The UN Security Council has called for an immediate end to all violence in Gaza after fresh Israeli air strikes against Palestinian targets have brought the death toll to more than 270 people.

By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem and Richard Holt
Last Updated: 8:36AM GMT 28 Dec 2008

Palestinian officials said that 271 Palestinians had been killed in 24 hours of Israeli attacks Photo: Reuters

The air strikes are in response to rocket and mortar attacks fire by Palestinian militants against Israel.

After four hours of talks discussions, the council released a statement saying: “The members of the Security Council expressed serious concern at the escalation of the situation in Gaza and called for an immediate halt to all violence.

“The members called on the parties to stop immediately all military activities.”

The statement also called on all parties to address “the serious humanitarian and economic needs in Gaza.”

It urged them to take necessary measures, including the opening of border crossings, to ensure Gaza’s people were supplied with food, fuel and medical treatment.

Palestinian officials said that 271 Palestinians had been killed in 24 hours of Israeli attacks in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Since the operation began, one Israeli had been killed by Palestinian rocket fire.

The Security Council meeting was convened at the request of Libya, the only Arab country on the council.

At least 200 Palestinians were killed earlier on Saturday after Israel launched the heaviest air strikes ever seen in the Gaza Strip, hitting scores of targets linked to the militant Islamist movement, Hamas.

The human toll ranks among the highest for a single day in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This day of bloodshed ended any hope of immediate progress in the peace process.

While Israel had been warning for days of action against Gaza’s militants, the scale and intensity of the attack, code-named Operation Cast Lead, was unexpected.

For the first time, Israel has attacked not just militants ordering or taking part in operations but members of the security forces and any buildings connected with them.

Every known police station, arms store and headquarters building in Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas since June 2007, was attacked, regardless of whether they were occupied. A passing out ceremony for new police officers was struck, killing around 40 cadets.

Nightmarish scenes were played out through as mangled bodies arrived at hospitals to be collected by grief-stricken relatives. Israeli sources said that 50 targets were struck by 60 jet fighters in the first raid, beginning at around 11.40am. A second wave then attacked militants attempting to retaliate by launching rockets at Israel.

After nightfall, still more air attacks were reported in the south of the Gaza, this time against a metal foundry. But militants fired at least 40 rockets at Israel, including one that hit a house in the town of Netivot, killing one man.

Witnesses said men were killed in the east of Gaza City while they were preparing to fire rockets towards Israel.

Two other Palestinians were wounded in the attack, while another man wounded in an earlier Israeli air strike died of his injuries, according to a medical source.

Locals said that Israeli helicopters also fired missiles late Saturday on four metals factories in the city. Israel says such factories are used to build or store rockets for firing on the Jewish state.

A new Israeli army toll late Saturday said that more than 70 rockets or mortar shells were fired against Israel in response to Saturday’s massive air strikes, killing one and injuring four people.

A Hamas spokesman warned that the militant group would “unleash hell” in response to the strikes.

Meanwhile, Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, warned that air attacks would continue until the threat of militants firing rockets into Israel had been dealt with once and for all. “The operation will go on and be intensified as long as necessary,” said Mr Barak. “The battle will be long and difficult, but the time has come to act and to fight.”

Other Israeli officials made clear the operation was not over and gave warning of continuous attacks.

Nine Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza since it withdrew all settlers and soldiers from the territory in September 2005.

Over the same period, at least 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in Gaza, according to figures compiled by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group.

Israel’s decision to act came after a six-month truce with Hamas, which ran out on Dec 19.

With a general election due in February, Israel’s leadership did not want to give any appearance of appeasing Hamas. When the rocket fire against Israeli towns resumed, they went for the military option.

A ground invasion was ruled out because of fears of Israeli casualties. The national security cabinet ordered an unprecedented air assault.

Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian national authority, who is based not in Gaza but in the West Bank, condemned the assault as “criminal” and called for the international community to intervene.

Gordon Brown expressed “deep concern”, calling on Hamas to stop rocket attacks and Israel to “meet its humanitarian obligations” and “do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties”.

The Prime Minister added: “There is a pre-eminent need for renewal of a comprehensive settlement for the Israel-Palestine dispute in 2009.” Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, called for an immediate ceasefire and urged “everybody to exert maximum restraint”.

Egypt condemned the Israeli raids and opened its border with Gaza to allow casualties to be treated inside its hospitals.

A White House spokesman appeared to place greater blame on Hamas. “Hamas’s continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop,” said Gordon Johndroe. But he added that Israel should “avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza.”

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said he was “deeply alarmed” by Israel’s air attack and appealed “for an immediate halt to all violence”.

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, pointed to the constant rocket attacks launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza at civilian targets.

“Israeli citizens have been under the threat of daily attack from Gaza for years. Only this week – hundreds of missiles and mortars shells were fired at Israeli civilian communities including the firing of 80 missiles on a single day,” she said.

“Until now, we have shown restraint. But today there is no other option than a military operation. We need to protect our citizens from attack through a military response against the terror infrastructure in Gaza. This is the translation of our basic right to self defence.”

Miss Livni asked for the support of Israel’s allies for an operation she defended as necessary to safeguard civilians against the threat of rocket attacks carried out by Hamas operatives.

“Israel expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and coexistence to determine the agenda of this region,” she said.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it evacuated all its settlers and dismantled their homes. The government believes this was an essential gesture of goodwill and a demonstration of its commitment to the two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians.

Israel has accused Hamas of squandering its opportunity by allowing rocket attacks to take place from Gaza, especially after its capture of the territory last year.

Thousands of Israelis have fled areas near to Gaza.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2003 Mohamed Khodr

Comments 10 | Recommend 0

Lawn Griffiths, Tribune

Source:

by courtesy & © 2008 Elias Akleh

David Ahntholz for The New York Times

Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of “The Taqwacores,” which a college professor has called “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims.

* Sign In to E-Mail or Save This
* Print
* Reprints
* Share
o Linkedin
o Digg
o Facebook
o Mixx
o Yahoo! Buzz
o Permalink

Article Tools Sponsored By
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: December 22, 2008

CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
David Ahntholz for The New York Times

Noureen DeWulf and Bobby Naderi, both actors, with Jay Verkamp, center, the sound mixer for the film version of Mr. Knight’s novel. The film was shot in Cleveland.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.

Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.

A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.

“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.

As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.

Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.

“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”

The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.

For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.

“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.

Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.

“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”

The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.

Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.

Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.

He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.

After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.

One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.

“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.

For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.

Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.

At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”

“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on December 23, 2008, on page A16 of the New York edition.

Israel always manages to commit its worst deeds when no one else is looking.

By Paul J. Balles

While Americans concentrate on the cost of rescuing the U.S. financial system, and Europeans worry about how the worldwide financial crisis will affect them, Israel blithely, with U.S. government and European community approval, deprives Gaza’s entire civilian population of food, medicine and clean drinking water.

When pushed to explain their behaviour, they claim self-defence. Defence against whom? More than 50 per cent of the population in Gaza is comprised of children under the age of 15. Few people outside of Gaza even notice this slow genocide.

Israel always manages to commit its worst deeds when no one else is looking. If they happen to be caught, they blame it on the Palestinians – on a few resistance fighters lobbing rockets into Israel in retaliation for a broken cease-fire. To the Israeli, the actions of a few violent Palestinians are justifiable cause for genocide of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.

Joe Mowrey writes:

As conditions in the Gaza Strip approach a catastrophic level of deprivation, the world media, and in particular the U.S. media, remain largely silent. The United Nations, whose truckloads of food and medical supplies continue to be denied entry into Gaza by Israel, appears to be one of the few international voices of dissent concerning the collective punishment of 1.5 million human beings.

As soon as someone takes notice of what Mowrey is talking about, the Israelis open the gates to allow a smattering of fuel or food into Gaza. Ironically, Khaled Meshaal has noted even Arab and Islamic regimes have remained silent about the tragedy resulting from the “criminal blockade” of Gaza.

Andrea Becker, head of advocacy for Medical Aid for Palestinians, has written about how the blockade has affected the hospitals and medical facilities. These are hardly resistance fighters:

…a child on life support doesn’t have the oxygen of a mechanical ventilator. A nurse on a neo-natal ward rushes between patients, battling the random schedule of power cuts. A hospital worker tries to keep a few kidney dialysis machines from breaking down, by farming spare parts from those that already have. The surgeon operates without a bulb in the surgery lamp, across from the anaesthetist who can no longer prevent patient pain.

The hospital administrator updates lists of essential drugs and medical supplies that have run out, which vaccines from medical fridges are now unusable because they can’t be kept cold, and which procedures must be cancelled altogether. The ambulance driver decides whether to respond to an emergency call, based on dwindling petrol in the tank.

Joe Mowrey reflects on the most bitter irony of all:

Has the sense of exclusivity and entitlement created by the Zionist experiment in Israel become so great that people there no longer see themselves in the mirror of their own history? The irony of Jews … denying food to hundreds of thousands of children in order, allegedly, to insure their own security, is breathtaking. Who could ever have imagined such a thing?

The Jewish Studies Global Directory of Holocaust Museums lists 61 memorial sites, including four in Israel and 24 in the United States. Reminders to the world? But not to Israelis? Not to Jews in America? Is it conceivable that Jews who remember the Holocaust only recognize genocide when they are the victims?

Rabbi Meir Hirsh, Neturei Karta Palestine, provides an answer:

How long will Jewish and non-Jewish leaders who claim the mantle of civilization and morality remain silent in the face of the ongoing state terrorism practised by the Zionist state against the Palestinian People, most visibly today in Gaza, where the Zionists believe they can starve the Palestinians into submission in violation of all tenets of international law, all religious values in general, including the values of the Jewish faith?

— Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see pballes.com. This article appeared in Redress Information & Analysis.

Source: Middle East Online

How to TackleTerrorism

By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (tr. Yoginder Sikand)

Terrorism is an international menace. Everyone condemns it but the question is: How to cope with terrorism?

I would like to give the answer to this question in brief.

First of all, we have to define what is terrorism. In Islam, only one kind of war is permissible, that is defensive war. This holds true only when the war becomes a necessity. In Islam, war is justified only by the law of necessity and not under normal laws.When there is an armed aggression from outside, the state is allowed to go to war in its defense – that too with some conditions. As far as non-government agencies are concerned, they are not allowed to go to war. No excuse whatsoever is permissible in this regard.

It does not mean that non-governmental individuals or organizations have no contribution to make. They have a lot of work to do in the fields other than the political field. But they will strictly have to adhere to peaceful means. For example, they can educate people, in both formal and informal aspects. They can inculcate the spirit of harmonious living among people. They can inculcate the spirit of constructive work etc.

The Genesis of Violence

Violence begins from the mind. So is the case of terrorism. Terrorism begins from the mind. Terrorism is nothing but the culmination of negative thinking. Hence, any effort to remove terrorism must begin from the minds of people. We have to re-engineer people’s minds on positive lines. We have to make them understand that peaceful action is far more effective than violent action.

Turning Negativity into Positivity

Our society is based on the principle of free competition – it is this competitive state of affairs that creates what are called problems. There are clashes of interest between different segments of society. But this situation is not an unwanted situation. This situation is good for society provided people learn the art of management of differences, rather than the art of eliminating differences. Failure of people management of differences leads to violence and war. Instead of this, when people are able to successfully manage differences; it results in peace in the society.

It is this formula that is given in the Quran in these words:  ‘Peace is the best’. (4:128)

It means that in the face of differences, the conciliatory approach is better than the confrontational approach. Muslim Sufis have adopted this formula, which they call: Sulh-e-kul. It means ‘Peace with all’. This is the only successful formula for establishing a better society.

No Extremism

There is a verse in the Quran: ‘Don’t be extremist in your religion’. (4: 171) The Prophet of Islam has said: ‘Refrain yourself from extremism, it is highly disastrous for you’.  Extremism leads to negative thinking, negative thinking leads to violence and violence leads to armed confrontation.

So-Called ‘Islamization’ of Terrorism

Some Muslim extremists justify their violent actions by saying that ‘Yes, we are involved in terrorism but we terrorize unjust people, just like the police. The police terrorizes criminals and we terrorize those people who are enemies of truth’.
These kinds of statements are nothing but so-called ‘Islamization’ of terrorism by uttering some seemingly beautiful words. This argument is based on a fallacy, that is, a wrong comparison. The police are an authorized body of a state. What the police are doing it is doing by legal authority. But these extremists or their self-styled organizations are not an authoritative body in this sense. As a matter of principle, these elements have no right to use arms; no excuse whatsoever gives them the justification to terrorize people. They have only one option: that is to persuade people by peaceful means, without using any arms or causing anyone harm.

Terror Attacks at Mumbai

The terror attack at Mumbai on November 26, 2008 should serve as an eye-opener for us all. It is a general belief that such terror attacks by Muslim youths are directly inspired by the teachings of the Quran. But the Muslim terrorist, who was captured alive at the time of the Mumbai attacks, had a different story to tell. He told in detail how they were prepared for that task. He explained to the interrogators that they were trained in some special camps for a long period of time. During this training period, apart from being trained on the use of arms, they were given ideological lessons constantly. They never said that they were advised to study the Quran. Instead, he told the interrogators that they were shown video films. In these films, they were made to watch bloody communal riots and to hear the speeches of some extremist Hindu leaders. What were these films? These films were based on selective news items or some exceptional items. In these films, the makers tried to generalize the exception. These youths underwent a brainwashing process by these sensitive video films.

For example, they were shown the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. This single incident greatly provoked their sentiments. But the fact is that apart from the Babri Mosque, there are numerous other mosques that are fully under Muslim control in India. According to one estimate, there are more than half a million mosques in India. Approximately the same number of Islamic, madrassas – big and small – also exist throughout the country. But these mosques and madrassas were not included in the video films that were shown to those Muslims terrorists. If these Muslim youths were also shown these functional mosques and madrasas, then certainly they would have had a different mindset. This kind of training was quite against the spirit of Islam.

The tragedy of the Babri Mosque and the communal riots shown to them was not a one-sided act. It was the result of an action and reaction process and Hindus and Muslims were both involved in this unwanted process. The blame for these bloody incidents goes to both the communities — Muslims and Non-Muslims. These video films showed only one side of the story and not the complete picture of the incident.

Unaware of Quranic Teachings

If these Muslim youths were asked to read the Quran at the time of their training, then surely they would have found this verse of the Quran which forbids killings of innocent people. This Quranic verse says that: ‘Whoever killed one single innocent human being should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind (5:32).  If these Muslim youths were aware of these Quranic teachings, it would not have been possible for them to kill innocent men and women in terror attacks.

Then there is a very relevant tradition of the Prophet of Islam. He said:  God grants to rifq (peace) what he does not grant to unf (violence).  (Abu Dawud, Sunan, 4/255) This Prophetic teaching tells us that the better way to achieve all objectives is the peaceful method and not the violent method.  If these Muslim youths would have been aware of this Prophetic teaching, they would certainly have adopted this peaceful method instead of the violent gun-culture to achieve their objective.

The Target of these Muslim Terrorists

Recently it was disclosed in an article written by the Pakistani ambassador to the USA, Mr. Hussain Haqqani, that Muslim terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba have a dangerous political plan in mind. Their thinking is that all the areas on the globe that were once under the Muslim rule, like the Ottoman empire or the Mughal empire or the Moorish empire, are Muslims by right. According to them, Non-Muslim nations have unjustly captured these areas. They are usurpers. It is now their right to re-capture all these Muslim areas and establish Muslim rule over these lands once again.

According to them, the recent terrorism is a justified war, aimed at achieving what they regard as their rightful objectives.

This kind of ideology is very dangerous. It is a permanent threat to world peace. Simply condemnation or counter-attack is not enough to eliminate this ideology. It requires a counter-ideology. We have to convince these people that political rule is not a hereditary right of any community or nation. Moreover, now we are living in the age of democracy. Democracy means a power-sharing system. Now every group has the right to share power in a democratic way. The hereditary concept mentioned above is nothing but a kind of anachronism, which is not tenable at all. Now we are living under the United Nations Organizations. All the nations of the world are members of this International body. Only that kind of political norm is acceptable that is just according to the United Nations’ Charter and the above kind of hereditary concept is certainly quite against the UNO’s accepted principles.

What Can be Done?

Now the question is what can be done in such an alarming situation? What is the practical solution to the present state of affairs? I think that there are two parts to this solution. In every country, there are stern laws to curb violence and terrorism. Governmental agencies must enforce all these laws. They must punish all those elements who are involved in such heinous acts. But another part of the solution pertains to the re-engineering of peoples’ minds. This task must be undertaken by the agencies that are non-governmental in their operations. It is completely a peaceful task. Re-engineering of people’s minds can be achieved only through education and positive training. This includes what I call as counter-ideology. The required peaceful result can be achieved only through the combined efforts of these two agencies — Governments and social reformers and activists.
==============================================================

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan is a Delhi-based Islamic scholar.  For more details, see http://www.cpsglobal.org

The Hidden Holocaust: Our Civilizational Crisis – Part 1: The Holocaust in History

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Part 1: The Holocaust in History

1. “Hidden Holocaust”

As we are all aware, the term “Holocaust” is traditionally used to refer to the “systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime”, during the Second World War. The word “Holocaust” is a Greek word, which means “sacrifice by fire.” It conveys an event, the scale and horror of which, transformed the course of world history. Moreover, it’s often seen as a crime against humanity that is unparalleled and unique.

This, we cannot dispute. The Nazi Holocaust was, indeed, a uniquely horrific genocide, whose enormity and systematic character is barely imaginable, designed to exterminate wholly the Jewish people, physically, socially, culturally, from the face of the Earth.

But what then, do we mean by a “hidden holocaust”? This term conveys the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale and enormity is such that one feels that the word “holocaust” does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is “hidden”, in the sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially unacknowledged.

This “hidden holocaust”, is escalating, accelerating, intensifying; according to all expert projections from the social and physical sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species, unless we take immediate drastic action, now.

2. “Civilizational Crisis”

We often hear the word “civilization”. It’s often been used to explain the dynamics of the “War on Terror”, as a clash between two civilizations, the advanced, developed and progressive civilization of the West, and the backward, reactionary civilization of Islam.

As is well known, the man who first formulated this idea as an academic theory of international relations was the Harvard professor and US government adviser, Samuel Huntington.

In early 2007, then Prime Minister Tony Blair described the War on Terror as “a clash not between civilizations”, but rather “about civilization.” The War on Terror is, he proclaimed, a continuation of “the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence.” [“A Battle for Global Values”, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007)]

But the “hidden holocaust” is not an aberration from our advanced civilization that represents the peak of human development, requiring only some reforms. Rather, the “hidden holocaust” is integral to the very structure, values and activities of our civilization. It is part and parcel of the “global values” of the international political and economic order that underpins industrial civilization. And unless we attempt to transform the nature of our civilization, we will all perish in a holocaust of our own making.

3. The Genocidal Conception of Civilization

The hidden holocaust associated with our modern civilization, began at the beginning of modern civilization itself.

The origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, English and other explorers ventured out from their home countries in search of new wealth and new land in all corners of the globe. They went to the continents of America, Africa and Asia and set up colonies and trading outposts.

Colonists and settlers had all sorts of intentions. Some of them had capital, and were simply looking for new investment opportunities. Others were trying to escape lives of hardship at home to make new lives for themselves with a fresh start by settling in the colonies. Others wanted to deliver the message of Christianity to native populations. Almost all of them saw themselves as part of the inevitable historical momentum of progress, bringing the fruits of European civilization to backward peoples.

Whatever the intentions, European expansion involved massive, systematic violence. Violence of all kinds. Wholesale massacres, forced labour camps, disease, malnutrition due to the imposed conditions of economic deprivation, mass suicides due to depression and cultural alienation. As Irving Louis Horowitz argues, for example, “the conduct of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide.” [Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1976), p. 19-20.] Below we review some salient examples.

4. American Holocaust

Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex civilizations of native Americans, over the next few centuries, were devastated. British historian Mark Cocker has reviewed reliable estimates of the death toll:

“[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico… Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.” [Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 5]

Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders, consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists, religious and cultural dislocation, and so on.

As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide, which he describes as an “American Holocaust”, these factors accelerated and intensified the mere impact of disease. He further describes the colonists’ strategic thinking:

“At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance ‘as vassals’ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer ‘all the mischief and damage’ that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you.” [David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 255]

This binary choice, put to the Native Americans five centuries ago, bears an unnerving resemblance to the rhetoric underpinning the “War on Terror” today, “you are either with us or against us.”

5. African Holocaust

In Africa, the slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted deaths of vast numbers of people. While slave structures had already existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it adopted in the course of European interventions. English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by raiding villages off the West African coast. The transatlantic slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of “a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas.” An observer at the time, British journalist Edward Morel wrote: “For a hundred years slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death.” [The Black Man’s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)]

From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died “in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East” is unknown, among the slaves “kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.” Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 – and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 – Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)].

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn has demonstrated convincingly the centrality of capitalism to the growth of new world slavery, arguing that the profits of slavery accumulated in the “triangular trade” between Europe, Africa and America contributed fundamentally to Britain’s industrialization. For instance, the profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation. [Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso), p. 572.] The question of capital formation, however, is only part of the story. The trans-atlantic slave trade was an indispensable motor in an emerging capitalist world system under the mantle of the British empire. The mechanization of cotton textiles, originally produced in American plantations manned by African slaves, was overwhelmingly the driving force in British industrialization. [CK Harley and NFR Crafts, “Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth”, Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (1994, no. 420)]

6. Indian Holocaust

In his landmark study, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), historian Mike Davis shows how British imperial policy systematically converted droughts in South Asia and South Africa into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines.

In India, between 5.5 and 12 million people died in an artificially-induced famine, although millions of tonnes of grains were in commercial circulation. Rice and wheat production had been above average for the previous three years, but most of the surplus had been exported to England. “Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread.” Under “free market” rules, between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while millions of Indian poor starved to death.

Crucially, Davis argues that these people died “not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.”

7. Division of the World

This violence was, therefore, not merely accidental to the European imperial project. It was integral, systematic, as a solution to the problem of native resistance.

Between about 1870 and 1914, European imperial policies received a new lease of life, resulting in the intense scramble for control over eastern Asian and African territories. Almost the entire world was divided up under the formal or informal political rule of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Japan. Between themselves, in Africa for instance they acquired 30 new colonies and 110 million subjects. African resistance was brutally crushed. Consider, for example, the 1904 uprising of the Hereros, a tribe in southwest Africa, against German occupation. The German response was to drive all 24,000 of them into the desert to starve to death; others who surrendered were worked to death in forced labour camps. [Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent, 1876-1912 (London: Random House, 1991).]

During this period, we can already see drastic inequalities in the international system. By 1880, the per capita income in the developed countries was approximately double that of the ‘Third World’. By 1913, it was three times higher, and by 1950, five times higher. Similarly, the per capita share of GNP in the industrialized countries of the developed core was in 1830 already twice that of the Third World, becoming seven times as high by 1913. [E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 15]

In summary, for five hundred years, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples were slaughtered, decimated, deported, enslaved, starved, exterminated, impoverished, and forcibly assimilated into an emerging world system dominated by Western Europe. This was how the global values and politico-economic structures of our civilization came into being. Globalization… the bloody legacy of a 500-year killing machine.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Overlook, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005), among other books. He teaches international relations at the University of Sussex, and directs the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. Visit Nafeez’s website The Institute for Policy Research and Development http://www.iprd.org.uk/

Institutionalized Contempt for Islam, How Do We Tackle It: A Riposte

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

A riposte is a fencer’s quick return thrust following a parry.  In this vein, I want to reply to Jafar Siddiqui’s concern about the growing professionalism in the Islamophobic industry and the lack of an effective Muslim response.  His question is “how do we tackle it?” He does not know, and neither do I, but that is no reason for despondency.  As long as we are asking questions, we are still alive, and that, given present circumstances, is encouraging.

There are many answers, most of them inadequate.  They range from denying that the problem is growing, all the way to joining a Sufi order so that we don’t have to worry about it.  Or we can become terrorists, which is worse than useless.  These ways are the easy ways out of the quandry.

And then there are the effective ways that are more difficult and require a lot of sabr or patience.  Perhaps the most difficult in the short-term is merely to be a good Muslim and a good American, which are two sides of the same coin.  Over the very long term, the most effective strategies are to educate the younger generation with vision so that they can enter academia and help change entire paradigms of thought, or join and found think tanks in order to shape political agendas, or even prepare for a career in politics in order to work proactively from an interfaith perspective on specific policy issues unrelated to Muslims as a group or Islam as a religion.

A few Muslims may be called to complete the original American Revolution or start a second one by joining the American Revolutionary Party, which I co-founded two years ago as one of the two drafters of its constitution.  We are not interested (yet) in running anybody for political office (though I understand that we are registered in the State of Washington for this purpose).  Instead we would like to support those within either of the two major parties who talk about real change but have nothing of substance to offer.  Check out http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us.

Jafar is concerned about how easy it is to raise a million dollars to build a mosque but how impossible it is to get support for effective, namely, competitive organizations, to influence the premises of policy, which is where all policy originates.  It is easy simply to assert that those with the larger perspective of grand strategy will never get funding from Muslims for our higher, divinely-inspired calling, and that fund-raising must target what Muslims and Arabs want, which perhaps means nothing beyond one’s own nose.  Only Jews have learned to combine inward focus with an outward focus on selling larger strategic perspective both to their funders and to the enlightened and universal self-interest of policy-makers generally.

We should never become defensive because that is a guaranteed strategy for defeat.  One function of Islamophobes, whether by design or not, is to distract Muslims from contributing to society by forcing them to focus on defending themselves.  Nasir Shamsi was adamant that my book for the Center for Understanding Islam should not attack or even mention any Islamophobes, because this would distract from the positive message of the book.  Ali Chaudry came to agree with him, and I did too about a year ago, so we dropped the book in 2007 as counter-productive since half of it was on defending Islam.

The same applies to the two books that I wrote in 2005 and 2006, which were largely negative on U.S. foreign policy and were rejected by the funders for the same reason, quite correctly so.

The problem is that people under attack, like Muslims, want to counter-attack defensively and get so hung up on this that they become irrelevant in the world.  Even worse, however, would be to do nothing, which was the result after the attack by the Mongols seven hundred years ago and by the European imperialists a couple of centuries ago.  Ironically, even America in recent years after 9/11 has copied the Muslims by going into a terrorized funk, despite the NeoCon’s fraudulent front of calling for freedom and democracy, with the result that America now seems to be declining toward the level of universal irrelevancy.

One can learn general strategy even as a child on the playground.  People who are confident in themselves can ignore attacks on the basis of the old ditty for children, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” My mother taught me this when kids used to yell at me and some beat me up.  She had me take lessons in martial arts and I immediately found that standing up to a bully immediately reduces him to a blowhard totally discredited among his own followers.  This works almost as well even when one challenges the bully to a fight and loses.  More importantly, I found that to ignore verbal attacks has the same effect and that this is the first step toward leadership.  This works on the playground and might even have universal applicability.

Of course, one can overdo this, as I did when I countered some disciplinary action by the principal by organizing a strike by all the boys.  We simply took off and spent the day exploring the forests of Belmont Hill, which I knew well in the western exurbs of Boston.  Of course, the police found me at home that evening and threatened to lock me up in prison.  My parents knew this was not serious, but I did not, so it successfully deterred me from future such leadership experiments.

The defensive and reactive mentality is always a loser.  It spells the end of every civilization.  In the Year 2008 election, the Republicans’ lost dignity by retreating defensively with the message “I’m not as bad as you think I am” and by stooping in desperation to the level of gutter politics.  This contrasted with Obama’s efforts to avoid this and focus on the positive, which was the major psychological reason the Democrats won, even though neither party had much to offer in the way of “change.” The Republicans could not even convince themselves that they had anything fundamental to offer other then existential fear, whereas Barack Obama was Reaganesque in calling for the best in America, even though the Democrats could not agree among themselves on what this might be.

Institutionalized contempt for Islam and Muslims?  We cannot ignore it, but it deserves only one thing: contempt.  And so do the desperate Muslims who deserve contempt because they have no faith in themselves or in Islam or in any religion and instead worship themselves by resorting to totally useless and terribly immoral acts of terrorism.  We should respond by offering the wisdom of Islam and cooperation with every other world religion in pursuing peace, prosperity, and freedom through the classical or traditionalist Islamic paradigm of compassionate and faith-based justice, buttressed by specific implementing policies of both institutional and substantive change.

Many Muslims are experiencing burnout, as do also 90% of the terrorists, from working defensively in what seems like a losing effort.  Our highest political concern should be not what will happen to Muslims but what will happen to America and the world, because focusing on ourselves does not adequately address our responsibility as Muslims to change the world fi sabil Allah wherever we live.

Unfortunately, in thirty years or so of full-time Muslim activism my message has been understood by many in the silent majority but by few among the Muslim activists.  The major reason for this is that generally the funders cannot think big enough.  Jawad Khaki understood what I was talking about and wanted to fund me a few years ago but only if he would not be the sole or even major funder.  There was no response at all in the Seattle community, which was more interested in countering specific attacks on Islam and Muslims.  This is essential, and CAIR is doing an incredibly good job at this (which is why it is so well funded), but such defensive tactics without a grand strategy are only buying time without addressing the real challenge of changing the governing global paradigm in both foreign and domestic policy from stability through power to peace, prosperity, and freedom through justice.

America’s dysfunctional global strategists in the Washington think-tanks are trying merely to survive in the face of global chaos by pursuing the status quo with all of its injustices.  Since this is inherently impossible, we have reverted to the law of the jungle, which is a losing proposition because we are battling others who like us not only are at the top of the food chain but can outlast us.

Islam will always be and so will Muslims, bi ithni Allah.  Our major concern should not be merely for ourselves.  Our ultimate goal should not be merely to survive as Muslims but to fulfill our amana from Allah as stewards of creation to pursue peace, prosperity, and freedom through transcendent and compassionate justice for every person and every community in the world (and perhaps throughout the cosmos).  This is our real identity, so our task, in sha’a Allah, is to become what we are.  If Muslims cannot help lead America in this quest from chaos to cosmos on earth, then there may be no future for human civilization.  Islam is indeed the answer, but that is easier said than done.  To be emotionally despondent is human, but to be discouraged from seeking answers and from taking action is un-Islamic.

As I reminded the reader at the end of my book, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, published more than a decade ago, if we think we are the only answer to a problem, then we are denying Allah.  In Surah al Baqara 2:243, 249, 251, we read, “Did you not turn by vision to those who abandoned their homes for fear of death, though they numbered in the thousands?  Allah said to them, ‘Die!’ … But those who were convinced that they must meet Allah said, ‘How often, by Allah’s will, has a small force vanquished a big one?  Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere.’ … And if Allah did not check one group of people by another, the earth would indeed be full of mischief, but Allah is full of bounty to all the worlds.” And in Surah al Tauba 9:40-41, we have the revelation, “Unless you go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty and put others in your place. … For Allah is exalted in Might and Wise.  Go forth, whether with equipped lightly or heavily, and strive and struggle with your goods and your persons in the cause of Allah.  This is best if only you knew.”

Again and again we read in the Qur’an, “Allah creates what He wills.  When He has decreed a plan, He but says, ‘be,’ and it is.” Surah Ali Imran 3:47, Surah al Nahl 16:40, and Surah Miryam 19:35, “Kun fa yakun.”

“And [the unbelievers] plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah” Surah Ali Imran 3:54, Surah al Anfal 8:30, and Surah al Ra’d 13:42.  And again in Surah Ali Imran 3:26: “Say, ‘O Allah! Lord of Power, You give power to whom You please, and you strip off power from whom You please.  You endow with honor whom You please, and You bring low whom you please.  In Your hand is all good. Verily over all things You have power.”

Since we are nearing the Feast of Christmas, we should take to heart the wisdom of Sister Lydia Griffin, an editor of ICNA’s The Message, expressed in its special December 1993 issue entitled The Crescent and the Cross, referring to a dialogue between Islam and the Vatican similar to the one flowering today: “Is this the time when true understanding is born, the realization that the power of the One message of the One God is so strong in resurgence, now that the world needs it so badly, that it can finally unite those so long separated by human fortresses and matchstick towers.  Barrier built on a mortar of illusion and fog.”

The strategy called for in the book on Shaping the Future is not “peaceful coexistence” through tolerance, which is defensive and self-defeating, or even acceptance of diversity through a higher level understanding through “peaceful engagement,” but rather is action in solidarity to overcome the barriers to cooperation in the pursuit of truth and justice.  The most profound sentence perhaps in the entire Qur’an is the admonition, wa tama’at kalimatu Rabika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “And the Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice” Surah al An’am 6:115.

The true power of faith-based reconciliation and faith-based cooperation in the pursuit of transcendent justice , which is the very definition of the traditionalist movement that gave birth to the Great American Experiment, does not lie in think-tanks created to wage mimetic warfare at an intellectual level, or in lobbying organizations designed to penetrate the existing power structure, even though they are essential for success.  Real success in tackling institutionalized contempt of Islam can come only from reliance by large organized communities of people on the power of God.

l

As part of his determination to distance his new republic from centuries of Ottoman Islamic heritage, Ataturk moved the capital from Istanbul, the base of the most extravagant mosques and Islamic monuments, to Ankara, a small trading town under the Ottomans. The new capital became a stronghold of secular republicans. However, with an Islamic mayor in the mid-1990s, Ankara went through a change of heart.

Shortly after Islamists won Ankara’s mayorship, the capital’s logo was changed from a Hittite pre-Islamic symbol to the Kocatepe mosque. The influence of Islam became more pronounced, most notably by the wearing of head scarves, when the Justice and Development Party (AK) rose to national power in 2002.

“Of course the coming of AK party to power and especially the second term opened the gate to the veil issue and because of that probably more and more shops of Islamic fashion opened,” said Alev Cinar, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ankara’s Bilkent University, who authored a book on the battle between Turkish Islamists and secularists over the public space.

Badei, a housewife living in Ankara, seconds Cinar, affirming that rise of the AK party encouraged many women in the capital to take the veil. “The party played a great role in improving the status of veiled women. Now, the veil is not considered as the president, prime minister as well as many parliamentarians have veiled wives. Veiled women are encouraged to go out now as there is less discrimination against them,” she said.

“The veil is no more restricted to lower classes, the Islamic fashion has flourished over the last three or four years. All brands have special departments for veiled women now,” she added.

Nevertheless, one should not assume that the secular class has fallen into the oblivion or the entire capital is following the same path. Ankara’s expanding western suburbs have become the new niches for Westernized secular upper classes.

— Noha El-Hennawy in Ankara