I just read some posts on this thread describing an incident so horrible, so painfully tragic, that although I came here to confess that I missed all the f's in the "of's," I don't feel like talking about it now.
I'll post this. It isn't cheering. It's from the Financial Times. I posted another article from the FT that is also alarming on the subject of the long term, on FADG. The last line in this one is "The sad thing is that America has fallen into the trap set by Bin Laden."
I confess to being very depressed.
search.ft.com
Lunch with the FT: Dr Dalil Boubakeur
By Jo Johnson
FT.com site; Mar 28, 2003
The heat in the dark recesses of the hammam, the communal bathhouse of the Paris mosque, was infernal. Sweat pools sagged in giant welts on the ceiling. A radio belonging to the man selling sugary tea and cakes piped in the news from the front, audible over the muted thuds and low groans of men being pummelled, stretched and twisted into pretzels by moustachioed masseurs. "American tanks have advanced to 150km of the Iraqi capital, which has suffered a second night of massive bombardment," a sombre voice intoned.
Frequented and financed largely by the Algerian community, the 1920s mosque, whose minaret and crenellated walls tower over the neighbourhood, bustled with activity. While the faithful attended evening prayers, tables in the mosque's trendy café were occupied by non-Muslim Parisians showing solidarity with a community that is living and breathing the war in Iraq.
Dr Dalil Boubakeur, the 62-year-old rector of the mosque, is perspiring gently when I return to the Latin Quarter on Monday afternoon. He is in great demand. Next month, elections in most of the recognised mosques across France will create a new Muslim assembly, with an appointed governing council which the centre-right government has asked him to chair. The main aim of the council is to stem the spread of what Nicholas Sarkozy, the highly visible interior minister, terms the "Islam of cellars and garages". Boubakeur, who once drew fire from young Arabs for describing the Islam of the banlieues as a religion of "hotheads", will become spokesman for the 4m-5m people who form Europe's largest Islamic population. Through him, the French state will for the first time have a formal channel through which to deal with the country's Muslims - nearly 10 per cent of the population - at a time of rising communal tensions.
Armed with a tray of Lebanese pastries - baklava, maamoul mixed with dates, pistachios, walnuts - I wait as he whistles through the line of suppliants filling his waiting room, before being ushered into the office occupied for a quarter of a century by his father, a theologian who produced an elegant translation of the Koran.
Born in Algeria and educated in Algiers, Paris and Cairo, Boubakeur was one of France's leading doctors before taking over the running of France's main mosque. Representative of a moderate form of Islam open to dialogue with other faiths, he has been courted by successive French interior ministers since the early 1990s and boasts an excellent relationship with President Jacques Chirac. The lapel of his jacket, which barely reaches across his round form, illustrates the warmth of the official reception: the red tag of the Legion of Honour sits next to the button denoting membership of the Order of Merit, recently pressed on him by Chirac at a ceremony at the Elysée Palace.
Dr Boubakeur's anti-war views have hardened over the last 48 hours. Over tea served from a silver jug into gold-laced glasses, Boubakeur, clutching what looks like an arameesh, a sickly sweet bolus of pine nuts and syrup, explains that the violence of the bombing in Baghdad has altered the nature of the war and all his feelings about it. What the world is witnessing is nothing less than a crime against humanity, he says. Like Saddam Hussein, he uses the analogy of the Mogul sacking of the Mesopotamian city in 1258. "I am overwhelmed by the emotion, disillusionment and loathing that the behaviour of the American armed forces is generating. How can the American people betray their own values with such cold calculation? My calls for moderation have no chance of being heard now that we have opened this Pandora's Box. It is pointless to call for calm. Such violence is just asking for a violent response. Everyone who called on them to show restraint has been left speechless by this brutal and inhumane side of America."
"Guten Appetit!" he says in a disarming attempt at cheeriness as he handles a syrup-soaked sponge before continuing his chilling inventory of the fall-out from the first week of bombing. America has already deployed an equivalent force in Baghdad to that of an atomic bomb or the carpet-bombing of Dresden. "Tension is mounting. There is a growing hysteria in the Muslim world at the number of people who are being killed and who risk being killed in the bombing. There can be no doubt that the madness of this bombing will be met with another kind of madness as people seek to reverse the humiliation of a city and people that are at the heart of Arab civilisation. Far from knocking out Islamic extremists, the US is stirring up new bitterness and creating a taste for vengeance."
The French Muslim community shared the fury of others around the world at the "injustice of such violent strikes against a people laid low by 10 years of sanctions and against an army which had no means of equipping itself to face an overtrained and overarmed American force".
Boubakeur is under no doubt that the Bush administration will eventually defeat Saddam Hussein, but rejects the idea that it will win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people. "Look at the way the population tried to hunt the pilots shot down by the river. That is hardly the welcome reserved for liberators, the triumphal parade with garlands and flowers Bush promised his forces. Perhaps there is an anti-Saddam feeling, but that is dominated by a strong nationalist sentiment. There are two emotions playing here and it seems that the Americans have overestimated the extent of the Iraqi people's resentment against Saddam Hussein and underestimated the extent to which Iraq has finally become a nation." Boubakeur says it should be left to the Iraqi people to force Saddam Hussein from power at a time of their choosing.
It is all very informal chez Boubakeur, who periodically beams at you over his oval glasses and calls you "my dear friend". People drop into his office, sit down close to me on the sofa for no discernible reason, nibble at the sugar-bombs, then drift off. He welcomes two more "friends", non-Muslim Europeans, one of whom later claims to work for French intelligence. Even if he admits that French Muslims continue to make tracks for Pakistan and Afghanistan, he believes France's position as leader of the worldwide opposition to the American-led attack on Iraq has given it a measure of shelter from the terrorist storm.
France's isolation from the US-led war in Iraq, which it denies is in any meaningful sense a part of the war on terror, is almost complete. Mr Chirac is surfing a wave of popularity in the Middle East. Palestinian mothers are reported to have named their children after him. Crowds cheered him on a recent visit to Algeria. Just as Americans rallied around President Bush when the war began, the French, and especially Muslims, have rallied around their antiwar president. The latest poll put popular support for Mr Chirac's diplomatic stance at 92 per cent. The size of the country's Muslim population and the near-unanimity of its opposition to war will contribute to making any Franco-US rapprochement difficult in the short-term. It is the second time in a year - following the rejection of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the anti-immigrant National Front leader, in last year's presidential elections - that France has united around its immigrant community. Few mainstream politicians would consciously throw away this chance to build on rare common ground with France's most problematic minority.
The three things Bush really needed to do, Boubakeur says, were - let the Iraqis sort out their own problems, "just as the president of the republic suggested"; help create a Palestinian homeland; and carry on fighting against fundamentalism. He shakes his head ruefully at the idea that the US and the UK could seriously consider administering Iraq for two to three years after an eventual victory. "It is based on a complete misunderstanding of the Iraqi people and of Muslim communities around the world, who will reject such unacceptable colonialism. The sad thing is that America has fallen into the trap set by Bin Laden." |
