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Huntington in Hindsight

No fatalism, all countries with their own interests, with or without religion. In fact, Chinese culture has a deep acceptance of Western culture, Chinese culture is always a change to absorb the benefits of other cultures, this is our feature. There is competition but in a globalized world, mutual cooperation and integration is far more than simple competition. I also hope that the Muslim friends can be so considered. Cultural interaction is not a zero-sum game.
 
This ought to be a more interesting and insightful debate, so I will start it off.

Recently I was reading an article in a British newspaper which stated that Muslims in the last century have continuously been followers in all walks of life. The evidence for it from the writer was the lack of any beneficial input to the world at large and whatever Muslims did do, in terms of adapting, using or developing was taken from others. This is only referring to the last century and not the golden age which seems like a dream now.

Now the change that is occurring in the middle eastern countries will all be in vain because the purpose of the so called revolution will be lost when the people who led the revolution will not be able to draw a checklist of what they want and why this happened in the first place. This opens up space for the versatile and ultimately treacherous Islamic parties who actually have an indigenous ideology that they formed from the events that have taken place in Islamic history, more specifically the one that espouses the violent nature.

Which political parties broke up Pakistan? PPP and Awami League, both are secular. Who have been ruling the majority of the Muslim states for the last fifty years? People like Ben Ali and Mubarak; all of them secular and treacherous to the core. So, how do you find the Islamists so treacherous? Please look at what is happening in Turkey and compare that to what is happening in Pakistan under the secular rulers.
 
Life as Art or Art as Life?


March 9, 2011
At Sharjah Biennial, Interpretation of a Region Defined by Rebellion
By VINITA BHARADWAJ

DUBAI — At first glance, the painting “Blessing Upon the Land of My Love,” by the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, looks like the scene of a massacre.

A canvas of red drips and splotches, it covers the floor and steps of a tranquil courtyard inside Bait Al Serkal, a heritage building and former hospital in the emirate of Sharjah. On closer examination, however, the floor is also decorated with foliage typical of the Basohli Hills in Kashmir, painted by Mr. Qureshi in the modern miniature style for which he is best known.

The site-specific project is one of more than 65 works specially commissioned by the Sharjah Biennial for its 10th edition starting Wednesday — an eight-week program of visual art, film, choreography, music, video and publishing, built around an enigmatic theme: “Plot for a Biennial.”

Jointly curated by Suzanne Cotter, the British curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, and Rasha Salti, the Lebanese creative director of ArteEast in New York, in association with the Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian, “Plot” is scripted around a constellation of keywords like treason, necessity, insurrection, affiliation, corruption, devotion, disclosure and translation.

“Based on the theme, I was interested in the architecture’s space and my own vocabulary as an artist,” Mr. Qureshi said of his painting. “In this courtyard, I saw a quietness and sadness. The courtyard, that was central to the region’s architecture and historically a peaceful enclave in homes, has now been replaced with violence in the Middle East and Pakistan.”

Ms. Cotter said: “Arriving at the ‘Plot’s’ lexicon was a conversational process. We thought of the urgent things pressing for representation through an artistic medium. We wrote down words that were meaningful to us and the contemporary artistic context, but at the same time wanted to explore the framework for a biennial and the times we live in.”

Established in 1993, the Sharjah Biennial long predates the Gulf region’s many art fairs and high-profile museum projects. Early editions focused on local and classical art forms, but in 2003 it stepped boldly into contemporary arts and has since become a major fixture on the Middle East’s contemporary art calendar. In 2009 it attracted more than 75,000 visitors.

While the Gulf’s rulers have clearly turned to art to project a political message of culture and stability, Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which organizes the biennial, says there has never been any pressure to conform to a preferred perspective or toe a propaganda line.

“If anything, we’ve been told to steer clear of market and commercial influences,” Mr. Persekian said.

Sharjah, one of the seven states that make up the United Arab Emirates, eschews the flamboyance of its better-known neighbor Dubai and lacks the financial clout of the federal capital, Abu Dhabi. Instead, it has positioned itself as the federation’s cultural center since the early 1980s.

“There’s a vibrant local cultural movement in Sharjah. The ruler is a keen patron of the arts and playwright,” Mr. Persekian said, referring to the emir, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi. “The emirate has several museums, an active fine arts society, theater society and an annual book fair.”

The emirate also has a strong focus on Islamic values, strict laws prohibiting the sale and possession of alcohol, and a “decency and public conduct” code — all of which, taken together, have given it a reputation as one of the most conservatively Islamic states in the federation.

Yet over the years, the biennial has managed to escape being a strictly Islamic art platform, engaging audiences with works that are powerful in their content, sometimes political in their message and broad in their appeal.

“I think its standing in the international art scene and biennial circuit has increased since its foray into the contemporary arts,” Ms. Cotter said.

For this edition, more than 90 artists from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, South Asia and the United States have contributed to installations and performances that will be spread throughout the emirate’s open spaces, historic venues and city streets — even its cricket stadium.

Its biggest challenge, however, is to bring in local audiences.

“One of the intriguing aspects of curating for the Sharjah Biennial was identifying the audience,” said Ms. Salti, the co-curator. “We had fragments of information about the demographic, but nothing clearly defined.”

That, said Mr. Persekian, was why it had been imperative for artists to visit Sharjah ahead of the exhibition, to put their projects and ideas into context.

“They needed,” he said, “to take into account the demographics, the particularities of Sharjah and the historical emphasis on culture and art that has always been independent in nature.”

An example is the Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah, who said that only when he visited the Sharjah Art Museum, one of the venues of the biennial, did he know, instantly, where he wanted his installation, “Art Exhibition,” to be displayed.

“They had to be centered between the museum’s permanent Orientalist collection and another biennial project,” he said of his 50 photorealist paintings, which explore the historiography of modern art in Palestine.

The installation draws on archive material to delve into questions about modern Palestinian art — its protagonists, platforms and documentation. In order to achieve this act of museographical simulation, he selected 50 photographs of exhibitions of Palestinian art that took place in different places around the world, from 1961 to the present.

Amid the tumult of Arab revolution and rebellion that provides the backdrop to this biennial, “art, exhibitions and biennials have never been more important to the region,” Mr. Rabah said.

“Art should be a priority at every moment. It’s necessary for a healthy and functioning democracy,” he said. “It should play a vital role in changing the political discourse and not be put aside until things get better. We must engage and communicate with people.”

To foster an essential dialogue between the artists and their audiences, the biennial has designed a circuit built around a series of encounters. Throughout the designated biennial sites, commissioned works have been placed in such a way as to bring them face to face with visitors and residents.

One of the more uplifting of these works is “Lebanese Rocket Society: Elements for a Monument,” by the Lebanese film and visual artists Joana Hadijithomas and Khalil Joreige.

A “rocket” made of iron and marble, standing 8 meters, or about 26 feet, is a reconstruction of Cedar IV, one of nine launch vehicles produced by the Lebanese Rocket Society between 1960 and 1967. Lebanon’s nascent space program is now long forgotten, but at the time it was a cause for national celebration whenever a Cedar rocket flew.

For the biennial, Ms. Hadijithomas and Mr. Joreige have built a mock rocket that induces a sense of time warp crossed with multiple ambiguities — is it a rocket, for example, or could it be a missile?

Mr. Joreige says the piece is not intended to romanticize nostalgia.

“It is the documentation of an anecdote that didn’t lead to anything,” he said. “But it makes one laugh about the possibility of a Lebanese space program. We question the purpose of a monument, the meaning of a monument, by producing a piece that reminds us of the way we were.

“Feel free to interpret it as you like.”
 
war between civilizations is a war to the death. we need more solid fuel rockets capable of quickly putting "satellite packages" into low earth orbit and deorbiting them as we see fit over a certain large part of the western hemisphere. we don't need an arms race, just enough "satellite packages" to make sure that in any potential total war, we will never lose alone.
 
And review this perspective --- Well if they don't love the US, at least they don't not despise the US, and for some in the the US, this is.....Well, in the US the arab revolt is not about Arabs, but what is the center of the universe for Americans....themselves:


The disappearance of the nightmare Arab
By James Carroll

Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, "God is great!" Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.

For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then the September 11, 2001 attack pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.

Absence of Arab perfidy, presence of god
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Gaddafi's men.

In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against "Crusaders and Jews" - all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama bin Laden - to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance - has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?

Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic "fanatics" chanting hate-filled slogans.

Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?

In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.

Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.

It's an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior "secular". In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an "afterthought" to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person - as the Koran says - as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.

A rejection of violence and the old lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as non-violence and peace.

History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to "people power," Arabs have given the concept several new twists.

Because so many people have believed in themselves - protecting one another simply by standing together - they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-Semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).

Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake - in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city's main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word "Jew" at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.

To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February's revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.

The mainstreaming of anti-Muslim prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Juan Williams, who said, "I get worried. I get nervous" around those "in Muslim garb," those who identify themselves "first and foremost as Muslims".

Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.

Scary, indeed - but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was "Islamofascism". In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis's book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: "we" did - with that "we" defined as Western civilization.

Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon's arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian Peninsula - all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.

How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Koran was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam's origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That's readily apparent in the fact that a 14th-century slander against Islam - that it was only "spread by the sword" - was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.

Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries is remembered as the "religious wars," even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the "age of exploration," also known as the age of colonial exploitation.

"Secular" sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. "Enlightened" nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being "religious".

No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be "against evil", with God "not neutral", as George W Bush blithely put it. And never mind that US forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the "infidel" - the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America's wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.

The revolution of hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, "we" in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.

Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can re-ignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can re-emerge.

But that one of the world's great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious - an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.


James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine's Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.
 
And from the learned ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, the fascinating piece below: If the US is a civilization that has not quite absorbed what the reaction of those who have experienced western colonialism, to attempts to create a multi-lateral version of the Bush era's unilateralism - the BRIC offer a perspective as well -- count on the US to discount it:



Arab revolt reworks the world order
By M K Bhadrakumar

[FONT="Arial"[SIZE="3"]]India, Brazil and South Africa have put a spoke in the American wheel, which seemed up until Tuesday inexorably moving, turning and turning in the direction of imposing a "no-fly" zone over Libya.

Arguably, the United States can still impose a zone, but then President Barack Obama will have to drink from the poisoned chalice and resurrect his predecessor's controversial post-Cold War doctrine of "unilateralism" and the "coalition of the willing" to do that. If he does so, Obama will have no place to hide and all he has done in his presidency to neutralize America's image as a "bully" will come unstuck
.

New Delhi hosted a foreign minister-level meeting with Brazil and South Africa on Tuesday, which was to have been an innocuous occasion for some rhetorical "South-South" cooperation. On the contrary, the event soared into the realm of the troubled world order and shaky contemporary international system. The meeting took a clear-cut position of nyet vis-a-vis the growing Western design to impose a "no-fly" zone over Libya.

All indications are that the US and its allies who are assisting the Libyan rebels politically, militarily and financially have been hoping to extract a "request" from the Libyan people within a day or two at the most as a fig-leaf to approach the United Nations Security Council for a mandate to impose sanctions under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Libyan rebels are a divided house: nationalist elements staunchly oppose outside intervention and the Islamists among them are against any form of Western intervention
.

'Unilateralism' only option on table
NATO defense ministers held a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to give practical touches to a possible intervention by the alliance in Libya. That the meeting was attended by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was indicative of the importance attached to the run-up to the alliance's proposed intervention in Libya. Gates missed an earlier informal NATO defense ministers' meeting on Libya held on the outskirts of Budapest a fortnight ago.

United States-British diplomacy was moving on a parallel track drumming up a unified position by the Libyan rebels to seek an international intervention in their country and specifically in the form of a "no-fly" zone. The Arab League and the African Union also maintain an ambiguous stance on the issue of such a zone.

Obama's calculation is that if only a Libyan "people's request" could be generated, that would in historical terms absolve him and the West of the blame of invading a sovereign member country of the United Nations - from a moral and political angle, at least - as well as push the Arab League and African Union into the enterprise.

Being a famously cerebral intellectual also, Obama is a politician with a difference and can be trusted to have an acute sense of history. His predecessor George W Bush would have acted in similar circumstances with "audacity", an idiom that is ironically associated with Obama.

Obama's tryst with history is indeed bugging him in his decision-making over Libya. Robert Fisk, the well-known chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs for the Independent newspaper of London, wrote a sensational dispatch on Monday that the Obama administration had sought help from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for secretly ferrying American weapons to the Libyan rebels in Benghazi, for which Riyadh would pick up the tab so that the White House would need no accountability to the US Congress and leave no traceable trail to Washington.

The moral depravity of the move - chartering the services of an autocrat to further the frontiers of democracy - underscores Obama's obsessive desire to camouflage any US unilateral intervention in Libya with "deniability" at all costs.

Now comes the body blow from the Delhi meeting.
The three foreign ministers belonging to the forum that is known by the cute acronym IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) thwarted Obama's best-laid plans by issuing a joint communique on Tuesday in which they "underscored that a 'no-fly' zone on the Libyan air space or any coercive measures additional to those foreseen in Resolution 1970 can only be legitimately contemplated in full compliance with the UN Charter and within the Security Council of the United Nations".

Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio de Aguiar Patriota told the media in Delhi that the IBSA statement was an "important measure" of what the non-Western world was thinking". He said, "The resort to a 'no-fly' zone is seen as expedient when adopted by a country but it weakens the system of collective security and provokes indirect consequences prejudicial to the objective we have been trying to achieve." Patriota added:
It is very problematic to intervene militarily in a situation of internal turmoil, Any decision to adopt military intervention needs to be considered within the UN framework and in close coordination with the African Union and the Arab League. It is very important to keep in touch with them and identify with their perception of the situation.

He explained that measures like a no-fly zone might make a bad situation worse by giving fillip to anti-US and anti-Western sentiments "that have not been present so far".

Equally significant was the fact that the trio of foreign ministers also penned a joint statement on the overall situation in the Middle East. Dubbed as the "IBSA Declaration", it reiterated the three countries' expectation that the changes sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa should "follow a peaceful course" and expressed their confidence in a "positive outcome in harmony with the aspirations of the people".

A highly significant part of the statement was its recognition right at the outset that the Palestinian problem lay at the very core of the great Middle Eastern alienation and the "recent developments in the Region may offer a chance for a comprehensive peace ... This process should include the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... that will lead to a two-state solution, with the creation of a sovereign, independent, united and viable Palestinian State, coexisting peacefully alongside Israel, with secure, pre-1967 borders, and with East Jerusalem as its capital."

'P-5' loses shine
Israel will be hopping mad over the declaration. That apart, does it matter to Obama and NATO if three countries from three faraway continents stand up with a common stance on a "no-fly" zone? Who are these countries anyway? But, it does matter. Put simply, the three countries also happen to be currently serving as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council and their stance happens to have high visibility in the world's pecking order on Libya.

The indications in Delhi are that at least one more non-permanent member of the Security Council is their "fellow-traveler" - Lebanon. Which means the "Arab voice" in the Security Council. In short, what we hear is an Afro-Asian, Arab and Latin American collective voice and it cannot be easily dismissed. More importantly, the IBSA stance puts at least two permanent veto-wielding great powers within the Security Council on the horns of an acute dilemma.

Russia claims to have a foreign policy that opposes the US's "unilateralism" and which strictly abides by the canons of international law and the UN charter. China insists that it represents developing countries. Now, the IBSA stance makes it virtually impossible for them to enter into any Faustian deal with the US and Western powers over Libya within the sequestered caucus of the veto-holding powers of the Security Council - commonly known as the P-5.

Therefore, the IBSA joint statement, much like the Turkish-Brazilian move on the Iran nuclear problem, is virtually mocking at the moral hypocrisy of the P-5 and their secretive ways.

Ironically, Delhi adopted the IBSA communique even as US Vice President Joseph Biden was winging his way to Moscow for wide-ranging discussions on the future trajectory of the US-Russia reset. Any US-Russian tradeoff over Libya within the ambit of the reset would now get badly exposed as an act of unprincipled political opportunism.

China's predicament will be no less acute if it resorts to realpolitik. China is hosting the summit meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in Beijing in April. Three "brics" out of BRICS come from IBSA. Can the BRICS afford to water down the IBSA joint communique on Libya? Can China go against the stance of three prominent "developing countries"?

On balance, however, China may heave a sigh of relief. The IBSA position may let the US pressure off China and delist the Libyan "no-fly" zone issue from morphing into a bilateral Sino-American issue. China cooperated with last week's Security Council resolution on Libya. It was an unusual move for China to vote for a resolution that smacked of "intervention" in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.

Western commentators were euphoric over the shift in Chinese behavior at the high table of world politics and were egging on the leadership at Beijing to finally shape up as a responsible world power that is willing to work with the West as a "stakeholder" in the international system - like Russia does.

Clearly, China is being cajoled to go a step further and jettison its other red line regarding a "no-fly" zone. There is no indication that China is about to concede its red line by succumbing to flattery. But, now, if China indeed does, it will be in broad daylight under the gaze of the developing countries. And it will be very difficult for Beijing to cover up such "pragmatism" with the veneer of principles. In a way, therefore, pressure is off China on the "no-fly" zone issue.

India regains identity
An interesting thought occurs: Is India forcing China's hand? Delhi has certainly taken note that the Libyan crisis provided China with a great opportunity to work with the US in a cooperative spirit that would have much positive spin-offs for the overall Sino-American relationship. The "no-fly" zone issue would have been turf where China and the US could have created an entirely new alchemy in their relationship. Beijing knows that Obama's presidency critically depends on how he acquits in the Middle East crisis.

All the same, Delhi's move cannot be dismissed as merely "China-centric". In geopolitical terms, it constitutes a highly visible slap on the American face. And there will be a price to pay in terms of Obama's wrath. That Delhi is willing to pay such a price - when so much is at stake in its bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council - makes the IBSA move highly significant. Indeed, it is after a very long time that Delhi will be refusing to stand up and be counted on a major American foreign policy front.

It is much more than a coincidence, too, that the declaration vociferously supported the Palestinian cause. India has taken the calculated risk of incurring the displeasure of Israel and the Israel lobby in the US. Besides, there are other signs, too, that Delhi has embarked on a major overhaul of its Middle East policies and the IBSA is only one template of the policy rethink - and, possibly not even the most far-reaching in the geopolitics of the region.

Even as the IBSA adopted its stance on Libya and the Middle East situation staunchly favoring Arab nationalism, India's National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon, a key policymaker of high reputation as a consummate diplomat and who works directly under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was engaged in an engrossing and meaningful conversation elsewhere in the Middle East - with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

Away from the glare of television cameras, Menon handed over a letter from Manmohan to Ahmadinejad.
According to the statement issued by
Ahmadinejad's office, the Iranian leader told Menon:

Iran and India are both independent countries and they will play significant roles in shaping up the future of the international developments ... The relations between Iran and India are historic and sustainable. Iran and India due to being [sic] benefited from humanitarian viewpoints towards the international relations, should try to shape up the future world system in a way that justice and friendship would rule.

The ruling world is coming to its end and is on the verge of collapse. Under the current conditions, it is very important how the future world order will take shape and care should be taken that those who have imposed the oppressive world order against the mankind would not succeed in imposing it in a new frame anew ... Iran and India will be playing significant roles in the future developments in the world. Our two nations' cultures and origins are what the world needs today
.

Menon reportedly told Ahmadinejad:
New Delhi is for the establishment of comprehensive relations with Iran, including strategic ties ... many of the predictions you [Ahmadinejad] had about the political and economic developments in the world have come to reality today and the world order is going under basic alterations [sic], which has necessitated ever-increasing relations between Iran and India ... The relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of India are beyond the current political relations, having their roots in the cultures and the civilizations and the two nations and both countries have great potentials for improvement of bilateral, regional and international relations.

Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be said further. In sum, this sort of Iran-India high-level political exchange was unthinkable until very recently and it highlights how much the Middle East has changed and Iran's role in it, and Delhi's perceptions and the Indian thinking regarding both.

Most important, Menon's arrival in Tehran at the present tumultuous juncture on a major path-breaking political and diplomatic mission to energize India-Iran strategic understanding also underscores the growing recognition in the region that the era of Western dominance of the Middle East is inexorably passing into history and the world order is not going to be the same again.[/SIZE]
[/FONT]

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey
 
Kya kar layrain, uno bol kay bolay:

Pleeeze, girl friend --- strong opposition and media keeping the govt accountable??

Anyway, the point you seem adamant about ignoring is that the Arab spring (with the exception of Libya-thus far) is about the lack of lives of dignity, that's why the Sodies had to bribe their own populace, not the word Citizens has not been used, because it does not apply.

Like I said, its not perfect, but there are checks and balances. Extensive studies have shown that corruption in dictatorships tend to be larger but hidden while in democracies they tend to be comparatively lesser but with more exposure. For example, Black outflow studies and even corruption studies have put China for example above India by many orders of magnitude. But the media attention would give the perception that corruption in India is much more.


When you say dignity....its specifically political dignity and rights. I insisted on saying that this is about democracy more than economics although it may have played some role. As I've mentioned earlier, if you look at HDI indicators or poverty levels, south Asian countries actually do much worse than most MENA countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but still you have revolutions there but not in S. Asia. The economics is not the major factor. Its the political rights and democracy or rule with consultation or through a proper representative shura or whatever other manner you may call it is the need of the hour.
 
I actually have a copy of the book "clash of civilizations" on my shelf because overall he did a very scholarly job of putting forward his thesis. Its not about Islam the religion as it is about muslim countries mainly in the Middle East region as a civilisational entity that he discusses.

Not like the some Islamphobes you see nowadays with outright falsehoods and hate mongering about iminent takeover of US by radical Islam and the implementation of sharia law and what not.

However, his main idea is to simplify International relations to one or two unifying concepts, and then he uses evidences to back up his concept of basically civilizations being the new source of conflicts. International Relations is a complex subject and if the complexities are not taken into account you end up with a false premise. For example, until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Europe was a mess with mercenary armies killing each other, wars running for 10,20, 30 years without end. The Church using its politico-religious power to cripple growth in science and free thought and widespread intolerance for Jews and other ethnic or sectarian groups. Not to mention the two great WW were all within the "western civilization".
The Clash of civilization thesis does not capture this very important aspect of history which affects International relations to this day.

The Ottoman empire at that time was much advanced technologically at that time compared to Europe. Christians and particularly Jews lived with much more tolerance than Europe. When the Spanish conquest in early 15th century resulted in expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain en masse. It was present day countries like Morocco and Tunisia then under Ottoman tutelage that gave refuge to the refugees. But at the same time the Ottomans were basically seen as a Colonial power and this eventually led to the Arab revolt which was again a clash within the "Islamic civilisation" that has major impact on International relations to this day. Even taking into account the Al qaeda ideology so to speak, it targets muslim dictatorships and power in muslim countries as the primary goal rather than total destruction of the US. The idea of attacking America on 9/11 was to weaken its support to what it perceived as American backed dictators and its enemies became anyone who disagree with them including devout Muslims who don't agree with their political-religious ideology. So you have the full spectrum of non-violent resistance led by say Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan who as a devout muslim drew his inspiration from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet to OBL and his ideology of justifying the killing of innocent people usually muslims. Again the Clash of Civilization doesn't give answers to these important questions.
 
Which political parties broke up Pakistan? PPP and Awami League, both are secular. Who have been ruling the majority of the Muslim states for the last fifty years? People like Ben Ali and Mubarak; all of them secular and treacherous to the core. So, how do you find the Islamists so treacherous? Please look at what is happening in Turkey and compare that to what is happening in Pakistan under the secular rulers.

Sorry to confuse you (again) with the facts and ruin your intact theories, but Pakistan was under a military regime before the 1971 war. The Army together with the intelligence agencies (with the support of the Islamic parties!) declared martial rule after the elections that gave the Bengals the majority in Parliament, and led to their uprising.

You already proved your ignorance on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but for god sake, this is the history of your own country!
 
Dedicated to gentle Ejaz - how now brown cow:


For all those interested, please do read Giles Kepel -- you may find that he articulates many of the ideas you have been thinking of but may not found cogent expression.


The birth of Islamic modernity
By Pepe Escobar


Ten years ago, on the road in AfPak before and after 9/11, the volume of choice in my backpack was a French edition of Gilles Kepel’s Jihad. Night after night, in many a mud brick house and amid endless cups of green tea, I slowly came to embrace its key thesis: that political Islam was in fact going down, not up.

On one side, we had outfits like al-Qaeda, self-designated vanguards bent on waking the Muslim masses from their slumber to unleash a global Islamic revolution; they were in fact Muslim versions of the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Rote Armee Fraktion.

On the other side, we had Islamists like the ones from the Turkish Justice and Development Party, ready to immerse themselves into Western-style parliamentary democracy, betting on the sovereignty of the people, not Allah’s
.

At the height of the "war on terror" - with those B-52s bombing Tora Bora without knowing that Osama bin Laden had already escaped to Pakistan - the tendency in the West was to lump most, if not all Muslims as deranged jihadis.

I agreed with Kepel that "clash of civilizations" was nothing more than a silly, shoddily researched concept instrumentalized by the neo-conservatives to legitimize their "crusade". But that needed some corroboration from history.


Ten years later, one may finally say that Kepel’s analysis was spot on. Hardcore Islamism, al-Qaeda-style, is a Muslim box-office disaster. For all its myriad declinations - in Iraq, in the Maghreb, in the Arabian Peninsula - al-Qaeda is no more than a desperate sect, destined to the dustbin of history as much as those Western-backed dictators a la toppled Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak who used to be the pillars of the Western struggle against radical Islam.

Kepel today directs the program of studies on the Mediterranean and the Middle East at the legendary Political Sciences school in Paris. In an article for Italian daily La Repubblica, he seals for good the victory of Islam as democracy over Islam as "revolutionary" vanguard. The money quote:
"Today the Arab peoples have emerged from that dilemma - squeezed between Ben Ali or bin Laden. They have now re-entered a universal history that has seen the fall of dictatorships in Latin America, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and also the military regimes in non-Arab Muslim countries such as Indonesia and Turkey."

The local meets the universal
And this is the crucial point; Arab peoples are now starting to build their own, hesitant, modernity. Kepel wonders why the first revolution happened in Tunisia, and he finds out that its key slogan was in French: "Ben Ali, degage". ("Ben Ali, go away.") The slogan was faithfully adopted - ipsis litteris - by the Egyptians, in a country where very few people speak French. They adopted this revolutionary call because they heard it on al-Jazeera. This allows Kepel to conclude that these current revolutions are rooted as much in local culture as in universal aspirations.

And yes, although the symptoms are the same - unemployment, poverty, corruption, total absence of freedom - these are diverse revolutions, and fought by the powers that be with diverse strategies. Some add fuel to the fire of confessional or tribal trouble, others bet on their large pockets or immunization to Western interference.

The problem is that the diversity of methods employed by tyrants to smash these revolutions is being misread by hagiographers of empire - so they can better legitimize the aura of selected repressive "good guys". Thus we have Pentagon-linked Robert D Kaplan trying to con public opinion into believing there are enlightened despots (the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, both King Abdullahs, in Saudi Arabia and Jordan) as opposed to unredeemable evil dictators (Muammar Gaddafi).

As if the Shi'ite majority in Bahrain needed the Sunni al-Khalifas to foster the formation of a middle class - the essential pre-condition to the establishment of democracy. The al-Khalifas never gave a damn about fostering a middle class, as only a small Sunni oligarchy profits from their autocratic "business-friendly" system.

And if the reasoning to defend selected tyrants is that some countries have no institutional base for a transition towards democracy, then tribal Libya led by "evil" Gaddafi is in the same package as the Gulf sheikhdoms led by "acceptable" kings and emirs
.

Take it to the bridge
As much as Western modernity is in crisis, this does not mean the world is being assailed by a modern religious war. The belief that Islam and the West are antipodes is the stuff of Fox News-style morons. The world is witnessing a re-Christianization of Europe as much as a re-Evangelization of the US. This proves that modernity and religion are compatible - in the West as well as the Middle East.

They may be coming from different cultural latitudes - the West from the decline of modernity, the Middle East from the decline of religious fundamentalism, just to converge at the same place; a bridge of dialogue between East and West.

So essentially what Kepel is trying to prove is that Europe and the Arab world have no alternative other than to try to build a hybrid civilization - not only in terms of movement of capital, goods and services but as in solid investments in culture and education - from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, with the Mediterranean as a hub. This implies Fortress Europe re-examining its place in the world, and a Mediterranean dialogue not conditioned by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.


It’s a long and treacherous road - with some many Gaddafis and al-Khalifas and Abdullahs that must be chased away. The Arab world has been traumatized for too long - almost a century since colonial powers Britain and France betrayed the Arab nation and carved up its land. The real test of the West's self-appointed "civilizing mission" is now; to welcome, and to help, with all its heart, the Arab world to the realm of modernity.


Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
 
muse, you seem to be obsessed with fitting these arab uprisings into some leftist progressive paradigm - its not really appropriate imo.
 
Dedicated to gentle Ejaz - how now brown cow:


For all those interested, please do read Giles Kepel -- you may find that he articulates many of the ideas you have been thinking of but may not found cogent expression.


The birth of Islamic modernity
By Pepe Escobar


Ten years ago, on the road in AfPak before and after 9/11, the volume of choice in my backpack was a French edition of Gilles Kepel’s Jihad. Night after night, in many a mud brick house and amid endless cups of green tea, I slowly came to embrace its key thesis: that political Islam was in fact going down, not up.

On one side, we had outfits like al-Qaeda, self-designated vanguards bent on waking the Muslim masses from their slumber to unleash a global Islamic revolution; they were in fact Muslim versions of the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Rote Armee Fraktion.

On the other side, we had Islamists like the ones from the Turkish Justice and Development Party, ready to immerse themselves into Western-style parliamentary democracy, betting on the sovereignty of the people, not Allah’s
.

At the height of the "war on terror" - with those B-52s bombing Tora Bora without knowing that Osama bin Laden had already escaped to Pakistan - the tendency in the West was to lump most, if not all Muslims as deranged jihadis.

I agreed with Kepel that "clash of civilizations" was nothing more than a silly, shoddily researched concept instrumentalized by the neo-conservatives to legitimize their "crusade". But that needed some corroboration from history.


Ten years later, one may finally say that Kepel’s analysis was spot on. Hardcore Islamism, al-Qaeda-style, is a Muslim box-office disaster. For all its myriad declinations - in Iraq, in the Maghreb, in the Arabian Peninsula - al-Qaeda is no more than a desperate sect, destined to the dustbin of history as much as those Western-backed dictators a la toppled Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak who used to be the pillars of the Western struggle against radical Islam.

Kepel today directs the program of studies on the Mediterranean and the Middle East at the legendary Political Sciences school in Paris. In an article for Italian daily La Repubblica, he seals for good the victory of Islam as democracy over Islam as "revolutionary" vanguard. The money quote:
"Today the Arab peoples have emerged from that dilemma - squeezed between Ben Ali or bin Laden. They have now re-entered a universal history that has seen the fall of dictatorships in Latin America, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and also the military regimes in non-Arab Muslim countries such as Indonesia and Turkey."

The local meets the universal
And this is the crucial point; Arab peoples are now starting to build their own, hesitant, modernity. Kepel wonders why the first revolution happened in Tunisia, and he finds out that its key slogan was in French: "Ben Ali, degage". ("Ben Ali, go away.") The slogan was faithfully adopted - ipsis litteris - by the Egyptians, in a country where very few people speak French. They adopted this revolutionary call because they heard it on al-Jazeera. This allows Kepel to conclude that these current revolutions are rooted as much in local culture as in universal aspirations.

And yes, although the symptoms are the same - unemployment, poverty, corruption, total absence of freedom - these are diverse revolutions, and fought by the powers that be with diverse strategies. Some add fuel to the fire of confessional or tribal trouble, others bet on their large pockets or immunization to Western interference.

The problem is that the diversity of methods employed by tyrants to smash these revolutions is being misread by hagiographers of empire - so they can better legitimize the aura of selected repressive "good guys". Thus we have Pentagon-linked Robert D Kaplan trying to con public opinion into believing there are enlightened despots (the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, both King Abdullahs, in Saudi Arabia and Jordan) as opposed to unredeemable evil dictators (Muammar Gaddafi).

As if the Shi'ite majority in Bahrain needed the Sunni al-Khalifas to foster the formation of a middle class - the essential pre-condition to the establishment of democracy. The al-Khalifas never gave a damn about fostering a middle class, as only a small Sunni oligarchy profits from their autocratic "business-friendly" system.

And if the reasoning to defend selected tyrants is that some countries have no institutional base for a transition towards democracy, then tribal Libya led by "evil" Gaddafi is in the same package as the Gulf sheikhdoms led by "acceptable" kings and emirs
.

Take it to the bridge
As much as Western modernity is in crisis, this does not mean the world is being assailed by a modern religious war. The belief that Islam and the West are antipodes is the stuff of Fox News-style morons. The world is witnessing a re-Christianization of Europe as much as a re-Evangelization of the US. This proves that modernity and religion are compatible - in the West as well as the Middle East.

They may be coming from different cultural latitudes - the West from the decline of modernity, the Middle East from the decline of religious fundamentalism, just to converge at the same place; a bridge of dialogue between East and West.

So essentially what Kepel is trying to prove is that Europe and the Arab world have no alternative other than to try to build a hybrid civilization - not only in terms of movement of capital, goods and services but as in solid investments in culture and education - from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, with the Mediterranean as a hub. This implies Fortress Europe re-examining its place in the world, and a Mediterranean dialogue not conditioned by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.


It’s a long and treacherous road - with some many Gaddafis and al-Khalifas and Abdullahs that must be chased away. The Arab world has been traumatized for too long - almost a century since colonial powers Britain and France betrayed the Arab nation and carved up its land. The real test of the West's self-appointed "civilizing mission" is now; to welcome, and to help, with all its heart, the Arab world to the realm of modernity.


Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Thanks, that is an interesting article. I hope that it is correct, although I have some serious doubts about it, especially the marching of the Arab masses towards liberal democracy.
 
in israel non - jews are being asked to pledge allegiance to israel as a specifically jewish entity.

And....? In Pakistan all the citizens (including non-Muslims) are not expected to be loyal to their country?

After all, Israel is a Jewish state.
 
r3

You say:

you seem to be obsessed with fitting these arab uprisings into some leftist progressive paradigm - its not really appropriate imo
.

Do I? This is a very interesting critique you offer - I encourage you to expand on this -- in particular "leftist progressive" -- what the heck is that? and why is it inappropriate?

What is Giles Kepel saying about Huntington? How does Wolfowitz refer or characterize to the local populations of the "arc of instability" and their importance to the US? As the US struggles with decline based on financial scams and as the narrative the US offers the world finds fewer takers, a most curious situation is developing, large majorities in Muslim majority countries simultaneous resent and admire the US - how does one explain this??

And finally the notion of Islamic "modernity" -- I encourage to re-examine the term "modern" from it's art history origin, onwards --- To the degree that there is such a thing as Islamic "modernity", what values define it, at least in the present

And Hybrid cultures, haven't all cultures that have decided that war is not an option, done this???

If this stuff is leftist - Guilty and if it's "progressive, again, guilty -- and if it's sane?? what then??
 

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