Check out this live world map, from the National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, in Hungary.
It shows “Emergency and Disaster” events currently in progress (and being distress signalled, I am guessing) around the world. Earthquakes, forest fires, epidemic and biological hazards, hurricanes, airplane accidents etc. The site also has various tables of recent such events and accidents around the world.
Makes you look out the window and have one of those “perspective” moments.
See if you can find Kazakhstan. Hint: Its currently displaying a 3.6 magnitude earthquake, in progress as I am typing this. I hope Anousheh Ansari is out of there already.
Technorati Tags:
Hungary, disaster, emergency, accident, National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Kazakhstan,
I totally missed this when it mattered, but the world’s first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, was keeping a blog while in space, even posting videos of her experience, which apparently consisted of “flying around hitting walls and dislodging things” and staring out of windows a lot.
She landed this morning in Kazakhstan. (But this is not the Kazakhstan post I was talking about)
Anyway, check out her blog and find out what space smells like. Thank God for velcro, indeed.
Technorati Tags: Anousheh Ansari, space tourist
The US Department of Energy released a report last week predicting that peak oil production is most likely only 5 years out. (via FP Passport, where you can find more info)
Here’s the full report. (PDF)
And if you’re thinking, but what about that huge discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, announced recently, the answer is nope, not big enough.
Developments in the Gulf of Mexico present a further problem, especially as far lessening America’s dependence on foreign (Middle Eastern) oil goes – transport. Stratfor reports:
Wells that tap fields farther south than the current development line are all well and good, but for any oil or natural gas produced by them to reach the mainland, those wells most first be attached to a connecting pipeline. Those connecting pipelines must then be linked to the existing infrastructure further north to make the link complete. With every year this jumble of transport networks gets longer, more tangled and, by extension, more vulnerable to hurricane damage.
Development of the Gulf of Mexico will not stop — indeed, we do not even expect it to slow for years — but the industry appears to have reached a point of diminishing returns. Developments the likes of those in 2005 are thankfully rare, but disruptions in general will only become more common: development of more fields farther from shore means a more vulnerable transport network, which in turn increases the impact of hurricanes when they do occur. Pre-Katrina/Rita output rates for the Gulf of Mexico — 1.5 million barrels per day of crude and 10 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas — from now on are probably the best that can be hoped for.
Now, did you notice that Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan “Papa” Nazarbayev has been spending a little time at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine this week? More on
Kazakhstan later. Because its NIIIICE!
Technorati Tags: peak oil, Robert L. Hirsch, gulf of mexico, department of energy
A no-nonsense explanation of the situation in Darfur and why it occured, in the Telegraph:
[..]
The death in Darfur is the result of a policy.
The policy is that of the Sudan government, which is now, in effect, the government of northern Sudan. That government is Islamist and Arab. It used to harbour Osama bin Laden until bombed by Bill Clinton. Even before the Islamists came to power in 1989, the north imposed sharia everywhere.
In 1990, it declared jihad against the south. It seeks to dispossess Christians and to assert Arab dominance of the north over the black population of the whole country. In Darfur, it destroys black villages through the Janjaweed and other militias.
As with Slobodan Milosevic’s Greater Serbia, Khartoum’s power grab is presented in the guise of restoring national unity. In reality, Khartoum wants to kill or expel as many blacks as possible while the rest of the world wonders what to do.
[..]
Last week, I was in southern Sudan. Although desperately poor, with 95 per cent illiteracy, and some armed groups still roaming the bush, the place is more or less at peace.This is because, at the start of last year, international pressure forced a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between north and south. The largely Christian south now has a great measure of self-rule, and will be allowed to vote, in 2011, as to whether it wants to secede from the Sudan. It is certain, if it ever gets its promised chance, that it will vote to break away.
A UN force of 7,000 is in the south, trying to see that the CPA becomes a reality. The north drags its feet on key provisions – most notably the settling of the borders.
It knows that if the borders are agreed, this will show clearly that most of the oilfields which earn the country large amounts of hard currency are in the south.
The north is supposed to give half of the revenue from the southern oilfields to the southern government, but there is no independent audit of what that revenue is, so the south is being short-changed. This suits China, which is in the country, helping itself to Sudanese oil at good rates.
The leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who run the south, told me that half their budget is spent on the army, and that this is what people want. They think the way to avoid war is to be strong enough to fight it.
Southern Sudan is all but unique in the modern world in having recently overthrown sharia rule. After years of officially imposed Islam, in schools, the civil service and preferences for jobs, Christians no longer have to live in daily fear. I visited towns where mosques and churches now coexist peacefully.
Yet one Anglican prelate I met, who said that he survived 20 years of persecution because “it is not so easy to kill a bishop”, told me that “the Arab Muslim is not a giving-up sort of person”.
The blow to Arab pride if the south became independent would be tremendous. The threat to the south is, therefore, huge. “We are the wall to the penetration of the Islamic religion to the whole of Africa,” Bishop Micah said.
What occurs in Darfur concerns not only the fate of its refugee, raped, hungry, dispossessed people. The outcome will also tell the north whether it can get away with what it wants. If it discovers that it can, it will start again on the much bigger prize of the south.
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Here’s a reminder of just how revoltingly brutal and inhumane the Arab Supremacism of the Sudanese Islamists is (The Guardian, July 20, 1004):
While African women in Darfur were being raped by the Janjaweed militiamen, Arab women stood nearby and sang for joy, according to an Amnesty International report published yesterday. The songs of the Hakama, or the “Janjaweed women” as the refugees call them, encouraged the atrocities committed by the militiamen.
The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies, the human rights group said.
[..]
During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang songs praising the government and scorning the black villagers.
According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: “The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God.”
The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village: “You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed.”
The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said.
The militiamen “are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish”, a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based onmore than 100 testimonies from women in the refugee camps in neighbouring Chad.
What the report does not mention is that according to the Sunnah women taken captive during Jihad can be taken as slaves and the Koran permits the rape of female slaves.
Robert Spencer explains:
“Each of us was raped by between three and six men….One woman refused to have sex with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us.”
This happened in Darfur, from which Sudanese military personnel actually airlifted women to Khartoum to serve as sex slaves.
Meanwhile, Indira Dzetskelova, the mother of one of the child hostages in Beslan, Russia, reports that “several 15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists.” Her daughter “heard their terrible cries and screams when those monsters took them away.”
[..]What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are … married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).
After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.
(I ran out of time yesterday, so posting part 3 today)
Ever so lightly.
Firstly a look at developments in some “moderate” Muslim nations.
Nibras Kazimi looks at Turkey in the NY Sun: “Return of the Gazi”
Psychoanalyzing the Turkish nation is a favorite pastime for many analysts since Turkey’s recurring identity crisis gives ample material for all sorts of conjecture: Is it trying to be Western? Is Turkey trying to rediscover its eastern roots? Is it getting more comfortable with its Ottoman inheritance?
This has been going on for decades, with some haughty Westerners finding it bemusing that a Muslim nation is trying so hard to put on sophisticated – read European – airs. Well, now Turkey’s existentialism is no longer eccentrically cutesy. Whichever way Turkey lands could potentially determine the outcome of a war between two civilizations – the West and Islam.
The acquittal of writer Elif Shafak is a small but positive sign. (Washington Post editorial).
But the overall trend is looking bleaker. Leon de Winter has more Turkey questions at his Free West blog (a recent discovery for me and highly recommended):
This is a decisive moment for Turkey. Either it recognises Greek aspirations and reneges on its promise to protect the Turks of northern Cyprus in order to be able to join the European Union, and at the same time pursues a peaceful solution for the Kurdish problem in its eastern provinces. Or it stands firm on Cyprus, bringing its candidacy for European Union membership crashing to a halt, and at the same time focuses on expansion into Iraqi Kurdistan in a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop deal with Iran.
Which is to be? Can Turkey survive as a nation if it gives up on its fear of the irridentist Greeks? Can it continue in its present form if it accedes to Kurdish demands for autonomy? Could Turkey ever turn itself into a docile federal democracy without risking a further loss of territory? Spain, Portugal and even Greece were transformed under the protective mantle of the European Union. Could it happen in Turkey, or will the Turks turn their backs on the West and allow themselves to become drawn into the approaching Middle East conflagration?
Maznah Mohamad in Lebanon’s Daily Star on the Malaysian crossroads: “Malaysia’s unsettling turn toward Islam”
Malaysian society is now gripped by a fundamental question: Is the country, which is more than half Muslim, an Islamic state? In practice, various religious and ethnic groups give Malaysia a distinctly multi-cultural character. But the Malaysian Constitution provides room for arguments on both sides of the question, and the relatively secular status quo is facing a serious challenge.
Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard on developments in Morocco: “The Islamization of Morocco” Extremism is displacing moderation in the North African kingdom.
A LITTLE MORE THAN three years ago, Morocco experienced Islamic terrorism firsthand. On May 16, 2003, Casablanca was hit with four simultaneous attacks that left 45 people dead and hundreds injured. The attacks were perpetrated by Moroccan citizens who were members of the al Qaeda-affiliated Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (known by its French acronym, GICM).
Needless to say, the kingdom was stunned that its sons had turned violently against it. Now, the dismantling of another extensive Islamist cell in Morocco confirms that extremism is spreading inside what has long been viewed as one of the most moderate countries in the Arab world.
In a series of arrests over the past month, Moroccan authorities have seized 59 people and over 30 kilograms of TNT, more than was used in the 2003 attacks but of the same type. The alleged targets were political and military leaders, along with locations in Marrakesh, Morocco’s premier tourist destination, the air force base of Salé, and the U.S. embassy in Rabat.
But the most troubling aspect of this cell by far is its membership. While the suicide bombers of 2003 came from the slums around Casa blanca, the newly arrested suspects are from all walks of life. They include five members of the military, three policemen, a Domestic Security officer, two imams, and four society women. Two of these women, the wives of Royal Air Morocco pilots, had volunteered for suicide missions in Iraq and Israel.
Now a brief look at Thailand.
David Warren’s analysis on the coup, on RealClearPolitics.com: “Thai Democracy”
There have been at least a dozen military coups, since Thailand first embarked on the “path to democracy” before the Second World War. After each comes the ritual of a gleaming new constitution. The good news is the coups get farther and farther apart. The bad is that the most recent coup — bloodless and fairly happy — happened this week.
The coups are justified because each elected government proves corrupt and incompetent. (So why don’t we have coups in Canada?) The Thai military goes in with a new broom, or at least a new set of officers from the last time, and usually enjoys, as now, great initial popularity. This wears thin fairly quickly, setting the stage for a new round of public celebration when democracy is restored. That sours, in turn, when the party that wins the election errs on the side of demagoguery, featherbeds to an unconscionable degree, and creates the conditions for another coup.
This pattern is not always strictly followed. When a mistake is made, in the established etiquette, a lot of people get killed. In one case, two generations ago, the army and navy found themselves on opposite sides of both the political spectrum, and Wireless Road. The resulting shoot-out made it perhaps Thailand’s least happy coup.
[..]
The situation is now complicated because in the far south of Thailand, adjoining Malaysia, where the Muslims are concentrated in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, another wave of revolution has come. Southern Thailand is now one of the many bloody fronts in the international “terror war”, where thousands have been killed, both by Islamofascist jihadis, and in police operations. The Western media wrongly describe this as a “separatist movement”, whenas the revolutionists are demanding the same imposition of the Shariah as they do in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Israel, France, and England.
[..]
The outgoing government was elected by “conservative” rural Thailand over the visible sneering of “liberal” Bangkok. The ex-prime minister was using brutal and insensitive methods to discourage the spread of “Islamism” in the south. Bangkok disapproved that sort of thing. The urbane people of that once-fair city, like the urbane people over here, have no alternative in mind, nor any willingness to confront the question. But neither will it go away.
Democracy is a beautiful flower in any garden. But in Thailand as elsewhere it does not survive, unless the beneficiaries have the guts to do the necessarily unpleasant weeding.
For insightful background info on the events in Thailand, have a read of Zachary Abuza’s piece in The National Interest: “A Coup in the Making? Expert in Bangkok says Autumn had been Dawning on the Thai Patriarch”
Now some famous last words. Last Monday, the day before the coup, Thaksin Shinawatra, (then) prime minister of Thailand, was answering some questions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (via Carolyn O’Hara of Foreign Policy):
Q: In your vision of a Thai democracy, who provides the check and balances on the military and security class?
THAKSIN: The role of military is [decreasing] in terms of involving in politics. So we don’t need a check and balance system on that part anymore because…this is [the] 21st century…[t]he memory is still about the 20th century. This is 21st. I think things [are] changing a lot. Thank you.
Obviously!
Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “U.N. shows why it’s incapable of reform”
His speech was mostly a lot of run-of-the-mill kook boilerplate — the U.N. is a stooge of the Great Satan (if only), America started the Israel-Hezbollah war (whatever) — but he wound up the usual shtick with a prayer for the return of the Twelfth Imam, the so-called “Hidden Imam” — or, as the Iranian president put it: “the perfect, righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet.”
This isn’t just some cockamamie pie-in-the-sky deal. Last year, Ahmadinejad told the Indian foreign minister that everything would be hunky-dory in two years’ time, which the minister took to mean when Iran’s nukes would be ready to fly. But, as the president went on to explain, that’s apparently the Twelfth Imam’s ETA.
[..]
The annals of human history are filled with millennial cultists of one form or another but ours is the first era in which they have the capability to live up to their sandwich boards. President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system: “The end is nigh” is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh.
What to do? Alan Dershowitz is a big liberal but he’s a sane liberal and, unlike many of his chums, he acknowledges the threat. So what’s his big idea?
He thinks Iran should be expelled from the United Nations.
Yeah, right. There’s more chance of the Twelfth Imam eloping with Paris Hilton.
Iran’s president was a huge hit at the U.N. Short of bringing out some burqa-clad Rockettes and doing a couple of choruses of “This Is the Dawning of the Age of a Scary Us,” he couldn’t have been a bigger smash. I said a year or two back, apropos the U.N., that it’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and blend it with a quart of dog poop the result will taste more like the latter than the former. And last week’s performances at the General Assembly were a fine illustration of that. Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez were the star finalists of “UnAmerican Idol,” and, just when you need Simon Cowell, the only Brit in sight was the oleaginous Mark Malloch Brown, Kofi Annan’s deputy, fawning over every crazy in town. The rest of the bigwigs reacted like Paula Abdul, able to discern good points even in fellows who boast about not having any. That’s the reality the Dershowitzes refuse to confront: that structurally the U.N. enables thugs to punch above their weight.
Washington Post’s David Ignatius: “Ahmadinejad’s Gauntlet”
Ahmadinejad’s confidence was the overriding theme of his visit. He was like a picador, deftly sticking darts into a wounded bull. As he moved from event to event — TV and print interviews, a chat with the august Council on Foreign Relations, his lecture to the U.N. General Assembly — he displayed the same flinty composure. It sometimes seemed as if he owned New York, dispensing his radical bromides like a tidy, compact version of Fidel Castro. I sensed the same certainty that was expressed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini back when this confrontation began in the late 1970s: “America cannot do a damn thing.”
[..]
An interview with Ahmadinejad is an intellectual ping-pong match. He bounces back each question with one of his own: Ask about Hezbollah’s attacks, and he asks about Israel’s attacks. Question his defiance of the United Nations, and he shifts to America’s defiance of the world body. In more than an hour of conversation with me and Lally Weymouth of Newsweek, he didn’t deviate from his script. Indeed, some of his comments in the interview were repeated almost word for word when he addressed the General Assembly a few hours later. This is a man adept at message control.
Stephen Johnson in the National Review: “Trash Talk at the U.N.” Chavez’s delusion.
To close neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, Chávez’s agenda is regional. Interviewed by Michael Shifter in the Washington Post last June, Peruvian President-elect Alan García said, “Chávez is using his millions of dollars to try and extend influence in the Andean countries, first Bolivia, now cloning a comandante in Peru [rival presidential candidate Ollanta Humala], then Ecuador, to surround Colombia, where he sees U.S. imperialism as strongest in Latin America.”
But when he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly this week, President Chávez made it clear that his objective is to lead a global coalition to confront the United States. To do that, he must build an empire of his own. With improvised oil alliances, he seeks to turn a commodity into a strategic political tool. Through arms purchases, he hopes to shore up his own strength and supply neighboring guerrilla movements. In multilateral forums, he proposes to remake institutions to suit his purposes.
The Wall Street Journal: “U.N. Charades” After the Shiite bomb, a nuke for Sunni Egypt?
The conclusion is hard to resist that the U.N. effort is really about persuading America that it can “live with” an Iranian bomb, just as it lives with a Pakistani bomb, because the costs of economic sanctions or military strikes are supposedly prohibitive. But a glimpse of what the world will look like if Iran succeeds was provided on Tuesday by Gamal Mubarak, the son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Cairo’s heir apparent floated a proposal for Egypt to develop its own nuclear programs, clearly a signal that the largest Sunni Arab country will go nuclear itself to prevent Shiite Iran from dominating the region. And where Egypt goes, Saudi Arabia and Turkey cannot be far behind. Is the international system really prepared to live with five, maybe six, nuclear powers in the Middle East?
The media portrayed this week’s U.N. speeches as a soap opera showdown between Mr. Bush and his adversaries. But in the matter of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it is not only the Middle East that is at risk, but the U.N., which is why Messrs. Chávez and Ahmadinejad felt so free to mock its evident failures.
Trudy Rubin for the Philladelphia Inquirer: “Razzing Bush, but offering… what?” The harshest critics at the United Nations represent leadership options that are not a better alternative.
I think the U.N. sideshow revealed how much leaders such as Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir have been emboldened by America’s troubles in Iraq. Those troubles convey the growing sense among America’s adversaries that the world’s sole superpower is on the ropes.
“The reason [for the defiance at the United Nations] was one-third Bush and two-thirds Iraq,” said one of the smartest political analysts I know, Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Things would be different if we were winning in Iraq.”
But we are not, and that reality underlay the uneasy drama at the United Nations. President Bush’s calls for promoting Mideast democracy seemed lame and overtaken by events.
Yet what was most disturbing about the U.N. drama is the picture it painted of a world order in which American leadership has faltered. Whatever one’s criticisms of President Bush, his three defamers at the United Nations presented no desirable alternative to U.S. dominance. The modes of government they represent spell disaster for those who follow them:
Think theocracy for Iran, populist authoritarianism for Venezuela, and ethnic genocide for Sudan.
This week’s Opinion and Comment round up is broken up over several posts. This first post continues on the main theme of last week’s round up – Pope Benedict XVI’s speech and the reaction in the Islamic world. And the reaction to the reaction, in Dar Al-Harb.
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal: “Hosni Mubarak Should Call Benedict XVI”
It is being widely said, mainly among his expectable Western critics, that the quotation from Manuel II Paleologus was a “mistake.” Really? I’d say Benedict is right about where he hoped to be after Regensburg: The whole world saying that a serious conversation between the pope and Islam is necessary. My guess is Benedict would clear his calendar if the Muslim Arab leadership said it is ready to talk. And the talk won’t be about who meant what in the 14th century. It will be about the here and now.
The pope has a Muslim problem all right. It is the hammering that Christian communities have been taking for years and are getting now in Islamic countries all over the world, but especially in the Middle East.
Laurent Murawiec, in the National Review: “The Wisdom of Benedict XVI”
Contrary to the naïve souls of unbounded cleverness, the pope is not trying to be nice, or to “sell” his doctrine like a Madison Avenue salesman. The dialogue he reports on takes place “in the winter barracks near Ankara.” There is a war going on. It is not a war “on terror,” it is a war on jihad and an Islam that has, for all practical purposes, thrown its lot with the jihadis, or at least never clearly and practically distanced itself from jihad. The emperor wrote the dialogue “during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402.” Ideas have consequences. The denial of human reason and the denial of faith go hand in hand to promote inhumanity. The West cannot defend itself if it believes in nothing. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature,” Benedict XVI reminds us — but what is Al Jazeera doing when it gleefully airs mass consumption snuff movies of jihadis beheading “infidels”? Jihad is the pathology of religion just as Nazism and Bolshevism were the pathologies of reason and modernity.
Michael Cook on MercatorNet.com: “A jihad on secularism”
Benedict has fired a warning shot across the bow of the Enlightenment Project, but its crew was asleep.
What cryptic message was Benedict sending when he bookended his speech with allusions to an obscure and tendentious dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian sage?
The pundits say that he was rebuking Islam for attempting to win converts with swords and suicide bombers. Obviously, but he had a more ambitious goal as well: to persuade thoughtful Muslims that the ravages of modernity and terrorist violence ultimately spring from the same root -– a stunted understanding of the scope of human reason. The terrorists, Benedict suggests, believe in “a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God.” Similarly, followers of the Enlightenment assert that one can say nothing meaningful about God and nothing certain about morality.
What is the solution? “The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur”: an inspiring goal indeed. Whether Benedict has come in time to rescue reason from its tormenters is another thing. I hope so.
MercatorNet also have a couple of other interesting items in their “FOCUS ON THE POPE’S SPEECH” series:
“How Joseph Ratzinger sees Islam”, by Samir Khalil Samir:
Pope Benedict’s record shows that he wants dialogue with the Islamic world – not about theology but about basic human values and freedoms.
and
“Islam’s eclipse of reason”, by Robert Reilly:
Islam has had its prophets of reason, but they were suppressed during the Dark Ages
Paul Kelly in The Australian: “Live by the word, die by the word”
The Catholic church has highlighted Islam’s linkage of religion with violence.
THE contentious speech by Benedict XVI and the statement by Australia’s George Pell signal a decisive change of attitude in the complex debate over the connection between Islam and violence. In his muscular statement this week, the Cardinal did more than defend the Pope. He did more than lament the Muslim violence directed against the Pope and the Catholic Church.
The essence of Pell’s statement was that such violence demonstrated one of the Pope’s main fears: that for many Islamists there is a link between religion and violence. This is an inflammatory subject that many opinion makers want to keep off the agenda.
[..]
The Pope and Pell articulate an emerging Catholic view about Islam. They believe the core issues are not being confronted: the link between Islam and the state and between Islam and violence. The test is whether Islam accepts religious tolerance and whether it rejects violence. They believe Islamic doctrine and practice in parts of the world today demands such a discussion.
[..]
The heart of Pell’s argument is that religion is a pivotal influence on the behaviour of Muslims. The idea that religion may shape personal behaviour is a revolutionary idea in today’s secular West. Yet how else can Islam be comprehended?
If religion is a pivotal influence, then a religious debate is essential. This is what the Pope and Pell want: a religious debate with Muslims about the meaning of Islam. This is also a revolutionary notion today because Western progressive secularism is either hostile to religion or not interested in religion. As a consequence, progressive secularists deal with Muslims on every basis except the meaning of their religion. Slight problem.
Pell lists the questions that need to be addressed. In so doing he recognises that the way Muslims see their religion is important for Australia’s future. How do they interpret the Koran? What are their views about its invocations to violence? How does Islam relate to the secular state? Will Muslim majorities in Europe, when they arrive, follow Mohammed’s dictum and introduce Islamic laws? Any such dialogue, according to Pell, proceeds on the admission that every faith, including Christianity, has crimes in its past.
Mark Durie also in The Australian: “Creed of the sword”
Islam has to accept that its militants find support for violence in their faith’s teachings and should pursue reform.
..
Islam has not yet come to a consensus about how Muslims should conduct themselves under non-Muslim rule. There is no consensus that a just war should not be conceived in sacralised terms as a jihad.
There is no consensus that the earlier, more peaceful verses of the Koran take priority over the later, more violent ones. There is no consensus that the old program of military expansion should not be resumed if and when it becomes practical to do so. There is no consensus that non-Muslims should be allowed to discuss the Koran and the life of Mohammed without becoming the target of intimidation, and subjected to accusations of ignorance, incompetence or racism.
The Muslim world is incredibly diverse and such a consensus may never be developed. Nevertheless it must be attempted. The important work to achieve this consensus is under way, but it remains to be completed, and any debate that can hasten the development of a less sacralised approach to the use of force within Islam deserves everyone’s whole-hearted support.
Charles Krauthammer in the Philladelphia Enquirer: “Tolerance: A Two-Way Street”
Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It’s hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.
Today’s Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:
– In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
– In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells a demonstration at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.
– In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun working in a children’s hospital.
“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.
[..]
Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act — rather than the charge — of forced conversion?
Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik ‘Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews “apes and pigs”? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that, “Someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one third of a trinity. … Don’t you hate the faith of such a polytheist?”
Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Dr. Ali Gum’a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against “the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers … who prepare (Passover) matzos from human blood”?
The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin Shura Council in Iraq declares that it “will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the ‘jizya’ (head) tax, then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword.” This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.
As I said. No sense of irony.
NY Post Editorial: “The absent Apologies”
Are apologies still in order?
Yes – but not from the pope.
We have yet to hear an apology from anyone in the Muslim world for:
* The horrific murder of Sister Leonella Sgorbatti, a 65-year-old Italian nun gunned down with her bodyguard outside her pediatric hospital in Somalia. The killing is believed to have been a reaction to Benedict’s remarks.
* The violent desecration of seven Catholic churches in the West Bank and Gaza by Palestinian Muslims.
* Overheated responses that have seen Benedict compared to Hitler and Stalin, burned in effigy and targeted for arrest by the religious affairs ministry in Turkey, where he is set to visit.
Dialogue is a two-way street: Pope Benedict has more than demonstrated his willingness to address his critics’ concerns.
If further apologies are called for, they need to be made to the pontiff.
Not by him.
Denis Boyles takes a look at how the press handled the whole affair in the National Review: “The Pope, Faith, and Reason”:
In the hands of the press, it was more like Will and Grace.
and L. Brent Bozell III makes some further observations on the media: “Media’s ‘victim religion’
There are moments where it becomes painfully apparent that the media elites think that the only thing redeeming about Western culture is its ability to regret its existence. Their dream president is a lip-biting man from Arkansas, traveling the globe apologizing for every historic fault, real or imagined, America has ever committed.
This was exactly their mentality with Pope Benedict XVI over his remarks at the University of Regensburg. One wonders if any of his critics had bothered to read his address, the theme of which was the inseparability of faith and reason.
A woman who worked for a contractor in Iraq recounts the untold story of the reconstruction effort and how this story was and is completely ignored by the MSM (via Gates of Vienna):
It’s difficult to accept feeling lied about when you are unable to do anything to correct it. It’s hard to feel unappreciated and unvalued when you have lost much while accomplishing sincerely worthwhile goals. But most of all, it is hard to accept profane vanity raising itself into the spotlight as it shuns the sweat, the courage and the lost lives of the more deserving. It makes you feel disrespected at a very deep level.
One (among many) aspect of Islam that non-Muslims continually get confused by, with more than a little help from Muslims themselves, is the concept of jihad. If you ask a Muslim what jihad means you will at best get a definition particular to that person’s brand of Islam or at worst barefaced taqiya aimed at placating the suspicions of an infidel. And as each Muslim believes, similarly to adherents of other religions, that their particular brand of Islam is the one true faith they will discount any other possible definitions of the term as “misundertanding”, “misintepretation” or “innovation”. I have seen internet forum debates on the subject between Muslims get as heated as any one may expect between a “true believer” and an infidel.
Any dialogue between Islam and the West inevitably hits this bump, often pivotal to the “you don’t understand Islam so you can’t make judgements on it” maneuvre, as the response to Popes Benedict’s comments has shown (for example). No fair discussion can continue past that point without a proper understanding of the various common meanings of the term, and thus some guidance past the common diversions offered. A recent paper from the Center on Islam, Democracy, and the future of the Muslim World contains an objective and well-rounded discussion of the various meanings of jihad and I reproduce the relevant section below. The paper was titled “Jihad ideology in light of contemporary fatwas”.
You can find the full paper here (PDF). It includes references for all the quotes below.
“What is Jihad and whose duty is it” (P. 7 – 10)
Three of the most common approaches to jihad in Islamic writings, ranging from the radical to the more moderate, include the following:
- The radical definition, according to which jihad is only a military (physical) conflict between the Muslims and the kuffar. This is the most common understanding of the term and it is deeply embedded in orthodox islamic interpretations and traditions.
- A conservative definition, according to which jihad is the struggle against heresy (kufr) and the kuffar in general. This struggle does not necessarily have to be military, and it may have various manifestations, among them preaching (da’awah). This approach acknowledges the existence of a duty of jihad in Islam but finds in traditional fiqh legal justification to put it in abeyance.
- A modernist (and—to some extent a mystic Sufi) definition, which relies on linguistic analysis of the word jihad (jahada—“to strive”), to divest it of its military connotation.18 According to this definition, jihad is the self exertion” of a Muslim to discipline his own soul, to improve one’s faith and to refrain from combat, his own evil inclination. To support this definition, a hadith is quoted, according to which the Prophet greeted soldiers on their return from war and told them that now they have returned from the “lesser jihad” (war) to the “greater jihad” which is the jihad against one’s own evil inclination.
The argument in contemporary fatwas for defining jihad solely as a military struggle is based on:19
- The duty to emulate the Prophet and his companions; the Prophet “strove” in military jihad most of his later life and therefore it is worthy of a Muslim to imitate this behavior.
- The explicit statements in the Qur’an (2:216) that “Fighting is enjoined on you and it is an object of dislike to you and there may be that you dislike a thing and it is good for you… Allah knows best.” And (8:39), “fight them until there is not more fitnah and the religion will be for Allah alone.” These verses are interpreted as a clear command to fight in a jihad, whenever possible.
- Disproving of the authenticity of the hadith on the “lesser jihad” and the “greater jihad.”
According to this viewpoint, not only is jihad a duty, but at least under the present circumstances it may only take the form of a Military jihad, and cannot be interpreted as a spiritual struggle. Furthermore, military jihad—and of course martyrdom— has added both spiritual and temporal value. It “implies all kinds of worship, both in its inner and outer forms. More than any other act it implies love and devotion for Allah, trust in Him, the surrender of one’s life and property to Him, patience, asceticism, remembrance of Allah and all kinds of other acts [of worship]. And the individual or community that participates in it finds itself between two blissful outcomes: either victory and triumph or martyrdom and Paradise.”20 [TOD: quote is from the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who is, according to Wikipedia, the "primary intellectual source of the Wahhabi movement", revered by modern Salafists ]
A second position, found among many mainstream scholars affiliated with Islamic establishments, defines jihad as a struggle against heresy (kufr) in general, and not a military struggle against the heretics. These scholars tend to emphasize the spiritual interpretation of jihad and its implementation mainly through da’awah, and to play down its military connotations. The proofs brought to support this argument include:
- The verse in the Qur’an which calls to “strive (jihad) against the disbelievers and the hypocrites (munfaiqin);” since the “hypocrites” are Muslims, and a Muslim cannot wage a military jihad against another Muslim,
it is construed to mean that the striving in this case cannot be in the form of war (qital).21- A “historic” argument that the only way to spread Islam in the time of the Prophet was through the sword. Today, however, there are many other ways to spread Islam, through da’awah—via the mass media, internet etc. An extreme example of this argument is that the concept of jihad was relevant in the 7th century and is not relevant in the modern world. However, such an argument runs the risk of contradicting the basic principle of the timelessness of the Prophet’s messages.
- A practical argument based on the relative weakness of the Muslims and the harm that will be caused to the Muslim Ummah if it wages a military jihad against the rest of the world.
If jihad is by definition a military conflict, the question remains whether a specific conflict warrants being defined as a jihad. The definition of a conflict as a jihad necessitates further rulings: is participation in the jihad a duty, or only recommended? Or is it a duty for some and recommended for others? Is it a sin to refrain from participation of any sort in a jihad?
Islamic legal sources distinguish between two types of jihad, according to the conditions which initiate them and the nature of the enemy:
- The “offensive jihad” (jihad taleb) is a “collective duty” (fard kifaya) of the community of Muslims to pursue the infidels into their own lands, to call upon them to accept Islam and to fight them if they do not accept. It can only be implemented under the command of an Islamic Ruler—the Caliph—who appoints believers to guard the borders and sends out an army at least once (some say twice) a year. As long as the Caliph has appointed Muslims to perform this duty, it is fulfilled and it is not incumbent on the rest of the Muslims in the community.
- The “defensive jihad” (jihad dafe’) is an individual duty (fard ‘ein) for all Muslims to defend Muslim lands when the infidels prepare to attack them or when they attack and occupy them or when Muslims come into proximity of infidels on the battlefield. In contrast to the former, this is an individual duty. As such, it is no less a religious imperative than the other five “pillars” of Islam: the statement of belief—Shahadah, prayer, fasting, charity and Haj. It becomes a de facto (and in the eyes of some a de jure) “sixth pillar;” a Muslim who does not perform it will not inherit Paradise.
A number of seminal tracts and fatwas by various radical scholars and leaders have put forth a cogent case that a defensive jihad exists and is an individual duty. This argument is echoed in many later fatwas. The argument for declaring the existence of a “defensive” jihad derives from the “irreversibility” of the Islamic identity of Muslim lands. Just as individual Muslims cannot convert (or even revert) to any other faith, any land which had once been under the sway of Islamic law may not be controlled by any other law. In the case that a land once controlled by Islamic law does come under control of another faith, it becomes the “individual duty” (fard ‘ein) of all Muslims in the land to fight a jihad to liberate it. If they do not succeed, it becomes incumbent on any Muslim in a certain perimeter from that land to join the jihad and so forth. There
is in Islamic law no statute of limitations on a land being “Islamic;” the longer the “occupation” of a given land is in place, the greater the duty of the Muslims to liberate it; Andalusia (Spain) is as much an “occupied” Muslim land as Palestine.Most contemporary fatwas on jihad agree that jihad becomes an individual duty incumbent on any sane and healthy adult male Muslim who has reached the age of puberty, under the following circumstances:
- When a Muslim ruler commands someone to fight—the command of the ruler, when directed to the individual, becomes an individual religious duty which may not be shirked.
- When facing the enemy in battle—the Qur’an is ambivalent on the issue of retreat in the face of superior enemy force; at first it forbids retreat entirely, except for tactical retreat, and later allows retreat in the face of a tenfold superiority of the enemy and finally two to one. The traditional reasoning is that the act of jihad is, by definition, an act of faith in Allah; by fighting a weaker or equal enemy, the Muslim is relying on his own strength and not on Allah, whereas, by entering the fray against all odds, the “mujahed’ is proving his utter faith in Allah and will be rewarded accordingly.
- When a country in which Muslims live is attacked by kuffar.
An interesting aside to the subjext is Andrew Bostom’s essay “Sufi Jihad”. It contains the following quote from the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali, described by the Islamic scholar W.M. Watt as “the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, and … by no means unworthy of that dignity”:
[O]ne must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year…one may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims] when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…If a person of the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book – primarily Jews and Christians] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked…One may cut down their trees…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need…
[T]he dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle…Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]…on offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]… They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells…their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle [-work] is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths…[dhimmis] must hold their tongue….
For an example of an honest modern (Shiite) example see the TV interviews with Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini Al-Baghdadi, from May 2006, translated by MEMRI TV, in one of which he states:
Jihad in Islam, from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, is of two types: Jihad initiated by the Muslims, which means raiding the world in order to spread the word that “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah” throughout the world. But this raid will not materialize in our era – the era of barbaric American capitalistic globalism -unless the Infallible, peace be upon him, is present.
But there are jurisprudents, both Sunnis and Twelver Shiites, who said the presence of the Infallible is not a prerequisite. If the objective and subjective circumstances materialize, and there are soldiers, weapons, and money – even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial weapons – we will conquer the world, so that “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah” will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris.
[...]
But as for defensive Jihad – it is not conditional upon turning to a Sunni or Shiite jurisprudent, to a source of authority, any Islamic school of thought, or Islamic party, because this type of Jihad is an individual duty. Everyone must fight – children, women, the elderly, the youth in order to liberate man, to liberate mankind, in order to liberate Palestine in its entirety, in order to liberate Iraq from the American-Zionist-British presence.