. …. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. …
    In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. … As far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away…. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments… have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. …
    Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze—a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. … This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. …
    We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. … If we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. …
    Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools…. This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care…. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

Here’s the tone-deaf response by Nixon speechwriter, anti-immigrant crusader, and right-wing dinosaur Patrick Buchanan. It’s such a perfect example of white paternalism that it parodies itself. I remember hearing this sort of talk growing up, but I thought it was gone.

    First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships… reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. …
    Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s… to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. …
    We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

What’s ironic is that Buchanan’s constituency of working-class whites, many of them second- or third-generation immigrants, are the very people Obama is trying to enlist in a common cause. Whether Obama becomes president, and America takes a step away from its legacy of division, depends in large part on whether disillusioned whites are able to hear Obama’s words, or whether they respond only to Buchanan’s us-versus-them rhetoric of the past.

Gaza Update

As a followup to doga’s post about the “dirty game” of “corrupt, interest-based politics” being played in Gaza, and the way we are all being sucked into it “voluntarily or involunarily,” here is a roundup of Gaza news that has appeared over the last few days.

First, everyone is talking about “The Gaza Bombshell,” the article by David Rose in Vanity Fair. A lot of what it reveals has been known for some time, in “bits and fragments” as Missing Links puts it, “but not the whole story.” For example, in May 2007, Tony Karon wrote an article called “Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?” which makes the same case with the advantage of foresight, rather than hindsight.

Both articles allege that following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, the Bush administration stoked the flames of civil war in Gaza by feeding money and arms to Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan to use against Hamas, with the intention of putting a government in place that would do Washington’s bidding. The coup failed because Hamas counterattacked before Dahlan was ready. They won the battle, leaving them in control of Gaza and setting up the situation we are in now.

Rose’s article provides valuable background, such as interviews with insiders including Dahlan, and documentatary evidence that has emerged after the fact. Its importance isn’t so much that it breaks new ground, as that it ties the loose ends together. One interesting angle is that Elliott Abrams, who bloodied his hands in the 1980s as one of the key Washington players in the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua, reprised his role 20 years later in Gaza. This is one reason Vanity Fair refers to the Gaza debacle as “Iran-Contra 2.0.”

The article begins in late 2006 with the torture of Hamas militants by Dahlan’s henchmen. In yet another sign of the way that viral media are revolutionizing the way we experience a story, the event was captured on video and can be watched here.

    “They told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground,” [says Abu Dan]. He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They shot our knees and feet—five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.” Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush. …
    There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan…has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan insists that Abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal. Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. … In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.” …
    Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents…which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. … But the secret plan backfired…. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza. …
    “Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister for the Haniyeh government…. “He was the one planning a coup.” …
    Years of oppression by Dahlan and his forces were avenged as Hamas chased down stray Fatah fighters and subjected them to summary execution. At least one victim was reportedly thrown from the roof of a high-rise building. By June 16, Hamas had captured every Fatah building, as well as Abbas’s official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlan’s house, which doubled as his office, was reduced to rubble.

This is a story of duplicity and overreaching, just what we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration. In an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, author David Rose mentions another way that this story fits the pattern of the Bush years. Critical information was kept from Congress which they needed to do their jobs.

    Amy Goodman: Isn’t it openly known that the U.S. is arming and supporting Fatah?
    David Rose: Well, no, it’s not, because, for example, General Keith Dayton, the United States security coordinator who has been in the region now for three or four years…told the Congress on May 23, 2007—that’s just over two weeks before the Hamas coup—that the US was only supplying non-lethal aid to Fatah. He was emphatic about this…. And in fact, just a week before the coup began, the news broke in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Dayton himself had asked for Israeli clearance to allow an import of armored cars, heavy weapons, machine guns and so forth into Gaza from Egypt…. I don’t think, by any stretch of the imagination, machine guns, ammunition and armored cars can be described as non-lethal aid. …
    Amy Goodman: Are you saying the Bush administration misled Congress, when it comes to—
    David Rose: I’m absolutely saying that. They lied to Congress.

Besides Elliott Abrams’ involvement, one of the reasons it makes sense to call this “Iran-Contra 2.0” is because, like the earlier scandal, it involved going behind the backs of Congress to get money and weapons to paramilitary forces the U.S. was supporting. In this case, rather than the money coming from arms sales to Iran, private donations from right wingers, and sale of cocaine in American cities, it was solicited from the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Egypt was directly involved in training Dahlan’s men. Yet another reason, perhaps, for the people of the Middle East to get their act together and put governments in power that support the interests of their people, rather than doing the bidding of Washington.

Next, the British newspaper The Guardian presents a report about the effects of Israeli sanctions imposed on Gaza since Hamas gained power there. According to a coalition of British aid groups, even before Israel’s latest invasion, the people of Gaza were suffering “their worst humanitarian crisis since the 1967 war.”

    Movement is all but impossible and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment and basic healthcare can no longer be taken for granted. The economy has collapsed, unemployment is expected to rise to 50%, hospitals are suffering 12-hour power cuts and schools are failing—all creating a “humanitarian implosion”….
    The situation in Gaza is “man-made, completely avoidable, and with the necessary political will can be reversed,” say the groups, which include Oxfam, Amnesty and Save the Children.

Yet the worst is yet to come for the people of Gaza, according to a story translated from Arabic by Missing Links, because the Israelis intend to prevent future rocket attacks by forcing tens of thousands of people living in northern Gaza to flee their homes. Apparently this plan will be implemented soon.

    Channel Two of Israeli Television disclosed yesterday, Wednesday, that the Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has gotten the green light from the Security and Political Council of Ministers…to plan for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, namely from the region that the resistance uses for the launch of [Qassam] rockets, and to move them toward Gaza City and to confine them there. … The reporter said that once the plan becomes operational, it would start immediately: In the first stage there would be a drop of leaflets advising residents to leave their homes…and in the event residents didn’t obey the warnings, the occupation army would begin bombing the inhabited areas in order to compel them to leave their homes and go to Gaza City.

Finally, in their usual display of slavish devotion to Israel, the U.S. Congress voted 404-1 on Wednesday to label the Israeli slaughter of civilians “inadvertent” and blame it on the Palestinians themselves. The resolution was originally written back in January, but new language was added just before the vote to justify Israel’s recent actions.

    Those responsible for launching rocket attacks against Israel routinely embed their production facilities and launch sites amongst the Palestinian civilian population, utilizing them as human shields. … The inadvertent inflicting of civilian casualties as a result of defensive military operations…while deeply regrettable, is not at all morally equivalent to the deliberate targeting of civilian populations as practiced by Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups.

Of the 435 members of Congress, the overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats endorsed these views. The only “No” vote came from maverick presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Amid all this cynicism and despair, there is one small piece of optimistic news. A worldwide coalition of Muslim intellectuals has issued a “Call to Peace, Dialogue and Understanding” that seems to be receiving a positive response from the Jewish community. Tariq Ramadan, whom I wrote about here, is one of the signatories of this document.

    It is our contention that we are faced today not with “a clash of civilizations” but with “a clash of ill-informed misunderstandings.” Deep-seated stereotypes and prejudices have resulted in a distancing of the communities and even a dehumanizing of the “Other.” We urgently need to address this situation. …
    Although many Muslims and non-Muslims only know of Muslim-Jewish relations through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there needs to be an awareness of other positive encounters at different stages of our history….
    Prejudice and bigotry towards each other have been perpetuated by our lack of knowledge about the other, and yet the pursuit of knowledge is at the core of both our religious traditions. …
    At this moment, there is no challenge more pressing than the need to bring to a closure some of the historical and long lasting estrangements between the Jews and Muslims. …
    At the core of the Muslim-Jewish tension lies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. … Most Muslims would hope that the sufferings Jews have experienced over many centuries would make them more sensitive to the sufferings of others, especially the Palestinian people.

My Middle Name Is Hussein

Barack Obama has been getting a lot of grief from right-wing bigots for no better reason than because his middle name is Hussein.

In Jordan, Hussein is the name of a former king; to the Shia it calls up memories of Mohammed’s grandson who died in the fight against tyranny; and to Muslims everywhere it could be the name of a cousin, friend, or even their own name. But unfortunately, in certain sectors of American society, where knowledge of Muslim culture is slight and the desire to understand it even slighter, “Hussein” means Saddam Hussein and through him, everything bad about the Middle East. To such people, saying “Barack Hussein Obama” is shorthand for all their doubts about Obama’s patriotism, his loyalty to America, and even his truthfulness. Such people say, “If he was really a Christian as he claims, then what is he doing with a Muslim name?”

Obama has been challenged for not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem at an event in Iowa; for refusing to wear a flag pin on his jacket because he sees it as a superficial form of patriotism; for spending a couple of years in a “madrassa” or public school in Indonesia; and for belonging to a church whose pastor once traveled to Libya to meet Muammar Qaddafi. Such charges all carry the same message. Is Obama really an American, or a secret Muslim? The fact that his middle name is Hussein is treated as the final proof.

Right-wing columnist Debbie Schlussel wrote a column last December called, “Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim.” In it, she reminds us that Obama’s father was a Muslim from Kenya, and that Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a Muslim country. She tells us, “Hussein is a Muslim name…and while Obama may not identify as a Muslim…in Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you.” In her opinion, this is enough to disqualify him from being president.

    Is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

I could get into the question of whether Americans are really “fighting the war of our lives against Islam,” a subject that embarasses me whenever it comes up, but I’ll save that for another post.

Meanwhile, just last week, radio host Bill Cunningham gave us another example of using Obama’s middle name as an insult, when he fired up the crowd at a rally for John McCain, Obama’s likely opponent in the November elections.

    He lambasted the national media, drawing cheers from the audience, for being soft in their coverage of Mr. Obama…declaring they should “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.” …
    Mr. Obama’s campaign has been dogged by whispered rumors that he is a Muslim—he is actually a practicing Christian.

Finally, today, someone came up with the right response to all this bigotry. Andrew Sullivan, one of America’s best-known political bloggers, posted this comment he’d received from a reader.

    Recall how football players shave their heads in solidarity with a teammate who’s going through chemo? What the Democrats need to do, should Obama become the nominee, is to use Hussein as their adopted middle names. Ted Hussein Kennedy. Nancy Hussein Pelosi. Hillary Hussein Clinton. … And his supporters, too. This is something that can easily go viral and backfire on the far right big-time.

That’s exactly right. The idea that a Muslim-sounding name should call into question a person’s belief in democracy, or his loyalty to his country, is absurd. In fact it is shameful. Just as Hitler wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if everyone in Germany had worn the Jewish star instead of the Nazi cross, having the middle name Hussein won’t sound so scary if everyone does it. So until Barack Hussein Obama is elected president in November, my middle is Hussein!

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting an appreciation of Obama from a friend of mine, a Moroccan teacher. Every so often, we hear that Obama’s election would have a positive effect on the image of the U.S. in the eyes of the world, and my friend has decided to step forward as an example of that. A warning to bigots, though: my friend is a practicing Muslim! Do we really want someone as president who appeals people like him?

(Un)Christian Intolerance

I should be used to it by now, but it still bothers me that some of the same people who say they hate Muslims because of their intolerance have no problem with stuff like this (thanks for the tip, netdur):

In case you’re wondering what this is about, in many parts of the U.S. it is acceptable for teachers to be openly gay. In California, they won the battle back in 1978. Programs that teach tolerance to kids, not just of gays but of all minorities, are common in many cities. This cartoon from a Christian website mocks that trend. The teacher promoting tolerance looks like a witch. The devils on the men’s shoulders contradict her claim that “this is an ordinary, loving family God has blessed.”

Later in the story, we learn that in the fantasy world of this comic strip, it is forbidden for children to even mention the Bible while they are in school. When a boy speaks up against the gay couple, the teacher threatens him with punishment. On their way home, a Bible-reading girl tells her friends they will be “cast into fire” unless they stay away from gays. Because the Bible is practically a banned book, they never heard this before. They immediately thank her and start to pray.

In the real Bible, not this fantasy one, there are sayings like, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” Also, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” In other words, don’t attack others for faults you have yourself. It strikes me as profoundly un-Christian to see Christians attacking Muslims for intolerance, when at the same time they are using the Bible to condemn others for showing too much tolerance!

I can’t prove that God exists or that He doesn’t, but I’m sure of one thing. If God does exist, we have no way to know what He is thinking. How can we can tell which of us He will cast into the fire, and which of us He will save? Claiming to know is the sin of vanity. On the other hand, both the Bible and the Qur’an promise us that God’s mercy far outweighs His judgment. So it’s quite possible that the gay couple’s love is blessed, as the teacher says, even though the cartoon mocks her for it.

The last thing Christians should do is condemn other religions for intolerance, when there is so much evidence of it in their own faith.

Two Types

“There are two types of people, those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.”

It’s a joke, but there is some truth in it, isn’t there? A more serious way of putting it would be that in our increasingly porous world, the real struggle isn’t between East and West, as chauvanists on both sides would have us believe, but between people who fear those who are different from them and those who embrace diversity as a strength. I’ve never been convinced that Muslims, Christians or Jews—or Hindus, pagans or atheists—are any more prone to extremism than the next guy. What I am sure of is that given the right provocation, any culture is capable of turning against “outsiders” it sees as a threat to its existence. The worst kind of outsider is the outsider within, whether it be the Jews of 1930s Germany, blacks in the American South during the same era, or real or imagined terrorists in the wealthy nations today. Some of us look at those who are dressed differently from us, have different features or speak a different language, and see someone we want to learn from. Others look at that same person and see an enemy. Some of us divide people into two types, and some don’t.

My blogger colleague leblase asked me to take my last post, Leaving the Garden, and reimagine it in the present day. How does the myth of Adam and Eve apply to us now? Why does it matter how we interpret it, whether as a tale of disobedience against an all-powerful Father, or as an acceptance of our self-awareness and responsibility? What I said about “two types” of humans is the beginning of my answer. Some people, normally the same ones who see everything in terms of “us versus them,” believe that the world is based on immutable laws handed down from outside, from a position of ultimate authority. For them, the goal of life is to attain certainty about those laws and follow them without deviation. The other type of person—the rest of us—whether we believe in God or not, are convinced that our intelligence serves a purpose, so we trust it more than we do authority when we are figuring out how to behave in the world. We are the ones who ate the fruit and left the garden. The bin Ladens and Dick Cheneys are apparently still there, arguing with the snake.

Leaving the Garden

Jews, Christians and Muslims all agree that before humans began the life we know today, we existed in a kind of ideal, suspended state in an earthly paradise where we did not yet know suffering or death, and where the entire potential of the human race was contained in one couple, Adam and Eve, who knew God as their creator and spoke with him as their protector.

This childlike state didn’t last long, because Satan appeared, offering Eve the fruit of a tree that gave knowledge of good and evil to those who ate it. This fruit was the one thing in the entire garden that God had forbidden to Adam and Eve. Driven by a fatal curiosity, they ate the fruit, and immediately “realized they were naked” and covered themselves with leaves. They could no longer live innocently as animals do, because they had acquired self-awareness and shame.

God soon appeared to cast them out of the garden, telling them that from now on they would have to live “by the sweat of their brows” and eventually die. Because of this death sentence, they would have to reproduce their species in order to survive. The Jewish version has God telling Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The Muslim version is more simple. “Get down from here,” God tells the unfortunate couple.

In either case, this was the beginning of the life of struggle we call the human condition, a life that Thomas Hobbes famously described as “nasty, brutish and short.” Most importantly, it was the beginning of our sense of moral responsiblity, our understanding that actions have consequences. Without responsiblity there is no freedom. In that sense, as long as we remained in the garden we would never be free.

The usual interpretation for Jews, Christians and Muslims is that leaving the Garden was God’s punishment for disobedience. But how could Adam and Eve be responsible for their disobedience when they didn’t yet know right from wrong? For me, the myth has always had a deeper meaning. Far from being a punishment, leaving the garden was a necessary step. God put the tree there for a reason. Eating from it signalled our departure from the animal world, and our acceptance of our responsibilities as human beings.

I recently finished reading Myth and Sexuality by Jamake Highwater, which has a section on the Garden of Eden myth. This led me to reflect on this story, which has been a touchstone for me for many years. I was inspired to write the following meditation. I’d appreciate hearing from readers about how you interpret this myth.

— • —

The Garden of Eden represents a state of childlike innocence, ignorance, and irresponsibility in which, like the animals, we were given everything. Rather than “worry about what tomorrow may bring,” we accepted it without hope or fear, and without regret, as part of a timeless and unchanging pattern. The Garden was our preconscious state.

By eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we became aware of the fact that acts have consequences, and that we are responsible for those consequences. We became aware of “disobedience” or innovation as a possibility. We learned that unlike the animals, we could modify our behavior, rather than simply accepting our condition as it was handed down from time immemorial. We could do this rather than that. And we became responsible for the consequences of doing this or that.

It’s no wonder that sex and death began to trouble us, where once we had taken them for granted. We began to cover our sexual organs and bury our dead. The act of naming the things around us also separated us from our state of innocence, because no other animal instrumentalizes its environment in this way. To name something demands a mental separation between “I” and “other.”

Eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was no sin. Indeed, it was a taking of responsibility for our own actions, a waking into consciousness without which no further advances would have been possible. But it’s true that it was a fatal act that can never be undone. It was a step outside the womb of childlike unknowing, into the harsh desert of freedom and responsibility from which there is no going back.

Now we are aware of death, and aware of all we don’t know. We aware that happiness has disappointment as its necessary contrast. It’s inevitable that we would look back to our time of unknowing and call it paradise. Yet would any of us “uneat” the fruit even if we could?

Becoming conscious was our “punishment” for eating the fruit, yet it was also our reward. Being cast out of the Garden into a life of toil and death is simply a metaphorical way of describing the effects of consciousness. Like us, animals suffer and ultimately die, but they know neither hope nor fear. For humans, the possibility of hope and fear is tied to self-awareness. Our consciousness defines us as humans. It is the “forbidden” fruit, its own punishment and reward.

Weblog Awards Finalist!

While I wasn’t paying attention, conservative blogger Jon Swift, whom inattentive readers sometimes think is writing parody but who is just a “reasonable conservative” as he says himself (so why don’t people believe him?) nominated me for the 2007 Weblog Awards in the “Best Middle East or Africa Blog” category. The list of finalists was announced today and I am on it, along with celebrity blog Iraq the Model, and blogs I enjoy like Sandmonkey and The Sudanese Thinker.

As an avid reader of blogs about the Middle East and North Africa, there are several I would like to see on the list besides my own. Perhaps it’s my own fault they aren’t there, because I should have nominated them while I had the chance. As I said, I wasn’t paying attention. Now I will have to wait until next year. Anyway, it’s an honor to be there, and I thank Jon Swift for offering his support to a humble debutant. (Mr. Swift was born in 1667 and has been blogging since the 18th century!)

If this sort of thing interests you, I encourage you to visit the Weblog Awards site and vote for me. If you’re going to do it, hurry up, because the polls close on November 8! While you’re at it, consider voting for Jon Swift in the category of Funniest Blog. In case you don’t know his work, he’s made a handy list of his best posts from the past year. Come to think of it, that’s a good idea. Here are a few of my own articles that I am proudest of. I’ve been blogging for just over a year now, so consider this an anniversary retrospective.

  • Do They Want to Kill Us?, October 2006 — Challenging the notion that Muslim youth are filled with hate for Westerners.
  • Progressive Islam, October 2006 — Online dialogues with two Moroccan friends, looking for the tolerant side of Islam.
  • The Friendly Fist, November 2006 — An examination of Morocco’s absolute monarchy. Is the monarchial system responsible for Morocco’s social inequality?
  • Privilege and Freedom, November 2006 — Perhaps well-off Moroccans themselves are not aware of the conditions in which the unlucky majority lives.
  • Political Paralysis in Morocco, November 2006 — A guest post by “Doga” in which he argues for Moroccan constitutional reform as a step toward restoring people’s trust in government.
  • Evolution in Islam, December 2006 — Exploring the notion of interpreting the Qur’an in a way that evolves with the times, using treatment of women as an example.
  • Waiting for the Rain, December 2006 — How cultural attitudes and the failure of the educational system have helped to encourage the lack of opportunity in Morocco.
  • Schizophrenic Morocco, December 2006 — Morocco is a nation of contradictions. Is this the Moroccan form of genius?
  • Censorship 2: The Jokes in English, December 2006 — English translation of the jokes published by Nichane which resulted in two journalists being put on trial for insulting Islam and the monarchy.
  • A Black Eye for Moroccan Freedom, January 2007 — More on the trial of the Nichane journalists, with a roundup of reactions from the Moroccan blogosphere.
  • Foreign Aristocrat, January 2007 — A meditation on my experience as a cultural outsider in Morocco.
  • What Is Truth?, January 2007 — Online dialogue about free speech and its limits. Is the Jewish Holocaust open to discussion, or is Holocaust denial always wrong?
  • The Price of Freedom, January 2007 — The voluntary exile of Aboubakr Jamaï, Morocco’s most courageous independent journalist.
  • Loss of Identity, January 2007 — An exploration of cultural identity. Is it fragile? Can it be lost? Can we construct our own?
  • Democracy and Its Obstacles, February 2007 — Why are young Moroccans indifferent to politics? Is democracy being blocked?
  • I Love to Read, February 2007 — Why don’t Moroccans read more? How can we change that?
  • Iran Fever: Part 6, March 2007 — Last of a long series of articles examining the chances that the U.S. will go to war with Iran.
  • Egypt’s Modern Pharaoh, March 2007 — Oppression and resistance in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak.
  • Why I Can’t Support Obama, July 2007 — Is Barack Obama just one more apologist for the American empire?
  • Insolence, August 2007 — Another censorship controversy in Morocco, this one involving an editorial criticizing the concentration of all power in the hands of the king.
  • Neoconservative Death Throes, August 2007 — A columnist with ties to Bush Administration officials calls for Bush to be made “President-for-Life.”
  • What the Nihilists Think, September 2007 — “Doga” explains why he is too disillusioned to vote in the upcomining Moroccan legislative elections.
  • Winners and Losers, September 2007 — An examination of the Moroccan election results, including the record low turnout, and the fracturing of the vote among six major parties.
  • Is Democracy Dead?, September 2007 — Is America becoming more like Morocco, a nation resigned to absolute power?

Finally, if you are interested in how this blog is viewed by an outside admirer, check out this recent interview with me in Ghasbouba.

Why Not Eurabia?

The man who insists that the U.S. is currently fighting “World War IV” against “Islamofascism” (World War III was the Cold War) and who said, “the only prudent—indeed, the only responsible—course is to assume that Ahmadinejad may not be bluffing…and to strike at him as soon as it is logistically possible” also wrote this:

    Looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process…[that] has been called, rightly, Islamization. … In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils….” But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West…. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims’ outrageous demands. … Already some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.

Our friend Norman Podhoretz is more than a solitary crank, he is a founding father of neoconservatism and a key foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Guiliani. I was wondering what he meant by “some observers,” so I googled “Eurabia,” a term I had never heard before, though it conjures for me the kind of racial paranoia that caused white supremacists of a century ago to go crazy about the Yellow Peril. I’m an innocent, I guess, because I wonder honestly, would it be so bad to live in a Europe full of Arabs, Turks and Pakistanis? to blend in marketplace or on the Metro with people wearing the traditional clothing of those lands, or hear the Islamic call to prayer in European streets? I guess I’m just a traitor to my race, because I could even imagine my own children belonging to such a “foreign” culture, only first I need to find the right partner, it’s not something I can do alone. The fear-mongering is lost on me.

Anyway, the first thing that came up in my google search was the book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by “the world’s preeminent historian of Islam,” Bat Ye’or. (Never heard of her? Me neither.) She has coined the term “dhimmitude” to refer to the supposedly humiliating condition of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, a situation that she feels has already destroyed Europe, with the U.S. in danger of being next.

    Eurabia cannot change direction; it can only use deception to mask its emergence, its bias and its inevitable trajectory. Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States…. Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people.

For those who want it, here is a collection of links to articles by and about Bat Ye’or, and the Eurabia concept. Here is the wikipedia article that defines Eurabia as “a scenario where Europe allies itself and eventually merges with the Arab world.” Here is a profile from The New Yorker of Oriana Fallaci, another proponent of the Eurabia concept, who accused Muslims in The Force of Reason of “invading and conquering and subjugating” Europe. She called it “the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created.”

I don’t want to go any further with this for now, because I feel like I’m digging in a nest of maggots. It astonishes me that such views could exist at all, and even more so that they seem to be the dominant view in the West. In my view, it isn’t an Islamic invasion that is destroying Western culture. Our culture of tolerance and enlightenment is being eroded from within by people like Podhoretz, Ye’or and Fallaci who refuse to adapt to the diversity of the global era.

The Power of Myth

This is an excerpt from the last chapter of A Short History of Myth by religious scholar Karen Armstrong.

    We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide. These myths have failed because they… have not been infused with the spirit of compassion [and] respect for the sacredness of all life…. These destructive mythologies have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, an attempt to exalt the self by demonising the other. Any such myth has failed modernity, which has created a global village in which all human beings now find themselves in the same predicament. We cannot counter these myths with reason alone, because logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.
    We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a “resource.” This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

Speaking of myths, allow me to recommend a couple of videos about what we might call the dark side of myth. Myth can be used in a political context to short-circuit reason and manipulate human behavior through emotional appeals. The first, a series of three hour-long segments aired on the BBC in 2005, is called The Power of Nightmares. It concerns the strange parallels between American neoconservatism, represented by people like Richard Perle and William Kristol, and Islamic extremism, represented by Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The second video, called Once Upon a Time in Iran (available here in a different format), follows a group of Iranian pilgrims to the shrine of Karbala in Iraq, where the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein died 1300 years ago at the hands of the caliph Yazid. It shows how Hussein’s resistance to tyranny helped to inspire Khomeini’s revolution against the Shah, seen as a modern Yazid, and is today informing the rhetoric of those who see Bush as yet another manifestation of Yezid’s spirit of tyranny.

As Karen Armstrong points out, “we are myth-making creatures,” so it would be a mistake to believe we can do away with myths and survive in the world on reason alone. We tried this in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it didn’t lead to the promised era of equality and peace. The only solution seems to be to stay alert to the myths that saturate our environment. Myths that reinforce our existing beliefs are the most effective, because we don’t even notice them. It’s easy for an American to recognize the story of Hussein and Yazid as a myth, though it is based on historical fact, but we are uncritical our own myth of America as a beacon of liberty for the world. Faced with so many myths, the most creative response is to become mythmakers ourselves. We must never forget that we have the power to appropriate myths, adapt them, attack them, talk back to them, rework them and make them our own.

Ramadan Roundup

Ramadan Mubarak if you’re fasting this month, or even if you’re not! And Shana Tova to our Jewish friends. There are quite a few Ramadan “greeting card” images floating around the internet, including one with a hammer and sickle from an Egyptian Marxist party, but the flickering stars on this one make it my favorite.

I observed the Ramadan fast during my first year in Morocco, to better understand what it was about, though I was surrounded that year by Moroccan atheists who kept begging me, as a foreigner, to buy them wine! I haven’t fasted since, but have enjoyed Ramadan “in my own way” as a time to soak in the tranquility and spiritual feeling that are so obvious at night, as people go to the cafes to congratulate each other on getting through another day, and the pious spend the night in prayer. It is a special time, but I can’t help sympathizing with this irreverent take by Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey, who has clearly been through it.

    People look tired, droopy eyed, unable to concentrate, and unwilling to work. They are suddenly completely incapable of both driving and parking, and their ability to stay civil with each other is reduced by 70%. All they want to do is do nothing. They are always thinking about food, lots and lots of food, they get up in your face and look at you strangely with a mix of envy and contempt if you are eating something good…. When they eat, they eat various dishes of food in the most ravenous of ways, and they just sit afterwards watching TV and slouching on the couch. […] Day one is almost over. Dear God, make it go fast this year. Please.

It seems that like any other religious holiday, like Christmas and Easter, the way people celebrate Ramadan in our stressed-out modern world has lost its transformative power. It doesn’t change us, or if it does, then once it is over we quickly forget. Rather than taking the time to reflect on the mysteries of life and the universe, we go through the motions because we are swept along by society—enjoying some of them, seeing others mainly as an inconvenience to our routine. Maybe we should stop kidding ourselves and drop these rituals, or invent new ones like Burning Man that are better adapted to our times.

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Based on my previous writing about the Moroccan elections, Pajamas Media asked me to write a piece for them analyzing the results. They’ve titled it “The Islamist Tidal Wave Never Hit.”

Those who read my earlier piece “Winners and Losers” will be familiar with the arguments. The significance of last week’s elections was in the record low voter turnout, the fragmentation of the vote among numerous major and minor parties, and of course the disappointing showing by the PJD. The big winners were the Palace and its technocrats like Fouad Ali El Himma, who engineered the elections and then ran in them, winning himself a seat in Parliament. If democracy means that elections determine the strategic shape of a nation, then Morocco will have to wait until constitutional reforms give real power to the elected government. For now we are seeing a cycle of “wash, rinse, repeat,” a series of weak governments under a king who makes the decisions, and this year’s elections have done nothing to change that.

My piece for Pajamas Media marks the first time since I’ve started blogging that I’ve been paid for an article. When they approached me, I had some reservations about doing it. I’ve always felt that Pajamas Media has a right-wing slant, particularly on the Middle East. For example, they host a blog by Michael Ledeen, a man I would describe as a wily lunatic, who is one of the strongest voices anywhere for attacking Iran. But it doesn’t help to write only for those we agree with, so I went along with the experiment. Would my views be coopted? I can report that no pressure was made to influence what I wrote, and my piece went on the site with only cosmetic changes. So I’m happy enough with the experience, and we’ll see if it continues.

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Meanwhile, Forbes Magazine published a list of the world’s richest monarchs, and Morocco’s Mohammed VI showed up in seventh place, with an estimated worth of two billion dollars. I remember mentioning a similar report to one of my Moroccan friends while I was still living there. His response was, “I wish him luck getting to number one, because then he might feel he can give some of it back to the rest of us.” Here is Forbes’ own comment:

    Nicknamed “king of the poor” for efforts to alleviate poverty and improve human rights. Palace’s reported operating budget exceeds $960,000 a day; much of it spent on clothes and car repairs.

Now, there are a few things I want to say. First, I don’t question that the king is a good person who is working hard for the best interests of his country. Nor do I question that he and his team are the most competent, best informed political force in Morocco today. I’m also aware that most Moroccans see the king as the glue that holds the country together, and they don’t want to live through the sort of tragedies that have befallen neighboring, kingless nations like Algeria and Libya. If the king were to run for election (an absurd, even sacriligeous thought in Morocco, since the monarchy is “sacred”) I’m sure he would win a majority in an up-or-down vote. Mohammed VI is popular, professional, and unlike his father, more liked than feared. But I can’t help wondering where all that money came from, whether monopolizing the nation’s economy had anything to do with it, and whether it might be a drain on the nation’s development.

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Finally, I want to thank my friend Bouba for his recent profile of me on his blog. He contacted me by e-mail to ask me how I chose the name “eatbees,” then posted my response. He also linked to some of his favorite content on this blog and other parts of my site. In the spirit of mutual flattery, I want to say that Ghasbouba is also a favorite blog of mine. Bouba writes about Morocco as an Amazigh from the Sahar, which is a perspective I’m eager to learn more about.

A similar thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago when Hisham of Moroccan Mirror, one of my favorite recent discoveries in the Moroccan blogosphere (there seem to be more and more English-language blogs out there!) chose me as one of his five favorite blogs. Thanks for the compliment, and again, the repsect is mutual. Hisham writes about both Moroccan and global politics, as I do here, by providing a lens (or a mirror?) that attempts to show them both from a common perspective.