Alternative Voices from Dar al-Islam: Bangladeshi rocker, Mac Hacque on Jihad

Here's the second installment of my 10-part interview with Bangladeshi rocker, poet, and pundit, Maqsoodul Haque, lead singer of the band Maqsood O'dHAKA. (Part 1 is here.)

So why the interest in global jihad, Mac?

Although I grew up to become an agnostic by choice, my childhood and teen years were thoroughly inculcated with Islamic culture. My mother was a pious believer and insisted I study the Koran – which a cleric would come to teach me.

Since we didn’t understand a word in Arabic, our knowledge of the Sura (or Koranic verses) was all via word of mouth. The way my mother explained what the Koran said, however, pointedly differed from what the cleric was teaching us. And because we went to a Christian missionary school, the cleric would criticize us for using English to communicate among ourselves and admonish us for having Hindu friends. ‘Mingling with infidels!’ he would say. I remember one day mother had a serious disagreement with the cleric over this issue and very soon, to our delight, a younger and more educated one replaced him.

On the Muslim Sabbath (Fridays), I was dragged to the nearby mosque by father to hear the mullahs instill the fear of aLLAH in my little heart (as they still do today in many mosques). Compassion and mercy were rarely the subject of the sermons. The mullahs would instead exhort at length about history, the great Jihads, and that the Prophets of Islam had fought to ‘slaughter the Infidels.’ All of this had the effect of activating the deeper introspection cells within my brain.

Father was a liberal and would painstakingly address all my innocent curiosity about Jihad. The first lesson I learned from him was that the greatest Jihad is against the self, the battle to suppress greed, hatred, anger, mischief, or waywardness - and the struggle to be caring and humble.

He also explained the spirit of Ijtihad and how the world had changed since the earliest days of Islam. He told me that Islam had assimilated many cultures, including our own, and its spread to almost all corners of the globe would not have been possible had it not had a peaceful or humane mandate.

I was imparted with this one solid lesson which has remained with me all of my adult life: that Jihad of weapons is the lowest form of Jihad, and one that aLLAH dislikes the most.

Tomorrow we'll hear about Mac's ringside side on the jihads that began in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...So stay tuned.

But meanwhile, check out another one of his band's video recordings here via YouTube.

The lowdown on Iran's Al Quds Force

That is, the group that the U.S. military is now firmly convinced was behind the killing of 5 American soldiers in Karbala, Iraq in January. As RFE/RL reports:

A top U.S. military official told a press conference in Baghdad today that the information [that convinced them] comes from a senior Hizballah operative captured in southern Iraq in March.

The Hizballah operative referred to is Ali Musa Dakduk, who was captured in March. Dakduk served in the organization for 24 years. He was described as a "surrogate" Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps' Quds Force by the military official, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner. As the RFE/RL report continues:

"Quds Force, along with Hizballah instructors, train approximately 20 to 60 Iraqis at a time, sending them back to Iraq, organized into these special groups," Bergner said. "They were being taught how to use EFPs [explosively formed penetrators], mortars, rockets, as well as intelligence, sniper, and kidnapping operations."

Bergner said Dakduk was a contact point between the Quds Force and a breakaway militant Shi'ite group. He said that group had been led by Qays al-Khaz'ali, a former spokesman for radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

So what is this Iranian Quds Force?

Here's how the Quds Force was described in a February RFE/RL interview with one Mahan Abedin, the director of research at the London-based Center for the Study of Terrorism and the editor of "Islamism Digest" journal:

RFE/RL: What is [the Quds Force] main function and in what countries has it been operating in the past two decades?

Abedin: Its essential function is to conduct special operations outside of Iran, and historically -- over the past 25 years or so -- it's been involved in the following theaters: involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s; it had extensive involvement in Lebanon; extensive involvement in Iraq throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, when they were working with Iraqi dissident groups and the Kurdish faction in the north to undermine Saddam [Hussein's] regime. [The Quds Force] was extensively involved in Bosnia in the early 1990s; it was in charge of supplying arms to the Bosnian Muslims. Their operations -- which have rarely received any coverage -- [included] their involvement in southern Sudan in the early 1990s, when they worked with the Sudanese army. So it's been involved in various theaters."

RFE/RL: What role does the Quds Force play in Iraq, and how does it operate?

Abedin: What they do essentially is work with militias and armed factions in Iraq, and they enable them to gain a critical advantage over their adversaries -- and their adversaries are, first and foremost, the Sunni factions.

RFE/RL: Does that mean they provide them with training?

Abedin: It depends on what you mean by "training." They would certainly give them highly specialized training in forming networks whose primary function is to gather and manipulate intelligence, and that's the primary battle in Iraq. . . If you talk about arms training, that is not necessarily the case, because a lot of these [fighters] already have that training.

Later on in the interview, Abedin disputes the notion that the Quds Force could possibly operate independently of Tehran:

Abedin: The Quds Force, although it's a highly specialized department, it is subject to strict, iron-clad military discipline. It's completely controlled by the military hierarchy of the IRGC, and the IRGC is very tightly controlled by the highest levels of the administration in Iran. If the Quds Force was going around blowing up American soldiers, then that would be definitely sanctioned by the highest levels of the Iranian government. But my point is that they're not doing that, because Iranian policy in Iraq is not about that. Iranian policy in Iraq is to give proper training and support to Iran's natural allies in Iraq in order to influence their political positioning in post-occupation Iraq. The Iranians are far too smart, in my view, to challenge American power in Iraq directly.

As to the size of this force:

Abedin: I think its core doesn't go beyond 800 people. These kind of specialized departments tend to be very small. But it's a very capable force -- their people are extremely talented [and] they tend to be the best people in the IRGC.

Look at this strange coincidence

Check out who Hamas is now fighting in Gaza. From the New York Times:

Hamas on Monday arrested the spokesman of a shadowy group holding a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter....

Hamas has demanded that the Army of Islam, led by a violent Gaza clan, free Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped on a Gaza City street on March 12.

But the group, whose formerly close relations with Hamas have soured, has demanded that Britain first release a radical Islamic cleric with ties to al-Qaida. It has threatened to kill Johnston if Hamas tried to free him by force.

Now consider what else the Times reports:

The Army of Islam threatened to release what it said were damaging documents about Hamas if its spokesman, Abu Khatab al-Maqdisi, remained in custody. The group also kidnapped 10 members of Hamas....

Al-Maqdisi was arrested while trying to fire on members of a Hamas-allied security force, said Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, who denied any link between al-Maqdisi's arrest and efforts to free Johnston.

To me this suggests that Hamas is now fighting the same type of insurgents the U.S. is in Iraq - that is, Al Qaeda linked insurgents.

Could the surge plan be working?

Preliminary numbers suggest that it may in fact well be. Even the New York Times reports:

Iraqi officials estimated that civilian deaths nationwide had dropped 36 percent in June, down to about 1,200. Civilian casualties in May had topped 1,900, they said. The Web site icasualties.org, which tabulates news reports of civilian deaths, put the number of deaths in June at about 1,342, down from 1,980 in May.

In Baghdad, 730 civilians were reported killed in June from assassinations, bombs or small-arms fire. That was down from 1,070 in May, a decline of almost 32 percent, an Interior Ministry official told The New York Times.

The cost of this good news for Iraqis, it should be duly noted, has largely been borne by U.S. military members who made the ultimate sacrifice for Iraq. As the Times reports:

With the increase in American troops starting early this year, there has also been a rise in soldiers’ deaths, although somewhat fewer American troops died in June, 101, than in April, 104, or May, when deaths reached 126.

Not to mention what all this is costing the American taxpayer.

Lord Ahmed defends himself against, he says, being "deliberately misquoted"

I finally got around to asking Lord Ahmed, the first Muslim peer in Britain's House of Lords if he had been properly quoted by the London Telegraph.

The Telegraph story I was referring to ran Monday with this headline: "Muslim peer compares Rushdie to 9/11 bombers." According to the London daily, Lord Ahmed responded to a query from the French newspaper Le Figaro on Salman Rushdie's knighthood with the rhetorical question: "What would one say if the Saudi or Afghan governments honoured the martyrs of the September 11 attacks on the United States?"

Now, I happen to know - and, full disclosure, like - Lord Ahmed. I got to know him because I interviewed him at length in London last January, when I was there to blog about the Clash of Civilizations debate between London Mayor Ken Livingstone and my sometimes coauthor, Daniel Pipes. (See my write-up here.)

I knew the Lord could be provocative. I did see him stand up and proclaim "[But] I am an Islamist" in front of a worried crowd that had assembled in a Whitehall lecture room to hear the scholar Bat Ye'or expound on her Eurabia thesis about the coming Islamist takeover of Europe.

As Lord Ahmed told me later, he did this in an effort to infuse what he thought was some reality into the crowd's alarmism. Were these people really seriously fearing the likes of him? - a loyal British citizen and a Lord no less, whose forebears had been serving the British crown for generations, first as colonial subjects and now as citizens? His forebears, as he went on to remind the crowd, had like many British Muslims, even in some cases sacrificed their lives defending the British flag.

His appeal fell largely on deaf ears. My reading of the crowd's reaction to his remarks was that before he opened his mouth that afternoon in January, Lord Ahmed had long been written off as a person of suspicion. As someone in attendance later pointed out, after all, it was Lord Ahmed who had invited the notorious anti-Semite, Israel Shamir, to address the House of Lords.

According to Stephen Pollard who wrote about this in an editorial published by The (London) Times not long after this event:

The gist of Shamir/Jermas’s speech at the meeting can be gleaned from its title, “Jews and the Empire”. It included observations such as: “All the [political] parties are Zionist-infiltrated.” “Your newspapers belong to Zionists . . . Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media, this mainstay of Imperial thinking.” “In the Middle East we have just one reason for wars, terror and trouble — and that is Jewish supremacy drive . . . in Iraq, the US and its British dependency continue the same old fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy in the Middle East.” “The Jews like an Empire . . . This love of Empire explains the easiness Jews change their allegiance . . . Simple minds call it ‘treacherous behaviour’, but it is actually love of Empire per se.” “Now, there is a large and thriving Muslim community in England . . . they are now on the side of freedom, against the Empire, and they are not afraid of enforcers of Judaic values, Jewish or Gentile. This community is very important in order to turn the tide.”

In his defense, Lord Ahmed told me that at the time he had invited Shamir to address his fellow peers, he had no idea how vicious some of the man's views were. He had met Shamir in Jerusalem, of all places, and he had been introduced to him as an Israeli who was uniquely sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. It was on this basis that he had invited him to come to the House of Lords.

Though it became abundantly clear to Lord Ahmed during the course of Shamir's talk that any sympathy his invited speaker might have had toward the Palestinians seemed to be rooted in a corresponding hatred for Jews, Lord Ahmed admitted to me that it never once occurred to him to shut his invited guest down. He did feel free to interrupt him a few times, though. And he remained fully confident throughout Shamir's lecture that, as he recalled for me, his fellow peers were also sophisticated enough to draw their own sensible conclusions and raise their own points of contention with his notorious guest.

He was unwilling to apologize for having allowed such a person into such a respectable venue, he said, because in his view it was better to have such controversial views publicly debated as opposed to suppressed. The gist of his argument, as I recall, was that such ideas should be aired so they can be judged on their merits - or deficiencies - as the case may be.

In a similar vein, he told me, he would not have dreamed of trying to prevent Bat Ye'or from speaking that day at Whitehall. Even though, as he suggested, her argument struck him as remarkably similar to Shamir's. Only according to Ye'or, he pointed out, it is the Muslims as opposed to the Jews who hold the evil empire designs.

Anyway, based on the hours of conversations I have had with Lord Ahmed, and the numerous emails we have exchanged, I couldn't believe that Lord Ahmed was now referring to the 9/11 hijackers as martyrs - as in martyrs who had died for Islam, his beloved religion - even if a London newspaper was saying it were so.

Lord Ahmed, after all, was the same Lord Ahmed who had proposed replacing the term "Islamic terrorists" with "apostate terrorists." He was also the Lord Ahmed who had advocated deporting radical clerics such as Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri - a position that earned him a fatwa calling for his death. And, he was the same Lord Ahmed who headed the committee that proposed having British imams pass English exams before being allowed to preach in British mosques. He even went so far as to recommend that these new English-language certified imams should then be monitored to ensure that wouldn't use their now proven facility with the Queen's English to inculcate an even wider audience with values incompatible with British citizenship.

These were not the positions of someone who would logically see the hijackers as martyrs in my view. Had he then misspoken to the French newspaper? Had the reporter somehow gotten it wrong? Were his remarks mistranslated? Or - horrors - had I misread him? To find out, I contacted him by email and this was his response:

I have always believed that the terrorists who attacked the twin towers on 9/11 and the terrorists who attacked London on 7/7 were despicable, evil fanatics.

The point I was trying to make with the French Reporter as well as with all the other reporters , was that Rushdie's knighthood is to Muslims as if the evil terrorists of 9/11 were to be awarded by the Afghans or the Saudis. We would be horrified.

Now, I have to say, missing from his comments were the clarification that I would have expected - that terrorism and blasphemy should in no way be equated, that one is clearly a more despicable crime against humanity than the other.

But in Islam, it should be recalled, blasphemy by a Muslim is apostasy, a crime punishable by death. So, while one might not like this sort of equivocating, I do think that in the end, Lord Ahmed did correctly peg the reason for the Muslim outrage.

And notice that he never suggested that Rushdie, like the terrorists, was either evil or despicable. He was just saying Muslims were horrified that Britain had bestowed one of its highest honors on someone who they, rightly or wrongly, believed had attacked them by having insulted their religion.

Did he mean to imply in his statement that knighting Salman Rushdie simply wasn't the best way to introduce the Muslim world to the merits of freedom of expression I asked him in a follow-up phone call. Yes, he said, this was certainly not the best way to convince Muslims of the importance of free speech.

"The Bangladesh Poet of Impropriety"

In an effort to bring you alternative views from the Islamic world, here is the first of my 10-part email correspondence with Maqsoodul Haque, who, as he writes on one of his many blogs is a "Bangladesh based anti-establishment radical thinker, columnist and jazz musician."

As a lead-up to this interview series, a few days ago I posted this YouTube video of one of his recent concerts.

So who are you Mac?

Just an average Bangladeshi with a lot of varying interest, the foremost being a passion for music and one that has been a part of my life for almost thirty one years. In my family tree which I can track back to six generations I find no musicians and I guess I learnt it all from the hours spent listening to the radio. My parents were poor and couldn’t afford music lessons for me, but my stern yet affectionate father noting my enthusiasm encouraged me to sing along with the radio. The ‘shower’ is where I probably graduated next and where I would lock myself in and sing to my hearts content. Without an audience I would conjure mental images of playing to thousands and all of it miraculously added up to my real life experience! I must be blessed? To date, I remain musically illiterate i.e. I cannot play any instrument, not the guitar, I do not know what a chord or a note is, or which key I am singing, but my discography has about sixty songs that I wrote, composed, and sang and made popular – so I must be doing something TERRIBLY RIGHT. I have ten albums to my credit, the most recent being in October of 2006. What amazes me is the fan following I have and last week when I was at a FM station I was deluged by over 300 text messages by a generation of listeners that wasn’t even born when my earliest recordings were released. I average about fifty live concerts a year.

Tomorrow I'll be posting his answer to the question: "Why the interest in global jihad?"

Meanwhile, enjoy another of his video recordings. Mac, incidentally, is the lead singer of the group, or, as he puts it, "I am the guy with a mullah beard and 'Gumcha' on my head."

On Saddam's non-relationship with Al Qaeda

Just when you're sure all the intelligence was sexed up prior to the Iraq invasion, comes this account from a former Defense Department intelligence analyst in today's Washington Post. Christina Shelton, who was in a position to know what she is talking about, suggests that in fact, the intelligence was sexed up after - for example in George Tenet's post-mortem of his career as the CIA director:

On Aug. 15, 2002, I presented my part of a composite Pentagon briefing on al-Qaeda and Iraq to George Tenet, then CIA director. In his recent book, "At the Center of the Storm," Tenet wrote that I said in opening remarks that "there is no more debate," "no further analysis is required" and "it is an open-and-shut case."

I never said those things. In fact, I said the covert nature of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda made it difficult to know its full extent; al-Qaeda's security precautions and Iraq's need to cloak its activities with terrorist networks precluded a full appreciation of their relationship. Tenet also got the title of the briefing wrong. It was "Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qa'ida," not "Iraq and al-Qa'ida -- Making the Case."

That day I summarized a body of mostly CIA reporting (dating from 1990 to 2002), from a variety of sources, that reflected a pattern of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda, including high-level contacts between Iraqi senior officials and al-Qaeda, training in bomb making, Iraqi offers of safe haven, and a nonaggression agreement to cooperate on unspecified areas. My position was that analysts were not addressing these reports since much of the material did not surface in finished, disseminated publications.

As Shelton goes on to eviscerate Tenet:

It's notable that on Oct. 7, 2002, Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stating that "our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida is evolving." He wrote:

."We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade" and of "the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad."

. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression" and that "al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."

· "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action."

And she concludes with this coup de grâce:

A more complete understanding of Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda will emerge when historians can exploit the numerous seized documents free from the politics of the Iraq war. For his part, Tenet, who was at the center of the political thicket, placed himself on both sides of the issue: providing intelligence on al-Qaeda and Iraq's relationship while at the same time inferring that no ties existed, only "concerns."

Are last night's would-be bombers in London related to the Harrow gang?

This ever-connecting mosiac, is all I have to say.

ABC News blog, The Blotter, reports:

British police have a "crystal clear" picture of the man who drove the bomb-rigged silver Mercedes outside a London nightclub, and officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com he bears "a close resemblance" to a man arrested by police in connection with another bomb plot but released for lack of evidence.

The bomb plot being referred to here is the Harrow Street gang. This gang plotted to blow up all sorts of places in Britain and the U.S. The ringleader, one Dhiren Barot, a Hindu convert to Islam had close enough ties to Al Qaeda that he worked directly with KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and after KSM was arrested in 2003, he was able to call a meeting with the Al Qaeda leaders in South Waziristan.

And here is an amazing photo of the Blue Mosque in Turkey

Blue Mosque, detail, originally uploaded by Timothy Neesam.

Friday prayers, Senossa, Mali

Photo courtesy of Steffan via Flickr

Mother and child, Nigeria

Mother and child, Nigeria, originally uploaded by Soumik.

West Africa does seem to be of increasing interest.....

But is America's interest about a. terrorism, b. oil, or c. both? (Full disclosure: Both are valid national interests as far as I'm concerned.)

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. military is putting together a new command, Africom, to bolster West African countries. As the Journal writes:

The effort, already under way in Benin, is an example of the type of security and social partnering the U.S. military hopes to replicate under a new U.S. command center focused on Africa. The idea is to bolster fragile nations and prevent failed states from breeding radical groups, like the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Now consider this context:

The move comes as the world's biggest oil companies -- including U.S.-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and France's Total SA -- are investing billions of dollars to boost production in Africa. . .

In most months, the energy-producing countries of West Africa -- primarily Nigeria and Angola, but also Gabon and the Republic of Congo -- ship as much or more oil to the U.S. as Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.

Incidentally, this isn't just about American interests, violence and oil-smuggling cost African nations - and oil companies in the region - hundreds of millions of dollars a year, says the Journal.

To assuage concerns that any American military presence in the region will only invite terrorists, Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told the Journal that only in "extraordinary circumstances in extremis after all other options had been exhausted" would any type of military intervention ever be contemplated.

Libya was was singled out as being particularly cold to this new plan. More typical, suggested the Journal, was this response from a street vendor in Benin: "Beninese like the U.S. Having the U.S. here would help us, but it could bring terrorists," he says.

Tehran grows more isolated by the day

Agence France Presse reports that Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit is accusing Iran of being behind Gaza's recent seizure of Gaza, and of creating problems in Iraq too. As the AFP reports via The (Australian) Age:

"Iran's policies encouraged Hamas to do what it has done in Gaza and this represents a threat for Egypt's national security because Gaza is a stone's throw from Egypt," the minister said in comments carried by the Al-Masri Al-Yom newspaper.

"The Iranian influence in Iraq also represents a threat for Egyptian and Arab national security. This obliges Cairo to restrict its relations with Tehran," he said.

As the newspaper goes on:

Closing ranks against Hamas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has invited Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders to a summit on Sunday.

Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, on the current situation

Described as "their unofficial poet laureate" by the The Economist, the magazine publishes Darwish's reaction to, as the magazine puts it, "the internecine fighting that culminated, during one-blood-soaked week, in what some fear could be a fatal schism in their putative state":

June amazed us on its fortieth anniversary: If we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hand so as not to forget!

The fortieth anniversary Darwish refers to here is that of the Six Day War, the war in which Israel defeated the militarized Arab states in less than a week.

The defeat was so humiliating for the Arab leaders that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading Arab Nationalist at the time, wanted to resign from power. The Egyptians protested this move, and Nasser, as is typical in the region, remained in office until he died.

Regardless of the loyalty Egyptians felt towards Nasser, his political program, the idea that hte Arab states would draw strength from and unify around the idea that they were all Arabs, united by culture and language, would be supplanted by a new unifying force: Islam as the solution to the region's problems.

Hamas is one of the groups who was able to capitalize on this belief.

As to what Darwish thinks will happen to the Palestinians, as he continues in his poem:

O future: do not ask us: who are you?
And what do you want from me?
For we too do not know.

A Classicist takes the pulse of the modern Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson, an expert on the Ancient Greeks, and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, opines in today's NRO:

On the debacle in Iraq he writes:

...the United States is taking an enormous toll on jihadists, and despite the terrible cost in blood and treasure, has not given up on a constitutional government in Iraq.

As to what's going on in Kurdistan:

...Kurdistan is emerging as a success few envisioned, refuting some conventional wisdom about the incompatibility of capitalism and constitutional government with Middle Eastern Islam.

On the Sunni Arab states:

The Sunni front-line states, who subsidized jihadists and still enjoy our misery in Iraq, but they are now terrified that these killers, in league with the Iranians, will turn on them. The net result is not just that some Sunnis are helping us in Iraq, but that they are being urged to for the first time by those in the Arab world, who would prefer to see the Iraqi government, rather than the terrorists, succeed.

And on Iran's quest for regional hegemony:

Theocratic Iran is not exactly as “empowered” as is generally alleged, but in the greatest crisis of its miserable existence. As the mullahs up the ante in the region, they could very soon not only lose Iraq, but also their own dictatorship. Trying to oppose the West in Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank is taking an enormous financial toll, as is the general isolation from the world community.

With oil prices at an all-time high, Iran can't provide gasoline for its own people, who resent the billions spent instead on Arab terrorists abroad. If oil were to dip from near $70 to $50-55 a barrel, the regime would face abject bankruptcy.

Next on Syria, Iran's loyal client-state:

Syria for all its terror still can't overthrow the government in Lebanon, but has managed the impossible: Not only does the Arab world seek to isolate it, but France and the United States are cooperating to thwart it in Lebanon.

On Hamas coup d'etat so to speak:

Hamas is high on victory in Gaza for now, but all it has accomplished is to further concentrate its nexus of terror into one small miserable — and quite vulnerable — locale in the midst of Jordan, Israel, and Egypt, while sacrificing the Palestinians greatest advantage: deniability of culpability. It will be harder now for the tired good cop/bad cop excuses, “militant wing,” etc. and all the other justifications for terror that the Palestinians use. Since Hamas bragged that it had routed (it matters less whether true or false) the Palestinian Authority from Gaza, the next barrage of rocket attacks from there, rightly or wrongly, will liberate Israel in its response from the past worries of collateral damage.

And finally, how the "Hezbollah victory" in Lebanon must look in hindsight from the perspective of the victors:

For all the talk of losing the Lebanon War, it is Iran and Syria, not Israel, that are stuck with billions in reconstruction costs for their battered Shiite pawns on the front lines.

If you think Israelis treat Palestinians bad, look how their Arab brothers treat them

Iraqslogger reports:

The plight of Palestinian refugees fleeing violence in Iraq and stranded in camps on the Syrian-Iraqi border is continuing to deteriorate as the summer heat intensifies and a solution remains elusive.

There is currently one camp on the Syrian side of the border, one in no-man's land and one on the Iraqi side of the border housing Palestinian refugees.

As the summer heat has increased, with temperatures now reaching 50 degrees Celsius, living conditions in the desert have become increasingly hazardous with snakes, scorpions and sand storms.

"The weather is very, very hot and people are becoming very nervous and upset," said one Palestinian in Al-Tanf camp, situated on no-man's land between Iraq and Syria. "We can't live here, it's too difficult. We need help, particularly air coolers."

"Children in particular are developing medical conditions that they've never had before simply because of the high heat and dust storms," said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Syria. The refugees are becoming increasingly desperate.

Iraqi refugees, by contrast, haven't been herded into such camps. I wonder what the difference is - that's right, the Palestinians aren't really human - they're just political pawns to be moved around the region's chessboard - or at least that seems to be the Arab view.

Gas is cheap in Iran - well, if you can get it

Look at this interesting graphic from Foreign Policy comparing what it costs to fill up a Honda Civic:



But as was widely reported today, while Iranians may have about the lowest gas prices in the world, Tehran just announced last night that gas rations would now be in effect.

Apparently some Iranians weren't too happy about this - up to 17 gas stations were reportedly set on fire by people protesting the government's new policy. As the Associated Press reports via the International Herald Tribune:

The president has come under growing criticism _ even from conservatives who once supported him _ for dramatically rising housing and food prices in the past year. Many fear the increase in fuel costs will further increase inflation.

"This man, Ahmadinejad, has damaged all things. The timing of the rationing is just one case," said Reza Khorrami, a 27-year-old teacher who was among those lining up at one Tehran gas station before midnight on Tuesday.

I'm reminded of the line from Hamlet. Ahmadinejad now seems to be in the process of hoisting himself with his own petard.

And just I was feeling a bit smug myself...

Indulging in some of my own self-congratulation, feeling that well, in the end, it will be we optimists who prevail (see post below if you have no idea what I'm talking about here), I then have a severe reality check when I see this New York Times story: "Truck Bomb Hits Baghdad Mosque, and 61 Are Killed."

You should check out Alissa Rubin's multimedia presentation from the scene of the aftermath to fully appreciate the horror of what just happened.

But, in case you can't, here's a glimpse from the Times written report:

"It was like an electrocution,” said Najim Abdul Wahid, 45, a carpenter who was working in the square at the time. “I saw a flash. When I was able to stand up again, I saw many charred bodies in the streets. People were screaming, calling for help. I saw many people burning inside their cars. Charred bodies mixed and melted with charred cars.”

Iraqis blamed the usual suspects for the bombing, Rubin reports (duly noted - they didn't blame Mossad - yet):

Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people from burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.

“He is a paid terrorist, not a human being,” he said. “The families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated. They had no faces.”

Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.

“Al Qaeda is like an octopus with many arms and hands,” he said. “This bombing was a challenge to the American and Iraqi army; they cannot get rid of these terrorists.”

Others in the neighborhood went further, accusing the Americans of helping Al Qaeda, which most people believe is responsible for the majority of the suicide bombings.

A man who identified himself only as Qassim, some of whose friends were killed in the large open parking lot across from the mosque, shouted: “The Americans finance Al Qaeda. They secure places and routes for them to do this.”

But others said they saw the bombing as an effort by religious extremists to inflame sectarian divisions. “People here realize that there is a conspiracy to sow hatred between us,” said Mr. Jaff.

Smug alert: Beware of good news from Iraq

USA Today has an interesting set of graphics on the changes in death patterns in Iraq.

The number of civilians killed in multiple-fatality bombings targeting civilians (read terrorist attacks) seems to be plummeting.

Jan 379
Feb 622
Mar 617
Apr 634
May 325
Jun 38 (through June 8)

Now I admit, the June numbers are way too preliminary, but still, there does seem to have been some positive trending.

The cost of this progress, you should note, has been U.S. and Iraqi military lives. As USA Today reports, April and May were the deadliest two-month period since the war began for U.S. forces. And Iraqi military and police fatalities topped 300 in April compared to January's death toll of 91.

Now whether this positive trend will continue - well, I hope it will. But then I'm not someone who is invested in the idea that the U.S. should fail in Iraq.

Call me cynical, but I sense that some people want the U.S. to fail in Iraq only so they can say I told you it would be a disaster. They don't care about the consequences of such a failure, they are just desperate to feel smug.

This guy must have a bad case of Islamophobia....Oh wait, he can't, he's....Muuusssssssssss

Here's what the doctor is ordering for Hamas

(No wonder this guy no longer practices medicine.)

The BBC is reporting that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's second-in-command (or his he in charge now? -- it has been a long time since we've heard from the top Al Qaeda leader) is suggesting that Hamas unite with Al Qaeda.

Apparently this idea occurred to him after seeing that Hamas was finally in control of its own territory in Gaza. Of course, as he says in the videotaped message, "taking over power is not a goal but a means to implement God's word on earth." By this he most likely is tacitly suggesting that now is the time for Hamas to ensure that not only the human sexes are segregated now in Gaza, but also the vegetables too.

Or maybe, after having seen where that brilliant stroke of governance led (the Anbar Province revolt for those of you who only look at the pictures on this blog), maybe he didn't purposefully mention this now because perhaps he's thinking that it would make more sense to first shut all girls' schools down, ban women (and laughter) from the public square, forbid women from working (including, of course, even widows who might be the only remaining breadwinners for their families), crush the homosexuals to death, outlaw kites, toys, videos, music on the radio, and, yes, pet songbirds, too, and convert all the soccer stadiums to chop-chop squares (that is places where the public can gather to see people beheaded, adulteresses stoned, and thieves relieved of their hands). At that point, he seems to tacitly suggest here, nobody will rebel when they're asked to segregate their vegetables.

Great advice, doctor and I bet Hamas is dumb enough to follow it too.