Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Old folks "occupy" CA bank

This sight  surely scared the bank manager more than a sprinting horde of "Brains!"-chanting zombies would have.  [HT: SF Weekly]

‘Wild Old Women’ Close San Francisco Bank Of America Branch (CBS San Francisco, January 5, 2012):

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – It was a slow-moving Occupy Wall Street protest, but it was an effective one. A dozen senior citizens calling themselves “the wild old women” succeeded in closing a Bank of America branch in Bernal Heights Thursday.

The women, aged 69 to 82, who live at the senior home up Mission street from the Bernal Heights Bank of America branch, decided to hold their own protest by doing what they called a “run on the bank.”

Tita Caldwell, 80, who led the charge of women with walkers and wheelchairs, said that they’re demanding the bank lower fees, pay higher taxes, and stop foreclosing on, and evicting, homeowners. [MORE]

Being caught on video arguing with--much less pepper spraying or ilegallydetaining--these protesters will make for rather bad PR. It's a PR disaster no matter how it gets handled. Which is appropriate given how scandalously cut-throat and neo-feudal  the American economy is today.  You can only put so much lipstick on this pig.

Cue the rightwing pundits with their slogans about clueless young people who don't understand how the real world works. Tell that to old peoplewho are eating cat food as the Right lectures them about "entitlement reform."

And cue the insincere declarations of support from centrist Democratic leaders whose economic policies are  consistently functionally indistinguishable from that of the Republicans. At least the latter are fairly consistent from a purely ideological standpoint as they promote policies that reduce America to a third world nation.

 

My essay on Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm pleased to report that a 2008 essay I wrote for Religion Dispatches on the occasion of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday has been published in a collection of short essays on the issues involved in his assassination and legacy. The book in question is The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. , edited by Noah Berlatsky and published by Greenhaven Press this year. It's part of their "Perspectives on Modern World History" series, which I think is geared towards high school students.

My short piece is entitled "King's dream remains unfulfilled." It argues that not only have MLK's most important teachings been neglected, but his memory is in practice often been co-opted in a reactionary manner that encourages complacency about America's continuing problems, both at home and abroad.

Speaking of MLK, listen to his breathtakingly courageous and prophetic speech against the dangers to America posed by militarism, "Beyond Vietnam." I think it's even more inspiring and topical than "Dream." Yet even though this speech was delivered almost 2 years later afterwards (and, eerily, exactly a year before his murder) and can therefore be said to be an even more accurate representation of his final worldview and mission, it has been completely written out of American culture. And, thus, so has the real Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who didn't just limit his activism and preaching to racial justice, however worthy that goal is in itself. To the contrary, he considered racial justice the first step in his mission to end injustice in (and by) America.

 

[Transcript of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech.]

The format of the book is "opposing viewpoints." Thus, my contribution was placed in opposition to another essay. From, err, a U.S. Government website (title: "King's dream has transformed America."). So much for a career in public diplomacy!

Unfortunately, the table of contents - which I was not consulted on - mistakenly lists me as a "writer and an Islamic Studies scholar." I'm not sure which is more misleading in this case. Sadly, "lazy blogger, would-be gadfly and permanent student" probably wouldn't impress most readers, though there's no dishonor in those callings in my view.

P.S. To my great embarassment, this post was accidentally posted to Tikkun Daily initially. That dang Windows Live Writer is a little too easy to use. On the bright side, it could've been worse--at least it was on a topic that's probably of interest to many Tikkun Daily readers. It could've just easily been a goofy ode to Star Trek, Legos or H.P. Lovecraft.

Leave no arms merchant behind

Johann Hari has sharp piece on the OBL assassination and US foreign policy. Here's a choice excerpt:

Flawed US policy keeps Osama's message alive - Analysis, Opinion - Independent.ie

Osama Bin Laden is dead, but US foreign policy is still giving him what he wanted. The US is bleeding cash. The angry, fighting people in Afghanistan today are -- according to leaked CIA reports -- overwhelmingly "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Even General Petraeus, the new head of the CIA, says there are only 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in the whole of Afghanistan. One senior military official compared their intelligence on them to "Bigfoot sightings". Crunch the numbers, and you find the US is spending $1.5bn (€1.03bn) a year on each al-Qa'ida fighter in Afghanistan. Is there anyone alive, except the private defence contractors making a fortune, who thinks that is a sensible use of cash?

Emphasis added. And Republicans shrilly denounce "Obamacare" as spendthrift profligacy.  Yet when it comes to the Pentagon, the cat seems to have the tongue of the folks who insist we're too broke for even the most minimal trappings of a modern society (i.e., basic social spending), to the extent of blocking spending that undeniably saves us money.

To say this is a "guns vs. butter" quandary doesn't really capture the Kafkaesque reasoning, because we've basically abandoned any pretense that there even is a quandary, a need to invest in both objectives.  It's all guns.

Forget about the war's dubious morality, the huge human cost on both sides, its relentlessly counterproductive geopolitical consequences, the seeming impossibility of winning it, or the conspicuous absence of an exit strategy or success criteria on the part of its boosters. Let's just boil it down to the bottom line: How can we even afford this endless welfare program for arms merchants, defense contractors and corrupt warlords?

I want my tax dollars back.

The Arab Street is owed an apology!

Most of the time I post stuff about Denmark, it tends to be bad news--of course, if you're a Muslim observer of Danish politics there's often been, sadly, pretty good reason for that--so I thought I'd try to atone a bit by translating this very thoughtful and topical piece by a Danish pundit on the lessons of the Arab Spring.

One could quibble about a few small things (e.g., identifying Saudi-funded establishments as "ultra-orthodox"; their claim to orthodoxy is rather debatable), but I think his thesis is dead-on. For years, it's been customary to dismiss the Arab masses with this offensive shorthand that casts them as a mindless  herd of animals, and Western media need to eat some crow now that their lazy, dehumanizing cliches have been so spectacularly disproven.

[Moved it over to the Tikkun Daily blog.]

No doubt I've translated some things poorly, so Danes lurking out there are encouraged to chime in and correct any mistakes.

You'll note that this isn't in Jyllands-Posten (the newspaper that became an international household name by publishing the infamous political cartoons that launched a thousand protests, demonstrations and ugly stereotypes).  Denmark has a number of national newspapers. Unlike Jyllands-Posten, Politiken is on the Left--the Danish equivalent of The New York Times, not that I find the Gray Lady  particularly leftist most of the time--and when it comes to the cartoons and Danish Muslims it has almost been "The Anti-Jyllands-Posten."

Its then editor in chief, the recently deceased Tøger Seidenfaden, was very critical of the decision of his counterpart at Jyllands-Posten (Fleming Rose) to publish the cartoons--as was I at the time--and one of its most prominent columnists, Rune Engelbreth Larsen, has long been a one-man Danish answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center, exhaustively documenting the rising tide of xenophobia and Islamophobia within Danish society and giving the desperately-needed straight dope on the significance of the cartoons and the factors in their bizarre transformation from mole hills to mountains.

Speaking of how different Politiken's political role has been, the newspaper under Seidenfaden's leadership even went so far as to issue an apology last year to Muslims for the cartoons. They were reacting to an international class action suit by Sayyids (i.e., descendants of the Prophet, peace be on him). Ironically, here we part company, as I think this move was a big mistake, not to mention a pointless gesture given how Seidenfaden and Politiken had nothing to do with the cartoons in the first place.

Now, I respect the good intentions at work and think the desire to turn a new page in Danish-Muslim relations was quite understandable, but the lawsuit was a farce. Its premise (that a group a Muslims who happen to be allegedly descended from the Prophet were especially harmed by the cartoons and somehow had legal standing to seek damages on his and/or the Ummah's behalf) was absurd, geopolitically counterproductive and self-evidently contrary to the precepts of international law.

That lawsuit reminds me of these short-sighted and ultimately dangerous campaigns by Middle Eastern countries to get the UN to outlaw blasphemy. It's rather embarrassing to see representatives of Muslim countries displaying such appalling ignorance of the fundamentals of law and Western political values  (though this is obviously intended more for domestic political consumption, not unlike the immoral, theocratic blackmail over family planning and abortion that Washington regularly engages in when Republicans are in charge). International law should only (and, indeed, ultimately can only) concern itself with the welfare of human beings, so the advocacy of pet religious dogmas or even religious faith itself simply has no place in such matters.

To go down any other road calls the entire legal edifice into question. And, besides, if these leaders had any understanding of law, they'd realize there already was a legal framework for taking action against Islamophobic demagoguery. To the extent real harm is being caused by such cases of "blasphemy," there  undoubtedly already is legal precedent under international law by virtue of their incitement of hatred between communities (not unlike how anti-Holocaust denial laws work).

But I digress, as usual.

Update: I've moved the translation over to Tikkun Daily blog.

 

The folly of "enhanced interrogation"

...and most Neocon contributions to foreign policy and counterterrorism,  for that matter.

There's a very enlightening if all too brief interview with a long-time FBI counter-terrorism agent in The New York Times. It's a reminder of how common sense and tried and true law enforcement techniques really went out the window under Bush Jr. and the Neocon body snatchers that seized control of most of the Beltway after 9/11.

In particular, it discusses how one of the most embarrassing episodes in American diplomatic history was simply due to bogus intelligence provided by a torture victim recipient of Enhanced Interrogation.  We got suckered by the oldest and most obvious trick in the book, saying whatever it takes to make the pain stop.

Sadly, the Keystone Cops and crusading zealots who brought us these un-American and self-defeating "innovations" are often still manning the gates. (Washington is, after all, a place where abject failure doesn't necessarily hurt your career prospects if you're a ideological hardliner. Just ask Obama's economic team, which is made up of the the Wall Street financiers and bankers whose cronyism, intense hostility to the most minimal government oversight, short-term thinking and whose rank deification of the The Market are what wrecked our economy in the first place.) Makes you feel safe, doesn't it?

Cheney as the Smirking Man

Political life after 9/11 often seems to imitate fiction. Increasingly, pulp fiction, alas.

According to Seymour Hersh--who's probably the most respected investigative reporter of our time and who has sources in government that would make a James Bond criminal syndicate green with envy--the US government entered into the assassination business big time after 9/11, and without any oversight or legal guidelines.  It really sounds likes something out of "The X-Files", only with an infinitely less entertaining villain.

The symbolism is overwhelming and seems to prove every anti-W joke right: These momentous and politically explosive covert operations were approved not by the Commander in Chief but the Vice President.

Seymour Hersh: "Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney, Had No Congressional Oversight | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

In response to this explosive revelation, Cheney's ex-national security advisor assured the public in a CNN interview that

There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

I'm relieved to hear that these killings around the world were "extremely well-vetted." Hopefully, the vetting wasn't being done by the crack observers of Muslimdom who packed Gitmo with innocent people. Or the Beltway security officials who don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni. Much less the experts who brought us the Iraqi WMD fiasco.

Why should we worry? You only need checks & balances, due process and transparency for serious stuff. This only concerns life and death, rule of law, and the sovereignty of foreign nations.

How is it that we've reached a point of such lawlessness and deeply immoral and muddled thinking that our government can treat assassinations on foreign soil as trivial matters not requiring even the barest legal oversight? 

Aren't Obama's critics the ones who keep getting "duped"?

The ever insightful Jim Lobe injects some perspective into the vacuous Beltway debate about Obama's alleged naivete in being committed to talking rather than shooting first in the Middle East.

LobeLog.com » Blog Archive » The Chalabsey Twins*

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have been traveling around the country together repeatedly charging that Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign-policy ideas are “naive” and even “reckless.” But what they hope their audiences will forget is that both of them were taken in by the most-successful foreign-policy con man — and apparently a close friend of Iranian intelligence — of his generation, Ahmad Chalabi.

Touche. Lobe continues:

it seems frankly unseemly for the two of them to now charge Obama with being dangerously naive about foreign policy and what it takes to deal with crafty and malevolent Middle Eastern leaders, like Iran and its friends and allies. Not only were they completely taken in by Chalabi and the INC, but they were also, as Paul Wolfowitz now admits, completely “clueless” about what U.S. troops would face once they got to Iraq. And they obviously either failed to consult or disbelieved the Iraq experts in the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community, not to mention former Centcom commander Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had long before concluded that Chalabi was a con artist who could not be trusted.

With sophistication like that — in contrast to Obama’s naivete — a McCain administration would seem ripe for the picking by would-be Chalabis, if not by the master himself.

Give a man enough rope...

Is that roasted elephant I'm smelling?

GOP cancer: Party could lose 20 more seats - John F. Harris and Josh Kraushaar - Politico.com

For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.

Suddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.

The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

The number of Muslims in Congress has doubled

Indiana just elected a Muslim to Congress in a special election.

Second Muslim elected to Congress - Yahoo! News

Indiana voters on Tuesday elected a Muslim to Congress, only the second of that faith chosen in U.S. history. Andre Carson, grandson of the late Democrat Rep. Julia Carson, was elected to serve the balance of her term in the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election. She died in December 2007, after serving 11 years in the heavily Democratic district. The younger Carson, 33, a member of the Indianapolis City Council who converted to Islam about a decade ago, will serve out the remainder of his grandmother's term through calendar 2008. He beat Republican Jon Elrod and a third party candidate with 52 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Elrod.

Good news, but I really dislike this phenomenon of spouses and children inheriting" offices from deceased politicians. Blood doesn't confer qualifications or experience.

It's practically feudal. Our political culture is supposed to be more evolved than that.

What, we still have an Electoral College? Touché, I stand corrected. I guess this makes perfect sense.

[HT: Amad]

My post on MLK at Religion Dispatches

I have a post at Religion Dispatches on the perverse ironies of the unspoken complacency with which the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is often celebrated.

Here's the final paragraph.

Religion Dispatches - MLK's 'Dream' Unrealized and Undigested

It seems to me that given America's glaring gaps today in economic justice at home and principled, constructive involvement in the outside world, King's "Dream" speech should if anything play as a stinging reminder of how little of his mission has been fulfilled. Instead, his stirring words are more often than not deployed not as a call for renewed introspection or commitment to equality, but as a self-congratulatory coda to America's modern social history that seems highly premature -- like those iconic feminist-themed Virginia Slims billboards of the past -- not to mention fundamentally at odds with the message of the man and the holiday being celebrated. Like the self-satisfied Virginia Slims billboards of the past, in some respects we've come a long way, Baby, but the fact that we've reduced Reverend King's holistic and unapologetically revolutionary message to the toothless, politically correct sermonizing of a Benetton commercial shows that his dream remains more than unfulfilled -- it remains scandalously undigested.