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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 2:42:58 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

How Arafat Fits Into the Arab World By LISA ANDERSON The New York Times 5/10/02 s the prospect of an international conference on the Arab-Israeli dispute becomes increasingly likely, both the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon face coming to terms with a Palestinian leader they can neither abide nor avoid. What is it about Yasir Arafat that makes him so troubling to the United States and Israel? In fact, the problem is not the man himself, as Mr. Sharon and President Bush seem to think, but the political position of the Palestinians in the Arab world today. Despite their recent calls for democratic institutions for the Palestinians, American officials' disquiet about Mr. Arafat does not seem to be caused by concern about the corrupt and authoritarian regime he installed in the Palestinian Authority. After all, Mr. Arafat merely mimics the governments of many of America's closest allies in the Middle East. Is Mr. Arafat disingenuous, as many argue, saying different things in different languages, with reasonable and peace-loving English rhetoric giving way to an intolerant and hate-filled vocabulary in Arabic? This seems unlikely. He knows perfectly well that both his supporters and his opponents can translate. Moreover, his recent, widely quoted outburst in English — calling the perpetrators of the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem terrorists, Nazis and racists — suggests that he feels no compunction about expressing himself candidly. Mr. Arafat's problem — and that of all who contend with him — is that he is expected to be a statesman without a state — an inevitably two-sided position. Sometimes he takes on the demeanor of his counterparts among the Arab rulers, deferential to the international norms and interests that contribute to keeping him in power, and sometimes he adopts the role of an opposition, railing against the same international norms and interests that also deprive him of the status the rulers enjoy. He has negotiated for his people, but he is also associated with militant protest that grasps for power without negotiation. This two-sidedness reflects the nature of politics in the Arab world, where there there are two powerful forces: the ruling circles on the inside and the economic and political arrangements at the margin. Over five decades of state building, the rulers of the Arab world hijacked nationalist aspirations and suppressed independent economic activities and politics. Helped by exceptional external revenues — foreign aid, oil income, loans — they built extensive and elaborate states while neglecting domestic concerns like education and social welfare. Now these states seem muscle-bound, paralyzed by their own overreaching and by their centralized organization. Outside their influence, the ill-educated and underemployed young people produced by decades of their negligent social policy constitute the backbone of informal economies that sustain the millions of officially unemployed. From the smugglers at the borders and the street vendors in the cities to the migrants looking for a future in London, Marseille, Hamburg and Kabul, millions of young people in the Arab world have embraced globalization with an enthusiasm — or desperation — that far outstripped the commitment of their governments. And this group also provides the recruiting ground for political groups operating outside governmental control and across borders — every militia, guerrilla group and armed salvation front from Lebanon to Algeria, Palestine to Sudan. In the meantime, the rulers draw on increasingly narrow pools of talent — family, military insiders, cronies — to manage governments with little public orientation. They rule increasingly restive populations mostly born after the rulers came to power. Since the moment of his election as the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Arafat has given every indication of wanting to join the ranks of the Arab rulers. He shows no aspirations to be an institutional innovator. For better or worse, he seems to have taken the negligent despotism of his colleagues among the Arab regimes as his model. But the other Arab rulers have states to rule. In this crucial respect, Mr. Arafat (like all potential Palestinian leaders) has less in common with the Arab rulers whom he wants to emulate than with the disenfranchised who make their living outside the established states, sustained by the networks of informal economies that respect no national boundaries. In his frustration with an international system that has failed to deliver what it promised, Mr. Arafat represents the forsaken in the Arab world. Without a stake in the system, neither he nor the region's other outsiders have enough to lose to prefer negotiation over resistance. If the Bush administration and the Sharon government succeed in bypassing Mr. Arafat, they will find nothing but more Arafats behind him, for the problem is not the person but the position. ______________________________________ Lisa Anderson is dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. nytimes.com

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 5:30:59 AM
From: FaultLine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It's a must-read--one of the strongest pieces I've come across since September 11. It's 2:30 AM and I've just finished reading "Terror, Islam, and Democracy"... There is no question that every participant on FADG should read this paper. "The Islamists see themselves as bold warriors against modernity and the West, but in fact it is they who have imported and then dressed up in Islamic-sounding verbiage some of the most dubious ideas that ever came out of the modern West, ideas which now—after much death and suffering—the West itself has generally rejected." --fl@warmedoverleninism.com

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 6:10:24 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

tb@jealous.com Me too. frank@toldyaso.com

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 6:51:41 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

"Terror, Islam, and Democracy, I have felt for a long time that the Muslim "Terrorist" movement was based on Marxism. This analysis, which I accept as factual based on Tekboy's putting his brand name on it, proves that. I have taken the liberty of snipping out some slices from the article and stringing them together here in order to "Highlight" this. >>>"Qutb"s brand of Islamism was formed by his knowledge of both the Marxist and fascist critiques of modern capitalism and representative democracy. His ideal society was a classless one where the "selfish individual" of liberal democracies would be banished and the "exploitation of man by man" would be abolished... They spread their revolutionary Islamist ideas,including the organizational and ideological tools borrowed from European totalitarianism... The Leninist characteristics of his rule, his policy of terror, his revolutionary tribunals and militias, his administrative purges, his cultural revolution... Zawahiri, who would become al-Qaeda's top operational planner,is reported to have said publicly that Osama is "the new Che Guevara"....Thus he employs the very term that Lenin had borrowed from "la Terreur" of the French Revolution. The line from the guillotine and the Cheka to the suicide bomber is clear.... We have also lost the keys to our own culture, otherwise, how could a degenerate Leninism aspire today to pass itself off as the true expression of a great monotheistic religion?... The Islamists see themselves as bold warriors against modernity and the West, but in fact it is they who have imported and then dressed up in Islamic-sounding verbiage some of the most dubious ideas that ever came out of the modern West, ideas which now, after much death and suffering, the West itself has generally rejected.<<< lindybill@justwhenyouthoughtweweresafefromtheleft.com

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 9:05:57 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

Re: "Terror, Islam, and Democracy" This excellent article raises so many good points it's hard to single out any one as being the most important. This is absolutely must reading, and I thank you for pointing it out. I don't recall perusing the Journal of Democracy site before either and have bookmarked that one as well, thanks again ! PS - search google for the authors, many other links turn up, I'm just starting to look at a few of them.

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/10/2002 12:19:37 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Yes, it's an excellent article. It is right in line with everything Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have been saying, but even more persuasive, coming from Iranian historians.

To: tekboy who wrote (29153)	5/11/2002 10:42:11 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

"Terror, Islam, and Democracy," Read it. Have a few summary comments with more detail if we decide to discuss it further. It's one of the better essays we've collectively read. My favorite was in the Rose and Hogue edited book, by the assistant professor of religion at Princeton on Islam. But this one is in the competition. It's large in scope, well written, seems to have control of the argument (some questions in a moment), and raises very significant questions. I thought it was strongest on Iran, not surprisingly because, according to the blurb, the two sisters are Iranians and are working on a "study" of the Iranian revolution. And, because one of the clear agendas driving the arguments, was to delegitimize Khomeini as a Muslim theologian. Their rendering is, of course, that he poisoned Islam with some of the more violent rhetoric from the West. I also thought it was strong when they began the task of establishing links between Islamists. I don't know how much of this is new but it worked in this argument. As a result of these strengths, if I were putting together an edited volume with some of the materials we've been reading, I would either frame it as one of the table setting essays in the first section, the essays which laid out larger arguments but needed the documentation of more detailed pieces later; or I would have considered it a niche essay on the Iranian revolution. However, I thought it needed work on several fronts: 1. Quite obviously, one other agenda they have is to link rhetoric from what they call Marxism to the language of the Islamists. I find that intriguing but the argument needs a good bit of work. First, the language of class struggle is not limiited to Marxism; second, Marxism (not the theories of Karl Marx) is a very broad category, some members of which wrote about the kind of violence they deplore, some did not, so that needs to be made clearer; third, a good bit of purity of violence language is no respector of political position (left or right) just of opposition to the status quo among some actors; finally, so far as I know, Marx never argued for this kind of violence, a purity via violence. 2. If this essay is to be taken as part of a genre of work which relates the movement of ideas to social movements, it needs to fill in some rather obvious blank spots. The most glaring is what social conditions make a population ready to hear these ideas and act on them. Not an easy task and certainly not one that can be done in this short an essay but they needed to acknowledge the absence. 3. I particularly enjoyed the connections made between folk. But that's just the beginning of working those out. The argument is weak as it stands but extremely suggestive. Finally, much of this was familiar, perhaps to all of us on the thread. Thanks to Nadine's mention of "Islamists", I started reading this kind of stuff last fall. She sent me to Daniel Pipes and company. I found them both too tendentious and too ideological but they lead me to Judith Butler's book, The Ninety Nine Names of God. Which I highly recommend as an introduction to this. She's a very professional journalist, was the Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times for a period, writes well, and has no policy axe to grind, at least that I could spot. Just found an important story and wanted to get it told right. Thanks, again, to tek for posting the article. And for improving my education.