The day after the revolution: A report from Gaza

Via the New York Times:

This packed, impoverished coastal strip had a postrevolutionary feel on Friday: the green flag of Hamas, victor over Fatah in what amounted to a five-day civil war, flew over public buildings where once the multicolored Palestinian one had been.

So how are Gazans reacting to the Hamas victory?

“These are the darkest days of my life,” said Ahmad Sawafiri, 47, a taxi driver. “What comes after all of this?

“We went backward 100 years.”

Mr. Sawafiri stood in a disgusted crowd in Gaza City watching looters strip the sumptuous villa of Muhammad Dahlan, a former Fatah security chief and bitter rival of Hamas, who was not in Gaza.

It was, for many Palestinians, a confusing and unaccustomed sight: black-hooded and normally disciplined Hamas fighters, seemingly driven by devotion to God, stripping away chandeliers, carpets, a bathtub — earthly goods but also symbols of what many see as Fatah’s corruption and excess. After the fighters left, poor people with donkey carts arrived, sweeping up stray bits of wood and metal and even uprooting the dapper Mr. Dahlan’s garden plants.

“I will explain it to you,” said one looter, Mazen Qasas, a vendor. “I am 34. I am married. I have six children. I am looking for a lamp, anything I can sell or use for my poor house. We are very poor. This is public property. These are corrupt people,” he said, referring to Fatah leaders. “They took everything.”

Abu Muhammad Ashor, a 33-year-old policeman who until recently supported Fatah, looked with amazement and anger at the fine beige tiles that lined Mr. Dahlan’s living room. “Look at these tiles,” he said. “With these tiles, we all could have bread every day.”

Read the rest of the article to get a sense for how the neighbors - and the U.S. - were reacting, not to mention the deposed Palestinian Authority now fighting to maintain control in the West Bank.

If you think some Westerners have a bad case of Islamophobia

How would you characterize the perpetrators of all the mosque bombings in Iraq?

What made me think of this was the New York Times report that a second Sunni mosque in Basra was blown up today. While this does seem to be in retaliation for the Samarra mosque bombing Wednesday, there doesn't seem to be any end in sight for these kind of sectarian reprisals.

If mosques are the problem some "Islamophobes" contend them to be, at the rate they're going in Iraq, it does seem they won't be a problem there much longer.

I wonder when Iraqis are going to have to ask themselves what all this terror and destruction implies about their faith.

I know that for onlookers, the message seems pretty clear. I mean at what point does all this destruction being carried out in the name of Islam not reflect badly on the religion itself?

While some will surely cling to what they say are the tenets that prohibit such actions, others including today's adherents are going to end up judging Islam itself by these kinds of actions.

Memo to mosque bombers: It's not just the other guy's building you are destroying here.

As the NYT puts process over substance it seems to miss the real story

The New York Times ran a pretty abbreviated report on the British terror trial that resulted in sentences totaling 136 years for the seven men convicted of planning, as the Times put it, "spectacular attacks in the United States and Britain."

In the Times presentation of this story, the really interesting aspect of this case seems to be that it raised "a fiery debate in Britain over whether the period of permissible detention without charge for terrorism suspects should be extended from 28 to 90 days" as most of the evidence presented at the trial came from the investigation after the men were arrested. As the Times summarized the police side of this debate: "Modern terrorism investigations need much more time to permit the police to carry out complicated investigations that require advanced code-breaking and language skills across international frontiers."

Consistent with the Times interest in process over substance then, missing from its account were any substantive details of the various plots, the motives of the men, or how these seven individuals came together in the first place.

So to get at that information, I went to the Telegraph.

As to the specifics of the plots, here is what this London newspaper reported:

[Dhiren] Barot, 34, [the mastermind,] spent a year researching and drawing up a 39-page document that he presented to senior al-Qa'eda planners in April 2004. It contained a number of potentially devastating ideas.

The "Gas Limos Project" proposed packing limousines with propane gas cylinders and driving them into underground car parks beneath targets. Police were unable to identify definite targets but found a list of railway stations and hotels in central London.

Barot also proposed a radioactive "dirty bomb", hijacking a train and blowing up a petrol tanker in a series of co-ordinated attacks. The plans had also suggested attacking Tube trains under the Thames, to flood the tunnel, and the Heathrow Express

As part of a previous plan to attack financial institutions in Washington and New York, Barot - a Hindu convert to Islam - had made a video in which one of the terrorists could be heard making the sound of a mock explosion at the World Trade Centre, five months before the September 11 attacks.

The gang had planned to blow up Tube trains under the Thames

Police also found a list a potential hotel targets in central London, including the Savoy, the Churchill InterContinental, the Berkeley, the Hyatt Carlton Tower and the Marriott at Marble Arch. The gang had researched details of entry points and underground car parks.

There was also discussion about using a radioactive dirty bomb to "close off an area the size of Manhattan'', though there was little evidence that they could acquire the radioactive material needed.

In a sidebar, the Telegraph provides some background on the ringleader, Barot:

Born a Hindu in the city of Baroda in the North West Indian state of Gujarat, the son of a banker from Nairobi, Kenya and an Indian mother, his parents fled the worsening political situation in East Africa in 1972, when Dhiren was a year old.

Manu Barot and his wife Bhartia arrived in Britain with Dhiren and his older sister, and moved into a 1930s semi-detached home in a cul-de-sac in the suburb of Kingsbury, Northwest London where Manu worked as a storeman at a local engineering factory and his wife worked at the local Sainsbury supermarket.

Barot was reportedly an "average student" whose highest level of educational attainment was a certificate in pre-vocational education from a local technical college. As the Telegraph continues:

Soon afterwards he converted to Islam, causing a rift with his father, and began attending prayer meetings at Willesden Library, run by the radical cleric Abdullah el-Faisal and at Finsbury Park Mosque run by Abu Hamza.

He worked in a series of hotels before taking a job as a booking clerk for Air Malta in Piccadilly, central London, leaving in September 1995 to go travelling.

Barot flew to Karachi in Pakistan and traveled from there to Kashmir where Muslims and Hindus had been involved in decades of fighting over the disputed territory.

There, he said, he "witnessed a side of Islam which cannot be found in classrooms."

He took extensive notes about the weapons and explosives and moved to Afghanistan where he spent a year working as a trainer in one of the camps for Islamic fighters.

It was probably during that time that he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and became involved with al-Qaeda, where according to US sources, he gained the nick name Esa al-Britani and Esa al-Hindi.

In September 1999 he traveled to the Philippines where he was trained in firearms, munitions and explosives handling.

He traveled to Karachi in January 2000 and from there to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard Walid bin Attash, known as "Khallad".

American intelligence sources believe he met the al-Qa’eda planner Hambali in Kuala Lumpur just as the September 11 attacks were being finalised.

It is also possible that he met two of the men who were to become hijackers on September 11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were meeting with Hambali in Kuala Lumpur around the same time.

In March 2001 Barot visited New York to look at potential targets.

The information was so detailed that it amounted to a virtual structural survey concentrating on how explosions could bring the buildings down but they were put on hold after September 11.

American supergrass Mohammed Junaid Babar said Barot called a summit in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan in March 2003, shortly after the arrest of several senior al-Qa’eda figures.

His British plans were probably presented to senior al-Qa’eda commanders when Barot flew to Lahore in Pakistan in February 2004.

He returned to Britain on April 21 using a false passport after apparently receiving the go-ahead.

In other words, this group wasn't just a bunch of al Qaeda wannabes operating alone over there in England. Barot was working directly with KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, as well as other al Qaeda leaders, for example the men he called to a meeting in South Waziristan in March 2003, after KSM was arrested.

Now as to why the New York Times didn't think these details were interesting, well, I guess for the same reason they thought recent news of the JFK plotters' arrests wasn't Page One material either.

Anyway, the Telegraph also provides some interesting biographical details on the men. They ranged in age from 23 to 34.

One, Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 27, had an engineering degree from Brunel University, the same school attended by two members of the fertilizer gang, another sleeper cell apprehended in Britain. This engineer's primary role in the plot, incidentally, seems to have been to chauffeur the C-student- Barot - around. Oh how his parents must cringe at reading that detail.

Zia ul-Haq, 28, also had a professional degree, his in architecture. But perhaps his parents can take some pride in the fact that at least their son seems to have gotten some respect from the ringleader, for whom, the Telegraph goes on to say, he "acted as a kind of consultant...and helped him gain access to specialist libraries."

The youngest member of the group, Omar Abdur Rehman, 23, also had promising career prospects. A graphic information design candidate, his contribution to the plot was to perform reconnaissance at the Ramada Hotel in Watford where he had a summer job to see how it would size up as a target.

In a sidebar analysis to the Telegraph story Philip Johnston provides these details on how these men met each other and how the police came to find them:

[Barot] recruited his terrorist cell - basically a support network - from among people he met at mosques and political meetings in Britain. Most were of Pakistani background and some had already been to training camps there, another constant in these plots.

Police and MI5 believe Barot was within six weeks of launching attacks in London. But he was detained only after police in Pakistan arrested a leading al-Qa'eda operative whose computer contained details of Barot's activities.

How many more ''sleeper'' cells are there?

I wonder when these war crimes will be prosecuted

Here's some of what went on in the battle for Gaza according to the Economist:

Ordinary Gazans have been sickened by the violence, which has included kneecappings, summary executions and throwing handcuffed captives off tall buildings. But when a group of them sallied out to protest in the streets and call for calm, they too came under lethal fire.

So now that Hamas has taken control, we'll no doubt be seeing them tracking down and trying everyone who committed such war crimes. Because when you're running a state, gentlemen, that's what you have to do: Clean up your act and everyone else's too. And good luck with this new task you've just seized for yourselves.

And let's hope your outside funding depends on your doing the right thing going forward. Because even if you were elected to power - or had to seize it - or whatever - the cost of dysfunctional statehood is that in the end, it's your outside bankers who get to call the shots.

So my advice would be to focus on the economy. Do what you have to do to achieve financial independence. And as you build up your treasury with your own enterprise, you might even find that the road to peace and Palestinian independence doesn't pass through Jerusalem at all.

Interesting War on Terror statistics

Check out related analysis at Americas North Shore Journal.

Another sign that the Taliban is desperate?

Somehow I can't believe that having to recruit children is a sign of strength.

Anyway, that is my reaction to yesterday's BBC report from Tank, Pakistan, that "pro-Taleban militants" are trying to get children as young as 11 to go fight their jihad.

Most families in Tank are reportedly too afraid to talk about what is going on a local teacher was prodded to go on the record and this is some of what he said:

"They don't really kidnap the children," says a local teacher. But he is hesitant and thinks his words through.

"The Taleban convince them it is their duty to carry out jihad [holy struggle]." But then he admits what he's left unsaid.

"How much convincing does a child need? ... Especially when promised adventure." The trouble is that in most cases, the "adventure" the Taleban offer usually results in no possibility of return.

"They are being trained as fidayeen," the teacher half whispers. "Fidayeen" literally means "those who sacrifice their lives".

As the BBC goes on to report, what this translates to is that these youngsters are being recruited for suicide missions.

The BBC did ask the obvious question: that is, why the adults in charge don't intervene in this process.

"Do you want me to lose my neck?" one summed up the situation for the reporter. "The Taleban don't ask for permission - they just tell us."

In March, however, some adults did intervene. When the Taliban showed up at a private English school, Oxford High, the students were still taking their exams. The militants were convinced to let the kids finish. By the time the test was over, security forces had been summoned and were able to drive the militants out - at least for a minute.

But the militants are back now and now it seems it is the security forces who are in retreat.

If the adults in Tank live in fear of the militants, the youth in town are more ambivalent. "We are not extremists... we are liberal people," a college physics student told the BBC. "But our identity is Islamic," he added, clarifying his position.

Another student was frustrated by the government's impotence: "They are the ones who should be protecting us," as one told the reporter.

Anyway, it must be fun to raise a family in Tank. One, um, hair-raising adventure.

U.S. sets new rules in favor of terrorists who operate at home

The Editors at the Wall Street Journal are betting that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, that al Qaeda agent al-Marri cannot be detained as an enemy combatant because he wasn't nabbed on any foreign battle field will be overturned on appeal because, well, it's ridiculous.

As the Editors summarize the ruling:

Judges Diane Motz and Roger Gregory, both Bill Clinton nominees, ruled that a person like al-Marri does not qualify as an enemy combatant, because the U.S. cannot be "at war" with a private group like al Qaeda.

For the "enemy combatant" moniker to apply, the court said, a terrorist must have set foot in the soil "alongside" the forces of an enemy state -- i.e., Iraq or Afghanistan. This is odd in itself, since by definition al Qaeda is a transnational organization. In some respects this makes it more of a security threat because there is no government the U.S. can hold responsible for its actions. . .

Judges Motz and Gregory duck these precedents by ruling that al-Marri belongs in a different category, having never taken up arms on a foreign battlefield. He was merely trying to kill us here at home. Al-Marri came to the U.S. on a student visa as part of an al Qaeda "sleeper cell," looking for new opportunities to disrupt the U.S. financial system after September 11. Working for 9/11 honcho Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he posed as a student at Bradley University while plotting. He was arrested for credit card fraud, and as his case worked through the court system, evidence of his al Qaeda affiliation built and he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina.

As the Editors continue, this is what this ruling implies for terrorists:

If you join al Qaeda today, and get your training outside a wartime-environment, any violent acts you commit against the U.S. cannot qualify you as an enemy combatant or subject you to the system of military interrogation. You will instead be prosecuted in the U.S. criminal justice system, which would make any al Qaeda operative's day.

A case against a terrorist suspect would require a level of transparency that could compromise intelligence gathering and possibly the nation's security. Through the discovery process, the terrorist "defendant" would be privy to the sources that compromised him -- sources that would thereby be made obsolete. And don't forget the domestic criminal rules of evidence. You think a lot of cases are dismissed on "technicalities" now?

Dubai, UAE

Dessert, Dubai UAE, originally uploaded by chrisdubai.

Iraqi voter

Iraqi voter, originally uploaded by lakerae.

Notice the tear. See below.

Will the promotion of democracy in the Middle East destabalize the region and destroy us?

Martin Kramer on why democracy should not be pushed in the Middle East:

In urging democracy on the Middle East, its advocates generally argue that the spread of democracy will make the Middle East and the world more secure. The theory goes like this: dictators and authoritarian rulers need an external enemy to justify their grip on power. This makes them unreliable allies and bellicose neighbors. To preserve power, they not only threaten their own people, they directly or indirectly threaten us. As long as this region isn't free, we'll be insecure. My teacher and mentor Bernard Lewis has put it starkly: "We free them or they destroy us."

As he goes on:

But the Middle East is also home to another kind of authoritarian rule. In this kind of system, the regime doesn't rely only on fear, or even primarily on fear. Such regimes don't require an external enemy or perpetual war. To the contrary: the ruler builds a consensus around the status quo, by sharing a bit of power, balancing interests, upholding law, and averting war. These aren't free societies--you can't stand in the town square and say what you want without fear of being arrested. But these aren't "fear societies" and they aren't "republics of fear."

Now in the Middle East, Saddam-style dictatorship, with mass graves and invasions of neighbors, is the exception, not the rule. So is Taliban-style puritanism, based on terrorism at home and abroad. The same is true of the genocidal regime in the Sudan, and the potentially genocidal regime in Iran. Democracy competes not against them, but against this consensual authoritarianism. And the reason democracy is losing that competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.

We musn't be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combatting terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don't threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don't seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

The problematic states in the Middle East, he goes on to argue, are, as he writes:

[The] states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren't democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they've actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don't provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats. What's discouraging is that this isn't true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It's true, for now, in all if them.

As he concludes:

The pro-democracy forces need to show how they'll make their peoples not only freer, but more secure--and how they'll make the rest of us safer.

Some more history

In honor of the victims of communism commemorated yesterday, when President Bush dedicated to them the new Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Washington, the editors at the Wall Street Journal (yes, that capitalist rag) write:

The numbers are almost beyond reckoning. Mao Zedong was responsible for 70 million peacetime murders, according to his biographer Jung Chang. The middle estimate of Stalin's victims is 40 million. Pol Pot slaughtered nearly three million fellow Cambodians in only four years. Ethiopia's Mengistu killed some 1.5 million opponents in the late 1970s, and contributed to the death by starvation of a million others in the 1980s.

Throughout these and other horrors, Communists always managed to find high-profile apologists among the bourgeois intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre for Stalin, Noam Chomsky for Pol Pot, and so on. Some, like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers, repented, but most did not. They may not have been witting accomplices to the butchery, quite. But they are the reason why the West was almost fatally late in recognizing the depth of evil it faced in its communist enemy.

Not by coincidence, yesterday's dedication took place on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, calling on the Soviets to "tear down this wall." Back then, the smart set (and some of his own advisers) said he was a fool for seeking to bring the communist nightmare to an end. Inasmuch as he led the free world in doing so, the memorial is also, inescapably, a tribute to him.

And another report from Baghdad

This one from Melik Kaylan in today's Wall Street Journal:

Among the agonies imposed on Baghdad by tormentors in the guise of self-appointed religious enforcers is the proscription of fun. Novelty, convenience, any kind of post-Quranic ease from hardship infuriates them. Ice cream is an abomination, as is mechanized garbage collection, because such delights didn't exist in the time of the prophet. A story is told that last year, on a road overtaken by jihadis, a DVD purveyor was ordered to close because DVDs didn't exist in the time of the prophet. "Neither did the BMW you drove up in," he responded. "When you come back and tell me again on a camel, then I'll listen." They shot him some days later, for his insolence.

Having set the scene, Malik then goes on to tell of his tour of Baghdad's few art galleries. Here is an excerpt:

Salam opened his [art] gallery in 2004 and closed it in fear, in early 2006, after two employees were killed. It hasn't reopened since. "I invested everything," Salam says. The place remains pristine, perfectly curated with sculptures and paintings in several rooms untouched and unshown for eight months. "This street, there's no embassy; the terrorists run around," he says. "I am just a private project. I wait every day. The terrorists don't like art."

Live from Baghdad: "A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil"

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki writes from Baghdad in today's Wall Street Journal:

War being what it is, the images of Iraq that come America's way are of car bombs and daily explosions. Missing from the coverage are the great, subtle changes our country is undergoing, the birth of new national ideas and values which will in the end impose themselves despite the death and destruction that the terrorists have been hell-bent on inflicting on us. Those who endured the brutality of the former regime, those who saw the outside world avert its gaze from their troubles, know the magnitude of the change that has come to Iraq. A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves. Some of our neighbors have made this struggle more lethal still, they have placed their bets on the forces of terror in pursuit of their own interests.

After explaining some of the difficult policy issues his government faces, he continues:

We have entered into a war, I want it known, against militias that had preyed upon the weakness of the national government and in the absence of law and order in some of our cities, even in some of the districts in Baghdad, imposed their own private laws--laws usually driven by extremism and a spirit of vengeance. Some of these militias presented themselves as defenders of their own respective communities against other militias. We believe that the best way to defeat these militias is to build and enhance the capabilities of our government as a defender of the rights of our citizens. A stable government cannot coexist with these militias.
Our conflict, it should be emphasized time and again, has been fueled by regional powers that have reached into our affairs. Iraq itself is eager to build decent relations with its neighbors. We don't wish to enter into regional entanglements. Our principle concern is to heal our country. We have reached out to those among our neighbors who are worried about the success and example of our democratic experiment, and to others who seem interested in enhancing their regional influence.

Our message has been the same to one and all: We will not permit Iraq to be a battleground for other powers. In the contests and ambitions swirling around Iraq, we are neutral and dedicated to our country's right to prosperity and a new life, inspired by a memory of a time when Baghdad was--as Washington is today--a beacon of enlightenment on which others gazed with admiration. We have come to believe, as Americans who founded your country once believed, that freedom is a precious inheritance. It is never cheap but the price is worth paying if we are to rescue our country.

Memo to allies: Don't get defensive, just clean up

At least that would be my advice.

From the New York Times:

The United States added four Arab allies — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar — to its list of countries with the worst records of preventing people from being sold into the sex trade and servitude. In its annual report on human trafficking, the State Department also added Algeria, Equatorial Guinea and Malaysia to the list of countries with the lowest ranking. The others are Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan and Venezuela. Countries have 90 days to improve their records or face sanctions, including loss of American aid and support for loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The administration can also choose not to impose sanctions.

All I can add is that most of these countries are wealthy enough to to do something about these conditions. So again, my advice would be to simply rectify this before going on the defensive.

What the Al-Marri v. Wright decision really implies

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web sums up wha the Fourth U.S. Circuit court just decided in the Al-Marri v. Wright appeal:

The [court] held yesterday [Monday] that the U.S. lacks the authority to detain as an enemy combatant one Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national and U.S. resident alien who was captured in Peoria, Ill., and found to be "engaged in conduct that constituted hostile and war-like acts, including conduct in preparation for acts of international terrorism."

The U.S. Supreme Court has previously held that U.S. citizens can be held as enemy combatants, including one--Abdullah al-Muhajir, né Jose Padilla--who had been captured in the U.S.

As to why the court decided that Al-Marri's case was different, as Judge Diana Motz wrote:

Al-Marri is not alleged to have been part of a Taliban unit, not alleged to have stood alongside the Taliban or the armed forces of any other enemy nation, not alleged to have been on the battlefield during the war in Afghanistan, not alleged to have even been in Afghanistan during the armed conflict there, and not alleged to have engaged in combat with United States forces anywhere in the world.

In other words, as Taranto points out, he was deemed to be a civilian, entitled to his constitutional protections. But as Taranto goes on to report, not all the Circuit Judges agreed. As Judge Henry Hudson dissented:

Although al-Marri was not personally engaged in armed conflict with U.S. forces, he is the type of stealth warrior used by al Qaeda to perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States. . . . There is little doubt from the evidence that al-Marri was present in the United States to aid and further the hostile and subversive activities of the organization responsible for the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Taranto draws this conclusion:

This makes clear the perversity of the court's reasoning. By its logic, alien terrorists are entitled to all the constitutional rights of civilians provided that they manage to stay out of Afghanistan and do their planning in America. The 9/11 terrorists, had they been caught, would have enjoyed more rights under this scheme than some low-level Taliban foot soldier.

A brief history of communism (but a rather long blog post)

In the NewStatesMan, Robert Service, author of the book Comrades: A World History of Communism, asks why when, as he phrases it, "communism destroyed millions of lives [its] critics are now branded 'neocons.'"

Because he does such a good job of summarizing communism's history (in my amateur opinion), I post the following admittedly long excerpts from his article:

What happened in the October 1917 revolution in Russia was an ideological bank robbery. Its leaders were nothing if not daring. Lenin and his party took over a state and then declared that no other kind of socialism was worthy of the name. They instituted a red terror. They seized hold of an entire economy, persecuted all religious faith, imposed a one-ideology media and treated society as a resource to be mobilised on their whim. These are historical facts that no communist in the 1920s sought to deny. Quite the opposite: the facts were advertised by the Communist International as the only way to do away with "bourgeois rule" and induce the birth of true socialism.

A minority of socialists around the world accepted this case, formed communist parties and joined the Communist International. None of these parties, except for the Mongolian one, stood a serious chance of coming to power until after the Second World War. Geopolitics changed after 1945. The Yugoslav communists had won supremacy in wartime. The Soviet army, being the occupying force elsewhere in eastern Europe, imposed a communist state order east of the river Elbe. In 1949, China experienced a communist military and political take-over. Ten years later, Cuba went the same way.

In doing the research for my book Comrades: A World History of Communism, I tried to find whether there was a basic pattern to the regimes that resulted. The conclusion was a stark one. In all cases of durable state communism, there was some approximation to the Soviet "model". A single party kept itself in power without concern for electoral mandate. A nomenklatura system of personnel appointment was introduced. Religion was harassed. National traditions were emasculated. The rule of law was flouted. The political police was ubiquitous and ruthless; labour camps were established. Foreign travel permits were made hard to come by. Radio and TV broadcasts from abroad were banned. A prim public culture was installed.

This was the pattern despite the many national differences. Popular music in Cuba remained lively and beautiful even though its exponents could not take themselves and their instruments to other countries. In Poland, the Catholic Church was allowed to function in the open. In China, there was some pride - except during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s - in those emperors who had governed a unified nation.

The new communist states, like the Soviet Union before them, undoubtedly engineered rapid industrial growth. The exception was Cambodia under Pol Pot, who emptied the towns of their entire populations. The same states fostered programmes of mass education. They also facilitated the promotion of people who had previously suffered from negative social discrimination. Reading and numeracy flourished. While capitalist economies failed to solve the problems of unemployment, everyone could find work under communism and had access to free health care and cheap housing.

Responding to critics who objected to characterizing communism as totalitarian, because not even a Stalin or a Mao could control every aspect of life, he writes:

Communist states were indisputably very far from a condition of total regulation from above. In fact, they were more chaotic in many ways than are most liberal democracies.
The reasons for this have long been obvious. Liberal democracies, despite all their faults, have lots of advantages. They have a pluralist culture and free media. They have an independent judiciary. They allow competition among political parties. Such features provide mechanisms for the correction of abuse that were largely absent under communist rule. The result is that such democracies have possessed more orderly societies than communist ones. Work discipline was generally poor under communism. Apathy about politics was widespread. Bureaucratic ineffectiveness was rampant.

What is more, it was no coincidence that durable communist states maintained a heavy load of repression. Millions of citizens always wanted things that incurred official disapproval. They hated the disrespect for national traditions, culture and religion; they were attracted by non-communist ideologies. In order to hold on to power, the communists used the secret police and labour camps. Some leaderships were more brutal than others. Life was different under Brezhnev and Andropov from what it had been under Stalin. And Cuba has held a smaller number of political prisoners as a proportion of its population than was true of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, all communist states were dictatorial, and it was no coincidence that they practised radio and TV jamming and made it difficult for their peoples to travel abroad.

The proof of the pudding came in 1989-91 in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The old cultural and political controls were loosened. Free public discussion and organisation were permitted, and in country after country there emerged a challenge to the ruling nomenklatura. Wherever contestable elections were held, the state order of communism fell apart.
Some "revisionists" denied that the savagery of the great terror in the Soviet Union or the cultural revolution in China was attributable to Stalin or Mao. Several of them supported ridiculously low figures for the number of deaths and arrests. There was also an endeavour in some quarters to lay stress on the positive economic and educational achievements of regimes, rather than on the persistent repression.

As he concludes:

The point is that repression was not some aberrant phenomenon under communist rule around the world. It was ideologically condoned in advance; it proved also to be a practical necessity for the consolidation of communist states. Communists from the 1920s through to the 1940s were frank about this: they eulogised dictatorship. Subsequently, they avoided debate on the matter or else contended that they would break with the models provided by historical communist states. They never explained how they would introduce communism except by massive force. The ghosts of the victims of all those bloody purges cry out for us to reject the printed apologias for the communist past.

I the history of communism is relevant to the jihadist and Islamist agenda - which of course is not an original view. Its, um, well neocon, isn't it?

Art from Iran

watercolor portrait, originally uploaded by my paintings.

Watercolor portrait. Exquisite, isn't it?

Syria

Palle alene i verden, originally uploaded by le petit danois.

There are fatwas and there are more fatwas and then there are the ridiculous fatwas

Today's New York Times reports on the number of fatwas now proliferating in Islam - and some of those that have drawn the most attention:

First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

As the Times notes:

For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month.

The controversy in Cairo has been more than just embarrassing. It comes at a time when religious and political leaders say that there is a crisis in Islam because too many fatwas are being issued, and that many of them rely on ideology more than learning.

As the Times continues:

The fatwa is the front line in the theological battle between often opposing worldviews. It is where interpretation meets daily life.

“It is a very critical issue for us,” said Abdullah Megawer, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al Azhar University, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Egypt. “You are explaining God’s message in ways that really affect people’s lives.”. . .

In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. “We have to be clear what is at stake here,” said Egypt’s grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. “When each and every person’s unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.”

I'm sure it must be humiliating for devout Muslims to have these sorts of fatwas grabbing headlines and being ridiculed around the blogosphere.

But perhaps devout Muslims can take comfort in the fact that once this type of mockery was allowed to flourish, it did unleash, at least in the West, an unprecedented period of human achievement.

Now, I duly note that no one can claim to have achieved Paradise on earth. Well, not unless, you are of the view that Afghanistan under the Taliban came close. But then I'm not sure what could be discussed if that really were one of the premises we had to operate on.

F-16 Fighting Falcon

Operation Iraqi Freedom, originally uploaded by rodrigo_bravo_d.

Another species of my favorite bird. This one is indigeneous to the United States.