The True Story of Free Speech in America

The True Story of Free Speech in America

Robert Fisk

Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.

Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian's little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel's lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian's family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring "to murder and maim" outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in "Palestine". He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.

Al-Arian's $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian's lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation - found Moody talking about "blood" on the defendant's hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonored and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America's torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a "contract interrogator", who has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation "facility" of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning "by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes". Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. "A man with no face stares at me … pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine."

Thank God, Fair didn't write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant's play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 "Servicepersons" - by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to his demise as "death" now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it - and who knew all about Mousa's fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it's really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It's to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country's schools. Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those "who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak", proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High's principal. And - my favorite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure the play would provide "a legitimate instructional experience for our students".

And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty's point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller's The Crucible were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that it wasn't their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing. It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A "legitimate instructional experience" if ever there was one.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=12528

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'

March 25, 2007
The Washington Post

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
How a three-word mantra has undermined America
by Zbigniew Brzezinski

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. . . .

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. . . .

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. . . .

The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. . . .

[Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).]

Iraq: The Hidden Cost of the War

March 12, 2007
New Statesman

by Andrew Stephen

The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion. . . .

To draw attention to her academic findings, Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down. . . .

In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from the current Iraq or Afghanistan wars have been treated at VA centres. Twenty per cent of those brought home are suffering from serious brain or spinal injuries, or the severing of more than one limb, and a further 20 per cent from amputations, blindness or deafness, severe burns, or other dire conditions. "Every person injured on active duty is going to be a long-term cost of the war," says Bilmes. If we compare the financial ramifications of the first Gulf war to the present one, the implications become even more stark. Despite its brevity, even the 1991 Gulf war exacted a heavy toll: 48.4 per cent of veterans sought medical care, and 44 per cent filed disability claims. Eighty-eight per cent of these claims were granted, meaning that 611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. . . .

The history at the end of history

by Francis Fukuyama

April 3, 2007 10:15 AM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/francis_fukuyama/2007/04/the_history_at_the_end_of_hist.html

Fifteen years ago in my book The End of History and the Last Man I argued that, if a society wanted to be modern, there was no alternative to a market economy and a democratic political system. Not everyone wanted to be modern, of course, and not everyone could put in place the institutions and policies necessary to make democracy and capitalism work, but no alternative system would yield better results.

While the End of History thus was essentially an argument about modernisation, some people have linked my thesis about the end of history to the foreign policy of President George Bush and American strategic hegemony. But anyone who thinks that my ideas constitute the intellectual foundation for the Bush administration's policies has not been paying attention to what I have been saying since 1992 about democracy and development.

President Bush initially justified intervention in Iraq on the grounds of Saddam's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, the regime's alleged links to al-Qaida, as well as Iraq's violation of human rights and lack of democracy. As the first two justifications crumbled in the wake of the 2003 invasion, the administration increasingly emphasised the importance of democracy, both in Iraq and in the broader Middle East, as a rationale for what it was doing.

Bush argued that the desire for freedom and democracy were universal and not culture-bound, and that America would be dedicated to the support of democratic movements "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Supporters of the war saw their views confirmed in the ink-stained fingers of Iraqi voters who queued up to vote in the various elections held between January and December 2005, in the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and in the Afghan presidential and parliamentary elections.

Inspiring and hopeful as these events were, the road to liberal democracy in the Middle East is likely to be extremely disappointing in the near to medium term, and the Bush administration's efforts to build a regional policy around it are heading toward abject failure.

To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home.

But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society - that is, a political order characterised by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernisation.

Moreover, the desire to live in a modern liberal democracy does not translate necessarily into an ability to actually do so. The Bush administration seems to have assumed in its approach to post-Saddam Iraq that both democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which societies would revert once oppressive tyranny was removed, rather than a series of complex, interdependent institutions that had to be painstakingly built over time.

Long before you have a liberal democracy, you have to have a functioning state (something that never disappeared in Germany or Japan after they were defeated in the second world war). This is something that cannot be taken for granted in countries like Iraq.

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along. But coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

In cooperation with Project Syndicate/The American Interest, 2007.

The Iraqi Resistance Only Exists to End the Occupation

April 12, 2007
The Guardian (UK)

The escalating attacks are not usually aimed at civilians, but are a direct response to the brutal actions of US-led troops
By Haifa Zangana

Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi exile who was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, is the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London

In Muqdadiyah, 50 miles from Baghdad, a woman wearing a traditional Iraqi abaya blew herself up this week in the midst of Iraqi police recruits. This was the seventh suicide attack by a women since the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, and an act unheard of before that. Iraqi women are driven to despair and self-destruction by grief. Their expectations are reduced to pleas for help to clear the bodies of the dead from the streets, according to a report by the international committee of the Red Cross, released yesterday. It's the same frustration that drew hundreds of thousands to demonstrate against foreign forces in Najaf on Monday.

In the fifth year of occupation, the sectarian and ethnic divide between politicians, parties and their warring militias has become monstrous, turning on its creators in the Green Zone and beyond, and not sparing ordinary people. One of the consequences is a major change in the public role of women.

During the first three years of occupation women were mostly confined to their homes, protected by male relatives. But now that the savagery of their circumstances has propelled many of them to the head of their households, they are risking their lives outdoors. Since men are the main target of US-led troops, militias and death squads, black-cloaked women are seen queuing at prisons, government offices or morgues, in search of disappeared, or detained, male relatives. It is women who bury the dead. Baghdad has become a city of bereaved women. But contrary to what we are told by the occupation and its puppet regime, this is not the only city that is subject to the brutality that forces thousands of Iraqis to flee their country every month.

Bodies are found across the country from Mosul to Kirkuk to Basra. They are handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-ridden, bearing signs of torture. They are dumped at roadsides or found floating in the Tigris or Euphrates. A friend of mine who found her brother's body in a hospital's fridge told me how she checked his body and was relieved. "He was not tortured", she said. "He was just shot in the head."

Occupation has left no room for any initiative independent of the officially sanctioned political process; for a peaceful opposition or civil society that could create networks to bridge the politically manufactured divide. Only the mosque can fulfil this role. In the absence of the state, some mosques provide basic services, running clinics or schools. In addition to the call to prayer, their loudspeakers warn people of impending attacks or to appeal for blood donors.

But these attempts to sustain a sense of community are regularly crushed. On Tuesday, troops from the Iraqi army, supported by US helicopters, raided a mosque in the heart of old Baghdad. The well-respected muazzin Abu Saif and another civilian were executed in public. Local people were outraged and attacked the troops. At the end of the day, 34 people had been killed, including a number of women and children. As usual, the summary execution and the massacre that followed were blamed on insurgents. The military statement said US and Iraqi forces were continuing to "locate, identify, and engage and kill insurgents targeting coalition and Iraqi security forces in the area".

It is important to recognise that the resistance was born not only of ideological, religious and patriotic convictions, but also as a response to the reality of the brutal actions of the occupation and its administration. It is a response to arbitrary break-ins, humiliating searches, arrests, detention and torture. According to the Red Cross, "the number of people arrested or interned by the multinational forces has increased by 40% since early 2006. The number of people held by the Iraqi authorities has also increased significantly."

Many of the security detainees are women who have been subjected to abuse and rape and who are often arrested as a means to force male relatives to confess to crimes they have not committed. According to the Iraqi MP Mohamed al-Dainey, there are 65 documented cases of women's rape in occupation detention centres in 2006. Four women currently face execution - the death penalty for women was outlawed in Iraq from 1965 until 2004 - for allegedly killing security force members. These are accusations they deny and Amnesty International has challenged.

There is only one solution to this disaster, and that is for the US and Britain to accept that the Iraqi resistance is fighting to end the occupation. And to acknowlege that it consists of ordinary Iraqis, not only al-Qaida, not just Sunnis or Shias, not those terrorists - as Tony Blair called them - inspired by neighbouring countries such as Iran. To recognise that Iraqis are proud, peace-loving people, and that they hate occuption, not each other. And to understand that the main targets of the resistance are not Iraqi civilians. According to Brookings, the independent US research institute, 75% of recorded attacks are directed at occupation forces, and a further 17% at Iraqi government forces. The average number of attacks has more than doubled in the past year to about 185 a day. That is 1,300 a week, and more than 5,500 a month.

Another way of understanding this is that in any one hour, day or night, there are seven or eight new attacks. Without the Iraqi people's support, directly and indirectly, this level of resistance would not have happened.

Iran May be the Greatest Crisis of Modern Times

April 12, 2007
The New Statesman

By John Pilger

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable looking from the side'."

It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defense until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for "Operation Iranian Freedom." Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets... at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."

One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland that is the real news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute "warning." They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next "enemy."

Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologize for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims "unpeople." Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.

Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" and Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).

Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.

In the second example, only the degree of suffering is different. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as "flawed." They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as "robust" and "close to best practice," and other government officials had secretly approved the "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.

"This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralyzed by its own indifference."

Such is the scale of the crime and of our "looking from the side." According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters' "damning verdict" on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority who have "lost faith" in their government. No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks claims now regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.

As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.

Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East, where OPEC has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so nonexistent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian program to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to "go anywhere." The recent UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.

Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone." In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never before. When homegrown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.

In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.

Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H. Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history" Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.

These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused "elements of the Iranian regime" of "backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq." He offered no evidence, and the Ministry of Defense has none. This is the same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue looking from the side?

Architect's Hijab Becomes Symbol of New Era in Islam

ARCHITECT'S HIJAB BECOMES SYMBOL OF NEW ERA IN ISLAM
[By Mitch Potter - The Toronto Star - March 24, 2007]

DAMASCUS -- For prominent Syrian career woman Luna Rajab, the moment of truth came last Ramadan at an evening social gathering of friends and colleagues.

Steeling herself to express outwardly what she had felt inside for many years, the 34-year-old architect stepped forward to reveal a decision that would earn the dismay of many of those closest to her, her mother and grandmother included.

Rajab's favourite motto had always been "say it with actions, not with words." And on this night, she said it all by covering her hair with that most Islamic of accessories, the hijab.

Never before had she worn the head scarf. Never before had anyone in her social circle, or even her own family. Today, she won't take it off -- Rajab's hijab is here to stay.

The most cutting comment that night came from one of her best friends, who stared, jaws agape, like a witness to religious lobotomy: "But Luna, I thought you were open-minded."

Rajab ruminates sadly on that comment three months later over a glass of mint lemonade. We are in the hidden courtyard of Jabri House, one of a handful of grand and glorious Damascene homes that Rajab has dedicated her life to saving as an architect specializing in historical preservation.

She knows the decision to wear the hijab placed her out of step with many in her circle. But taken in the context of the larger Arab world, she says, it is her friends who are out of step -- which is okay by her. Rajab does not believe in forcing anyone on the question of wearing the hijab. In a free world, it is a personal choice, she says. Yet Rajab takes comfort in the fact that by just about any standard one might care to apply, Islam is on the rise again in the Middle East.

Politically, socially, and culturally, the process of Islamification has been underway for decades, despite the repressive efforts of some Arab regimes that see an existential threat in the steady rise of political Islam.

For many, the process is happening almost by default, as the era of secular Arab nationalism loses the last of its legitimacy, its promise all but exhausted by decades of rampant corruption and failure to deliver benefits to the region. If anything, the process has been accelerated by the attacks of 9/11, or more specifically, by the response to that dark and bloody day.

Lebanese sociologist Abdo Kahi describes the drift toward Islamic identity as anything but ideological. "Ideology has logic, but the return to Islam is happening as an idea without logic. It is happening by default, without discussion, as a matter of the heart.

What all human beings share is the universal desire for hope, security, justice, values -- and one day perhaps, real democracy.

"And if you look to the Middle East of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, there was some hope these things would be delivered. But the Arab leaderships failed utterly," he added. "They only enriched themselves. And the U.S. failed utterly, protecting those corrupt regimes while at the same time ignoring the need to forcefully find a solution for the Palestinian question, which remains an open wound."

United Nations researchers pinpointed the dimensions of unrest in their 2004 Arab Human Development Report. Arriving just as the rationale for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was re-branded from a hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into a much larger scheme to implant Arab democracy, the UN's words appeared to point the way forward.

"The Arab world finds itself at an historical crossroads," the report's authors warned. "Caught between oppression at home and violation from abroad, Arabs are increasingly excluded from determining their own future ... Freedom requires a system of good governance that rests upon effective popular representation and is accountable to the people, and that upholds the rule of law and ensures that an independent judiciary applies the law impartially."

But as a string of elections, some more democratic than others, hiccupped around the region, many Arab thinkers lost faith. What some describe as the "democracy hypocrisy" was laid bare one year ago with the surprise election of Hamas in Western-backed elections in the Palestinian Territories.

Those who actually covered the campaign saw the Palestinian electorate embrace a deftly played Hamas election platform built as a war on corruption without so much as a mention of the word Israel. Running under the banner of "Change and Reform," Islamic candidates tapped the Palestinian appetite for payback against the graft-addled Fatah movement that helped itself to decades of foreign aid under the late Yasser Arafat. Rather than a referendum of peace versus war, it was a contest of clean versus dirty.

But the subtleties were lost on Israel and the international community. Shocked by the election of Hamas, the doors of engagement slammed shut.

Canada, at best a peripheral player in the international voices of Mideast mediation, was the first to announce a freeze on direct Palestinian aid, followed soon thereafter by the United States and European Union. The boycott effectively neutered the Hamas government even before it began.

Many Arab analysts, secular and otherwise, shake their heads at what they see as the shortsightedness of the decision to cut Hamas off at the knees.

"The Bush administration sees all Islamists as radicals and all radicals as terrorists and thus they all need to be eliminated. But this attempt to corner Hamas clearly has backfired," said Ahmad Moussalli, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. "It sent a message to the entire Arab world that the promise of democracy is false. And it handed a gift to political Islam by keeping it outside the halls of power, thereby giving them an even greater aura of sanctity."

Lebanese sociologist Kahi said Arab disappointment is underscored today by the evident backtracking of the Bush administration, which has ceased to even speak the word democracy as it works to rally authoritarian Sunni Muslim leaderships to help contain the political disintegration of Iraq.

"Arab Muslims today see the George Bush project of democracy in the Middle East crashing to a halt," said Kahi. "The only results they can see are McDonald's, [pop singer] Madonna and bombs. There is nothing real in it for them. The only place left to turn is Islam."

Blanket rejection also feeds radicalism, said Moussalli, as the pole of political Islam wavers between moderation and radicalism. "The more venues are closed, the more moderates get forced to the margins. The radicals are a much smaller force than the moderates, but without a political future some people will resort to military activities to change what they consider to be an evil reality."

Joost Hiltermann, Middle East team leader of the independent policy think-tank, the International Crisis Group, predicts that sooner or later the West will need to find a way to engage political Islam.

"The West ought to at least contemplate it because you can't just keep this stuff bottled up and continue to support repressive regimes. It won't work," he said. "It is a simple question of historical experience. The era of Arab nationalism, of secular ideology, is about to die because it has proved itself capable of delivering nothing but repression, corruption and illiteracy."

"There are only two ways for the West to contend with this," he continues. "Either give a comparatively moderate Islamic group like the Muslim Brotherhood a chance to live up to their promises by having a chance to govern. Or conversely, they can undermine the Muslim Brotherhood by actually forcing the ruling governments in the Arab world to clean up their act by fighting corruption, governing properly and actually offering some freedoms to their people."

Back at Jabri House in Damascus, Luna Rajab laughs, realizing that two hours have flown by. She never intended to talk so much about so private a matter. Foremost, she says, wearing her hijab is "something very personal, between me and God."

But there is more to it than that, far more. Rajab says the hijab is a statement born of frustration with how the Arab world has lost its moral compass. But it is a statement intended also for Westerners, many of whom she feels have far too easily allowed themselves to direct the anger over 9/11 at Islam itself, rather than at the terrorists who claimed to act in its name.

But the overarching reason for wearing a hijab, said Rajab, is to be a role model for other young Muslim women. "I want to send the message that I am a professional and well-educated woman. I speak languages (French, English, Arabic), I am open-minded and I am respected in my field -- and I also happen to be an observant Muslim woman. I engage fully in modern society, I love science, I read voraciously and there is absolutely no contradiction in being all these things and a good Muslim woman."

The conversation turns to the mutual friend who introduced us -- a Syrian journalist, also Muslim, who was forced to give up an opportunity to work with a major foreign news organization some years ago by her eldest brother, a religious conservative. At issue was the brother's fear his sister would be exposed to foreign men. And he was so distraught at the prospect that he barged into the agency's Damascus office and demanded they retract their offer.

"Yes, in our family we educate our women," he snarled. "But when they grow up their job is to chop carrots."

Rajab nods knowingly at the anecdote. She knows also the journalist in question eventually went ahead and took the job in defiance of her brother.

"These attitudes exist, but they have nothing to do with the real Islam. Here in the Arab world there is a tendency to blame outsiders for all our problems. But to take this attitude is to admit you are powerless to change things," said Rajab.

"Well, I want to be a part of the change. If we study the era of the Prophet Muhammad we know women were strong participants in society. And then somewhere along the way we fell into decline, poverty, neglect and deterioration. Islamic values were scrambled and mixed up with tribal and traditional social habits. And out of this came men who want to lock away their women in the name of Islam."

So she will count herself among those working toward "redefining the basis of real Islam."

"I want to help set our compass back to where it belongs... The important thing now is that we open our minds, read more, strive for knowledge. And in the end, there can be a renaissance of the open, inclusive, peaceful, science-loving Islam that appeals to me so much."

The De-Colonization of Islamic Culture

THE DE-COLONIALIZATION OF ISLAMIC CULTURE:
   The role of language, religion and tradition
   [By Dr. Mohamed Elmasry]
===========================================================================

A paper presented at the Islamic Conference, Cairo, Egypt, March 27-30, 2007)

* * *

Today the question for a Muslim, any Muslim, is not "Who am I?" but rather,"Who are we?"

Humans, in contrast to other social animals, do not just live in societies -- they produce societies in order to live. It follows logically then, that Muslims can only know themselves by knowing who they are in relation to others.

But Muslim countries, more than any others in today's world, are being subjected to dangerous forces of recolonialization due to: (a) their natural resources, especially oil; (b) their strategic geopolitical positions, and; (c) their huge potential consumer market of more than 1.2 billion people.

By "recolonialization," I mean the cumulative economic and political injustices committed against Muslim countries by the West, which in some cases have escalated into military aggression, invasion, and occupation.

These forces of recolonialization are working in the context of an unbalanced and unfair system of globalization that benefits mainly the world's rich and powerful nations. Both historically and in our post-modern times, colonialization and re-colonialization do not only mean that the West is trying to impose its political and economic interests on others, but its culture as well.

Full paper is posted at: http://www.canadianislamiccongress.com/ar/lang_religon.php