Sunday Reading: The Sirens of Baghdad

The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul) is the third in a trilogy. The previous two novels have also been discussed at this site: The Swallows of Kabul (discussed in an essay on women and Islam) and The Attack.

Yasmina Khadra's most recent novel tells the story of a young Bedouin man in a desert village of Iraq. Although he is forced to return to Kafr Karam, his village, from the university in Baghdad when the Americans invade Iraq, life in his village remains relatively unaffected by the war until insurgent activity draws the interest of the Americans in the region. First, an air attacks disrupts a wedding party, killing several. When the Americans arrive in his village and invade, they perpetrate an outrage upon the young man's dignity and familial honor, which he can only repay with an act of vengeance. The Americans crash through the home, looking for a supposed weapons cache or any sign of insurgency:

Hellish insults erupted from the end of the hall. My mother, ejected from her room, immediately collected herself and went to help her invalid husband. "Leave him alone. He's sick." Soldiers brought out the old man. I'd never seen him in such a state. With his threadbare undershirt hanging loosely from his thin shoulders and his stretched out drawers fallen nearly to his knees, he was the very image of boundless distress, walking misery, an affront personified toin all its absolute boorishness.

The resulting image of his father's manhood, exposed ridiculously after the American soldiers knock him to the ground, is the final straw for the young man. After the indignities suffered that night, the young man leaves Kafr Karam without so much as a word to his family, his sister excepted, to make an attack on the Americans. Anything less, he insists, would make him ashamed to be seen in his village.


He makes his way to Baghdad where he nearly starves before being taken in by his cousin Omar. His cousin quickly assesses what he is about and tries to talk him out of a rash action that would harm his fellow Iraqis rather than his intended American victims. Omar, who has seen much in Baghdad, counsels his friend:

"...you have to know exactly what you're getting into. You see what the resistance does every day. It's killed thousands of Iraqis. In exchange for how many Americans? If the answer to that qeustion doesn't matter to you, then that's yorur problem. But as for me, I disagree."

This kind of dialectic is found frequently in Khadra's novels, especially the two most recent ones, as characters talk about terrorism, Muslim identity, and the West.

Through Omar's help, the young man lands with some other friends from Kafr Karam who are active in the insurgency. A warehouse that acts as a front for their bomb making operation provides the young man with a salary and a job while he awaits his opportunity to exact revenge on the West. Eventually the opportunity comes in the form of a dramatic terrorist that "will make September 11th seem like a noisy recess at an elementary school." As the young man arrives in Beirut and makes final preparations for the attack, his confidence never wavers, at least not until the novel's final moments.

The third novel in Khadra's trilogy bears the closest resemblance to the second, The Attack. Both novels are told as a flashback, as the opening pages describe an attack (or impending attack) which the rest of the novel leads up to chronologically. And both novels take the reader into the mechanics as well as the psychology of terrorists. Both novels show sympathy to the grievances that motivate those, called terrorists by the West, who see themselves as revolutionary warriors fighting against the oppression of Judeo-Christian powers. In The Attack, the main character was, however, a Westernized Arab definitively opposed to the self-destructive mindset of the terrorist, and he sought in the novel to challenge that mindset, to confront the actors face-to-face as if to say, like Laertes to Hamlet, "thus didst thou." Sirens, by contrast, is told from the point of view of a would-be killer, single-mindedly devout in his pursuit of destruction.

Therein lies the novel's flaw. The young man is so single minded in pursuit of his cause, so unflinching as to be implausible. He is too sensitive, too warm and good a man to not face doubts in pursuit of his cause. In the early parts of the novel, he vomits at the sight of any violence, and he admits to being girlish in his ability to cry, which he does more than his sister. Still, at no time in the novel, prior to the dramatic conclusion, does he express any doubt about the righteousness of his cause and the innocent deaths that could result. As Janet Maslin of the Times writes, "The cumulative effect of these events (the violence of Kafr Karam) turns the narrator into a numb yet still melodramatic automaton, ready to be used by the forces of terrorism and vengeance." And it simply doesn't feel right. Outwardly, in conversations with other characters, the young man is so stone faced about his determination for vengeance that he doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of failure or doubt. But even to the reader, the self doubt we expect, and which would make the ending more fitting, never is revealed.

In all, the moderate, sensible, western-oriented Muslim intellectuals who appear in Khadra's novels--like the narrator in The Attack, Zunaira in Swallows of Kabul, or Jalal in this novel (although Jalal has radicalized to jihad, he maintains his rationality in the face of large-scale annihilation, a rationality that plays a critical role in the novel)--are more like Khadra himself, and so the murderer's persona in Sirens of Baghdad seems a little artificial and forced.

But all three novels, set in the Muslim world's most dangerous places--Kabul, Baghdad, and the West Bank--are brilliant narratives, examining with honesty and sensitivity the fractures within the Muslim world and its relationship to the West.

Links, and an excerpt

The Guardian: Khadra expertly evokes an urban atmosphere of paranoia and random destruction. There is one particularly telling scene on the road to Baghdad in which people in a traffic jam watch a US helicopter fire two rockets at nothing in particular ("we saw two masses of flames and dust rise over a ridge") - an image reminiscent of the moment in Heart of Darkness when Marlow observes a warship dully shelling the jungle, firing blind into the dark continent. Throughout the novel, the tension between the narrator's home environment and his adopted world of mechanised destruction is subtly emphasised by means of natural imagery, as when he and another character say goodbye: "We part without pats or embraces, like two rivulets spilling off a rock."

The Telegraph: While village life in the desert is ably captured, it is hard for Khadra's depiction of occupied Baghdad to compete with the depressingly vivid depictions of the place in our nightly news footage. Much of the second half of the novel is devoted to long Islamist monologues - zealotry that might have been lifted wholesale from a jihadi video posted on the web.

More dissatisfying than the set-piece quality of these diatribes is their language, whose overly European character somehow doesn't ring true. The problem seems deeper than that of mere translation. Speaking of Westerners, one radical rants: "They're just infuriated retards, smashing valuable things, like buffalo let loose in a porcelain shop… Violence and hatred sum up their history; Machiavellianism shapes and justifies their initiatives and their ambitions. What can they comprehend of our world, which has produced the most fabulous pages in the history of human civilisation? Our fundamental values are still intact; our oaths are unbroken; our traditional points of reference remain the same."

A "buffalo in a porcelain shop" is just a hasty rewording of "bull in a china shop". Machiavelli is a curious allusion in a part of the world that hardly lacks for scheming tyrants. Even "traditional points of reference" sounds straight out of Western academia.

I can't seem to get on the same page with the Times, with whom I disagreed on Khadra's previous (brilliant) novel, The Attack, and now this. This is just WRONG (at least in regards to The Attack)! IMHO:

If “The Swallows of Kabul” remains the most wrenching and imaginative book in this trilogy, “The Attack” now seems the most artificial and didactic. “The Sirens of Baghdad” falls somewhere in between, with a blunt story line that has real passion behind it. The author’s ear for Iraqi despair, fury and violation is keen, even as he manipulates the book’s ideological posturing to reflect different points of view. In the end, this cautionary tale sounds more like real history.

A smart pairing: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Siren's of Baghdad in Baltimore's City Paper

A note on the following excerpt: The Americans are portrayed as monsters in this novel. They are seen from Iraqi eyes, as gun weilding maniacs constantly on edge. The Iraqi police fare only slightly better: corrupt, but culturally aware at least. In the early part of the novel, still set in Kafr Karam, the blacksmith's son, who seems to be autistic or slow, cuts his fingers off in an accident, and the narrator attempts to drive the injured man and his father to the clinic. At an American checkpoint, the injured man panics and is shot by the American guards. In the following passage, the narrator returns home with the father of the deceased:

A police car took us back to the village. I didn't completely grasp what was happening. I was inside a sort of evanescent bubble, sometimes suspended in a void, sometimes fraying apart like a cloud of smoke. I remembered clearly the mother's unbearable cry when the blacksmith returned home. Immediately, a crowd gathered, dazed, and incredulous. The old struck their hands together, devastated; the young were outraged. I reached my house in a lamentable state. The moment I stepped over the threshold and into the patio, my father, who was dozing at the foot of his indefinable tree, started in his sleep. He'd understood at once that something bad had happened. My mother didn't have the courage to ask me what the matter was; she settled for putting her hands on her cheeks. My sisters came running with kids clinging to their skirts. Outside the first howls began, somber lamentations heavy with anger and passion. My sister Bahia took me by the arm and helped me to my rooftop room. She laid me down on my pallet, brought me a basin of water, took off my filthy vomit-stained shirt, and started washing me from the waist up. Meanwhile, the news spread through the village, and our entire family went to condole with the blacksmith and his household. After putting me to bed for the evening, Bahia left to join them, and I fell asleep.

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Lelyveld on Carter

The latest NY Review is full of great stuff. I'm so glad I subscribe.

Since I wrote about Jimmy Carter's most recent book a few weeks back, I wanted to point out this thoughtful and illuminating review in the NY Review by Joseph Lelyveld, who approaches the subject of Carter's use of the word "apartheid" as a sensible and level headed journalist, reviewing the uses of the word by others and the meanings applied to it. Excerpt below.

(And a note to my regular readers: my Sunday Reading was hijacked by Martin Amis' bizarre and disturbing novel House of Meetings, which I finished over the weekend but I don't know what to say about. I'll give it a shot next week, so check back then. It's on to poetry for the cruelest month.)


The branding of Israel as an "apartheid state" was one of the themes of resolutions presented at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, under United Nations auspices in 2001 (and one of the reasons Secretary of State Colin Powell cited for calling the American delegation home). Yet at about the same time, the term "apartheid" began to surface in discussions in what might broadly be called the Israeli peace camp as a plausible if somewhat contentious way of characterizing the occupation of the territories or the prospects of the Jewish settlements there; as a benchmark, a description of what the occupation already was or might become. Five years ago, writing in Haaretz, Israel's most respected newspaper, Michael Ben Yair used the A-word in describing the occupation that he said began on "the seventh day" of the Six-Day War. Ben Yair, the attorney general in the governments of Yitzak Rabin and Shimon Peres in the 1990s, is no fringe figure. "Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories," he wrote,

we developed two judicial systems: one—progressive, liberal—in Israel; and the other—cruel, injurious—in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.
Two years later, the political commentator and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti used the word prospectively. Ariel Sharon's plan to disengage from Gaza and build a security wall along—and beyond—the eastern frontier of the West Bank was tantamount, he argued, to making Israel "a binational state based on apartheid." It meant, he said, "the imprisonment of some 3 million Palestinians in bantustans."

In recent weeks, largely in response to the controversy in this country over the Carter book, the word "apartheid" has popped up in Israel's interminable security discussion more often there than it normally does in print. Thus we find Uri Avnery, a veteran of the peace movement, detecting "a strong odor of apartheid" in a military order (since rescinded) forbidding Israeli drivers to give rides to Palestinians on the West Bank; and Shulamit Aloni, the education minister in the last Rabin cabinet, declaring on the Web site of the tabloid Yediot Ahronot that Israel "practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population."[1] Two clicks on the Web site of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a small but vocal peace group, brings you to a screen headed "Campaign Against Apartheid," proposing a "Civil Society Call to Action." Israelis using the term "apartheid" in debates that go on mainly in Hebrew provoke a predictably hostile reaction. But that reaction in Israel is ritualized by now, not nearly as fresh in its outrage as the one the former president aroused here by using "apartheid" as a verbal battering ram in order to reopen a debate about the occupation of Palestinian lands—one that Democrats and Republicans, unlike Israelis, outdo each other in shunning.

Two uses of "apartheid" are in play when attempts are made to attach the word to Israel: the Durban usage, citing Israel as an "apartheid state"; and, more commonly, the application of the term to the occupation in the territories, which has now gone on for all but nineteen of the nearly fifty-nine years of Israel's existence, through different phases as Jewish settlements took root and expanded on the West Bank along with the heavy military presence that guards them, supplemented now by a network of roads for the exclusive use of the settlers and the Israel Defense Forces. The settlements, roads, barriers and military presence have effectively divided the West Bank into security zones or enclaves, severely limiting Palestinian passage from one zone to the next. The crushing impact on Palestinian lives and families is clear enough. The debate on whether it amounts to "apartheid" turns on whether it's to be seen as a legitimate and reversible response to the threat of terrorism across the border in Israel, or whether it's meant to be as permanent as it looks.

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We only talk to Syria when...

Syria offering help to stop violence in Iraq.

Bush administration refusing.

We don't seem to mind talking to Syria when we've got someone we want to rough up a little bit.

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Glenn Greenwald Must Read

A must-read from Glenn Greenwald.

I posted some comments recently about AIPAC and Jimmy Carter's contention that criticism of Israel is virtually impossible because of the Israel lobby.

This post gets into that pretty well. Great, great read, as always from Greenwald.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali on NPR (Updated)

UPDATE: Pierre points me to the interview in the NYT. Here is a sample, and then I am done with Ali for a while; I've devoted too much space on this blog to her already!

Q. Have you seen any ideology coming from within Islam that gives young Muslims a sense of purpose without the overlay of militancy?

A. They have no alternative message. There is no active missionary work among the youth telling them, do not become jihadis. They do not use media means as much as the jihadis. They simply — they’re reactive and they don’t seem to be able to compete with the jihadis. And every time there is a debate between a real jihadi and, say, what we have decided to call moderate Muslims, the jihadis win. Because they come with the Koran and quotes from the Koran. The come with quotes from the Hadith and the Sunnah, and the traditions of the prophet. And every assertion they make, whether it is that women should be veiled, or Jews should be killed, or Americans are our enemies, or any of that, they win. Because what they have to say is so consistent with what is written in the Koran and the Hadith. And what the moderates fail to do is to say, listen, that’s all in there, but that wasn’t meant for this context. And we have moved on. We can change the Koran, we can change the Hadith. That’s what’s missing.


Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on NPR today. She was on to discuss her new autobiography Infidel. Since I just wrote about her book I thought I would listen. You can listen on line, but transcripts take a while. I was able to take some notes on the interview Neil Cohen did with her, and while it's not perfect, here's what I came up with (not exact quotes, of course) with my comments in paretheses and italics. Of course if my paraphrasing is too inexact you can go to the NPR site and listen to the whole thing. See if you agree with me that Ali, for a public person who was in the legislature in Holland, seemed very nervous to be on the air.

Here we go:

Ali claims that she did undergo the practice of "circumcision" (Ohdave: a word I object to for being inaccurate and euphemistic.)

She claims cultural practice had been around for centuries prior to the Prophet. the question of sexual morality needs to be addressed... While Islam is not responsible for the practice and doesn't condone it, genital mutilation lends itself to the need to ensure that a woman in virgin when she is married, which is in line with the need for women to be virgins when they marry... men also supposed to follow law of no premarital intercourse but of course only women are held to this standard, only women checked when married.

Caller: This is an example of what I call colonial feminism. When colonial forces use women's issues to advance a neo-colonial agenda. Ms. Ali is being used for that purpose. My question is whether she feels she is being used. I hope she knows that Siad Barre was a colonial puppet. (Ohdave: quite novel sophistry used by the caller...in protesting oppression of women Ali is actually engaging in advancing a neo-colonial agenda which seeks to colonize by freeing! That's rich.)

Ali: I'm not being used. I belong to a generation right after independence in Somalia. My generation cannot blame outside forces...(Ohdave: Ali being a bit naive or disingenuous here...as though post-colonial generations are not influenced by the history of colonialism?) People who persecuted in my life were Somalis, even clanmates... what fascinates me about the west is its history of individualism, liberty, life, rationality, learning vs. dogma, experiment, trial and error. I know western societies have terrible things in the past like the burning of witches, the second world war (Ohdave: by which I take her to mean the Holocaust), the support of brutal dictators in third world. But the other part of the west is developing institutions which safeguard the rights of individuals and it would be a mistake to lump them together. When I read history the most passionate people to fight slavery were white Americans, and British...same for colonialism which was abolished by individuals within those societies fighting against colonialist practices. Today slavery is only practiced in Muslim countries. (Ohdave: this is a pretty weak argument by Ali I'm afraid...Islam is not the defining characteristic of these countries that causes slavery to be accepted... Both Christianity and Islam have condoned slavery in the past... connecting Islam to slavery in this way confirms what Ali's critics say about her sloppy thinking in her criticism of Islam...) Islam is spread to countries that are poor, that is a kind of moral colonialism. (Ohdave: Interesting concept.) Gender separation is propogated by the most wealthy Muslim nations (the Saudis). Anti semitism is a source of shame in the west where it has been practiced in the past and western countries take pains to root out this racism but it is still active in many Muslim countries, not a source of shame, and out in the open. Muslims must solve their problems themselves. I am no longer muslim but have responsibility to say let's stop blaming external forces; let's fix the problem ourselves. I'm not a believing Muslim but part of that history.

Neil Cohen: question about Ali describing in her book Infidel meeting a member of the Muslim brotherhood preaching total obedience of the wife to the man. Ali said, must a wife be obedient to her husband? The man said, of course not. Ali defied him saying in that case men and women are not equal if a woman must obey husband. The man said she could not know the mind of God.

Ali basically recounted the story.


Caller: Women in Islam who come to the west often have a one sided polarized view of Islam. It is prevalent in people like her. My question is if Muslim world must open minded (prejudiced) the children of Iraq--would it be closed minded of them to say that the US came in and destroyed their world? (I didn't get this question...) "Terrrorism only exists in the Islamic world" is an incorrect statement... You ignore state terrorism... Israel for example... Ali wants to close her eyes to them and pretend they don't exist.

Ali: OK, thank you. For empirical evidence on whether women in Islamic world are in crisis, refer to the UN Arab Human Development Report. The authors say the Arab world slow in three ways: lack of freedom, lack of knowledge or training, and a disempowerment of women (Ohdave: Ali refers to this report in her book The Caged Virgin). That's not something I am inventing, I am reacting to it... Tony (the caller) is referring to Iraq and Israel... The Americans and British went into Iraq with intention of freeing from Iraq from Saddam (Ohdave: she's got a lot to learn about US politics... unfortunately she is learning it at the American Enterprise Institute...) It's not gone well, but that doesn't mean they were evil in their intentions. Regarding Palestine and Israel, you can't keep using that to blame them for all the things that go wrong in the Muslim world. (Ohdave: she's got a point... there does seem to be a tendency to turn everything back on Israel no matter what the issue or argument.)

There is no true liberal democracy in the Islamic world. Turkey and Indonesia not true fully functioning democracies. Women are subjegated in all parts of the world; Palestine not cause of that... we can't keep blaming Israel for the problems of arabs and muslims everywhere.

Cohen: Do you still travel with bodyguards? What's it like to have death threats?

Ali: I been on book tour and get that question again and again. It gives me more zest for life...I realize how short it is I've come to conclusion there is no hereafter so I try to enjoy life to fullest

Caller: I have seen many Somalis who wrote abou circumcision and publicized and never have one done anything to help other people educate girls and young women so that the practice will not continue.

Ali: You can't do anything concrete. I'd love to go to Somalia but evey 10 seconds a girls' genitals are removed. It would be delusional to think one individual can do anything to stop it. We try to talk about it to persuade people to stop practicing it. For a long time people have talked about cutting but I have said let's address the root causes. Instead of asking, Will my daughter have a husband to take care of her, get your daughter an education so you don't have to depend on someone else to take care of her. The practice of genital mutilation is rooted in and continues because of the need to have a husband, which depends on the practice of genital mutilation. Ali suggests she is trying address the root issue of sexism in Islam.

Cohen: are you stil in touch with family? What do they think of your book?

Ali: I think my brother knows I've written a book; we are not in touch. The tension between me and family is that i should not link Islam with the issues I discuss. They don't talk to me.

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Sunday Reading Trio: Women and Islam

UPDATE: The post contains an exchange I had with Sophia of Les Politiques.

This essay discusses the following works:

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. Translated from the Dutch by Jane Brown. Free Press, 2006.

Yasmina Kahdra, The Swallows of Kabul. Translated from the French by John Cullen. Doubleday, 2004.

I

Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong, which Juan Cole called in a 2003 review a "very bad book", takes as its premise the notion that the Islamic world, once a world power which maintained empires stretching from Spain to India, failed to respond adequately to the challenges of the West, which emerged triumphant in the 19th and 20th centuries.


The heart of Cole's criticism of the book is that it isn't clear what Lewis means by "what went wrong":

Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? is a very bad book from a usually very good author. How a profoundly learned and highly respected historian, whose career spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and one-sided punditry is a profound mystery. While I cannot hope to resolve the puzzle, I can explain why I come to this conclusion.

Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a brush so broad that he may as well have brought a broom to the easel. He begins by speaking of the "Islamic world," and of "what went wrong" with it. He contrasts this culture region to "the West," and implies that things went right with the latter. But what does he mean by the "Islamic world?" He seldom speaks of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very substantial proportion of the whole. Malaysia and Indonesia are never instanced. He seems to mean "the Muslim Middle East," but if so he would have been better advised to say so. With regard to the Middle East, what does he mean by the question "what went wrong?" Does he mean to ask about economic underdevelopment? About lack of democracy? About a failure to contribute to scientific and technological advances? About ethnocentrism? All of these themes are mentioned in passing, but none is formulated as a research design. If "what went wrong" was mainly economic, political and scientific, then why pose the question with regard to a religious category? Lewis straightforwardly says that Islam in and of itself cannot be blamed for what went wrong (whatever that was). Since Islam is not the independent variable in his explanation, why make "the Islamic world" the unit of analysis? Discerning exactly what Lewis is attempting to explain, and what he thinks the variables are that might explain it, is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

In spite of Cole's frustration, Lewis' point seems fairly clear, if not clearly stated: What Went Wrong seeks to understand why the Islamic world isn't more like the West, why its institutions haven't "modernized" in order to meet the needs of its people. Lewis tells the history of the contact between Europe and Islam, in military, cultural, political, and religious terms, showing how Islamic and Christian institutions developed differently in each of these areas, and how Islamic countries responded in their contact with the West.

Lewis begins with a chapter on "Lessons from the Battlefield," showing how the once dominant Muslim armies were eventually subdued by the forces of Europe, with Muslim weakness beginning to be exposed with the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt and continuing with the wholesale colonization of the Middle East by France, Britain and Russia.

But more to the heart of "what went wrong" in Lewis's analysis seems to be the failure of Islam to adapt to social, cultural, and intellectual norms of the West. In his third chapter, "Social and Cultural Barriers," and fourth chapter, "Modnernization and Social Equality," Lewis tracks the demise of the three basic inequalities of Islam, which otherwise emphasizes equality of all believers: the inequalities granted women, slaves, and non-believers.

According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal and religious quality--unbelievers, slaves, and women. The woman was obviously in on significant respect the worst placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer...only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was...

Lewis then goes on to show how, much as in the West, slavery diminished and was essentially outdated by the late 19th century. As for non-believers, their status improved as well. Women, however, did not benefit in the Islamic world from the advances made by women in the West. While the status of non-believers and slaves improved dramatically, there was no interest in improving the position of women, and the "outcome of that struggle," even today, Lewis says, is "far from clear." He explains that the liberality towards women shown in more economically modern societies in the Islamic world, the need for women in the workforce, was part of the backlash of "fundamentalist" political movements such as the Iranian revolution of 1979. "Khomeini," Lewis says, "spoke with great anger of the inevitable immorality that would result from women teaching adolescent boys."

Lewis makes an interesting distinction between "westernization" and "modernization". The status of women is an example for Lewis of the differnce. While many Islamic regimes recognize the need for modernization, Lewis argues, they do not see the need to more fully integrate women into society. That, he explains, would be "westernization" and an imposition of Western social ideals into Islamic society, not "modernization." While Islamic states recognize the need to modernize their economies and to take advantage of the technological advances of the modern world, doing so cannot mean importing irreligious Western social mores and practices.

Lewis also discusses the concept of "secularism" in Islam. Agreeing with Karen Armstrong and her competing history of Islam, he shows that Islam does not have a history of separating state and religion in the way that Christian states understand it. Contrasting Islam with Christianity, Lewis explains that Christ's admonition to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's," has led to a dominant belief in the separation of faith from civic governance. In fact, the church developed separately from individual states, and the notion of "canon law" versus "common law" is a distinction unheard of in Islam. As Lewis explains, there is no Islamic equivalent to "the church", no ecclesiastical hierarchy, and no clergy:
"Islam recognizes no ordination, no sacraments, no priestly mediation between the believer and God. The so-called clergyman is perceived as a teacher, a guide, a scholar in theology and law, but not as a priest." While early Christians were persecuted by state power, until Consantine converted, "Muhammed was, so to speak, his own Constantine," the original leader of the Muslim faith who also ruled politically. From the beginning of Islam, the ruling of society and organization of society was centered around Islam. The notion of secularism was foreign to Islamic states. "Since the state was Islamic, and was indeed created as an instrument of Islam by its founder, there was no need for any separate religious institution. The state was the church and the church was the state, and God was head of both, with the Prophet as his repesentative on earth."

Lewis concludes without offering a prescription for change, but suggesting that the current course of Islamic states in trending towards fundamentalism as a means to combat modernity and preserve the purity of Islam. Ironically, Lewis asserts that his book was in page proof at the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

II

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's writings collected in the volume The Caged Virgin seems to respond directly to the question "what went wrong" with a clear and specific answer. While she deals more generally as well with the question of modernity and Islam, her specific focus is Islam's treatment of women. Ali even has an essay in her book entitled, "What Went Wrong," and discusses directly Lewis's argument. A sample:

Lewis's position is unambiguous. The subtitle of his book, The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, is revealing. The people who abandoned Islamic civilization have not fully experienced the intrusive, painful, but ultimately liberating process of modernization as their neighbors and rivals in the Christian West have. Lewis warns that a downward spiral of hatred and resentment, anger and self-pity, poverty and oppression can result from rejecting modernity, but he hopes that Muslims will use their talents and energy to achieve a common goal, so that one day Islamic nations may become an important civilization again.

A little background: Ali came to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage which her Somalian parents had arranged for her. In the Netherlands she became involved with women's issues, and worked as an interpreter for Somali women who found their way to abortion clinics and battered women's shelters. Her experiences, some of which are described in the book, reinforced her antipathy towards Islam. She eventually ran successfully for the Dutch parlaiment, where she fought to abolish the practice of genital mutilation (a campaign which is also described in the book). In 2004, she wrote a screenplay entitled Submission which was realized by the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. The screenplay is included as a chapter in The Caged Virgin. The short film was broadcast on Dutch TV, and Van Gogh was murdered shortly after.

Since then, Ali has moved to the United States, where she presumably feels less threatened by the European Muslim community she has so thoroughly attacked in her work and has unfortunately taken up residence with a new set of tyrants, the American Enterprise Institute. At the same time, her attack on Islam has invited a vigorous response from European intellectuals such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. For background on this discussion, visit Pierre Tristam's Candide's Notebooks, here and here. One can also read Ash's remarks on Ali, along with his review of Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam, here at the NYReview site.

Ash is exactly the kind of European liberal intellectual that Ali attacks ferociously in her book. In Ali's view, Muslim men have appropriated Islam in order to subjegate women throughout Islamic culture. Moreover, she argues that European liberals like the Social Democratic Party, whom she left in order to join the more conservative Liberal Party, have accomodated Islamic mysogyny in the name of tolerance and multi-culturalism. Ali responds specifically to this kind of criticism, levelled against her by Ash and Buruma (in this case, Ash):

Ali performs a great service in drawing our attention to these horrors, which are the dark underside of a supposedly tolerant "multiculturalism." However, some Muslim women object to the way in which she blames their oppression on the religion of Islam, rather than on the specific national, regional, and tribal cultures from which they come. (Ali herself acknowledges that genital mutilation is not prescribed in the Koran.) Buruma reports a televised meeting she had with women in a Dutch shelter for abused housewives and battered daughters, several of whom objected strongly to the film Submission. "You're just insulting us," one cried. "My faith is what strengthened me." According to Buruma, she dismissed their objections with a lofty wave of her hand

.

Ali's response is very simply this: that Islam, in spite of the "strength" it gives women like those described above, creates conditions by which women are objectified and abused. In Ali's view, Islam has created a cult of virginity by which women are kept more or less encaged, hence the "virgins' cage", and their sexual purity kept intensely suspect. Men, however, engage in occasionally libertine behavior, for which they suffer no consequences. The double standard leads to a virtual imprisonment of women, severe restrictions on their work and family life, sexual abuse, and a profound shame that surrounds any sexual indiscretion, tantamount to expulsion from the family. Ali sees the European view of human rights and freedom, but suggests that European liberals don't care to protect the rights of Muslim women out of a fear of offense of the Muslim population.

Ash is correct that Ali acknowledges that the Koran does not mention genital mutilation. However, Ali points out that Muhammed did marry a nine-year old girl, and suggests that Islam essentially condones the double standards and the view of women as property of men. What Ali seeks is not, however, to destroy Islam. She seems to have fond memories of many aspects of her Islamic upbringing. What she seeks is, as she calls it, a "Voltaire" who will lead Muslims to a more modern and rational faith, one that is in accord with human rights and freedom for women. One radical idea Ali worked to fulfill is a law requiring girls to undergo physicals in order to ensure they have not had genital mutilation, and prosecution of parents whose daughters have received the practice.

Ali explains that the tribal, but not Koranic, practice of genital mutilation that has become widespread in Islamic cultures is bound up with the cult of virginity:

People blame me for not drawing a distinction between religion and culture. Female circumcision, they say, has nothing to do with Islam, because this cruel ritual does not take place in all Islamic societies. But Islam demands that you enter marriage as a virgin. The virginity dogma is safeguarded by locking girls up in their homes and sewing the outer labia together. Female circumcision serves two pruposes: the clitoris is removed in order to reduce the woman's sexuality, and the labia are sewn up in order to guarantee her virginity.

She goes on to argue throughout the book that Islam tends to segregate Muslims immigrants, especially women, from integrating fully into European society, and has inhibited the development of Islamic nations, keeping them "backward" and keeping their peoples ignorant and poor.

Ali concludes her book with an essay entitled "A Call for Clear Thinking":

Muslims must review and reform their approach to Muhammad's teachings if those who love freedom and the open society are to coexist peacefully with them. The terrorists and their allies the fundamentalists should not dictate to us Westerners the rules of the game. We must maintain and proclaim our core values of free and open debate, of rational thinking, and the rule of law, not religion. In this, the resolve of the British people to preserve civil rights is brave, and should be an example to all of us. The use of torture and the denial of legal rights to suspects of terrorism will serve only to corrupt Western systems and views of the West as a model of openness. Such actions also provide the terrorists with facts that serve as ammunition to prove their specious argument that the West is hypocritical and morally confused.

III

Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul)set his novel The Swallows of Kabul in the Afghanistan of the Taliban. It tells the story of Mohsen, a member of the middle class prior to the rise of the Taliban, and his wife Zunaira, who had been a scholar. Zunaira is increasingly isolated and depressed by the conditions in Kabul. A proud woman, the thought of going out of the house in a burqa is abhorrent to her. As a man, her husband naturally enjoys full priveleges of freedom and movement. She resents him terribly, as though he is a personal manifestation of the Taliban in her own home. She complains to Mohsen:

We're not anything anymore. We had some priveleges that we didn't know how to defend, and so we forfeited them to the apprentice mullahs. I'd love to go out with you every day, every evening: I'd love to slip my hand under your arm and let you sweep me along. It would be marvelous to stand in front of a shop window, leaning against you, or to sit at a table, just the two of us, chatting away or making fantastic plans. But that's no longer possible. There will always be some foul-smelling ogre armed to the teeth who'll reprimand us and forbid us to speak outdoors. Rather than be subjected to such insults, I prefer to stay inside my own four wall.s. Here at home, at least, when I see my reflection in the mirror, I don't have to hide my face.

...I refuse to wear a burqa. Of all the burdens they've put on us, that's the most degrading. The Shirt of Nessus wouldn't do as much damage to my dignity as that wretched getup. It cancels my face and takes away my identity and turns me into an object.

Another couple inhabits the story as well. Atiq is a jailer, and his wife Musarrat is ill. She loves her husband dearly, although she seems unable to please him. She lacks energy. She knows she is dying. Atiq sees her as a martyr, and, paradoxically, resents her helpfulness and generosity. Atiq is ill at ease, and even his friends are able to sense it. If you wife displeases you, they tell him, divorce her. But stop acting so glum. Atiq can't divorce her, as he feels a perpetual obligation to her, which only increases his resentment.

Mohsen one day convinces Zunaira to walk with him. She wears the burqa. But their walk is interrupted by a talk in a public square by a famous scholar. A guard of the Taliban forces Mohsen to stop and listen. When he approaches, Zunaira is laughing with her husband. The guard tells them they should be ashamed. He strikes Mohsen in the face, then lectures him. When Mohsen protests that he can't stay, he is given two lashes with a whip on his shoulder. He is then instructed to stay and hear the sermon. Zunaira, meanwhile, is forced to wait with the other women. Two hours later, she is weak and barely able to walk home. At home, she tells her husband, "don't touch me," and Mohsen feels stung again.

In a later argument over the events of the day, Zunaira strikes her husband and kills him in a freak accident. She is arrested, and sentenced to death.

While she is at the jail, Atiq sees her without her burqa and falls in love with her. After his wife discovers his feelings, she gives up her life in a final selfless act of love for her husband. She devises a plan to substitute herself for Zunaira and suffer the public execution that Zunaira is scheduled to suffer.

Zunaira walks out of the jail disguised then as Atiq's wife. She wants to go home, but must go to the execution first. Atiq tells her to wait for him, and that he will take her someplace safe after it is over. But after it is over, Atiq cannot find Zunaira. The women are indistinguisable from one another, and the sybmolism is clear: women are no longer individuals, they have been objectified by the Taliban, turned into dispensible and replaceable objects. Your wife displeases you? Divorce her. Trade her in for another. But Atiq, who has lost his humanity to the oppression of the Taliban, is no longer able to distinguish those characteristics that make us human, that make women special. The woman who loved him unconditionally he allowed to walk away to her death. In a poignant final image, Atiq pulls burqas one by one, frantically, from every woman he can reach, looking for his love Zunaira. Outraged, his countrymen pelt him with rocks until they rob him of his conciousness.

This is Khadra's final image of the Taliban and militant fundamentalist Islam: women forced into anonymity, and death to anyone who dares to look them in the eyes.

The following exchange took place on Candide's Notebooks regarding this essay. Sophia is the author of the blog Les Politiques.

Ohdave, I wasn't able to comment on your page, I am leaving my comment here. First, I think there isn't much to say about Lewis about the modernisation of Islam. I think you cannot tackle this problem without considering the colonial history of Muslim middle eastern countries. There is a great bias in analysing the relation of Islam to modernity without taking this apsect into consideration. I think Lewis has discredited himself on all what he has written on the middle east and I would not stop one moment at any of his arguments.
Hirsi Ali is still sticking to her storyline as a poor girl forced into marriage while during the controversy in the Netherlands her parents went public to say that there is no truth to this story. Ali herself was not genitally mutilated because her father was a 'liberal' when compared to the rest of his countrymen. Another lie in Ali's assumptions about genital mutilation is that it is to keep the girl virgin. I read many essays by a doctor and a scientist who was against genital mutilation in the excellent but now defunct magazine 'The Scientist' published by the NYAsci that was put into death by the Bush administration for lack of funds. I should retrieve these essays or at least some of them in my papaer archives, this was before internet. The authoir who was a leading scientist fighting the practice explains what is genital mutilation and it is rooted in cultural practices. Ali got it wrong all the way. Genital mutilation is practised not within the virginity framework but under the false belief that it increases the pleasure of men during sexual relationships. If a girl is not operated, she is considered as unfit for marriage. Societies live with many false beliefs because this doctor interviewed men who told her that they end up stoping any sexual relationship with their wives because of the mutilation. However, as genital mutilation is considered a prerequirement for marriage and as most of these families are poor and want to see their daughters married, first thing they do is to make their daughters fit according to cultural beliefs. There are many scientists working with NGOs to stop genital mutilation which has to do with economic and cultural apsects of certain societies rather than Islam.
About Ali. Before becoming an extremist anti-anything islam or Muslim, she was an extremist Muslim when she was living in Arab countries with her family. She became indoctrinated by her teacher (female teahcer) into adopting a fundamentalist version of Islam.
I am very suspicious of Ali's motivations. These people have often personal vendettas against their own demons and it seems to me that what drives Ali in not Elightenment, it hurts me deeply to think that people consider an extremist like her an enlightened person. An enlightened person is a rational and tolerant person and Ali is neither of these. She is an extremist being on the Muslim or the anti-Muslim side.
Yasmina Khadra is very symptomatic of the New Islam, and yes there is a New Islam. First the author took his wife's name as his pen name and he has a humanistic, while critical look at his religion.
Of all the three above, only Khadra qualifies for me as the one we should read on Islam. We should discard the other as rubbish, and I am not exagerating...

Sophia, thanks for the correction on Ash. I will get to it soon. I don't know why my comments aren't working at my site; I'll have to look into it. Linda complained of the same problem.

About genital mutilation: I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but certain practices Ali describes such as the stitching of the labia and binding the legs together are pretty clearly designed to enforce virginity. She acknowledges that there are cultural traditions at play, but her larger point is that these cultural traditions along with the subjegation of women in Islam form a kind of two headed monster which opresses women. In fact she goes to pains, in my view, to show that in its purest form Islam is a tolerant and peaceful faith, but that there are elements of mysogyny within its contemporary practice that need to be closely examined. I don't think that is a radical argument. And the argument that I think is really compelling is that liberals in the west who have fought for the emancipation of women in our own societies tend to excuse--is that the right word?--the treatment of women in the name of cultural tolerance.
Ali's testimony on the treatment of women is compelling. Actually, I thought it was shocking. The question of the place of fundamentalist religion in general within tolerant western societies is an important one. I think you dismiss her a bit too easily. She is not an Arab Muslim, but isn't her experience as an African Muslim living (formerly) in Europe equally valuable?

Ohdave, I stil think Ali is a fraud. Nothing in her experince relates to Islam in general or to others but only to her own private fantasies about religion and womanhood.
I found the name of the Sudanese anthropologist who wrote about female 'Circumcision'. It is Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf. She taught in the US. She was a visiting scholar at the Pembrike center for teaching and research on women at Brown university and lectured at the university of connecticut in Storrs. She of course condemns female genital mutilation but she explains scientifically the origins of the practice and how to fight it. The practice, according to her is intended to dull women,s sexual pleasure and increase men's. The only association with virginity is that 'girls who are spared the ordeal by their parents are thought to be promiscuous, a man chaser'.
And sorry, the magazine I mentioned is not The Scientist but 'The Sciences' a beautiful magazine that was interrupted in 2001.
I am going to scan the article sometime soon and send it to you.
It afflicts me that intelligent people like you have as their sources on the matter someone like Ali. The only thing Ali 'knows is what she believes in' to paraphrase Tony Blair.

Ohdave,
I found on the web a lenghtier version of Musharaf's views in a pdf article.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ dif...1abusharaf.html
In which you can read that some Muslim clerics even fought the practice as early as the 1820s:
''Despite the prevalence of the ritual, historically there has also been strong opposition that can be traced to the precolonial era, when indigenous efforts attempted to extirpate it. The first resolute and strong anti-circumcision movement in precolonial Sudan was religiously galvanized in the name of Islam. Before the annexation of the Sudan by Mohamed Ali, in the Turco-Egyptian Empire in 1821, El Sheikh Hassan wad Hassona, then a powerful religious cleric, initiated a campaign to exonerate Islam and redefine its position, especially in the eyes of people who attributed circumcision to Islamic religious ideology. To this day, older women avow the miracles of this cleric, who convinced many that people can be circumcised without genital cutting...''

I would add the following quote from Ali's book regarding genital mutilation as it relates to the culture of virginity: A girl, upon being told by a doctor that she is pregnant: Then she says, "But that is impossible, I am a virgin, I can't be pregnant." She continues to deny it. She says she can prove that she is a virgin: "I was stitched." She can't have done it with a boy, because the stitches are intact.

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The Carter Controversy

Since I wrote about Jimmy Carter's Peace, Not Apartheid, the controversy surrounding the book has continued to swirl. At the time, I linked to some of the articles that described the criticisms of Carter. Now, Carter has appeared at Brandeis University defending the book, and appeared on NPR. I am not sure if Carter is defending himself or his legacy, or simply trying provoke a wider discussion of the Palestinian issue. I suspect it's a little of both. But then it's natural to defend yourself when you are being attacked.

Attacking Carter as an anti-semite as some have openly done, according to him (although I haven't seen it in those words) or attacking him as being biased towards Israel is terribly unfair. The following from Ken Stein will serve as an example of the criticism directed at Carter:

To support Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid's central theme that Israel is intransigent, Carter recasts Hamas as a moderate partner ready to negotiate with Israel. He launders its reputation both with careful word choice and omission. He uses the past tense, for example, to describe Hamas as an "Islamic militant group that opposed recognition of Israel [and] perpetrated acts of violence." Carter adds that he "urged them …to forgo violence." He omits mention that Hamas denies the right of a Jewish state to exist in the Middle East and the group's belief that historical Palestine belongs in its entirety to Muslims. Carter is incorrect when he writes that Hamas has not been responsible for any terrorist acts since August 2004. Hamas on many subsequent occasions claimed responsibility for firing Qassam rockets into Israel and also claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in June 2006.

Carter is certainly critical of Israeli policy in the book and in his public statements. But it's important to remember that Israel has the power in this relationship. It is within Israel's power to recognize the 1967 borders. It is in Israel's powers to restore water rights to Palestinian territory. It is within Isreali rights to do lots of things vis a vis the Palestinians that they have chosen not to do. Is it, however, within Palestine's power to force the Arab world to accept the Jewish state? There is a greater scope of action on the part of Israel, and therefore a greater responsibility for how she reacts to provocations from the Palestinians.

Regardless of whether Carter "mention that Hamas denies the right of a Jewish state to exist", Carter repeatedly states that two conditions exist for peace: the creation of a Palestinian state, and recognition of Israel's right to live in peace with her neighbors. The critics of Carter seem to neglect this point, in an almost kneejerk reaction to any suggestion that Israel could do more to establish peace.
In reading Carter's book (which, alas, I can't quote because it's back at the library!), it's clear that he recognized the need for the security wall when it was initially built, and he acknowledges the fact that attacks on civilians decreased after its construction. However, Carter is critical of the way that the wall has snaked through Palestinian territory and has been used for land acquisition. This is, again, a point that at least some critics, including Stein, seem to miss, or dismiss. Stein also challenged Carter on factual points which, as Carter explains on NPR, only he would know.

Finally, as to the point that Carter makes about the Israel lobby, how can anyone deny it? How can it be denied that the powerful Israel lobby influences the debate in Washington?

Still, I am interested in the critical commentary, and I readily recognize my limitations on this subject. But Carter's commitment to peace and active involvement in the peace process ought to, in my view, insulate him from some of the vicious criticism he has received, some of which is petty and ankle-biting.

I encourage my readers to visit the following links to judge for themselves:

Carter and Stein on NPR, both available at this link.

Stein's essay on Carter.

Carter discussed at Jewlicious: Carter was wrong, they say.

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Haaretz: Rice not serious

Late in the Bush presidency, Condi Rice has suddenly decided that peace between Israel and Palestine might put a shine on his tattered legacy. So, presto! Let's have negotiations and get this thing done! Could Rice's self-serving intentions be more transparent?

The tone of the Haaretz article below seems to be, "Why now? Where have you been for 6 years?"

Take a minute and read it.


MADRID - On her way to the Middle East, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used a refueling stop in Ireland to let loose the following ground-breaking insight about the Arab-Israeli conflict: "There are too many important stakeholders, and any progress on the Palestinian-Israeli front is going to require all of the parties."

All of the parties? Every single one of them? Is there something we are missing? Is Ms. Rice planning a trip to Damascus? Washington has decided to talk to the elected Palestinian government? And what about the Israelis? Is the U.S. planning to demand that Jerusalem evacuate a single outpost, as a sampling, as required by the road map, for the sake of Bush's vision of the Middle East?

It is too bad that on her way to the region Rice could not find the time to stop in Madrid and drop in on the peace conference being held there to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the conference her boss' father and one of her predecessors, James Baker, convened in 1991. She would have found there a huge array of "parties" dying to be part of the solution to the conflict: Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis, Europeans and Russians. There were also some Israeli MKs, including the representative of Yisrael Beiteinu, and two former Likud "princes." There were also four Americans, former senior officials at the State Department.

Everyone heard the Arab League's secretary-general, Amr Moussa, reiterating the organization's commitment to a League proposal for a solution to the conflict, made in March 2002. He said that the League's 22 member states are sticking by the well-known formula - land for peace, and a negotiated solution to the refugee problem. They listened to the address of Dr. Marwan Muasher, who as Jordan's foreign minister was one of the architects of the Arab initiative, who noted that in spite of the wars, the diplomatic impasse and the continued occupation, no Arab state has withdrawn its support for the initiative. Muasher said that the authors of the League's resolution gave serious attention to the security needs of Israel, "not only vis-a-vis the Palestinians, but also vis-a-vis all the states in the region, including Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia." He said that the Israelis are invited to express their security concerns in talks with the Arab states.

Had Rice found a free moment to drop in on Madrid, she would have heard that were it not for the nearly delusional insistence of Bush to topple President Assad's regime, it would be possible to extract Syria from the "axis of evil." The Syrian legal expert Riad Daoudi said, at the conference, that if the United States and Israel would honor Syria with the title "a party to the conflict," it would be possible to talk about everything - including his country's links with parties who do not accept the League's resolution.

On her way here, Rice said that as an academic, she had read a great deal about past efforts to bring about progress on the Palestinian issue. "If you don't lay the groundwork very well," Dr. Rice said, "then it's not going to succeed." As she was about to depart for a meeting with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the visiting secretary of state insisted on the need to stick by the road map, and explained to reporters that preceding the map proposal, thorough preparatory work was carried out. So, what came of it? It will soon be four years since this multi-stage plan was introduced. The last stage - a permanent solution with the Palestinians and a peace agreement with Syria and Lebanon - was supposed to be signed no later than the end of 2005. For now, the conflict is only getting worse.

Before Israel and the Palestinians are two options. One, to go down the path of the Madrid process of Bush, Sr., who recognized that following the victory in the first Gulf War, force should be followed by a political settlement. The other, to follow Bush, Jr., who believes, after the failure of the second Gulf War, that what follows force must be more force. If they choose the first option, the draft - a variation of the Arab League's resolution and the Clinton proposals - is waiting on the shelf. If they opt for the second path, we will all end up like the rats in the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

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Sunday Reading: Peace, Not Apartheid

Cross posted at Candide's Notebooks.

UPDATE: Link to Dennis Ross' response to the accusations of plagiarism added at the bottom of the post.

In spite of its provocative title, Jimmy Carter's latest work, Peace, Not Apartheid, is more memoir than polemic, more analysis than argument, and more reasoned than passionate. After thee decades of involvement with the Isreali-Palestinian peace process, Carter has earned the right to speak on the state of the Holy Land in the new century, the state of the peace process, and the promises that have not been kept.

Still, the title is provocative, and has generated outrage on the part of many pro-Isreali commentators. Micheal Kinsley, for example, wrote:

Comes now former president Jimmy Carter with a new best-selling book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." It's not clear what he means by using the loaded word "apartheid," since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa.

Carter has defended the title, saying he wouldn't change it. But Kinsley is not entirely correct in saying that Carter doesn't explain it. I think Carter explains that he means a system of forced separation:

Utilizing their political and military dominance, they are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, ecapsulation, and apartheid on the occupied territories. The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa--not racism, but acquisition of land. (emphasis mine) (p 189)

Still, the reviews have been harsh, accusing Carter of anti-semitism, plagiarism, and factual errors. Meanwhile, fellow Democrats, who rather rather shred one of their party's icons than anger the Israel lobby in Washington, fall all over one another to condemn him.

I've long respected Carter. It's easy to respect, even if you don't agree with his politics, his post-presidency. It's become almost cliche to say he was a better ex-president than he was a president. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, besides earning him a Nobel Prize, have served as an example of what a life of service is all about. Additionally, there are his books... novels, memoirs, children's books, political science...he's been prolific, and brave enough to tackle whatever subject interests him at the moment. His writing, like his post-presidential life, has defied the predictable channels that others may have set out for him. But I admire him also for his honest and earnest Christianity. His faith informs his life, shapes it; he is an evangelical Christian who proselytizes not through shaming others or cajoling but through speaking of his own experience in faith, in a process that becomes not "proselytizing" at all but, in that overworked and often misused word, "witnessing". I have always been moved by his discussions in Living Faith of teaching Sunday school at his church. I've always thought that the idea of a former president of the United States and world leader taking time to teach Sunday school was an incredible testimony to the man's humility and commitment to others.

I've always respected him politically also for his courage and his refusal to follow the political debates of the day. While many other former leaders continue to engage in the dogfight of Washington, Carter never has engaged in fiercest rhetoric of partisanship. While people like Bob Dole are trotted out by the right from time to time to level attacks on Democrats on national television, you never see that from Carter. Carter has certainly given his opinion on the war, or the Middle East, from time to time, but he doesn't repeat the talking points of the Democratic Party just to score cheap political points. He doesn't lash out at his enemies, or get drawn into debates with the lap dogs of the right who would nip away at the ankles of his legacy.

This book is exactly what you would expect from Carter. It's a reasoned, balanced discussion, brutally honest at times, but always fair. It has the additional benefits of being lucid, direct, and concise. (Without appendices, it is only 216 pages.)

Carter begins the book with an overview of the difficulty of the current situation. With typical optimism, Carter explains why he thinks the problems in the Middle East can be resolved:

In the times of greatest discouragement, ultimate hope has rested on the fact that, overwhelmingly, the people in the region--even those Syrians Isrealis, Lebanese, and Palestinians who are most distrusted by their adversaries--want the peace efforts to succeed. The rhetoric and demands from all sides may be harsh, but there are obvious areas of agreement that can provide a basis for progress. Private discussions with Arab leaders are much more promising than their public statements would lead one to believe, and in Israel there is a strong and persistent constituency for moderation that is too little heard or appreciated in neighboring states or in America.

Throughout the book, Carter repeats this theme in various way, and illustrates it through various conversations he has had with Arab and Isreali leaders. He wants his readers to believe that peace in the Middle East is possible, and even likely.

Carter then leads readers through a history of the peace negotiations as seen through his eyes over the past 40 years. He discusses Camp David, Oslo, the presidencies of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Carter's own involvement in the Palestinian elections, Israel's incursions into Lebanon, the election of Arafat, and finally a discussion of the security wall in Palestine and its effects on the Palestinian people.

Throughout the book, Carter emphasizes the two, dual conditions for peace between Israel and Palestine. The first is the recognition of Israel's right to exist within the borders of 1967, and Israel's withdrawal to the borders established by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Carter again and again shows that his discussions with both Isrealis and Arabs indicates that both sides recognize, at least intellectually, the need for both of these conditions to be met. He also seems to indicate that elements on both sides are prepared to meet these conditions in order to achieve the goal of long-term peace in the region.

Two important obstacles currently prevent serious discussions on this issue. The first is the "security wall" that currently exists and undergoes continuing construction on Palestinian land.

The future prospects for the West Bank are even more dismal. Especially troubling is the huge dividing wall in populated areas and an impassable fence in rural areas. The status of this barrier is a key to future peace in the Middle East. The original idea of a physical obstruction was prmomoted by Isreali moderates as a means of preventing intrusive attacks after the withdrawal of Israel's occupation forces. The first barrier, surrounding Gaza, proved that this was a valid premise, in that there was a substantial decrease in cross-border raids. The plan was to continue constructions of the barricade along the border between Israel and the West Bank.

Instead, the governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert have built the fence and wall entirely within Palestinian territory, intruding deeply into the West Bank to encompass Israeli settlement blocs and large areas of Palestinian land...(it) cuts directly through Palestinian villages, divides families from their gardens and farmland, and includes 375,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side of the wall, 175,000 of whom are outside Jerusalem. One example is that the wandering wall almost completely surrounds the Palestinian city of Qalqiliya with its 45,000 inhabitants, with most of the citizens' land and about one-third of their water supply confiscated by the Israelis. Almost the same encirclement has occured around 170,000 citizens of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.

First a wide swath must be bulldozed through communities before the wall can be built. In addition to the concrete and electrified fencing materials used in the construction, the barrier includes two-meter deep trenches, roads for patrol vehicles, electronic ground and fence sensors, thermal imaging and video cameras, sniper toweres, and razor wire--all on Palestinian land. The area betweent eh segregation barrier and the israelis border has been designated a closed miltary region for an indefinite period of time. Israeli directives state that every Palestinian over the age of twelve living in the closed area has to obtain a "permanent resident permit" from the civil administration to enable them to continue to live within their homes. They are considered to be aliens, without the rights of Israeli citizens...

President Goerge W Bush said, "I think the wall is a problem. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and the Israelis with a wall snaking through the West Bank." Since 1945, the International Court of Justice has functioned esentially as the judicial arm of the United Nations system, and in July 2004 the court determined that the Israeli govenrment's construction of the segregation wall in the occupied West Bank was illegal. (pp. 192-193)

While Carter is critical of the wall and the way it imprisons the Palestinian people, he saves his harshest words for the Bush administration, although he does not directly criticize Bush by name. Instead, he deplores the lack of US involvement in the peace process over the last six years, and the absence of the US as an impartial arbiter between the two sides. The following excerpt shows the manner in which Carter criticizing US policy (again, without naming specific leaders):

A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on conroversial issues is a privelege to be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and withheld from those who reject U. S. demands. Direct engagement with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and government leaders in Damascus will be necessary if negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and other key leadrs risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran.

In Carter's analysis the time is ripe for renewed peace efforts. He describes the mood of the Palestinian people, including prominent prisoners whose opinions are highly valued, who have agreed in principle to a recognition of Israel and a commitment to peace within 1967 borders. Unfortunately, Israeli politics currently make current negotiations unlikely, as does the lack of leadership from the United States.

Carter concludes with this essentially irrefutable statement:

The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honr its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Isarael's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is Squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Isreali confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

Peace, Not Apartheid is a concise readable analysis of the current situation and recent history. But it also serves to remind us of the presence of one of our great statesmen. While Bush receives counsel from men like Kissinger and Cheney, Carter works for peace outside of the official Washington channels. It is unfortunate that at the end of a brilliant career of conflict resolution and leadership towards peace, that this honest and humble man be accused of anti-semitism. Nothing could be more pro-Israel than working towards lasting peace in the region, and only a respect for international law and basic standards of human rights will create that peace. Carter and his book deserve better than the response it has received.


Links to various views on Carter's book:

Dennis Ross on Carter's "plagiarism"

Carter Library

Kinsley in the WaPo

Last week's NYTimes review, much less sympathetic than mine.

Carter on the defensive

The Forward on Carter's use of the word "apartheid" and the Democrats, just before the last election, paying more deference to the Isreali lobby than to their party's icon.

Finally, Pierre Tristam says, "You mean it's not apartheid?"

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Things no better in Iraq; Tristam on Lebanon

Firing Rummy ain't the answer.

Read this from Juan Cole:

How bad the situation is in Iraq is suggested by this email I just got from a professional who used to be in Iraq but now is in a nearby country:


' It is desperate in Iraq, worse then ever and there is no end in sight. I had lunch with [a former high ranking medical educator in Iraq] two days ago. [He]noted that Iraq no longer has neuro-surgeons, no cardiac surgeons, few pediatric doctors - they are all gone, killed or fled to neighboring countries like him. He was given seven days to get out or be killed. He is one of the lucky ones. He and his family have an opportunity for a new life in the US. But what about all the others. Where are they to go?

Another friend, a Sunni sheikh of the Shammar tribe noted to me that thousands of former officers are prepared to assault the G[reen] Z[one]. It is no longer a matter of can they do it, they are only mulling over the timing. The breach of the Green Zone security the other day was a test of their ability to get in, and not a real attempt at a coup, though it is reported as such. Every Iraqi I talk to says unambiguously that the resistance attached to the former regime would take out the Shiite militias with barely a fight, but that the resistance will not commit wholesale revenge against the Shiite population. They just want to get rid of the "carpet baggers" from Iran. '

Sure sounds like Civil War to me.

Wanted to add also that as Lebanon explodes the best place to read commentary on that situation is Candide's Notebooks. I think most of my readers have probably migrated here from that site, but just in case those of you reading are unfamiliar with Pierre's site, it is really the best clearinghouse of Lebanon information on the web.

Things in the Middle East seem to be going from bad to worse.

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NYReview take on Israel/Hezbollah

The New York Review of Books arrived in my mailbox yesterday and there was a piece on the Israel/Lebanon conflict. In typical NYReview journalistic style, it is part summary of the conflict, part analysis, and Robert Malley approaches the conflict from all angles, including Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, and so on. His take on the US approach is worth mention here:

As for the attitude of the US administration, it has been utterly incomprehensible. Banking on an implausibly swift Israeli victory, the US stood virtually alone against a cease fire even as the number of civilian victims grew and even as the Lebanese government is ostensibly wished to support pleaded in vain for the violence to halt. Thta the US made protestations of sympathy for the Lebanese people while giving concrete support for Israel's military operations only compounded popular fury. All this for a cause--the battle for "freedom"--that was further discredited on every day of further bloodshed and whose purported beneficiaries--the Arab people--want nothing to do with. America's standing in the region may well recover, but it is incresingly difficult to see how or when.

I am struck by how the American miscalculation is so similar to Iraq... banking on a swift victory... When will these guys learn?

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