Netanyahu’s effort to do ‘anything possible to stop’ Obama being re-elected president
The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday reiterated his willingness to attack the Iranian nuclear program without support from Washington or the world, returning to an aggressive posture that he had largely abandoned since his United Nations speech in September.
“When David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the state of Israel, was it done with American approval?” Mr. Netanyahu asked in an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 on Monday night. “When Levi Eshkol was forced to act in order to loosen the siege before 1967, was it done with the Americans’ support?
“If someone sits here as the prime minister of Israel and he can’t take action on matters that are cardinal to the existence of this country, its future and its security, and he is totally dependent on receiving approval from others, then he is not worthy of leading,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “I can make these decisions.”
Though American officials, including President Obama, have always acknowledged that Israel ultimately has the right to decide how to defend itself, Mr. Netanyahu’s tough tone and timing — on the eve of the American presidential election — are sure to reignite rifts with Washington over how best to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb.
As has been the case over the past two years, however, it is impossible to know whether his hawkish words are harbingers of deeds or part of a strategic campaign to scare nations into increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran.
“I am not eager to go to war,” Mr. Netanyahu said in the seven-minute interview. “I have been creating very heavy pressure, and part of this pressure comes from the knowledge some of the most powerful nations in the world have that we are serious. This isn’t a show, this is not false.”
Besides the creation of diplomatic tensions if Israel were to act alone against Washington’s wishes, there is a more practical concern: the Israeli military lacks the capacity to penetrate all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, and thus could most likely only delay the potential development of a nuclear weapon by a few years. The United States has bunker-busting bombs that could do far more damage.
The interview was broadcast on “Fact,” a program often compared to “60 Minutes,” at the end of an hourlong documentary on Israeli decision making regarding Iran over the past decade. The program highlighted the opposition of Israel’s own security establishment to a unilateral strike, saying that Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, ordered the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for an imminent operation in 2010 but were rebuffed by the chiefs of their military and international intelligence service.
Among those interviewed was Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister currently contemplating a political comeback. He accused Mr. Netanyahu of “spitting in the face” of Mr. Obama and “doing anything possible to stop him from being elected president of the United States,” a harsh critique in a country that regards safeguarding its special relationship with Washington as a sacred priority. [Continue reading…]
Obama and Romney remain silent on climate change, the biggest issue of all
George Monbiot writes: Here’s a remarkable thing. Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama – with the exception of one throwaway line each – have mentioned climate change in the wake of hurricane Sandy.
They are struck dumb. During a Romney rally in Virginia on Thursday, a protester held up a banner and shouted “What about climate? That’s what caused this monster storm”. The candidate stood grinning and nodding as the crowd drowned out the heckler by chanting “USA! USA!”. Romney paused, then resumed his speech as if nothing had happened. The poster the man held up? It said “End climate silence”.
While other Democrats expound the urgent need to act, the man they support will not take up the call. Barack Obama, responding to his endorsement by the mayor of New York, mentioned climate change last week as “a threat to our children’s future”. Otherwise, I have been able to find nothing; nor have the many people I have asked on Twitter. Something has gone horribly wrong.
There are several ways in which the impact of hurricane Sandy is likely to have been exacerbated by climate breakdown. Warmer oceans make hurricanes more likely and more severe. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, increasing the maximum rainfall. Higher sea levels aggravate storm surges. Sandy might not have hit the United States at all, had it not been for a blocking ridge of high pressure over Greenland, which diverted the storm westwards. The blocking high – rare there at this time of year – could be the result of the record ice melt in the Arctic this autumn.
This might sound like the wisdom of hindsight. But in February the journal Nature Climate Change published an article warning that global warming is likely to “increase the surge risk for New York City”. As storms intensify and the sea level rises, it predicted that storm surges previously described as 100-year events would become between five and 30 times as frequent.
Four years ago, Obama pledged that “my presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change”. He promised a federal cap and trade system and “strong annual targets” to reduce carbon pollution. But he ran into a ridge of high pressure. His cap and trade bill was killed in the Senate in 2010.
At a meeting in the White House in 2009, his strategists decided that climate change was a banned topic: it caused too much trouble. From then onwards, Obama would talk about clean energy and green jobs and improvements in fuel economy, but would seldom explain why these shifts were necessary. The problem with this approach is that you cannot engineer a sustained reduction of greenhouse gas emissions only by getting into clean energy: you also have to get out of dirty energy. And that requires statesmanship: active and persuasive engagement with the public. [Continue reading…]
As a second-term president there’s some chance that Obama could rise to that challenge. The chances of Romney taking up the issue are I would say precisely zero.
Middle East lost
Shadi Hamid writes: One of the great mysteries of the past four years is how Barack Obama — who rose to the presidency, in part, on his promises to fundamentally re-think and re-orient U.S. policy in the Middle East — has instead spent his term running away from the region.
It is difficult to remember it now, but the prospect of an Obama presidency was initially greeted in the Arab world with a mixture of relief and guarded optimism. His name and Muslim origins certainly helped. But there was something else: For the first time, here was an American president who seemed to have an intuitive grasp of Arab grievances. This grasp extended, perhaps most importantly, to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israelis may have been victims, but so too were the Palestinians. In short, Obama seemed to “get” the Middle East. This didn’t sound like someone who wanted to spend three years “pivoting” to China.
To look back at Obama’s various statements before becoming president is somewhat jarring. At a 2003 farewell party for the scholar Rashid Khalidi, a fierce advocate for Palestinian rights, Obama told the audience that his conversations with Khalidi had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases … It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation.” Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah recounted Obama telling him in 2004: “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” (The campaign denied that Obama made such remarks.)
It is easy to make too much of these comments, as many already have. But there is little doubt that Obama stood apart from past presidents in the way he thought and spoke about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Moreover, he understood the conflict’s centrality in the broader Arab narrative. As he told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2008, “this constant wound…this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.” Even after becoming president, Obama would go out of his way to acknowledge America’s checkered and sometimes tragic history in the region. In his 2009 Cairo address, he noted that tension between the West and the Muslim world “has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
The question isn’t whether such sentiments are good or bad. Whatever his prescriptions, Obama evidently believed in restoring American leadership in the Middle East and, by extension, that U.S. leadership mattered and could be used for good. In the subsequent years, however, Obama seems to have gradually lost faith in America’s ability to impact the course of events. [Continue reading…]
“American leadership” is a phrase and a concept that has passed its sell-by date. What it connotes is an ill-conceived duality: that the United States is either in control or disengaged; that the U.S. must always choose between dictating outcomes or declining to participate. This then leads to arguments about whether American power is declining and if it is, whether that power can be restored. Either we get what we want, or we won’t play. It’s a childish mentality.
The challenge that needs to be faced by the next president is that America’s effective engagement with the Middle East and the rest of the world can no longer be defined by such narrow expectations. The realists’ devotion to national interest needs to be replaced by a focus on collective interests. We no longer live in a world where narrow interests are sustainable.
How civil wars evolve
Peter Dizikes writes: When the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan, in late 1996, they soon launched a sustained military offensive to the north, an area they did not control. The following May, however, Abdul Malik Pahlawan, an Uzbek leader of the so-called Northern Alliance, which had been defending the region, struck a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban — who marched right into Mazar-i-Sharif, a key northern city.
All of two days later, Malik changed his mind, recognizing that his group would not have as much power as he had hoped. Quickly joining forces with two other ethnic groups in the area, Malik and his Uzbek followers repelled the Taliban in a bloody battle, eventually regaining control of the northern provinces.
This episode contains a larger lesson: Contrary to the common perception, political alliances during civil wars are not formed along immutable religious, ethnic or linguistic lines, according to the research of MIT political scientist Fotini Christia. As she explains in a new book, “Alliance Formation in Civil Wars,” published this month by Cambridge University Press, such alliances are often created for balance-of-power reasons, and stretch across religious or ethnic boundaries. Moreover, factions can develop within homogenous groups — leading seemingly solid allies, representing the same identity groups, to oppose each other.
“We see a civil war as black-and-white, a two-sided conflict between a government and rebels,” Christia says. “But usually it is a more dynamic situation.” In these more fluid circumstances, she adds, “Two groups can be friends one day and bitter enemies the next.”
The practical upshot of Christia’s findings is that many civil wars, though often described as manifestations of ancient sectarian conflicts, are often fought between factions whose leaders are more pragmatic — possibly suggesting that these wars can be resolved if the right incentives are in place.
“We have to be a lot more nuanced in the way we understand the dynamics of civil wars,” Christia says. “The process of alliance formation and alliance breakdown can take on a life of its own as a conflict unfolds.” Or, as she writes in the book, “policy makers should not be looking to race, language or religion to predict or preclude civil wars’ allies.” [Continue reading…]
Lewis Lapham’s antidote to the age of BuzzFeed
Ron Rosenbaum writes: The counterrevolution has its embattled forward outpost on a genteel New York street called Irving Place, home to Lapham’s Quarterly. The street is named after Washington Irving, the 19th-century American author best known for creating the Headless Horseman in his short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness — against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for…BuzzFeed.
Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet — here is the paradox — the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past.
Which is why the spartan quarters of the Quarterly remind me of the role rare and scattered monasteries of the Dark Ages played when, as the plague raged and the scarce manuscripts of classical literature were being burned, dedicated monks made it their sacred mission to preserve, copy, illuminate manuscripts that otherwise might have been lost forever.
In the back room of the Quarterly, Lapham still looks like the striking patrician beau ideal, slender and silvery at 77 in his expensive-looking suit. A sleek black silk scarf gives him the look of a still-potent mafia don (Don Quixote?) whose beautiful manners belie a stiletto-like gaze at contemporary culture. One can sense, reading Lapham’s Quarterly, that its vast array of erudition is designed to be a weapon — one would like to say a weapon of mass instruction. Though its 25,000 circulation doesn’t allow that scale of metaphor yet, it still has a vibrant web presence and it has the backing of a wide range of erudite eminences.
When I asked Lapham about the intent of his project, he replied with a line from Goethe, one of the great little-read writers he seeks to reintroduce to the conversation: “Goethe said that he who cannot draw on 3,000 years [of learning] is living hand to mouth.” Lapham’s solution to this under-nourishment: Give ’em a feast.
Each issue is a feast, so well curated — around 100 excerpts and many small squibs in issues devoted to such relevant subjects as money, war, the family and the future — that reading it is like choosing among bonbons for the brain. It’s a kind of hip-hop mash-up of human wisdom. Half the fun is figuring out the rationale of the order the Laphamites have given to the excerpts, which jump back and forth between millennia and genres: From Euripides, there’s Medea’s climactic heart-rending lament for her children in the “Family” issue. Isaac Bashevis Singer on magic in ’70s New York City. Juvenal’s filthy satire on adulterers in the “Eros” issue. In the new “Politics” issue we go from Solon in ancient Athens to the heroic murdered dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 21st-century Moscow. The issue on money ranges from Karl Marx back to Aristophanes, forward to Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov, back to Hammurabi in 1780 B.C.
Lapham’s deeper agenda is to inject the wisdom of the ages into the roiling controversies of the day through small doses that are irresistible reading. In “Politics,” for example, I found a sound bite from Persia in 522 B.C., courtesy of Herodotus, which introduced me to a fellow named Otanes who made what may be the earliest and most eloquent case for democracy against oligarchy. And Ralph Ellison on the victims of racism and oligarchy in the 1930s.
That’s really the way to read the issues of the Quarterly. Not to try reading the latest one straight through, but order a few back issues from its website, Laphamsquarterly.org, and put them on your bedside table. Each page is an illumination of the consciousness, the culture that created you, and that is waiting to recreate you. [Continue reading…]
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘In the Name of Love’
Tom Engelhardt on supersized politics in the 2012 election
The permanent militarization of America
Aaron B. O’Connell writes: In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.
The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from 14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such cuts would entail.
Nor has the private sector infected foreign policy in the way that Eisenhower warned. Foreign policy has become increasingly reliant on military solutions since World War II, but we are a long way from the Marines’ repeated occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, when commercial interests influenced military action. Of all the criticisms of the 2003 Iraq war, the idea that it was done to somehow magically decrease the cost of oil is the least credible. Though it’s true that mercenaries and contractors have exploited the wars of the past decade, hard decisions about the use of military force are made today much as they were in Eisenhower’s day: by the president, advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, and then more or less rubber-stamped by Congress. Corporations do not get a vote, at least not yet.
But Eisenhower’s least heeded warning — concerning the spiritual effects of permanent preparations for war — is more important now than ever. Our culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era, and civilians, not the armed services, have been the principal cause. From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Of course, veterans should be thanked for serving their country, as should police officers, emergency workers and teachers. But no institution — particularly one financed by the taxpayers — should be immune from thoughtful criticism. [Continue reading…]
World on track for 6 degrees Celsius warming without carbon cuts, study shows
The Guardian reports: The slow rate of emissions cuts in major economies has put the world on track for “at least six degrees of warming” by the end of the century, analysts will warn today.
New research by consultancy giant PwC finds an unprecedented 5.1 per cent annual cut in global emissions per unit of GDP, known as carbon intensity, is needed through to 2050 if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet an internationally agreed target of limiting average temperature increases to just two degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Such deep reductions in carbon intensity would be over six times greater than the 0.8 per cent average annual cuts achieved since 2000.
The report also confirms that greatest rises in greenhouse gas emissions came from the emerging E7 economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey, whose cumulative 7.4 per cent annual increase in emissions swamped record levels of reductions in the UK, France, and Germany.
PwC warns sustained economic growth in these countries could “lock in” high carbon assets that will make it significantly harder for them to decarbonise over the coming decades, a point likely to be raised at the UN-backed Doha Climate Summit when it kicks off later this month.
Why sea level is rising faster than predicted
Map showing the impact on the South East U.S. coastline from changing sea levels.
Deborah Byrd writes: The 2007 IPCC report projected a global sea level rise between 0.2 and 0.5 meters by the year 2100. But current measurements of sea level rise suggest Earth’s seas are rising at the maximum rate proposed by the IPCC – or faster. These measurements suggest a rise of one meter or more by the end of the century. That’s according to University of Colorado geologist Bill Hay, who presented his results yesterday (November 4, 2012) at a meeting of The Geological Society of America. Hay said:
Modern climate models … do not include the many feedbacks we are just discovering.
For example, he said, Arctic sea ice and Greenland ice cap melting, and groundwater mining, all lead to feedbacks not included in climate models predicting sea level rise.
Arctic sea ice – which is already in the ocean – does not in itself raise sea level. But this melting plays a role in the overall warming of the Arctic, which leads to ice losses in nearby Greenland and northern Canada. In other words, when sea ice melts, it releases fresh water from the Arctic, which is then replaced by saltier, warmer water from the south. That warmer water pushes the Arctic toward more ice-free waters, which absorb sunlight rather than reflect it back into space like sea ice does. The more open water there is, the more heat is trapped in the Arctic waters, and the warmer things can get. So, according to Hay, melting Arctic sea ice is “a big heat pump that brings heat to the Arctic.” That feedback is not typically in climate models predicting sea level rise. [Continue reading…]
Reading guide: Where Romney and Obama actually stand on global warming
By Cora Currier and Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica, November 1, 2012
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo linked the storm to a broader change in the weather. “I don’t call it ‘global warming’ because you trigger a whole political debate,” Cuomo said. “But the frequency of extreme weather is going way up.”
President Obama and Mitt Romney have been even more reluctant to utter the words “global warming.” Neither candidate mentioned climate change over four presidential debates and none of the moderators asked about it — the first time that’s happened since 1988.
Obama has barely spoken of it on the campaign trail, while Romney has mocked the president’s earlier promise to address climate change.
As reporters and scientists discuss what role climate change may have played in fueling the storm, we’ve looked beyond the candidates’ rhetoric — or lack thereof — to find out where they actually stand:
Video: Should progressives vote for Obama or third parties in swing states?
Video: Adam Serwer (Mother Jones) and Jamelle Bouie (The American Prospect) discuss tomorrow’s election
Five countries (and regions) where the U.S. election matters most
Tony Karon writes: Superbarrio Gómez ran the most underreported campaign of the 1996 U.S. presidential election. The masked Mexican wrestler turned social activist showed up in New Hampshire during the primary season and declared himself a “candidate” even though his foreign citizenship rendered him ineligible. Decisions affecting the lives of Mexicans are made in the White House, he reasoned, so Mexicans should have a say in choosing its occupant. It’s a sentiment that’s widely shared: two-thirds of the 26,000 respondents from 32 countries in a recent poll believe that the White House has an important impact on their lives, and for that reason, almost half believe they should have a vote in the U.S. presidential election. (If they did, President Barack Obama would be a shoo-in, according to almost every poll.)
The level of interest in this U.S. election, however, is considerably lower than that of 2008. One reason for this may be that any global citizen tuning in to the campaign’s foreign policy debate would have struggled to find substantial differences between what Governor Mitt Romney advocated and what the White House is doing. There is also a growing sense of the relative decline of U.S. global power. The U.S. remains the world’s most militarily powerful country and its largest economy, but its ability to shape economic and geopolitical events in distant climes has steadily declined over the past decade — whether it’s Afghanistan or Iraq, the rapidly changing Arab world or Europe’s debt crisis, Washington struggles to impose its will.
That said, the Oval Office remains the world’s strongest single center of power, and the outcome of Tuesday’s vote will be closely watched. Here are five places [Syria, Israel, China, EU, and the Arctic] where the stakes are particularly high [Continue reading…]
Bashar al-Assad wants war not peace reveals Syria’s former prime minister Riyad Hijab
The Daily Telegraph reports: The most senior politician to defect from the Bashar al-Assad’s regime has revealed that the President repeatedly rejected calls by his own government for a political compromise, in favour of all-out war.
In his first full interview with a Western newspaper since he fled to Jordan in August, Riyad Hijab, the former prime minister, told The Daily Telegraph that he and other senior regime figures pleaded with Mr Assad to negotiate with the Syrian opposition.
One week before his defection, Mr Hijab, the vice-president, the parliamentary speaker and the deputy head of the Baath party together held a private meeting with Mr Assad.
“We told Bashar he needed to find a political solution to the crisis,” he said. “We said, ‘These are our people that we are killing.’
“We suggested that we work with Friends of Syria group, but he categorically refused to stop the operations or to negotiate.”
Mr Hijab referred to the war waged against the Muslim Brotherhood by Mr Assad’s father, Hafez, which led to the deaths of up to 10,000 people in an assault on the city of Hama.
“Bashar really thinks that he can settle this militarily,” he said.
“He is trying to replicate his father’s fight in the 1980s.” Mr Hijab was speaking as key anti-regime figures gathered in the Qatari capital Doha to replace the fractured opposition Syrian National Council with a new government-in-exile. Once formed, the new Council would seek to gain formal international recognition, and, crucially, better weapons.
Mr Hijab said he rejected an offer to be part of the US-backed proposal, promising to be a “soldier in this revolution without taking a political position”.
He said the lack of serious action by the West had consolidated President Assad’s confidence.
“Bashar used to be scared of the international community – he was really worried that they would impose a no-fly zone over Syria,” he said. “But then he tested the waters, and pushed and pushed and nothing happened. Now he can run air strikes and drop cluster bombs on his own population.” [Continue reading…]
Video: The changing face of Syria’s opposition
British Muslims split along sectarian lines over Arab uprisings
HA Hellyer writes: For more than a decade I have been studying the community dynamics of Muslim Britons. Their views on the Arab uprisings are intriguing: sectarian fears, disappointments, scepticism, hope and ethnic concerns are all there.
Muslim British community activists have not ignored the Arab uprisings. They could not have. The Arab world is at the heart of the Muslim world.
True, most Muslim Britons do not have Arab ethnic backgrounds, and most have evolved to become essentially “post-Islamist”. Post-Islamism, in this sense, means their initial impetus for engaging in political life was from an emotional attachment to Islamism, but they have a secular rationale in the public arena that is not dissimilar from British social conservatives. But many of them have roots in Islamist community organisations and links, if only symbolic ones, to the Muslim Brotherhood.
So even the many Muslim Britons who are post-Islamist are deeply interested in the Islamist project in power, and in the challenges that project finds in Egypt and Tunisia, in particular.
There are, of course, differences of opinion. Many ordinary Muslim Britons of Pakistani descent, for example, now consider Pakistani politics to be utterly hopeless – and instinctively assume that the political state of the Arab world is likewise impervious to constructive change.
In activist circles, however, there is something of a quandary. On the one hand, many Muslim British activists came to political maturity in the anti-war movement, and their stances on the Arab uprisings are imbued by that experience, and by left, and far-left, opinions.
After the Nato intervention in Libya, I heard an interesting interview illustrating that tension. An activist intellectual was talking to a representative of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood who had lived in the UK for many years. The activist, as a staunch supporter of the anti-war movement, was opposed to the intervention. But the Libyan was very much in support of it.
That activist was not alone; his opinion is common among many Muslim British activists, who have come to be sceptical of any western engagement in the Muslim world. [Continue reading…]