This past Friday night Bill Maher continued his slide from politically incorrect to merely incorrect. The habitual defender of Israel had this to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"[T]he main reason we hate Ahmadinejad is because of what he said about Israel. At least that’s what sticks in my craw. And I think most people – certainly the New York papers – because he said “Israel should be wiped off the map” – some people say it’s a mistranslation. Whatever. Horrible thing to say. And he denies the Holocaust. But, those are things he says to get elected. Okay? There are Jews in the Iranian Parliament. He can’t be that anti-Semitic. I think those are the equivalent of when the Republicans in this country say, “Gay marriage will lead to death."

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It's the last Friday of Ramadan and you know what that means: It's Quds Day. Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem.

From Khomeini's original declaration of the holiday in 1979:

Quds Day is the day of Islam; it is the day when Islam should be revived, so let us revive it and implement Islamic laws in the Islamic countries. Quds Day is the day when we must warn all the superpowers that they can no longer keep Islam under their control by means of their evil agents. Quds Day is the day to give life to Islam. The Muslims must awaken, they must come to realise the power they have, the material power and the spiritual. What are the Muslims, who form a population of one billion, enjoy divine support and have Islam and their faith behind them, afraid of? . . . The governments in the world should know that Islam will not be defeated, Islam and the teachings of the Qur’an should prevail in all countries. Religion should be the religion of God and Islam is the religion of God so it should advance on all regions of the world. Quds Day is the day to announce such a matter, the day to announce ‘Muslims, advance!’ Advance on all the regions of the world. Quds Day is not confined to (matters pertaining to) Palestine alone, it is the day of Islam, the day of Islamic government, the day when the flag of an Islamic Republic should be raised in all (Islamic) countries, the day when the superpowers should be made to realise that they can no longer advance on the Islamic countries.

Breitbart reports on festivities in Iran:

Tens of thousands of Iranians marched through Tehran on Friday proclaiming solidarity with Palestinians and chanting "Death to Israel" in the Islamic republic's annual protest against the Jewish state.

Iranians of all ages began the march through the centre of the capital to Tehran University to mark Quds Day, calling for Jerusalem and Israel to be handed to the Palestinians.

Coloured bibs were haIrnded out to protestors with the legend "Death to Israel, Death to United States" while "Palestine will only be free with fighting and faith" was the slogan on one banner.

Despite the heavily politicised nature of the demonstration, there was a festive mood with the numerous children present having their faces painted as cats and rabbits in entertainment laid on by the municipality.

Bunnies and kitties, that's sweet.The AFP reports how it went down in Gaza:

Thousands marched in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Friday, torching the flags of Israel, the United States and Britain in an annual day of protest called by Iran in solidarity with Palestinians.

Demonstrators marched from the town of Beit Lahiya to Jabaliya in the north of the territory where the Islamist Hamas seized power in mid-June.

Urging on the crowd as it burned the flags, Khader Habib, an official with the radical Islamic Jihad group that organised the march, promised to continue resistance against Israeli occupation.

"Israel is a cancerous tumour that has sprouted in the region, but we will continue the jihad and the resistance until Jerusalem is liberated," he said.

Finally, here's some warm and fuzzy Quds-ing in Pakistan, from the Post.

Hasan Zaidi, Divisional President, Imamia Students Organisation, told The Post that Al-Quds rallies would disseminate the message of love, peace and unity among the oppressing nations and pay the way for the freedom of Baitul Muqaddas, which was the first Qibla and the most sacred place for the Muslims all over the world.

Today The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli authorities have started to talk about the September 6 IAF attack on targets in northern Syrian. Up until now Israeli officials had been uncharacteristically mum on the incident, leaving everyone to speculate on the nature and intent of the operation. The Jerusalem Post's round-up:

The Washington Post reported that the target had been a facility involved in a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project - a claim backed by former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

Britain's Sunday Times, meanwhile, reported just over a week ago that soldiers from the IDF's elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) had seized North Korean nuclear material from a secret Syrian military installation before it was bombed by IAF jets.

The paper claimed that the IAF attack on September 6 was sanctioned by the US after the Americans were given proof that the material was indeed nuclear-related. It also stated that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who used to head the unit, personally oversaw the operation.

Someone who claims to have access to Binyamin Netanyahu told me that the strike was essentially a test of Iranian surveillance capability - to see what Iran could catch and how soon. Sounds far fetched, but who knows?

I was shocked from the start that this story wasn't a much bigger deal. It would seem to me that a nuclear nexus of Iran, Syria, and North Korea pretty much defines our worst nightmare. This comes, by the way, two months after a mysterious accident in northern Syria, widely believed to be the result of chemical weapons development, killed both Syrian and Iranian engineers.

What I find most interesting about this is that Victor Davis Hanson said a long a time ago we would start to see Saudi Arabia and Turkey and others in the area give Israel the implicit okay to take out regional threats to stability. Hanson said they'd condemn Israel publicly, but not do a thing about it. I'm not sure I've even seen the public condemnation.

As someone who's a great admirer of Ibn Warraq's scholarship on Islam -- though he tends, as he freely admits, to be more of a bibliographer than an original thinker -- I was fascinated by the essay in the New York Review of Books entitled, "How to Understand Islam." The first part is a lucid critique of the politically correct history of Islam, the one that maintains the faith was not spread by the sword or by coercive materialist means -- like the taxation benefits recently lauded by Osama bin Laden -- or that it is intrinsically a religion of peace. (For one thing, I doubt very much that the Prophet would have accepted such a homilistic depiction of some of the most stunning military campaigns waged in the post-Hellenic period.) But the second part of the essay is a kind of in-house rebuke of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. The author, Malise Ruthven, rejects Buruma and Garton Ash's ludicrous term "Enlightenment fundamentalist" -- which they promulgated in the pages of the New York Review -- as a fair or adequate assessment of the brave Islamic apostate and fearless atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

It might be more appropriate, however, to describe Ali as a "born-again" believer in Enlightenment values. Infidel has the hallmarks of a spiritual autobiography in which she progresses through various stages of illumination, from childhood trauma in Somalia (entailing genital mutilation inflicted by her own grandmother), through an adolescence in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, where a brief espousal of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood empowers her to question her family's tribal values within the frame of the movement's stultifying, still patriarchal religiosity, toward eventual enlightenment and emancipation in Holland, aided by encounters with Dutch fellow students and readings from Spinoza, Voltaire, Darwin, Durkheim, and Freud. This remarkable spiritual journey is interlaced with a classic story of personal courage in the face of a parochial and misogynistic social system that systematically brutalizes women in the name of God, and in which women routinely submit to neglect and violence. Told with a rare combination of passion and detachment, it is a Seven Storey Mountain in reverse: a pilgrimage from belief to skepticism.

Yet for all Hirsi Ali's questioning, there is a spiritual quality about her rebellion. The final break with her family occurs when senior members of her clan arrive in Holland to persuade her to rejoin the husband chosen by her father, in order to save the family's honor. Her refusal seems divinely mandated. "I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. 'It is the will of the soul,' I said. 'The soul cannot be coerced.'" The clan leaders, and her husband, accept the verdict. The soul cannot lie.

"Born-again atheist, practicing troublemaker" is a Morrissey lyric by way of Gore Vidal. But I don't know if I'd call this rebellion "spiritual" so much as moral and intellectual. For instance, "soul" can easily be used as a synecdoche or metaphor for human will by an evolutionary psychologist who rejects the mind-body dichotomy but also, say, appreciates the novels of Dostoevsky. However, it is true that Hirsi Ali displays reverence and awe for some of the finer manifestations of the religion she deplores.

"Enlightenment fundamentalist" wasn't only a smirking and stupid term to coin with respect to her, it was also a profoundly ungenerous one. As I wrote a few months ago in my capsule review of Infidel, published on Commentary's contentions blog:

Right-thinking intellectuals may choose to ignore or rationalize Koranic injunctions like “Your wives are your tillage, go in unto your tillage in what manner so ever you will,” arguing that these are only interpreted literally in a few third-world countries. Yet Hirsi Ali, who grew up in Somalia and traveled with her divided family to Saudi Arabia and Kenya, stands as a living reply: these literalists really get around. They are now, in fact, comfortably ensconced in cosmopolitan cities like London and Amsterdam, where Theo van Gogh, her friend and collaborator on the film Submission, was pulled off his bicycle and shot to death by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004.

What best refutes Garton Ash’s charge of fundamentalism is the demonstrable fact that, even in her newfound atheism, Hirsi Ali can still pay homage to the rituals of faith. She writes in Infidel: “People were patient with each other in the Grand Mosque, and communal—everyone washing his or her feet in the same fountain, with no shoving or prejudice. We were all Muslims in God’s house, and it was beautiful. It had a quality of timelessness. I think this is one reasons Muslims believe that Islam means peace: because in a large, cool place full of kindness you do feel peaceful.”

Now show me bin Laden’s public acknowledgment that the Bill of Rights has its charms, too.

So can we now please have done with the animadversion that suggests Spinoza is in any way the inverse mirror image of Sayyid Qutb or Hassan al-Banna?

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t groan and shift in my chair when I read the following first line from a transcript of a Chicago television news show broadcast yesterday: “A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a Muslim parent.”

I envisioned a schoolhouse renovation involving footbath facilities or a plan to excise the Holocaust from social studies class. The first of which is occurring on the university level in this country, and the second of which has occurred in England.

However, then came the next line: “But now, as CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.”

Apparently the school district is 30 percent Arab American and things got confusing when a student wanted the school to put up Ramadan decorations. The superintendent decided to strike the set, as it were, and go with no religion in the school. Period.

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Ali Eteraz' post in Comment on reform in Islam is probably one of the more concise enunciations of the next thing the West is going to have to learn about Islam and Islamic history:

Extremists, being dissenters to Islamic traditionalism, are not merely a reaction to external pressures like western foreign policy (which they are), but also a reaction to the traditionalist response (or lack of response) to internal problems as well.

The lessons have been slow-going; it's taken us since roughly 1979 to get to the point where some significant number of people on the street know that there are Sunnis and Shi'ia. You'd think that would have hit home long ago. Likewise with Wahhabism, but tragedy hitting close to home has everyone doing a bit more homework. Still the spectre of comparisons looms, and every halfway educated westerner is waiting around for Islam to catch up to Christianity.

Ali's post echoes the argument of fellow Jewcy contributor Steven Schwartz, and demonstrates that it's high time the West realize that history and culture are not marching toward some pre-ordained point, nor do they march in any sort of generally similar direction. The problematic moment in Ali's otherwise excellent post is the very end, when he declares:

Extremism is not just an irrational conflagration; it is rational, though misguided, dissent.

I get where he's driving here, but there's something about saying "extremism is rational"--just putting those three words side by side--that I can't swallow.

The distinction here is philosophical, but important even for plain speaking such as the kind used in Ali's piece. The demarcation should be should be between 'valid' and 'sound,' nothing to do with rationality, which is actually a discipline or stance that prizes general soundness over validity. In our every day speech we use most of these terms interchangeably, a good argument is sound, valid, and rational. But a valid argument needn't follow from true premises. The classic example: Napoleon was German, Napoleon was nice, therefore all Germans are nice. This formulation isn't improper. We can understand it, but we can understand it well enough to see why it's absurd. Napoleon wasn't German, there are plainly some mean Germans, Napoleon doesn't seem to have been so swell, therefore the entire argument is lousy. Validity only requires one proceed in formal logic in proper argumentative form. A sound argument, however is valid, it's premises are true, and therefore it's conclusions follow and yield a conclusion that is also true.

The claims of extremists, being amalgamated from amateur political critique and professional superstition, are comprised generally of mostly untrue premises mixed with some legitimate complaints about misuse of power, economic inequality, etc. Their arguments however are not only misguided, they are unsound. This means their conclusions are untrue and thus the 'conflagration' that is extremism cannot be considered 'rational' simply because it follows a recognizable pattern of argument while deploying a small amount of true premises with a large amount of false ones.

Ali's a lawyer, one of my favorite writers on this topic, and I'm sure I'm not telling him anything he doesn't know. I just it would be worthwhile to draw out a slightly more rigorous, even if somewhat surgical distinction from that statement.

Turkey is steadily becoming one of the most dangerous, complicated, and bizarre players on the world’s Islamic stage. The Washington Post has a story about a mega-best-selling Turkish book series asserting that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other politicians in the strongly Islamic Justice and Development Party (or AKP) are actually Zionist agents. And the books are more than a popular phenomenon. They're part of a curious political movement.

Both the American Jewish Committee and The National Jewish Democratic council issued statements criticizing John McCain's recent remarks about non-Christians and the presidency. As well they should have.

McCain said in a recent interview:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith," McCain said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president.

I've never had a problem with John McCain's age. (But maybe that’s just because at 35, I’m apparently already too out of touch to know how to text my vote in to a news network after a debate. I ruined a good 45 minutes trying to thumb in my McCain vote a few weeks ago.) He does, however, have a minor knack for making gaffs that seem particularly, what. . .out of touch. Perhaps one could take some solace in the notion that this recent whoops is evidence of McCain's unease in pandering to Evangelicals?

I don't believe the man is particularly prejudiced against non-Christians, but a statement like that can't go unchallenged. As a spokesman for the American Jewish Committee said, "To argue that America is a Christian nation, or that persons of a particular faith should by reason of their faith not seek high office, puts the very character of our country at stake."

McCain has since tried to quell the noise. And I hate to say it, but his efforts at clarifying his intitial remarks seem, once again, off:

It's almost Talmudic. We are a nation that was based on Judeo-Christian values. That means respect for all of human rights and dignity. That's my principle values and ideas, and that's what I think motivated our founding fathers.

There's a sort of Clintonesqe disregard for the substantive at work here.

And by the way - "It's almost Talmudic"? He's gone from the frying pan into the fryer. Do the truthers and company need any more evidence of the insidious hand of the evil Jewish lobby? I can hear the shrill mob now: "John McCain said the U.S. is a Talmudic nation!" 

Of all the tenuous alliances in the post-9/11 universe there are perhaps none so fragile as those of Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s with . . .well, any number of things: his own country, Washington, radical Islam, military dictatorship. Take your pick. Having declared himself a partner in the U.S.’ war on terror, Pakistan’s baby-faced President has survived no less than three assassination attempts by Islamic radicals. While foes in his own country view him as a U.S. puppet, his critics in the West see him as an enabler of Islamic extremism, citing Musharraf’s seeming reluctance to crack down on jihadists in Pakistan and the tribal areas to the northwest. For years he’s ruled with his hands tied, unable to show Pakistanis he’s his own man and unable to prove himself a worthy ally to the West.

Now, with looming democratic reform in Pakistan and legitimate challenges to his leadership, a reframing of the country’s political landscape is unavoidable. On the one hand, Musharraf may find a mandate and lead Pakistan into democracy and national reconciliation. On the other, he may go from impotence to irrelevance. And a Pakistan without Musharraf could leave the U.S. yearning for the days of its ineffective friend.

This past Saturday Musharraf won Pakistan’s presidential elections by an apparent landslide. His victory was so overwhelming that many are crying foul. Additionally, the Supreme Court still has to rule on the legitimacy of the elections, as Musharraf’s status as Chief of Army Staff may render a presidential run unconstitutional. Musharraf said that if the court decides in his favor, he’ll give up his military position. Some have speculated that if the court rules against him he’ll impose martial law.

What’s America to do? Condemn Musharraf and call for more closely monitored elections, or support a military dictatorship that’s been a lukewarm friend? The answer is to support Musharraf and guide him down the path of reform. An alienated Musharraf leaves a power vacuum with some nasty contenders, namely the Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA). The MMA is the ruling party of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan, and are outspoken proponents of a Taliban-like theocracy. As Musharraf has already stated his willingness to share power with Benazir Bhutto of the secular pro-west People’s Power Party (PPP), any talk of abandoning him at this point would be morally reprehensible and pure idealist posturing.

Did I say morally reprehensible and pure idealist posturing? Cue the Clinton camp:

Here’s former Clinton national security advisor (and current Clinton campaign advisor) Sandy Berger and former Clinton assistant for Near East and South Asia Affairs Bruce Riedel as tough-minded idealists in yesterday’s Herald Tribune:

Musharraf took power in a military coup in 1999. When we traveled with President Bill Clinton to South Asia in 2000, we made a four-hour stop in Islamabad, where Clinton insisted on speaking to the Pakistani people. He made a strong appeal for a return to democracy, less than half a year after Musharraf had deposed Pakistan's elected - if not entirely effective - Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Seven years later, the people of Pakistan, which is increasingly on the edge of chaos, deserve no less.

I love the “four hour” boast. Clinton spent a whopping four hours on the question of Pakistani self-determination and these guys think he should get a medal for it. The full context of this marathon inspirational speech is truly pathetic. Far from “insist[ing] on speaking to the Pakistani people,” the Clinton Administration debated the stop for weeks. Eventually they decided to throw it in at the close of the larger tour. This was back when questions of global security were “settled” with appearances, waves, and proclamations.

More Berger and Riedel:

Some say Musharraf is all that keeps Pakistan from an Islamic takeover. Musharraf used that line with Clinton in 2000, but Clinton didn't buy it then and we should not buy it now. Pakistan's democratic institutions and politicians are far from perfect. Whose are? But they should be given the opportunity to address their country's problems.

[…]

Free and fair elections will produce a secular government that would have the legitimacy to tackle extremism. Every election in Pakistan's history shows the Islamists are a small minority and the more-secular parties are the majority.

Perhaps the report on the MMA victories in the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan are buried in the dark depths of Sandy Berger’s pants.

I’m a fan of consensual government—for the people of Pakistan and everywhere else—but without security moderate voices are silenced. After all, Jimmy Carter assured us that the good people of Gaza, if given the chance, would demonstrate their willingness to live peacefully alongside their Israeli neighbors.

General Musharraf, however maddening, is Pakistan’s best hope for progress.

Gary Kasparov is not the only chess prodigy making waves these days. Natan Sharansky has a piece on today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion page about the ongoing legal battle in France over media coverage of the alleged killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Al-Dura was the 12-year-old Palestinian boy seen huddling with his father behind a barrel amid a hail of Israeli bullets in September of 2000. The horrifying footage was (understandably) inescapable around that time and became an iconic media byte, launching anti-Israel rallying cries the world over. It certainly added heat, and blood, to the second intifada.

In a clip released soon after the attacks of September 11, Osama bin Laden said:

In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing.

But almost immediately after the al-Dura footage aired, the circumstances surrounding the incident were called into question and the legitimacy of the 59-second clip itself became a matter for some contemplation. An inquiry by the IDF concluded that it would have been nearly impossible for al-Dura to have been hit by bullets fired from the Israeli’s positions. For those who doubt the findings of such an interested party, The Atlantic, sighting sources outside of the IDF, ran a fairly exhaustive and thought-provoking breakdown of the evidence. The New Republic, Commentary, and a German documentary also weighed in with similar conclusions.

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[Note: This post is Stephen Schwartz's take on an ongoing Jewcy debate between Jamie Kirchick and Ali Eteraz about the legitimacy of the term "Islamofascism." Read Kirchick's original post; Eteraz's reply to it; Kirchick's second post; Eteraz's reply to it.]

I claim to have originated the term “Islamofascist” as a description of present-day jihadists. “Islamofascism” was previously used, most notably, by the British scholar Malise Ruthven to denote Arab dictatorships, i.e. in a completely different context. Writing from Washington in The Spectator (London), a week after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I intended to compare Al-Qaida with the threat of the Axis to the democracies during the 1930s, and the need to unite against the terrorists. I presumed that a common front would bring leftists and liberals together with conservatives, as it did in America in 1941, but leftists and liberals did not figure prominently in my thinking. The concept was not specifically aimed at leftists and liberals, and thus my own discourse about Islamofascism did not comprise an appeal to the left.

Rather, my formulation had emerged from my discussions with Muslims in America, in the Balkans, and by e-mail around the world, about Saudi-financed Wahhabism. These Muslims referred to the Wahhabis as “fascists in religious disguise.” Any consideration of leftists and liberals in discussing Wahhabis as Islamofascists was a secondary, if not a purely unconscious aspect of my thought process. The Muslims I then knew disliked leftist politics, and I was mainly concerned with Muslims.

In writing my book The Two Faces of Islam, however, I tried to develop the theory of Islamofascism in political and sociological terms. Last year, at TCSDaily.com, as reposted at the Weekly Standard website, I published a text titled “What is Islamofascism?” There I argued, “Political typologies should make distinctions, rather than confusing them, and Islamofascism is neither a loose nor an improvised concept. It should be employed sparingly and precisely. [Radical Islamist] movements should be treated as Islamofascist, first, because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form – German National Socialism.”

Further on, I wrote, “Islamofascism [like Nazism] pursues its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between states. Al-Qaida has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence…

“Fascism rested, from the economic perspective, on resentful middle classes, frustrated in their aspirations and anxious about loss of their position. The Italian middle class was insecure in its social status; the German middle class was completely devastated by the defeat of the country in the First World War. Both became irrational with rage at their economic difficulties; this passionate and uncontrolled fury was channeled and exploited by the acolytes of Mussolini and Hitler. Al-Qaida is based in sections of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian middle classes fearful, in the Saudi case, of losing their unstable hold on prosperity – in Pakistan and Egypt, they are angry at the many obstacles, in state and society, to their ambitions. The constituency of Hezbollah is similar: the growing Lebanese Shia middle class, which believes itself to be the victim of discrimination.

“Fascism was imperialistic; it demanded expansion of the German and Italian spheres of influence. Islamofascism has similar ambitions; the Wahhabis and their Pakistani and Egyptian counterparts seek control over all Sunni Muslims in the world, while Hezbollah projects itself as an ally of Syria and Iran in establishing regional dominance.

“Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world view – a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between Muslims and alleged unbelievers. For Sunni radicals, the practice of takfir – declaring all Muslims who do not adhere to the doctrines of the Wahhabis, Pakistani Jama’atis, and the Muslim Brotherhood to be outside the Islamic global community or ummah – is one expression of Islamofascism. For Hezbollah, the posture of total rejectionism in Lebanese politics – opposing all politicians who might favor any political negotiation with Israel – serves the same purpose. Takfir, or ‘excommunication’ of ordinary Muslims, as well as Hezbollah’s Shia radicalism, are also important as indispensable, unifying psychological tools for the strengthening of such movements.

“Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties’ ideological monopoly. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.

“I do not believe these characteristics are intrinsic to any element of the faith of Islam.”

I would add to this two supplemental notes. First, my method in analyzing Islamofascism was not original – it is derived from Trotsky’s writings on the menace of Nazism. But the influence of Trotsky as a historical and political thinker is not dependent on allegiance to socialism, much less Bolshevism.

Second, in response to a query from Christopher Hitchens, I would add that Wahhabism shares with German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism a theory of racial superiority – as every Muslim knows, Wahhabis believe that only Arabs are real Muslims, only Saudis are real Arabs, and only Najdis – from the desert region in which Wahhabism appeared – are real Saudis.

I emphasize that none of my commentary on this topic was or is directed to the left or aimed at influencing the left. The discussion of Islamofascism has, in effect, been hijacked by leftists, such that many who take up the matter now assume that given my Trotskyist background, and interest in Trotsky as a historical personality, the theory of Islamofascism was conceived as a political gambit to summon left-liberal support to the war on terror.

I was and remain indifferent to the views of leftists and liberals about Islamofascism because I have completely given up on the left and liberals in general as agents of positive change. I broke with the left openly in 1984 over Nicaragua, and their support for the Soviet-imperialist Sandinistas. Between then and now a series of other lessons in disaffection was reinforced for me by the American left. I was prominent in the Newspaper Guild, as I had previously been active in transportation unions, but watched as a labor organization dedicated to improved income, conditions, and job security was transformed into an ideological agency fixated on concentration of media ownership and other “progressive” issues. Politics has always been the death of effective trade-unionism, and there is no substantial labor movement in America today. In the absence of strong unions, there is no real left. Nor, of course, is there a basis for strong unions in the situation of industry, which has declined as an effect of the information revolution and rise of the world market. The unions have failed to grasp the challenge of organizing information workers or acting on a global level; rather, they have turned to the narcotic of protectionism. But none of these lacunae can be filled by the blandishments of leftist ideology, especially that sheltered in the Western academy.

My final loss of respect for the left and liberals came during the Yugoslav wars. I went to Bosnia-Hercegovina beginning in 1991, working (and living) there and in Kosovo during various periods from 1997 to 2001, and returning there repeatedly since 2003. I witnessed American and other foreign leftists siding with the Milosevic regime in its program of fascist aggression, and then observed the “politically-correct” policies imposed on the prostrated Balkan Muslim territories by the United Nations as well as representatives of the Clinton administration. UN and European Union administration, with American support, kept the murderous Serb terrorists in control of two-thirds of Bosnia and still deny independence to Kosovo, which is currently threatened by revived Serb violence. How can one consider “progressive” those who cannot tell the Bosnian and Albanian victims from the Serb aggressors? I also experienced the absurd process by which American liberals and social-democrats associated themselves with the bogus anti-Milosevic “revolution” in Serbia in 2000. I published a short meditation on that misadventure titled “Nausea,” but paraphrasing Camus rather than Sartre.

I could expatiate on this turn in modern political history, but that should wait for another time. I remain a defender of the oppressed, but I no longer believe at all in liberal clichés. The war in Iraq has reinforced my indifference to, and insistence on the irrelevance of, leftist and liberal rhetoric. As if these life-changing events were insufficient, I have lived to see a widespread propaganda emerge condemning democracy, in a vocabulary indistinguishable from that employed by the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. Such nonsense has entered the American mainstream, along with unambiguous Jew-baiting directed against the neoconservatives, and both have been adopted with enthusiasm by the former left and liberals. Today’s true partisans of democracy are found more among the neoconservatives and traditional conservatives than among leftists and liberals.

It is therefore of little or no consequence to me whether leftists and liberals understand the threat of Islamofascism. More than ever, I am almost exclusively concerned with Muslim comprehension of the term, which has been badly misrepresented by Islamist demagogues.

Those who claim that “Islamofascism” is “offensive to Muslim Americans” are complicit in such deceptions. First, the category of “Muslim American” has been confected to transform a religious community, which should be referred to as “American Muslims,” comparable to “American Jews” or “American Christians,” into a presumptive ethnic community aggrieved about discrimination, like “African Americans.” (“Jewish Americans” is acceptable as a reference to those who define Jewishness ethnically, but American Muslims are not ethnically uniform, and nobody would refer to “Catholic-Americans” as if they were members a single culture. “Christian American,” in the past, was a euphemism employed by Jew-baiters and is a precedent Muslims should avoid.)

The only American Muslims offended by the term “Islamofascism” are those to whom it is best applied, i.e. the “Wahhabi lobby” centered on the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). On October 22, the first day of the Islamofascism Awareness Week organized by David Horowitz, 1,000 American Muslims assembled at the Saudi Embassy in Washington to protest “Wahhabi fascism.” They were obviously not offended by the identification of extremist Muslims as fascist. Nor, in the time immediately following 9/11, did one of America’s most strident and extreme Islamist preachers, Hamza Yusuf Hanson, anxious to reinvent himself as a moderate, refrain from telling the Guardian in London, “there are Muslim fascists.”

Perhaps predictably, I agree with Jamie Kirchick’s view that liberals and leftists are conditioned to denounce the term “Islamofascism,” rather than to analyze the Islamofascist phenomenon, out of a misplaced solidarity with Muslims. But I find Ali Eteraz’s response to Kirchick to be fantasy and nothing more. The claim that American academic institutions shelter those “leading the charge against theocracy, anti-semitism, fundamentalism, and disenfranchisement in the Muslim world” is exaggerated, to say the least. The few individuals he enumerates, laudable as they may be, are a tiny minority when compared with the army of apologists for radical Islam found in Middle East Studies departments on American campuses.
Further, I am not convinced that Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, Iranian dissidents Akbar Ganji and Haleh Esfandiari, Riffat Hassan, Amina Wadud (whose activities are ambiguous and distorted by Western media), Andullahi an-Naim, Rafia Zakaria, Laleh Bakhtiar, or Ziba Mir-Hosseini can all be accurately described as acolytes of the charlatan Edward Said. The diatribe titled Orientalism is not only incomprehensible but amazingly ignorant of Islam – Said even attacked Sufism. Frantz Fanon, whose work had nothing to do with Islam except that he was a guest of the Algerian revolutionaries, is forgotten. And what is the “post-colonial left” but another trivial invention of American academics? I have no reason to believe that any, much less all, of the mentioned figures reject the term “Islamofascism.”

But perhaps they do reject it. If so, so what? I and others, who in the anti-Wahhabi combat may be counted in the millions, do not reject it. Islamic pluralism means that we who love freedom may disagree with one another about theory, typology, and tactics, if we do not disagree in condemning the fascism represented by Saudi Wahhabism, Egyptian and Pakistani-Afghan radicalism, and the Iranian clique of Ahmedinejad. Although I have criticized some allies, and reserve the right to argue with others, we should not consider it more important to dispute with our associates in the battle against the extremists than to defeat the terrorists. But only a few leftists and liberals have so far proven their commitment to such a victory over Islamist violence.

Few hate Stalinism more than I, but I would never criticize Churchill and Roosevelt for their wartime alliance with the Muscovite monster. Various enemies of Islamofascism may anger us by their criticisms of what they perceive in Islam. But the Islamofascists want to kill us. While we keep our mouths wide open, yelling our disagreements with those also under terrorist attack, a sword is being sharpened for our necks. Let me add that one of the speakers at the aforementioned October 22 Muslim rally against Wahhabi fascism, the Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, lives in the U.S., but has been threatened with beheading on a Saudi website.

I believe Islamofascism will be defeated by Saudi Sufis, Shias and other non-Wahhabi Muslims, who are pressing King Abdullah to break the official links between the Wahhabi clerics and the monarchy; anti-Wahhabis in other Gulf states; Iranian reformist intellectuals and Sufis; Iraqi Shia opponents of the Khomeinist state system in Iran, and Iraqi Sunni enemies of Al-Qaida; Algerians and Egyptians who survived Islamist terror; Balkan Sufis and traditional Hanafi Muslims confronting Wahhabi infiltrators; Turkish Alevis opposed to the Sunnicentric AK party regime; Sufis and traditionalists in West Africa, Sudan, Kurdistan, Central Asia, and southeast Asia, and the brave opponents of Wahhabis, other takfiris, and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Western help is crucial in this war, as in earlier wars against tyranny.

But few of these Muslim heroes have heard, or care about, Edward Said or his peers. Few people in the West, including self-important Muslim bloggers, know or care about them. Many are ordinary peasants, village clerics, and local shaykhs. Some are Shias well-versed in Western as well as Islamic philosophy. But they know what Islamofascism is because they have faced it, and their opinion counts most. The left and liberals long ago ceased to advocate for such people, and instead placed all their confidence in the Western academic elite, i.e in themselves and those who aspire to become like them. Academic leftists, yearning for the ‘60s, are as repellent as old rock stars; they are to politics what Mick Jagger is to pop music – pathetically believing they are immortal. I am sorry, but I do not eat that bread.

Hindu-Jewish Leadership SummitYesterday's New York Times ran a story about Indian-Americans finding an activist role model, and sometime partner, in American Jews.

Indians often say they see a version of themselves and what they hope to be in the experience of Jews in American politics: a small minority that has succeeded in combating prejudice and building political clout.

Sanjay Puri, the chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee, said: “What the Jewish community has achieved politically is tremendous, and members of Congress definitely pay a lot of attention to issues that are important to them. We will use our own model to get to where we want, but we have used them as a benchmark.”

One instance of Indians following the example of Jews occurred last year when Indian-American groups, including associations of doctors and hotel owners, banded together with political activists to win passage of the United States-India Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Act, which allows New Delhi to buy fuel, reactors and other technology to expand its civilian nuclear program.

I remember when Bush announced the passage of the United States-India Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Act. One of the administration's finer foreign policy moments. An overlooked commitment to global outreach at a time when the U.S. was taking a lot of flack for its supposed unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy.

I think the U.S. relationship with India these days has taken on a similar tint to our relationship with Israel in the following aspect: Its a non-zero-sum game. On the biggest issue of the day The U.S, India, and Israel are up against the same menace. As the Times article goes on to say: "[A]mong Hindus, who are a majority in India and among Indian-Americans here, some assert that a vital bond they share with Jews is the threat to India and Israel from Muslim terrorists."

Although, some Indian-Americans are leery of emphasizing that commonality.

This makes me relatively suspicious, because there is the desire to reduce the complexity of the issues in a conflict,” said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford.

The India Community Center in Milpitas, Calif., represents the nonsectarian approach many Indian-Americans take to replicating the experience of American Jews. When Anil Godhwani began talking to other Indians in Silicon Valley about opening a center, “more than one person talked to us about making this a Hindu community center — sometimes in very strong terms,” he said. That was never his intention, though he was raised Hindu.

Indians have worked with The American Jewish Committee on immigration and hate crimes legislation. The American Jewish Committee has also organized group trips to Israel for Indian Americans.

This is a golden opportunity, one that must not be wasted. Jewish Americans and Indian-Americans must join forces and figure out how to conquer that most formidable of our common antagonists: our over-protective mothers.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali interviewed by Reset:

You defined Mohammed a tyrant and a pervert. You are absolutely free to think and say anything you want, but maybe this kind of somewhat provocative language is useless, isn’t it? It could create walls and clashes, not favouring a dialogue. Your story is a terrible story and everybody should know that, but maybe this language could be an obstacle for moderate Muslims.

The prophet Mohammed married a six-year-old girl, had sex with her when she was nine, and there are millions of Muslim men today who follow in his footsteps. When I say he was a pervert, this is what I mean. Now, my opponents say “you will create walls if you call him this way”. What I say is that for these poor little girls who are 9, 10, 11 or 12, the wall already exists. In my views, provoking people to see what is happening behind this wall does not mean erecting walls, but trying and letting these walls tumble down. When Bin Laden, the Saudi Kingdom and Ahmadinejad want to establish theocracies today in the name of Islam, they are following the example of the prophet Mohammed. That is why I call him a tyrant. If we want to provoke people to think about this tyranny and how it comes about, it is good to bring Mohammed down to our level and say: “what he did was normal in the seventh century, but today we do not like it anymore, we do not find it normal, we do not like tyranny”.

Allan Bloom once recalled, in The Closing of the American Mind, how a simple question could yield encyclopedias of moral casuistry. Ask a contemporary American classroom if British civil servants in India were right to stop the practice of sati, whereby widows would throw themselves onto their dead husbands's funeral pyres, and you'd be met by yowls of enlightened protest: "But those civil servants shouldn't have even been there!" Yes, but what about intervening in a tribally coerced act of self-immolation? At some point, the colonial theory abandons you and you're forced to make a decision: allow a gruesome suicide to proceed, or try to prevent it from doing so...

I'm sure I'll get aggrieved comments just for linking to this interview, much less pulling that particular excerpt from it. Allow me then to ask: Is anything Hirsi Ali says factually untrue? Did the prophet Mohammed not marry a 9 year-old girl, and should 9 year-old girls continue to be married to older men -- in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere?

If you spend enough time spouting vitriol toward violent Islamism, you're almost certain to be deemed a 'racist' or an 'Islamophobe' sooner than later. Sometimes it comes from Muslims who are justifiably sensitive because their AK-toting coreligionists get such an inordinate amount of airtime compared with those who fight for democracy and social justice. Other times--oftentimes--it comes from educated Western liberals. Sami Zubaida takes on this careless and inaccurate portrayal of the so-called Muslim World:

It is not just that there are ethnic and social diversities within Muslims, but that many of them are nominal Muslims, and religion enters marginally, if at all, into their lives.

The political implication is that all Muslims are to be "recognised" in terms of their faith, as a community, which is clearly not sociologically viable. But it is politically pursued by those individuals and institutions that seek communal authority and leadership, encouraged by government quarters which seek such "leaders" for shows of consultation and participation.

In the process, he also swiftly debunks the standard liberal myth that regards Islamism as a response to hegemonic cultural incursion:

These men are not culturally distinct from the mainstream. They were proficient and articulate in English, spoke with local accents, were products of British education, social life, sports and entertainments. They had separated from the cultural religion of their parents and embraced militant salafism. Their hostility to their British compatriots did not proceed from cultural difference but from ideological hostility, one that is phrased in the idioms of British culture.

I added the bold-faced emphasis to the quote above because bold-faced emphasis on this very fact--that not all Muslims are terrorists--is strangely missing from most 'liberal' conversations today, but in the most bizarre way. The Islamophobia watchdogs who play fast and loose with the charge make a strange error: if not all Muslims are terrorists (a point on which we agree), then criticism of radical Islamist terror does not extend to all Muslims. It is far more disrespectful to deny people the diversity of their culture than it is to criticize those diseased elements within it that wreak havoc on all the others.

There's hardly anything more bizarre than telling a person who says "bin-Laden is a backward, bloodthirsty freak" that they're racist against Muslims. The implication of such an accusation is that bin-Laden is representative of a singular Muslim World, a world with no capability for independent thought, or creative difference--a world where those who sacrifice their lives for freedom and justice are the same as those who sacrifice themselves for dictatorship and oppression. No matter how hard I try, I can think of no greater insult to the adherents of the Islamic faith.

Due to an unfortunate subscription firewall, it's impossible to link to the full article in this month's Atlantic by Terence Henryentitled 'Get Out Of Jihad Free.' That's too bad because it would probably shock more than a few folks to know that the Saudi government has implemented a program that not only acknowledges the rottenness of al-Qaeda, but also offers jihadists a form of amnesty that proceeds from the premise that the terror group is a Jim Jones-style cult.

The narrative is familiar: group brainwashes disillusioned kids into severing family bonds, essential ties to family are replaced with bonds to the group which proceeds to sacrifice recruits to a cause rooted in pure psychosis. Bin-Laden is painted as a Manson-ish figure and the steps to rescuing his victims involve a public appeal by family members urging the confused jihadi to abandon holy war and come home to mom, pop, uncle, auntie and the whole crew. They say it works. I suppose we'll see about that.

Leaving aside motive, sincerity, and effectiveness of the policy, an interesting fact still remains: for Tariq Ali and certain quarters of the 'left,' al-Qaeda represents "slaves and peaseants" who "don't always obey their masters." Of 9/11 Ali said, "The subjects of the Empire had struck back." The Saudis say, 'don't drink the Kool-Aid, these guys are wackos.'

Eagerly awaiting an explanation as to how George W. Bush is responsible for the assassinations of schoolteachers in Thailand:

...the new generation of separatist militants, calling themselves Patani Freedom Fighters (pejuang kemerdekaan Patani, or pejuang), has been responsible for 75 deaths and 91 injuries of teachers since January 2004, when the insurgency escalated. They have also burned 194 schools in the same period.

These folks aren't content to merely boycott educators and places of learning. They go all out. And why?

Human Rights Watch examined leaflets distributed by pejuang militants in the southern border provinces explicitly warning ethnic Malay Muslims not to send children to government schools and not to cooperate with Thai authorities. The leaflets say that doing so is considered to be a forbidden sin (haram) and can be subject to severe punishment, including death.

Apparently the Patani "Freedom Fighters" aren't even big on educating themselves in their own beliefs. If they were, they might have come across this quote from the Prophet Muhammad in the Hadith:

The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.

Insha'Allah, this idea will gain ground sooner than later.

Tony Blair thinks we aren't adequately confronting terrorism on the ideological front:

The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, 'It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.'

But the very phrasing of this statement reveals a deeper problem. Why is the former Prime Minister of Great Britain saying that we are 'finding it hard to win?' Are we? Or was the war won before it was even declared? Terrorists are pissants. They are the rednecks of the Middle East--the KKK of the Islamic world. One might instead lament their having been given such credit as a foe. How it must massage their pathetic little egos to know that the Great Satans now recognize them not only as a massive global threat, but as one that is so goddam hard to stamp out?

Picture the madrassa pitch: 'You see Khalid, even Tony Blair admits that we are winning. And George W. Bush has finally acknowledged the great millennial struggle in which we are engaged...now strap this on.'

The CATO Institute once reported that lightning strikes, deer, and allergic reactions to peanuts have claimed more lives in America than terrorism. Somebody like Norman Podhoretz might interpret this as frivolous downplaying of the WWIV enemy. But wouldn't it sting more to hear that, for all their righteous rage, terrorists aren't any scarier than Jif, Bambi, or a wicked afternoon thunderstorm?

It matters little how eloquently you argue with a group that is immune to argument. But even the most stupid, irrational people understand when they're not being given the time of day--when they want to be heard, noticed and given credit and get nothing but a big, fat snub. Some believe that, considering jihadists known it for years now, it's all the better that we've recognized that we're at War. True, it's important to recognize an enemy and destroy it. But attention is a form of dignification.  If your enemy believes things that are, as Blair rightly notes, "absurd," then perhaps it's best to make a concerted effort to avoid giving their ideas any more dignity than they deserve, especially in the public discourse.

Jihad doesn't have truth or history on its side, but its proponents will never acknowledge the real contours of either--it has 21st century black market weaponry and an inflated sense of power and importance, that's all. It also has its demise inscribed in its very make-up. The steam it gets from our statesmen who talk about long, hard battles almost matches what it gets from our leftists who legitimize its unjustified "sense of grievance." We'll be in much better shape when both our leaders and our progressives start treating terrorists like the gnats they are--small-brained, weak, and doomed to get stamped out.

Now that the terror threat in Britain has been hilariously "lowered" from 'critical' to 'severe,' (in other words, from 'imminently fucked' to 'almost certainly screwed'), it's as good a time as any to meditate on the ol' 'Why They Do It' question. First, let's review the stock answers with which we're all quite familiar:

American foreign policy, British foreign policy, imperialism, poverty in the Third World/Global South, the War in Iraq.

Now, let's canvass a former member of the British Jihadi Network, Hassan Butt:

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Hassan isn't even an apostate. He hasn't renounced Islam and in fact he's quite devout. But when his superiors wouldn't answer his hard questions about Islamic theology, he did his own searching and discovered that he couldn't square what he had been told to do in the name of Islam with what he found in the Qu'ran.

I know this might disappoint those folks who live to point out that economic disadvantage and American/British foreign policy are the fundamental engines of evil in the world. But watch the videos below as Hassan reminds us of the power of a fascistic ideology on the minds of the pious, the well-to-do, and, not least on those who don't want to be forced into marrying a girl they don't want to marry.

Those who think that Bush and Blair's war against al-Qaeda and Ba'athism cause terrorism or that suicide bombers are angry at the sight of starving children might do well to acquaint themselves with the history of Islamic schism--the Khawarij and the Wahhabis for a start. There is a great deal of contrast between these splinter groups and the first ummah. Muhammad's ascendancy was due to his character, one that was uncommon in Meccan society--he was a brilliant resolver of conflict amongst those of different tribal allegiance.

It wasn't until those with specific power interests within the Islamic empire injected a separatist violent strain into Islam that the violence of jihad against "unbelievers" came into being as we know it today. This ideology was at once appealing to desert brigands and thieves who could use it as a perfect tool for political power grabs, and for the raping and pillaging of fellow Muslims. It functions the same to this day.

Those who today continue to insist that Islamic terrorism would disappear or diminish if only George Bush would leave Iraq and if only fewer offensive cartoons would be published only make apparent their own historical illiteracy with respect to the Middle East and Islam. Hassan Butt knows what he's talking about. Individual groups may not issue fatwahs nor may they declare jihad. The division of the world into believers and unbelievers is outdated. In the spirit of Butt's recommendation to confront extremism on the level of theology, it might be worthwhile to call on the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad). The inhospitable region of the Arabian peninsula known as Najd was home to Ibn Wahhab; it has home to vicious fanaticism for centuries and it is the birthplace of many of al-Qaeda's most integral beliefs. Muhammad himself said that the people of Najd were essentially people of hell:

'O Allah, bless our Syria and our Yemen!' They said: 'Ya Rasulallah, and our Najd!' He didn't reply. He blessed Syria and Yemen twice more. They asked him to bless Najd twice more but he didn't reply. The third time he said: 'There [in Najd] are the earthquakes and the dissensions, and through it will dawn the epoch [or horn] of shaytan.'

Now today, as the flame of violent, separatist Islam burns, many actively apologize for those who defame the religion by carrying out brutal mass murder in its name. They say 'BushBlairimperialismpoverty' and think they're ever so cultured, ever so full of conscience and respect for Islam. In reality, they "do the propaganda work" of the modern day equivalents of those people the Prophet deemed people of hell.

Whoever says Islam is an outdated desert religion has this fact working against them. Muhammad could apparently spot the enemies of peace far better than many of the supposed forces of progress in our modern world.

Granted the title is a bit academic, but it might have been chosen because How The Queer Cheered For the Fag Slaughtering Ayatollahs wouldn't have gone over with the authors' colleagues at Perdue. Afary and Anderson's study of French philosopher Michel Foucault's adoration for the Islamist elements of the Iranian Revolution, goes a long way toward demystifying the odd affinities between today's academic left and reactionary Islamism. Foucault is a colossal presence in the imagination of many liberals who today are confronted by Islamic radicalism, which should frighten anyone who reads this examination of a brief but damning period in Foucault's intellectual career. All of Foucault's writings on the Revolution are included and many are available for the first time in English.

Want to get an idea for why liberals, progressives, feminists, and leftists today are so often insufficiently revolted by a patently totalitarian movement? Read Afary on Foucault.

(see video interviews with the authors here.)

Henry Porter makes the case in the Guardian that, unlike with the IRA, Al Qaeda cannot be negotiated with or even debated on civilized terms:

A couple of weeks after a man had attempted to blow up hundreds of young women at a London nightclub, it makes you quite proud to see the clubs and pubs in London full of people enjoying themselves. As I watched, a voice at the back of my mind asked: 'What the hell is al-Qaeda on about?' Which is not such a dumb question because most of the standard answers concerning Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan do not explain the terrible level of violence that the four men jailed last week - all of whom had benefited in some way from the Britain's hospitality - planned for their fellow citizens. The Middle East may seem to provide convincing pretexts but we shouldn't for a moment believe that withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and a settlement in Palestine would stop al-Qaeda. For one thing, there is a devotion to cruelty, a blood lust if you like, among the extremist sects of Islam which seems to go way beyond the desire to gain certain political goals or religious goals. Look at the way Arabs are being killed by al-Qaeda in the Anbar province of Iraq or at the murders of barbers in Basra, or the decision by an Iranian court to order a 43-year-old woman named Mokarrameh Ebrahimi to be stoned to death for adultery, which Amnesty International says 'beggars belief'.

Of course, this should be self-evident by now. But it isn't. Still we hear that Islamists are reverse-engineered foreign policy analysts and that if the U.S. did things like pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantled its air strips in Saudi Arabia (done, by the way), Bin Laden would call off his goon squad and retire to quiet life of the sharia-saturated mind. Never mind that Al Qaeda seems more preoccupied with the goings-on in Pakistan and Nigeria, over which the U.S. has precious little sway (it takes Gen. Musharraf to ask Bush to stand down on killing known jihadists, and to do so for Musharraf's own political "stability"), and that a caliphate is, by design, a theocratic imperium whose origins preexist secular republicanism.

From now on I'd like the obverse of Porter's argument the Burnt Pot Roast thesis, for it amounts to the same collapsible logic: if only the wife didn't ruin the dinner, her husband would stop beating her.

I saw A Mighty Heart last night, the movie about Daniel Pearl's abduction and murder, and I was surprised. First, I liked the movie and expected not to. Second, it was not the anti-Muslim screed I'd expected it to be. If anything was a subject made for exploitation Hollywood style it was this story. An American-Jewish reporter goes to Pakistan to report on the teeming world of Islamic extremism. He goes seemingly with an open mind and American values of inquisitiveness and tolerance. His values are met by jihadi hatred, kidnapping and ultimately beheading. Could you have any better recipe for a suspense potboiler full of leering, evil Arabs?

Yet, Michael Winterbottom the director, chooses to avoid this obvious pitfall (and he faces many others as well). He decides he is going to try to write a story about two idealistic children of the world (Daniel and Marianne Pearl) thrown into the maelstrom of third world poverty, desperation and religious hatred. Despite being tested in the deepest and most painful ways it is possible for a human to be tested, the Pearls both retain their humanity intact. This is a hopeful movie. But its hope doesn't come cheaply or easily. It is hope wrested from violence and suffering. Perhaps this is the only type of real hope there is--hope based on adversity.

The main element of this film is confusion. Everything and everyone is a swirl of movement and emotions. Hardly anything remains in one place very long. The camera sweeps through the teeming streets of Pakistan's fetid urban centers providing the full panoply of human energy and misery. The crowded slums actually become a character in themselves in the film. Winterbottom does this in an ingenious way. He doesn't really have to tell you about the social conditions in third world Muslim countries that serve as the breeding ground for Islamic extremism. No characters have to engage in long conversations about it to explain it to the audience. The camera does it for you.

But there is one element I felt the filmmaker didn't explore fully enough. You have to admit that the decision by a young American Jewish journalist to accept an assignment in Pakistan, hotbed of some of the most rabid anti-Israel, anti-western sentiment in the world, strikes one as quixotic or perhaps even nuts. Why did Pearl do it? What were his reasons for taking this assignment? What was the Wall Street Journal's thinking in making this assignment?

I'd like to know more about Daniel Pearl. What did he believe both as a journalist, a Jew and human being. What were his private thoughts about the imams, sheikhs and jihadis he covered in Pakistan? The movie doesn't covey much of this and I wish it did more. It would've explained much to me that is lacking in the motivations of the key characters.

On a less momentous note, I wish the character of the Pakistani police inspector had been more explosive and energetic. The role as written portrays a genial, humane, soft-spoken man. What about someone who shrieks, who loses his temper, who hits people, who curses, who is wily, but still retains his humanity? Personally, I think it would've added to the drama of the situation.

I was struck by one element of the plot. At the end in voiceover, Marianne Pearl tells us that just before he was beheaded Daniel looked into the camera and said he was a Jew and that a street in Bnei Brak (Israel) is named for his grandfather, who founded the town. This is Pearl reaching back into his Jewish soul for something he is proud of, something that will mark his life, something he can leave after his death for others to know what was important to him as he faced his fate. It was also the ultimate act of rebellion against his captors--saying to them: "you can kill a Jew, but my grandfather helped build a Jewish country and it will live on after me despite your hated and violence."

I am grateful that A Mighty Heart didn't lapse into parody or propaganda. It portrayed a confusing, multi-faceted event with admirable nuance and emotional complexity.

Christopher Hitchens has one of the most beguiling presences I've ever encountered in a media figure. He has that booming tenor that reminds one of Dylan Thomas reciting his mellifluous poetry. I hear he has a similar penchant for the 'hard stuff' as well. The words and ideas flow out of Hitchens mouth smooth as honey. Their power is almost magnetic. The high-toned English accent doesn't hurt either.

But when you step back and really examine what he's saying it's pretty much all bilge. Well, OK, maybe not all. But so much of it is that you feel that smooth, suave delivery is a betrayal or deception of sorts.

So how much does Christopher Hitchens really know about Islam? Apparently, not terribly much. He participated in a panel discussion on Warren Olney's To the Point. Towards the end of the discussion, he responded to a Muslim scholar's claim that Islam derives from the word for "peace." Here is what Hitchens said (audio):

Islam, by the way, does not mean "peace." It means "surrender," "prostration."

As even a Jew who knows any Hebrew can tell you, Islam certainly does derive from the word salaam or shalom in Hebrew. As Svend White, an Islamic studies specialist who writes Akram's Razor tells me:

...One can spin this *somewhat* by emphasizing the fact that the type of "peace" is a kind of surrender...

What is misleading about Hitchens' statement is he neglects that "Islam" connotes the peaceful "surrender" of a believer to the will of God, but not the "surrender" of a non-believer before the force or power of Islam.  Such peaceful surrender, which some see as the essence of faith, is a feature of many of the world's religions.  Hitchens is spinning Islam as a religion of violence and domination. So it's convenient to distort the religion's name as well. We see here the power of a guileful ideologue used to stir the pot of intolerance and Muslim-bashing.

Few will argue that there are not serious issues that need to be addressed between Islam and other world religions and that some Muslims defame their own religion by claiming to embody it as they kill the innocent. But Hitchens is merely a provocateur, rather than someone willing to engage in a serious dialogue on the subject.

While most of my previous writings have been about the (mis)interpretation of the Quran that Bin Laden engaged in -- for example, his reading of The Slayer Verse 9:5 in the Quran -- I have never really stopped to think about his geo-political evaluations.

While reading one of his interviews from 1999, I came across a passage that makes him appear a bit prophetic, and based on that, makes me wonder what he, a former ally of the CIA, learned in his time. Again keep in mind this is four years before we invaded Iraq:

These days, there is also a plan to divide Iraq into three - one in the north for Muslim kurds, a state in the middle, and a third in the south.

Given the fact that we know that AEI and Project for New American Century had plans for Iraq in the late 90's, it makes one wonder how Bin Laden was simultaneously aware of them. Is it really just a guess?

In his interview he went on to add another interesting tid-bit. It could be a bit of wishful thinking:

The same applies to the land of the two mosques (Saudi Arabia) where there is a plan to divide it into a state for the two mosques, another state for oil in the eastern region, and a state in the middle. This would make the people of the two mosques always busy trying to earn a living, and would leave a few people in the oil region who can be easily controlled.

Again, that plan seems extremely specific. Too specific, no? How many people have you met -- certainly I have never met any -- who have ever articulated such a plan about Saudi Arabia. The specificity of that plan bothers me, especially because it is coming from a guy who used to hob-nob with all of our insiders, and then knew about our Iraq plans four years before they were advanced. It might be possible that in 1999 there was potentially such a plan for Saudi Arabia -- dreamt up by whom? -- but things changed radically in 2001 when Saudi Arabia threw their entire weight with us.

Ah hell, who knows, maybe all this 9/11 talk has just got me chasing Bin Laden ghosts. The left side of my political brain says that the right-wing's fear-mongering is working; the right side of my political brain says that in today's world you can never be too careful.

UPDATE: In an email I am shown this map about redrawing the Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is split into three. That map comes from the Armed Forces Journal which printed an article on the subject. This was after the Iraq War, though.