About.com Middle East Issues

Tunisian President Ben-Ali "Re-elected"

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:51:37 +0000

The Pasha's Smile: Tunisia's Zine Elabidine Ben Ali, one of North Africa's "soft" dictators, was re-elected in a show election in October, with some 90% of the popular vote. (Omar Rashidi/PPO via Getty Images)

I must have missed it. Or maybe not: when a Middle East dictator wins yet another election by a crushing margin, has en election taken place? Not really. The Oct. 25 election in Tunisia was good for some flashy PR fodder for Zine Elabidine Ben Ali, the country's self-appointed president for life, but not much else. Tunisia, like North African neighbors Morocco, Libya, Egypt and Algeria, is (as the Economist aptly put it) a one-man show.

Ben Ali, ruling since November 1987, when he seized power by way of Middle Eastern leaders' favored yellow-brute road (a coup), won with 90% of the vote, supposedly his lowest tally yet. In 1989, 1994 and 1999 he won with the sort of margin Saddam Hussein and Muammar el Qaddafi would be proud of (99%). In 2004 he got just 95%. There was a reason. He wanted to show George W. Bush, who was high on illusions of bringing democracy to the Middle East, that there is an opposition in Tunisia. Contending with similar illusions from Barack Obama, Ben Ali must have been in an even more generous mood, allowing three pre-approved opposition candidates (Mohammed Bouchiha, Ahmed Inoubli and Ahmed Brahim, the latter the only one to dare criticize the regime on occasion) to claim a few votes.

But Tunisia's electoral system is like Iran's: it has all the appearance of a democratic system but none of its authenticity. Candidates for the presidency in Tunisia had to be approved by Ben Ali's Constitutional Council, which is like Iran's Guardian Council. Ben Ali is the equivalent of the Supreme Leader, minus the religious conceits.

There's a legislature, but it's dominated by Ben Ali's Constitutional and Democratic Union party, which is neither constitutional nor democratic. According to the Tunisian constitution, Ben Ali was to be limited to two terms. Every time he wanted another one (he's up to five now, almost as many as Robert C. Byrd's U.S. Senate run) he had the legislature amend the constitution. The constitution also bars a president older than 75 to run again. Not a bad idea (especially in the United States, where doddering presidents or would-be dodderers have a dismal record). Ben Ali is 73. In five years, if his constricting heart hasn't caught up with him, look for him to change that provision, too, though he might run into his own precedents at that point: he legitimized his coup in 1987 by claiming that his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, 84 at the time, was senile.

Yet Europe and the United States consider Ben Ali a dear friend for three reasons. He runs a relatively growth-friendly economy that he converted from socialism. He represses jihadists and fundamentalists brutally. And Tunisia is a favored European and American vacation spot. In exchange, western governments keep mum about Ben Ali slamming democracy, silencing any media that doesn't spit-polish his tassels and buttons, and torturing anything that moves against him in Tunisia's prisons, which share Egypt's, Morocco's and Algeria's compulsion for sadism.

American taxpayers bankroll some of Ben Ali's dictatorship to the tune of about $20 million a year. The U.S. Congress salved its conscience recently by approving a $12 million appropriation in aid to Tunisia with a few wagging words, noting that "restrictions on political freedom, the use of torture, imprisonment of dissidents, and persecution of journalists and human rights defenders are of concern and progress on these issues is necessary for the partnership between the United States and Tunisia to further strengthen."

But nothing along those lines has changed for decades and the partnership continues. In Tunisia as elsewhere in North Africa's shimmering coastal dictatorships, Club Med trumps liberty and democracy.

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Tunisian President Ben-Ali "Re-elected" originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 09:51:37.

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Netanyahu Jabs at U.S.: 900 More Illegal Apartments in Jerusalem

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:27:39 +0000

Unsettling: Israel aims at Arab East Jerusalem (David Silverman/Getty Images)

Earlier this month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reflecting her administration's about-face on demanding that Israel freeze its settlements in occupied Palestine, was commending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his "restraint" on settlement activity.

This is how Netanyahu returned the compliment: A few hours after George Mitchell, Obama's Middle East envoy, pleaded in person with a Netanyahu aid to stop construction in the Gilo settlement, Netanyahu's government approved 900 new housing units there. Gilo isn't just any illegal settlement. It's in Arab Jerusalem, the part of Jerusalem Palestinians want as the capital of their future state. If Netanyahu has his way, there's never going to be such a future state. He made the point again this week.

The snub was a double jab for Netanyahu--one in Palestinians' eyes, one in the Obama administration's eyes. Clinton's State Department replied with characteristic meekness: "State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said, "We find the Jerusalem planning committee decision to move forward the approval process for the expansion of Gilo, in Jerusalem, as dismaying." That's the best Clinton's iron tongue can do. Dismaying.

Obama's words came sharper, and by way of Fox News, which he'd been snubbing. "I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel's security. I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors. I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous," Obama said. Very dangerous.

The question is, for whom, or for what? Netanyahu has already scuttled Obama's attempt to bridge so much as a negotiating gap to enable new talks. He didn't need to prove his point (he already has in the West Bank, adding hundreds of units to illegal settlements there in further displays of Clintonian "restraint").

The 900 new housing units are more than a jab. They're a provocation, the sort of provocation a Netanyahu predecessor, Ariel Sharon, was good at: It was Sharon who in September 2000, surrounded by hundreds of policemen in riot gear, marched on the Temple Mount, or Haram el-Sharif as Muslims know it (the Noble Sanctuary), the holiest Islamic site in Jerusalem, at a time when Muslims feared an Israeli takeover of the holy site and their destruction of the mosques on Haram el-Sharif. Tensions had already been intense. Sharon knew it. He went looking for confrontation. He got it. Riots broke out. Israeli police shot into crowds, killing four Palestinians. The West Bank and Gaza were aflame again. Even Israeli Arabs took to the streets. Thirteen Arabs were killed before it was over. It turned out to be a prelude for the second Intifada, which broke out that December when Yasser Arafat came away from the Camp David summit with President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak after rejecting the closest thing to a viable proposal for a Palestinian state since 1967.

No such proposal is anywhere in Netanyahu's plans. Yet a third intifada at this juncture looks unlikely: Palestinians are divided and subdivided. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is ready to call it quits. Hamas is in control of the open-air prison known as Gaza. And Israel, laying siege to it all, is everywhere calling the shots, even as far off as Washington, D.C.

So Netanyahu's provocation has the added dimension of being that of a prime minister fully aware that he has free rein, and can provoke again and again without fearing much by way of retaliation--not from a divided and demoralized Palestinian population, not from an American president whose approval rating is dipping below 50%, and certainly not from Hillary Congeniality Clinton.

Day by day, settlement by settlement, the two-state solution is being buried under Netanyahu's designs, unopposed except in words.

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Netanyahu Jabs at U.S.: 900 More Illegal Apartments in Jerusalem originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 18:27:39.

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Noam Shalit to Hamas: Father to Fathers

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:21:29 +0000

From Parent to Parents: Noam Shalit pleads with his son's captors in Gaza to release him. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

On June 25, 2006, Hamas militants staged an ambush at an Israeli outpost on the border with Gaza, killed two Israeli soldiers and took a third, Gilad Shalit, hostage. The abduction triggered an invasion of Gaza, and a similar ambush days later on an Israeli patrol along the Israeli-Lebanese border, by Hezbollah militants, triggered a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah.

In December 2008, Israel launched a three-week assault on Gaza, ostensibly to reclaim Shalit and demolish Hamas. Neither objective was achieved, although one-fifth of Gaza was demolished and more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a commission to investigate instances of atrocities and war crimes on both sides. Hamas collaborated. Israel did not. The result was the Goldstone Report.

As commissioners conducted their investigations, they called for testimonies from Israelis, Palestinians and others. Among those testifying was Noam, Shalit, Gilad's father. Noam Shalit last July in Geneva took the opportunity to address the people of Gaza and Hamas militants directly. He did so in terms that transcended politics, ideology and the usual bromides that attend both. He did so as a parent, appealing to the parent in his sons' captors' hearts.

With Shalit's release again uncertain despite promising signs last month, it's worth listening to his father's words:

People of Gaza, I do not come before this Mission as a representative of the Israeli State. I come neither to condemn nor to justify the recent Israeli operations in Gaza. I am not a politician nor do I care for politics. I am a civilian and the father of three.
[...]People of Gaza, your leaders are fighting to return your sons and daughters from captivity. This is an understandable desire. You may agree with such a policy. Many of you, however, will realize that the fate of an entire prison population cannot depend on the ransom of one young man.
Your leaders have committed a crime with respect to my son. They hold him to ransom and, by the same token, they hold all of you to ransom. For three years now, you have been held hostage to the inflexible demands of your leaders and their unwillingness to compromise. They issue demands which, I fear, the Israeli Government will never meet. My son's fate is the means through which your leaders distract your attention from the destruction they have brought upon you. Is this humane? Are these the acts of an honorable regime?
People of Gaza - Do not ignore the root cause of our mutual suffering. You know that the injustice done to my son was the trigger for war. You also know that the release of my son is the key to peace and the lifting of the Israeli commercial blockade. A small gesture and a little effort on both sides can relieve the misery of many.
[...]And finally to the people holding my son: I urge you to release my son. You have the power to act with grace. Do it for the respectability that you wish the international community to accord you. Do it because you see yourselves as statesmen acting with humane intent. Do it for the sake of the respect you say you show this Mission. Do it not for gain but do it, I beg you, because it is the just and right thing to do. But most important of all, do it for the peace and welfare of your own people.

The following is his complete testimony, delivered in Geneva on July 9, 2009.

Read Noam Shalit's full testimony.

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Noam Shalit to Hamas: Father to Fathers originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 07:21:29.

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Hillary Clinton Corkscrews Into Kabul

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:28:08 +0000

Clinton in Kabul: At least she's not telling stories about dodging sniper fire. (Paula Bronstein / Getty Images)

Domestic political brownie points aside, there is next to no value to a president or a member of his cabinet corkscrewing in and out of Iraq or Afghanistan, as President Bush did with regularly primed drama beginning with his 2003 Thanksgiving drop into Baghdad, and as Barack Obama's people are now doing. The visits aren't designed to advance diplomacy, let alone policy, but to massage impressions. A presidential visit to the war zone, however flashy, secretive and bunker-like, somehow is designed to project a mix of daring and caring. The shows are calibrated to match up with enough public gullibility to make them apparently worthwhile, because they keep happening.

Hillary Clinton flashed into Kabul today on her way back from Shaghai, though whatever she did in Kabul she could have video-conferenced from Westchester County: she spoke, not quite bracingly or interestingly, to the U.S. embassy staff ("We need your feedback about what works and what doesn't work") then met with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the current incarnation of the Army of One in Afghanistan before telling Hamid Karzai, the fraudulently re-elected and increasingly corruption-ridden president of Afghanistan, that it was time he did something about corruption.

This is the Karzai whose brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a member of the provincial council in Taliban-infested Kandahar province, is both reportedly a drug lord and on the CIA's payroll. Maybe Clinton, as a guest of honor at Karzai's inauguration on Thursday, will be seated next to Ahmed. Better yet: maybe she'll return to the United States boasting that Karzai promised her, Captain Renault-like, to get a handle on things. Really. (Cue "Really with Seth and Amy.")

A loyal fan of Clinton as First Lady, Senator and presidential candidate, I've not been a fan of hers as secretary of state, a job she was neither prepared for nor capable of carrying out with the kind of force and wiles it requires, especially (and most of all) in the Middle East, where the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, minor authoritarians and even Karzai are turning her into an embarrassing figurehead of impotence. Her greatest value to the Obama administration so far has been to spare Obama the embarrassment of looking impotent himself.

But he is. Nothing of substance, but nothing, has been achieved anywhere in the Middle East since Obama took over. Not in Afghanistan, where matters have worsened measurably in the past year, not in Iraq, where deterioration lurks in the wake of every American redeployment, not with Iran, which has simply scoffed at Obama's well-meaning offer of a new start (and Obama had no reply to that cold shoulder), certainly not in the Plestinian-Israeli conflict, which looks primed for a third intifada. The Bush clock of ineffective caretaking, tirelessly wound up by Condoleezza Rice (Clinton's predecessor at State) might as well still be ticking. Clinton's ineffectiveness, her blandness on the world stage and torpor-inducing lack of imagination has a lot to do with it. She's not been a policy maker but a speech-maker, and pretty lousy speeches at that.

I'm glad my new colleague, Foreign Policy Guide Barry Kolodkin, is still giving her an outside chance at notching off a Nobel (not the hardest feat in the world these days). She can use a few friends, though I'd prefer she grew a pair of brass knuckles. Ultimately the fault lies with Obama and his own rubbery spine, as well as his decision to give Clinton a consolation prize to neutralize her.

This is a great disappointment for admirers of both Obama and Clinton (I counted myself among them). It's been a shattering disillusionment in the streets of the Middle East, where the Clinton-Obama surrender to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze said it all: the Obama administration speaks well, raises hopes, but is unwilling to stand by its promises.

For Clinton to attend Karzai's inauguration is one more disillusionment. It's one thing to concede that the Afghan president's bogus re-election can't be reversed. It's another to endorse it with a secretary of state's presence at the inauguration. This, too, is caving in to circumstances instead of leading them.

There was a hint of hope on Wednesday that Obama might not be caving entirely to McChrystal's folly of escalating the Afghan war. "My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president," Obama said. "One of the things I'd like is the next president to be able to come in and say, 'I've got a clean slate'." If he's finally talking exit strategy, good. It's about time. But Obama has given no other indication of being so decisive.

It's doubtful that he's about to start being so with Afghanistan, though that's precisely where he should start. The stakes are nowhere higher in his foreign policy, and Hillary Clinton is certainly not going to be of any help there. She proved it again today.

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Hillary Clinton Corkscrews Into Kabul originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 21:28:08.

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Ali Eteraz, Up from Pakistan's Dust

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:50:26 +0000

I met Ali Eteraz--in so far as virtual encounters can be termed "meetings"--by chance. I was live-blogging game after game of the 2006 World Cup when, at some point during the USA-Italy match from Kaiserslautern (an improbable 1-1 tie), he made his first appearance in the comments: "we are such an undisciplined team. 22 fouls in 50 minutes is unreal. you expect fouls like that from juniorhigh players."

Note the we: Like me a relatively recent immigrant--Ali was born and raised in Pakistan and teened in the Deeply Bible-thumping South before graduating to Manhattan; I was born and raised in Lebanon, teened in New York City--we'd appropriated the United States as our own in most ways possible down to Team USA's cleats, not least because Pakistan and Lebanon generally place, in soccer's world rankings, somewhere below Liechtenstein and the Caribbean spit of sand known as St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Immigrants from soccer's lesser gods tend to identify with their adoptive land's lords, if they can field a better team. That was the case for Eteraz and me during the World Cup.

_{Eteraz
(Eteraz photo)}

His second comment was not as innocent. I can't quite reproduce it here, though you're welcome to read it for yourself. His subsequent comments had the same Artemio-Cruz-on-his-deathbed quality, with the advantage that Eteraz was just starting out, and my admiration for him was born: The wit tangling with fulminations, directness that would humble a Bill O'Reilly, intelligence and originality by the megawatt, and through it all, a distinctive attempt, more often successful than not I'd say, to forge a third way for Islam (and for himself as a Muslim): none of the dull, serrated belligerence of the lunatic Salafist fringe, but none of the conventional Islam-is-for-lovers-of-peace bromides, either.

We lost touch about a year after the World Cup, though his writings popped up anywhere two or more progressive Muslims aggregated around a blog. Eteraz, it always seemed to me, would like to be Islam's Martin Luther. He's never encumbered by humility (which served him particularly well as a shield in the Age of Arrogance that were the Bush years), even less so by doubt that he could be wrong. It's not arrogance. It's not dead certainty. It's conviction, informed and critical, a form of anti-ideology that dogmatically hounds and demolishes dogmatists. He knows their language and their methods. That's what makes him, to them, dangerous.

He's not for the faint-hearted. Whether he's mocking Barack Obama's pole-length tango with Islam, hailing "state-sponsored Sufism" or shaking up the West's progressive Muslims from their torpor, he grabs throat and soul and doesn't let go.

And now he's made it. Children of Dust, his memoir of growing up in Pakistan and the United States, was published in late October by HarperCollins. (The title, inspired by the Koran, is a riff on a satanic taunt of god for creating Adam of clay.) If St. Paul had his epiphany when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus, Eteraz had his, in reverse, when he got back on his horse and high-tailed it away from the totalitarian ideology of the madrassas where his family had enrolled him. Here he was, a devout Muslim looking to deepen his faith happily and voluntarily in a madrassa, only to discover a world as bleak as Orwell's English boarding school (in "Such, Such Were the Joys") and as rigid as a Maoist reeducation camp, but allegedly in god's name. (Listen to Eteraz describe the transformation in his interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross).

There is a Voltairean feel (the Voltaire of Candide and Zadig, which owe plenty to the literature of the East) to the outline of Eteraz's narrative down to the way he summarizes his chapters: "Book V: The Reformer--Ali Eteraz, In which the author, aghast at the militant and murderous use to which Islam is being put, becomes an activist and goes to the Middle East to start a reformation."

It fits.

I'd always imagined Ali Eteraz as a novelist. Non-fiction is too constraining for his mind, too much like the madrassa of his youth. It pays the bills but doesn't satisfy the soul. Sure enough, Eteraz describes the book as "creative non-fiction." It's a memoir, but on Eteraz's terms: he aims to mold the world to himself rather than defer to the reverse. He never gives you the sense that he can't pull it off.

Besides, it's as simple as that: Islam needs Eteraz. So does the West.

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Ali Eteraz, Up from Pakistan's Dust originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 20:50:26.

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France, Child Molesters and the Burqa

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:24:35 +0000

What if he wore a burqa? Would the French government have looked so kindly on Roman Polanski? (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

Plenty has been said on the re-arrest of Roman Polanski, the confessed child rapist and filmmaker now languishing in a Swiss jail, awaiting extradition to the United States.

But I stumbled on a quite original perspective on the case, in a different context: How does France's refusal not only to extradite Polanski for all those years but to celebrate him and include him in the most rarefied air (and airs) of high French society square with France's recent war on the burqa?

Ibrahim Abusharif, a Chicago native, journalism professor at Northwestern's Doha, Qatar campus, and an engaging blogger (his blog's title, "From Clay," echoes the title of Pakistani-American writer Ali Eteraz's "Children of Dust") asks the question. Here's his biting answer, from a longer piece he contributed to almuslim:

While I make no judgment about this case per se, the following comes to mind: the French seem to have no problem granting freedom and privilege to a man who "drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in the home of actor Jack Nicholson" (according to Slate). Yet French President Nicolas Sarkozy may declare, with little public dissent, that a woman who wears a burqa is not welcome in France because the burqa is a symbol of a woman's repression. In other words, the rape of a girl has no negative symbolism, and if there were such symbolism, then its expiration is rushed along nicely by a rapist's association with the arts.
Is this what we may infer from this French quandary? To recap, a middle-age man who reportedly forced a girl to satisfy his lust in natural and unnatural ways repeatedly is welcome in France to live, work, sign autographs, and dine at high levels, but a woman who dresses like the mother of Jesus (God bless mother and son) is told that there's no room at the inn.

The full article is worth a read.

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France, Child Molesters and the Burqa originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 15:24:35.

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Why the Fort Hood Attack Was Not an Act of Terrorism

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:49:32 +0000

All-American: Beca Wilkerson, 8, watches as U.S. Army soldiers from Fort Hood march past as they participate in a Veterans Day parade through downtown on November 11, 2009 in Killeen, Texas, a town all-too familiar with mass murders. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The small central Texas city of Killeen, pop. 85,000, was once best known--when it was known at all--as the nearest place to Fort Hood, one of the largest military bases in the world. Killeen was where soldiers could unwind, get drunk, find their various pleasures. At 12:45 p.m. on Oct. 16, 1991, a Wednesday, George Hennard, the 35-year-old ex-merchant seaman and son of a former Army doctor who unsimlingly bought breakfast at the same convenience store every morning for months, smashed his pick-up truck through Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, got out, and, for 10 minutes, as Houston Chronicle reporter Cindy Rugeley wrote at the time, "calmly and methodically strolled through the cafeteria, randomly shooting innocent people as they crouched under tables. Often he would stick the gun at a victim's head or body and fire." Police bullets wounded him. He finally put an end to what, until then, was the worst mass shooting in American history by putting an automatic pistol to his head and killing himself. A motive? If there was one, it was the raving, unrequited fantasies about women by a lone unable to keep his job, and whose suicide fantasies hadn't been a secret.

Killeen is again in the news today for a mass murder, this time at Fort Hood, this time reportedly by a man with an Arabic-sounding name, a 39-year-old Army major, Nidal Malik Hasan. The massacre was "the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11," in the reliably spurious words of radio hatemonger Sean Hannity. But is there a difference between Hennard's mass-murder spree and the Fort Hood attack?

Actually, yes. One was more easily defined as terrorism, the other, not.

So, a quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida's bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah's raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The June 25, 2006 Hamas ambush of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing two Israeli soldiers and taking a third, Gilad Shalit, hostage; d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; e) The Nov. 5 Fort Hood massacre that left 13 soldiers dead; f) None of the above.

The answer, of course, is (f) - none of the above. It's time for a more clear-eyed definition of terrorism.

Continue reading "What is Terrorism? Toward a Clear-Eyed Definition."

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Why the Fort Hood Attack Was Not an Act of Terrorism originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 09:49:32.

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Fort Hood Inquisition: "Terrorists" Among Us

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:43:07 +0000

Between Grief and Reason: Barack Obama thinks he can get a fair investigation of the Fort Hood massacre without the attendant political theater that's already mucking up the story. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In his radio address today, President Barack Obama pledged that "the full story" of the Fort Hood massacre will be told, whatever the speculation. Investigators, he said (repeating what's already quite old news) will look at the motives of Nidal Malik Hasan, the only suspect in the case, "including his views and contacts."

Obama was referring to the steady inquisition of speculation, mostly from the lunatic fringe on the right (the Hannities and Limbaughs whose hate-shows make them eminently qualified to detect their more violent incarnations out there) to whom Hasan is already guilty of terrorism in league with al-Qaeda's highest echelons.

The only thing Hasan is guilty of so far is, first, being a Muslim; second, being a devout Muslim, which turns up the Defcon of suspicion a whole notch; and third, having carried on a few email exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American preacher who learned everything he could from American-style preaching and applied it to his religion, which also happens to be Islam.

Al-Awlaki is as American as Timothy McVeigh. He was born in New Mexico. His parents are Yemeni. And it's to Yemen that al-Awlaki has retreated to preach what American policy under Ronald Reagan once taught every Arab preacher to preach, when the subject was Afghanistan and the occupier was Soviet: Attack the invader, resist the occupier. It so happens that roles have changed a bit. The invader and occupier, in Arab and other Middle Eastern eyes, is now the United States and its Western allies. Americans, understandably, are taking exception to al-Awlaki turning American lessons on Americans.

But Americans who thread-count their beliefs in line with Hannity's stitches, less defensibly, are pretending that this is all new to them, that al-Awlaki is a type of extremist they've never known, let alone encouraged, financed, trained and produced before--which the CIA has, on all counts. Al-Awlaki is pretty young. Had he and his zealotry come of age during the Reagan years, he'd have been enjoying the fruit of a regular CIA paycheck and more than his share of earthly virgins compliments of American taxpayers. No need to wait for the hereafter for the proverbial 72.

Instead, he's dot-connecting Suspect Number Two in the inquisition to turn Nidal Malik Hasan from a typical American mass murderer into something Other, something un-American, something more al-Qaeda like.

Which leads us to Obama's second point in his radio address: "I know there will also be inquiries by Congress, and there should. But all of us should resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theater that sometimes dominates the discussion here in Washington. The stakes are far too high." Well, yes. But it's too late for that. The theater is in full swing.

There's a reason some people would love to see Hasan convicted as an al-Qaeda terrorists. It would vindicate the war on terror. It would revive it. More to the point: It would, in their eyes, absolve America, make it seem above that sort of barbarity even though it is ground zero for just that sort of barbarity. The Fort Hood massacre is an essentially American act, through and through (down to its neighboring Killeen, Texas, a city that had the unhappy distinction of being the site of the worst mass shooting in American history until it was overtaken by the Virginia Tech massacre). It's only natural that many Americans would rather not think of it that way. It smacks too close to home, especially with the overtones of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan coming back to haunt American soil.

So Hasan's motives should and will be studied. But equally important, and ultimately more useful, is the study of American motives behind the rush to see Hasan as not just a terrorist, but an Islamist, Arab terrorist--to excise him from American culture as much as possible and turn him into one of them. That's the motive, in reverse, that had American policy presume that it could judge, jury and execute the Middle East's problems on America's timetable. It's the motive that now wants Hasan declared an alien anomaly when he is merely a brutal reflection of American presumption come home to roost.

Your Turn: Is the Fort Hood Killer a Terrorist? You Decide.

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Fort Hood Inquisition: "Terrorists" Among Us originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 15:43:07.

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KSM At a Courtroom Near You

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:02:12 +0000

After and Before: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, imprisoned in Guatnanamo (left), and shortly after his arrest in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 2003, in Department of Defense photographs.

Khaled "Shaikh" Mohammed, the alleged (and, post-torture, confessed) mastermind of most al-Qaeda plots under the sun, will be moved from Guantanamo to within walking distance of the World Trade Center site, where he will face trial in a federal district court. The move, more sensational than stunning, is in keeping with Barack Obama's promise to end the Bush administration's extra-judicial treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and eventually close the facility, which continues severely to damage America's image and credibility.

The decision is a legal no-brainer: The Guantanamo prison, as an off-shore detention facility designed to be beyond the reach of American law, was never defensible. But the handling of 9/11 and other terrorism suspects has always and overwhelmingly been about politics and appearance, manipulation and revenge, more than law. It still will be.

So Obama's decision will explode a new set of controversies. Opponents of the decision claim, somewhat absurdly, that bringing 9/11 suspects to American shores is dangerous for civilians. But if law enforcement isn't capable of ensuring the basic safety of civilians and preventing escapes of suspects, we have a bigger problem than 9/11 suspects on our hands.

Opponents of the decision also claim that civilian courts are ill equipped to deal with terrorist suspects. What they mean is that by sticking to the law, the process will be too open and revealing of U.S. government means and abuses involving the prisoners during the Bush years. That does raise a serious legal conflict, however: by trying Mohammed in federal court, his waterboarding and other tortures will be revealed. Evidence collected through torture is inadmissible in court. Then again, Mohammed himself may help in this regard: he's supposedly confessed, and offered a guilty plea, looking for an avenue to martyrdom--which, at this point, any publicist of KSM's would advise is the more advantageous route. Which would also create problems for Obama: does he want to be complicit in the making of a martyr in the shadow of Ground Zero?

Other things to keep in mind: KSM isn't moving immediately. Members of Congress have to be given 45 days' notice before any Guantanamo prisoner is moved to American shores. Most of the 215 prisoners at Guantanamo aren't affected by the decision. to bring KSM and four other men to the United States. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole, will still be tried by a military commission.

Still, what I once wrote about al-Nashiri applies to him, to KSM and all the other Guantanamo suspects: Whether they're found guilty, executed or not won't change a thing about American justice and how it's viewed in the world. That damage is done. It can be repaired. The question remains whether it will be.

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KSM At a Courtroom Near You originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 09:02:12.

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Terrorism at Fort Hood? You Decide

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:21:59 +0000

Fanaticism Galore: The Guns Galore store in Killeen, Texas, suspected of being the place where U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan bought his firearms before allegedly killing 13 soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

Sean Hannity, the radio hate-show host, termed the Fort Hood massacre on Nov. 5, 2009 the first act of terrorism on U.S. soil since the 9/11 attacks. Is he bonkers? Is he right? President Barack Obama subsequently promised a full investigation and warned against turning the event into "political theater."

But the Hannities of the world insist, on mere shards of evidence and plenty of speculation, that the massacre was not just terrorism, but an act of Islamist terrorism--rather than, more likely, one more in the long list of American mass murders.

Who's right? You decide. Click here and share your thoughts.

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Terrorism at Fort Hood? You Decide originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 15:21:59.

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