Jeremy Scahill on the ‘expanding US war in Pakistan’.
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Osama’s epic fail:
Support for bin Laden is said to be in decline in Muslim countries* (but it’s still quite high**), at the same time as ‘al-Qaida’*** is said to be ‘weakening’, having difficulty in finding new recruits, and finding former ideologues and sympathisers speaking out against their methods and views. As reported by The Guardian, 60-70% of information about al-Qaida suspects now comes from friends and family, not security agencies or surveillance.
The right method should be to treat such groups and individuals as violent criminals, and fugitives on the run from the law. They don’t represent an existential threat to societies, other than, perhaps, the very ones they claim to be ‘liberating’. While people may question the invasion of Afghanistan (and certainly the follies of continued occupation must be questioned), it shouldn’t be forgotten that dozens of Kenyans and Tanzanians paid the price for the bin Laden’s fascination with resurrecting an ‘Islamic empire’ and being rid of Americans, foreigners, and non-Muslims. Then again the lives of black-skinned disbelievers and pseudo-Muslims probably rank low on the priority list for certain Muslim ‘activists’.
*Good spin for Barack Obama fans: support for violent Muslims was on the rise or otherwise high in the Bush years; it declined when Obama came to power.
**How much of this is the two-fingered response?
***This became a catch-all term for any violent Muslim fanatic. At one point al-Qaida franchises were opening faster than Subway ones. At least the use of this label has been scaled back. -
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According to the Orientalist, even Muslim failures (like success) are not of their own doing but always attributable to pre- or extra-Islamic cultures (pdf):
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China’s ‘resource grab’ extends to Ecuador.
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Suicide bombing in Ingushetia:
The suicide attack in Nazran, Ingushetia’s main city, injured more than 138 people, including children.
The republic borders Chechnya and has seen a spate of shootings, bombings and other attacks on police and government.This follows the killing of a minister, and an attack on Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the republic’s president.
Yevkurov is blaming the US, Britain and Israel for the series of attacks:
“The West will keep seeking to prevent Russia from reviving the former Soviet might,” he added.
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Colonialism:
Apparently an investigation by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office found “information in abundance pointing to a high probability of systematic corruption or serious dishonesty” and concluded there were “clear signs of political amorality and immaturity and of a general administrative incompetence”.
Widespread, systematic, corruption? Political amorality and immaturity? In an island government? Heh…
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Johann Hari writes a polemic against Andrew Roberts, the “extremely right-wing” historian and champion of the British Empire.
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American Empire:
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I was reading something, and it occurred to me it would interesting to compare the Zanj Rebellion with the Haitian Revolution.
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Algerian Feminists Slammin’ Americans (and the French): A review of Marnia Lazreg’s new book, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad.
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Reviews of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia at The National and The New York Review of Books.
From The National:
[T]he United States had dealt swiftly and mercilessly with other inconveniently-placed native populations: in the 1940s and 1950s, indigenous communities in Puerto Rico, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands and elsewhere had been “relocated” in order to make way for American military installations or nuclear test sites, often with disastrous results. This time around, the Americans found a willing partner in Britain, a declining power eager to free itself of the burdens of empire without renouncing its presence in the Indian Ocean. The Americans told the British that they wanted “exclusive control” of the [Chagos Archipelago] – delivered “without local inhabitants”. In exchange, the United States forgave a $14 million bill for assistance it had provided to the British nuclear missile programme.
To meet their obligations to the United States, the British needed to remove the natives without appearing to violate the rights of colonised people enshrined in international law. The solution was a breathtakingly cynical act of bad faith. As a UK Foreign Office legal adviser described in an internal memo, all the British had to do was “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population”. Thus, the Chagossians – a community whose roots on Diego Garcia stretched back for generations – were transformed into mere “transient workers”. Vine reveals that this bit of semantic dispossession was an explicit part of the secret agreements between the two allies regarding the fate of the islanders. The US embassy in London was instructed in a memo from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to use the term “migrant labourers” when discussing the Chagossians with the British, since “withdrawal of ‘inhabitants’ obviously would be more difficult to justify”.
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As well as being an advocate of political quackery, it seems Paul Wolfowitz was fond of terrible historical analogies. The sad thing it is wasn’t Wolfowitz who paid the price for his ignorance and arrogance (instead he got a cushy job).
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I don’t think a distance of approximately 15,000 km is that ‘narrow’ a region of influence.
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Right-wing nonsense at its finest:
It is not even worth destroying James Littlepole’s ‘point’. I would just prefer to laugh at his stupidity.
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America’s Kipling tries to rehash something he read in a Jared Diamond book, identifying future invasions he will support.
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This was the real reason for the use of torture:
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Marylin Young and Yuri Tanaka have put together a new book on the bombing of civilians:
John Keegan identified the emergence of ‘thing-killing’, which is aimed at maximising human pain, during the 19th-century; the barbaric bombing of civilians is simply a continuation of this imperial tradition.
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Whites only:
I really don’t accept the second paragraph. Were soldiers conscripted to fight from the African or Asian colonial possessions of the British or French empires really fighting ‘vicious racism’? Come to think of it, were ‘native’ (white or black) American or British conscripts concerned about antisemitism? Maybe there were some who were motivatied by these concerns about racism (e.g. no doubt Jews who had escaped from Nazi Europe or had relatives there). But I doubt it there were widespread concerns about racism, although I am happy to be corrected. On the face of it, this seems like a contemporary concern being written into what was, ultimately, another war between empires.
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A look at the Muslims who fought for the USSR in the Afghanistand.
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As-salaamu alaykum – after negotiating a premature school holiday brought on by British snow and a stomach bug, I can now finally introduce myself. My name is Yunus Yakoub Islam, but I’m usually known as Yakoub. I’m a Muslim (convert/revert), a libertarian socialist and the parent and primary carer of my 16 year old autistic son (I also have two more allegedly grown-up children).
When I’m not jumping up and down singing songs from Muppet Christmas Carol, I’m busy writing an online autoethnography called the Tasneem Project Scrapbook, a “work in progress therapeutically reconstructing my own identity.” If I was to pick just one word to describe myself, it would be “explorer”.
As someone fascinated by human societies and cultures, I maintain a keen interest in news media, and my understanding of Muslim news in the mainstream press is largely shaped by my reading of Elizabeth Poole. Finally, when it comes to my ‘Muslim allegiances’, I don’t judge anyone on the basis of whether they are “Salafi” or “Shi’a” or “Progressive” – I don’t think Imperial (US) airport security worries about such things when they search a Muslim up his/her you-know-where.
Thanks, and peace…
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A powerful and sharp critique of promoting democracy around the world using guns and bombs.
