Book Reviews from Middle East Quarterly Fall 2005

Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005
http://www.meforum.org/article/787

Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World. By Katharine Scarfe Beckett.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 276 pp. $65.

Beckett studies the nearly five centuries from the rise of an Islamic
policy (A.D. 622) to the first Crusade (A.D. 1096), looking in detail at
the wisps and traces of English knowledge of, contact with, and attitudes
toward Muslims. The results are highly interesting.

Who knew that Bishop Georgius of Ostia, a papal legate to England,
reported in 786 to the pope on two synods he had attended and included
this decree: "That no ecclesiastic shall dare to consume foodstuffs in
secret, unless on account of very great illness, since it is hypocrisy
and a Saracen practice"? Or that Offa, the king of Mercia (a region of
the Midlands, north of London) during the years 757-96 had a gold piece
struck in his name, now available for view at the British Museum, which
bore, as Beckett puts it, "a somewhat bungled Arabic inscription on
obverse and reverse in imitation of an Islamic dinar"?

In fleshing out Dark Ages' reactions to the new faith, Beckett very
usefully establishes the primitive base from which the English-speaking
peoples even today ultimately draw their views. She tells about the
unique English traveler's account to the Middle East dating from this era
(that of Arculf); tallies the dinars found in such places as Eastborne,
St. Leonards-on-Sea, London, Oxford, Croydon, and Bridgnorth; and totes
up the Middle Eastern imports, such as pepper, incense, and bronze bowls.
She finds that a "continuing network of trade and diplomatic links"
connected western Christendom to the Muslim countries.

As for attitudes, they were not just uninformed but static. Beckett notes
that initial responses to Islam were shaped by pre-Islamic writings,
especially those of St. Jerome (c. A.D. 340-420), on Arabs, Saracens,
Ismaelites, and other easterners. This prolonged influence resulted from
a pronounced lack of curiosity on the part of Anglo-Saxons and most other
Europeans.

To end on a jarringly contemporary note: dismayingly, the influence of
Edward Said has reached the point that his theories about Western views
of Muslims now reach even to the early medieval period; Beckett devotes
page after page to dealing with his theories. Happily, she has the
confidence and integrity (in her words) "to some extent" to dispute those
theories.

Daniel Pipes

Building a Successful Palestinian State. By The Rand Palestinian State
Study Team. 407 pp. $35, paper. The Arc: A Formal Structure for a
Palestinian State. By Doug Suisman, Steven N. Simon, and Glenn E.
Robinson. 93 pp. plus DVD. $32.50, paper. Helping a Palestinian State
Succeed: Key Findings. By RAND. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation,
2005. 33 pp. in English, 34 pp. in Arabic. $12.00, paper.

Planners and development experts suffer from a deserved reputation for
technocratic top-downism that ignores the wishes of people and
sociocultural context; they are also known for utopian visions
disconnected from practical reality. Seldom has that stereotype been more
fully fulfilled than in the three complementary RAND studies about a
Palestinian state.

Most striking is how the study treats Palestinians as subjects to be
studied rather than as actors to participate in the creation of their own
state. Blissfully divorced from any discussion about Palestinian social
history or the kinds of communities its people have created, the authors
happily catalogue advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to
developing Palestinian cities. The education chapter, to be fair, does
provide a decent account of the existing system, how it evolved, and what
Palestinians want, but it is the exception that proves the rule.

The analysis also has a head-in-the-clouds character. Chapter after
chapter run through the authors' thoughts to create their model society
for Palestinians without betraying the slightest hint of awareness that
fifty years' experience with international aid has shown the disastrous
effect of such an approach. The report makes only a slight passing
references to the extraordinary amounts of aid pumped into the
Palestinian territories after the 1993 Oslo accords—aid that led to
corruption and social distortions which undermined the Palestinian
Authority's ability to function effectively. The RAND authors would
exacerbate the central problem of Palestinian society—a refusal to take
responsibility for itself but instead blaming outsiders for all problems
and expecting foreigners to rescue them. Also,
a-Cadillac-rather-than-Chevy-approach pervades the study. The authors'
point of reference seems to be the infrastructure and facilities
characteristic of Europe and North America, not those of low-income,
developing countries.

Finally, the three volumes share the central organizing image of an "arc"
formed by a high-speed railroad linking the major population areas of
Gaza and the West Bank. There is the minor problem, as the authors note
in passing, that roads rather than rail would be used for most freight
shipments, for emergency services, and for those who can afford cars
(including tourists, dignitaries, and the growing middle class the study
envisages). A good road would connect the Palestinian urban areas at a
much more modest cost than the billions the authors propose to pour into
a railroad, which could quickly turn into a money-losing inefficient
public enterprise of the kind which plagues many developing countries.

Patrick Clawson

The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life. By
Lawrence Rosen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
230 pp. $24 ($17, paper).

Drawing upon his experiences as an anthropologist in Morocco, Rosen
analyzes several facets of modern Muslim society. The elusive thesis of
his essays collected here would seem to be that all politics in the
Middle East is personal. Power may grow out of the barrel of a gun but is
only deemed legitimate when the leader takes into account the primacy of
social relationships, especially tribal units.

The chapter on tribes might have been worthwhile reading for U.S. military
commanders heading to Iraq in 2003, in that Rosen rejects the idea that
tribes are but a stage in political evolution and contends that they can
coexist within other types of political systems. While one might find
reason for optimism for democracy in Iraq from his view that Middle
Eastern rulers are "more like paramount chieftainships than like states"
because they "get their power from below—from other chiefs," Rosen also
argues that "each leader is by definition legitimate if he succeeds in …
grasp[ing] the reins of power." Might, in other words, does make right.

In this vein, Rosen holds that Daniel Pipes was wrong to assert in his
1983 book, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power that Islamic
expectations for good governance are set so high that no Muslim
government is ever truly legitimate.[1] Instead, Rosen sticks to his
assertion, acquired in Morocco, that simply seizing power legitimates a
ruler.

Rosen's interests take some essays in the direction of strictly cultural
issues, such as Moroccans' view of corruption and mixed marriages (a
chapter better suited to a legal textbook). Other of his chapters look
more broadly at current issues, such as his views on the continuing
relevance of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for having allowed a kernel
of doubt to nose its way under the smugly righteous ideological tents of
ulema and mullahs. Rosen's optimism about a kinder, gentler Islam
developing in Europe seems anachronistic after the 2004 Madrid
explosions, the ritualistic murder of Theo Van Gogh, and the 2005 London
attacks. His contention that "deep cultural change is not going on" in
the Islamic world remains to be seen, but it stands out for
counter-intuitive boldness. Overall, while The Culture of Islam contains
thought-provoking nuggets, finding them amidst the opaque dust of
anthropological verbiage makes it often more trouble than it is worth.

Timothy R. Furnish
Georgia Perimeter College

Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam. By Abdullah Saeed and Hassan
Saeed. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. 227 pp. $99.95 ($29.95, paper).

The apostate is a Muslim who leaves Islam—or who is accused of being an
enemy of Islam. The rights and wrongs of this punishment are the subject
of the Saeeds' book. What had once been just an internal issue has become
an international one since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's edict in 1989
declaring Salman Rushdie, then living in London, an apostate. That said,
the issue still has its center in the majority-Muslim countries. For
example, Muslim intellectuals accused of apostasy in Egypt alone include
Farag Fuda (murdered in 1992), Nagib Mahfouz (stabbed in the neck in
1994), Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid (ordered to divorce his wife in 1995), the
feminist leader Nawal al-Saadawy, who has received death threats—and this
author, who was fired from his position at Al-Azhar University in 1987 and
briefly jailed.

Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam superficially reviews the debate
on apostasy in Muslim history. It takes up such matters as the
contradiction between apostasy laws and the freedom of belief; apostasy
and Muslim thinkers; apostasy law and its potential for misuse; reasons
for apostasy; understanding the fear of apostasy among Muslims; and the
need to rethink apostasy laws.

Unfortunately, the authors ignored the major books written on apostasy in
Islam, the ones that explore its historical roots. These include Murder
in the Name of Allah by Hazrat Mizra Tahir Ahmed[2]; Killing the
Apostate, a Crime Forbidden in Islam, in Arabic, by the Syrian writer
Muhammad Muneer Adelby; and my own Penalty of Apostasy, Historical and
Fundamental Study,[3] in Arabic and English.

Another problem: 9-11 dangerously spread the issue of apostasy by
providing great support to the fanatic elements in Muslim society. This
development implies a need to focus on the role of the Saudi state and
its Wahhabi dogma in activating and supporting the punishment for
apostasy and its role in the Islamist war against the West and against
Muslim freethinkers. This means looking at such topics as the role of
on-line websites in urging the punishment of apostates and discussing
ways to end the application of this penalty as a core religious reform.
But the Saeeds do not take up these vitally important topics.

Ahmed Subhy Mansour
Alexandria, Va.

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Religion culture diversity and tolerance - shaping the new Europe

Archbishop of Canterbury -
’Religion culture diversity and tolerance - shaping the new Europe’
Tuesday 8 November 2005, by Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams last week visited the
European Institutions in Brussels the visit culminating with a call on
the President of the Commission, President José Manuel Durão Barrosa on
Tuesday afternoon.

In the course of a three-day visit Dr Williams held meetings and
consultations with politicians and officials from the European
institutions and delivered a major lecture - Religion, culture, diversity
and tolerance - shaping the new Europe.

The visit comes two months after Dr Williams addressed political and
religious leaders at a conference organised by the Sant’ Egidio community
in Lyons, where he spoke on questions raised of the European political
institutions by faith communities and also took part in a forum on the
future of Europe.

The Archbishop was accompanied by the Rt Revd Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of
the Church of England diocese of Gibraltar in Europe.

The Text of the lecture is as follows.

Recent discussions about the admission of Turkey to the EU have brought
into the open all sorts of concerns about the historic Christian identity
of Europe; and these in turn have given a little more focus to the wider
issue of what exactly Europe thinks itself to be in the current global
context. In what follows, I want to suggest a way of understanding
Europe’s Christian heritage that may open some doors for a common vision.
Our international situation is at the moment deeply uncertain and fluid.
There is widespread impatience with transnational institutions, from the
EU to the United Nations, yet equally widespread anxiety about the
dominance of a single power. We are increasingly aware of the issues that
cannot be solved by single sovereign states on their own - ecological
crisis, terrorism, migrancy - yet are uncomfortable with any notion of
global jurisdictions. We in the Northern/Western sphere are conscious of
facing (to put it as neutrally as possible) a highly critical, if
internally diverse, global ’opposition’ in the shape of the Islamic
world, and we do not know how best to respond to its presence outside and
inside our own borders. Enlightenment liberalism, the self-evident creed
of reasonable people, now appears as simply one cultural and historical
phenomenon among others. Its supposed right to set the agenda for the
rest of the world is no longer beyond question, however much the American
Right or the European Left assume that their positions are the natural
default beliefs of intelligent human beings, and that cultural and
religious variety are superficial matters of choice or chance.

The solution requires us first to retell the history of Europe. What we
mean by ’Europe’ culturally speaking tends to be the complex of
civilisations and language groups brought into political relationship by
two factors - the great Germanic, Turkic and Slavonic migrations that
destroyed the Roman Empire, and the emergence of new institutions that
sought to salvage the legacy of that empire. Among the latter, the
Christian Church is quite simply the most extensive and enduring, whether
in the form of the Western Papacy or of the ’Byzantine Commonwealth’, the
network of cultural and spiritual connections in Eastern Europe linked to
the new Roman Empire centred on Constantinople. As some historians have
argued, the emergence of Islam in fact produced a third competitor for
the imperial Roman legacy; but we shall be returning to that notion later
on.

In the West, the new Germanic kingdoms, governed by tribal law and feudal
obligation, engaged in a centuries-long conflict with the renewed system
of centralised Roman administration whose supreme court of appeal was the
Pope. For the Roman-centred Church, the fact of Christian identity was a
theoretically universal thing, which made it possible to legislate across
cultural, linguistic and economic frontiers, and which generated an
international civil service. Throughout the Middle Ages, the two models
jostled, bargained, quarrelled and reshaped each other; by the sixteenth
century, a new configuration was emerging, as the political world we
recognise as ’modern’ was born.

Although some scholars in the last century and a half have argued as if
the battle had been between a damaging centralism and a healthy local
independence, the truth is much more complex. The Roman system worked on
the basis that any local jurisdiction was subject to a higher law; the
local power of a monarch or an aristocracy could not be the last word,
and tribal or familial loyalties should not determine people’s
possibilities. It was this spirit that, for example, enshrined the
principle that consent was necessary for a valid marriage, challenging,
if only implicitly, some of the prevailing assumptions about the status
of women. It was this spirit that, in the hands of Thomas Aquinas,
reserved for citizens the right to criticise, and even in some
circumstances to replace, a monarch on the basis of universal law.

At the same time, the problematic result of the system was a legal
language that gave no place to concrete local tradition and the networks
of semi-formal mutual obligation which actually make up specific
societies, and a stress on the absoluteness of the ultimate sovereign
court as religiously sanctioned.

The Reformation produced a new map of the political territory. The
evolving nation-states of Europe were eager to appeal to local sentiment
in support of new levels of political independence, affirming the right
of the state to assert its own jurisdiction as beyond appeal. The Roman
Catholic Church emerged as still a resolutely international body as
against the new national churches of the Reformation, but with no very
clear account of how it saw the legitimacy of the new states. In due
course, the final revolt against traditional forms of authority, feudal
or ecclesiastical, led to the Enlightenment model of universal secular
legality - the principles of the French Revolution and, in modified form,
the Napoleonic Code. Both Catholic universalism and the remnants of
’common-law’ custom and mutuality were removed from public life in the
name of a universal system of legally conceived equality and freedom,
divorced almost entirely from religious sanction.

Now the point of this rather breathless (and by no means uncontroversial)
tour of Western European history is to try and identify what the argument
is that has made Europe the way it is. The history just summarised tells
us that the conflict of the so-called Dark Ages, the encounter between
the tribal kingdoms and the Church, the tangled relations of common law,
canon law and Romanised civil law guaranteed that political power in
Western Europe was always a matter of negotiation and balance. Despite
what some historical caricatures have maintained, sovereign state power
in Europe was never consistently treated as a sacred thing. Political
power is answerable to law and to God, and it is therefore right in some
circumstances to challenge it.

This is what I should regard as the central conviction of political
liberalism (as distinct from theological or social liberalism) - the idea
that political life can and should be a realm of creative engagement. It
is not, notice, a principle simply of democratic rights, nor of
individual liberties; it affirms rather that loyalty to the state is not
the same thing as religious belonging: not that the state has no claims,
but that it is a mistake to see those claims as beyond challenge in any
imaginable circumstances. And in this sense, to the extent that Europe
has pioneered such ’liberalism’, Europe is what it is because of its
Christian history.

Let me elaborate this a bit further. The Church of Christ begins by
defining itself as a community both alongside political society and of a
different order to political society. Its membership is not restricted by
race or class or speech, and in that way it puts questions against the
absoluteness of any local and tribal identity. Yet it does not seek to
set up another empire on the same level as the Roman imperium. It has
’citizens’, but their citizenship is not something that requires them to
set up societies in rivalry to the existing systems. Until the state
makes ultimate claims which Christians cannot obey, Christian citizenship
is largely invisible; in the Roman Empire, when the Emperor requires
worship from citizens, the hidden potential for dissent appears.
Martyrdom establishes the distinctiveness of Christian belonging over
against all other kinds.

That model of an alternative citizenship is what gradually produced the
systems of ecclesiastical law. But when the Western Empire collapsed, it
was only the Church that retained any sense at all of a unifying legal
frame of reference.

But this means that Western modernity and liberalism are at risk when they
refuse to recognise that they are the way they are because of the presence
in their midst of that partner and critic which speaks of ’alternative
citizenship’ - the Christian community. What I have been arguing is that
the distinctively European style of political argument and debate is made
possible by the Church’s persistent witness to the fact that states do not
have ultimate religious claims on their citizens. When the Church is
regarded as an enemy to be overcome or a private body that must be
resolutely excluded from public debate, liberal modernity turns itself
into a fixed and absolute thing, another pseudo-religion, in fact. It is
important for the health of the political community that it is able to
engage seriously with the tradition in which its own roots lie. To say
this is not to demand the impossible, a return to some past age when the
institutional Church claimed to dictate public policy. But without a
willingness to listen to the questions and challenges of the Church,
liberal society is in danger of becoming illiberal. Wholesale secularism
as a programmatic policy in the state can turn into another tyranny - a
system beyond challenge. The presence of the Church at least goes on
obstinately asking the state about its accountability and the
justification of its priorities. It will not do to forget that the
greatest and most murderous tyrannies of the modern age in Europe have
been systematically anti-religious - or rather, as I have already hinted,
have become pseudo-religions.

What I am arguing is that the virtues we associate with the European
identity, the virtues of political liberalism in the sense I have
outlined, will survive best if they are seen as the outgrowth of the
historic European tensions about sovereignty, absolutism and the
integrity of local communities that were focused sharply by the Christian
Church and its theology - a theology that encouraged scepticism about any
final political settlement within history.

It is, of course, such engagement that the draft European Constitution
envisages; and this needs to be affirmed and held on to. But we should
also note one important implication of the model that has been sketched
so far. If the state ahs no sacred character, it is not the sole source
of legitimate common life: intermediate institutions, guilds, unions,
churches, ethnic groups, all sorts of civil associations, have a natural
liberty to exist and organise themselves, and the state’s role is to
harmonise and to some degree regulate this social variety. This
’interactive pluralism’, rooted in the liberalism of thinkers like Acton,
Maitland and Figgis, would see the healthy state neither as a group of
suspiciously coexisting groups, nor as a neutral legal unit whose
citizens all possessed abstractly equal rights, but as a space in which
distinctive styles and convictions could challenge each other and affect
each other, but on the basis that they first had the freedom to be
themselves.

While it is essentially hospitable to the stranger and the migrant, it has
to confront the risk that it may find itself being hospitable to some sort
of bid to alter the foundational idea of Europe as a sphere of ’liberal’
interaction between communities within the frame of law.

And this, of course, raises the spectre that haunts so much of our
discussion, the fear of a militant Islamic ideology that seeks to replace
liberalism with a new theocracy. I noted earlier that Islam itself was
culturally and historically one of the systems that replaced the Roman
Empire, providing - only now on a profound religious base - the same
sense of belonging in a single culture of equality and justice. To be a
citizen of the umma was to be assured in principle of belonging to a
reality for which nationality and class were irrelevant to the
theological and legal status proper to a believer. It is true to say that
Islam is in its most robust historical form, both ’Church’ and ’state’;
and thus it is a challenge to any Muslim to make sense of living outside
that unitary reality. The uneasy and sceptical relationship between the
political community and the community of belief that has characterised
the Western Christian world (and often even the eastern Christian world
as well) is at first sight largely foreign to Islam.

Yet in fact Islam has had a history outside its historic majority
cultures. It has had experience of negotiating its way in other settings.
Its celebrated principle that there is no compulsion in religion means
that it is not absolutely and theologically committed to an imposition of
specifically Muslim law even in majority contexts - or so some would
argue. The work of Muslim thinker like Tariq Ramadan on the identity of
Western Muslims spells out some of the principles by which a Muslim
identity outside a Muslim majority state can be understood. On the basis
that cultural habits that do not directly conflict with Islamic precept
become Islamic in virtue of being practised by Muslims, it is possible
for a Muslim to see his or her Western cultural identity as integral to
their Muslim identity. There is, says Ramadan (Western Muslims and the
Future of Islam, p.53) no single ’homeland’ for Muslims: they can be at
home in any geographical and political environment, and they need to
avoid ’self-ghettoization’, becoming ’spectators in a society where they
were once marginalized’ (55). They need to be arguing and negotiating in
the public sphere. But the acceptance of such argumentation is
undoubtedly a development, as Ramadan agrees - a necessary recognition of
distinctions between primary and secondary concerns in social life, a
following-through of principles rooted deeply in classical Muslim
thinking about ijtihad, the labour of interpretation (43-48). In modern
conditions, this labour is something needed not simply in the context of
jurisprudence within Muslim society, but in relation to an irreversibly
plural and complex environment.(65-77). Ramadan can even say -
surprisingly for the Western reader - that the Muslim distinction between
religious and social authority, between what is enjoined for the good of
the soul and what is ordered for the stability of an external
environment, is really much the same as the Christian distinction between
Church and state. What is different is that the Islamic world has never
gone so far as to sanction the absolute institutional separation that
emerged in the Christian world (145).

I have devoted some time to Ramadan’s discussion of Muslim identity in the
West partly for its intrinsic interest and partly to reinforce the main
argument of this paper. ’Europe’ has introduced into the cultural map of
the world a particular habit of argument, a particular recognition of
diversity which carries with it also a certain recognition of the limits
of the state’s authority. By denying to the state an unquestionable
freedom to reshape the conditions of social life, by giving place to
arguments that call the state to account in the name of a higher law,
this political and philosophical tradition assumes that the political
realm will always be one in which mediation and mutual listening will be
normal and in which law exists as a means of such mediation. Where the
state is not an essentially religious unit and where the religious
community does not seek to become a universal executive, diversity is
inevitable. However, this does not imply the necessity of relativism, or
of what is sometimes called ’consumer’ pluralism (the availability of a
plurality of lifestyle choices). If religious communities are
acknowledged as participants in public argument, they are bound to some
level of creative engagement with each other and with the secular voice
of the administration, so as to find a solution that has some claim to be
just to a range of communal interests.

We misunderstand our situation, then, if we imagine that the world’s
current problem is a neat binary opposition between a totalising
religious culture (Islam) and a single ’enlightened’ or ’democratic’
world of rational neutrality. The reality is a lot more interesting - and
it is interesting precisely because of the theological roots of modernity.
A Muslim thinker like Ramadan helps us to see that, while it was
Christianity, for a variety of internal reasons, that crystallised in its
most extreme form the idea of the state’s relativity and secular
character, Islam itself acknowledges the same tension between levels of
human identity and aspects of human virtue and implies the same liberty
of criticism against specific political systems. But both equally allow
that loyalty to these systems is not inconsistent with the loyalty of
faith; commitment to the lawfulness of the processes of argument in a
society and acceptance of the outcome of ordered negotiation is
presupposed by the political ethics of both traditions. Without that, we
should simply revert to the ghetto ethics from which Ramadan is seeking
to liberate his co-religionists.

But we cannot leave the subject without revisiting the dangers of a
secularism that is equally forgetful of history. The political style that
seeks to keep religious communities in the private sphere, insisting that
religion is always and primarily an individual option related only to the
supposed wellbeing of that individual and like-minded private persons, is
at risk, as I have said earlier, of becoming itself a pseudo-religion, a
system that is beyond challenge. A mature European politics will take
another route, seeking for effective partnership with the component
communities of the state, including religious bodies. It will try to
avoid cresting ghettoes. It will value and acknowledge all those sources
of healthy corporate identity and political formation (in the widest
sense) that are around.

And perhaps this is the central contribution to be made to a future
European identity by the Christian tradition. It challenges the global
socio-political juggernaut - consumer pluralism combined with insensitive
Western promotion of a rootless individualism, disguised as liberal
democracy. It affirms the significance of local and intentional
communities, and their role in public life. It is able to welcome the
stranger, including the Muslim stranger in its midst, as a partner in the
work of proper liberalism, the continuing argument about common good and
just governance. When it is allowed its proper visibility, it makes room
for other communities and faiths to be visible. By holding the space for
public moral argument to be possible and legitimate, it reduces the risk
of open social conflict, because it is not content to relegate the moral
and the spiritual to a private sphere where they may be distorted into
fanaticism and exclusion. For Europe to celebrate its Christian heritage
in this sense is precisely for it to affirm a legacy and a possibility of
truly constructive pluralism. And for the Church to offer this to Europe
(and from Europe to the wider world) is not for it to replace its
theology with a vague set of nostrums about democracy and tolerance but
for it to affirm its faithfulness to the tradition of Christian freedom
in the face of the world’s sovereignties.

Source : The anglican communion

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Do not Put Islamic Spin on French Riots: Ramadan

ISLAMONLINE.NET

Do not Put Islamic Spin on French Riots: Ramadan
Tuesday 8 November 2005

PARIS, November 8, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) -

As French riots continued unabated for the 12th night running, seeing more
cars torched and French authorities threatening curfews, a well-known
Muslim thinker warned against bringing religion into a situation that has
nothing to do with faith and a poll showed two thirds of French people
dissatisfied with their government’s policies on marginalized suburbs.

"Above all, one must not Islamisize the question of the suburbs. The
question that France must answer is absolutely not a question of
religion," Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan told Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Tuesday, November 8.

Asked by AFP where the roots of the malaise lie, Ramadan said the entire
political class in France has been "blind" to what has been happening in
the suburbs, with their unemployed youth of Arab and African origin and
bleak high-rises.

"There’s an obsession about a religious divide, but no one sees the
socio-economic divide in France, with places in the process of becoming
ghettos with the suburbs on one side, the better-off areas on the other."

"There must be a struggle against this institutionalized racism. There are
second-class citizens in France. That is the reality."

"People (in the suburbs) have the impression that they count for nothing,
that they can be looked down upon and insulted in any way," Ramadan added
to AFP, from his current vantage point at Oxford University.

"We’re in the process of losing a footing in the suburbs. Even so-called
Muslim associations are more and more disconnected. The fracture is
profound... We are seeing an Americanization in terms of violence."

The Swiss thinker - of Egyptian origins — grandson of the founder of the
influential Muslim Brotherhood movement in the 1920s, added there needs
to be a return to order: "Violence is not a solution and sanctions must
be taken against gangs."

But he said that security measures can only be part of a broader policy,
one that addresses the core of social problems.

"We need a modern-day Jaures," he said, referring to Jean Jaures, the
pioneering French socialist politician at the turn of the 20th century.

"It was Jaures who said that the religious question must be filed away so
that one can focus on the social question. The unity of France is a myth
in socio-economic terms, and the question of faith is not the problem."

It would also help to keep a lid on "counterproductive" speech, said
Ramadan, who recalled Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s description of
the rioters as "scum".

"It’s not by insulting one part of France that you can protect the
other."Unemployment

Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of French people feel that the
government’s policies towards the poor city suburbs where rioting has
spread for the past 12 days are misguided, according to a poll.

Asked about the government’s approach to the general "situation in the
suburbs" — without specific reference to the recent unrest — 71 percent
felt it was "going in the wrong direction".

Only 20 percent of respondents approved of the government’s policies,
according to the monthly survey conducted jointly for Yahoo, the
Liberation newspaper and iTele news channel.

Concerning unemployment — seen as a key factor behind the riots — the
survey revealed that 58 percent of people were unhappy with current
policies, while 33 approved, according to AFP.

On the fight against crime and insecurity, 59 percent of those who replied
said they were unhappy with the current government policy, against 34
percent who supported it.

The poll of 1,007 people was conducted on November 4-5 as the violence
that erupted northeast of Paris on October 27 started to spread beyond
the capital.

Curfews Threatened

On the ground, more cars were torched overnight into Tuesday but the
situation looked calmer after Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin
announced that regions are to be given powers to impose curfews to curb
riots that have gripped hundreds of towns across France.

Police said Tuesday that 1,173 vehicles were burnt and 330 people arrested
overnight as France experienced its 12th straight night of urban violence.

Twelve police officers were lightly hurt, mainly by thrown projectiles.
Some officers were the target for people firing buckshot, though none was
hit. A dozen buildings were hit by arsonists.

The number of vehicles torched and arrests made were slightly lower than
for the previous night, possibly signaling a tapering off of the unrest
that has raged since October 27.

Overnight Sunday, more than 1,400 automobiles were gutted by flames and
395 people were detained.

The escalating violence claimed its first life on Monday as a 61-year-old
man, who was beaten into a coma last week, died in hospital.

Under pressure to act as the arson and street violence headed into a 12th
night, Villepin, speaking on national television, said regional
authorities would be given the power to impose curfews "where necessary".

A decree was to be adopted at a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday and
curfew measures would be applicable from Wednesday morning, Villepin
said.

President Jacques Chirac was to hold a cabinet meeting Tuesday which was
to give regional authorities the power to impose curfews if necessary to
restore public order.

The prime minister ruled out an army intervention to stop the violence,
which spread to some 300 towns over the weekend, but said that 1,500
police reinforcements would be deployed to restore public order.

And some 200 people held a silent tribute to Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, who
died in hospital after being assaulted Friday as he was discussing the
riots with a neighbor in Stains, north of Paris.

IslamOnline.net

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'Tudung' is part of convocation attire, government says

"Tudung" Is Part Of IIUM Convocation Attire For Women, Shafie Says
November 09, 2005

PUTRAJAYA, Nov 9 (Bernama) -- A "tudung" (headcover) is part of the
official dress for International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM)
female
graduates during convocation ceremonies, said Higher Education Minister
Datuk Dr Shafie Mohd Salleh, Wednesday.

The dress-code must be adhered to by all graduands, both Muslims and
non-Muslims, he said.

"For non-Muslims, they are not required to wear "tudung litup" (a cloth
covering the whole head) but scarves will do," he told reporters here
when asked to comment on the issue raised by DAP in the Dewan Rakyat two
weeks ago.

On the wearing of tudung by non-Muslim IIUM students when attending
lectures, Shafie said it was a symbol of respect to the university.

-- BERNAMA

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Al Qaeda's battle for hearts and minds

Asia Times Online
10 November 2005

Al-Qaeda's battle for hearts and minds
By Ehsan Ahrari

No one can claim that al-Qaeda is not watching the twists and turns
of the debates related to global terrorism that are currently being
waged in the United States and the Muslim world. The 9-11
Commission's report popularized the argument by recommending to the
Bush administration that it must wage a war of ideas to win the
hearts and minds of Muslims.

Al-Qaeda's chief theoretician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has incorporated
this concept in his own enduring campaign against the United States.
He has been busy in the past few months publicizing al-Qaeda's
perspectives to the Muslim world and to the West in particular.

In this regard, one has to consider Zawahiri's recent appeal for aid
for the victims of the massive earthquake in South Asia, and in
particular Pakistan-administered Kashmir. There is clear urgency for
help: more than 80,000 people have died, and many millions have been
made homeless in the remote area.

The poor response of the international community to the greatest
human tragedy in Pakistan's history is quite apparent. What is even
more tragic is the tepid response of the Middle Eastern oil
monarchies, whose treasuries are brimming. The United Arab Emirates
and Kuwait offered $100 million each, while Saudi Arabia offered $133
million. Kuwait went to the extent of publicizing its $500 million
aid to Hurricane Katrina victims in the US, but comes up with a
relatively measly $100 million for the victims of Kashmir.

Turkey has been an exception to the general miserly response of
Muslim countries. Only one day after the earthquake, the government
in Ankara responded by sending search and rescue teams and food and
other aid to Pakistan. It followed up by sending $150 million in aid.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first foreign
dignitary to visit the earthquake-devastated area, where he observed,
"My wish is this - the world is using resources for armaments, they
should also put aside resources for such disasters."

The poor response of the international community to the victims of
Kashmir was underscored by the United Nations saying that it had
received only 27% of the $312 million of its flash appeal for quake
relief - compared with 80% pledged within 10 days of a similar appeal
to international donors after the tsunami of December 26.

The government of Pakistan's own response to this massive human
tragedy has also been described as slow and inadequate. One leader of
Pakistan-administered Kashmir stated, "It's a shame as the government
on the other side [Indian-administered Kashmir] acted promptly and
provided relief and rescue in all the affected areas ... People are
angry here as they think Islamabad has double standards, even in
handling natural disasters."

What about the Islamist organizations of Pakistan; how did they
respond? The same Kashmir leader told Reuters, "The jihadi groups are
more sincerely taking part in relief operations. Those groups, which
were branded bad by the government, are no doubt doing well and will
influence people's sympathy in the future."

A number of earthquake victims attested to this reality by stating
that the only prompt help they have gotten has been from Islamist
groups. (See Asia Times Online Waging jihad against disaster, October
20.) Even Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf agreed with
the performance of the Islamist groups related to post-earthquake
assistance.

Examine the above realities from the perspective of al-Qaeda's
version of public diplomacy. Considering the publicity given by the
Western media to all statements that al-Qaeda issues, Zawahiri's
appeal for aid for Pakistani victims was heard all over the world.

The immediate danger that this appeal poses is to Musharraf's own
regime. Here is a president who has cast the fate of his government
by siding with President George W Bush's "war on terror". Then he
started waging his own war on al-Qaeda and the Islamist/jihadi forces
inside his country. Yet, from America's point of view, he has not
done enough.

Secondly, in his own hour of dire need, at least the way he described
it to the BBC, his government did not receive adequate assistance.
According to Musharraf, the reason for such an inadequate Western
response is that no Western victims were involved, as they were in
the tsunami-related catastrophe.

In a number of Western countries, the rejoinder to Musharraf's
criticism followed two general themes. First, the poor response has
something to do with a general aid-related fatigue in the West,
because the world has been experiencing a series of mega-human
calamities. Second, a question is also being raised about why oil-
rich Muslim states aren't coming to the rescue by creating about a
billion-dollar aid mechanism, especially at a time when prices oil
prices are so high.

Al-Qaeda is having a field day watching the community of nations
perform so deplorably in regard to the human tragedy in Pakistan. It
can, quite effectively, underscore three perspectives. First, that
the illegitimacy of current Muslim governments in the wake of their
failure to come to the rescue of a Muslim tragedy of epic proportions
does not require any further debate, from the perspectives of al-Qaeda.

Second, the seeming lack of Western concern only underscores al-
Qaeda's claim that the West does not really care about what happens
to Muslims, as long as the compliant and sycophant Muslim regimes
continue to preside over the political status that ensures the
dominance of the West. Third, given the preceding two reasons, al-
Qaeda's own unrelenting insistence on the violent overthrow of all
extant Muslim regimes is further established, at least in the minds
of everyone who is mildly sympathetic to that organization's criticisms.

What emerges from the preceding is a transnational pan-jihadi entity
carefully studying the twists and turns of the US and Western
responses to countering terrorism and coming up with its own
countermeasures.

Despite the dismantlement of the Taliban regime, al-Qaeda knows that
the battle for control of Afghanistan has barely begun. It will
continue its guerrilla-type skirmishes with US-led and Afghan forces.
But the most important concomitant battle is to influence the hearts
and minds of the Muslims of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A weak Afghanistan remains under constant threat of major political
turbulence. At the same time, an unstable Pakistan serves as an even
more significant target than Afghanistan. The centers of gravity to
win its war against the "enemies of Islam" - a phrase that al-Qaeda
uses to depict all forces that oppose it and its objectives - are
located in those two countries.

All it must do is keep the focus of rhetorical barrages on all Muslim
tragedies and grievances and persistently highlight the sustained
ineptness of the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A highly
charged environment thus created would be vastly conducive to even
greater instability in the region. That is the essence of al-Qaeda's
battle to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, not only in South
Asia, but also in the rest of the world of Islam.

Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, VA-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times
Online His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for in

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What happened in France

French Lessons

By Jim Hoagland
Wednesday, November 9, 2005

"We are victims of our architecture," says Guillaume Parmentier, the
head of a French institute, as he struggles to explain two weeks of
rioting in the sterile high-rise ghettos populated by France's Muslim
immigrants. True. But architecture is not the whole story.

The social explosions that have hit France are being watched
nervously by the rest of Europe for signs that this could become
something that so far it is not: a religiously motivated uprising by
Muslim youths against their Christian and Jewish neighbors. But jihad
-- or the assumed lack of it -- is not the whole story either.

The French -- and the angry, nihilistic Arab and African youths in
their midst -- are also "victims" of that country's immigration and
assimilation policies and, indirectly, its paternalistic social
welfare system. Mark them as casualties of a particular brand of
politically correct arrogance that French politicians have practiced
for 30 years, and you begin to get something like a whole story.

France's upheaval is too important to be explained away by any single
factor. And it is too important to be treated as a matter of
satisfaction by Americans irritated by the French, on foreign policy
or other grounds. France and its beautiful, troubled capital are
proxies for all affluent nations that have elevated into an art form
the habit of ignoring the world's poor, desperate and criminally
inclined.

Our collective neglect lumps them all together, and it helps make the
disadvantaged become prey or accomplice for criminals and Islamist
fanatics. In that sense, we are all French right now. It is not just
Paris that is burning. It is Africa, and the Middle East, and parts
of Asia and Latin America, that are burning and showering flames on
the Paris ghettos. And on London, Madrid, New York, Bali and Casablanca.

Hurricane Katrina helped Americans understand in sickening detail the
failures of local and federal emergency-response bureaucracies.
France's riots should illustrate to the French the dead-end nature of
the physical and social architecture of building a tall fence around
the country's 5 million to 10 million Muslim immigrants and their
offspring, and then pretending they are essentially not there.

The French equivalents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward lie in 300
or more " zones de non-droit " (lawless areas), which sparked the
national rioting. These are areas in the immigrant suburbs of Paris
and other large cities where the police do not go as a matter of
policy. They have instead for years established checkpoints on the
perimeter of these islands of soulless high-rises and then let the
inhabitants fend for themselves.

So now we know: Lawless areas can exist inside strong national
boundaries as well as in the failed states of Africa and Asia.
Governments can stumble into disaster by hoping for the best while
letting serious problems fester in Clichy-sous-Bois as well as in New
Orleans.

Television interviewers have descended on Clichy-sous-Bois and the
other locales of arson and pillage to transmit the voice of the riot.
Almost in unison and by rote, the perpetually unemployed children,
and grandchildren, of North African immigrant workers who settled in
France in economic boom times complain that they are marginalized and
discriminated against -- even though they are as "French" as anyone
in the country.

True. But the prejudice of others is not the whole story either.

The unemployment benefits that France's generous social welfare
system provides to these youths may have bought the stylish clothes
and grooming many of them display in the television interviews. But
it has not bought their satisfaction or acquiescence in the system
that feeds them and isolates them. Those payments may have enabled
these youths to be as disdainful of the kind of work their parents
eagerly came here to find as are the other "French."

The riots are in some ways a protest against what their parents have
created (no surprise there) and against the enormous pressures that
life in a Western society brings to bear on antiquated Muslim family
structures. These youths lash out with molotov cocktails against the
cultural crossfire that envelops them. And they become easy prey for
the criminals and militants dumped into the failed townships of a
proud and rich nation.

So there is no single explanation and no single answer. The United
States has responded to the collapsing social and family structures
of the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia with the fire and
brimstone of war. The French respond to a related challenge within
their borders with political insincerity and economic handouts. The
failures of both countries have more in common than either is
prepared to acknowledge today.

jimhoagland@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Why France is burning

Why France Is Burning

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, November 9, 2005

One day in the late 1970s, the writer James Baldwin was explaining to
an Arab friend that he wanted to go back to America after many years
as an expatriate in France. "America has found a formula to deal with
the demon of race," Baldwin told Syrian businessman Raja Sidawi, who
had a house near him in St. Paul de Vence. In France and the rest of
Europe, people pretended that the race problem didn't exist, Baldwin
said, but "someday it will explode."

Baldwin was right, on both counts. The United States began to find
solutions for its tormenting "original sin" after its cities burned
in the 1960s. And France, unable to make the same transition toward
racial integration, is now watching flames engulf the poor suburbs of
Paris that are home to many of its black and brown immigrants. By
yesterday morning, the rioting had spread to 300 towns and cities,
and a desperate French government was imposing curfews under a 1955
state-of-emergency law.

"The Fire Next Time" was the title Baldwin gave to his prophetic 1963
book about race. Sure enough, the fire came. Americans of my
generation remember the riots in Watts and Newark, and the explosion
of rage in Washington after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was a
trial by fire, and it changed America. Racist politicians such as
George Wallace tried to sow more hatred, but a consensus emerged that
America needed to provide real opportunities for the enraged young
blacks who were throwing the molotov cocktails. The country began a
period of court-ordered affirmative action that was acutely painful
for blacks and whites but changed how America looks and feels.

The sin of slavery will never be fully redeemed, but America today is
a far different place than where I grew up. African Americans now
play prominent and powerful roles in every area of American life --
as chief executives of huge companies, on television and in the
movies, in top positions in government and politics. Like a
recovering addict, we're still solving the issue of race one day at a
time, but we've come a long way.

France has scarcely begun that journey. But the events of the past
two weeks suggest that the day of reckoning Baldwin foresaw may
finally have arrived. Over the past two weeks, more than 5,000 cars
have been set ablaze. More than 70 police and 30 firefighters have
been injured in the violence. The angry kids haven't been intimidated
by hard-line Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he wanted to
cleanse the "scum" in the suburbs with a water gun. And they haven't
been soothed, either, by the calls for reconciliation by French Prime
Minister Dominique de Villepin. In fact, the catfight between these
two rival politicians has made the crisis worse -- devaluing both
carrots and sticks.

America's lesson for the French is that they have a long, hard road
ahead. The starting point is to break the French state of denial. The
average (white) French person believes fiercely in the country's
revolutionary traditions of liberty, equality and fraternity -- to
the point of pretending that these virtues exist for everyone when
they clearly don't. France's prized educational meritocracy -- a
gulag of tests and exams that prepare the way for the best and
brightest to enter elite national schools -- is in fact gamed by the
existing elite. They know which lyces are the fastest entry ramp for
their kids, which test-prep programs will produce the best results on
the feared baccalaureate exams. Right now, France has what amounts to
a reverse affirmation action -- a system of supposed equality that
guarantees unequal results.

I lived for several years in France, returning to America a year ago,
and I was always astonished by the French inability to reckon with
racial divisions. You just didn't see black or brown faces in
prominent positions -- not in the National Assembly, not on French
television, not among business leaders, not in the media. French
analysts have been warning for decades about the dangers of
warehousing African and Arab immigrants in the suburbs, but the
French have refused to adopt aggressive affirmative-action programs
that might change the situation. The country was so worried about
Muslim extremists that it ignored the more immediate problem of the
soulless, sullen suburbs.

The French daily Le Monde recalled in an editorial Monday the warning
by President Jacques Chirac in 1995, when he was still mayor of
Paris, that youths in the poor suburbs would end up revolting if they
couldn't find good jobs. How right he was. Chirac, like most
thoughtful people in France, could see the crisis coming, but he
couldn't take action. Now it is upon them. As Baldwin warned: "No
more water, the fire next time."

davidignatius@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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The Scum of France

The “Scum” of France
by AbuOmar, 8 Nov 2005

Nicolas Sarkozy, the country's tough-talking interior minister, hardly
helped when he characterized the young men responsible for the violence
as la racaille. He was also the one responsible for pushing an
irresponsible and discriminatory law banning veils and headscarfs on
Muslim female students. He was also the one who pledged loudly to clean
the slums again using a slur, to “Karcher” - power hose them.

Now, the “scum” of France want to burn him. Interviews with the youngsters
aged no more than 16 reveal a clear revulsion for Sarkozy. They say that
they will not let up until Sarkozy, who incidentally comes from a
Hungarian immigrant family, is sacked.

The spark that inflamed what is inappropriately termed as the French
intifadah comes after two teenagers were accidentally killed in an
electrical power substation while running away from police. Then as the
rioting started, police fired tear gas into a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois
which was packed with people in congregational prayers. There was neither
regret nor a show of empathy from the authorities.

The pattern of police harassment contributed to the fear, the intimidation
and the hate of the youth. Muslim and 2nd and 3rd generation Arab and Non
white immigrants are stopped and searched whenever it pleases the police.
The police raid and forcibly enter houses and humiliate their parents by
making them lie on the floor. All of these happen under the watchful and
vengeful eyes of the young.

These remind us of the discrimination and oppression the Blacks suffer in
America. In a way it also reflects the abominable Israeli occupation. A
familiar racist theme in punishing the poor and the destitute.

A rioting teenager said this: “They took my grandparents from his home
country and forced them to work for them here and do the dirty menial
chores which they themselves loathe to do. They made my parents work and
labour in their factories. They had nothing for us and treat us as
“scum”. Now, they are being paid back in return by us!”

This also reminds us of what injustice does to security as mentioned by Dr
Ahmad Totonji a while back. In the Qur’an it says that those who believe
and do not cloak their iman with injustice, they are entitled to
security; they are the ones with guidance. If people continue with the
injustice, they cannot achieve security and they have to deal with it
themselves and not make us, Muslims as scapegoats.

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[MGG] A buffoon comes to the rescue

THE HEALTH MINISTER, DATO' Chua Soi Lek, is the latest buffoon in the
Malaysian cabinet. He says statements he does not believe in or mean,
and blames others for the state of affairs for which the National
Front government, of which he is a member, is responsible. He blames
government scholars, especially in medicine, for staying put in their
country of study after graduation. Does he really mean that? Those on
government scholarship has to have a gurantor, usually the father or
a blood relative. Instead of saying how many Malaysians are staying
put overseas, why does he not tell us how he has made guarantors pay,
or how much he has collected, or how many doctors have been excused
from working in Malaysia? Why does Eire give leave of absence for up
to two years, doctors returning home after studying at Malaysian
government expense. Most of these scholarship or bursary holders are
Malay, usually those in the lower category, and the government would
only ask them to pay only if the guarantor is in the Opposition
party, usually PAS. How can the National Front ask Malay guarantors
to pay what they had promised to do if their chap who got the
guarantee does not return? Especially when the Malay ground is, at
the moment, split three ways. It is UMNO which runs the National
Front, and what UMNO says goes.

The guarantors are usually UMNO members, whom it does not want to go
the Opposition. So, the guarantors are usually let free. The Malays
stay overseas because most of them had returned home after their
studies, waited six to eight months for a government call. They are
given the right to work in the private sector, when they inquire why
they have not been called. If the ordinary man knows who or why they
are overseas, the National Front government should as well. Are they
children or relatives of those in power, and so excused so that their
guarantors do not have to pay back? There is more to it than
Malaysian newspapers, radio and television, and the Minister's press
conferences and press statements say. It is unfair to put the blame
on those who received a government grant. One farmer's son, having
graduated returned. He was left cooling his heels unemployed. He was
allowed by the authorities to return when he inquired why he had not
been asked to join government service. In the past, this runaround
was given to non-Malays. The MCA minister is now worried that it
affects Malays too.

He is a medical doctor, but he has not praticed medicine in recent
years. He is a full time politician, and busy going up the National
Front and MCA heirarcy. He is where he is because he plays politics.
He does not ask his civil servants, so it seems from his recent
actions. He is afraid of the Malay civil servant. He is like most
politicians, in Malaysia of the National Front especially, when he
gets verbal diarrhea whenever he gets a chance to be reported by the
in radio, television or news media. So he says what comes of his
mind, and he is usually wrong. He takes the view, as does many in his
position, but especially when he is a non-Malay, and believes what he
says is cast in stone, but his words are cast on shifting rafters
floating in the sea. They mean nothing. The people do not believe
what he, and others of his ilk, says. These statements are made for
what he thinks is effect, mainly to ensure he remains in the cabinet,
is well regarded in the MCA, is returned in the next election. So he
say things that make him a buffoon but mean nothing to the people to
whom he addresses these statements. The Malaysian newspapers and news
media praise him to the skies for his 'statesman' like statements,
but most people, even MCA and UMNO members, despise him.

His latest statement suggests that a policy decision taken in secret
by civil servants and announced with great fanfare should never be
challenged. The "Tak Nal" anti-smoking campaign is the National Front
Government's answer to smoking, especially by children. He now says
that the tobacco companies, which loses out if the campaign is a
success, had found creative ways to beat the ban. And blames tobacco
companies for fighting back. The National Front government wants
money from the tobacco companies, even if these companies find it
difficult to advertise that fact. The tobacco companies are prepared
to fall in line with all this. But now the National Front is
confused. It is under pressure from the anti-smoking lobby, and it
wants to be the hero to all, it acts as if it is an enemy of the
tobacco industry. But if the National Front government has taken a
policy decision, as it obviously has, he says no one should query it,
least of all those directly affected. He is unhappy that the tobbaco
company has decided to beat the government's "Tak Nak!" policy. But
that the what companies do.

The water privatisation in Selangor, for instance, is a problem. The
company that was given the privatisation fixed it such that the
consumer paid ten times and more for their water. When the consumers
complained. the government insisted that it was all legitimate. But
when the complaints continued, including that made by UMNO members,
the government solved the problem by giving it to the same group of
people but under a different company, and a new computerised sysem.
For the moment, it is all right, but it will be a matter of time
because the over charging becomes company policy. But no government
minister has come public with this gouging of the consumer. This UMNO
company has done worse than the tobacco companies. But it is done in
secret, and the tobacco companies damned for defying the government's
policy. The government cannot expect others to follow its policies
meant for the public to be challenged, if its own companies do not
have the people in mind when it rises prices arbitrarily or bills
people more than they should pay, and does nothing about it.

That is why the National Front asks ministers other than UMNO to
becomes buffoons like Dato' Chua Soi Lek. This is how it thinks it
can stay in power. But it would not be so. More than half the
population were born after Merdeka in 1957, but most of the younger
Malaysians do not accept the National Front though their parents do.
Policies take a generation to fruit. A generation is usually 30-35
years. Policies the government took after the racial riots of 1969
begin fruiting now. And the policies taken now will fruit 35 years or
so from now. But unless UMNO takes the lead in attacking the people
rather than asking the other party leaders in the National Front to
do so, it would be in the opposition by a few years before 2020. The
2020 vision was taken to remain in power, and its policies
disappeared with the retirement two years ago of the former prime
minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. Today's policies are thought through
by Malays. The non-Malay is ignored or kept away when possible. That
is why buffons from the non-UMNO parties are asked defend the
undefensible.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx,com

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Some racist words not a joke

The Star, 9 November 2005

Some words are not a joke
BY JANE RITIKOS

IN polite terms, it was deja vu. In reality, it was pure racist slur.

It was a case of “oops, he did it again” when Jerai MP Datuk Badruddin
Amiruddin referred to the Malaysian Indians as keling last Tuesday.

Records showed that he uttered the derogatory word in the same august
house on April 21, 1998.

Badruddin: Used the word ‘keling’ to describe Malaysian Indians in
Parliament again

In fact, M. Kulasegaran (DAP – Ipoh Barat) recalled that he used the
term three times. At that time, Badruddin asked Kulasegaran, who was
then Teluk Intan MP, why he was smiling, and said, for no reason:
“Ama, apa, keling, keling, keling.”

Kulasegaran protested but Badruddin and some other backbenchers
retorted by saying the opposition MP was merely being too sensitive.

They argued that there were places such as Tanjong Keling and that
there was nothing wrong with it.

Last Tuesday, Badruddin gave the impression that he had short memory.

He was commenting that it was peculiar to see a male newsreader wear
an earring when Chong Eng (DAP – Bukit Mertajam) noted that it was a
tradition for the firstborn son in an Indian family to do so.

Badruddin replied, “I am talking about Muslims, not keling”.

Tempers flared immediately between the foes from both sides but
Badruddin was unrepentant – he brushed it aside and said Malaysians in
northern peninsula used the word keling to describe Indians.

Kulasegaran: ‘I will raise the matter with the A-G seeking for
Badruddin to be prosecuted’
Nobody in the Dewan challenged him on this alleged “fact”. When
pressure mounted from the Opposition, Badruddin said: “Aiyah, must we
quarrel over a small matter like this?”

Badruddin withdrew his words, with the support of some backbenchers
who wanted the matter to be done with.

The next day, Kulasegaran tried to get Badruddin referred to the
Committee of Rights and Privileges but Speaker Tan Sri Ramli Ngah
Talib dismissed it, ruling that the matter had been resolved with
Badruddin’s retraction.

“The MP treated the matter as a joke,” said Opposition Leader Lim Kit
Siang when met outside the Dewan.

“He said that he did not mean to insult anyone but his excuse did not
hold water because he was reluctant to retract it and did so only
after a standoff with other MPs. He is unrepentant because we know
this is not the first time.”

To his credit, Badruddin apologised on Thursday to any community if
they felt he had offended them, as he believed that it was in the
spirit of Hari Raya that he should seek forgiveness.

But the DAP is not taking this lightly. It has lodged not one but two
police reports against Badruddin, and Kulasegaran plans to pursue the
matter with the Attorney-General.

“MPs have full indemnity and immunity in the House but according to
the Parliament rules, anything seditious, amounting to treason or
bringing hatred or ill-feelings among the community must not be
brought up.

“I will raise the matter with the Attorney-General seeking for
Badruddin to be prosecuted,” he said.

Other MPs, however, felt that the matter had been settled especially
now that Badruddin had retracted his words.

Idris Haron (BN – Tangga Batu), when asked about the issue, gave a
cryptic explanation of the situation, saying it was about “a same
sentence with two different meanings.”

Using the example of a Malay phrase, he said: “The statement mari kita
mencari siput babi (let us look for snails) and mari kita mencari
siput, babi (let us look for snails, you pig) gives us different
meanings.”

Idris was certain that Badruddin, as a seasoned MP, did not mean to
offend anyone. But this time, Badruddin’s action had affected at least
one MP who was hurt by his action.

Kulasegaran, when contacted, said he encountered Badruddin in the
men’s toilet after the storm and “I was very uncomfortable. I avoided
him and said nothing to him. I just felt so insulted.”

During the whole fracas, it was observed that apart from Kulasegaran
and the DAP, not many MPs including those of the MIC showed their
concern over such a smack of racism in the august house. Even PAS was
silent during the entire episode.

It was as though such a slur could well be repeated, and each side
would argue that the other was being over sensitive, and no one would
take it seriously.

Even Badruddin derived no pleasure from it. When asked to comment on
the police report against him, the usually talkative Badruddin
appeared stunned.

Perhaps in one of those rare moments of his life, he was at a loss for
words. All he could say was: “I’d better not comment on it.”

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France is clinging to an ideal that's been pickled into dogma

France is clinging to an ideal that's been pickled into dogma

Britain is in no position to lecture, but the French model of colour-
blind integration gives racism a free hand

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November 9, 2005
The Guardian

Paris is in flames and it's more than a city which is burning. The
presidency of Jacques Chirac, already battered, is being consumed
before our eyes. The French political class, shaken by the No vote in
May's referendum on the European constitution and the rejection of
the Paris bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, is feeling the ground
tremble. Not since 1968 has there been such a widespread and
sustained challenge to the French state.

But the greatest threat of all is to an idea, one that has held firm
since the first days of the Republic. If that idea is now shrivelling
in the flames of Lille and Toulouse, the heat will be felt far beyond
France: it will reach even here.

The riots themselves are not hard to fathom; several French
commentators have said the only mystery is why they didn't break out
15 years earlier. If you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and
disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut
around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and
then subject them to daily racial discrimination at the hands of
employers and the police, you can hardly expect peace and
tranquillity. Cut public spending on social programmes by 20% and you
will guarantee an explosion. All you have to do is light the fuse.

And this fire has been building for decades. It was after the second
world war that - just as health minister Enoch Powell went recruiting
for NHS staff in the Caribbean - France went shopping among its
foreign colonies for labourers and factory workers. It brought these
mainly Arab migrants in, then dumped them on the outskirts of the big
cities. It did the same to the Harkis - Algerians who had
collaborated with the French colonial authorities - and the next
waves of North African immigrants, warehousing them like an unwanted
commodity in high-rise ghettoes on the périphérique, out of sight of
the white folks of the city. And there they have stayed for a half
century.

Their anger could not stay pent-up forever. And the official reaction
to the first outbreak of violence clearly inflamed it. Interior
minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to "Karcherise" the "scum" who were
burning cars and torching buildings: Karcher is the brand name for a
kind of sand-blaster, the sort of machine one might use to remove
bird droppings from a wall. According to former Libération columnist
Doug Ireland, to speak of Karcherising the North African youth on the
streets was "as close as one can get to hollering ethnic cleansing
without actually saying so".

The motives of the man they call Sarko are not hard to divine: he
wants to run for president in 2007 and has clearly decided his
constituency is the white right nurtured by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His
hardman language during these last 10 days has been a nakedly
Powellite bid for those National Front votes.

Now his rival, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has taken the
initiative, reviving a 1955 curfew law which allows local authorities
to impose a state of emergency. He may succeed where Sarkozy failed,
restoring a semblance of calm. But the move itself has caused
disquiet. For the 1955 law was passed to quell Algerian unrest at the
height of the independence struggle. That the same legislation should
now be used to put down the children and grandchildren of the
Algerian rebels has prompted some glum reflection in France - as if
that bitter war never really ended.

It's this sentiment which gets close to what is really at stake. Yes,
these riots are rooted in economic deprivation and urban decay. But
they also have an ethnic, racial dimension. And France's key problem
is that it cannot face that fact.

That is a less polemical statement than it sounds. For it is a matter
of bald fact that France does not officially recognise the concept of
ethnic difference at all. It is literally illegal for anyone
compiling an official census even to ask about someone's ethnic
origins. There are no figures showing the rate of French-Algerian
unemployment or school enrolment or hospital treatment. French
official texts speak of integration as resting on the "refusal to
distinguish citizens according to their origins and their
particularities". In other words, there can be no Algerian French or
French-Moroccans or any other such combination. There are only the
French.

This is a defining republican value. Tim King, who writes the
excellent France Profonde column for Prospect magazine, says the idea
is rigidly enforced. "When an immigrant comes to France, he must drop
everything he has ever learned of his previous culture; he has to
leave it in his baggage."

The doctrine was doubtless perfectly well-intentioned. There shall be
no categories of citizen in France, it declared. The law shall view
everyone equally.

The trouble is, it is not the law that decides every aspect of daily
life: people do. And they do not always have the pure, colour-blind
outlook presumed by the French notion of integration. On the
contrary, racism of the overt, gross variety persists in France. One
study last year found, for example, that a man with a classic French
name applying for 100 jobs will get 75 interviews. A man with the
same qualifications, but with an Algerian name, will get just 14. The
trouble is, according to the law, that is a mere coincidence. After
all, both Francois and Abdul are French citizens.

France's refusal to see the ethnicity of some of its people as
relevant translates into de facto racism. If human beings were free
of prejudice, the French republican ideal would work beautifully.
Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand.

It is a classic example of what happens when an idea designed for one
era remains unchanged for a later one. As Neil Kinnock might have put
it, a once decent value becomes pickled into a dogma - enforcing the
very opposite outcome of the one it intended.

The French do not face this problem alone. The US has a model of
integration which is the reverse of France's: it positively
encourages new migrants to hold on to their first culture, happy to
let them hyphenate as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.

But that model is not perfect either. As we saw after Katrina, there
are still plenty of Americans who feel excluded by their race. That's
partly because the US model applies to immigrants, those who chose to
make their life anew in America. It does not apply either to those
who were already there or those who were dragged to the country in
chains, in the holds of cargo ships. Which is why Native Americans
and African-Americans both argue, with justification, that they are
shut out of the American dream.

Britain has an emerging model too, one we call multiculturalism. It
did not arrive from nowhere, but partly came out of our own
experience of race riots in the 1980s. Unlike France's, it recognises
difference and has passed legislation to protect it. But it also
yearns for some affirmation of common identity. It knows there are
differences between us - but it wants there to be ties that bind.
What those ties should be, what notion of Britishness might hold us
all together, nobody seems quite sure.

Indeed, the problem of racial cohesion in Britain is far from solved,
as we saw last month in Lozells. But multiculturalism is still the
best model we have. And, after the last 10 days, it may be the only
one left.

freedland@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Europe faces 'fear of all things foreign'

Europe faces 'fear of all things foreign'

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday November 9, 2005
The Guardian

Watching the French riots with a mixture of trepidation and
schadenfreude, Europe's rulers have arrived at two conclusions. One
is that the violence is a peculiarly French affair, the product of
colour blind republicanism and bungling by an out-of-touch elite. The
other is it will not happen here. Both conclusions are questionable.

"The conditions in France are different from the ones we have here -
we don't have giant apartment blocks," said Germany's foreign affairs
adviser Wolfgang Schäuble. Appearing to blame French police tactics,
Tony Blair said Britain was different, too. When opposition leader
Romano Prodi suggested Italy could be next, he was accused of being
alarmist.

But problems of discrimination, youth unemployment - half of the
detained French rioters are under 18 - racial prejudice, religious
intolerance, and xenophobia induced by fear of terrorism and
globalisation are entrenched in most European countries, said Aurore
Wanlin of the Centre for European Reform. And they have potential to
cause more explosions.

"There is a debate in every society about how to integrate minorities
and migrants, especially unskilled workers at times of economic
difficulty," Ms Wanlin said. "But they don't agree what to do so this
debate is usually very quiet. There is a lack of visibility about the
problem - until there's a crunch like in France and suddenly it
cannot be avoided. So you cannot say it will not happen somewhere
else. It will, although probably in a different form."

Undercurrents of antipathy are discernible across Europe. The
Netherlands was traumatised by last November's murder of the film-
maker Theo van Gogh. The killing crystallised fears about
international terrorism and national identity in a country where 20%
of the population is of foreign descent. It also led to attacks on
mosques.

Like the Nordic countries, Germany prides itself on its
integrationist approach to its 2.5 million-strong Turkish minority.
But joblessness in immigrant communities is double the national
average and youth unemployment affects one in three. Tensions were
also apparent during a spate of "honour killings" that shocked Berlin
earlier this year.

Spain, with one million Muslims, is struggling to repel illegal
migrants from North Africa, a problem also faced by Italy. After what
he termed "the recent tragic events at Spain's borders with Morocco",
José Luis Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, bravely proposed a
"Euro-African ministerial conference on immigration". At least Mr
Zapatero is trying to build bridges. Marcello Pera, speaker of the
Italian senate and devout Catholic, complained about "mongrel"
Europe. It is not a big jump from there to the incendiary comments of
France's Nicolas Sarkozy about "riff-raff".

Europe's failure to agree on how to deal with its principal
minorities, or even how to address them, extends to the EU itself, Ms
Wanlin said. "The EC has been trying to develop guidelines on
integration but the issues are so sensitive that it has been
difficult to find common ground."

And while Europe's governments fumble, the rise of far-right
political parties represented another trend that could trigger
trouble, she said. "The advance of the extreme right is an expression
of a degree of racism in Europe but more deeply ... social malaise -
fear of anything foreign."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Riot emergency brings back curfew laws of the colonial age

The Times November 09, 2005

Riot emergency brings back curfew laws of the colonial age
Charles Bremner in Paris

POLICE began enforcing curfews in riot-hit areas across France last
night after President Chirac declared a state of emergency, applying
a law last used in the 1960s in an attempt to end the orgy of arson
by youths from immigrant housing estates.

The law, enacted in 1955 to suppress riots in Algeria, a French
colony at the time, empowers regional authorities to declare curfews,
order house searches, prohibit public assembly and put people under
house arrest. Curfew breakers will be liable to up to two months’
imprisonment during the emergency, which lasts for an initial 12
days. Opponents denounced the measures as dangerously provocative,
but M Chirac told the Cabinet after a twelfth successive night of
violence that it was “necessary to accelerate the return to calm”.

As the measures were about to come into effect, fresh outbreaks were
reported in Toulouse last night, with dozens of youths setting cars
alight and hurling petrol bombs at police.

Monday night’s grim toll across France stood at 1,173 vehicles burnt,
several schools and public buildings attacked and 330 arrested. In
Toulouse a rioter lost a hand trying to throw back a tear gas
grenade. In the Breton port of Brest, police said that attackers
fired pellets at them. In Lyon two officers were injured by steel
boules. Police leaders and mayors in towns that have been hit by the
worst violence in France since 1968 generally welcomed the emergency
measures. But it was opposed by teachers, sections of the Left and
the media, and by groups working to calm the Muslim-dominated housing
estates.

Le Monde, the leading daily newspaper in France, took strong
exception. “Exhuming a 1955 law sends to the youth of the suburbs a
message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends
to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents,” it said. The
largest teacher’s union said that M Chirac’s decision would be seen
as a “message of war” to disaffected youths who already see the riot
police as an army sent to humiliate them.

The 1955 law was applied by President de Gaulle in 1962 to combat
violent opposition to his decision to pull out of Algeria after an
eight-year war.

As local authorities prepared a list of areas for curfews, judges in
the Paris suburbs and other cities rushed through the trials of
youths caught destroying property or fighting police. More than 260
young men have been sentenced. About half of those detained were
under the age of 16.

“The kids don’t understand the gravity of their deeds,” a senior
police officer said. “We call it the Game Boy effect. They go out and
do over cops like they do on their video games. The leaders are 18 to
25, but they put the young ones up to throw the petrol bottles.”

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, also announced a
multimillion-pound package of measures to ease the plight of the
descendants of the immigrants from the 1950s and 1960s whose anger
has exploded on to the streets.

The package includes the creation of a national anti-discrimination
agency and 20,000 jobs with local government bodies or associations
for estate dwellers. The Prime Minister told parliament: “We must be
clear — the Republic is at a moment of truth. What is in question is
the effectiveness of our model of integration.”

The riots, which began on October 27, have laid bare the failure of
the republican doctrine, which supposedly promotes assimilation by
guaranteeing equality while officially refusing to acknowledge the
needs of ethnic or religious communities. M de Villepin said that
racial discrimination was a daily fact of life, as reflected in the
preference given to jobseekers with native French-sounding names.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-Right National Front, said
that the unrest was the “civil war” that he has long predicted as a
result of uncontrolled immigration.

The riots in France showed how the combination of inequality, race
and powerlessness could be incendiary, Trevor Phillips, the chairman
of the Commission for Racial Equality said. Speaking in Edinburgh at
the 40th anniversary of the first anti-discrimination law introduced
in Britain, Mr Phillips said race equality legislation was not an
abstract and often arose out of tragedy.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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Europe's Miserable Mistake

Spanish Writer: Europe's Miserable Mistake - a MUST READ!

Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez, a Spanish writer, posted an article recently in
the newspaper of Barcelona entitled, All European Life Died in Auschwitz.
NOTE: This article was written BEFORE the riots began in France. This is a
summary of the article.

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible
truth - Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced
them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We
destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great
and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this
people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade,
and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we
burned.

And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to
ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our
gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance,
religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an
unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have
turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in
filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan
the murder and destruction of their naïve hosts. And thus, in our misery,
we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for
destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We
have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their
talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their
determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue
death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and
others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

Selah!

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