Muslim Heretics Conference

Editorial: After America has spoken for Obama

Mr John McCain, the Republican candidate in the presidential elections 2008, gracefully conceded defeat by announcing on Tuesday: “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly. A little while ago, I had the honour of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love”.
Mr Barack Obama is black: thus was history made. He also has charisma which makes him conform to at least one American yardstick of election. He has been focused upon as a person far more than on his programme. His middle name “Hussein” — rhyming with Saddam’s surname — has put off many in America while exciting the Muslims of the world. Yet there was much that went in his favour because of how the Republican incumbent George W Bush got it wrong for two terms.
The economy is first because the common man in America feels the pain of a bankrupted economy and indebtedness more than ever before since the Depression of the 1930s. In 2000, the Americans were exercised about what to do with the huge budget surplus; in 2008, in addition to the financial crisis, America is spending a billion dollars of actually borrowed money every month on Iraq, a war that made America the most hated nation in the world, while eroding the feelings of those who once admired it.
Pakistanis have been discussing Obama these past months with a lot of hope and some misgiving. This is in line with the general Muslim sentiment in the world, as expressed by some debates televised from the Middle East where America is judged every living moment. The vote was for Obama, barring some Arabs who thought the Democrats would lean more heavily in favour of Israel and not do much to stave off the danger of Iran in the region.
In Pakistan, the view that Mr Obama will initiate a policy of “engagement” rather than insist on unilateral “pre-emption” gave him full marks. Similarly, the hope is that he will positively “engage” with Iran instead of threatening it with attack. His selection of Joseph Biden as vice-president has also been well received. Mr Biden has introduced a bill in Congress that will triple the American annual aid to Pakistan. And Congress is expected to be “conquered” on both sides of the Hill by the Democrats.
Of course, raging anti-Americanism in Pakistan has filled some with misgivings over what he will do from across the Durand line. He has promised to target Al Qaeda inside Pakistan if Pakistan can’t manage to do it. He also has pledged to beef up the force in Afghanistan by transferring troops from Iraq. Will that mean that he will increase the “drone attacks” hurting Pakistan today as its army actually makes headway in its fight against the terrorists or “militants” in the Tribal Areas? The balanced view is that there are better chances of Mr Obama listening to the democratic government in Islamabad than was the case under Mr Bush.
But there is still something wrong with the assessment of many Pakistanis regarding the change of government in the United States. The main flaw is that we want the outside world to adjust to our feelings without first examining the validity of the way we feel and think. If we protest “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” against the ISAF-NATO raids, why don’t we protest the terrorists who have violated our territory much more palpably and have shown to the world that our state is not capable of controlling its own territory? This unrealistic attitude also attaches to Mr Obama’s presumed reference to Kashmir. We are overjoyed at Mr Obama’s statement that he will work on normalising relations between Pakistan and India and helping us resolve our disputes. We “assume” that he will address himself to the Kashmir dispute because in our eyes that is the only obstacle on the road to peace with India. But it is clear that that is not how the coming diplomacy will proceed. America relates to India and Pakistan in accordance with the positions they occupy in the world. India belongs to the category of strong nations which don’t take external pressure for policy change. Pakistan belongs to the category of weak nations that have to adjust their policy to external developments. It suffers if it doesn’t conform to the rules of this category.
Luckily, Pakistan is adjusting much better under the current democratic government than it did under General Pervez Musharraf. Its security is threatened from within rather than from India. One can easily perceive this to be true if one takes off the old strategic goggles. The “proxy” war with India in Afghanistan, in Balochistan, and in the Tribal Areas is becoming a problem, and this is where Mr Obama will most probably concentrate. This is where Pakistan and India can both make adjustments without feeling cheated of their sovereignty.
All in all, a new era of global change seems to be in the offing. The question is: will Pakistan trim its sails in line with the changes as they occur, and in the light of its economic interest which should override all other “strategically” invented ones, or insist on behaving recklessly as it has done in the past? *
Second Editorial: LBA: be kind to citizens
The Lahore Bar Association (LBA) on Tuesday locked down the entire lower courts in Lahore, causing a lot of harassment to the litigant citizens. This was following the Black Day on Monday when the entire legal system of the country was more or less shut down. On Thursday (today), the weekly protest by the lawyers is expected to cause more disruption.
Efforts to shut down the High Court have not borne fruit, which may unfortunately fire the powerful lawyers to use more coercion. But our appeal to the powerful lawyers is to take pity on the citizens who actually support them. The provincial government is on their side, which should persuade them to behave with grace and mercy. By any yardstick of justice, punishment cannot be “indirect”, that is, the government in Islamabad cannot be chastised through the pain suffered by innocent citizens of Punjab. The lawyers’ movement can ill afford an erosion of popular support at this stage. *

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - Editorial: After America has spoken for Obama

By James Rupert

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — Hala Mustafa’s friends in Cairo were so thrilled by the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency that they told her to stop wearing red, to avoid looking as if she had adopted the Republican Party colors of John McCain.

“Arabs are very excited,” said Mustafa, editor of Democracy Review, an Egyptian quarterly. “People are imagining that he is a Muslim like them and that he is going to bring a new America that is friendly.”

Obama’s race, Islamic family roots and promise of change give him an opening to blunt militancy rooted in decades of white colonial rule and sharpened by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Exploiting that chance won’t be simple, given that the president-elect isn’t a Muslim, pledged to continue strongly supporting Israel and refused to rule out pursuing extremists in Pakistan.

He will be seen as “a fellow victim of white elites who has miraculously come to power, a figure like Nelson Mandela” of South Africa, and thus “will snatch the initiative from al- Qaeda and the jihadists,” said Ishtiaq Ahmed, an associate professor of international relations at Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. In the short term, though, Muslims’ expectations for Obama “are much too high to be fulfilled.”

Security Challenges

Extremism will present the new U.S. president with many of his most urgent security challenges: the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, civil wars in Sudan and Somalia, the revival of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Iran’s development of technologies usable for nuclear bombs. Israel will elect a government three weeks after Obama takes office, an event likely to shape his ability to pursue a Palestinian peace deal.

Afghanistan today offered a fresh example of the difficulty of battling terrorists without alienating even friendly Muslim countries.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded that Obama stop civilian casualties after an air strike by Western forces hit a marriage celebration near Kandahar yesterday, killing 37 civilians, including 23 children, according to an Associated Press report citing local officials. The attack came after Taliban forces attacked troops near the wedding, AFP reported. The U.S. military said it was looking into the matter.

Karzai’s `First Demand’

“We cannot win the fight against terrorism with air strikes,” Karzai said at a press conference, the AP said. “This is my first demand of the new president of the United States — to put an end to civilian casualties.”

Al-Qaeda has noted Obama’s potential to make progress in repairing America’s reputation among Muslims, damaged under President George W. Bush, said Rohan Gunaratna, director of a terrorism study center at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

“Obama will be able to change the perception among Muslims, even moderates, that the United States under President Bush was attacking not terrorism, but the Islamic world,” he said. Militants were “discussing on jihadist Web sites that if Obama comes to power, it will risk a very significant defeat for them.”

Obama’s Kenyan father and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim. As a boy, Obama, 47, attended a mostly Muslim public school in Jakarta, though he never adopted the religion. He describes his baptism and commitment to Christianity in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and has underscored to Jewish voters that he would be a strong supporter of Israel.

Positive Outlook?

In Iran, which has confronted U.S. governments since its own Islamic revolution 30 years ago, people believed before the vote “that powerful lobbies will not allow a colored person to become president,” said Kazem Jalali, a senior member of the Iranian parliament’s national-security and foreign-policy commission. Obama’s election “can bring about a positive outlook,” he said.

“Pakistan and the United States share common interests and objectives,” Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, said in a letter to Obama. The letter, released by the prime minister’s office in Islamabad today, added: “I look forward to more opportunities to discuss ways to further strengthen Pakistan-U.S. relations and to promote peace and stability in our region and beyond.”

Gamal Heshmat, an Egyptian leader with the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement in the Arab world, said that his group doesn’t pin too many hopes on Obama’s presidency.

Fixed Tenets

“There are certain fixed tenets to U.S. foreign policy that contradict the interests of our region and our nation,” Heshmat said in a telephone interview from Damnhour, a city northwest of Cairo. “If this policy is to continue only with a softer face, then this is something we do not welcome. The elections will not represent much.”

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said that country’s political leadership “welcomes and respects the choice of the American people in electing Sen. Barack Obama as president of America.”

The government has “a sincere desire” to cooperate with the president-elect “to achieve the joint interest of the two sides, preserve the security and stability of Iraq, maintain its full sovereignty and protect the interests of its people,” the spokesman said in a statement e-mailed from Baghdad.

June Elections

An Obama administration’s willingness to drop the Bush administration’s veiled military threats could energize moderate Iranians hoping to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in elections next June. Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a self-declared reformist who may run, told journalists last month he welcomed Obama’s offer to hold talks with Iran.

“Tehran will be willing to bargain” if Obama assures the country’s ruling clerics that the U.S. won’t try to overthrow them, said Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian political-science professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad’s media adviser, said Iran welcomed the possibility of new policies from Obama. “His slogan was change. We too believe that change is an inevitable requirement,” he told the state-run Al-Alam satellite news channel.

In Iraq — where Obama says he will pull out combat troops by the summer of 2010, in part to focus on the fight against al- Qaeda worldwide — any new slide into warfare among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions would renew Muslim accusations that the U.S. invasion had brought on the country’s collapse.

Careful and Realistic

The continued weakness of the Iraqi state and government means “leaders will need to be careful and realistic about how quickly they can move” to reduce the U.S. presence, according to a report last month by Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East and counterinsurgency specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In Pakistan, where Obama says he would authorize U.S. forces to attack Osama bin Laden if the al-Qaeda leader were found there, the civilian government is struggling to contain a Taliban movement along the Afghan border. It has stepped up cross-border attacks on U.S. and Afghan government troops and provided what the U.S. says are new sanctuaries for al-Qaeda.

In July, Obama joined the man who became his running mate, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, 65, in sponsoring a bill to triple U.S. nonmilitary aid for Pakistan to $7.5 billion over five years.

Pakistani political and military analyst Talat Masood said that approach ought to replace the stepped-up U.S. raids, which have radicalized residents and weakened Pakistan’s government.

“There is no short-term military solution” to the Taliban uprising, Masood said, and U.S. efforts should focus on long- term development, leaving the Pakistani military to combat the insurgents.

Bloomberg.com: India & Pakistan

Posted by: Andrea Shalal-Esa

Tags: Tales from the Trail: 2008, Barack Obama, CAIR, Colin Powell, Indonesia, Muslims

WASHINGTON - The largest U.S. Islamic civil rights group was among the first to congratulate President-Elect Democrat Barack Obama, a man who some opponents tried to portray as a Muslim because of the childhood years he spent in Indonesia.

“President-elect Obama’s victory sends the unmistakable message that America is a nation that offers equal opportunity to people of all backgrounds,” the Council on American Islamic Relations said in a statement just minutes after Obama’s victory speech in Chicago.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the group, said they hoped to offer the Obama administration some support and advice.

“We look forward to having the opportunity to work with the Obama administration in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, projecting an accurate image of America in the Muslim world and playing a positive role in securing our nation,” Awad said.

Obama, who will be the first black U.S. president and whose middle name is Hussein, is a Christian. But throughout the campaign, false rumors circulated on the Internet that he was Muslim and therefore not a suitable candidate for the White House.

Son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, Obama spent part of his childhood in largely Muslim Indonesia.

More than 20 million copies of a film called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” were included as advertising supplements in newspapers across the country, many in battleground states.

CAIR lashed out against the film, which was distributed by a private group unaffiliated with the McCain campaign and featured suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican and African American, endorsed Obama last month saying that he was troubled by the attempts to link Obama to Islam.

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?” he asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America,” Powell said.

Tales from the Trail » Blog Archive » American Muslims quick to congratulate Obama | Blogs | Reuters.com