Posts – mustafamalik.com

Bangladesh, Pakistan trade luck

Mustafa Malik July 10, 2019

I FEEL GOOD about living to see this day. Bangladesh, whose creation I once opposed, is belying my forebodings about its future. It has surpassed Pakistan and, in some cases, the economic behemoth of India in economic development and well-being. Bangladeshi economic performance glows brighter when you compare that with the near-meltdown of the Pakistani economy.

Here’s how Bangladesh compares with Pakistan and India economically and socially, as shown by four key indicators. The first three are from the World Bank database, and the fourth from that of UNICEF.

Economic growth rates: Bangladesh – 7.9%; Pakistan – 5.4%; India – 7%.

Per capita income: Bangladesh – $1,700; Pakistan – $1,400; India – $2,000.

Life expectancy: Bangladesh – 73 years; Pakistan – 67 years; India – 69 years.

Literacy rate (15-24 years): Bangladesh – 73%; Pakistan – 56%; India – 69%.

First, a bit of the genesis of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 1947 old Pakistan was carved out of two Muslim-majority slices of the Indian subcontinent, separated by 1600 miles of Hindu-majority India. East Pakistan, agrarian and flood-prone, was inhabited mostly by impoverished Bengalee Muslims. West Pakistan, especially its Punjab province, throbbed with industries and flourishing farms and was the locale of most of the country’s armed forces.

Bengalee Muslims had struggled onerously to create the “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan while the ethnically diverse Muslims of what became West Pakistan were opposed or indifferent to the Pakistan movement. The irony of ironies, 24 years after the creation of Pakistan, Bengalee Muslims in East Pakistan split Pakistan to make their eastern province independent Bangladesh. They had become fed up with army rule, economic exploitation and political suppression by West Pakistan’s mostly Punjabi military, feudal and political elites. Ever since Pakistan is what had been West Pakistan.

Bangladesh’s quite rapid economic progress and strides toward modernization have been an agreeable surprise to me because I had underestimated the progressive and creative potential of my fellow East Pakistanis. I believed that the relatively backward East Pakistan, with its stagnant economy, couldn’t survive, or at any rate would suffer, without the support of Pakistan’s western wing. In my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital, I argue repeatedly that the “real task before us,” East Pakistanis, was to restore democracy in Pakistan, not dismember the country, which we had fought hard to create. East Pakistanis accounted for 56 percent of the Pakistani population, and I maintained that under a democratic system that would ensure free and fair elections, “we will rule Pakistan,” ending military rule and economic exploitation of the Punjabi clique.

On the morning of March 22, 1969, I was abducted at dagger-point from Dhaka by a dozen or so rowdy activists of the Bangladesh independence movement. My kidnappers called me a “Punjabi agent” and tormented me for my “filthy writings” against the Bangladeshi “national liberation.” They eventually let me go with the warning that if I dared to write “one more word” against their movement, my corpse would be “floating in the Burigunga,” the river snuggling Dhaka’s southern border.

I soon dropped my byline from my commentaries and the Observer’s publisher, Hamidul Huq Choudhury, arranged to send me out to work as the paper’s London bureau chief. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that I was among about 200 East Pakistanis who had become persona non grata in the newly independent Bangladesh. I immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

From America I began to watch Bangladesh’s steady economic rise, after two decades of economic downturn, a famine and two military coups. It led first to my confusion and then soul searching and research. From my inquiries I realized that Bangladeshis’ innate spirit of enterprise and ingenuity, which I suspect party derives from their genetic inheritance, have been propelling their rapid rise. I was at once embarrassed and elated. Embarrassed because of my underrating Bangladeshis’ capabilities and opposing their independence struggle, and elated because of the accomplishments of my fellow natives of the new nation.

Bangladeshis are a hybrid racial strain, belonging to Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Australoid other racial stocks. In 2014 I ran into two German researchers in Dhaka who were investigating the genetic components of Bengalee ethnicity in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, also inhabited by Bengalees. Ninety-eight percent of Bangladeshis are ethnic Bengalees. Fritz von Meyer, from Lower Saxony, told me that the “very rich racial mixture” in their genome had made Bengalees more inquisitive and innovative than people with less variegated racial and ethnic genealogies. I realized that prolonged military-political suppression by the Punjabi-led West Pakistani elites had, partly, kept that ingenuity and creativity from flowering among Bengalees in East Pakistan.

Today I see the same deplorable drama playing out in what is left of Pakistan. I didn’t research the genetic or societal characteristics of Pakistan’s diverse ethnic communities, but Punjabis are known for their talent and enterprise, Pashtun for their indomitable courage and perseverance, Baloch for their vigorous spirit de corps and artistic aptitudes, and so on. If harnessed, these gifts of character and abilities could catapult Pakistan into high levels of progress and prosperity.

Yet Pakistan is facing the deepest crisis in its history. In April a Pakistani economist warned that his country had “reached the point of collapse.” Kaiser Bengali said, “The alarm bells are ringing. We have no choice but to beg. I fear starvation, poverty and unemployment.”

Prime Minister Imran Khan, once an internationally famed cricket star, came to power promising to create 10 million new jobs and 5 million new houses and revitalize the economy. Little did he know that the burden of running an impoverished country with domineering army generals looking over his shoulders is quite a bit heavier than running through the cricket field with leg pads, thigh guard, helmet and gloves.

Pakistan’s growth rate has plummeted to a nine-year low, to 4 percent; 35 percent of its population languishes below the poverty line. Yet curbs imposed by the IMF bars the government from launching public sector programs that could have alleviated the hardships of the poor. The IMF has given Pakistan $6 billion in loans to help stabilize the economy, imposing constraints on the government’s economic and financial policies. Meanwhile, prices of sugar, flour, electricity and most other essential commodities and services are rising unremittingly. On top of it, the Pakistani government has had to announce a sharp tax hike, also under IMF pressure, which, when presented before the parliament, drew angry shouts and howls. The country’s productivity, reflected in its export earnings, has dropped significantly. It’s telling to recall that as late as in 1992 Pakistan’s per capita real GDP, adjusted for purchasing power of the currency, was 65 percent higher than India’s. Today it’s 28% lower than that of its larger neighbor.

The rise of productivity, a fast rise, would be the key to restoring Pakistan’s economic health, and with it political and social advancement. But raising productivity requires a motivated manpower with animated hopes and aspirations. The problem is you can’t truly motivate people into doing anything consequential if it doesn’t enkindle their creativity and energy and offer them a stake in the outcome of their drudgery. It all calls for social and political freedoms, which Pakistan’s power-drunk military brass, landed aristocracy and government bureaucracy have resisted tooth and nail so far.

The military, in collaboration with the aristocracy and bureaucracy, has continually interrupted in the democratic process throughout Pakistan’s history. Imran Khan is Pakistan’s 19th elected prime minister. Thanks to military-bureaucratic interventions none of the 18 before him completed his or her five-year term in office. Khan is trying to do so by accepting the military tutelage – practically ceding foreign relations to the generals and clearing his key domestic programs with them. That’s not a recipe for economic recovery or growth, let alone promoting freedom and democracy in Pakistan.

As I said on other occasions, I’m an optimist who is waiting for the day Pakistanis say enough is enough. That day they will rise to beat their swashbuckling generals and colonels back into the barracks – as the Turks did in the wake of the aborted Turkish military coup in 1916 – and win their freedoms and their and their children’s’ future.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog.

Is Democratic Party festering in a rut?

Mustafa Malik June 28, 2019

AS I WAITED yesterday for the second Democratic presidential debate, I tossed out a question to Facebook. Could Joe Biden “get up before the referee counts to 10”? Some friends liked it, but none offered a response.

I had thought that the former vice president, so far the clear front-runner in the polls, would get a knockout punch from Bernie Sanders. The “democratic socialist” from Vermont is running second to him in the polls. I thought – and hope – that the Democratic Party has started loosening its embrace of Wall Street and social conservatives, coddled by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the now dormant Democratic Leadership Council. The Barack Obama presidency, despite Obama’s progressive rhetoric, was basically and extension of that era.

Biden did get a crushing blow during the debate. He was pummeled over his professed pride in working with racist lawmakers, opposition to school busing, insensitivity to the plight of immigrants, dillydallying on the abortion issue, vote for the Iraq war, and other right-wing positions. And CNN declared him a “direct loser” of the contest.

But it was mostly the foxy Kamala Harris, not Sanders, who gave him most of the thrashing. And most of the post-debate analysts in the news media anointed Harris winner of the encounters.

Sanders’ main problem with many Democrats has been his no-holds-barred blitzkrieg against the established, if corrupt, political and economic order and his call for a revolution to trash it. Many centrist and right-of-center Democrats have been leery about it. His push for Medicare of all, a free college education and elimination of all student debts, ending all foreign wars, and so forth, also rattle many Democrats for whom the established order is akin to religion.

Mainstream media, most of them owned by mega corporations, have been rankled by Sanders’ anti-corporate, anti-capitalist programs and rhetoric. Salon dismissed his political surge as “more about anti-Clinton sentiment than actual Bernie fever.”

On foreign policy, the mainstream media have traditionally followed the American flag, largely because of their thin grasp of foreign affairs. The late Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center told me in 2008 that “more than 60 percent of our [Middle East] correspondents have no grounding in the dynamics of societies across the Mediterranean.”

Much of the media and many Democrats appear to be leaning toward Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who appeared in last night’s debate. These two high-energy, combative senators are progressive enough to tear the last Democratic vice president into pieces and revile the exploitative neoliberal economic establishment, while not threatening to dismantle that establishment. Harris is also popular with pro-Israeli Democrats, a substantial chunk of the party, because of her Jewish husband and hobnobbing with Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians.

The primaries are a barometer of the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. I will be watching them to see how much of the party has broken loose of its corporate, right-wing tether. Are enough of them ready to jump into Sanders’ revolutionary bandwagon? Would they settle, instead, for a more conventional but still progressive candidate like Harris or Warren? Or do too many of them remain too invested in the Clintons-Wall Street economic order to abandon Biden, who seems to be running for a third term for Obama?

Last night’s was just the first of six primary debates that the Democratic National Committee plans for the party’s presidential candidates, the sixth is scheduled for December. We probably won’t know until the new year whether the bulk of party has moved past the Clinton-Obama era or is still staggering in a rut.

-Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

War on terror winding down

Mustafa Malik May 6, 2019

ON EASTER SUNDAY a bunch of Islamic State terrorists bombed several Sri Lankan churches and hotels, leaving more than 250 dead and nearly 500 wounded. The terrorist group said the carnage was meant to avenge the March 15 shootings at two New Zealand mosques by an Islamophobic Christian, Brenton Tarrant. Forty-nine people had died in those attacks.

Surprisingly, the Trump administration’s response to these attacks has been muted. No denunciation of “radical Islamic Islamic extremism.” No thunders about rooting out terrorism. It appears that President Trump – unlike his two predecessors in the Oval Office – is considering washing his hands of the “war on terror.” He had hinted doing so earlier. Does it mean he has finally realized the futility of the bloody, gargantuan, global anti-terror enterprise?

The Muslim and Christian terrorists who staged the killings in New Zealand and Sri Lanka echo bygone days when religious violence in both Islamdom and Christendom was not only acceptable, but often laudable.

During my early teens in my three-centuries-old ancestral village, Polashpur, in what is now Bangladesh, one of my aunts used to hold “puthi reading” reading sessions her guest rooms. Puthi in old Bengali means a folk history book, narrating exaggerated or fictionalized stories of history, love affairs, etc. Many villagers believed them to be true.

I attended a session in which aunt Sakina was reading out Jangnama (war history) in Sylheti Nagri script about a battle (I forget which one) between Arab Muslim invaders of a non-Muslim tetorry. A cluster of my other relatives had gathered around her, chewing pan – sliced betel nuts mixed with tobacco and lime and wrapped in betel leaves – and listening with rapt attention.

When Sakina came upon an anecdote about Muslim invaders slaughtering “hundreds of thousands of infidels,” native non-Muslim defenders of the territory, her audience broke into a chorus of applause: “Subhan Allah” (glory to God). My second cousin Mukaddas Ali Tafader sprang to his feet, punched the air with his right fist, roaring: “Fi naari jahannam,” a Quranic phrase meaning, “into the fire of hell.” My relatives obviously viewed the massacre of the “hundreds of thousands” of people defending their homes and families from the Muslim invaders as a virtuous act approved, if not mandated, by Allah. Never mind the Quran teaches Muslims to regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths and their practitioners as fellow partisans of the Abrahamic tradition.

But in the late 1950s the mostly illiterate village Muslims in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) thought Jangnama and other accounts of folk Islam were Islamic scripture. Thanks to the spread of education and modernization of Muslim societies, most Muslims today know more about Islamic values and principle and have critical views about folk Islam. During trips through Muslim countries in South Asia and the Middle East I am amazed by everyday Muslims’ discriminating views about and Islamic tenets, culture and tradition. As anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out in the 1990s, Islam has now been going through “a major cultural revolution,” barely noticed or acknowledged in the West.

Today the Islamic mainstream no longer approves of religious violence. By the way, Muslim armed struggles against the Israeli apartheid and colonialism in Palestine; Indian occupation of Kashmir; American invasion of Afghanistan; and Muslim monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East are reactions to foreign subjugation or domestic repression – not religious passion per se. And support for those struggles is widespread among Muslims and many non-Muslims around the world.

Religious zealotry against perceived enemies of Islam is confined to the fringes of some Muslim societies. The IS in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya in Somalia, Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and some other Muslim guerrilla groups belong to those fringes.

The history of Christianity, by which I mean Western Christianity, used to be much more violent that those of Islam and other faiths. During the Thirty Years’ War, fought in the seventeenth century between Catholics and Protestants, 25 percent to 40 percent people in German states perished. In Brandenburg, the losses amounted to half its population. Württemberg lost three-quarters. The pogroms, the Inquisition and other flare-ups of violence against the Jews, Christian heretics and “pagans” racked Europe and North America for centuries.

The Crusades were an epic orgy of hair-raising Christian savagery against Muslims and Jews. In July 1099 when the Crusaders stormed into Jerusalem, they wept in joy. Having thanked God for enabling them to enter the holy city, the Crusaders streamed through the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, killing everyone in sight. They beheaded men, rapaciously raped and murdered women, and thrust children’s heads against walls, smashing their skulls. Thomas Asbridge has written that “blood-hungry, ravening packs” of Crusaders plunged in a two-day bacchanalia of random murder, rape and plunder that “left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses.” These Christians’ cruelty to Muslims and Jews was no different from their brutality to Christian heretics inside Europe. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council anathemized all heresy and proclaimed rich rewards in the hereafter for those who would kill heretics, or enslaved them and seized their property.

Most Western Christians today would believe that the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Puritan violence against Quakers and other American Christians were prompted by misinterpretations of the Gospel. (I don’t know, though, about Vice President Mike Pence or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo!) Christianity has since gone through a three-fold transformation: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. These revolutions catalyzed the secularization and modernization of Western societies, fostering religious tolerance and pluralism. Most Western Christians no longer view non-Christian groups through religious lenses, let alone fight them in the name of religion.

For Western Christians the Other now is defined by secular ideologies nationalism, racism and economic creeds, which have triggered warfare and violence on far greater scales than witnessed during the earlier eras of religious violence.

There remain, however, fringe groups such as followers of evangelical preachers, Ku Klux Klan, anti-abortion campaigners, and white supremacist gangs. Racism and anti-immigrant zealotry inform the French National Front, Sweden Democrats, Greek Golden Dawn, Polish Law and Justice, Dutch Party for Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party. Affiliates and supporters of these groups and political parties engage in cross burning, bombing mosques and synagogues, and attacks on non-white individuals and institutions.These days Christian terrorist and extremist groups lurch on the fringes of Western societies, as do their prototypes in the Muslim world.

Violence and bigotry among fringe groups isn’t confined to Muslim and Christian societies, however. It’s as or more prevalent among Israeli Jews, Indian Hindus and Buddhists in Myanmar and other southeast Asian countries. The question is whether these violent fringes of religious communities will eventually evolve and join the mostly peaceable mainstreams of their faiths? Or would their ideologies spread further in their countries? I won’t venture any answers, and social anthropologist are all over the place on these questions. Violence or social disorder must of course be tackled legally and socially, but the problem is we don’t know and often can’t figure out their sources.

Despite its bigots and warmongers, the Trump administration seems to have come to the same conclusions. Their slow-pedaling of the war on terror, slackening of the Afghanistan war and pullout of American troops from Syria are further proofs of this trend.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Modi, Bibi, Trump & liberal order

Mustafa Malik April 12, 2019

Narendra Modi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday on his reelection as Israeli prime minister. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister has been one of the closest allies of the Israel’s right-wing racially inspired one.

Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, has offered a piece of good news to Donald Trump, the racially motivated American president. Trump, too, is going to win re-election next year, “absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it,” Cohen predicted. What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

Cohen’s piece reminded me of John Mearsheimer’s latest book, The Great Delusion, which I finished reading last week. The international relations scholar says America’s “liberal hegemony” in the world is about to end partly because liberalism is failing. Liberalism, the ideology of the Enlightenment, wanted rational individuals to build peaceable, humanist societies around the world. Protagonists of the ideology believed that people’s religious and ethnic prejudices had kept them from building such societies and hence these thinkers wanted men’s and women’s affiliations with religious and ethnic systems replaced by their allegiance to institutions of liberal states, which would uphold the liberty and promote good life.

Mearsheimer says individuals “using their critical faculties, reach different conclusions about what constitutes the good life.” This has happened because Enlightenment philosophers ignored the fact that cultural systems, created through living in communities, “shaped how individuals think and behave.” If we follow the political scientist’s logic, liberalism is failing because it failed to recognize people’s affinity with religion, race and ethnicity, which have produced Netanyahu, Trump and Modi. Well, Mearsheimer is kind of echoing the thinking of a host of powerful minds from Isiah Berlin to Reinhold Niebuhr to our own Martha Nussbaum.

Mearsheimer says, correctly, that Americans’ commitment to liberalism has always been “flexible.” Religion never really left the American public square. Neither has race, as shown by the malignant episodes of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and now Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s crusade against Hispanic immigration. Would Trump have been so obsessed with building a wall along the Mexican border if the immigrants from the south were whites from Britain, France or Germany?

The case is not fundamentally different in Europe. Western and Northern Europe have, of course, succeeded in banishing religion from public and private spheres. But racism? It lay dormant for several decades after the Holocaust and has now revived with a vengeance. My direct encounter with European racism occurred during 1998-1999, when I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. My inquiries about the issue drew negative responses throughout the five EU countries in which I conducted the fieldwork. In France, Germany and Austria – part of the white cultural monochrome (with largely suppressed Muslim subcultures) – discrepancies in “cultural” and “democratic” institutions were cited as the main reasons Turkey wouldn’t fit into the EU. In Britain and the Netherlands, avowedly “pluralist” democracies, I was told that Turkey’s relatively poor economic performance and also “slow progress” toward a full-fledged democracy would “create problems” if Ankara were to join the bloc. These were the general lines of feedback from my unscientific samples, with exceptions, of course.

In reality, Turkey has outpaced the economic performance some of the countries that have joined the Union since, e.g. Slovenia, Croatia and Lithuania. Its democratic evolution, with the inevitable blips of an emerging democracy, is more striking than that of some of the bloc’s latest members, especially the post-Communist ones. Poland and Hungary are virtual autocracies. Yet Turkey’s chances of accession to the EU is more remote today than was two decades ago when I investigated the question.

Turkophobia of the “white-Christian club,” as the former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once described the EU to me, dates back to Ottoman Turks’ conquest southeastern Europe and march to the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Race and culture, informed by the values of Western Christianity, remain a stumbling block to the bloc’s acceptance of brown-skinned Muslim Turks’ membership application. Racism in Europe has reached the highest levels since the Holocaust mainly because of an influx of Muslim immigrants with different shades of brown skin tones. Muslims make up 6 percent of the European population. Islamophobia is but a new incarnation of anti-Semitism, which raged in Europe for many centuries.

Britain, viewed as a model of racial and religious tolerance, is a case in point. In no other Western country would you see so many brown Muslims and black Caribbeans serving proudly in public offices from the government ministry to Parliament to city councils. Much of it, however, reflects the traditionally pragmatic Britons’ acceptance of the demographic reality. Non-whites make up 13 percent of the British population of 64 million. Actually, race consciousness remains endemic to British psyche and has been heightened by the growth of non-white communities. Polls have shown that fear of Muslim immigration has been a key driver of the Brexit campaign. One poll put out last November by The Independent newspaper found that 31 percent of white Britons feared that “Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims a majority of this country’s population.”

If race is eating away at liberalism in Europe, religion and ethnicity have kept it from taking root in most of the rest of the world. The concepts of church-state separation and rights of the rugged individual are among the basic principles of liberalism. But these ideas have been alien to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pashtun, Palestinian, Kurdish, Balinese, Hutu, Tuareg, Mulatto, and Zambo communities. Many people in these religious and ethnic groups would sacrifice their individual well-being, and sometimes lives, for communal solidarity and interests.

We need a new world order that safeguards the cultural, economic and political interests of autonomous religious and ethnic communities. Netanyahu must be barred from continuing to dispossess and subjugate the Palestinians, Modi from suppressing the freedoms of Kashmiri and other Indian Muslims, and Trump from trampling the rights of Hispanic immigrants and would-be immigrants at the Mexican border. An American citizen, I am voting for Bernie Sanders who, as president, would promote these cherished aspirations of mine, along with others.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

What about Israel-first Americans?

Mustafa Malik March 11, 2019

Among the latest antagonists of Ilham Omar is Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times. The well-known columnist has attacked the Muslim congresswoman for suggesting, in his words, “that American politicians who support Israel are guilty of dual loyalty.”

McManus does a great job of repackaging received knowledge and is one of many, many Americans, especially in the political and media establishments, who have ganged up on the Democratic congresswoman for her so-called “anti-Semitic” comments. She had mentioned the “dual loyalty” of American citizens promoting Israel’s interests. She also had said that she could serve well her constituents in the fifth congressional district of Minnesota without having to show “allegiance to a foreign country,” meaning Israel.

The Somali-American lawmaker didn’t voice any concern, but I often do, about the many Americans – politicians or not – whose primary loyalty seems to lie with Israel, not the United States.

Despite Omar’s transparently correct description of the nature of some Americans’ loyalty to Israel, nearly dozen pro-Israel groups wrote to House speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding that Omar be stripped of her membership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Harshest among her attackers are the Jewish chairpersons of three House committees – Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey. They also pushed for a House resolution denouncing the lawmaker’s remarks as “anti-Semitic.” Pelosi and other establishment Democrats in the House of Representatives were about to introduce such a resolution but got dissuaded by fierce opposition from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill and were forced to settle for one that criticized all forms of bigotry. Omar has suffered vicious Islamophobic attacks from a lot of other Americans as well.

I would point out that Omar didn’t impugn any Americans’ loyalty to the United States. She just maintained that some Americans’ allegiance isn’t confined to America but also extends to Israel. I would go a step farther. I would ask where lay the primary loyalty of Democratic Jewish Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin; or Democratic Jewish Representatives Ted Deutsch, Engel and Lowey, when they voted against the Iran nuclear deal. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it’s officially known, was fiercely opposed by Israel but negotiated and signed by the Democratic president Barack Obama and approved by a Senate majority.

What about Haim Saban, a major financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns, who says publicly and proudly, “I am a single-issue American, and my issue is Israel”? Which country claims the preponderant loyalty of the Jewish Americans who don’t enlist in the American military but join the Israeli armed forces to fight Israel’s wars? They included, among many American Jews, a son of the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and a former colleague of mine at an American newspaper. Where lies the primary loyalty of the tens of thousands of Jewish American citizens who uprooted themselves from America and have settled in Israel, more than 60,000 them in illegal West bank settlements? What about the Americans, including President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have shown little interest in homeless Americans but have spent millions of dollars in helping build illegal Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories?

If I were an Israeli Jew, I would worry about Israel’s friends like these, who have created a false sense of Israel’s security. I would note the attitudes of the younger generation of Americans and Westerners – including Western Jews such as in J Street – who are becoming fed up with Israeli colonialism and Israel’s subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians. And I would ask myself: How long can Israel manage to live by the sword in the increasingly hostile world? This question – not lham Omar, or Hamas, or Iran – has become Israel’s existential challenge.

Mustafa Malik, host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Saudi betrayal of Palestinians

Mustafa Malik November 11, 2017

AS I NOTE the Saudi, Israeli and American governments coming together on the same platform to confront Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah, I wonder how my father would’ve reacted to the event.

Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has been prodding Israel to go to war with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah organization, apparently to divert the Saudi public’s attention away from the regime’s badly botched interventions in Yemen and Syria. Ofer Zalzberg, a researcher at the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far been wary of taking on the powerful Hezbollah. Netanyahu, though, has hyped his propaganda blitz against Iran and Hezbollah, apparently to throw a smoke screen around the serious corruption charges he and his wife face in Israeli courts. And Iran-phobia, among other things, has driven Donald Trump, America’s Christian president, to join the anti-Iranian alliance of the Muslim crown prince and Jewish prime minister.

I don’t recall a time since the early seventh century when governments from all three Abrahamic faiths forged an alliance against a common adversary. My late father was an Islamic scholar in the Indian state of Assam and what is now Bangladesh. He used to say that in the Arabian town of Medina, in the early 620s, the Islamic community, or umma, consisted of all three Abrahamic faiths groups: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Eventually, that community split into three. “Baba,” as I called my father, was steeped in the orthodox Islamic version of Muslim history. He blamed the split on Jewish and Christian “betrayal” of Muslims, which included a Jewish attempt to kill the Prophet Muhammad.

The Americans and Israelis have been joined at the hip for decades, while the Muslim world – including Saudi Arabia – viewed Israel as its archenemy because of its occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing and persecution of Palestinians. The House of Saud was especially vociferous about its support for Palestinians because most Palestinians are Muslims and it claimed its legitimacy to its service to Islam, which was born in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi and other Arab autocracies used to be on pretty good terms with Iran during the decades it was also was under an autocracy. The Arab autocracies became wary of Iran after its Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the repressive pro-American monarchy of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, and replaced it with a populist Islamic government. The Arab monarchs and dictators feared that Islamic populism might spill over to their societies, threatening their despotic rule.

The fear of populist and democratic “subversion” also prompted Arab monarchies to oppose the Arab Spring of 2011-2012 and rally behind the military putsch in Egypt that overthrew that country’s democratically elected government of President Mohammed Mursi. Mursi belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading Islamic movement in the world. Many Muslims had long questioned the House of Saud’s claim to Islamic legitimacy. Now its hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood eroded that claim further.

Apologists of the Saudi monarchy have had a hard time defending its Islamic credentials. They included Walid Arab Hashim, an economics professor at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. During a research trip to the kingdom in 1991, Hashim told me about many activities of the monarchy to promote Islamic causes and institutions around the world.

I told him about many un-Islamic activities I had known members of the Saudi royal family to have indulged in during their visits to the United States. I also asked if hereditary rule could be justified by the teachings of the Quran or the traditions of the prophet of Islam.

I didn’t expect him to give forthright answers to these questions to a foreign journalist, which would likely have cost him his job, and he didn’t. He told me that his country’s ruling dynasty was “a biped animal.” One of its two legs rested on Islam, as its founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, had come to power in the 1920s in alliance with the Wahhabi Islamic movement. The monarchy remained “dedicated to the service” of Islam, he added. Its other leg, he said, rested on Arab tribalism, which historically had supported dynastic rule.

“Which leg does it first put forward,” I asked the professor, “Islam or the dynasty?”

He laughed, without giving me an answer.

I thought I got the answer in July 2013 when the House of Saud ganged up with the Egyptian army General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to get Mursi’s Islamic government toppled and replaced by Sisi’s brutal military dictatorship. Later that year I ran into an official of the Jeddah-based World Muslim Congress (Motamar Al- Alam Al-Islami) who was visiting Washington. The organization is funded by the Saudi government and carries on Islamic outreach and charity work in different countries. I asked the gentleman about the rationale behind the Saudi government’s campaign against Egypt’s Mursi government and support for the military dictatorship that overthrew it and also it’s increasing hostility toward Iran.

He told me on condition of anonymity that both the Brotherhood and Iran had posed “a threat” to the monarchy. Echoing Hashim, the professor in Jeddah, he said the Saudi government had been funding and supporting “many very important programs for Muslims and Islam” around the world. Among them he mentioned Saudi Arabia’s financial and diplomatic support for Palestinians and other “oppressed” Muslim groups. He claimed that the Saudi-led Arab decision to “ostracize Israel in the Middle East has kept Israel from annexing the West Bank and Gaza.”

I recalled his comment as I observed the the Saudi crown prince lurch into the embrace of Netanyahu, while Israel continues to occupy Palestine and expropriate Palestinian lands by building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Except for Iran and perhaps Qatar, other Persian Gulf states are hopping into the Saudi train to Israel. I wonder what incentive, except the Palestinians’ own fighting spirit, would ever persuade Israel to concede the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

I guess if Baba were alive today he wouldn’t have called the Saudi-Israeli-American entente against Iran and Hezbollah a reunion of Abrahamic faiths. More likely, he would’ve branded bin-Salman’s genuflection to Netanyahu a betrayal of the Palestinians and the umma, most or which remains morally committed to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli colonial occupation.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington, who hosts this blog.

Kurdish fiasco ‘America first’ cause

Mustafa Malik October 10, 2017

WHEN PATRICK HENRY vowed to “live free or die,” he couldn’t have known about today’s Kurdish dilemma in Iraq. Two weeks ago 92 percent of Kurdish voters in northern Iraq voted in a referendum to create an independent state, consisting of the three Iraqi provinces where they’re in a majority. Unfortunately for them, the outcome has been, not independence, but curbs on their freedom to travel, economic hardships, and political isolation in the region. Now very few Iraqi Kurds seem ready to risk further hardships pushing for independence, let alone die fighting for the cause.

Iraq already has banned air travel in and out of its semi-autonomous “Kurdistan.” No Iraqi government can expect to stay in power if it were to allow the dismemberment of the country. And the Turkish government has announced it’s going to shut off the oil pipeline of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which runs through Turkey, carrying 5.5 million barrels of crude oil daily and providing more than 90 percent of the KRG’s annual budget. Ankara fears that the secession of a Kurdish enclave in Iraq would embolden its own Kurdish militants, who have been carrying on a terrorist campaign since 1984 to create an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like the Baghdad government, had urged the KRG over and over not to hold the referendum.

Two days ago Baghdad announced that it’s now going to host a summit among Iran, Turkey and Iraq to decide on further measures to punish the KRG for its secessionist move.

Poor Iraqi Kurds! Their grievances remind me of a Mexican official’s response to President Trump’s demand that Mexico pay his proposed wall along its boundary with the United States. An aide to President Enrique Peña Nieto told the Trump administration, facetiously of course, that Mexico would be happy to pay for the wall provided it’s “built along the northern boundaries of New Mexico and Arizona.” He was obviously alluding to the fact that those American sates used to be part of Mexico until the United States grabbed them by force.

Kurds in Iraq – and in Turkey, Iran and Syria – have a similar grievance. In reality, their plight as minorities in those Middle Eastern countries originated in the imperialist machinations of a century ago. When France and Britain were gobbling up territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, they promised the Kurds an autonomous statelet, which they said could eventually become an independent nation-state. That commitment was mentioned in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. Little did the Kurds know that oil under their soil would turn out to be the stumbling block to their independence, just as resources in many other developing countries had cost theirs. Lure of resources drove European powers into invading and colonizing most of the non-Western world.

In the 1920s as Britain was settling down in its Iraqi colony (bestowed on it under the League of Nations mandate), the British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company struck oil near Kirkuk, in the middle of the Kurds’ “promised land” of an autonomous state. Out the window went the British and French pledge for a “Kurdistan.” The two imperial powers now decided to split the more resourceful part of the centuries-old Kurdish homeland between the British colony of Iraq and neighboring French colony of Syria and dole out the remainder of the territory to Turkey and Iran.

Thus 35 million Kurds have become the world’s largest ethnic community without a state of their own, languishing as minorities in four states and refugees in many others. During trips to Iraq and Turkey, the word I often heard Kurds mention as the source of their quandary was “betrayal” – betrayal by British and French colonial powers. Throughout the century that followed the fourfold partition of their land Kurds in one country or another have struggled off and on for a national homeland or homelands.

In Turkey bloody terrorist attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and bloodier government reprisals have cost nearly 40,000 lives in three decades. In Iraq separatist uprisings by the Kurdish Peshmerga militia led to equally brutal government crackdowns, including a chemical attack in the Halabja village by the Saddam Hussein government.

Thanks to America’s need for the Kurdish Peshmerga militia to fight its wars against the Saddam government and then against the Islamic State, the United States has helped set up Iraqi Kurdistan with wide local autonomy. But Washington never agreed to support Iraqi Kurds’ secessionist scheme. In northern Syria Kurds have taken advantage of the five-year-long Syrian civil war to carve out a territory they call Rojava, which they aspire to turn into an autonomous or independent Kurdish stare. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad is also perturbed by the Rojava campaign and the adrenaline it could get from the KRG referendum in Iraq. Last week Damascus denounced the KRG for its referendum. In Iran Kurdish separatism is less assertive than in any of the three other countries. But Tehran, too, worries about a spillover of the Kurdish ferment in its neighborhood, and the Iranian government has decried the referendum in northern Iraq. The United States and several European countries have also been concerned that a Kurdish independence movement in Iraq could threaten the stability of the state system in that region. The Trump administration repeatedly warned KRG President Masoud Barzani not to stage the referendum.

Barzani couldn’t but have known that in the teeth of the strong regional and international opposition his referendum would open a Pandora’s box, instead of promoting Kurdish independence. True, the Kurds lost their territories to the four states against their will, just as Mexicans lost part of their land to America against theirs. But plenty of water has flowed down the Euphrates and Mississippi rivers since America and the four Middle Eastern countries took shape and evolved as nation-states. The aide to the Mexican president can’t expect to wrest Texas, New Mexico or Arizona back from America anymore than Kurds in Iraq – or Turkey, Syria or Iran – stand a reasonable chance of tearing up those nation-states to create one or more independent Kurdish states.

The Kurds could achieve their goal of national independence in one of two ways: by the force of their own arms or through the military or diplomatic intervention of a major power or powers. Bangladesh, South Sudan and East Timor gained their independence in one or the other of the two processes. But Kurds in none of the four countries have the armed capability to secede, and support for their cause in the international community is zero (Oops! I forgot the vociferous Israeli support for the KRG’s independence project).

You would wonder why, then, the KRG president went ahead with his ill-fated referendum. I think his fast dwindling support base among Iraqi Kurds has something to do with it. Barzani was elected KRG president by the regional legislature in 2005. Since then he has turned into an autocrat, ruling the territory without a mandate since his term of office expired in August 2015. His blatant nepotism, rampant corruption in his government and a sharp downturn in the region’s economy have heightened his people’s discontent against him. But the aspiration for an independent homeland still animates most Kurdish minds and hearts in Iraq. If he held the referendum to shore up his popularity among Kurds, their overwhelming yes vote shows that he made a good bet. But sadly, their euphoria was short-lived. Media reports show that it already has died down and most Kurds are worried, instead, about the onset of the economic and political crisis, spawned by the neighboring states’ virulent reactions to the referendum.

I think the international community should get to work to help resolve the Kurdish imbroglio. The United States, which has used Iraqi Kurds in two major wars, is morally obligated to step in to pull them out of the quagmire. The Kurdish predicament also offers the Trump administration an opportunity to get away from its own quagmire created by the president’s reckless stands on the climate change accord, Iran nuclear deal, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other issues. He should get Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to take the lead in an international initiative to bring about a reconciliation between Iraqi Kurdistan and its neighbors. Because such an effort would bolster America’s standing in the world, it would be part of Trump’s “America first” agenda.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

No ‘cakewalk’ to Pyongyang, please

Mustafa Malik September 17, 2017

ON WEDNESDAY I was about to head out to a seminar on cyber security at Wilson Center in Washington when I peeked into the Internet to check the latest news.

“U.S. quietly plans to occupy North Korea after war,” a banner headline in London’s The Sun newspaper screamed at me. I remembered that President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had said, too, that military action against North Korea is a possibility.

The story led to a Newsweek link. Clicked, it opened a piece in which German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was quoted as saying that a war between the United States and North Korea “could be deadliest conflict in history,” more catastrophic than the Second World War.

The seminar was about security threats from North Korea, China and Russia. James Lewis, vice president of Center from Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, talked about a “deterrent” against cyber threats from Pyongyang.

I told him that North Koreans had been saying that their nukes are meant to be “a deterrent against American invasion.” I also mentioned that I had heard Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq lamenting that if Saddam Hussein had a few nuclear weapons he could’ve “deterred the U.S. invasion” of 2003, sparing both Iraq and America the “unnecessary and catastrophic war.”

Lewis nodded, apparently signaling that he was aware of it.

Continuing, I inquired if Iranians wanted to have “a couple of nukes,” which they insisted they never did, won’t those warheads also serve as a deterrent against Israeli or U.S. military action? I couldn’t conceive, I added, of Iranians wanting to “commit national suicide” by initiating a nuclear conflict with Israel or the United States.

I asked the CSIS executive what he thought of Kim Jong-un’s reasoning for a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. invasion.

The panelist didn’t answer my question, but warned, instead, that North Koreans “would be deluding themselves” if they thought that a few nukes “would give them immunity” against the U.S. military power. The United States could “get rid of the problem” posed by Kim, regardless of his nukes.

Was he hinting at a possible regime change in North Korea? I wondered.

Explaining the reason America was determined to prevent North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, Lewis said, such weaponry could tempt those countries “to evade their responsibilities under international law, to violate international law,” and threaten their neighbors and international security.

I thought of asking him the obvious question of whether the United States and other nuclear powers weren’t potentially violating international law over and over because they sat on nuclear stockpiles. Nuclear arsenals have given them the ability to commit illegal aggression against non-nuclear countries. Also, they have equipped them with veto powers at the U.N. Security Council, practically shielding them against accountability for violations of international law. But I didn’t want to get into an argument with the panelist.

Martin C. Libicki from the U.S. Naval Academy, another panelist, picked up on my comment about Iran. He said Iranians would be “right to think that Israel can do things with its [nuclear] capabilities that its neighbors can’t.” But the Israelis needed that capability for their national security, added the professor of cyber security studies.

Their comments reminded me of a complaint that my Pakistani mentor had made to me several times in the early 1970s. Nurul Amin was prime minister and later vice president of Pakistan, and I worked as his press aide. He would lament to me about America’s “blatant and illegal” military interventions, and often regime change, in Iran, Lebanon, Vietnam, Congo, Ghana and elsewhere. “Independence from colonial rule lets us [Asian and African nations] have our own brown and black rulers,” he would say, “as long as we toe their lines.”

On the subway train back home from Wilson Center, it occurred to me that Nurul Amin’s comment of the Cold War era doesn’t quite apply to the new world we live in. Yes, in 1953 the CIA under the Eisenhower administration could have Iran’s democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq easily overthrown in a military coup. But by 1979 Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries bundled out the brutal pro-American monarchy of Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, whom the Americans had installed in Tehran.

In 1958 the Iraqi army overthrew the pro-Western monarchy in Iraq while Muslim insurgents in neighboring Lebanon rose up against the pro-Western Christian minority government of President Camille Chamoun. Chamoun asked for U.S. help, and the Eisenhower administration immediately rushed some 14,000 troops to Lebanon. The Muslim insurgents ran for cover and the invading American troops hit the beaches in Beirut.

“We drank a lot,” as the U.S. Marines corporal Thomas Zmecek would recall later. “We were provided with swimming trunks and swam with the daughters [of Christian hosts] and had a grand time.”

Twenty-five years later a U.S.-led multinational force was stationed in Lebanon to intervene in a brewing civil war between the Israeli-backed Christian forces and Syrian-backed Muslim and Druze activists. When opposition forces threatened the presidency of Maronite Christian Amin Gemayel, the Reagan administration, prodded by the Israelis and Secretary of State George P. Schultz (against the strenuous objection of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger) ordered an American contingent to rush to West Beirut to protect the Gemayel regime. But the new Lebanese generation didn’t go into hiding as had their parents and uncles in 1958. They were infuriated by the America intervention in their internal affairs and began to mobilize to resist it. But one of them, a Shiite Muslim, spared them a prolonged fight. He went on a suicide mission, piling up explosives onto a truck and detonating it at a U.S.-French Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen. That led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon.

American politicians and bureaucrats have had difficulty grasping the changed social ethos and worldviews of contemporary generations of post-colonial societies. Many people who grew up under European colonial rule or in the shadow of the colonial era were tolerant of Western military interventions and hegemony. Their children are not. Born in independent countries and exposed to Western values of freedom and democracy, disseminated by myriad communications media, they’re mostly allergic to foreign domination and presence of foreign troops on their lands.

American neocons and Cold War retirees who planned the Iraq war were ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, without having a clue about the dynamics of the Muslim youth of the day. During the run-up to the war neoconservative security expert Ken Adelman proclaimed he was “reasonably certain” that the Iraqis would greet invading U.S. troops “as liberators.” He probably was musing over Lebanese Christians reveling at the arrival of U.S. troops in 1958. Or maybe images of Koreans hailing U.S. Marines under Gen. Douglas MacArthur after their heroic victory in Battle of Inchon was flashing back on his mind.

But in 2003 Iraq had a fiercely independent-minded breed of Arabs who, despite their sectarian feuds, were deeply hostile to foreign domination, as I had observed during three trips in previous years. Their resistance to the U.S. invasion led to the rise of the Islamic State, sectarian blood-letting, unraveling of the Iraqi state, and the security of America and the West.

I’m not sure that the United States can launch a successful invasion of North Korea. Unlike Iraq, that Communist country is believed to have between six and 16 nuclear weapons, most or some of which are in locations unknown to Americans. “It is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, [intelligence] collection nations that we have to collect against,” Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, told Congress in May. Even if America can succeed in taking out all of Kim’s nukes before an invasion, which is extremely unlikely, I doubt that North Koreans would hail American invaders as “liberators” anymore than did Iraqis. North Koreans are extremely xenophobic people, usually suspicious of foreigners. A U.S. occupation force would very likely get bogged down in the Hermit Kingdom for years, which the war-wary American public is unlikely to accept.

If the Trump administration blunders into an invasion of North Korea, I’d be as concerned about the catastrophe it would spawn for Americans and Koreans as is Gabriel, the German foreign minister.

– Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts this blog.

Turks, EU: Never the twain meet?

Mustafa Malik May 17, 2017

IS TURKEY FINALLY waking up from its dream of joining the European Union?

During the past six weeks EU politicians excoriated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his victory in a Turkish constitutional referendum, which transforms the country’s parliamentary system into a presidential one, concentrating wide powers in the presidency. The constitutional changes go into effect after the 2019 Turkish general elections, and if Erdogan is re-elected, he’d become a powerful “executive president.” These Europeans, and many Turks, see that making him an “authoritarian” ruler. Some of them demanded and end to negotiations on Turkey’s accession to the EU. Others argued that Turkey would be unable to adopt “European values,” which EU members are required to observe. Those values include democracy, the rule of law, human rights and minority rights.

In response, Erdogan threatened to hold a new “Brexit-like referendum,” asking the Turks if they wanted to join the European bloc at all. Over the years many Turks have been turned off by what they consider a discriminatory stance of a “Christian club” toward their Muslim nation. A poll taken in 2014 found that only 28 percent of Turks viewed EU membership as “a good thing,” compared to more than two-thirds of them who did so in the 1990s and early 2000s.

At any rate, tempers have cooled lately among politicians on both sides. Never mind, says the EU foreign policy chief. Federica Mogherini has announced that the talks on the the 30-year-old Turkish membership application would continue. “It is not suspended,” she insisted. “It hasn’t ended.” And last week Omer Celik, Turkey’s EU affairs minister, confirmed her announcement. He said “there is no question” of breaking off those talks.

I have been predicting, though, that Turkey would never join the European bloc, not as a full member, anyway. I came to this conclusion nearly two decades ago, and nothing has happened since to change my opinion. During 1998-1999 I was conducting fieldwork in Europe and Turkey on how a Turkish Islamic surge would affect Ankara’s bid to join the European bloc. I had a fellowship with the German Marshall Fund of the United States to do the project.

On August 2, 1998, at the end of a long interview with Erdogan, then disgraced mayor of Istanbul, he asked what I had learned about Europeans’ attitudes toward Turkey’s EU membership. I told him that “I’d be surprised” if his country would ever become a “full member” of the bloc. The mayor didn’t seem to be convinced. Four months before, he had been convicted by a State Security Court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting, which the judges said had incited “hatred based on religious difference.” Turkey was then a radically secular state and Erdogan had been known as a gung-ho activist of the Islamist Welfare Party. I interviewed him when he was packing to vacate the mayor’s office and await an anticipated jail sentence from the State Security Court. He told me that he would be working to have Turkey “join the [European] Union.”

Contrary to what I had heard about him, Erdogan disputed my characterization of him as an “Islamist” and asserted twice that he believed that the Turkish government should be “secular,” and that religion should be a “private matter.” He was no more an Islamist than Helmut Kohl was a Christian fundamentalist, he said. Kohl was then chancellor of Germany, belonging to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). I’d learn later that Erdogan, Parliament members Abdullah Gul (later president) and Bulent Arinc (later speaker of Parliament) and a number of other former Welfare Party activists were about to leave the Islamist movement and form a conservative Muslim party. Polls had shown that two out of three Turkish Muslims, religious as they were, had been leery about Islamism.

Soon after his newly formed Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won the 2002 parliamentary elections, Erdogan set out for a whirlwind trip through Europe, pushing the Turkish accession case to EU governments and elites. The Turkish leader reiterated to them that he was a “secular” politician who had no intention of setting up an Islamist government. And he began making continual visits to the United States (Yesterday was his 13^th visit to the White House), meeting government officials and intellectuals, including some neoconservatives, and trying to dispel the notion that he or the AKP had an Islamist agenda. He also talked about his pursuit of Turkey’s EU membership.

ACCESSION TALKS

On December 10, 2002, the day before his first visit to the White House to meet then President George W. Bush, Erdogan told me in Washington that he would be asking the U.S. president to “say a good word” to EU leaders about the Turkish case. Bush did just that, and in December 2005 the EU began Turkish accession talks. I read news reports about some Turkish politicians were optimistic about their finally joining the Europeans, which had been a consuming mission of the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

I still didn’t expect to see Muslim Turks showing up in Brussels to join discussions about the policies and priorities of the bloc. I didn’t think “democratic deficit” and “poor human rights record” were the real sources of the EU’s angst about Turkish accession, even though these shortcoming were routinely mentioned as Turkey’s disqualification for bloc membership.

If you have European friends or observed Europeans’ attitudes toward the Turks closely, you’d know what dismays them most about having Turks in Europe. Julius Ray Behr, an architect in Berlin, was quite candid to me about it. During a 2000 trip I asked him about his take on the Turks’ efforts to join the EU. Were they trying achieve “in Brussels what they could not accomplish in Vienna”? he replied, laughing. He was referring to the Ottoman army’s 1683 attack on Vienna, which was repulsed by the city’s Austrian and Polish defenders, putting an end to the Ottoman Empire’s thrust toward Western Europe. A burly, graying man in his late 50s or early 60s, Behr suggested that if the Turks, then about 60 million, were allowed to join the bloc, they would mess up Europe’s “social and cultural life,” infusing Islam into it.

I heard the argument before and since. Since the Dark Ages, Continental Europe has been a white racial monochrome, and Europeans violently resisted the presence of other racial and cultural strains in their midst. Beginning in the late 15^th century, Jews and Muslims, who had lived in Europe for centuries, suffered waves after waves of slaughter, forced conversion to Christianity and expulsion from the Continent. Most of those Jewish and Muslim refugees were welcomed with open arms in Muslim Turkey and Levant. In pre-Enlightenment Europe, Jews were detested as “Christ killers” and Muslims as heathens. Post-Enlightenment, they were scorned as inferior races. The Holocaust was the final episode of whitening Europe’s social and cultural texture.

Erdogan, as I observed him, is a passionate, willful man, who isn’t quite acculturated to Western democratic institutions and practices. He’s not very tolerant of dissent as would be, for example, Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron. Erdogan and his government say, however, that the current political and social turmoil has been spawned by the old ultra-secular Kemalists establishment. Kemalists are follower of Kemal Ataturk’s laicist, anti-Islamic ideology, who have been campaigning for the secularization and Europeanization of Turkish society and culture. Having been roundly defeated in successive elections, many of them have made common cause with Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been trying to topple the AKP government through undemocratic means. In 1999 Turkish intelligence found Gulen colluding with his associates to destabilize the then secular government in Ankara, and the cleric dashed into exile in the United States to evade arrest and prosecution.

Gulen has, or had, an extensive network of followers in Turkish police, judiciary and military. The military, the self-appointed “guardian” of Kemalism, continually overthrew democratically elected governments until the AKP came to power in 2002. The military brass, Kemalists and Gulenists have had a hard time accepting the AKP government, despite it being elected democratically. In 2007 the army high command issued a threatening memorandum opposing the election of Abdullah Gul as president, arguing that the headscarf worn by his wife, Heyrunnisa, would violate the secularist tradition of the presidential palace. The Kemalist opposition in the parliament, which used to elect presidents, also decided to boycott the vote. The AKP responded with a snap election, which it won handily, neutralizing military-Kemalist resistance to Gul’s election as president.

CRACKDOWN ON DISSENT

The next year Kemalist prosecutors sued the AKP in the Constitutional Court, demanding the party be banned because it had become a “center of anti-secular activities.” The Constitutional Court had, at the bidding of the army and Kemalist elites, outlawed five political parties one after another. This time, though, the AKP survived because only six judges, instead of the required seven, supported the motion to ban it. This was followed by other Kemalist and Gulenist court cases against Erdogan government. The abortive military coup last July, which the government says was masterminded by Gulen, was the latest attempt so far to overthrow the Erdogan government.

Reacting to these subversive actions, especially the failed coup, the AKP regime launched a widespread crackdown on Gulenist and Kemalist dissidents. It has jailed thousands of political dissidents and fired thousands of others from their jobs in the police, judiciary, bureaucracy and military. Several media outlets have been shut down, and scores of journalists thrown behind the bar. Many Kemalists and Gulenists obviously have supported or joined destabilizing activities or the abortive coup. But many innocent citizens appear also to have been caught up in the fray and lost their jobs or suffered detention or prison terms. Given the mounting opposition to Erdogan and his government, I won’t be surprised to see them defeated in the next or a subsequent election.

But Erdogan and the AKP will be remembered for ending the 90-year-long military and Kemalist pseudo-autocracy in Turkey and ushering in full-fledged, or nearly so, democracy. In one bold move after another the Erdogan government purged the military of many of its coup-mongering officers; reformed the military-dominated National Security Council, bringing it under civilian control; stripped the Constitutional Court of its power to ban political parties; disbanded the clandestine West Study Group (BGG), a cell within the army, which collected intelligence on politicians and planned coups; expanded freedom of the press and expression; introduced a new Penal Code, abolishing torture by police and security personnel; guaranteed individual rights, which was subordinated to the demand of whatever law-enforcement agencies decided was the “security of the state”; restored the use of the Kurdish language and celebration of Kurdish symbols cultural events, banned since the founding of the state; and so on.

The government has rolled back many of the democratic reforms it carried out. I expect these lapses to be remedied by this regime or its successors. I don’t believe that the Turks, having tasted the blessings of freedom and democracy, will revert to the Kemalist era again. They demonstrated their new, indomitable spirit of freedom during the coup attempt last July when everyday Turks, responding to Erdogan’s televised call, poured into the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, braved military bombs and bullets, chased and assaulted rebel troops and crushed the uprising in hours. That was the first time in history the Turks challenged and quashed a military putsch.

DEMOCRACY’S BIRTH PANGS

Formative phases of most democracies – including the United States, Britain, France and Germany – have always been marked by similar and more dire mayhem: civil wars, ethnic and religious strife, and authoritarian governance. Some of the newer democracies within the EU are also going through their birth pangs. Look at the post-Communist democracies of Hungary and Poland. Freedom House has lamented a “spectacular breakdown of democracy” in the two countries, and human rights watchdogs and media pundits have denounced their “autocratic” governments. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has all but silenced political dissent through continual crackdowns, suppressed press freedom, persecuted his opponents, and proudly declared Hungary an “illiberal state.” He says Western European “liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), has passed laws flouting parliamentary rules, weakened the country’s highest court, stifled the press, appointed loyalists to civil service and government-run media organizations. He has turned the public television broadcaster TVP into a PiS party station. (Critics call it TVPiS!). PiS has gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure the victory of its candidates. And so on.The problem is that both Orban and Kaczynski continue to win elections, the former has a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament. European politicians and news media continue to criticize their autocratic rule. Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, met Orban at the EU’s Riga summit and greeted him: “Hello dictator!”

Yet few Europeans are calling for Hungary’s or Poland’s expulsion from the EU, just as few would like to have the Turks in the bloc. Ask a Turk why, and he or she would tell you that Poles and Hungarians have the right faith and skin tone, and more of less blend in the cultural monochrome that Europe has been for the past two millennia. Turkey, with its Muslim population of 90 million, would rupture that cultural harmony. Echoing the German architect Behr, Remy Leveau, a political science professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Institute of Political Studies of Paris), told me the “real problem” hindering Turkish membership of the EU. “We [Europeans] don’t have a history of cultural pluralism.” I was chatting with him at his office on Rue Michel-Ange in Paris on the gloomy afternoon of November 2, 2000. Even though Europeans were secular, he said, “we observed All Saints Day yesterday,” and “Christian values” underpinned “our moral standards and worldviews.” Having Muslim Turks in European neighborhoods wouldn’t “help social cohesion,” he added.

All the same, Turkey remains an asset to Europe and America, having the second-largest armed forces in NATO and serving as a bulwark against anti-Western guerrilla and terrorist forces in the Middle East. Turkey, too, is the EU’s fourth-largest export market and fifth-largest supplier of imports.

Today, under an agreement with the EU, Turkey hosts 3 million refugees from the Middle East and South Asia, who would otherwise be flooding Western Europe, creating a demographic and security nightmare there.

Hence Mogherini wouldn’t suspend, let alone end, Turkey’s “accession” talks, even though she knows the Turks wouldn’t be joining the family of European nations. I can foresee the eventual outcome of the negotiations: The Turks won’t become Europeans, but would maintain special economic and security relations with Europe.

The Erdogan government knows this. As a result, it’s already cultivating strategic and trade relations with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and a host of Middle Eastern countries.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs analyst in Washington, has researched EU-Turkish relations and U.S. foreign policy options in the Middle West and South Asia. He hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’: https://muslimjourney.com.

Bravo, Trump!

Mustafa Malik April 7, 2017

This is a first for me: supporting an action of President Trump. I applaud his order tonight to strike Syrian military installations with dozens of Tomahawks. It’s a highly moral and humane undertaking whose strategic consequences are likely to be far-reaching.

I hope that America will finally get rid of the ghastliest and most repugnant dictator alive, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And I hope this is the beginning of the end of the hell on earth that has engulfed the Syrian people for six years, which has seemed eternity to most.

I have opposed Trump’s election and most of his words and deeds so far. And I will continue to criticize his right-wing domestic political and economic programs and most of his other uninformed and potentially counter-productive foreign policy agenda. But his decision to clip the wings of the bloodthirsty dictator in Damascus has my unreserved support. The president has put the world, and especially the Obama administration, to shame, which they richly deserve, for wringing their hands while Assad and his Russian and Iranian collaborators systematically slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrian men, women and children.

Trump has been widely criticized and lampooned, often rightly, for his many faults and failings, but tonight he has hopped onto a moral high ground for his bold decision: to punish the Assad regime for its chemical attack, which has snuffed out the lives of scores Syrians, including “beautiful babies,” as he put it. With a single stone he also is killing a host of other birds: cutting Vladimir Putin down to size; giving Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a bloody nose; putting Kim Jong-un on notice; earning the support and accolade of Arab regimes, whatever it’s worth; and above all, giving a principled dimension to his otherwise wrong-headed, rudderless administration.

The ultimate outcome of the U.S. intervention in Syria is unlikely to please Trump, his Republican friends and many other Americans. Post-Assad Syrian politics and society will likely be dominated by Sunni Arab forces most of whom will remain hostile to U.S. support for Israel and the repressive Arab monarchies and dictatorships. It will require the Trump and the United States a much greater epiphany to earn the support and trust of Arab and Muslim societies, which, at this moment, doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of the laudable operation the administration has launched in Syria.

Nobody can tell the future awaiting Syria, which is going to be chaotic at least for a while. Whatever it is, it will be far better than the nightmare that millions of Syrians have gone through since they rose up against their brutal dictator.

Meanwhile, Trump’s bold and decisive undertaking in Syria has earned him and America abiding gratitude of the Syrian nation (except the coterie surrounding and supporting Assad), and a very bright spot in Syrian history.

–Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’: https://muslimjourney.com.

Mustafa Malik

Stop, and look around you.

— Tolstoy

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