For years we have heard pro-Israeli supporters talk about how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, well, that argument is no longer valid with the recent historical elections taking place in Neighboring Egypt. Pro-Israeli groups have often sought to legitimize themselves with this argument, that by virtue of being a democracy, Israel should be supported, and that since Israel is a democracy, it shows that they are somehow better than the Arabs.
No longer will Israeli apologists be able to use such arguments, though I have no doubt they won’t stop repeating the argument, pretending that the Arab democracy we see in Egypt does not exist. Readers may be thinking that this argument was well refuted with the case of Iraq, since Iraq is a democratic country too, were elections are held to pick and choose their leaders. While this is true, the democracy of Iraq leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth due to how it was installed. It was a foreign nation that invaded Iraq, for it’s personal agenda, and it’s own personal interests. And no doubt Israeli apologists would be so keen in telling everybody that the only reason democracy exists in Iraq is because of America, in other words Arabs themselves could not move towards freedom, they needed the west to come and do it for them.
The case of Egypt represents a stronger case, because unlike Iraq, it was the people themselves who rose up and brought the change for their society. They didn’t have a foreign nation coming in to install their own foreign agenda for their own personal interests. The Egyptians showed that they themselves could do it, they had their own authentic revolution which they succeeded in, and now they are reaping the fruits of benefit from their own blood and tears. 50 million Egyptian voters take to the streets to choose their own leaders.
What make this all the more worse, is that Israel itself was not supportive of the Egyptian revolution. The country that always lauds itself due to its democracy was the very same country against a revolution for freedom. Not only was Israel against the revolution, but so were the pro-Israeli groups, and lobbies as well. Israel and its supporters were more worried about their own interests and how they could be affected due to the revolution, and were happily content to support the dictator in order for those interests to remain protected. Even as we speak, pro-Israeli groups openly speak of their disdain of what’s happening in Egypt, in fear of the fact that the Egyptians themselves, without foreign interference, are choosing and deciding the fate and destiny of their own country, that it is Egyptians putting their country and interests first, before that of Israel and the West. And off course this is unacceptable.
Let us also not forget about Tunisia, which already held their own free and fair elections, where the people themselves, without foreign interference, decided the fate of their own country, a right they earned with their own revolution. However so, don’t expect Israeli apologists to take note, because as long as it’s an Arab democracy, by the Arabs themselves, it doesn’t really count. Democracy would only count if there were somehow some western fingerprints to the whole process, it’s unacceptable for the Arabs to have their own democracy, because who knows whom or what they could elect, which in essence is the whole point of democracy.
For Israeli apologists however, both in Israel and the West, it’s become clear that when they talk about democracy, they only talk about a democracy they like. In other words if you vote for somebody they like and approve of, somebody who puts their interests in high regard, then they will be more than happy to accept this as democracy. However if you vote for somebody they don’t like, somebody who will not represent their interests, they will then label this as not being democracy, and they will choose to reject this democracy.
At the end of the day, Israel and it’s supporters can choose or reject whatever they want to, but the reality is this, Israel is no longer the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s time for Israel and it’s supporters to get with the times.
Kuwait’s ruler has blocked a proposal by 31 of the 50 elected members of parliament to amend the constitution to make all legislation in the Gulf Arab state comply with Islamic law, an MP said on Thursday.
The approval of Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, is needed for any constitutional change.
“His highness the emir is not in favour,” said Mohammad al-Dallal, an Islamist MP and legal expert. The proposal was put forward by the Islamic Justice Bloc and signed by 31 lawmakers, he said.
Political parties are banned in Kuwait so MPs have to rely on forming blocs in parliament. The 15-member cabinet selected by the prime minister can also vote in parliament.
“We must think again about convincing the emir or submitting it again in another format,” Dallal said.
“Our society is a conservative society, a lot of people request that laws comply with sharia (Islamic law). We also do not have a stable political system,” he said, adding such an amendment could help make lawmaking less chaotic.
Islamist MPs have proposed amending the constitution in this way several times in the past. This time, they asked to change article 79 to make sharia “the only source” of legislation rather than a major or main source as it is now.
Like elsewhere in the region, Islamists have made political gains in the major oil producer. With many campaigning on an anti-corruption platform, Islamists increased their share of parliamentary seats in Kuwait after a snap election in February which ushered in its fourth parliament in six years.
Kuwait, a regional US ally, is ruled by a Sunni Muslim monarchy and states Islam as its official religion. About 85 percent of Kuwait’s population is thought to be Muslim. The next biggest groups are expatriate Hindus and Christians.
Pollack said, ‘Seems like in the arab lands, democracy only brings in forces which actively work to introduce undemocratic laws. It’s a strange case where the unelected emir has more wisdom than the elected politicians.’
Umer said, ‘Thank God for Amir’
To Pollack I say, Remember, Kuwait was not a democratic country in the first place, it outlaws all political parties, so there has been no threat to its democratic status, it had none. Furthermore surely it is ‘undemocratic’ for the Amir to block the legitimate legislative wishes of 62% of the MPs? Pollock, you should be on the side of the MPs if you were being consistent.
But the real reason for your objection has nothing to do with democracy or the lack or it: it reflects the deep-seated Western prejudice against Muslims and Islam.
Europeans and Americans are so deeply convinced of the superiority of their secular, liberal culture that it is, to say the least, difficult for them to empathise with a profoundly different system. You may ask ‘why should I bother understanding it?’ The answer should be obvious: the peace and good order of our world depends upon this understanding.
The ummah (the Muslim community of believers) is today weak and divided. It will not always be so. It is imperative for the West to make the effort to see past its inherited cultural hostility and cease opposing by military might and cultural hegemony those who follow the way of the final prophet of God, Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
To Umer I say, Muslims thank God for Muhammad, upon whom be peace, and the Islamic community he created. Sovereignty belongs solely to God not to man, his creature. This flows directly from the Muslim confession of faith, lā ʾilāha ʾillà ‘Llāh which, in this context, can be interpreted as meaning that ‘there is no legislator but the Legislator’. The Amir of Kuwait appears to be working against this principle.
Saudi Arabia has banned all government and private agencies from using the Gregorian calendar in official dealings.
The use of the English language to answer calls or communicate, mainly in companies and hotels, has also been banned, a local daily said.
All ministries and agencies have to use the Hijri dates (Islamic calendar) and the Arabic language, the interior ministry said. The ministry attributed its decision to preserving the Islamic calendar and the Arabic language, Arabic daily Al Watan reported. In the statement to the ministries and establishments, the ministry said that it noted that some government entities were using Gregorian dates “unnecessarily”, in a violation of high orders and instructions.
By John Feffer, Co-director, Foreign Policy In Focus
Everybody loves Dexter. He’s handsome. He’s helpful. He works at the Miami Metro Police Department, and he’s very good at his job as a blood-splatter analyst. Oh, did I mention that he moonlights as a serial killer? Don’t worry: he only kills bad guys. That’s part of the code that Dexter’s adoptive father, himself a police officer, passed down to his son. As a child who had watched his mother die a horrendous death, Dexter couldn’t overcome the murderous impulses that surged within him. His father, channeling those impulses in the only constructive way he could think of, created a better monster of his son’s nature: a serial killer of serial killers.
The other essential rule of Dexter’s code: don’t get caught. He is very precise in the way he dispatches his victims, and he will do almost anything to evade detection. Dexter works for the law, but his second job is most definitely above the law.
During its six seasons on Showtime, the popular TV show Dexter has asked a vexing moral question: can a person do good by doing bad? Let’s throw in one more twist. Sometimes Dexter makes mistakes and kills people who don’t fit his definition of Really Bad. He must then wrestle with his (rudimentary) conscience and, more importantly, try to resolve the paradoxes of his father’s code. One last painful element of the Dexter story: his efforts to wipe out bad guys occasionally endanger and even lead to the death of his own nearest and dearest. Dexter has a serious problem, in other words, with blowback.
By this point, you’ve probably figured out my theory. Dexter is all about U.S. foreign policy and the moral calculus of a superpower. Our government has likewise been on a killing streak for a long time, and there’s no end in sight. But we are also, as a country, conflicted about this propensity toward murder. We try to tell ourselves that we only kill bad guys like Osama bin Laden and his ilk. We maintain that we intervene in the affairs of other countries for only the best and purest of reasons. But we also suspect that we have deviated from our code — many times and with devastating consequences.
The first season of Dexter aired in 2006, and it’s tempting to draw the parallels between the serial killer and our serial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. But let’s go post-partisan here and instead look at what the Obama team is doing today. “More recently, there has been hope for a more humane set of policies from the Obama administration,” writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Adil Shamoo in an excerpt from his new bookEqual Worth. “However, such hope has not materialized in the form of a new policy toward the [Middle East]. The Obama administration is bent on proving its ‘national security credentials’ by following the old policy of vengeance and not of justice.” This tension between vengeance and justice, a major preoccupation of Dexter, was on display last week when a U.S. drone strike killed Fahd al-Quso, a top al-Qaeda operative in Yemen.
Quso helped plan al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and he would certainly fit Dexter’s definition of Really Bad. He pledged to attack any and all Americans, soldiers and civilians alike. Maybe, you say, we should have apprehended him. Actually, Quso had been apprehended — several times. The FBI interrogated him prior to September 11. He escaped from prison in 2003 only to be recaptured in 2004 and then released by the Yemeni government in 2007. Maybe Washington should have tried extraordinary rendition. But the Obama administration has largely backed out of the business of extraordinary rendition in favor of extrajudicial killing.
Dexter would have no compunction about taking out Quso. Extrajudicial killing is what he’s all about. America’s favorite serial killer is judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped up in one.
But how do we feel about the U.S. president occupying that role? To make a final judgment, we must consider the legal issues, the foreign policy implications, and finally the practical matter of blowback.
The Obama administration only admitted publicly back in January to the existence of its CIA-directed drone attacks in Pakistan. Talk about open secrets. The New American Foundation estimates that the Obama administration has expanded the drone program sixfold over what the Bush team had initiated in Pakistan. And that doesn’t include the expansion of drone warfare to Yemen and Somalia or the drone strikes that the Air Force conducts over Afghanistan.
Two weeks ago, in an effort to increase transparency in one of the most opaque overseas operations the United States conducts, White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan was more expansive about the program. “One could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between al-Qaeda terrorists and civilians,” Brennan said. “It’s this surgical precision, the ability, with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it that makes this counter-terrorism tool so essential.”
Next time I need surgery, I’m certainly not going to employ Brennan. Tasked with removing a tumor in my toe, he’d lop off my entire leg, remove an arm from an attending nurse, and accidently cut away a couple limbs from patients waiting in pre-op. That’s how “surgical” the drone strikes have been. The New America Foundation estimates that they have a 17 percent error rating (in other words, we’ve killed 300-450 non-militants). This corresponds to the calculations of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has compiled a list of 317 civilians killed by drones in Pakistan.
There are two major categories of drone strikes. The first, dubbed the personality strike, goes after a known bad guy. The second, the signature strike, targets unidentified individuals and groups according to their pattern of behavior. Neither type qualifies as “surgical.” In the first case, U.S. drones killed Zabet Amanullah on the presumption that he was a top Taliban commander when in fact he was a human rights advocate. Even Dexter would have felt bad about that. In the second case, the United States is expanding its definition of enemy combatants to include groups in Yemen and Somalia, and this makes even the State Department uncomfortable.
We should all be uncomfortable. It’s bad enough when the president directs the extrajudicial killings by handpicking a set of discrete targets. But signature strikes give the CIA even more latitude in drawing up kill lists and racking up “collateral damage.” As William Saletan explains in Slate, “in the Pakistani frontier regions, the CIA has license to take out fighters who appear to be involved, or intent on getting involved, in the Afghan insurgency. The drone campaign has spread from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency.”
So, the United States doesn’t do so well with the first rule of Dexter’s code — only kill bad guys. It works a great deal harder to abide by the second rule: don’t get caught. It has done its utmost to conceal the drone program and create plausible deniability. “To absolve itself in the most sensitive strikes, the CIA has become skilled at using lawyers to cover its tracks. “They use paper when it is going to help them,” says the former official. “Or they get on the secure phone. Or they get in an elevator casually with a lawyer and ask for his advice, like, ‘There’s nothing preventing me from destroying those tapes, is there?’” writes Michael Hastings in an in-depth article on drones in Rolling Stone.
Wait, you might say, what Dexter does is clearly illegal. Murder is illegal. But aren’t drone strikes legal? It’s a war, they’re combatants, we’re combatants, we take them out. Why bring in any lawyers?
Back in the 1970s, the United States banned the practice of assassination until Congress passed a law in the wake of 9/11 that empowered the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in going after those responsible for the terrorist attacks. But the targeted killing of American citizens, the “collateral damage” inflicted on innocent bystanders who happen to be in the vicinity of targeted drone strikes, and the dispatch of unknown targets based on unreleased evidence of their behavior all raise difficult legal questions. That’s a polite way of saying that these are lawsuits waiting to happen.
Moreover, what if other countries made the same claims in assassinating individuals in the United States? Washington might rethink the legality of its actions when China or Russia authorizes a drone attack on a Uygur or Chechen “terrorist” hanging out in Chicago. They too could use the self-defense argument.
So, strictly speaking, targeted killings are legal because the Congress passed a law declaring them legal. But they still fly in the face of international law and establish a dangerous precedent that will one day be used against the United States.
Meanwhile, the blowback continues. In a drone strike last year, the United States killed an American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki, a leading al Qaeda militant. A subsequent strike took out two of his close relatives. “The October drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a U.S. citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes,” writes Jeremy Scahill in The Nation. “’I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the U.S. performed a great service for al-Qaeda, because those operations gave al-Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy,’ says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes ‘have recruited thousands.’ Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with al-Qaeda, ‘which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge.’”
Dexter is an individual driven by his nature to kill. He can’t help himself. The United States is not an individual, but rather a collection of institutions subject to the democratic control of more than 300 million individuals. Like Dexter, the United States was baptized in blood —the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans — and has been steeped in blood ever since. But it need not be part of our nature any more than the Holocaust defines Germany today or King Leopold’s monstrous crimes compel modern-day Belgium to behave in like manner. If the U.S. government argues, as Dexter does, that the system is broken and the Really Bad act with impunity, Washington can do something Dexter can’t — use its unprecedented power and influence to strengthen international law rather than undermine it.
If Dexter turns himself in, the show is over. The United States, in its last flush of unipolar glory, fears the same ending should it suddenly adhere to international law. With its expanded drone program, the Obama administration has kept America’s serial killer persona on the air for too long. More and more Americans are just saying no, as Medea Benjamin chronicles in her new book on drones. It’s time for the United States to stop breaking bad and behave like a proper, law-abiding member of the international community.
This is an Interesting take on Dexter as a metaphor for US Foreign Policies. There are some contentious points to be made between the two, however. Dexter spends a lot of effort on “vetting” his targets – he never picks a target – and then dismisses exculpatory information that might cause him to hesitate in making his kill: try applying that to Iraq – where the invasion was planned long before the killers had even achieved the power to carry it out – and then dismisses exculpatory intelligence data – and even invented evidence – to support their pre-determined, absolute commitment to kill – while completely accepting “collateral damage”. In this one example, Dexter appears to be behaving far more morally than the previous administration.
Dexter is not a true psychopath: he would not suffer as he does if when he mistakenly kills an innocent. I wish we could say that about the American excursions into the internal affairs of other countries that pose no real threat to America.
Al-Qaeda terrorists plot to kill civilians in the West, innocent men, women and children. Think 9/11 New York, 7/7 London. Western governments hunt down the conspirators and incarcerate them without charge or kill them with drones. Even to express sympathy with al-Qaeda type actions can lead you to imprisonment for life.
Western governments repeatedly condemn terrorist acts as barbaric, evil, and state that terrorism must at all costs be defeated.
This anti-terrorism rhetoric is such a part of our world view today that when it is disclosed that the US Military itself taught over 800 military officers the ‘necessity’ (see below) of making war on civilians no one seems to see the elephant in the room.
Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley until this week taught at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.
Dooley presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are “no longer relevant.”
He added: “This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable…).”
His war plan suggests possible outcomes such as “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation … Islam reduced to cult status,” and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia “destroyed.”
His course on Islam was taught since 2004. It was offered five times a year, with about 20 students each time, meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years.
The BBC’s North America editor Mark Mardell commented, “What does seem rather surprising is that all those commanders, captains and colonels must have sat through the course and not felt the need to tell someone that something rather weird was going on”
Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said.
This is such an extraordinary statement that it is worth repeating:
Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching.
Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley has not been sacked. He has not been charged with any terrorism related offenses. He has not been charged with anything at all. He has not been locked up without trial. He has not been rendered to Guantanamo Bay.
In fact the only change to his life appears to be the fact that ‘he is no longer teaching’.
Words fail me. I could condemn all this as hypocritical, self serving, two-faced, deceitful, double-dealing, and duplicitous, but this doesn’t even begin to express the revulsion the world must feel at the blatant double standards the US authorities maintain.
But the conclusion is obvious:
The United States government utterly condemns terrorism if it is perpetuated by Muslims, but it takes absolutely no action whatsoever against non-Muslim advocates of terrorism in the US itself such as Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley – who gets to keep his job.
♦
Compare the treatment of Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley with that of Muslim Tarek Mehanna who was recently sentenced to 17 years in prison for supporting the right of Muslims to defend themselves against US troops:
A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for “total war” with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.
The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that “Hiroshima”-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.
“It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn’t academically sound,” said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is “no longer in a teaching status”. Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. “It’s part of a much larger problem,” Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.
On Thursday, Danger Room – a national security blog at Wired.com – published a series of documents revealing that a defense department class for US military officers urged soldiers to prepare for a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. In this battle for supremacy, Geneva Convention standards for armed conflict would be irrelevant and the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be applied to civilian populations “wherever necessary”.
Hundreds of pages of teaching material and reference documents obtained by Danger Room show the course – which was open to US military commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels – argued that the real threat to US national security stemmed not from radical militants, but from Islam itself.
In a July presentation, Dooley claimed: “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” He proposed a four-stage solution that included the possibility of reducing Islam to “a cult status” and threatening Saudi Arabia with starvation.
Dooley brought in several ideological allies to support his conclusion, including Shireen Burki, who in 2008 told future military decision makers that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate”. John Guandolo, a former FBI employee, presented students with an array of materials including a paper in which he argued: “It is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians.”
The course echoes a curriculum presented to FBI agents. In September, FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with a trove of the agency’s training materials in which counter-terrorism agents were taught that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat”.
The influence of anti-Islamic rhetoric has also found its way into municipal police departments. The New York police department has been the subject of increasing scrutiny amid a series of reports from the Associated Press revealing the existence of the department’s so-called “Demographics Unit”, which has been used to map out ethnic communities. The unit focused on a list of 28 “ancestries of interest”, all of which are predominantly Muslim. In the course of over two dozen articles, the AP laid out how the NYPD – with the help of CIA advisers – infiltrated mosques, Muslim community centers and local colleges.
In January the New York Times revealed the department had played the Third Jihad – a film which claims that American Muslims of all stripes are in the midst of an effort to seize control of the country – for 1,489 police officers. The NYPD initially denied that any officers had seen the film and that it was not involved in its production, but was eventually forced to admit that police commissioner Ray Kelly participated in an interview for the film.
Sarsour said the latest revelations showed the problem was widespread. “It’s not just the department of defense. It’s not just the military. It’s anywhere from showing a movie like the Third Jihad to 1,500 New York City police officers to training FBI agents that Muslims are easily radicalized to become terrorists.”
She said the Islamophobic lessons taught to US military and law enforcement personnel have further damaged national security. “There’s already a deficit of trust between the community and law enforcement.”
Sarsour argued that such revelations feed the narrative offered by extremist groups. “We’re basically confirming what al-Qaida is telling Muslims across the world,” she said. “Our government should be up in arms to know that this is happening, particularly at the department of defense, in a very fragile time in the Middle East.”
“Same sex couples should be able to get married”, said the President of the United States Barack Obama in an interview with the television station, ABC. Obama, speaking on 9th May in the Cabinet Room of the White House, stated: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married”. The Vice-President Joe Biden also declared he was in favour of same-sex marriage.
However leaders of the largest Christian Church in the world were clearly very disappointed:
US Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin (of the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island) said,
The decision of President Barack Obama to endorse same-sex marriage is extremely disappointing, but not at all surprising. This is a very divisive and devious president who, from the beginning of his administration has actively pursued a liberal, secular agenda that discards fundamental moral values including respect for human life, and religious freedom. This is a sad day in American history. Even the President of the United States does not have the authority to redefine the sacred institution of marriage that has been given to us by God.
What is the Islamic view of ‘gay marriage’? The excellent website Eye on Gay Muslimsclarifies the unambiguous teaching of Islam:
‘Whatever actions are carried out in pursuit of fulfilling sexual desires must be deemed unlawful unless the proper channel is followed, i.e. marriage, which Islam defines clearly as being only with the opposite sex. We select one relevant verse to begin a short discussion of this matter:
And Allah has given you spouses (azwāj) of your own kind, and has given you, from your spouses, sons and grandsons, and has made provision of good things for you. Is it then in vanity that they believe and in the grace of Allah that they disbelieve? [16:72]
The reference to procreation is significant, as one of the aims of marriage is indeed to bring forth new generations of humans who will worship Allah. Furthermore, much could be said about the word azwāj (sing. zawj) with its linguistic and Qur’anic meaning as “the opposite part of a pair”. One of the numerous evidences in the Qur’an of zawj meaning the opposite sex, and indeed a very relevant evidence in this context, is the following proclamation of Lut (peace be on him). Here it is evident that the spouses (azwāj) of the men addressed cannot be male, and that homosexual partners cannot be considered as azwāj:
“What! Of all creatures do ye come unto the males, and leave the spouses (azwāj) your Lord created for you? Nay, you are a people exceeding limits.” [26:165-6]
From such verses, we establish that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Therefore any sexual activity between two men or between two women is by necessity outside the realms of marriage and, by extension, outside the realms of permissibility. In other words, homosexual marriage is unsupportable within the Islamic legal system, and by definition any homosexual behaviour is fornication; indeed, it may be considered a level worse, by virtue of including the additional element of sexual perversion.’
Associated Press= WASHINGTON (AP) — A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America’s enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggested that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.
The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.
The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the last decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists — not the religion.
“They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit,” the instructor, Army. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.
Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are “no longer relevant.”
He adds: “This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable…).”
His war plan suggests possible outcomes such as “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation … Islam reduced to cult status,” and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia “destroyed.”
A copy of the presentation was obtained and posted online by Wired.com’s Danger Room blog. The college didn’t respond to The Associated Press’ requests for copies of the documents, but a Pentagon spokesman authenticated the documents. Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said.
Dooley refused to comment to the AP, saying “Can’t talk to you, sir,” and hanging up when reached by telephone at his office Thursday.
In what he called a model for a campaign to force a transformation of Islam, Dooley called for “a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam,” with the presumption that Islam is an ideology rather than just a religion. He further asserted that Islam has already declared war on the West, and the U.S. specifically.
“It is therefore illogical” to continue with the current U.S. strategy — which Dooley said presumes there is a way of finding common ground with Islamic religious leaders — without “waging near ‘total war,’” he wrote.
The course on Islam was an elective taught since 2004 and not part of the required core curriculum. It was offered five times a year, with about 20 students each time, meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years.
Though Dooley has been teaching at the college since August 2010, it was unclear when he took on that particular class, called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”
The joint staff suspended the course after it had received a student complaint, and within days Dempsey ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses don’t use anti-Islamic material.
On Thursday, Dempsey said the material in the Norfolk course was counter to American “appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness.”
“It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound,” Dempsey said when asked about the matter at a Pentagon news conference. “This wasn’t about … pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.”
In his July 2011 presentation on a “counterjihad,” Dooley asserted that the rise of what he called a “military Islam/Islamist resurgence” compels the United States to consider extreme measures, “unconstrained by fears of political incorrectness.”
He described his purpose as generating “dynamic discussion and thought,” while noting that his ideas and proposals are not official U.S. government policy and cannot be found in any current official Defense Department documents.
A Pentagon inquiry is seeking to determine whether someone above the professor’s level is supposed to approve course materials and whether that approval process was followed in this case, said Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for Dempsey.
The problem of negative portrayals of Islam in federal government is not new. A six-month review the FBI launched into agent training material uncovered 876 offensive or inaccurate pages that had been used in 392 presentations, including a PowerPoint slide that said the bureau can sometimes bend or suspend the law in counterterror investigations.
That is significant because ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has stressed the importance of working with leaders in the Muslim community as an important part of the battle against terrorism. The FBI review began last September after Wired.com reported that the FBI had discontinued a lecture in which the instructor told agent trainees in Virginia that the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to be violent.
‘That readers of FHM have voted an androgynous man in to their most recent list of the 100 Sexiest Women in the World might have been a cause for celebration among equal rights campaigners. Instead, the magazine has provoked outrage over its warning to readers to “pass the sick bucket” on encountering 19-year-old Andrej Pejic, rather ignoring the fact that it was they who voted for him in the first place.
“Designers are hailing him as the next big thing,” the blurb accompanying Pejic’s entry online read before it was hastily removed, after drawing a wave of criticism. “We think ‘thing’ is quite accurate.
“The gender bender has jumped the gun in hoping he might one day be signed as Victoria’s Secret Model (pass the sick bucket).”
The magazine said: “Andrej Pejic appears at number 98 in FHM Magazine’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2011.
“Regrettably the copy accompanying Andrej’s online entry wasn’t subbed prior to going live. Once we realised, we removed it immediately and apologised for any offence caused. FHM has spoken to the individual concerned and taken steps to ensure this can never happen again.”
Though the outrage caused by comments prompted FHM to remove the entry from its website, Pejic will still feature in the print version of the list which comes with this month’s edition.
“More troubling is the fact that Andrej is not the only one when it comes to supermodels that are not all they seem,” the magazine goes on. “The current face of Givenchy and “lady” locking lips with Kate Moss on the cover of Love magazine is transgender model Lea T. who began life as Leandro. One fashion trend we won’t be following.”
Yet, it is really just another success for the 19-year-old Serbian model, who grew up in Melbourne. He was first spotted by a talent scout while working at his local fast-food restaurant, and his since modelled for Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs in campaigns at Paris Fashion Week. When he began modelling his agency encouraged him to be more masculine, and go to the gym, as the menswear clients wouldn’t like him, before realising a completely new direction might be more profitable. But it is not the first time controversy has followed him. Last month his unbuttoned top on the cover Dossier Journal in the United States became an issue for the book-selling giant Barnes & Noble, which insisted the magazine be sold in opaque plastic bags.
Having been chatted up by Australian men since the age of 14 (“Sometimes they’re shocked, but most of the time they still want to buy me a drink,” Pejic says), neither his place on the list nor the reaction it has engendered will come as a particular surprise to him.
He has been more philosophical than his persecutors on the matter. In an interview last month, he declared: “It’s a very liberal industry. You can be yourself. Just not overweight.”
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Rehan responds
Now that’s what I call ‘Equal Opportunities’ and a ‘Fairer Society’!
As we say in London, this is REALLY taking the p*ss. Talk about affirmative action. How can a professed man be on the list of sexiest women. Having said that, if you look at the state of some of the women who make that list, it becomes more understandable…
I love how he says: ‘it’s a very liberal industry, you can be yourself, just not overweight’. He could have also added ‘or dressed in clothes which cover your gonads’. And I don’t think we are going to see a Western model who covers her hair with a headscarf though we CAN get a female model who is a man. You see the problem with liberalism? It can only tolerate ITSELF.
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I have had the misfortune of watching the horrifying cultural phenomenon that is ‘Americas Next Top Model’ and although this abomination has been made by Tyra Banks to show just how modelling is NOT all about looks it yet fails horribly and is one of the best indictments of Western feminism in existence. The way they berate and harass women to conform to their values is so blatant it’s not even funny.
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Having said that, knowing a bit about the fashion industry in terms of my friend who is a photographer, this decision to include a man in the sexiest women should come as no surprise: the fashion industry is RUN by men who do not like women (sexually). If you think about it, a lot of the women we are presented with in the fashion industry are rather handsome, with strong T’s and jaws that would make Superman blush. I posit this is because there is a preponderance of homosexual men in the fashion industry in key positions (anyone who denies this is delusional) and they tend to find women who are somewhat masculine in terms of their facial structure to be more suitable for their campaigns. Look at Cindy Crawford back in the day or Amber Valletta or even Giselle Bundchen today. I’m not saying they are not attractive, but they are rather ‘handsome’ as far as women go.
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There is a great documentary film about the modelling and beauty industry in the United States and how it treats women and children called ‘America the Beautiful’ which is available for download and is an excellent insiders view (it REALLY is good, especially if you have children or are a woman).The recent Channel 4 documentary series (which was well received) with the unsubtle title ‘Stop Pimping Our Kids’ addressed the sexualisation of children by the fashion industry as well.
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Rehan (here writing in a personal capacity) is a cultural commentator based in London
Drinking alcohol has long been a part of Australian culture. But today, the country is suffering huge social and economic costs from its love for the drink. A recent report estimated that the tangible cost for alcohol misuse is $25bn a year, including medical expenses, lost wages and productivity. Ten million Australians experience negative effects from other people’s drinking, and 70,000 fall victim to alcohol-related assaults. With an increasing number of young people binge-drinking, children as young as 10 are seeking treatment for alcohol addiction. Police and hospital authorities are urging Australians to sober up but face formidable challenges from a powerful alcohol industry and an entrenched drinking culture.
God says in His Word:
“They ask you about intoxicants and games of chance. Say: In both of them there is a great sin and means of profit for men, and their sin is greater than their profit.” Qur’an, Sura 2: 219
(As the issues discussed in this Guardian article affect the lives of literally millions of Muslims I thought it worthwhile to reproduce the article here).
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A one-sided justice sees weaker states punished as rich nations and giant corporations project their power across the world, argues George Monbiot in the guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 April 2012
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The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.
While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg tribunal’s definition of a “crime of aggression”, which it called “the supreme international crime”. The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.
The foreign secretary, William Hague, claims that Taylor’s conviction “demonstrates that those who have committed the most serious of crimes can and will be held to account for their actions”. But the international criminal court, though it was established 10 years ago, and though the crime of aggression has been recognised in international law since 1945, still has no jurisdiction over “the most serious of crimes”. This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, are procrastinating. Nor have the United Kingdom, the United States and other western nations incorporated the crime of aggression into their own legislation. International law remains an imperial project, in which only the crimes committed by vassal states are punished.
In this respect it corresponds to other global powers. Despite its trumpeted reforms, the International Monetary Fund remains under the control of the United States and the former colonial powers. All constitutional matters still require an 85% share of the vote. By an inexplicable oversight, the United States retains 16.7%, ensuring that it possesses a veto over subsequent reforms. Belgium still has eight times the votes of Bangladesh, Italy a bigger share than India, and the United Kingdom and France between them more voting power than the 49 African members. The managing director remains, as imperial tradition insists, a European, her deputy an American.
The IMF, as a result, is still the means by which western financial markets project their power into the rest of the world. At the end of last year, for example, it published a paper pressing emerging economies to increase their “financial depth”, which it defines as “the total financial claims and counterclaims of an economy”. This, it claimed, would insulate them from crisis. As the Bretton Woods Project points out, emerging nations with large real economies and small financial sectors were the countries which best weathered the economic crisis, which was caused by advanced economies with large financial sectors. Like the modern opium wars it waged in the 1980s and 1990s – when it forced Asian countries to liberalise their currencies, permitting western financial speculators to attack them – the IMF’s prescriptions are incomprehensible until they are understood as instruments of financial power.
Decolonisation did not take place until the former colonial powers and the empires of capital on whose behalf they operated had established other means of retaining control. Some, like the IMF and World Bank, have remained almost unchanged. Others, like the programme of extraordinary rendition, evolved in response to new challenges to global hegemony.
As the kidnapping of Abdul Hakim Belhaj and his wife suggests, the UK’s foreign and intelligence services see themselves as a global police force, minding the affairs of other nations. In 2004, after Tony Blair, with one eye on possible contracts for British oil companies, decided that Gaddafi was a useful asset, the alliance was sealed with the capture, packaging and delivery of the regime’s dissenters.
Like the colonial crimes the British government committed in Kenya and elsewhere, whose concealment was sustained by the Foreign Office until its secret archives were revealed last month, the rendition programme was hidden from public view. Just as the colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to parliament about the detention and torture of Kikuyu people, in 2005 Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, told parliament that ”there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition”.
Reading the emails passed between the offices of James Murdoch and Jeremy Hunt, it struck me that here too is a government which sees itself as an agent of empire – Murdoch’s in this case – and which sees the electorate as ornamental. Working, against the public interest, for News Corporation, the financial sector and the billionaire donors to the Conservative party, its ministers act as capital’s district commissioners, governing Britain as their forebears governed the colonies.
The bid for power, oil and spheres of influence that Bush and Blair launched in Mesopotamia, using the traditional camouflage of the civilising mission; the colonial war still being fought in Afghanistan, 199 years after the Great Game began; the global policing functions the great powers have arrogated to themselves; the one-sided justice dispensed by international law. All these suggest that imperialism never ended, but merely mutated into new forms. The virtual empire knows no boundaries. Until we begin to recognise and confront it, all of us, black and white, will remain its subjects.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found atwww.monbiot.com
Mubin Shaikh is a former agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, back in 2006 he managed to infiltrate a group that was planning to conduct attacks in Canada. In this interview with MDI’s Sami Zaatari, he tells us about that experience, plus the reasoning behind why people would want to do such things, as well as giving his opinion on the likes of Robert Spencer and their opinions on why extremism is occurring.
