‘Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden’ Reviewed by Noah Feldman

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden
Becoming bin Laden

Review by NOAH FELDMAN

Published: February 12, 2006
NY Times

There is something obscene about reading the self-justifications of an acknowledged mass murderer. But what makes the collected speeches, interviews, Web postings and other public statements of Osama bin Laden different from, say, “Helter Skelter,” is that bin Laden is not clinically mad. He gives reasons for his actions that, while morally outrageous and religiously irresponsible, could be accepted by otherwise logical people who shared his premises. This makes him more, not less, dangerous than the Charles Mansons among us. Bin Laden has an audience, of which he is acutely aware — a fact made particularly clear by his recent offer of a “truce” with America. His words, as much as his deeds, aim to convince others to embrace his view of the world and act accordingly.

Without words, in fact, bin Laden’s violence could not achieve its stated goals. By his own account, bin Laden is neither a nihilist nor a millenarian. He does not claim to embrace violence for its own sake or in the hope of hastening the apocalypse. Rather, he purports to fulfill the twin duties of calling nonbelievers to Islam and defending the Muslim community from attack.

The goal of jihad (presented by bin Laden as a matter of self-defense) needs words because bin Laden has no sizable army at his back. Unable to subjugate the West, bin Laden thinks his best bet is to inflict harm — human and economic — and then blackmail his target. For bin Laden, then, actual violence is instrumental. It is the interpretation of violence that is the very essence of his religious and political program. To hold his explanation in one’s hands is to confront his reason for being.

“Messages to the World” is almost too well produced. Bound in an attractive orange wrapper and printed on excellent paper, it comes decorated with a thumbnail painting of the man himself, garbed in one of his allusive, carefully constructed outfits. The peaks of the Hindu Kush loom in the background, reminders of the Tora Bora debacle. James Howarth’s English translation is idiomatic and creditable. Bruce Lawrence’s notes are occasionally idiosyncratic — why refute the claim that the United States created the AIDS virus but not the argument that “Rumsfeld, the butcher of Vietnam,” is responsible for two million deaths? And Lawrence’s introduction could have done without the puzzling comparison to Che Guevara. For the most part, though, the contextual explanations provided in the volume will be helpful to those uninitiated in the discourses of contemporary Islamic radicalism.

A Hamas Surprise: Women Secure Victory

A Hamas surprise: Women secure victory

By Ian Fisher
The New York Times
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2006

GAZA Hamas has been known and feared for its men, armed with suicide bombs. But in its parliamentary election triumph here last week, one secret weapon was its women.

To a degree that specialists said was new in the conservative Muslim society of the Gaza Strip, Hamas used its women to win, sending them door to door with voter lists and to polling places for last-minute campaigning.

Now unexpectedly in control of Palestinian politics, Hamas can boast that women hold six of its 74 seats in Parliament, giving the women of the radical group, guided in all ways by their understanding of Islam, a new and unaccustomed public role.

“We are going to lead factories. We are going to lead farmers,” said Jamila al-Shanty, 48, a professor at the Islamic University in Gaza who won a seat in Parliament. “We are going to spread out through society. We are going to show the people of the world that the practice of Islam in regard to women is not well known.”

If Shanty’s prediction is borne out, the role of women will certainly not be along the secular Western lines followed largely, and with real strides for women, under decades of leadership by Yasser Arafat’s now-defeated Fatah faction. The model will be Islam: Women in Hamas wear head scarves and follow strict rules for social segregation from men.

One of their role models, and one of the few women in Hamas well known before the election, has a history particularly troubling to many in Israel and the outside world.

She is Mariam Farhat, the mother of three Hamas advocates killed by Israelis. She bade one son goodbye in a homemade videotape before he stormed an Israeli settlement, killing five people before he was killed. A comment she made later received wide publicity: She said that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known as the “mother of martyrs,” she is seen in a campaign video carrying a gun.

Now she is one of the six women elected as Hamas legislators. The election rules included quotas for women for all parties. Farhat was surrounded recently at a Hamas victory rally at the women’s campus of the Islamic University by young, outspoken, educated women who see no contradiction between religious militancy and modernity.

“She is a mother to every house, every person,” said one of the students, Reem el-Nabris, 20, who kissed and hugged Farhat.

Farhat, 56, who had not been active in politics, said she hoped she deserved their praise as a role model. But she said her role should not be the only one for Hamas’s women.

“It is not only sacrificing sons,” she said after the rally. “There are different kinds of sacrifice – by money, by education. Everybody, according to their ability, should sacrifice.”

The Islamic University, an oasis of order in the grit and chaos of Gaza, shows as well as any place the conflicting images of Hamas in relation to the women who strongly support it.

A stronghold for Hamas, though not exclusively for its supporters, the university is split in two for men and women, and it can be jarring to cross the corridor from crowds without a woman’s face to another of women, all with their heads covered, some wearing the full veil, the nikab. On the day of the rally, some also wore green Hamas baseball caps.

Yet Hamas encourages, and in some cases pays for, the education of these women. Sabrin al-Barawi, 21, a chemistry student, said she had been raised with Hamas programs for women: social groups, leadership courses, Koran classes. “It’s not only religious,” said Ahlan Shameli, 21, who is studying computers. “It’s the Internet, computers.”

“Before Hamas, women were not aware of the political situation,” she said. “But Hamas showed and clarified what was going on. Women have become much more aware.”

In nearly two decades, the top tier of Hamas’s leadership has seemed very much reserved for men. But supporters of Hamas, as well as those of Fatah and other specialists, agreed with Shameli that Hamas had earned strong support from women. Studies and results from municipal elections show women supporting the group in larger numbers than men.

If the men’s most visible role has been fighting Israel, it is Hamas’s social programs that have attracted the loyalty of women. Hamas offers assistance programs for widows of suicide bombers and poor people, health clinics, day care, kindergartens and preschools, in addition to beauty parlors and women-only gyms. Women “are the ones who take kids to clinics,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “They are the ones who take children to schools.”

During the elections, he said, Hamas mobilized these same women as if it had been “building up for this occasion for 30 years,” using them as grass-roots campaign workers.

“It’s something noticeable in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “In Palestinian society, our values do not accept women to go out and campaign in the street. It’s really a new phenomenon, especially for Hamas.”

Reem Abu Athra, who directs women’s affairs for the Fatah youth wing, said that her party did not seem to understand how mobilized Hamas’s women were generally, and that Fatah had not matched the grass-roots work by Hamas women during the elections.

She said Fatah seemed to think it would naturally win the women’s vote, as the more secular party that has been in some ways a leader in the Arab world in rights for women.

“Fatah took women for granted, and this is one reason it lost,” she said.

Naima Sheikh Ali, a Fatah legislator who runs a group for Gaza women, said Hamas’s strict interpretation of Islam would remain a barrier to true participation by women. They cannot, for instance, be judges under Islam, she said, and will generally remain segregated and pushed to the side.

“Yes, they respect women, but as they conceive that respect,” she said. “It is from a religiously fundamental view. For the women’s movement, this will set us back several steps.”

Shanty disagreed. She said that women, and especially the wives of top Hamas leaders, had long played a central role in Hamas’s leadership, though she said that role had not been publicized to protect them.

“Every decision that is taken by Hamas is passed to us, not after the decision is made but before,” she said.

One measure of participation by women may be the extent that they take part in addressing the main problems facing Palestinians, and not just on social issues that affect women, families or children.

In an interview before she won a legislative seat, Mouna Mansour, 44, a physics teacher who is the widow of Jamal Mansour, an assassinated Hamas leader, seemed very much engaged in the central issues. The peace process with Israel, she said, was dead. There should be a Palestinian state, but not at the cost of Jerusalem or the claims of Palestinian refugees, who under previous negotiations would not be permitted to move into what is today Israel.

Hamas, she said, needs to rebuild the economy, get rid of poverty and unemployment and, for now, continue the cease-fire with Israel.

But she also defended the decision of a young Nablus man to become a suicide bomber.

“Why not ask the question from another angle?” she said. “Why would he blow himself up if he was not subject to such great pressures? What leads you to do such a bitter thing? People do this from anger and injustice, to bring back life to their own people by sacrificing their lives.”

But there is also unease. One student at the Islamic University said Hamas represented an unknown for women like her. The student, Rula Zaanin, 19, said Hamas had, at least, earned her trust.

“A lot of Palestinians love Hamas and wanted them,” she said. “But we don’t know what will happen.”

The Hamas Landslide

Palestine: the world watches and waits
The Hamas landslide

Hamas’ landslide win at the Palestinian elections on 25 January has been greeted with indignant warnings and commentaries from the United States and the European Union, including France. We need to put this event in context.

By Alain Gresh

Though the election was held under foreign occupation, more than three-quarters of registered voters cast their vote. It was a victory for democracy and proof that Palestinians care about it. Some 900 international observers reported the election to have been free and fair.

Voters expressed their rejection of the policies of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah on at least two levels. They condemned their inability to create sound institutions, eliminate corruption or improve daily life. Everyone in Palestine is aware of the permanent constraints of an occupation that has been in place for nearly 40 years but, even taking that into account, the PA’s record is poor. It is equally poor in regard to negotiations with Israel since the 1993 Oslo accords.

Mahmoud Abbas’ whole gamble since he was elected president in January 2005 was that a moderate position would kickstart the peace process. That didn’t happen. Ariel Sharon, having said for so long that Yasser Arafat was an obstacle to peace, offered nothing to his successor. With the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza came further expansion of settlements and faster building of the separation wall, regardless of condemnation by the international court at The Hague. That was the whole point of the withdrawal. The checkpoints and restrictions have continued to make daily life impossible for Palestinians, the number of political prisoners increased to several thousand and so on.

It is therefore strange to hear US and European leaders pondering how to “continue the peace process�?. But no process existed before the elections: it had stopped with Sharon’s election.

The Palestinians voted for Hamas not because they supported its founding programme pledged to destroy Israel, nor because they wanted to see a resumption of suicide attacks (on the contrary, recent opinion polls show they want peace and negotiation), but because they wanted to end disastrous PA rule. It is to be hoped that the cataclysm of 25 January will compel the Palestinian body politic to renew itself and devise a more effective strategy towards the occupation.

Hamas is, without doubt, popular in both the West Bank and Gaza. It is part of the political landscape. As in many Arab countries, it is illusory to think that progress to democracy can be made without including the Islamists. For the Palestinian population, Hamas has three major assets: it actively resists the occupation, it has a big social welfare network and it commands the loyalty of its cadres. Exercising power will, however, be a severe challenge. Hamas is to the right economically, favourable to free market policies; socially it is extremely conservative, a cause for concern, especially to a large number of women.

Hamas is also pragmatic: it refused to take part in the 1996 elections, arguing that they were held in the framework of the Oslo accords; it has since modified its position although the situation has not changed. It has also forged alliances with highly respected local figures, welcomed Christians to its ranks and shown its competence in running the municipalities in which it had been elected.

We do not know what will happen in the coming months. However, if the European countries have a role to play, it is to recall that any solution to the Middle East conflict must be based on United Nations resolutions: complete evacuation of all the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and Israel’s right to peace and security. They must require Hamas to recognise Israel in accordance with international law, but at the same time reiterate that the present stalemate comes from Israel’s own persistent refusal to put UN resolutions into practice.

We Will Not Sell Our People or Principles for Foreign Aid

We will not sell our people or principles for foreign aid

Palestinians voted for Hamas because of our refusal to give up their rights. But we are ready to make a just peace

Khalid Mish’al
Tuesday January 31, 2006
The Guardian

It is widely recognised that the Palestinians are among the most politicised and educated peoples in the world. When they went to the polls last Wednesday they were well aware of what was on offer and those who voted for Hamas knew what it stood for. They chose Hamas because of its pledge never to give up the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and its promise to embark on a programme of reform. There were voices warning them, locally and internationally, not to vote for an organisation branded by the US and EU as terrorist because such a democratically exercised right would cost them the financial aid provided by foreign donors.

The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections the world’s leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.

We are being punished simply for resisting oppression and striving for justice. Those who threaten to impose sanctions on our people are the same powers that initiated our suffering and continue to support our oppressors almost unconditionally. We, the victims, are being penalised while our oppressors are pampered. The US and EU could have used the success of Hamas to open a new chapter in their relations with the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Muslims and to understand better a movement that has so far been seen largely through the eyes of the Zionist occupiers of our land.

Our message to the US and EU governments is this: your attempt to force us to give up our principles or our struggle is in vain. Our people who gave thousands of martyrs, the millions of refugees who have waited for nearly 60 years to return home and our 9,000 political and war prisoners in Israeli jails have not made those sacrifices in order to settle for close to nothing.

Hamas has been elected mainly because of its immovable faith in the inevitability of victory; and Hamas is immune to bribery, intimidation and blackmail. While we are keen on having friendly relations with all nations we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our legitimate rights. We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different, our cause is no less worthy, our determination is no less profound and our patience is no less abundant.

Our message to the Muslim and Arab nations is this: you have a responsibility to stand by your Palestinian brothers and sisters whose sacrifices are made on behalf of all of you. Our people in Palestine should not need to wait for any aid from countries that attach humiliating conditions to every dollar or euro they pay despite their historical and moral responsibility for our plight. We expect you to step in and compensate the Palestinian people for any loss of aid and we demand you lift all restrictions on civil society institutions that wish to fundraise for the Palestinian cause.

Our message to the Palestinians is this: our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without exception or discrimination.

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.

We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.

· Khalid Mish’al is head of the political bureau of Hamas hoood88@hotmail.com

What Hamas is Seeking

What Hamas Is Seeking

By Mousa Abu Marzook
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; A17
Washington Post

DAMASCUS, Syria — A new era in the struggle for Palestinian liberation is upon us. Through historic fair and free elections, the Palestinian people have spoken.

Accordingly, America’s long-standing tradition of supporting the oppressed’s rights to self-determination should not waver. The United States, the European Union and the rest of the world should welcome the unfolding of the democratic process, and the commitment to aid should not falter. Last week’s victory of the Change and Reform Party in the Palestinian legislative elections signals a new hope for an occupied people.

The results of these elections reflect a need for change from the corruption and intransigence of the past government. Since its creation 10 years ago, the Palestinian Legislative Council has been unsuccessful in addressing the needs of the people. As the occupation solidified its grip under the auspices of “peace agreements,” quality of life deteriorated for Palestinians in the occupied territories. Poverty levels soared, unemployment rates reached uncharted heights and the lack of basic security approached unbearable depths. A grass-roots alternative grew out of the urgency of this situation. Through its legacy of social work and involvement in the needs of the Palestinian people, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) flourished as a positive social force striving for the welfare of all Palestinians. Alleviating the debilitative conditions of occupation, and not an Islamic state, is at the heart of our mandate (with reform and change as its lifeblood).

Despite the pressures of occupation and corrupt self-rule, Palestinian civil society has demonstrated its resilience in the face of repressive conditions. Social institutions can now be given new life under a reformed government that embraces the empowerment of the people, facilitates freedoms and protects civil rights.

Our society has always celebrated pluralism in keeping with the unique history and traditions of the Holy Land. In recognizing Judeo-Christian traditions, Muslims nobly vie for and have the greatest incentive and stake in preserving the Holy Land for all three Abrahamic faiths. In addition, fair governance demands that the Palestinian nation be represented in a pluralistic environment. A new breed of Islamic leadership is ready to put into practice faith-based principles in a setting of tolerance and unity.

In that vein, Hamas has pledged transparency in government. Honest leadership will result from the accountability of its public servants. Hamas has elected 15 female legislators poised to play a significant role in public life. The movement has forged genuine and lasting relationships with Christian candidates.

As we embark on a new phase in the struggle to liberate Palestine, we recognize the recent elections as a vote against the failures of the current process. A new “road map” is needed to lead us away from the path of checkpoints and walls and onto the path of freedom and justice. The past decade’s “peace process” has led to a dramatic rise in the expansion of illegal settlements and land confiscation. The realities of occupation include humiliating checkpoints, home demolitions, open-ended administrative detentions, extrajudicial killings and thousands of dead civilians.

The Islamic Resistance Movement was elected to protect the Palestinians from the abuses of occupation, based on its history of sacrifice for the cause of liberty. It would be a mistake to view the collective will of the Palestinian people in electing Hamas in fair and free elections under occupation as a threat. For meaningful dialogue to occur there should be no prejudgments or preconditions. And we do desire dialogue. The terms of the dialogue should be premised on justice, mutual respect and integrity of the parties.

As the Israelis value their own security, Palestinians are entitled to their fundamental rights to live in dignity and security. We ask them to reflect on the peace that our peoples once enjoyed and the protection that Muslims gave the Jewish community worldwide. We will exert good-faith efforts to remove the bitterness that Israel’s occupation has succeeded in creating, alienating a generation of Palestinians. We call on them not to condemn posterity to endless bloodshed and a conflict in which dominance is illusory. There must come a day when we will live together, side by side once again.

The failed policies of the U.S. administration are the result of the inherent contradiction in its position as Israel’s strongest ally and an “honest broker” in the conflict. World nations have condemned the brutal Israeli occupation. For the sake of peace, the United States must abandon its position of isolation and join the rest of the world in calling for an end to the occupation, assuring the Palestinians their right to self-determination.

We appeal to the American people’s sense of fairness to judge this conflict in light of the great thoughts, principles and ideals you hold dear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the democracy you have built. It is not unreasonable to expect America to practice abroad what it preaches at home. We can but sincerely hope that you use your honest judgment and the blessings of ascendancy God has given you to demand an end to the occupation. Meaningful democracy cannot flourish as long as an external force maintains the balance of power. It is the right of all people to pursue their own destiny.

The writer is deputy political bureau chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He has a U.S. doctorate in engineering and was indicted in the United States in 2004 as a co-conspirator on racketeering and money-laundering charges in connection with activities on behalf of Hamas dating to the early 1990s, before the organization was placed on the list of terrorist groups. He was deported to Jordan in 1997.

Comments on the Hamas Victory by Beshara Doumani

Comments on the Hamas Victory

Jan. 26, 2006
Beshara Doumani

Dear Friends,

Some initial thoughts on the political earthquake of a sweeping Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections:

Today, January 26, 2006, marks the official end of a fifty-year long period during which the Palestinian national movement was dominated by secular political culture and the beginning of a new phase of unknown duration dominated by an Islamist political culture. The consequences are huge, not just for the Palestinians, but for the Middle East and for global movements of change as a whole. This is because the question of Palestine has become a fundamental symbolic icon of the dark side of the modern condition and a weathervane for the nature of politics in the twenty-first century.

Minutes ago, Hanna Nasser, head of the Palestinian Central Elections Commission announced that Hamas won 76 out of the 132 seats of the Palestinian Parliament, with Fatah, the movement that has dominated Palestinian national politics since the late 1960s garnering only 43 seats. The final results might change slightly, but the basic picture is clear. On the internal Palestinian level Hamas’s land slide victory means that it will take over most of the institutions of the Palestinian Authority in the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Hamas will set the political agenda for that segment of the Palestinian population living under foreign military rule. Its victory will also reinforce the already strong position (if not dominant) position of Islamist political movements in the other two major segments: Diaspora Palestinians, the world’s oldest refugee population; and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which constitute about fifth of the total Israeli population.

In terms of the relationship with Israel, nothing fundamental will change, but the mask will be off. Parliament and government are words that connote a sovereignty that is absent in reality. The “there is no partner for peace” mantra has been an iron clad law of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians since the days of the British Mandate. Sharon’s version was only the latest incarnation of “there are no Palestinians” of Golda Meir through “the PLO is a terrorist organization” of successive governments until Oslo in 1993, to “we will not negotiate with Arafat” of the post-Oslo era. Hamas did not just win, Abbas and Fatah were eviscerated by Israeli governments that engineered their failure of the “peace process” to produce any fruit, and by Fatah leadership’s own gluttony which blinded them to the consequences of their own failures. Still, the Hamas victory will make it much easier for Israel to sell the “no partner for peace” line.

On the regional level, Hamas’ victory is part of a larger trend of the ascendance of political Islam via the iconic vehicle of the secular liberal political order of the Enlightenment: the ballot box. The incredible scenes of women supporters of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt scaling walls in order to reach polling stations sealed off by police sent in to prevent a certain electoral defeat of the ruling government party, reveals a great deal about the determination of Islamist political parties that have swept to victories in many other countries, including Iraq and the limited municipal elections in Saudi Arabia.

The Hamas victory will lead to an even greater international isolation of the Palestinian national movement by governments in Europe and the United States and, potentially much more important, by the bulk of the international solidarity and civil society movements based, as they are, on the principles of secular humanism and non-violence. Ironically (again) Hamas won partly because it is the most effective organizer of grass roots civil society and self-help institutions, whereas Fatah depended too much on its ability to provide salaried jobs financed by regular contributions from donor countries. Well, the PA is already broke and the money transfers might very well dry up if the EU and the United States and Israel decide to impose a financial blockade. And even if the world deals with Hamas when it comes to the question of Palestine, little attention will be paid to changes on the social and cultural levels such as educational content in schools, personal status laws, public rituals of piety, and other forms of social discipline practiced through public control of the female body.

Elections are but a snap shot and there are a myriad of factors that can skew results. I can go on for a long time about specific case studies of what happened here and there. But there is a larger truth: Following Oslo, the daily life of Palestinians in the occupied territories has deteriorated to almost sub-human levels, largely due to Israeli policies. The best that people hope for is to keep their head above water and pray that their society will not suffer a complete and total collapse. At times like these, people turn to God and to each other. Hamas has helped them to do both, and they have something to show for it.

The saga continues.

Beshara Doumani ©2006

Beshara Doumani is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is Academic Freedom After September 11.
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The Rise of Political Islam: The Palestinian Election and Democracy in the Middle East

The Rise of Political Islam
The Palestinian Election and Democracy in the Middle East

A longer version of this piece appears at Tomdispatch.com

Dilip Hiro
January 25 , 2006

By now, the voting will have begun in today’s Palestinian elections. It’s not clear how well Hamas — the Arabic acronym which stands for Movement of Islamic Resistance — will do, but opinion polls in the Palestinian territories show the Islamic organization pulling neck and neck with the ruling Fatah party. This is so even though Fatah strategists have plastered the territories with posters of Marwan Barghouti, the popular younger leader who is serving five life sentences for murder in an Israeli jail.

This is but the latest manifestation of the rise of political Islam in the electoral politics of the Middle East, a development that — despite the Bush administration’s endless promotion of democratic reform in the region — is causing deep worry among top policy makers in Washington.

Last year began with Islamist candidates winning most of the seats in the first very limited municipal polls in Saudi Arabia and ended with the Iraqi religious parties — both Shiite and Sunni — performing handsomely in the December parliamentary elections. The official Iraqi results, announced on January 21, showed the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance winning almost 80% of the seats that should go to the majority Shiite community. Likewise the Islamic Iraq Party won 80% of the places to which the Sunni minority is entitled.

In between these polls, in a general election held last summer, Hizbollah emerged as the preeminent representative of Lebanese Shiites, the country’s largest sectarian group (which is grossly underrepresented in parliament). And in the first election for the legislative assembly not flagrantly rigged by Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood registered a nearly 60% success rate by winning 88 out of the 150 seats it contested. The Brotherhood certainly could have won many more, but its leadership deliberately decided to contest only a minority of seats in order not to provoke the regime of Egypt’s pro-American president and so create a situation in which he might be likely to strike out indiscriminately against the opposition.

Put all of this together and you have what looks like a single phenomenon sweeping the region. However, focus on these developments one by one and what you see is that the reasons for Islamist advances are not only different in each case but particular to each country.

Take Iraq. History shows that when an ethnic, racial, or social group is persecuted or overly oppressed, it tends to turn to religion to find solace. In the Americas, this was true, for instance, of the Africans brought in as slaves. It is not accidental that today African-Americans are still more religious than white Americans.

Once Iraq became part of the (Sunni) Ottoman Empire in 1638, Shiites were persecuted and discriminated against. Even after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as King Faisal was installed by the British as Iraq’s ruler, little changed. He was Sunni, as were the leaders of the Baath Party that followed him to power. Mosque and religion became the last resort of Iraqi Shiites. Once the Baath Party was pulverized in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion, the Shiite religious network emerged as the most cohesive and efficient organization in the country — and remains so today. In the late 1970s, following the fall of the secular regime of the Shah, Iran witnessed a similar phenomenon. As for the Sunnis, that long dominant minority, twelve years of UN economic sanctions hurt them as badly as non-Sunni Iraqis. Increased misery and growing impoverishment led the Sunni masses, too, to turn to Islam for consolation and support. So it is not surprising that once Sunnis decided to participate in the electoral process, most of them favored the Iraqi Islamic Party.

There is no evidence to suggest that, under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis were overwhelmingly secular to begin with. There were then no public opinion polls to discover the actual views of the Iraqi people. The Arab Baath Socialist Party was itself secular in the sense that one of its three founders, Michel Aflaq, the ideological guru of Saddam, was a Christian who moved from Beirut to Baghdad and died there in 1989.

Far more reliable, when it comes to the state of public opinion, is the confidential poll conducted in late July 2004 for the International Republican Institute, an offshoot of the U.S. Republican Party, and leaked to the press that September: Seven out of ten respondents said that the Sharia, or Islamic law, should be the “sole basis” of Iraqi laws, and the same proportion — 70% — preferred to live in a “religious state”; only 23% opted for a secular one. The two elections since then have only underlined the accuracy of this poll.

Egypt is the country where the Muslim Brotherhood was first established in 1928. By inflicting a swift and humiliating defeat on an Egypt ruled by President Gamal Abdul Nasser, a man wedded to “Arab socialism,” in June 1967, Israel delivered a near-fatal blow to the hopes for the development of secular Arab nationalism in the region. In that hour of their downfall most Egyptians attributed the Israeli victory to Jewish devotion to their religion and, in a similar spirit, turned to Islam for their own spiritual succor. It was at that point that the Muslim Brotherhood, though still an outlawed organization, began gaining popularity.

With Anwar Sadat (known to have been sympathetic to the Brotherhood earlier in his life) succeeding Nasser as president in 1970, pressure on the Brotherhood eased for a while. In more recent years, the failure of Hosni Mubarak’s rule to narrow the gap between a tiny, wealthy elite and the country’s impoverished masses has provided the Brotherhood with an ever richer soil in which to plant its utopian and increasingly appealing slogan, “Islam is the solution.”

Today, it is fair to say that the failure of both Arab socialism and American-style capitalism to deliver the goods to the bulk of the population, leaves a probable majority of Egyptians ready to try the Third Way of Islam.

The Palestinian case is altogether different. Israel’s 38-year-long military occupation, with its devastating impact on the everyday lives of the occupied, has spawned a politics that has no parallel elsewhere in the Arab world. Its salient features include: powerful tensions between local and long-exiled leaders; high political consciousness; a lack of distance between followers and leaders of a sort not found in long established states and regimes; and a turning to religion for solace.

The ruling Fatah movement suffers from tensions between local leaders and those who spent many years abroad before returning after the 1993 Oslo Accords. The leadership of Hamas, on the other hand, is almost wholly local.

Because the Palestinian state is not fully formed, followers in the ranks of such parties are able to exercise direct pressure on the leadership. As the governing party which has proved corrupt and inept in administering the Palestinian entity, Fatah has seen its standing wane. By contrast, Hamas has a history of providing free social services to the needy and is not tainted with a history of corruption and cronyism.

In short, while political Islam is ascendant in the emerging electoral politics of the Middle East, the reasons for its successes are varied and specific to each country. This is not a case of “one size fits all.” That is the least that those who mold public opinion in the United States ought to grasp.

As for the policy makers in the Bush administration, they will, sooner or later, have to face reality and deal with organizations such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as they have found themselves forced to play ball with the religious parties in an Iraq occupied by their troops.

Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After and The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies, both published by Nation Books.

Copyright 2005 Dilip Hiro

Hamas Campaign Rally in Nablus

Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

“Supporters of the radical Islamic movement Hamas showed suport for the group Sunday at a campaign rally in the West Bank City of Nablus.”

(Photo caption via NY Times.)

Hamas Recognizes Israel

Egypt Says Hamas Recongises Existence of Israel
21 Jan 2006 10:57:56 GMT
Source: Reuters
CAIRO, Jan 21 (Reuters) – The Palestinian militant group Hamas recognises the existence of Israel and will go along with negotiations with the Jewish state, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in an interview published on Saturday.

Aboul Gheit, whose government has had close contacts with Hamas and other Palestinian militants over the past year, also said that joining the political process would lead to fundamental changes in the thinking of Hamas.

Hamas, which advocates replacing Israel with an Islamic state throughout historical Palestine, is taking part in Palestinian parliamentary elections for the first time on Jan. 25. It poses a strong challenge to the ruling Fatah movement.

Ed: Full article below

New Osama bin Laden Tape

OBL has recently come out with a new tape (full transcript below), which the CIA has recently authenticated. Were he to suddenly give up his chosen profession – global jihad – and become a professional musician, would his cassettes still be popular? I think not. He would have a hard time auditioning demo tapes, but tapes warning of doom: air time on al-Jazeera. His niece, has tried to capitalize upon the name as a rising singer, while dismissing it, in her own ambitions to stardom.

Like the al-Zawahiri tape from this month, OBL has great access to information wherever he may be and specifically calls out Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Not only that, but he’s reading human rights reports about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Clearly, he does not consider his own beliefs as infringing upon human rights – the jihadi double standard.

Most importantly, OBL offers a truce.

Based on the above, we see that Bush’s argument is false. However, the argument that he avoided, which is the substance of the results of opinion polls on withdrawing the troops, is that it is better not to fight the Muslims on their land and for them not to fight us on our land.

We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.

We are a nation, for which God has disallowed treachery and lying.

In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability and we will build Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the war.

The White House quickly rejected such a truce. Yet if the U.S. government is indeed at war, as they have stated, why not come to the negotiating table? OBL also recognizes the military-industrial-complex as being the beneficiary of this war and having a vested interest in its continuation. He further recognizes that al-Qaeda, Inc. may loose the war to the U.S., but warns that future generations will seek justice – Iraq may prove him right.

Ed: Full transcript below