THE REAL ENEMY OF ARABS AND ISLAM

NOT THE JEWS , NOT THE USA BUT THE HIGHLY CORRUPT , DUBIOUS ARAB SHEIKHS,KINGS,PRESIDENTS AND GENERALS.

THESE ARE THE REAL FIFTH COLUMNISTS WHO ARE ACTUALLY ON THE PAYROLL OF USA,BRITISH AND ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES.

THESE DUBIOUS ARAB SO CALLED LEADERS NEED TO BE ROCKETED FIRST.ONCE THIS IS DONE ISRAEL WILL LAST FOR MORE THAN A WEEK.

A REVOLUTION , A VIOLENT COUP DE TAT IS NEEDED.

Obama’s Team Prepares Escalated Bloodletting-Patrick Martin

Obama’s Team Prepares Escalated Bloodletting

Patrick Martin



(A day after he was sworn in as President, Barack Obama signed orders to close down Guantanamo and end the use of torture in the USA. The world was ecstatic that America may finally be embracing the ‘rule of law’. But the euphoria lasted only two days. On 24 January, President Obama opened his ‘murder account’ as the new Commander in Chief. He ordered Predator strikes in Waziristan that killed 22 Pakistanis in their homes. In Obama’s book, torture is intolerable but slaughter is another matter; it is the use of ‘smart power’. + Usman Khalid + )



By Patrick Martin , 24 January, 2009, WSWS.org



In a series of meetings and public appearances Wednesday and Thursday, and with the first military strikes of his administration, President Barack Obama has given a clear signal that he plans intensified bloodshed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the US escalates its military intervention in Central and South Asia.



Missiles fired from unmanned Predator drones struck two targets inside Pakistan Friday morning, killing at least 18 people. As is always the case with such exercises in remote-controlled murder, US officials claimed they were targeting Al Qaeda, although even US media accounts admitted that the majority of those killed were local residents.



Three missiles struck the village of Zharki in North Waziristan, killing ten people, of whom five were described by US "security sources" as Al Qaeda militants. A few hours later, another missile hit a house in South Waziristan, killing eight people whose identities were not known.



The strikes were the latest in a series of more than two dozen such attacks since last August, and Pentagon officials said they had carried out the attacks under existing authority from the outgoing Bush administration, while keeping the new president fully informed of the action.



The death toll from the missile campaign, according to Pakistani government figures, numbers at least 263 people. Even US government officials claim only a handful of those killed had any ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.



The attacks on sovereign Pakistani territory are blatant violations of international law, which the regime in Islamabad protests verbally, while continuing to accept billions in US subsidies to the country's military.



Obama and his newly confirmed secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, staged what amounted to a political rally at the State Department Thursday, at which they announced the appointment of two new US pro-consuls to the region.

Former senator George Mitchell is to reprise his role from the Clinton administration as the US envoy to the Middle East. Former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The different titles reflect different roles. Mitchell has been given responsibility for reviving and supervising negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as between Israel and neighboring Arab states. His job is strictly diplomatic.



Holbrooke is to work with the US-backed regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the US military command in Kabul, to coordinate joint action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. He is not labelled an "envoy," according to the State Department, because he will have input into military policy as well as diplomacy, and because he will not be negotiating with the Taliban—a rebuff to pleas for such talks by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some European countries.



Clinton called the two appointments "a loud and clear signal ... that our nation is once again capable of demonstrating global leadership." Obama said the two would "convey our seriousness of purpose" in both areas.



Mitchell chaired the negotiations in Northern Ireland that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, under which the IRA disarmed and Irish Republican politicians have joined the provincial government. He later chaired a commission on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose report, delivered in April 2001, was ignored by the incoming Bush administration because it called for a freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank.



Israeli officials, and particularly the right-wing Likud Party, which is favored to win the country's February 10 parliamentary elections, have openly expressed their distrust of Mitchell, who is partially of Lebanese-American ancestry (his mother was a Maronite Christian).



Mitchell's appointment cannot disguise the fundamental policy of US imperialism in the region, which makes use of the Zionist regime as its military spearhead against the Arab masses. Both Obama and Clinton, to whom Mitchell will report, have made clear their support for the 24-day Israeli onslaught on Gaza, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians lost their lives, and over 5,000 were wounded.



The selection of Holbrooke is even more ominous, since he has long served as one of the most ruthless representatives of American imperialism, going all the way back to his early days in the Foreign Service in Vietnam. He came to public notice as the leader of the US diplomatic team at the 1995 talks on the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, held in Dayton, Ohio, that concluded with a US-imposed settlement in the civil war in Bosnia.



In his encouragement of ethnic cleansing by the Croatian regime of Franjo Tudjman, which drove a quarter million Serbs out of the Krajina region of southern Croatia in a 1995 offensive, Holbrooke could deservedly face war crimes charges. He later boasted, in his memoir of the Dayton talks: "Tudjman wanted clarification of the American position. He bluntly asked for my personal views. I indicated my general support for the offensive ... I told Tudjman the offensive had great value to the negotiations. It would be much easier to retain at the table what had been won on the battlefield than to get the Serbs to give up territory they had controlled for several years."



Holbrooke was fully aware at the time of the Dayton talks that the Croatian Army was carrying out atrocities against the Serbs, and was later quoted saying, "We ‘hired' these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control' them. But this is no time to get squeamish about things." He will now seek to find new "junkyard dogs" to do the dirty work of American imperialism in south and central Asia.



In his remarks at the State Department rally, Obama reiterated his concern over what he called a "deteriorating situation" in both Afghanistan and Pakistan," a region that is "the central front" of the struggle against terrorism. This language, echoing George W. Bush's description of Iraq, underscores the new administration's commitment to military subjugation of the Afghan population and wider attacks on the Pakistani population of the border region, largely Pushtun-speaking and linked by tribal ties to the majority Pushtun population in Afghanistan.



Clinton said that Holbrooke's mandate would be to "coordinate across the entire government an effort to achieve United States' strategic goals in the region." These goals have little to do with the remnants of Al Qaeda hiding out in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The real focus of the intervention, under Obama as much as under Bush, is to establish the United States as the principal power in the oil-rich region of Central Asia.



The renewed focus on military problems in Afghanistan was signalled as well by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been retained in his position during the transition from Bush to Obama. He told a press conference Thursday that US goals in Afghanistan had been "too broad and too far into the future. We need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years, in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al-Qaeda, preventing the re-establishment of terrorism."



There is mounting anxiety in the Pentagon over the viability of US supply lines to Afghanistan, especially if the force on the ground is doubled, as Obama plans. Two-thirds of US supplies go through Pakistan and convoys through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan have come under repeated attacks. General David Petraeus, the former Iraq commander who was promoted to head the US Central Command, with responsibility for war planning throughout the region, recently completed a trip through Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan, seeking agreements on expanding US supply shipments through those countries. He reported on his findings to the Obama White House on Wednesday.



According to a report in the New York Times January 22, another major concern of US military authorities in Afghanistan is the strengthening of Taliban influence in the southern provinces around Kandahar, patrolled now mainly by British, Canadian and Dutch troops, who are spread thinly through a vast area.



The Times reporter noted worriedly: "It is perhaps in Kandahar, one of the provincial capitals, where the lack of troops is most evident. About 3,000 Canadian soldiers are assigned to secure the city, home to about 500,000 people. In a recent visit, this reporter travelled the city for five days and did not see a single Canadian soldier on the streets. The lack of troops has allowed the Taliban to mount significant attacks inside the city."++

What else is Yazidiyyat – What Else is Karbala-By Dr. Haider Mehdi

What else is Yazidiyyat – What Else is Karbala!
By Dr. Haider Mehdi

I have known the grief and anguish of the mourners of Karbala (the martyrdom of Imam Hussain) and have emotionally, religiously, spiritually, psychologically, sociologically and politically understood the outpouring of “marsiya- khani” (lamentation commemorating Imam Hussain’s martyrdom) that has continued until today for over 1400 years. I am a Muslim. I am a Shi’a. I have protested all my life against the human savagery in Karbala and my communal participation in “marsiya khani” is an unending transcendental and generational expression of political protest against Yazidiyyat – the ultimate brutality in human spirit for the sake of power, oppression and malevolent domination over others.

Yazidiyyat is a symbol of an obvious barbaric penchant towards human massacre and carnage to satisfy a compulsion to megalomania deeply rooted as a motive in the mentality of those who practice it. It is an intentional process to seek clearly defined objectives – the victims of this doctrine are helpless, innocent and powerless human beings. It is a barbaric creed.

I had never thought in my wildest imagination that I would see, at this stage of human civilization, the doctrine of “Yazidiyyat” so blatantly and so deliberately used against humanity and a “Karbala” witnessed on my TV screen right in front of my eyes in my own living room. But such has been, hopelessly, the reality of the 23-day “Gaza holocaust” and massacre of Palestinians including children, women and men, the young and old, the sick and the starving. And the world remained a spectator during this horrifying human carnage. What else is Yazidiyyat – what else is Karbala?

A knock at a door (Zeitoun, Gaza, January 4th) where the frightened members of an extended family were hiding from Israeli bombardment and ground assault as Attiyah, 46, (husband) and Zinad Samourri, 35, (wife) mother of eight children opened the door, the Israeli soldiers in cold blood shot Attiyah dead and then went on a rampage to massacre the other members of the family in this small hiding place.

“So far dozens of bodies, mostly women, children and elderly, have been recovered, almost all from the same extended family. The 48th corpse – horribly decomposed – was found on Monday but there are fears others lie under the rubble and soil churned up by Israeli armoured vehicles,” reported Tim Butcher of The Telegraph Group of London. Navi Pillay, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights has already called for war crimes investigations against Israel for the massacre that took place in Zeitoun on January 4th and 5th.

The question is: Isn’t this the “holocaust” of the 21st century? Isn’t it Yazidiyyat? Isn’t this the “Karbala” of our times? Should not the entire humanity be protesting, mourning and condemning this savagery, this inhumanity – this kind of approach to a political doctrine explicitly and intentionally espoused by the powerful nations in their conduct of international relations and their horrifying lack of respect for human life other than their own people?

The ultimate irony and human tragedy of the “Gaza holocaust” is that it was planned, executed and supported by an absolute complacency of the outgoing and incoming American administrations and the incumbent British government. The entire West remained silently in cahoots with the Israeli-American-British plan, what the Israeli Zionist Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called “a re-formulation of objective reality” – another addition to the US-Western arsenal of inhumane political doctrines in global politics.

As a human being with enhanced consciousness and advanced awareness of human conditions and as a member of the segment of the contemporary world that wishes to place high value on human life, I had expected that the entire global civilization would turn upside down with anguish, condemn the “Gaza holocaust,” and demand an abrupt cessation to the repressive political creeds of our times. But it did not happen that way.

I had hoped that Barrack Hussain Obama, in his inaugural presidential speech, would have acknowledged Israeli brutality and categorically condemned it. I had hoped that Obama would say something along the lines of repudiation of the past American foreign policy approach to bring transformations to his country’s future direction in global politics. I had hoped that he would say: ‘The massacre of Palestinians has taken place in Gaza under our watch and America and the American people are ashamed of it. I pledge to the Palestinian victims and their families that America will do justice to them now, and my administration will not allow now and ever again such use of brutal military force and political doctrine against any people anywhere in the world. This is my pledge, the pledge of all Americans and I want to assure the entire global community that, as of this moment, America has changed – change has finally come.’ Now that would have been the declaration of a true statesman committed to the fundamental change that Obama has promised to the American voters and the people around the world.

But nothing of the sort was said or promised. Instead Obama did not condemn Israel’s barbarism in Gaza. He later spoke to Mahmoud Abbas and promised “to work with him as partners to establish a durable peace in the region.” But that is the classic repetition of American rhetoric of the past: no substance, no results, no change, no commitment to a policy of fairness to the Palestinian people – the usual political manipulation to continue the status-quo of Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and beyond.

I had hoped that Hilary Clinton would be horrified at Israel’s audacity of placing the new American administration, at the very outset, in a political conundrum and global crisis. I had hoped that Clinton would unleash her anger by recognizing the American part in the “Gaza holocaust.” I had envisioned that, in a reflective mindset pursuing “change” in the US foreign policy doctrine, Clinton would admit and lament that President Bush and Secretary Rice’s last-minute assault on the American image world-wide by collaborating with Israel in its “Gaza holocaust” has brought disaster and shame to the cherished values of freedom, justice, fairness and peace for all people everywhere. I had hoped that she would say that the Gaza massacre is inexcusable – and that the Obama administration apologizes on behalf of the American people. I imagined that she would have assured all people everywhere that this incoming administration had no complicity, role or part in this horrendous act of savagery against an innocent population – and she would commit herself in making sure, by supporting international law and human-rights conventions, that such an outrageous onslaught against any people anywhere will not happen again in the annuals of future human history.

But Clinton did not commit herself to any “change” in the US foreign-policy doctrine of status-quo. What she said was alarmingly resonant of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Clinton said that this administration will not talk to Hamas. The problem is that Hamas is the legitimate democratically elected representative of the Palestinian people. How can a serious negotiator of peace for the Palestinians sideline Hamas? Indeed, Clinton’s statement is yet another indicator of future American foreign policy failure in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. And this failure will happen not because of misunderstanding the nature of this conflict; it is going to be the result of an intentional policy to further push forward Israeli dominance in the Middle East. Clinton envisages the so-called peace in the entire Middle East on American terms – fairness or justice is not an ingredient in this equation.

I had also hoped that Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations Secretary General, after his visit to the Gaza Strip, would have issued an ultimatum to the UN Security-Council that he would resign in protest of Israeli brutality in Gaza unless the Security-Council immediately sanctioned Israel.

But that did not happen either. Perhaps, the UN Secretary General was not moved consequentially by the human tragedy he saw. What he said was, “These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today…” But why not grab the bull by the horns and destroy its wickedness? In the meantime, as for decades, the UN political establishment keeps on working as an extended arm of American foreign policy and overall Western interests. No change there either. Sad, isn’t it?

I had hoped that all Arab regimes would have acted decisively and collectively to gain powerful and important political roles in global politics to mend the international system and make it more responsive to the larger interests of their countries and their people.

But they have virtually let the opportunity slip away yet again. It seems that oil money and American threats to destabilize their regimes are perceived more powerful than the desire and confidence to acquire commanding prowess in the global political system. Consequently, it seems that the Arab world will remain subservient to American-Western dictates for years to come. The Palestinian people will continue to suffer and Israeli military adventurism will expand in its scope as an ally of the US-West the Middle East, spreading its reach to Southeast Asia and the Central Asian Islamic States.

I had hoped that India would sever its diplomatic relations with Israel. It would do so as the largest democracy, denouncing the brutality and genocide of an innocent people in the 21st century. But it did nothing of the sort despite the fact that India is unwilling to forget the Mumbai violence for a fraction of a moment. Rightfully so. But how can it remain a passive non-actor in the global political system so as to not punish Israel for its heinous crimes against humanity? It is the ultimate contempt and neglect of the human condition and an act of absolute hypocrisy, isn’t it?

I had hoped that Pakistan’s incumbent leadership would immediately cut off military supplies to the US-Nato forces in Afghanistan that go through Pakistan’s territory unless the Bush administration forced Israel to stop its carnage in Gaza. Ask any Pakistani and you would get the same opinion. But, it seems, that the incumbent government in Pakistan does not care much for its public opinion, especially when it comes to dealing with the US. Indeed, it is alarmingly un-democratic for a regime that claims democratic credentials. Ironic, isn’t it?

I had hoped that billions of black flags would fly over billions of homes all over the Muslim world as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, sharing their grief and anguish over the Israeli-inflicted “holocaust” on them. But it did not happen. Hence, it confirms that the entire Muslim world is politically dead, expressionless, indifferent to the violation of their “beings” – and their political leadership and governments are “agents” of American imperialism. Unbelievably sad, isn’t it?

The only voice raised in this empty and pathetic political wilderness of the Muslim world came from the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad who, in a open letter to Obama, wrote the following on January 1st, 2009:

“1) Stop killing people. The United States is too fond of killing people in order to achieve its objectives… War is primitive, the cavemen’s way of dealing with a problem. Stop your arms build up and your planning for future wars.

2) Stop indiscriminate support of Israeli killers with your money and your weapons. The planes and the bombs killing the people of Gaza are from you.”

I wonder if my readers agree with Dr. Mahathir Mohamad? If you do, then express it – forcefully and assertively. If you don’t, imagine a Gaza-like “holocaust” in your backyard – most probably in Swat, somewhere in NWFP or Afghanistan. The wise thing is to act now – before it’s too late.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American President, said in 1933: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

What are you afraid of? What is your fear? Remember, they are trying to paralyze your advance…subjugate you to their will…implant fear in your hearts …and get away with it! Don’t let them do it to you!

Wake up and stand for yourself and your intrinsic faith in humanitarian principles – your right to justice, fairness and peace…! Mind it, that is what Karbala was all about…!


The “Gaza Holocaust” is a tragedy of a monumental scale because it has happened in our own lifetime – right in front of our eyes…! It is the Karbala of our times!!

Protest it…! Feel grief for it…! Mourn it…! Let “them” know you are not going to take it anymore…!



The writer is a professor, political analyst and a conflict-resolution expert.

An Illegitimate and Lawless Country

From: --"Kaiser Tufail"



Question: Which country alone in the Middle East has nuclear weapons?

Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections? Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East seized the sovereign territory of other nations by military force and continues to occupy it in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions?

Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East routinely violates the international borders of another sovereign state with warplanes and artillery and naval gunfire?

Answer:Israel.

Q: What American ally in the Middle East has for years sent assassins into other countries to kill its political enemies (a practice sometimes called exporting terrorism)?

Answer:Israel.

Q: In which country in the Middle East have high-ranking military officers admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war were executed?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to prosecute its soldiers who have acknowledged executing prisoners of war?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East created 762,000 refugees and refuses to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to pay compensation to people whose land, bank accounts and businesses it confiscated?

Answer: Israel.

Q: In what country in the Middle East was a high-ranking United Nations diplomat assassinated?

Answer: Israel.

Q: In what country in the Middle East did the man who ordered the assassination of a high-ranking U.N. diplomat become prime minister?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 and wounding 171 American sailors?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East employed a spy, Jonathan Pollard, to steal classified documents and then gave some of them to the Soviet Union? Answer: Israel.

Q: What country at first denied any official connection to Pollard, then voted to make him a citizen and has continuously demanded that the American president grant Pollard a full pardon?

Answer: Israel.

Q. What Middle East country allows American Jewish murderers to flee to its country to escape punishment in the United States and refuses to extradite them once in their custody?

Answer: Israel


Q. What Middle East country preaches against hate yet builds a shrine and a memorial for a murderer who killed 29 Palestinians while they prayed in their Mosque.

Answer: Israel

Q: What country on Planet Earth has the second most powerful lobby in the United States, according to a recent Fortune magazine survey of Washington insiders?

Answer: Israel.

Q. Which country in the Middle East deliberately targeted a U.N. Refugee Camp in Qana, Lebanon and killed 103 innocent men, women, and especially children?

Answer: Israel Q: Which country in the Middle East is in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. vetoes? Answer: Israel.

Q. Which country in the Middle East receives more than one-third of all U.S. aid yet is the 16th richest country in the world?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East receives U.S. weapons for free and then sells the technology to the Republic of China even at the objections of the U.S.?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East routinely insults the American people by having its Prime Minister address the United States Congress and lecturing them like children on why they have no right to reduce foreign aid?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East had its Prime Minister announce to his staff not to worry about what the United States says because "We control America?"

Answer: Israel

. What country in the Middle East was cited by Amnesty International for demolishing more than 4000 innocent Palestinian homes as a means of ethnic cleansing.

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East has just recently used a weapon of mass destruction, a one-ton smart bomb, dropping it in the center of a highly populated area killing 15 civilians including 9 children?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East routinely kills young Palestinian children for no reason other than throwing stones at armored vehicles, bulldozers, or tanks?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East signed the Oslo Accords promising to halt any new Jewish Settlement construction, but instead, has built more than 270 new settlements since the signing?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East has assassinated more than 100 political officials of its opponent in the last 2 years while killing hundreds of civilians in the process, including dozens of children?

Answer: Israel

Q.. Which country in the Middle East regularly violates the Geneva Convention by imposing collective punishment on entire towns, villages, and camps, for the acts of a few, and even goes as far as demolishing entire villages while people are still in their homes?

Answer: Israel


This has got to be forwarded.

BOYCOTT JEWISH PRODUCTS

BOYCOTT JEWISH PRODUCTS

ZIONIST ATTACK ON GAZA GHETTO CONTINUES

ZIONIST ATTACK ON GAZA GHETTO CONTINUES A.H AMINNOT A SINGLE EUROPEAN OR US MAJOR LEADER CONDENMED ITTHE UN LED BY ITS MOST SPINELESS AND SHAMELESS SECRETARY GENERAL IS TOTALLY IMPOTENTA BILLION SHAMES ON ARAB KINGS,PRESIDENTS,GENERALS..............DISBAND YOUR ARMIES,NAVIES AND AIR FORCES BECAUSE YOU ARE SHAMELESSA BILLION CURSES ON TWO SHAMELESS ARAB LEADERS SADAAT AND ARAFAT FOR MAKING PEACE WITH THE ZIONISTSMY QUARREL IS NEITHER WITH THE CHRISTIANS NOR JEWS AND I AM NOT A PRACTISING MUSLIM , BUT WITH ZIONISTS WHO ARE WORSE THAN THE KAMINSKI AND DIRLEWANGER BRIGADES OF WARSAW 1944THE PALESTENIANS BEING KILLED ARE BOTH CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS.THE LESSONS THAT THE PIMPS ATTACKING GAZA GHETTO ARE DRIVING IN THE WORLD IS THAT HITLER WAS RIGHT ! HOLOCAST WAS THE IDEAL FINAL SOLUTION.AN ERRONEOUS LESSON BUT A PERCEPTION THAT SEEMS CLOSER TO THE TRUTH THAN IT REALLY IS.SHAME ON ARAB LEADERS KINGS AND PRESIDENTS.SHAME ON EUROPE AND USA.WHERE ARE YOUR HUMAN RIGHTS WHEN STATELESS PALESTENIANS ARE KILLED.SOME EUROPEANS MAY NOT KNOW THAT MANY PALESTENIANS ARE CHRISTIANS TOO.A PATHETIC STATE OF AFFAIRS.EVEN IF ARABS KILL ZIONIST SOLDIERS , HALF THE 1000 PALESTENIAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN THAT THE PIMP ZIONISTS ATTACKING GAZA GHETTO HAVE KILLED THE ZIONISTS WILL MAKE PEACE.THE FAULT OF THE PALESTENIANS IS NOT THAT THEY ARE NOT RIGHT BUT THAT THEU DONT HAVE WMDS.THERE IS A LESSON HERE WHICH ADOLF BUSH HAS TAUGHT THE WORLD IN 2003.IF YOU DONT HAVE WMDS YOU WILL BE ATTACKED AND SLAUGHTERED LIKE COCKROACHES IN ABU GHARIB !

Tacit Approval

Tacit Approval

Is the silence of the moderate Muslim majority against terrorism making it complicit in the murderous outrages of a few Islamists?
By Mahir Ali


On Christmas Eve last year, a feature in The New York Times dwelt on Muhammad Fawaz, “a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger.” The 20-year-old had longed for a scholarship to study abroad, but did not have the right connections. “So Mr Fawaz decided to rebel,” wrote Michael Slackman. “He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanour of an Islamic activist.”
“In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood ... Now he works to recruit other students to the cause ...”
“Across the Middle East, young people like Mr Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock‘n’roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.”
“These young people – 60 per cent of those in the region are under 25 – are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervour has popularised a more conservative interpretation of the faith.”
That’s not an uncommon view among the liberal western intelligentsia, nor is it particularly inaccurate. The phenomenon is a relatively recent one, however. For much of the 20th century, radical Islamic movements were generally restricted to the fringes of Muslim societies. In some cases – as in Nasser’s Egypt – they were considered a sufficient threat as long ago as the 1950s to attract state repression, which invariably backfired.
Back in that period and well into the 1980s, the United States harboured the impression that it could use such groups as a counterweight against communism and left-wing nationalism. It disbursed funds and advice with abandon. This tendency reached its apotheosis in the so-called jihad against Soviet forces and their Afghan allies, the consequences of which have resonated far and wide ever since. The events of 9/11 stand out on account of where they occurred, but a great many more lives have been lost elsewhere – not least in Algeria during the 1990s – partly through the courtesy of veterans of the Afghan crusade.
Algeria is an interesting case in point, because it spiralled out of control after the armed forces refused to recognise an irrefutable electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front. The decision led to years of civil war, during which both sides resorted to unspeakable atrocities. Since the 1990s, the West has been allergic to the prospect of Islamist administrations – although even during that decade it was happy to facilitate the passage of jihadis to Bosnia and Kosovo.
The contradiction between this allergy and its supposed preference for democracy perhaps took its starkest form in the Palestinian territories after Hamas – an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that in its formative stages was propped up by Israel as a means of weakening the relatively secular Fatah – secured an electoral victory. The US and most of its allies refused to engage with the Hamas leadership in the absence of its explicit recognition of Israel, thereby reinforcing the impression that notwithstanding all the clamour about democracy, popular verdicts count for nothing unless they produce results that meet Washington’s approval.
Double standards of this variety have long fed into the lack of respect that US foreign policy inspires through much of the Muslim world – a tendency that was sharply exacerbated by the war in Iraq. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the US confronts the irony of being cast in the role it had once chosen for the USSR: propping up a government of restricted appeal in Kabul while combating the combined forces of conservative nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, the latter supplemented by foreign recruits.
The historically lopsided American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its role in bolstering unpopular and invariably undemocratic regimes throughout the Middle East are often cited as crucial explanations for the antagonism it attracts, not least from Islamists of the violent variety. This analysis is by no means mistaken, but it is incomplete. It cannot suffice as an explanation for a phenomenon that has been witnessed in recent years across and beyond the Muslim world: a drift towards increasingly rigid interpretations of Islam that most of the faithful would previously have considered anathema.
It is often pointed out that the vast majority of Muslims across the world are moderates, while attention is generally focused on the relatively small groups that advocate violent jihad and sometimes are determined to practice what they preach. A common riposte is: Why, in that case, is the moderate majority so reticent about confronting and denouncing the extremists? The implication here is that Muslim moderation is a contradiction in terms, and that the near silence of the majority makes it complicit in the murderous outrages of the few.
It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. In the same way as followers of other monotheistic religions, Muslims are an amorphous bunch, and there is little danger of this cultural and even theological diversity being obliterated in a relentless march towards Wahhabism or Salafism. There is no good reason to suspect that most adherents of the faith oppose peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims, or harbour absurd visions of some kind of caliphate extending across vast swathes of the planet.
At the same time, however, it would be unrealistic to deny that there has in recent decades been a drift towards fundamentalism across the Muslim world as well as elsewhere, wherever Muslims are settled in large numbers. The alarming increase in conspicuous piety does not in itself point towards a matching rise in support for terrorism. Many perfectly pious Muslims are more than comfortable with the tenet that there should be no compulsion in religion and will have no truck with confessional violence, be it inter-faith or intra-faith.
Yet there is cause to fear a steady increase in the numbers of those whose attitude bears comparison with that of the more virulent evangelical Christians. The latter are chiefly an American phenomenon, and although they may not personally be prone to violence, they have little objection if it is committed on their behalf. Their selective and literal interpretation of the scriptures has even led them to blindly support Israel on the grounds that the latter’s obduracy is likely to turn it into the battlefield for Armageddon. (On the utter lunatic fringe of this special interest group are those who believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist and that his ascendancy is a sign that the end is nigh).
The Muslim equivalent of this tendency includes at least tacit support for acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, and can extend to support networks and other forms of sustenance for the terrorists. Those thus inclined are often affiliated, formally or otherwise, with the likes of Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Pakistan, Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Such networks are fond of emphasising their role as welfare organisations – and more often than not, this is not a spurious claim. In many countries such bodies are more effective than state agencies. It’s disingenuous to pretend, however, that this is their only, or even their primary, function.
The drift towards extremism in the Muslim world is invariably attributed to repressive regimes and economic disarray: the same sort of factors that once upon a time powered left-wing movements. This can, however, only be a partial explanation for the phenomenon. After all, recent history offers no examples of purportedly Islamic regimes – be it the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, the mullahs in Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan – that have been anything other than repressive. Nor has Islam’s theoretical preference for an equitable distribution of wealth ever been coherently manifested in a national setting.
Another explanation points towards a siege mentality based on the impression that the rest of the world is determined to disempower, if not decimate, Muslims. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, this fear was based on the fact that Muslims were the beleaguered party in most of the world’s hotspots, be it Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir or Chechnya. A common counter-argument in this respect is the at least equally pertinent claim that when a conflict, no matter how ugly, involves Muslims killing other Muslims, the ummah is strangely unaffected. To cite the most obvious instance, how many protests have there been throughout the Muslim world against the genocide in Darfur?
Among Muslims in the West, the siege mentality is compounded by alienation within the societies in which they have grown up. The first generation of Muslim immigrants in Britain, for instance, faced with relative equanimity the hostile environment in which they found themselves. They did not abandon their cultures, but it was widely assumed that subsequent generations would be increasingly better assimilated. It happened in some cases, but in others the drift has been towards an Islamic identity. Taken to an extreme, the latter tendency can lead to violent consequences. You can blame it on racism. You can blame it on Iraq and Afghanistan.
But these can, at best, be regarded as contributory factors rather than a satisfactory explanation. It’s as if a switch has been pulled in the Muslim psyche. It’s hard to say whether something has been switched on or something else has been switched off. This urge to indiscriminately take the lives of others is, naturally enough, considered unacceptable outside the fold of Islam (although the means deployed to countermand it all too often produce the opposite effect). What’s alarming is that some Muslims don’t consider it unacceptable. And those who do, often lack the ability or the courage to make themselves heard.
Sometimes it seems as if a veil has descended between Muslim minds and common sense. This does not affect only those who have never been afforded the opportunity to consider a worldview that might contradict what they are taught in their madrassas. It also extends to those who have been exposed to an enlightened education. The inclination to see a particular interpretation of religion as the only solution is what makes religion a problem.
Whatever your faith, there is something seriously amiss if your confessional identity supersedes your status as a member of the human race. This is a concern for all faiths: so many of the world’s conflicts would lose their raison d’etre if only Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the rest, without exception, could attach primacy to each other’s common humanity.
It sounds like a pipe dream, but it may well turn out to be only long-term guarantee of coexistence. Other religions, have passed through the kind of phase that Islam seems to be going through. In the case of Christianity, it took a thorough reformation to transcend the nonsense associated with the Inquisition and so on. Islam appears to be headed in the opposite direction, but that could change. About the only kind of jihad that could be justified under the present circumstances would be a struggle within Islam aimed at banishing the baser concepts that prop up obscurantism.
A few months ago, a report in the British press related how it had taken a fatwa from the Muslim Law (Shariah) Council UK to enable a blind Muslim student, Mahomed-Abraar Khatri, to enter a Leicester mosque with his guide dog. The Guide Dogs Association called it “a massive step forward for other blind and partially-sighted Muslims.” It almost made one wish a similar fatwa could offer deliverance to those Muslims who doggedly refuse to see the light.

The Saudi-isation of Pakistan

The Saudi-isation of Pakistan

A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.

By Pervez Hoodbhoy




The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other “wild” areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan’s urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan’s collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan’s lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate “corruption” by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
“Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along “Islamic lines.” Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child’s book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan’s timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation,” General Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as ‘maulvi sahibs’ teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be “disciplined” and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan’s elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious ‘mutaween’ (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still “dare” to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

The Power of the Pulpit-Mohammed Hanif

The Power of the Pulpit


By Mohammed Hanif




The Saudi-isation of Pakistan


Maulvi Karim, who taught me to read the Quran and led prayers in our village mosque for 40 years, was one of the most powerless men in our community. The only power he assumed for himself was that of postman. The postman would deliver the mail to him and then he would walk from house to house distributing it. He would, of course, have to read the letters for a lot of families who couldn’t read.

He was also a dog lover.

I joined him a number of times as he played with his little Russian poodle outside his house, then walked to the mosque, did his ablutions and led the prayers. After prayers he would hang out at the door of the mosque exchanging gossip with regulars. There would be people loitering outside the mosque when he went in. They would still be around as he finished the prayers and came out. It never occurred to him to ask these people to join him. It never occurred to the people who hung outside the mosque to feel embarrassed about not joining the prayers. They all lived on the same streets, not always in harmony, but religion in any of its forms was not something they discussed on the street. What was there to discuss? Wasn’t faith a strictly private business? Something that happened between a man and his god and not something that had to be discussed in your living room.

A minority went regularly to the mosques, another minority opened a bottle of something in the evening, but most people had secular pastimes like watching soap operas on TV and placing small bets on cricket matches.

He may sound like a character from the early 20th century but Maulvi Karim died only about a decade ago, and till his last days he had not given up his routine. In the social hierarchy he was somewhere between the barber and the cobbler. His basic functions were limited to being present at births, death and weddings. If he had been alive today and watched an episode of Alim Online, I wonder what he would have made of it. I wonder if he would have felt envious of all the celebrity maulanas who have become a staple of satellite television programming. Not only do they crop up on every discussion on every topic on earth but now they have their own TV channels as well, where they can preach 24/7, interrupted only by adverts for other mullahs.

The mosque imam, who served an essential social function, has given way to another kind of mullah: the power mullah, who drives in a four-wheeler flanked by armed guards; the entertainer mullah, who hogs the airwaves; and the entrepreneur mullah, who builds networks of mosques and madrassas and spends his summer touring Europe. And then there is the much maligned mullah with his dreams of an eternal war and world domination.

Since “mullah,” when pronounced in a certain way, can be read as a derogatory term, and since we don’t want to offend them (because we all know that they do get very easily offended) we should call them evangelists or preachers.

Mullahs, maulvis, imamas, or ulema-i-karam as many of them prefer to call themselves, have never had the kind of influence or social standing that they enjoy now. A large part of Pakistan is enthralled by this new generation of evangelists. They are there on prime time TV, they thunder on FM radios between adverts for Pepsi and hair removing cream. In the past few years, they have established fancy websites with embedded videos; mobile phone companies offer their sermons for download right to your telephone. They come suited, they come dressed like characters out of the Thousand and One Nights, they are men and they are women. Some of them even dress like bankers and talk like property agents offering bargain deals in heaven.

I grew up during the time of General Zia, the first evangelist to occupy the presidency in Pakistan. But even he had the good sense to keep the beards away from prime time television. But the ruthless media barons of today have no such qualms. They have turned religion into a major money-spinner. Pakistan’s economy remains in its endless downwards spiral, but it certainly seems there is a lot of money still to be made in televised preaching.

They have also tailored their message to the aspiring middle classes. Recently on his show on Haq TV, Tahirul Qadri (and he has gone from being a maulana to Allama to Sheikh-ul-Islam) thundered that religion doesn’t stop us from adopting new fashions. You can change your furniture every few years, there is nothing wrong with getting the new car models, but it should all be done in good taste. The man could had have given his lecture on Fashion TV. “But you shall never question the basic tenets of religion,” he went on. The implication was clear: you shall never question what he has to say. The message is even clearer: make money, spend it and it’ll all turn out to be okay if you keep tuning in to my programme.

And the message is being taken seriously by the upper classes of Pakistan. I walked into a new super store in Karachi’s Clifton area and was pleasantly surprised to see what looked like a books section. It was a books section indeed, but it was called “Islamic Books Section” and all the books in it were about Islam.

I went to a Nike store, and it was no different from any Nike store in any part of the world: over-priced, shiny sneakers and branded football shirts. But in the background instead of the loud gym music, the hallmark of such stores, speakers played recitation from the Quran.

The multinational companies, sensing the mood of the people, have also joined the bandwagon. Mobile phone companies offer calls to prayers for ring tones, and Quranic recitations and religious sermons as free downloads. During the month of Ramadan a number of international banks were gifting their preferred clients fancy boxes containing rosaries, dates and miniature Qurans.

It’s the perfect marriage between God and greed.

Traditionally, what a preacher needed was a pulpit. For the pulpit he needed a mosque, and to get to a mosque he needed to do a long apprenticeship in which he had to prove his worth to the community before he could be allowed to sit at that pulpit. With the arrival of satellite TV channels, evangelists provide the most cost-effective programming and, as a result, have found a pulpit in every living room.

Even the Sindhi and Seraiki language channels, which were known for their liberal political approach and sufi messages, have found their own evangelists to fill the slots.

And their influence has changed our social landscape beyond recognition. Twelve years ago, an old friend from school tried to recruit me into a militant anti-Shia organisation. After dropping out from high school, Zulfikar Ahmad had started a motorcycle garage and joined one of the sectarian organisations that were flourishing in the area. We had a heated discussion over his politics, and I reminded him of a number of common friends who were Shias and were as good or bad Muslims as any of our other classmates. Visibly unconvinced, Zulfikar gave up on me and wished me luck in my godless life.

Zulfikar’s attempt at converting me was one of the many signs of religious intolerance creeping into our lives. Taliban-ruled neighbouring Afghanistan and many middle class Pakistanis, while enjoying the relative freedoms of a fledgling democracy, hankered for a more puritanical, Taliban-style government. But these zealots, despite their high profile, remained marginal to society as religion was a personal affair, not something you discussed in your drawing room.

As I moved back to Pakistan a few months ago, I was overwhelmed by the all pervasive religious symbols in public spaces and theocratic debates raging in the independent media as well as in the drawing rooms of friends and relatives. The graffiti on the walls of Karachi, blood-curdling calls for jihad, adverts for luxury Umrahs are omnipresent. And for those who can’t afford to go all the way to Mecca, neighbourhood mosques offer regular lectures and special prayers sessions.

I spent the Eid holidays in my village in Punjab and attended prayers at the mosque, which Maulvi Karim used to run. My village folk are very wary of radical mullahs and have appointed an imam who is Maulvi Karim’s son and has spent most of his youth in Birmingham. His sermon was probably the most progressive I have ever heard. He advised his male congregation to share household work with their women. He gave examples from Prophet Mohammed’s life and said that he used to clean his own room even when he had more than one wife. “You must attend to your stock yourself. It doesn’t matter if you have servants, feed your buffaloes,” he said. I looked around in amusement, trying to imagine these men, steeped in centuries of male chauvinistic tradition, going home to do their dishes.

What puzzled me in the end was that his prayer included get-well-soon wishes for Baitullah Mehsud, who according to local TV channels, was ill. I couldn’t reconcile the imam’s message for equality of the sexes and his good will for Mehsud, whose crusade against women is as well known as his anti-American jihad.

For answers I turned to my old friend Zulfikar. He still sports a long, flowing beard but his conversation is peppered with Punjabi expletives which I found quite refreshing amidst the wall-to-wall piety in my hometown. “I have left all that jihad-against-Shias business behind,” he told me. “I have college-going daughters now. Bringing up children in these times is a full-time jihad.”

He told me that he was worried about the others. “I look as if I am a Taliban supporter but I am not. But these clean-shaven people you see here,” he pointed to some clients and workers at his garage, “inside they are all Taliban.” He explained that with Pakistan coming under repeated US attacks even people who have voted for moderate political parties are looking towards the Taliban for deliverance.

In Karachi, there are frequent warnings that the Taliban are headed this way. There are posters warning us about Talibanisation. Altaf Hussain thunders about them at every single opportunity. But nobody seems to warn us about the preachers who are already here: the ones wagging their fingers on TV always tend to precede the ones waving their guns, smashing those TVs and bombing poor barbers.

Preaching is also turning out to be an equal opportunity business. Driving my son to his new school one day, I listened to a woman talking with a posh Urdu accent on a local FM radio. With a generous smattering of English, she was trying to persuade her listeners to dress properly. “When you prepare for a party, how much do you fuss over a dress? You select a piece, then you find something matching, then you have second thoughts. All because you want to look your best at the party. You want to flatter your host. And do you prepare like this when you know that one day very soon you are going to go to the ultimate party, where your host will be Allah?”

The speech, we were told, was brought to us by al-Huda Trust, which is located in the upscale Defence Housing Authority and has its own website.

Later, I ran into a relative, a mother of two who was wearing jeans and a shirt, and who asked our opinion about her new hairdo. She was fasting, I was not. She quoted me some rules for fasting: situations in which one is allowed not to fast, along with some more injunctions for lapsed ones like myself. When are you going to start wearing the hijab? I asked her jokingly.

Probably never, she said. “The Book tells us only to wear something loose, not to draw attention, not to wear anything tight. There are so many rapes, abductions. We must not provoke.”

“How do you know all this religious stuff?” I asked her.

“I have read it in books,” she said nonchalantly, as if it was the most normal thing for a liberated working mother to pore over religious texts to decide the length of the hem of her skirt or the size of her blouse.

“Where does it say?” I challenged her. “In the Quran. I have read it myself.” She started another mini-lecture, which ended with these words: “The point is that Allah doesn’t want a woman to draw attention to her bosom.”

Listening to these preachers, people in Pakistan today seem to believe that God is some kind of lecherous old man who sits there worrying about the size of a woman’s blouse while American drones bomb the hell out of the Pashtuns in the North. You can blame the Pashtuns for many things, but no true Pashtun has ever been accused of wearing tight dresses.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, stumbling from one crisis to another, has been accused of many things, but nobody has ever accused him of having a political philosophy. He was asked about this a while ago in an interview, and he parroted some clichés about Sindhi Sufi poetry and world peace. “I am a great admirer of Sindhi Sufi poetry,” but I doubt Zardari would get very far reciting it to one of the thousands of evangelists unleashed on this hapless nation. Because if Zardari has read Sindhi Sufi poetry – or, for that matter, Punjabi, or Pushto Sufi poetry – he would know that it is full of more warnings about mullahs than all the CIA’s country reports lined end-to-end. Sometimes I am also puzzled at my own reactions to these preachers: why do these overt symbols of religion bother me when I myself grew up in a family where prayers, Quran, and rosaries were a part of our everyday life. One reason could be that the kind of religion I grew up with was never associated with suicide bombings and philosophies of world domination. Religion was something you practiced on your own, between meals and going to school. It didn’t involve blowing up schools, which seems to be the favourite pastime of Islamist militants in today’s Pakistan and something that our televangelists never talk about. Maybe people are just buying into the symbolism as a way of expressing their defiance towards the Pakistan government’s policies that many of them see as a mere extension of the US. Maybe, like many other expats, I just hanker for those good old days when saints and sinners, believers and sceptics and preachers and their bored victims could live side by side without killing each other.

2,000 Afghan youths ready to go to Gaza

2,000 Afghan youths ready to go to Gaza

MPs Dawn (Pakistan)KABUL, Jan 6: Lawmakers in Afghanistan said on Tuesday that 2,000 Afghan youths were ready to go to Gaza to defend Palestinians from Israeli attacks, warning the strikes could lead to a worldwide Muslim uprising. A declaration drawn up by the legislators, who are not sitting but met in a special session to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip, was read out to journalists by the secretary of the Lower House, Abdul Satar Khawasi. Lawmakers called the strikes, which began on Dec 27 in response to rocket attacks from Gaza, “barbaric and tyrannical.” “Some 2,000 youths from different provinces of our country are ready to go to the Gaza Strip and defend the helpless Palestinian Muslims,” the statement said, without giving details. It warned that if “invasions” of Palestinian territory were to continue, the defence of Muslim lands would grow into a “worldwide uprising by... Muslims of the world against infidels.” The lawmakers also accused US President George Bush of “justifying this horrifying Israeli crime” by refusing to stand against it, and chided other world leaders for keeping silent. There have been protests for several days across Afghanistan against Israel’s military offensive, in which more than 580 Palestinians, including nearly 100 children, have been killed. The protesters have also criticised Israel’s ally, the United States, Afghanistan’s main provider of military and financial support in its fight against an Islamic insurgency and attempts to rebuild after decades of war.—AFP

“My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me” by M. R. Khan,

A Guantanamo Diary

Reviewed by

Beej K Singh

January 7, 2009


“My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me” by M. R. Khan, ISBN: 978-1-58648-498-9 was published by Public Affairs, New York.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan – a girl of Afghan heritage, an idealist, and a student at the Law School of the University of Miami – passionately felt that many of the detentions at the Guantanamo Bay facility (Gitmo) were illegal. On a day when she was rattling on and on to her fiancé about the perceived window.google_render_ad();injustice, he got tired and said – “Why don’t you stop complaining and get involved – if you feel so strongly about it?!”So, she did. She used Google to locate the key lawyers representing the Gitmo detainees. She interacted with them and soon found to her astonishment that since none of them spoke Pashto, many of the Afghan detainees had been simply unable to communicate with someone who would understand what they had to say. She sent out her resume, got through the process of getting a “Secret” security clearance, and was taken on as an interpreter by one of the lawyers. Over time, her role grew as she helped with more and more of the detainees – many of whom came to trust her as a “fellow Afghan” – someone who brought to them Starbucks “chai” (the beverage closest to the type of tea they would have had in Afghanistan). The older ones among them even addressed her using the term “bachai” (child) and she could connect with them as only an Afghan could. Later on, she visited Afghanistan to collect evidence needed to prove the innocence of individuals. Out of this experience and her related research comes her book “My Guantanamo Diary”.In her book, Khan chronicles accounts of ten or so Gitmo detainees and intersperses those accounts with a liberal dosage of her own observations on the circumstances surrounding those individuals and also her personal views on various Gitmo-related issues. Khan did not have access to any of the “high value” detainees at Gitmo. However, she appears to believe that a large number of the Gitmo detainees were like the ones she interviewed.Khan initially went to Gitmo with only a vague set of ideas of what she would encounter – perhaps expecting to run into hardened terrorists – the type that Donald Rumsfeld had called the “baddest of the bad”! Instead, the first inmate she met was the pediatrician Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi who – upon the fall of the Taliban – had returned to Afghanistan from an exile in Iran and had been picked up the very second night of his return. Some of the other detainees include an eighty year old partially paralyzed man, a goat herd (who seemed too smart to be a goat herd), a businessman, a Sudanese journalist, and a former police chief. As she met more and more of the Gitmo detainees and became familiar with their stories, Khan appears to have come to the conclusion – as would many readers of this book, that many of Gitmo’s Afghan inmates were individuals against whom there was no credible evidence of any wrongdoing – some were perhaps simply swept up by events around them, or they had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, or because a neighbor, or some enemy had made false complaints against them (possibly to obtain a bounty) – leading to an indefinitely long incarceration in a facility far away with virtually no access to any legal redress and no ability to prove their own innocence. Khan also drops some hints that some individuals may have been picked up in Pakistan and “groomed” in local jails (to grow a beard and other Taliban-like outward features) before being “sold” to the Americans.The question that comes through most strikingly from Khan’s remarkable accounts is – how can a system supposedly full of safeguards go so wrong so quickly – and stay that way for so long?! To quote Khan – “The Guantanamo cases raise lasting and fundamental questions about American willingness to abide by its principles and adhere to the rule of law, especially when under threat”.What also comes through rather strongly is that many of those individuals could have been cleared with a simple check of fact – available to even the most hardened criminals in the U.S. Such an opportunity was mostly denied. The incarcerators seldom sought out any witnesses of their own, even the “accusers” were often classified – and there was rarely an effort to find the witnesses that were requested by the detainees. Instead, those in charge saw it fit to merely put away those detainees by using one pretext or another, deny them their day in the court and hide from public view or scrutiny any accounts of what was happening. In the process, what appears to have been done was to go about deliberately creating an unreal zone – a space that was not the U.S. and yet was not, for all practical purposes, a part of the rest of the non-U.S. world either, a space where the executive exercised the unusual powers of wartime without the encumbrances of the Geneva convention, where those in charge had control to do whatever they pleased without the element of accountability, a space where tragically, human beings in charge of other human beings often turned into less than human beings and treated others as such. In this man-made space, while the detainees languished under U.S. control, they had no recourse to the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. As Ms. Khan puts it so eloquently (if with some humor) even the Gitmo iguanas were protected by the U.S. wildlife laws – but its detainees had no protection whatsoever!Another part that comes through touchingly from this book is how – when some of these same detainees were eventually freed and were able to return to their interrupted lives –even though many had lost years to what turned out to be unjust incarceration, few if any hold a grudge against the Americans – and virtually none do so against the American people.It is unlikely that anyone but one of the Afghan heritage, like Ms. Khan, could write a book like this. The U.S.-born and brought up author, like any lawyer, knows the rights of individuals and the legal recourses for ensuring that those rights are respected – with the ability to interface with the legal community, if necessary, for the same. She also appears to be young enough to not have a vested interest in “protecting” a track record which could be attacked by an adversary, and idealistic enough to not care for such protection. Further, it is unlikely that a book like this could ever happen without at least some support from right-minded individuals in and around her – who believe that fundamental rights of citizens ought to be respected and not, as alleged, simply thrown away in the name of fighting terror. Ms. Khan has the benefits of having an insight into the Afghan mind and can make a distinction between mere cultural issues – like women being under a burqa – versus what constitutes a fundamental denial of human rights in a Taliban-like societal setup. She is no apologist for the latter but it is also important to her that in the name of fighting Taliban-like adversaries, the U.S. does not grab the right to ride rough-shod over what is among one of the most sacred features of the U.S. Constitution – a presumption of innocence on the part of the individual until the individual is actually proven guilty. Khan is not naïve enough to believe that Gitmo does not house evil characters. She also admits that since the detainees were themselves the primary source of information, some of the accounts could be less than accurate or embellished. The point she makes again and again is – while the Gitmo may house innocent as well as evil detainees, it is only through an honest examination of their records that can one separate one from the other.Some accounts of the detainee treatment – as reported to Khan by the detainees, are particularly disturbing. Khan notes that there are cultural attributes of Afghanis which make them very reluctant to discuss some of the humiliations they may have encountered. However, it is not possible to independently corroborate those accounts.Another touching part of the accounts is that of the two Pakistani poet brothers whose creativity Gitmo could not extinguish – and in fact one of whom wrote thousands of pieces of poems during his incarceration but – in a tragic irony, after being freed one brother disappeared in Pakistan (possibly picked up by its security agency) and then the other brother wrote no more – in the process, Pakistan “accomplishing” what even Gitmo had failed to do.In the touching finale, Khan is able to visit the pediatrician, her first interviewee, in Afghanistan and see him now reunited with his family after a lapse of many years. In spite of the apparent deep bonding that had formed between the two – he is only able to shake hands as an expression of his clear gratitude – Afghan culture precluding any acts of hugging between them. The book has plenty of humorous moments, too – like when Khan describes how she had the Gitmo Base Commander’s letter (of reprimand) framed and hung right above her toilet, or when one of the detainees asked her supervisor – a married but childless lawyer – what he “had been doing for the past fifteen years!” or how the Censors would not declassify any poetry or art in communications from Gitmo detainees because it might contain “coded messages”, or when a Habeus lawyer gets accused of slipping an Under Armour brief and a Speedo bathing suit to his client.“My Guantanamo Diary” is a book which needed to be written – not only to archive the sad events in the lives of the detainees it describes– but also to come to terms with the serious aberrations from due processes that the U.S. appears to have allowed itself to commit in that facility. It is a book which needed to be written so that it will be possible for successive generations to believe that even in the 21st century, in an age when all kinds of information stays at one’s fingertips and all kinds of accountability processes exist at every step, it is possible for the government to indeed trample over individual rights without serious hindrance from the judiciary or legislature and with only tacit support or even mere callousness on the part of its citizens. So the question remains – how could it all go so off-track so quickly?!It is not the fault of the U.S. Constitution – that ultimate document around which all our lives are centered and from which all our laws evolve. That document provides a set of iron-clad safeguards. It is simply that even iron-clad safeguards can be breached by those who are given the sacred task of guarding its provisions and just as important, of not violating its intents. The situation that prevailed in the U.S. post nine-eleven was unusual – it was unlike anything else the country had ever witnessed. However, because it was such an unusual situation, it was all the more important to guard the core values guaranteed to all. The basic fault of the approach seems to have been to adopt expediency at the expense of the presumption of innocence and claiming that such protection did not exist for a subset – and arrogate to oneself the power to decide who was worthy of that protection, and when. Khan attempts to capture an insight into such a mindset in describing how a Pentagon attorney tries to intimidate her when she approaches him to get the “Pentagon perspective” on what she had seen and recorded. The attorney (among other things) calls her Washington Post article of a couple of years earlier “strange”. To quote Khan:He and I have a different idea of what is “strange”. Strange is American soldiers torturing prisoners. Strange is giving rewards of $5,000 to $25,000 per prisoner, and stranger still is the U.S. making many arrests without first investigating allegations put forth by locals who stand to gain financially from them. Strange is holding men for over five years without charging them. Strange is military’s removal of organs from prisoners who committed suicide before sending their bodies home for burial. Strange is calling a paralyzed 80-year old man an “enemy combatant”. Strange is that while U.S. soldiers throw the Quran in buckets of feces, the administration had figuratively done the same to the U.S. Constitution.Khan’s book raises clear-cut questions. The questions remain – and they need to be answered through a comprehensive and honest examination – to be done by more than one party. Any acts of flinching from such an examination – and there is always an understandable reluctance to delve into the past (especially if it has unsavory aspects associated with it) would merely leave room for those same mistakes to repeat on a later day. There has always existed a fault line between the desire to administer justice fairly so as not to inadvertently punish the innocent and the desire to administer justice expeditiously so as to keep the country secure. Converting that fine fault line into an immense chasm was the real tragedy of the massive earthquake that the event called nine-eleven represented – and during the darkest days of Gitmo that chasm looked ever-widening and almost permanent!One can not predict earthquakes and one would hope there won’t be too many – but having been through one, it would be unacceptable not to prepare for the next one – to prepare for what to do if and when it comes. And also for what NOT to do – otherwise the lessons from the Gitmo tragedy would be lessons in vain!

How a minority of US State Department officials were ignored by the Dulles Brothers in 1950s-Jihadism in 2009: The Trends Continue

How a minority of US State Department officials were ignored by the Dulles Brothers in 1950s-Jihadism in 2009: The Trends Continue

The use of religion against USSR which was opposed by a minority of US officials at the State Department in 1950s is leading to great chaos worldwide today.A small minority of US officials in 1950s dod express these apprehensions but their concerns were swept aside by dubious characters like the Dulles brothers and many others heading the US governmental bureaucracy.Today we see the fruits of the tree planted by myopic thinkers like Dulles brothers of USA.The threat to USA and to the world has increased.USSR was never a real threat.It was a percieved threat.The Islamists are a real threat and not a percieved threat.Actually the Islamist militant revival will sooner or later lead to rise of Christian extremism.The USA's anglo saxon dominance will collapse demographically within next 50 years with Latinos going in majority and the whole system would collapse.

Agha H Amin






Jihadism in 2009:

The Trends Continue

January 7, 2009

Global Security and Intelligence Report Stratfor:

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

For the past several years, we have published an annual forecast for al Qaeda and the jihadist movement. Since the January 2006 forecast, we have focused heavily on the devolution of jihadism from a phenomenon focused primarily on al Qaeda the group to one based primarily on al Qaeda the movement. Last year, we argued that al Qaeda was struggling to remain relevant and that al Qaeda prime had been marginalized in the physical battlefield. This marginalization of al Qaeda prime had caused that group to forfeit its position at the vanguard of the physical jihad, though it remained deeply invol ved in the leadership of the ideological battle.As a quick reminder, Stratfor views what most people refer to as “al Qaeda” as a global jihadist network rather than a monolithic entity. This network consists of three distinct entities. The first is a core vanguard, which we frequently refer to as al Qaeda prime, comprising Osama bin Laden and his trusted associates. The second is composed of al Qaeda franchise groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq, and the third comprises the grassroots jihadist movement inspired by al Qaeda prime and the franchise groups.As indicated by the title of this forecast, we believe that the trends we have discussed in previous years will continue, and that al Qaeda prime has become marginalized on the physical battlefield to the extent that we have not even mentioned their name in the title. The regional jihadist franchises and grassroots operatives pose a much more significant threat in terms of security concerns, though it is important to note that those concerns will remain tactical and not rise to the level of a strategic threat. In our view, the sort of strategic challenge that al Qaeda prime posed with the 9/11 attacks simply cannot be replicated without a major change in geopolitical alignments — a change we do not anticipate in 2009.2008 in ReviewBefore diving into our forecast for the coming year, let’s take a quick look back at what we said would happen in 2008 and see what we got right and what we did not.What we got right:* Al Qaeda core focused on the ideological battle. Another year has passed without a physical attack by the al Qaeda core. As we noted last October, al Qaeda spent a tremendous amount of effort in 2008 fighting the ideological battle. The core leadership still appears to be very intent on countering the thoughts presented in a book written in 2007 by Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, an imprisoned Egyptian radical and a founder (with Ayman al-Zawahiri) of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Al-Sharif’s book is seen as such a threat because he provides theological arguments that counter many of the core teachings used by al Qaeda to justify jihadism. On Dec. 13, an 85-page treatise by one of al Qaeda’s leading religious authorities, Abu-Yahya al-Libi, was released to jihadist Web sites in the latest of al Qaeda’s many efforts to counter Dr. Fadl’s arguments.* Pakistan will be important as a potential flashpoint. Eight days after we wrote this, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Since then, Pakistan has become the focal point on the physical battlefield.* The November 2007 addition of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) to the global jihadist network will not pose a serious threat to the Libyan regime. The Libyans have deftly used a combination of carrots and sticks to divide and control the LIFG.* Jihadists will kill more people with explosives and firearms than with chemical, biological or radiological weapons. We saw no jihadist attacks using WMD in 2008.What we got mostly right:* The Algerian jihadist franchise, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), will be hard-pressed in 2008, but not eliminated. AQIM succeeded in launching a large number of attacks in the first eight months of 2008, killing as many people as it did in all of 2007. But since then, the Algerian government has been making progress, and the jihadist group has only conducted two attacks since August 2008. The Algerians also are working closely with neighboring countries to combat AQIM, and the group is definitely feeling the heat. On Dec. 23, 2008, the Algerian government reportedly rejected a truce offered by AQIM leader Yahia Djouadi. Djouadi offered that al Qaeda would cease attacks on foreigners operating in oil fields in Algeria and Mauritania if the Algerian security service would cease targeting al Qaeda members in the Sahel region. The group is still alive, and government pressure appears to have affected its operational ability in recent months, but it di d take a bit longer than we anticipated for the pressure to make a difference.* Syria will use Fatah al-Islam as a destabilizing force in Lebanon. We had intelligence last year suggesting that the Syrians were going to press the use of their jihadist proxies in Lebanon — specifically Fatah al-Islam. We saw a bit of this type of activity in late May, but not as much as anticipated. By November, Syria actually decided to cut ties with Fatah al-Islam.* Jihadist operatives outside war zones will focus on soft targets. Major terrorist strikes in Islamabad and New Delhi were conducted against hotels, soft targets Stratfor has focused on as vulnerable for many years now. Other attacks in India focused on markets and other public places. While most of the attacks against hard targets came in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a few attacks against hard targets in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Turkey. Granted, the Sanaa and Istanbul attacks were unsuccessful, but they were attacks against hard targets nonetheless.What we missed:* The jihadist franchises in Yemen resurged, and the al-Shabab in Somalia found success. While we quickly picked up on these trends in April and May respectively (and beat most others to the punch with some very good analysis on these topics), we clearly did not predict them in December 2007. We knew that the influx of fighters from Iraq was going to impact countries in the region, but we didn’t specifically focus on Yemen and Somalia.The Year AheadWe anticipate that we will see the United States continue its campaign of decapitation strikes against al Qaeda leadership. While this campaign has not managed to get bin Laden or al-Zawahiri, it has proved quite successful at causing the al Qaeda apex leadership to lie low and become marginalized from the physical jihad. The campaign also has killed a long list of key al Qaeda operational commanders and trainers. As noted above, we believe the core leadership is very concerned about the ideological battle being waged against it — the only real way the theology of jihadism can be defeated — and will continue to focus their efforts on that battlespace.As long as the ideology of jihadism survives (it has been around since the late 1980s), the jihadists’ war against the world will continue. It will continue to oscillate between periods of high and low intensity. In the coming year, we believe the bulk of physical attacks will continue to be conducted by regional jihadist franchise groups, and to a lesser extent by grassroots jihadists.With the lack of regional franchises in North America, we do not see a strategic threat to the United States. However, as seen by the recent convictions in the Fort Dix plot trial, or even in the late October case where a U.S. citizen apparently committed a suicide bombing on behalf of al-Shabab in Somalia, the threat of simple attacks against soft targets in the United States remains. We were again surprised that no jihadist attacks occurred in the United States in 2008. Given the vulnerabilities that exist in an open society and the ease of attack, we cannot rule out an attack in 2009.In Europe, where AQIM and other jihadist franchises have a greater presence and infrastructure, there is a greater threat that these franchises will commit sophisticated attacks. It must be recognized, though, that they will have a far harder time acquiring weapons and explosives to conduct such attacks in the United Kingdom or France than they would in Algeria or Pakistan. Because of this, we anticipate that they will continue to focus on soft targets in Europe. Due to differences between the Muslim communities in the United States and Europe, the grassroots operatives have been more active in Europe than they are in the United States. The May 22, 2008, attempted bombing at the Giraffe Cafe by a Muslim convert in Exeter serves as a good reminder of this.Jihadist FranchisesAfter failing last year to predict the resurgence of the jihadist franchises in Yemen and Somalia, we will be keeping a sharp eye on both for 2009. Somalia continues to be a basket case of a country, and the instability there is providing an opportunity for al-Shabab to flourish. There is currently an attempt under way to bring stability to Somalia, but we anticipate that it will not succeed, due to the militant factionalism in the country. The only thing working against al-Shabab and their jihadist brethren is that the Somalian jihadists appear to be as fractious as the rest of the country; al-Shabab is itself a splinter of the Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC), which ruled Somalia briefly before the Ethiopian invasion in 2006. There are currently as many as four different jihadist factions fighting one anot her for control over various areas of Somalia — in addition to fighting foreign troops and the interim government.In Yemen, things have been eerily quiet since the Sept. 17 attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa and the government campaign to go after the group behind that attack. Six gunmen were killed in the attack itself, and the Yemenis have arrested numerous others whom they claim were involved in planning the attack. The Yemenis also killed or captured several significant jihadists prior to the September attack. But given the large number of Yemenis involved in the fighting in Iraq, the number of Saudi militants who have traveled to Yemen due to pressure at home, and the Salafist-jihadist influence within Yemen’s security and intelligence apparatus, it will be possible for the two jihadist franchises in Yemen to recover if the Yemenis give them breathing space.Meanwhile, though Iraq is far calmer than it was a few years back, a resurgence in jihadist activity is possible. One of the keys to calming down the many jihadist groups in Iraq was the formation of the Awakening Councils, which are made up of many Sunni former Baathist (and some jihadist) militants placed on the U.S. payroll. With the changes in Iraq, responsibility for these Awakening Councils has been passed to the Iraqi government. If the Shiite-dominated government decides not to pay the councils, many of the militants-turned-security officers might return to their old ways — especially if the pay from jihadist groups is right. Intelligence reports indicate that Baghdad plans to pay only a fraction of the approximately 100,000 men currently serving in the Awakening Councils. The Iraqi central government apparently plans to offer the bulk of them civilian jobs or job training, but we are skeptical that this will work.Elsewhere, Pakistan is once again the critical location for the jihadists. Not only is Pakistan the home of the al Qaeda core leadership as its pursues its ideological war, it also is home to a number of jihadist groups, from the Afghan Taliban and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in the northwest to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in the northeast, among several others. The coming year might prove to be pivotal in global efforts against the jihadists in Pakistan. Pakistan already is a country in crisis, and in some ways it is hard to imagine it getting much worse. But if Pakistan continues to destabilize, it could very well turn into a failed country (albeit a failed country with a nuclear arsenal). Before Pakistan becomes a failed state, there are a number of precursor stages it probably will pass through. The most immed iate stage would entail the fall of most of the North-West Frontier Province to the jihadists, something that could happen this year.This type of anarchy in Pakistan could give the jihadists an opportunity to exert control in a way similar to what they have done in places like Afghanistan and Somalia (and already in the Pakistani badlands along the Afghan border.) If, on the other hand, Pakistan is somehow able to hold on, re-establish control over its territory and its rogue intelligence agency and begin to cooperate with the United States and other countries fighting the jihadists, such a development could deal a terrible blow to the aspirations of the jihadists on both the physical and ideological battlefields. Given the number of plots linked to Pakistan in recent years, including the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack and almost every significant plot since 9/11, all eyes will be watching Pakistan carefully.