Category Archives: Issues

The wife of Jesus: New discovery challenges fundamental Christian belief

Ariel Sabar interviews Harvard researcher Karen King who talks about the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’”

The fragment was a shade smaller than an ATM card, honey-hued and densely inked on both sides with faded black script. The writing, King told me, was in the ancient Egyptian language of Coptic, into which many early Christian texts were translated in the third and fourth centuries, when Alexandria vied with Rome as an incubator of Christian thought.

When she lifted the papyrus to her office’s arched window, sunlight seeped through in places where the reeds had worn thin. “It’s in pretty good shape,” she said. “I’m not going to look this good after 1,600 years.”

But neither the language nor the papyrus’ apparent age was particularly remarkable. What had captivated King when a private collector first e-mailed her images of the papyrus was a phrase at its center in which Jesus says “my wife.”

The fragment’s 33 words, scattered across 14 incomplete lines, leave a good deal to interpretation. But in King’s analysis, and as she argues in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review, the “wife” Jesus refers to is probably Mary Magdalene, and Jesus appears to be defending her against someone, perhaps one of the male disciples.

“She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.”

The papyrus was a stunner: the first and only known text from antiquity to depict a married Jesus.

But Dan Brown fans, be warned: King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography. The text was probably composed in Greek a century or so after Jesus’ crucifixion, then copied into Coptic some two centuries later. As evidence that the real-life Jesus was married, the fragment is scarcely more dispositive than Brown’s controversial 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” [Continue reading…]

If references to Jesus’s marriage were removed from the gospels, this may have less to do with the promotion of celibacy as a Christian ideal than with the need to buttress claims about Jesus’s divinity. After all, if he had a wife then he almost certainly had children and not just a mother but also a father — a human father.

And with that blasphemous thought perhaps it’s worth remembering that those who feel their faith is being challenged can have extreme reactions — whatever their faith. Remember The Last Temptation of Christ?

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Netanyahu’s Iran strategy erases the Palestinian problem

Chris McGreal writes: Binyamin Netanyahu’s appearance on Meet the Press this weekend was telling.

Interviewer David Gregory called him the “leader of the Jewish people”. That’s certainly how the Israeli prime minister would like to see himself, and he wouldn’t be the first.

Israeli leaders have long claimed the mantle of voice of the Jewish people around the world and protector of the Diaspora. Part of that is rooted in the idea of Israel as a safe haven, and the desire of every Israeli government to draw in new citizens. A few years back, Ariel Sharon tried to tell Jews in France that they were so persecuted they needed to move to Israel for their own protection. This at a time when Hamas and Islamic Jihad were blowing innocents to pieces in Jerusalem restaurants and on Tel Aviv buses. There was no rush to the El Al flight from Paris.

But there is also the global aspect. Netanyahu stood before the United Nations last year and claimed to speak for hundreds of generations of Jews across the world. It was an attempt to elevate himself above a mere political leader to claim to represent the full weight of Jewish suffering in justifying his government’s stance towards the Palestinians.

Gregory’s slip – he later corrected himself by tweeting that it would be better to call Netanyahu the leader of Jewish state – was revealing of a mindset in certain sections of the American press that has a hard time dealing with the fact that Israel’s prime minister might not be the leader of an entire people, but just another politician less worried about the common good than shoring up his power.

That was where Meet the Press was revealing on a second point. It threw up evidence of just how successful Netanyahu has been at putting his political interests before those of Israel’s future, which should lie in keeping the ever-dimming prospect of a two-state solution alive.

There wasn’t a single mention of the Palestinians during the 15 minute interview. Gregory didn’t ask about them, and Netanyahu didn’t talk about them. Thus the fate of several million people living under varying degrees of an occupation that continues to plunder land, maintain discriminatory laws and administrative procedures – such as rationing water to Arab villages while their neighbors in the Jewish settlements have unlimited supplies – remains in limbo. Netanyahu’s government, meanwhile, pays lip service to the creation of a Palestinian state while pursuing policies intended to stave off the day of its birth. [Continue reading…]

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Mitt Romney’s no-state solution

Robert Mackey writes: As my colleague Sarah Wheaton reports, Mitt Romney said privately in May that “there’s just no way” for an independent Palestinian state to be established on the West Bank territory Israel has occupied since 1967. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments, during a discussion with donors in Florida, were secretly recorded and published on Tuesday by Mother Jones, a liberal magazine.

In the surreptitiously recorded video, Mr. Romney can be heard asserting that “the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish,” because “the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace” and remain “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel.” He then cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state, given the region’s geography: [continue reading…]

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Why anti-Islam film may fail the free-speech test

Sarah Chayes, former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, writes: In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. “The most stringent protection,” he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, “would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

Holmes’ test — that words are not protected if their nature and circumstances create a “clear and present danger” of harm — has since been tightened. But even under the more restrictive current standard, “Innocence of Muslims,” the film whose video trailer indirectly led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens among others, is not, arguably, free speech protected under the U.S. Constitution and the values it enshrines.
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The current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited.

Likelihood is the easiest test. In Afghanistan, where I have lived for most of the past decade, frustrations at an abusive government and at the apparent role of international forces in propping it up have been growing for years. But those frustrations are often vented in religious, not political, terms, because religion is a more socially acceptable, and safer, rationale for public outcry.

In the summer of 2010, Jones announced his intent to publicly burn a copy of the Muslim holy scripture, the Koran, that Sept. 11. He was eventually dissuaded by a number of religious and government officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who called him to say his actions would put the lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. On the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where I worked at the time, consensus was that the likelihood of violence was high.

When Jones did in fact stage a public Koran burning on March 20, 2011, riots broke out in Afghanistan, killing nearly a dozen people and injuring 90 in the beautiful, cosmopolitan northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Seven of the dead were United Nations employees; the rest were Afghans.

In Afghanistan, and in all of the Arab nations in transition, an extremist fringe is brawling for power with a more pluralistic majority. Radicals pounce on any pretext to play on religious feeling. I could pick out the signs of manipulation in Afghanistan — riots that started on university campuses where radicalized Pakistani students abound, simultaneous outbreaks in far-flung places, the sudden

appearance of weapons. By providing extremists in Libya and elsewhere such an opportunity, the makers of “Innocence of Muslims” were playing into their hands.

As for imminence, the timeline of similar events after recent burnings of religious materials indicates that reactions typically come within two weeks. Nakoula’s video was deliberately publicized just before the sensitive date of Sept. 11, and could be expected to spark violence on that anniversary.

While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. “Based on my understanding of the events,” 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, “I think this meets the imminence standard.”

Finally, much 1st Amendment jurisprudence concerns speech explicitly advocating violence, such as calls to resist arrest, or videos explaining bomb-making techniques. But words don’t have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says Lewis. “If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard.”

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How the Occupy movement may yet lead America

Reihan Salam writes: Occupy succeeded in expanding the boundaries of our political conversation, creating new possibilities for the American left.

As our slow-motion economic crisis grinds on, it is worth asking: How might these possibilities be realized? For some, Occupy was a liberating experience of collective effervescence and of being one with a crowd. As one friend put it, it was “the unspeakable joy of taking to the streets, taking spaces, exploring new relations and environments” that resonated most. For others, it created a new sense of cross-class solidarity. Jeremy Kessler, a legal historian who covered the Occupy movement for the leftist literary journal N + 1 and the New Republic, senses that it has already shaped the political consciousness of younger left-liberals. “There is more skepticism towards the elite liberal consensus,” and so, “for instance, there is more support for the Chicago teachers union and more wariness towards anti-union reformers.” Ideological battle lines have in this sense grown sharper. Yet it is still not clear where Occupy, and the left, will go next.

Perhaps the most politically fruitful path for the American left would be to go back to the future – to draw on the lessons of the Populists of the William Jennings Bryan era, who sought to unite farmers and industrial workers against the stranglehold of Eastern capital. Back then, the Populists failed, as the interests of industrial workers were more closely tied to their bosses than to those of highly indebted smallholders living in the prairies. Now, however, millions of middle-income households struggle under the burden of underwater mortgages.

In the latest issue of the Nation, David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist considered an intellectual leading light of the Occupy movement, argues that the “financialization” of the economy should be understood as “an enormous engine of debt extraction,” through which the 1 percent extracts wealth from the 99 percent. Rather than champion specific policies designed to reduce the burden of debt, Graeber calls for a campaign of mass resistance devoted to delegitimizing what he calls “Mafia capitalism.” While Graeber’s language is bracing, and it will undoubtedly appeal to at least some radicals who hope to keep the spirit of Occupy alive, it is not obvious that his idea of mass resistance can build a mass movement.

But might a softer version of Graeberism succeed? As the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin argues in The Populist Persuasion, American populist movements have traditionally pitted the producing majority against a parasitic elite. That is one reason why “We Are the 99 Percent,” the slogan coined by Graeber and his allies, has proved so resonant: It invokes older American political traditions. [Continue reading…]

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Can debt spark a revolution?

David Graeber writes: The idea of the “99 percent” managed to do something that no one has done in the United States since the Great Depression: revive the concept of social class as a political issue. What made this possible was a subtle change in the very nature of class power in this country, which, I have come to realize, has everything to do with debt.

As a member of the team that came up with the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” I can attest that we weren’t thinking of inequality or even simply class but specifically of class power. It’s now clear that the 1 percent are the creditors: those who are able to turn their wealth into political influence and their political influence back into wealth again. The overriding imperative of government policy is to do whatever it takes, using all available tools—fiscal, monetary, political, even military—to keep stock prices from falling. The most powerful empire on earth seems to exist first and foremost to guarantee the stream of wealth flowing into the hands of that tiny proportion of its population who hold financial assets. This allows an ever-increasing amount of wealth to flow back into the system of legalized bribery that American politics has effectively become.

When we were organizing the Wall Street occupation in August of 2011, we really didn’t have any clear idea who, if anyone, would actually show up. But almost immediately we noticed a pattern. The overwhelming majority of Occupiers were, in one way or another, refugees of the American debt system. At first, that meant student debt: the typical complaint was “I worked hard and played by the rules, and now I can’t find a job to pay my student loans—while the financial criminals who trashed the economy got themselves bailed out.”

What was remarkable wasn’t so much the fact that the camp began to fill with so many debt refugees, but how much their plea resonated across the political spectrum. In the 1960s or early ’80s, the plight of a college graduate juggling loans wasn’t the sort of thing most likely to wring the hearts of transit or sanitation workers. But Occupy received warmth and solidarity from organized labor. Something clearly had changed. We had come to see ourselves as members of the same indebted class. [Continue reading…]

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The surge in ‘insider’ attacks in Afghanistan

Reuters reports: Four U.S. troops fighting with the NATO-led alliance were killed in another suspected “insider” attack in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths this weekend caused by Afghans turning on their allies to six.

Four troops were found dead and two wounded when a response team arrived at the scene from a nearby checkpoint, a spokesman for the coalition said. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the four dead were Americans.

One of the six members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) operating the observation post with six coalition troops was also found dead, while the other five had disappeared.

“The fighting had stopped by the time the responders arrived,” said Major Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the NATO-led coalition.

Sunday’s shooting took place in Zabol, a province where U.S. forces are based, according to a local official.

The attack came a day after two British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman while returning from a patrol in the southerly Helmand province, one of the strongholds of the Taliban-led insurgency.

At least 51 foreign military personnel have been killed in “insider” attacks this year, deaths that have badly strained the coalition’s relations with Afghan forces as it moves towards handing security responsibility to them by the end of 2014.

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A week of criminals and culture clashes

Rami G Khouri writes: The criminal tragedy of the death of four American diplomats in Benghazi has rightly captured the attention of the world and raised questions about whether attacks against embassies are a reasonable way for people to express their anger. It is clear that the three things we witnessed this week – spontaneous mob scenes, pre-planned orderly demonstrations and organized military attacks against American facilities – represent three different phenomena, each of which reflected a significant political reality in the Arab world today. Why these three all gravitate to American embassies is a relevant question that deserves more analysis, but for another day.

At the other end is the spark of this week’s dynamics, namely the vulgar and deliberately provocative film by anti-Islamic criminals in the United States (including some of Egyptian Coptic origin) who know that if they insult the Prophet Mohammad they will incite demonstrations and violence across parts of the Arab-Islamic world. A small number of virulent Islamophobic movements in North America and Europe vent their racist insults through websites, publications and other means, and when these are translated into Arabic and spread through the digital world, the result is what we witnessed this week in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and other countries.

But what, in fact, did we witness? It is important to try to understand the separation lines between the different players comprising the new scorecard of Arab political cultures in a process of deep transformation, and, in cases like Libya, that also represent the birth of totally new national political and governance systems. Small groups of armed Salafist militants carry out operations such as the attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, while the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and other such Islamists tend to stick to orderly and peaceful demonstrations. Spontaneous groups of angry citizens fall somewhere in between when they vent their anger at the insulting film about the Prophet Mohammad by storming American embassies and tearing down or burning the flag.

These groups represent the equivalent of the American terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the ideological Tea Party, those many Americans who spontaneously gathered, danced and celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed, and those few Americans who burned down mosques around the country. The criminals in this mix must be viewed and dealt with very differently from the others who are angry, energetic and excitable, but not necessarily criminal in either their intent or their conduct. [Continue reading…]

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Nakoula Basseley Nakoula taken in for questioning

Reuters reports: A California man convicted of bank fraud was taken in for questioning on Saturday by officers investigating possible probation violations stemming from the making of an anti-Islam film that triggered violent protests in the Muslim world.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, voluntarily left his home in the early hours of Saturday morning for the meeting in a sheriff’s station in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said.

“He will be interviewed by federal probation officers,” Whitmore said. He said Nakoula had not been placed under arrest but would not be returning home immediately. “He was never put in handcuffs… It was all voluntary.”

Nakoula, who has denied involvement in the film in a phone call to his Coptic Christian bishop, was ushered out of his home and into a waiting car by several sheriff’s deputies, his face shielded by a scarf, hat and sunglasses.

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Can the U.S. stop the wave of Muslim protests targeting its embassies?

Tony Karon writes: Egregious insults like the Innocence of Muslims film would not be so easily translated into rage at U.S. power were it not for the simmering long-term rage at Washington over its invasions of Muslim countries, its support for Israeli governments and Arab despots, its drone strikes and more.

Deep anger at U.S. foreign policy is the extended preexisting condition that geopolitical Obamacare has failed to significantly alter; the outrage at an offensive film is the opportunistic virus that, when combined with the preexisting condition, creates a crisis. Instances of American Islam-bashing are used to prove that the policies and actions of the U.S. that most anger ordinary Arabs are not simply discrete foreign policy choices driven by self-interest and other agendas but rather expressions of a deeper animus toward Islam itself — a proof that functions as a chemical catalyst that can bring residual anger to a boil.

Yes, it’s always manipulated by cynical opportunists driven by narrow political agendas, but the outrage itself is real, and it’s hardly confined to a movie. Without the pre-existing anger, in fact, the film would be like a detonator without dynamite. Only the combination of the two creates the explosion.

So in that sense, President Obama’s Republican critics are not wrong in suggesting that this week’s upsurge in protests represents, at least in part, a response to the Administration’s handling of the Middle East or even to what vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan on Friday called ”mixed signals” from the White House. But where Ryan and those echoing him are wrong — egregiously, spectacularly wrong — is in suggesting that the protests are a response to a retreat from “moral clarity and firmness of purpose,” watchwords of the Bush era. On the contrary, the Muslim world was up in arms against the U.S. on a sustained basis for most of the Bush presidency, precisely because of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unconditional backing of Israel as it pummeled Palestinians and the obvious hypocrisy of a policy of proclaiming democracy and freedom while coddling friendly despots. If the Arab world is angry at the “mixed messages” coming from the Obama Administration, that’s because the President in Cairo in 2009 had promised a break from Bush-era policies yet failed on many fronts to deliver it. It’s not the changes Obama’s made since the Bush era that drive Arab anger; it’s his Administration’s many continuities with Bush-era policies in the Middle East.

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Anti-western violence gripping the Arab world has little to do with a film

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writes: The maelstrom of anti-western violence in the Arab world has little to do with an anti-Islam propaganda film released on YouTube.

It has more to do with decades of perceived western imperialism – and the organisational skills of the Salafis, known for their no-compromise, literal interpretation of the faith.

Such rightwing Islamists were wrongfooted by the Arab spring. For years, the jihadis and Salafis thought they had a monopoly on revolution and were the only viable opposition to the Arab dictators.

When the regimes were threatened by popular uprisings, the Salafis took weeks and months to respond. In Libya they initially called for the demonstrators to support the ruler of the land, Muammar Gaddafi. As it became clear that the revolutions would not instantly deliver the brighter future people had marched for, the Salafis began to use that discontent to their advantage.

They are brilliant at agitating on the streets – working on the unemployed, the frustrated, people who feel life should be better. In Tunis, the Salafi agitation began months before the propaganda film – the Innocence of Muslims – surfaced. They attacked cinemas, secularists and artists. In Bahrain and Syria they worked along sectarian lines, and in Egypt they launched vicious confrontations with the Coptic Christians. [Continue reading…]

In Cairo, protests outside the U.S. embassy appear to have lost support from the Salafists and a demonstration at Tahrir Square only drew a few hundred.

The Wall Street Journal reports: “Egyptians don’t like to protest this way,” said Hisham Al Ashry, a self-identified adherent to hardline Salafi Islam and one of the main speakers at the Salafi-led protest outside the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. “They want to protest against America, they want to protest against the embassy, but not this way. They want a peaceful protest to express their opinions.”

Many self-identified Islamists in Tahrir Square distanced themselves Thursday from the scene at the U.S. Embassy. They said it was the work of nonpolitical hooligans who are often in their young teens and in several instances have joined in violent clashes with police after what started as peaceful protests.

“Egyptians refuse this,” said one of the protesters in Tahrir Square who called himself Abu Safiyan. He invoked from memory the Prophet Muhammed’s invocation to protect foreign emissaries.

Most of the crowd that could be seen throwing rocks at police officers along the Nile River a block from the U.S. Embassy appeared to be in their teens. Few were dressed like Mr. Abu Safiyan, whose long beard and starched white gown characterizes many adherents to Salafi Islam.

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The politics of outrage is still an irresistible temptation

Issandr El Amrani writes: One of the hopes – for me at least – of the Arab uprisings is that they will lead to a qualitative change in the substance of Arab politics. I mean this not just in the sense that undemocratic regimes will be undone, replaced by real politics with real stakes and rotation of power. I also mean that I hope the uprisings can short-circuit some old tropes of regional politics, about identity, wounded pride and angry impotence.

Alas, this week’s embassy protests and senseless killings show there is still much farther to go.

Protests and incitement about books, films or statements deemed insulting to Islam have for decades been a staple tool of Islamists, and of both religious and secular governments in the region.

Consider the 2005 Danish cartoon crisis, when thousands took to the streets against offensive cartoon depictions of Prophet Mohammed – months after they had been published. This was fomented in good part by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which, at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, refocused the region’s attention on a newspaper published four months earlier.

That resulted in protests (apparently backed by both governments and the Islamist movements with which they usually fought). In Syria and Gaza at least, governments apparently allowed several European embassies to be raided. The Danish embassy in Pakistan was also bombed. By early 2006, over 100 had died either as a result of the attacks or because of the efforts to control the riots worldwide.

Other examples quickly come to mind, from the 1988 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign in 2000 against Syrian novelist Hayder Hayder’s Banquet for Seaweed.

These usually served political purposes – no doubt Khomeini used the Rushdie fatwa to distract Iranians from the consequences of the terrible war with Iraq he prolonged; the Muslim Brothers loved to embarrass the government for having published Hayder’s book. And in 2005, the Mubarak regime made use of the Danish cartoon crisis just as it was coming under increased domestic and external pressure to democratise.

Islamist movements (even if they are not alone in this) have shown that they excel in using an insult (real or perceived) as part of their culture wars: the tactic is to portray themselves as the sole defenders of the faith. In this week’s case, they chose to do so even though the film in question was released only online and no one would have heard of it or paid attention to it without their efforts. [Continue reading…]

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Conspiracies of convenience: what’s behind the film fracas?

Hani Shukrallah writes: I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I strongly sense conspiracy in the whole sordid “film maligning the Prophet” fracas, which, in a few hours, claimed the lives of three American diplomats and delivered a devastating blow to the Arab revolutionary upsurge and to the new democratic and pluralistic awareness that both lay behind that upsurge and was its most precious product.

Let me hasten to explain, however, that I use the questionable term, conspiracy, not in the sense that everyone from the makers of the film to the hysterical demonstrators that attacked the American missions in Cairo and Benghazi are in cahoots; nor do I base my argument simply on “who benefits most”, which almost invariably is the conspiracy theorist’s most crucial analytical tool.

WhatI really mean by “conspiracy” here is that the Prophet Muhammad is in fact wholly secondary to the real motives of the various parties to the ugly and bloody brawl. Yet, somewhat like the conspiracy theorist, I base my argument here more on a reading of the events and their context, rather than on concrete, tangible facts.

To use detective story parlance, what I present below is largely “circumstantial” evidence, leaving it the readers to judge for themselves whether it is sufficiently compelling.

My first suggestion in this respect is that the makers of the film had deliberately set out to goad Muslims into just such violent and irrational reactions as we have seen in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere.

It’s been tested many times before, and even if we can’t blame the penchant of certain influential political and ideological forces among us for ignorance and stupidity, we can still argue that those who would set out to trigger such responses are in possession of a very clear manual setting out how to do it, and the broad outlines of expected outcomes.

We need only recall the 2005-6 Danish cartoons episode. The insignificant Danish newspaper that triggered the hullabaloo had been transparently out to trigger a reaction from Muslims, and a reaction it got. I personally have not the least doubt that the Christian fundamentalist preacher who publicly set a copy of the Qur’an on fire was also deliberately out to goad Muslims into a reaction.

The obvious, outward motive of such attempts is not difficult to discern: to show Muslims as irrational, violent, intolerant and barbaric, all of which are attributes profoundly inscribed into the racist anti-Muslim discourse in the West.

And, it’s a very safe bet that there will be among us those who will readily oblige.

I can guess at two additional motives, one of an immediate, specifically targeted nature, and the other considerably more general and strategic in nature. America is hurtling towards presidential elections in which Barak Hussein Obama is running for a second term. For large sections of the American Christian Right (closely allied to rightwing Zionism), Obama is, if not the anti-Christ, than at the very least a Muslim mole planted in the White House.

For his part, Obama, from the very start of his presidency, had set out to douse the fires of the “clash of civilizations” then still raging curtsey of Messrs Bush and Bin Laden, among others. An editorial in the New York Times commenting on Obama’s famous address to the Muslim world from Cairo University, lauded him for having “steered away from the poisonous post-9/11 clash of civilizations mythology that drove so much of President George W. Bush’s rhetoric and disastrous policy.”

To reignite “the clash” in some form serves to bolster the American Right as a whole, the American Christian Right (which is a mainstay of the Republican Party) specifically, while at the same time undermining Obama, who at best had acted to bring it to an end, and at worst is “a bloody Muslim” himself.

A much broader motivation, which does not exclude Obama as target, is to tarnish, even to deny the very existence of an Arab Spring. [Continue reading…]

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Scowcroft, Brzezinski call for clear thinking on military action on Iran

National Security Network reports: Today a senior group of bipartisan security experts at the highest levels – retired Cabinet secretaries, diplomats, military leaders and intelligence specialists – released a comprehensive study on the potential costs and benefits of a military strike on Iran. The group issues a sober warning that “a foundation for clear thinking about the potential use of force against Iran” is lacking in the public discussion to date. Signatories include Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard L. Armitage, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chuck Hagel, Gen .Anthony C. Zinni, Leslie H. Gelb, Lee H. Hamilton, Ellen Laipson, Adm. William Fallon, Amb. Thomas R. Pickering, Amb. William Luers, and others. Other analysts have recently sounded the same alarm. While the Iran Project report explicitly does not make policy recommendations, CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman concludes in his recent study, “The best way out is successful negotiations.”

A military strike likely to delay, not prevent a weapon – while also increasing Iran’s motivation to attain a bomb. The Iran Project report finds, “U.S. policy statements indicate that the objective of military action against Iran would be to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. … a military action involving aerial strikes, cyber attacks, covert operations, and special operations forces would destroy or severely damage many of Iran’s physical facilities and stockpiles. But in our judgment, complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is unlikely; and Iran would still retain the scientific capacity and the experience to start its nuclear program again if it chose to do so.” The group echoes conclusions of Israeli and U.S. intelligence by concluding, “We believe that extended military strikes by the U.S. alone or in concert with Israel could delay Iran’s ability to build a bomb by up to four years—if the military operation is carried out to near perfection, with all aircraft, missiles, and bombs working to maximum effect. A military strike by Israel alone, with its more limited military capacity, could delay Iran’s ability to build a bomb for up to two years. The distinction between preventing and delaying Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon would be a critical one, when considering the objectives of war.”

The Iran Project signatories add, “we believe that military action probably would reduce the possibility of reaching a more permanent political resolution of concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. In fact, we believe that a U.S. attack on Iran would increase Iran’s motivation to build a bomb, because 1) the Iranian leadership would become more convinced than ever that regime change is the goal of U.S. policy, and 2) building a bomb would be seen as a way to inhibit future attacks and redress the humiliation of being attacked.” [Continue reading…]

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