"The Koran may be an invaluable document – but so is a Green Card"

Robert Fisk, as usual, enlightening and funny:

Why is the Arab world – let us speak with terrible sharpness – so backward? Why so many dictators, so few human rights, so much state security and torture, so terrible a literacy rate?

Why does this wretched place, so rich in oil, have to produce, even in the age of the computer, a population so poorly educated, so undernourished, so corrupt? Yes, I know the history of Western colonialism, the dark conspiracies of the West, the Arab argument that you cannot upset the sheikhs and the kings and the autocrats, the imams and the emirs when the “enemy is at the gates”. There is some truth to that. But not enough truth.

Once more the United Nations Development Programme has popped up with yet one more, its fifth, report that catalogues – via Arab analysts and academics, mark you – the retarded state of much of the Middle East. It talks of “the fragility of the region’s political, social, economic and environmental structures… its vulnerability to outside intervention”. But does this account for desertification, for illiteracy – especially among women – and the Arab state which, as the report admits, is often turned “into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support”?

As Arab journalist Rami Khouri stated bleakly last week: “How we tackle the underlying causes of our mediocrity and bring about real change anchored in solid citizenship, productive economies and stable statehood, remains the riddle that has defied three generations of Arabs.” Real GDP per capita in the region – one of the statistics which truly shocked Khouri – grew by only 6.4 per cent between 1980 and 2004. That’s just 0.5 per cent annually, a rate which 198 of 217 countries analysed by the CIA World Factbook bettered in 2008. Yet the Arab population – which stood at 150 million in 1980 – will reach 400 million in 2015.

I notice much of this myself. When I first came to the Middle East in 1976, it was crowded enough. Cairo’s steaming, fetid streets were already jam-packed, night and day, with up to a million homeless living in the great Ottoman cemeteries. Arab homes are spotlessly clean but their streets are often repulsive, dirt and ordure spilling on to the pavements. Even in beautiful Lebanon, where a kind of democracy does exist and whose people are among the most educated and cultured in the Middle East, you find a similar phenomenon. In the rough hill villages of the south, the same cleanliness exists in every home. But why are the streets and the hills so dirty?

I suspect that a real problem exists in the mind of Arabs; they do not feel that they own their countries. Constantly coaxed into effusions of enthusiasm for Arab or national “unity”, I think they do not feel that sense of belonging which Westerners feel. Unable, for the most part, to elect real representatives – even in Lebanon, outside the tribal or sectarian context – they feel “ruled over”. The street, the country as a physical entity, belongs to someone else. And of course, the moment a movement comes along and – even worse – becomes popular, emergency laws are introduced to make these movements illegal or “terrorist”. Thus it is always someone else’s responsibility to look after the gardens and the hills and the streets.

And those who work within the state system – who work directly for the state and its corrupt autarchies – also feel that their existence depends on the same corruption upon which the state itself thrives. The people become part of the corruption. I shall always remember an Arab landlord, many years ago, bemoaning an anti-corruption drive by his government. “In the old days, I paid bribes and we got the phone mended and the water pipes mended and the electricity restored,” he complained. “But what can I do now, Mr, Robert? I can’t bribe anyone – so nothing gets done!”

Even the first UNDP report, back in 2002, was deeply depressing. It identified three cardinal obstacles to human development in the Arab world: the widening “deficit” in freedom, women’s rights and knowledge. George W Bush – he of enduring freedom, democracy, etc etc amid the slaughter of Iraq – drew attention to this. Understandably miffed at being lectured to by the man who gave “terror” a new name, even Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (he of the constantly more than 90 per cent electoral success rate), told Tony Blair in 2004 that modernisation had to stem from “the traditions and culture of the region”.

Will a solution to the Arab-Israeli war resolve all this? Some of it, perhaps. Without the constant challenge of crisis, it would be much more difficult to constantly renew emergency laws, to avoid constitutionality, to distract populations who might otherwise demand overwhelming political change. Yet I sometimes fear that the problems have sunk too deep, that like a persistently leaking sewer, the ground beneath Arab feet has become too saturated to build on.

I was delighted some months ago, while speaking at Cairo University – yes, the same academy which Barack Obama used to play softball with the Muslim world – to find how bright its students were, how many female students crowded the classes and how, compared to previous visits, well-educated they were. Yet far too many wanted to move to the West. The Koran may be an invaluable document – but so is a Green Card. And who can blame them when Cairo is awash with PhD engineering graduates who have to drive taxis?

And on balance, yes, a serious peace between Palestinians and Israelis would help redress the appalling imbalances that plague Arab society. If you can no longer bellyache about the outrageous injustice that this war represents, then perhaps there are other injustices to be addressed. One of them is domestic violence, which – despite the evident love of family which all Arabs demonstrate – is far more prevalent in the Arab world than Westerners might realise (or Arabs want to admit).

But I also think that, militarily, we have got to abandon the Middle East. By all means, send the Arabs our teachers, our economists, our agronomists. But bring our soldiers home. They do not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice upon which the al-Qa’idas of this world feed. No, the Arabs – or, outside the Arab world, the Iranians or the Afghans – will not produce the eco-loving, gender-equal, happy-clappy democracies that we would like to see. But freed from “our” tutelage, they might develop their societies to the advantage of the people who live in them. Maybe the Arabs would even come to believe that they owned their own countries.

Steroids and Baseball

Jose Canseco is a prophet.

David Ortiz is a fraud and a liar and a cheat.

Alex Rodriguez (and I'm a Yankees fan) has always been a douche, so whatever.

The entire last 15-20 years of baseball is a sham as far as statistics go. Bonds, McGwire, Sosa... it's all bullshit. Doesn't matter anymore.

Derek Jeter, however, is still the man. Red Sox nation can eat it with their tainted championships.

Peter Gammons even said the Red Sox championships from this decade are tainted. Even after winning, you're still cursed Red Sox nation.

Ishmael Reed on Gates and Racism

Ishmael Reed ain't having it:

Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”--the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

Prior to the late eighties, Gates’ tough love exhortations were aimed at racism in the halls of academe, but then he signed on to downtown feminist reasoning that racism was a black male problem. Karen Durbin, who hired him to write for The Village Voice, takes credit for inventing him as a “public intellectual.” He was then assigned by Rebecca Penny Sinkler, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, to do a snuff job on black male writers. In an extraordinary review, he seemed to conclude that black women writers were good, not because of their merit, but because black male writers were bad. This was a response to an article by Mel Watkins, a former book review editor, who on his way out warned of a growing trend that was exciting the publisher’s cash registers. Books that I would describe as high Harlequin romances, melodramas in which saintly women were besieged by cruel black male oppressors, the kind of image of the brothers promoted by confederate novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon.

Gates dismissed a number of black writers as misogynists, including me, whom he smeared throughout the United States and Europe, but when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting a young woman, sexually, he told the Times that he would “go to the wall for this president.” Feminists like Gloria Steinem defended the president as well, even though for years they’d been writing about women as victims of male chauvinists with power, the kind of guys who used to bankroll Ms. magazine.

Not to say that portraits of black men should be uniformly positive--I’ve certainly introduced some creeps in my own work--but most of the white screenwriters, directors and producers who film this material--and the professors and critics who promote it-- are silent about the abuses against women belonging to their own ethnic groups. Moreover, Alice Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have complained that in the hands of white script writers, directors and producers, the black males become more sinister straw men than they appear in the original texts.

Read the rest.

Honor Killing's Sanctiond by Islam?

Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer asserts the following:

Muslim woman fears death in an honor killing after her lover was attacked with sulphuric acid. These killings, as we have documented here, happen again and again in an Islamic context -- yet the Daily Mail here attempts to give the impression that they happen all over the place. Yet if they do happen in Hindu and Sikh communities, and among Christians (a more fanciful claim), the frequency is much greater among Muslims -- not least because there is Islamic legal sanction for the idea that a parent who kills his child incurs no penalty: "Retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2.) In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

This has been Spencer's latest attempt to link Islam with honor killings. He has been quoting this section of the Reliance of the Traveler fequently to prove that Islam condones or accepts honor killings.

First of all, in many honor killing cases the father and/or mother are not involved in the murder. Many times it's been the brother who has been responsible for the murder of the woman who is killed for supposedly "shaming" the family. Based upon the legal anecdote Spencer quotes above from the Reliance of the Traveler, the brother would not be saved by the Shafi'i fiqh manual. He would be condemned for murder.

Also, can Spencer quote any Islamic authorities that specifically say that honor killings are Islamically justified, meaning both Allah and His Messenger have allowed for parents or family members to murder their relatives?

The question is not whether Muslims have tried to justify such behavior Islamically, but whether Islam condones or finds acceptable such behavior.

Spencer is the noted Islam expert. Maybe he can enlighten us. If not, he should have the courtesy to refrain from such baseless attempts to link Islam with despicable acts of violence that are not sanctioned by Islam or its core texts (namely the Qur'an and hadith of the Messenger of Allah, peace and prayers of Allah be upon him).

Please take the time to read Imam Zaid Shakir's rebuke of trying to link Islam with honor killings. As the Imam says, such people are murderers, and they should be punished to the fullest extent possible:

This practice has absolutely no sanction in the Qur’an, the Prophetic practice, or in the evolved systems of Islamic law.

These people are a disgrace to their faith if they think their actions are sanctioned by their religion, just like the extremists who justifty their terrorism vis a vis Islam.

Howard Zinn on Intelligence

From one of the greatest political scientists in American history. Zinn comments on the legacy of Robert McNamara, the deceased former Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ.

Well, assessing the legacy … It seems to me one things which we should be thinking about, is that McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give back to you and remember. That’s what MacNamara was good at. He was bright and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks questions, " Is this right? Is it wrong?" And McNamara never asked that question. Even when he was leaving, even when he decided he had to leave the post of Secretary of Defense, even when he left, his leaving was not based on the fact that the war was wrong. His leaving was based on the fact, well, we weren’t going to win.

This comment is easily applicable to all generations of youth. Our society has a bad habit of putting an emphasis on the test scores kids get and not on less tangible characteristics, like moral uprightness, character, honesty, courage.

I have known my fair share of child geniuses - the ones with the super high SAT scores, the ones who get into the top med schools and law schools. Most of the time they're like human machines, with super dedication to school work, who engage in occasional charitable work, but who would never dedicate their life to a worthy cause. They are the products of their parents who groom them to become socially acceptable elites. These are the people who usually become the heirs of super rich elites who keep their mouths shut and go with the flow to avoid causing any trouble and jeopardizing their social rank/job prospects/marital prospects.

In contrast, I have known plenty of men and women who went to small schools and do amazing things with their lives and who live for helping and aiding others through their God given gifts and talents. These people are never patted on the back, they were never expected to amount to anything special.

Yes, there are people who go to the top schools, get super high SAT scores and turn out to be great leaders and activists. But the vast majority are trained to play it safe, keep quiet and engage in socially acceptable forms of activism... like speaking out about Darfur and not Gaza or Iraq or Afghanistan. It's easy to speak out about Darfur, our government has claimed there is genocide going on there. You have the state's support. Say all that you want. But as for the three others cases, speak out and risk losing your social status. Kids today, especially in higher social ranks, are encouraged by parents, teachers, and others to shut up and ignore the crimes of our own government, and instead focus on the evil of other nations.

Our parents and teachers and elders should be teaching our youth to speak out against our own government's crimes, first and foremost, because that's what we can change and alter most easily. It's like when people tell Muslims in America to fix the Saudi government's policies towards women and minorities. I don't live there so how am I going to change anything there???

But it's easy to take up tasks like that. It's also safe. Maybe you will lose your job if you start getting ancy about government policies domestically and internationally. Maybe your friends will shun you. Maybe your family will think your crazy.

But that's the sacrifice we all make when we decide to speak out for the truth and fight against oppression and tyrrany. You don't have to get a 1400 on your SAT or go to Yale law school to understand that.

Uncles, Aunties, and the Internet

I am sure if you are a Pakistani American and you know Pakistani uncles and aunties in your local community who use the internet and email that you have eventually received an email from them telling you about how Starbucks is funneling money to support the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories (the IDF has a never ending supply of lattes), or how Apple was building a replica of the Kabah in downtown Manhattan (this chain letter apparently began in 2006 or so, and I receieved it again just a few months ago).

Us younger more sophisticated and savvy internet users know better than to believe everything we get in our inbox. We know that the emails we receive are full of crap sometimes. Soemtimes it's some dude in Nigeria or Ghana telling us that we were selected to inherit $758,434,334,547,494.98. Just send over your social security number and it's all good. Alas, the elders in our community are not so wise.

A respected uncle/relative told me the other day that Australia has banned jummah prayers.

I was like, "wha?" With one eyebrow raised.

Well, he told me that and told me something even crazier... the person leading the prayer at the mosque that night, someone I know, was in tears and recited prayers condemning Australia for banning jummah prayers. The people at the mosque that night, the uncle told me, were distraught at how a Western country could ban the Friday congregational prayers, fearing America might be next.

I was shocked, too. At how lacking in common sense these uncles were.

Frankly, I have seen this same issue occur in my local Muslim community before. That's the sad part. But what's worrisome is that our elders are vulnerable to chain emails. This is similar to what occurred in the Jewish community in South Florida with the "Barack Obama is a secret Muslim" chain letter that went out before last November's election. Many elder people in South Florida still believe that Obama is a secret Muslim.

Well, I grabbed a laptop and did a Google search of the claim. I typed in "Australia and jummah prayer."

What came up?

Nothing telling me that jummah prayer was banned in Australia. So I then went to Al-Jazeera because I figured if any news media web site would be discussing this, it would be the folks over at Al-Jazeera.

Nada. Nothing.

Of course Austalia had not banned jummah prayers! What the hell is wrong with these people!?!

I told the uncle that this was completely bogus and he should warn others that they should not be spreading such misinformation because one, it makes people sound crazy, and two, it's spreading a lie.

Anyone heard of that verse in the Qur'an telling believers to verify the truth of an accusation before they spread it to others?

The result was that some people in the community were spreading a rumor that Australia has banned jummah prayers. Apparently there is some jerkoff out there who has nothing better to do than write bogus emails trying to get Muslims to hate certain Western countries and corporations.

There's the one about Starbucks, Coca-Cola, the Netherlands, and now... Australia.

I checked Snopes.com, the information clearinghouse for chain emails, and they didn't even have this crazy chain email listed. Instead, they had an email alleging that Australia wanted to kick Muslims out entirely. I guess it's better to just have jummah banned, at least you can still live and work in the country.

The moral of the story: if you have parents or some other elder relative who uses the internet and uses email, warn them to use common sense. Because if they don't, and they tell others about these ridiculous stories, it makes our entire community seem like paranoid conspiracy mongers. I mean, we're already considered paranoid conspiracy mongers by many Westerners, so let's not exploit ourselves for the benefit of people who already don't like Muslims.

And if your parent or relative insists on spreading these chain emails, please report their account to their service provider and have them banned. I'm kidding. Sort of. But please, let's stop the retardation of our uncles and aunties by giving them good advice. It's an easy way of preventing the embarassment of community leaders who are clueless and believe that whatever they recieve in their inbox is as sound as Sahih Bukhari (there are no "daef" emails, I guess).

The internet is a great tool. But left in the hands of uncles and aunties, it can be a dangerous device if not used with caution and care. Let's all do our part and become filters for our parents and relatives. Lest the Australians suffer a worldwide Muslim protest for no reason.

Uyghurs and China

What's happening in China? I have found two articles (one from the Left and one from the Right) discussing the Uyghur protests in China. The grievances of the Uyghurs seems legitimate and deserves more attention, but since they are Muslims, it seems they may not get the attention they deserve from our press. They definitely won't get love from the far-Right, who can't possibly seem to fathom the idea that Muslims could ever be oppressed.

As to the fact that some Uyghurs were found in Afghanistan, but were subsequently released, demonstrates the problems with the war the U.S. is fighting. Many innocent people are getting rounded up with religious extremists. But while most of the Uyghurs are using protests to make change, some from their ethnic group are restorting to terrorism.

Chinese authorities also have alleged that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement has ties to al-Qaeda. Allegedly, Hasan Mahsum, the group’s founder and leader, was a protégé of Osama bin Laden, who offered his spiritual, logistical and financial support. Mashum denied these claims; however, in 2003, he was shot dead in an al-Qaeda training facility in Pakistan, indicating that perhaps this link was true. The Chinese government has also said that many of the group’s members have trained at al-Qaeda’s training camps, which were then based in Afghanistan.

The truth of such allegations remains difficult to determine, since many originate with China’s state-run media. But there is credible proof that the United States should have some concerns about the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. There is no doubt that many of its members were captured at al-Qaeda training bases after the invasion of Afghanistan. In addition, Kyrgyztan officials sent two East Turkestan Islamic Movement members back to China, claiming they were scouting out Western embassies in the city of Bishkek for a potential attack. U.S. forces also captured a group of Uighurs after the invasion of Afghanistan, ultimately releasing them to Albania, Bermuda and a tiny Pacific Island nation named Palau.

This is the problem with Muslims in the modern age. Muslims have many legitimate grievances, but these grievances become tainted by the actions of extremists. Palestine, Lebanon, Chechnya, and other places are all similar.

Violence is and must be a last resort. Terrorism is not Islamic. Islam does not condone the killing of innocent people (non-combatants). This is consistanty mentioned in the books of fiqh.

Defensive jihad justifications don't fly either because such a notion is for the people of the territory that is attacked. The fiqh books that mentioned defensive jihad radiating out to other Islamic lands was for a time and place that is so different from today that using such a foreign policy is inapplicable considering the foreign relations and treatises currently in place in the world. Jihadists want to fight, always, no matter what. Fighting is not the answer to achieve peace, except in nominal situations. People in the modern era have achieved their freedom and liberation through non-violent means. Muslims must adhere to such a philosophy if they want to adhere to their religion and if they want to achieve peace.