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

Comparing US Muslims to European Muslims

A very interesting article in The Economist.

Look out, Europe, they say

Why so many Muslims find it easier to be American than to feel European

UNICEF: 25% of world children seriously underweight

UNICEF - Press centre - A Quarter of the World’s Children Seriously Underweight

“The lack of progress to combat undernutrition is damaging children and nations,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, speaking on her first anniversary as head of the global children’s agency. “Few things have more impact than nutrition on a child’s ability to survive, learn effectively and escape a life of poverty.”

Another snippet:

“Despite progress in some countries, developing-world averages for underweight children have dropped just five percentage points in the last 15 years. Today, 27 per cent of children in developing countries are underweight – around 146 million. Nearly three quarters of the world’s underweight children live in just ten countries, and over half in just three countries: Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, according to UNICEF.

Meanwhile, so-called leaders in America obsess about the co-called War on Terror.

The benefits of being born in a beachside country

There's an intriguing article in openDemocracy.net ("Aiming for the sea" by George South) about the negative consequences for economic development of being landlocked. 

We all know that the presence of natural resources often has a decisive impact on a country's fortunes--in some cases for the worse, though, as the tragic legacy of African diamonds and Arab oil shows; the main blessings for normal people of such easy-to-horde natural resources are often corruption and authoritarianism--but we don't often consider the importance of having ports.

One interesting fact:  It costs 7 times more to transport goods over land than sea.  That's a huge additional expense for a number of already impoverished countries.

Consider these statistics. Outside of western and central Europe, the average income of landlocked countries is just $1,771, compared with $5,567 for coastal nations. It has been estimated that growth rates of the world's thirty-one landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) are 0.7-1% lower than they might otherwise have been, as a direct result of their being landlocked. The UN Human Development Index reads like a grim advertisement for the benefits of a coastal existence: life expectancy in LLDCs is 3.5 years lower than in their maritime neighbours, and education index scores are 0.36 lower, on a scale of 0 to 1. Nine of the world's twenty poorest countries are landlocked, and sixteen of the thirty LLDCs are classified as "least developed".

Who killed General Zia?

The fearless and always enlightening Eric Margolis on new suspicions that that perrenial favorite of Muslim conspiracy buffs--often for very good reason--the Mossad, had a hand in General Zia's demise in 1988.

Read Another Day in Empire's informative analysis, too, while you're at it.

I'm far too uninformed on this to have an opinion as to the culprit, but the premise is hardly ridiculous.  It wouldn't be the first time Israeli intelligence has been involved in assasinations or other violent black ops.  Sometimes, conspiracies are all too real.

----------------------------------------

TIME FOR TRUTH ABOUT THE MURDER OF PAKISTAN’S LEADER, ZIA UL-HAQ

The 1988 assassination of Pakistan’s President, Zia ul-Haq remains one of our era’s abiding major mysteries. Only the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy has produced wilder speculation and more conspiracy theories.

A recent article claiming the late President Zia ul-Haq was assassinated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, has been totally ignored by North America’s media. `Ancient history,’ is the way one US intelligence official dismisses the claim. By contrast, this new claim about Zia’s murder has aroused enormous interest and much fevered speculation in Pakistan and India.

I knew President Zia well and admired him greatly for his courageous statesmanship in almost single-handedly facing down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. I was the first journalist to learn of Pakistan’s top secret role in the Afghan War, but never revealed the story until 1989. Zia ul Haq’s and Pakistan’s heroic role in bringing down the Soviet Empire has been forgotten by too many people. Once the Soviets were defeated, his former ally, the United States, turned against Zia and Pakistan.
[So very true. One Pakistani general graphically likened Pakistan to a condom discarded after being used to "penetrate" Afghanistan. Sorry, folks, but that's what he said, and not without reason. --Svend]

Now, highly respected journalist, Barbara Crossette, former South Asia Bureau chief of the `New York Times,’ reports in the latest issue of the `World Policy Journal’ that former US Ambassador to India John Gunther Dean told her Israel had assassinated President Zia.

This is a bit of a tangent, but there's a really engrossing (and long) interview with Ambassador Dean, who despite his criticisms of Israel is not only Jewish--his family's name before immigrating to the US from Germany in the late 1930s was "Dienstfertig"--but hails from a prominent family in prewar European Jewish life.  His analysis of Zionism is particularly intriguing. 

Margolis says that Dean's diplomatic career was destroyed by the pro-Israel lobby. Dean claims that Israel tried to assasinate him in Lebanon due to his pro-Arab sympathies.  (Echos of Count Folk Bernadotte!)  Don't know if either claim is true, but neither would be a first, either.

Chinese tourists: Asia's new 'ugly Americans'

Chinese tourists: Asia's new 'ugly Americans' (Christian Science Monitor)

Colonialism's many guises

In his latest entry in Fall of Icarus, Zahir laments the palpable ignorance, prejudice and condescension of a "60 Minutes" report on American doctors working in Pakistan after the earthquake.

The transcript includes a self-deprecating comment by one of the doctors that highlights in a lighthearted way how, as outsiders who don't speak local languages or know local culture, they were inevitably out of their depth on the ground in Pakistan:

When they were dropped off here, Chris Summers was surprised to learn they were the only aid workers there. “I can't believe we haven't seen anyone else in this valley,” Summers says. “There's such a need here. You know? And we're isolated here. I don't really know what's happening in the rest of the country. But in this valley, Jeelum Valley, an enormous need and how is it possible that it's just us, you know, 13 knuckleheads from New York here?”

The narrator quickly intervenes and proves himself to be the real "knucklehead" of this segment by reducing Pakistan and this tragedy to an offensive caricature:

Knuckleheads? This is Osama bin Laden country, dotted with training camps for jihadists, where Islam is at its most radical and America is seen as the enemy.

Such incredibly trite, uninformed and simplistic coverage. Where does one start? 

It's enough to make you miss the "good old days" of open colonialism, when the officials and scholars opining about the Muslim world at least had a modicum of education, knowledge of history, and understanding of the outside world.  They certainly had their doublestandards, prejudices, and blindspots, but they were so blissfully unaware of the world around them.   (For example, even the much maligned author of the "White Man's Burden", Rudyard Kipling, had an intimate familiarity with the "exotic" peoples about which he opined.)   Today, the management of the "Colonies" has been handed off to historically illiterate hacks with a child's attention span.

I'm reminded of a report by Eric Margolis.  He was asked recently by a "journalist" on during an interview for an American TV show,  "How many Al-Qaeda do you think died in the earthquake?"  His response put things back in perspective: "A handful, but not worth single dead Pakistani child."

Such inane and disturbing talk isn't an aberration--it's a window into contemporary America's neocolonial relationship with the rest of the world.  Today, as in the past, the natives "over there" are so relentlessly dehumanized that otherwise intelligent people stop viewing them as fellow human beings worthy of sympathy and respect.

Colonialism is indeed alive and well.

For the rich, it's a small world after all

There is an embarrassingly elementary fallacy that undermines so much otherwise learned analysis of the so-called War on Terror, American/Muslim relations, and  international affairs in general:  Observers ignore the many powerful class interests that are shared among elites around the world regardless of which side they inhabit of cultural, political, religious or geopolitical fault lines.  Few journalists peddling the Clash of Civilizations worldview bother to explore how, thanks to similar relationships between them and with their surrounding societies, the wealthy the world over tend to display remarkably similar core values and priorities. 

In short, money trumps ideology, culture, religion, language, politics, and so on.  A factory owner in Karachi tends to have the same underlying priorities as a factory owner in Boston or Bombay (and the latter even in time of war) than with his neighbor.  With a few honorable exceptions, rich people are basically Republicans, even if they consider themselves Democrats, Islamists, or Marxists.  That's not a slur--it's an immutable law of nature.

This is an insight that's been basic to Marxian social analysis for a long time, which is presumably why the most stimulating and innovative social theorists tend to be some variety of Marxist or ex-Marxist (in fact, modern Sociology would not exist were it not for Karl Marx, hate him or love him). 

One sees examples both mundane and dramatic of this all the time, but I think the recent news that Saudi Prince Waleed ibn Talal is ready to declare jihad to protect Rupert Murdoch from a hostile takeover bid of Fox News takes the cake.

In an interview on CNBC Tuesday, Alwaleed said he has communicated his strategy to Murdoch and was "mobilized and ready" to further boost his voting stake "if we feel that the strategy of Mr. Murdoch and his son and his family is being threatened by any outsider." He added: "Clearly, this is something we will not accept, because we are very happy as shareholders with what Mr. Murdoch is doing."  

Umm...what you "we", paleface?

Now, perhaps there is more to this, but it's hard not to raise your eyebrows at the sight of a prominent, powerful and widely considered enlightened Muslim leader (and a Saudi one, to boot) praising the work of the architect of the rise of one of the most irresponsible and anti-Muslim forces in the American and international media.

To the average Muslim, Arab, activist, or generally peacefully inclined individual, I should think that almost any change in Fox's leadership would seem a good thing.  To the rest of us, Fox sure isn't doing a bang-up job or improving the "bottom line".  Quite the contrary, for most of the millions of Arabs and Muslims for whom the Western media would assume Prince Waleed to be a spokeman, Fox under Murdoch has been an abysmal performer whose dividends have been increased war, prejudice and sensationalism.

Now, my guess is that Mr. Malone (the robber baron from whom Prince Waleed is chivalrously defending robber baron Murdoch) is at least reasonably competent and unlikely to bankrupt Fox, so what is the prince so concerned about Malone changing?  What about Murdoch's vision is so valuable that he must remain at the helm at all costs, I wonder?

The answer is so simple that it seems cliched.  This is about money.  It's also about a host of of incredibly rarefied considerations from a plane of reality that most of us will never glimpse, much less enjoy.   People inhabiting that realm have the same interests and priorities, regardless of where they live, what language they speak, or what god they worship.

This lesson applies to more than just the Davos-going captains of industry.  While I think globalization causes this phenomenon to be most marked among the extremely wealthy--Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei probably subscribe to the same yachting magazines and bump into each other at the same soirees on the French Riviera--it undoubtedly applies to all strata of society to one degree or another.

Note:  Thanks to the Moderate Independent for pointing out the irony of this alliance.