Community Voices

It’s one the thing to have the right premises and arrive at the wrong conclusion, but it’s another when both the premises and the conclusion are wrong.  Historian Efraim Karsh’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “The Palestinians, Alone,” is a prime example of the latter.  

Karsh argues that because Arabs have apparently stopped caring about the Palestinian cause, Palestinians are more likely to realize that they are alone in the struggle and make peace with Israel.  Really?  

Let’s start with the premise.  Karsh’s main piece of evidence for Arab indifference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a recent survey conducted by the Al-Arabiyya television network that found 71% of Arabs are uninterested in the peace process.  But professing a lack of interest in a diplomatic solution is not the same thing as failing to care about the conflict altogether.  It’s entirely possible -- and the more likely scenario, in my opinion -- that many Arabs have lost interest in negotiations but still care deeply about the plight of the Palestinians.  

In fact, James Zogby of the Arab American Institute affirms that this is the case.  In a blog appearing in The Huffington Post, he argues that Arab public opinion “remains riveted” on the Palestinian cause.  Indeed, polling for Zogby’s upcoming book finds that “the issue of Palestine and the rights of the Palestinians are priority concerns for Arabs from Morocco to the Arab Gulf States.”  

So why the apparent apathy to diplomacy?  The very article that Karsh links to in order to cite the Al-Arabiyya statistic explains that Arabs are “sick of waiting” and “too tired” of the peace process, currently stalled at the so-called proximity talks stage, because it has failed to produce results for the Palestinians.  In other words, Arabs aren’t interested in negotiations because they're pessimistic about their effectiveness.  This is hardly grounds for thinking they don’t care about the conflict at all.

From his flawed interpretation of the poll, Karsh then moves on to Arab regimes’ mistreatment of the Palestinians. He goes through the historical record, selecting cases -- like Jordan's slaughtering of Palestinians in the Black September of 1970 and Kuwait’s expulsion of Palestinians after the first Gulf War -- in which Arab states have added to the Palestinians’ misery.  But governments acting in their self-interest, at the expense of human rights, is hardly a revelation.  And Karsh should know that Arab regimes, autocratic as they are, do not represent their people’s desires.

Karsh’s conclusion from the misread poll and selective reading of history is that isolation will cause Palestinians to become more amenable to peace.  He ends his piece with this prediction:

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

There are so many assumptions in this statement, it’s hard to know where to start.  Leaving aside the most glaring one that Palestinians are solely to blame for the lack of peace, let’s focus on the assumption that they'll be more inclined to negotiate if they don't have allies.  Karsh implies that isolation will weaken the Palestinians’ position, convincing them to accept Israel and begin negotiations again.  But he provides no evidence to think that this will happen.  And, in reality, it's more probable that the opposite will happen -- that a lack of international, and especially Arab, support will make reaching a peace agreement much less likely.  Without Arab mediation, it would be enormously difficult to reconcile Fatah's and Hamas's differences, leaving the Palestinians divided.  As the past few years of internecine conflict has shown, the Palestinians aren't in any position to negotiate with Israel.

Further, the example of Hamas shows what happens to a group that is isolated.  By all accounts, the siege on Gaza -- which isolated Gazans not just from other Palestinians and Arabs but from the entire world -- has strengthened Hamas and made Gazans more vindictive of Israel.  Isolation tends to radicalize, not moderate, again making peace more difficult.

With evidence that is woefully misinterpreted and an unsupported conclusion, it makes you wonder how Karsh's piece made it past the NY Times' editorial desk.

WASHINGTON – Nearly eight years after he denounced what he called a “dumb war” in Iraq and nearly two years after he won the White House promising to end it, President Obama on Monday plans to mark the formal end of the combat mission there.

While most public attention these past months has focused on Mr. Obama’s expansive and hotly disputed domestic agenda, the military has quietly been making progress toward the goal that first animated his campaign for the presidency: pulling out of Iraq.

By the end of this month, in accordance with the strategy Mr. Obama put in place after taking office, the American force in Iraq will have shrunk from 144,000 to just 50,000 troops. The remaining “advise and assist” brigades will officially focus on supporting and training Iraqi security forces, protecting American personnel and facilities and mounting counterterrorism operations. Those 50,000 troops are due to leave by the end of 2011.

“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Mr. Obama says in remarks prepared for delivery Monday to the Disabled American Veterans in Atlanta. “Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31, 2010, America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing – as promised, on schedule.”

Mr. Obama’s planned appearance before the veterans group will be the first of several similar events in coming weeks to draw attention to the transition in Iraq. While he has gone months without mentioning the war much in public as he focused on tightening regulation of the financial industry and stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the president is now trying to remind Americans of one of his most important, if largely unheralded decisions.

The high-level public focus on Iraq appears aimed at least in part at blunting some of the growing frustration, particularly among his liberal base, over the struggling war in Afghanistan. The president essentially is arguing to skeptics in the public and in Congress that he is bringing at least one war to a conclusion and can do so with another eventually as well.

A fact sheet prepared by the White House, for instance, pointedly notes that even with his troop buildup in Afghanistan, the drawdown in Iraq means that the total number of uniformed Americans in the two countries will have dropped from 177,000 when he took office to about 146,000 by the end of August.

But with the Afghan conflict now the longest-running war in American history and casualties rising in July to their highest level since it began nearly nine years ago, it may be hard for Mr. Obama to offset the growing anxiety about one war by claiming success in another. In the House, 102 Democrats voted last week against a $59 billion spending bill to pay for the two wars, 70 more than voted against a similar measure last year.

The replacement of the commanding general in Afghanistan and the publication byWikileaks of tens of thousands of secret U.S. military reports have focused attention on the struggles in turning around the war. The number of troops in Afghanistan has tripled since Mr. Obama took office but he has ordered that some of them begin pulling out by July 2011.

The tension over that deadline was evident on a talk show on Sunday, when SpeakerNancy Pelosi and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates outlined starkly different ideas of what they hope or anticipate will happen next summer. Just last month, Vice PresidentJoseph R. Biden Jr. played down the July 2011 start of a withdrawal, saying it could mean pulling out “as few as a couple thousand troops.”

Ms. Pelosi made clear she found that unsatisfactory. “I hope it is more than that,” she said on “This Week” on ABC. “I know it’s not going to be turn out the lights and let’s all go home on one day. But I do think the American people expect it to be somewhere between that and a few thousand troops.”

But Mr. Gates, appearing on the same program, said he hopes to limit any troop pullout at first. “My personal opinion is that drawdowns early on will be of fairly limited numbers,” he said.

With Iraq, Mr. Obama has stuck to his withdrawal schedule despite changing conditions on the ground. He promised during the campaign to pull out combat forces within 16 months. But after taking office he extended that to 19 months to give the Iraqis enough time to hold a new election, assemble a fresh government and get through a transition with the security of a robust American force.

Instead, the election that was supposed to be held in December did not take place until March and the vote was so close that Iraqi political leaders are still deadlocked over forming a new government nearly five months later and no resolution is in sight. There are also lingering problems, like a crippled electrical infrastructure that leaves many Iraqis often without power.

Some critics have said Mr. Obama ought to slow down the drawdown to make sure insurgents cannot take advantage of the current political confusion.

But White House officials said they believe it is safe to stick to the original timetable because the caretaker government has proved effective at maintaining security despite the political stalemate. Moreover, they note that the 50,000 American troops that will remain constitute a powerful force in their own right, capable of handling various contingencies.

In excerpts of his Georgia speech released by the White House, Mr. Obama hails the improved security in Iraq, without mentioning that he opposed the troop buildup ordered in 2007 by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, that along with a strategy change is credited by many with turning the war around. Mr. Obama has now assigned the leader of that surge, Gen. David H. Petraeus, to take command of the troop buildup in Afghanistan.

“Today, even as terrorists try to derail Iraq’s progress, because of the sacrifices of our troops and their Iraqi partners, violence in Iraq continues to be near the lowest it’s been in years,” Mr. Obama says in the prepared remarks. But he cautions that the fighting is not over: “There are still those with bombs and bullets who will try to stop Iraq’s progress. The hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq.”

Mr. Obama plans to use the speech to straddle the longstanding domestic divide over the Iraq war by embracing the accomplishments of American troops. “Our nation has had vigorous debates about the Iraq war,” he says. “There are patriots who supported going to war, and patriots who opposed it. But there has never been any daylight between us when it comes to supporting the more than 1 million Americans in uniform who have served in Iraq – far more than any conflict since Vietnam.” nytimes.com

If you’ve been following the debate over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, you most likely will have heard a thing or two about Saudi Arabia’s intolerance of non-Muslims.  

Opponents of the plan have been arguing that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to build the mosque because Saudi Arabia does not allow the construction of non-Muslim religious sites.  For example, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, recently came out against the mosque, to be called Cordoba House, on these exact grounds.  A statement published on his website on July 21 begins “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”  Gingrich then proceeds to question the sincerity behind the name of the mosque and its sources of funding, but his central point is that Muslims are practicing double standards.  Midway through the statement, he returns again to Saudi Arabia and points out indignantly that “no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca.”

Gingrich and his conservative Christian ilk are not alone in demanding that the Saudis reciprocate religious tolerance before the mosque is given a green light.  At protests organized last month in NYC against the proposed mosque, signs, presumably held by Jews, could be spotted that stated “You can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a synagogue in Mecca.”  Another protester held a placard that stated “Build this Mosque… Right After a Cathedral in Riyadh is Complete.”  And, in the comments section of newspaper articles discussing the mosque controversy, at least one commentator can be counted on to bring up the Saudi ban.  For instance, in a July 20th article in the New York Times, a commentator asks rhetorically “How many churches are there in Mecca, how many in Madina, how many in the whole of Saudi Arabia?”  Though not the most popular, the comment was recommended by 67 people.

Thus, it seems fair to say that those opposing the mosque find the lack of reciprocity on the part of Muslims, represented by Saudi Arabia in their eyes, a valid argument.

Fortunately, though, most Americans understand that first amendment rights are just that – rights, not bargaining tokens.  The Manhattan Community Board approved plans to build the mosque in a 29-1 vote two months ago.  And, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the mosque in the face of mounting criticism, calling opposition to it "un-American" and "against what the nation stands for."

But beyond the un-Americaness of qualifying freedom of religion, the analogy of mosques in New York to churches in Saudi Arabia is wrong on two other grounds that opponents of the mosque have missed.  

First of all, the call for reciprocity might make sense if the people who want to build the mosque and pray there are Saudi government officials.  After all, it is the Saudi government – not ordinary Muslims – whose intolerance of other religions, not to mention of Shia Islam, is the reason there isn’t “a cathedral in Riyadh.”  Although the Cordoba Initiative, the organization that has raised $100 million to build the mosque, has not revealed its sources of funding, there is no doubt that the Muslims who will pray at Cordoba House are Americans, including African-Americans, and immigrants from around the world who have made New York their home.  In fact, only a tiny sliver of them are likely to be from Saudi Arabia, as Saudis are a minority among Arabs, who are in turn a minority among Muslims.  It is wrong – and unfair – to hold Muslims in NYC responsible for the policies of a country that, beyond visiting once to make pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (one of the pillars of Islam), they probably have nothing to do with.

Second, there is a verse in the Qur’an, which Muslims take to be the word of God, that bars non-Muslims from entering Mecca (Ch. 9, Verse 28).  Over time, scholars have interpreted the verse to include Medina as well. Presumably, the purpose of the ban is to preserve the sanctity of, as well as Muslim control over, the two holy cities.  Thus, NYC is not the equivalent of Mecca because it is not sacred ground.  The divine injunction against non-Muslims entering the two holy cities does not, of course, excuse Saudi Arabia's persecution of religious minorities and failure to allow non-Muslims to build places of worship elsewhere in the kingdom.  But it does explain why there isn’t “a synagogue in Mecca.”  Before someone points out that this exclusivity is a sign of Islam’s intolerance, let’s keep in mind that the concept of preserving certain land for certain people exists in other religions as well.  The most obvious example of promised land is Israel, not Mecca. 

The failure of Americans to take these two points into account is indicative of a tendency to treat Muslims as a monolith and a wider ignorance of Islam.  Hopefully, the first amendment will be sufficient to deter opponents from taking legal action against the Cordoba Initiative and will allow the mosque to be built.  Afterwards, Cordoba House’s congregation should take it upon themselves educate New Yorkers – and Americans in general – about Islam and show them the diversity of the Muslim-American community.

Nasr Abu Zayd, the liberal Egyptian scholar whose marriage was annulled against his (and his wife’s) wishes 15 years ago, passed away last week.  Abu Zayd’s “crime” had been calling for an interpretation of the Qu’ran in its historical and cultural context.  This outraged intolerant Islamists, who brought a lawsuit against him on the grounds that he is an apostate and therefore cannot remain married to a Muslim woman.  The court agreed, causing Abu Zayd to flee to Europe.  The rest is, sadly, history.

One of the most insightful articles on Abu Zayd’s death is by Brian Whitaker of the Guardian.  In the aptly titled commentary “Divorcing Fundamentalism,” Whitaker eulogizes Abu Zayd by drawing on some of his conversations with the scholar a few years ago about dealing with Islamists.  Abu Zayd’s remarks are still very timely and present an approach that people in the West and moderate Muslims can use to challenge manifestations of Islamism that they abhor, including the niqab and terrorism.  About Abu Zayd, Whitaker writes: