Muslim Heretics Conference

Bangladesh is a country rich with human potential, but that potential can only be realised by making poor people’s needs — which Islamists around the world have previously made their own political territory — the new government’s top priority
As fears about the Islamisation of politics in the Muslim world grow, Bangladesh, with the world’s fourth-largest Muslim population (126 million), has moved dramatically in the opposite direction.
Bangladesh is usually heard about only when cyclones and tsunamis ravage its low coastline, but the country’s relatively anonymous international stature belies its strategic importance. Its secular politicians’ ability to defeat the country’s Islamists decisively in the recent parliamentary election may, indeed, have revived the viability of “Muslim democracy” around the world.
The recent landslide victory (with a huge turnout) for the Awami League in Bangladesh’s first election in seven years, after two years of a military-backed caretaker government, has moved the country to the forefront of the battle between secular democrats and Islamists that is now underway across South Asia. The election was a credit to the country’s democratic yearnings — and I say that as the chairman of the European Parliament’s short-term election observation mission to Bangladesh.
The new electoral register was more robust than in many Western countries, with a photo ID picture alongside each elector. The violence that had been widespread in previous Bangladeshi elections was entirely absent, with the security services’ professionalism in policing the elections — and the army’s willingness to return voluntarily to its barracks — playing a key role.
In Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh now has a charismatic leader whose massive electoral mandate augurs well for creating the type of strong, secular government that the country needs. She returned to Bangladesh from exile, which the army had imposed on her. After her return she still had to endure imprisonment and trumped-up murder charges.
Hasina’s enormous popularity as a former prime minister, and her status as one of only two surviving daughters of Bangladesh’s founder, Sheikh Mujib Rahman, always ensured that she would be a leading contender in the election. Her overwhelming triumph has vindicated her belief that ordinary Bangladeshis want a secular and stable future for their country — one that, in contrast to Pakistan, is characterised by warm relations with their giant neighbour, India.
The comprehensive defeat of the Islamist parties that sought to take Bangladesh away from its democratic and secular roots, and which had sought in 1971 to impose Urdu as a national language and suppress Bengali language and culture, is the real story of the election. The vote demonstrated that Bangladesh’s 153 million people have little appetite for bringing Islamism into politics. Bangladesh needs only to look west to India and Pakistan to see the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.
But if Hasina is to succeed in continuing to blunt Islamism, she must address the fundamental problems that have destabilised Bangladeshi society for decades. Chief among these is the poverty endured by the majority of her country’s population.
To some extent, it is surprising that the Islamist parties did not do better, considering their success elsewhere in mobilising the most marginalised and vulnerable in society. If the Awami League is unable to address the country’s systematic poverty and social inequality, Islamism may well yet succeed in rallying the impoverished to its banner. The Jama’at-e Islami, indeed, told me during my stay that they had a 30-year agenda to introduce sharia law into Bangladesh.
The examples of Hamas and Hezbollah provide a salutary reminder of the challenges faced by the new government in Bangladesh. Although these terrorist groups are better known internationally for atrocities against Israel, they have established strong political support by providing organised social services such as schools and clinics for poor people.
Hamas and Hezbollah prospered in this way because the governing authorities were either unable or unwilling to address grassroots poverty. In the case of Hamas, this displacement was due largely to the massive corruption of the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat, whose cronies pocketed billions of dollars intended to alleviate poverty and suffering in the Gaza Strip.
Given that endemic corruption in Bangladesh is perhaps the primary obstacle to providing essential services for poor people, it is essential that Hasina adopt a tough approach to corruption from the outset. Corruption is also a potential trigger for intervention by the military, a recurring feature of Bangladesh’s history that has consistently impeded the country’s development.
Beyond fighting corruption, Hasina must also ban all foreign donations to political parties, in particular the “Wahhabi gold” that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states use to fund Islamist parties.
The challenges facing the Awami League are many and varied, but it is not without resources. Bangladesh is in a better position to weather the global financial storm than most Asian countries, because its banks are not over-exposed and its garment industry focuses on the lower end of the market, which, so far, appears to be holding up. But chief among Bangladesh’s opportunities is the chance to show the world that a Muslim-majority country can freely embrace liberal democracy and make it work by confining religion to the private sphere.
With its constitutional majority, the government should ensure this outcome by restoring the 1972 Constitution, which established Bangladesh as a secular democratic state. Bangladesh is a country rich with human potential, but that potential can only be realised by making poor people’s needs — which Islamists around the world have previously made their own political territory — the new government’s top priority. —DTPS
Charles Tannock is UK Conservative Foreign Affairs Spokesman in the European Parliament and led the EU parliamentary delegation of election observers to the recent Bangladesh elections

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - view: Reviving Muslim democracy —Charles Tannock

Speaking of the Jews, Razib has an interesting post (following up on this post, from last year) attacking the intellectual seriousness of the term “Judeo-Christian.” Among other things, he argues that in terms of historical beliefs and practices, it makes more sense to talk about a Judeo-Islamic tradition, with Christianity, trinities and all, as the outlier, than it does to lump the Christians and the Jews together.
Given that the term in question evolved, in part, as a characteristically American form of politeness - a way to make a Jewish minority in a largely-Christian society feel welcomed and at home - I don’t think it’s a surprise that it’s somewhat wanting in the intellectual-rigor department. But I think there are two defenses to be made of it. The first is that it’s most often employed in the context of intra-Western debates over secularism, atheism, the culture war, and so forth, rather than in the context of Islam - and in a landscape like the post-Enlightenment West, where traditional religion has often been opposed by secular ideologies of various stripes, Jews and Christians would seem to have enough in common to constitute a Judeo-Christian axis (if you will) that can be reasonably contrasted with worldviews ranging from Comtean positivism to Marxism and National Socialism. (It’s not a coincidence that the term “Judeo-Christian” was initially popularized during decades when the latter two ideologies were ascendant.)
Throw Islam into the mix, obviously, and the term makes less immediate sense. Razib allows that self-consciously modernized faiths like Reform Judaism and liberal Protestantism have more in common with one another than either does with contemporary Islam, but he makes the case that “Rabbinical Judaism, the dominant form of Judaism between 500 to 1800, resembles Islam much more than Christianity,” and that even the Judaizing tendencies in post-Reformation Christianity don’t create a practical affinity with Judaism comparable to the similarities between how Muslims and Jews worship the God of Abraham.
His brief is plausibly argued (though he glosses rather quickly over the implications of the  Maimonidean-Scholastic connection), so let me just offer one possible response: Namely, that you could arguably rest a case for a deeper Judeo-Christian than Judeo-Muslim affinity on how the junior religion relates to the parent faith. Both Christianity and Islam are essentially supersessionist, obviously, but I suspect that the Christian decision to swallow the Hebrew Bible whole into its scripture - and to preserve, rather than elide, Jesus’ own obvious self-understanding as a Jew - ultimately creates deeper grounds for dialogue than does Islam’s insistence that the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures was deliberately corrupted and required correction from Muhammed.
Put another way, Christian tradition seems to have more respect for the essential integrity and God-givenness of pre-Christian Judaism than does Islamic tradition. This makes it difficult to imagine a Muslim version of the sort of rethinking of what, precisely, supersessionism means than we’ve seen from Evangelicals and Catholics in this century - a rethinking that’s been crucial for the development of Judeo-Christian dialogue. And by the same token, there’s no equivalent in the foundational narrative of Islam to the striking Jewishness of Jesus, a quality which would seem to make Jewish engagement with the Gospel narratives - and Christian engagement with that engagement - more plausible and intellectually fruitful in the long run than Jewish engagement with the figure of Muhammed.
Admittedly, though, these suggestion are entirely provisional, and perhaps hopelessly timebound. The potential for fruitful Jewish-Christian dialogue was not readily apparent, to put it mildly, during many periods of Christian history; there were periods when Jewish-Islamic dialogue was in better shape that it is today; and it may be that Muslim-Jewish dialogue in, say the 24th century will look a lot like Christian-Jewish dialogue does at present, the various scriptural tumbling blocks notwithstanding. And if that dialogue is taking place between religious scholars in a peaceful Israel and Palestine, I’ll be delighted to have my theory disproven.

Christian, Muslim, Jew - Ross Douthat

The incoming Obama Administration confronts the problem of how to deal with the criminal (by domestic as well as international law) infliction of torture by elements of the United States government, with authority coming from the very top, and not merely on important terrorists but on random innocent victims.

While the Bush Administration has no doubt made errors in the course of its valiant attempts to protect us all from Islamofascist terrorists, in one respect it has displayed admirable creativity, from which the Obama Administration could benefit: assuming only that the President-elect is sufficiently generous-minded (as he seems to be) to be willing to learn from adversaries.

I refer to the question of the limits of executive power, or rather the unlimitedness of executive power. To call the legal positions taken by the Bush Administration “creative” would be to undervalue them: “breathtakingly audacious” would be more accurate. But those positions, and the actions taken in accordance with them, now stand as precedent, and the President-elect has expressed his admiration for audacity.

Audacity is certainly called for. Our situation today is historically unique. Not only are we (as the Bush Administration and its supporters tirelessly insist) at war with an enemy so nebulous as to guarantee that the war will have no end, but we confront strong evidence of the existence of a Fifth Column, though not the particular Fifth Column the warhawks predicted.

Every step taken since the Bush Administration took power: ignoring the al-Qaeda problem until the 9/11 attacks, covering up the role of the House of Saud in facilitating those attacks, using the aftermath of those attacks for partisan advantage rather than forming a government of national unity, allowing bin Laden’s escape, failing to establish an effective anti-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan, continuing to prop up Pervez Musharraf despite his strong support for the Islamofascist ISI, failing to secure international support for the invasion of Iraq, invading Iraq, failing to prevent looting in Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army and most of the civil service in the name of de-Ba’athification, supporting Ahmed Chalabi in his power-lust despite his ties to Iran, staffing the CPA with ignorant young wingnuts instead of professionals, allowing the looting of the CPA by contractors and cooking up legal interpretations to protect them from criminal liability, engaging in torture, failing to cover up the fact that they were engaging in torture — Need I go on? — has tended to weaken this country, and the West, in this existential struggle.

It is of course possible to explain each of those decisions individually as the product of ideology, corruption, incompetence, or some combination of the three. But surely it strains credulity to imagine that the entire pattern, tending inevitably to the end of strengthening our enemies and weakening our institutions and our alliances, was mere accident. Surely the least hypothesis is that there were, in the Bush Administration and its supporting institutions, one or more Islamofascist moles. The Hansen case reminds us that the best cover for a mole is apparent fanatical hatred of whichever foreign power the mole is working for. So we should seek out our Fifth Column among those who have been loudest in denouncing Islamofascism, and especially among those most insistent on subverting our Constitution to do so.

That points directly at Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Addington, and Yoo. Perhaps they are innocent, but the presumption of innocence is one of those ideas Yoo properly dismissed as “quaint.” Remember, it was precisely the decision to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem (with responses constrained by the Constitution) that the Bush Administration correctly identified as the key weakness of the Clinton Administration in its response to terrorism.

No, this is a matter of national security, and therefore covered by President-to-be Obama’s inherent and unlimitable powers as Commander-in-Chief in wartime. According to the various doctrines offered by the Bush Administration, he he can order the indefinite detention, and aggressive interrogation, of anyone he deems, his sole and un-reviewable judgment, to be an enemy combatant, including anyone who has given “material support” to terrorism. And as long as those detentions and interrogations occur outside the sovereign territory of the United States — at Gitmo or Bagram, for example — neither the courts nor the Congress has any authority to intervene, or even to inquire: even in cases where the subjects of the detention were known in advance to be innocent of anything but boasting. Indeed, any Congressional inquiry at all into any action by the President or his aides — even frankly criminal activity such as the obstruction of justice — is barred by the doctrine of Executive Privilege, as asserted by the Bush Administration.

The President-elect should, therefore, as his first official act — indeed, perhaps as part of his Inaugural Address — order the immediate detention of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, David Addington, and perhaps a few others, at a secret location outside the sovereign U.S., for the purposes of extracting from them evidence of the plot and the identities of the other participants, who can in turn be detained and interrogated to see what they have to say for themselves.

Since most bullies are also cowards, I suspect that the years of maltreatment the Bush Administration inflicted on innocent Afghani peasants to get them to make false confessions will not be necessary to get Bush and his cronies to confess. A month of hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and stress positions, or a few minutes on the waterboard, should suffice. Their confessions will retrospectively justify the interrogations. And of course they cannot be given the right to counsel, since their lawyers would necessarily learn about the interrogation techniques, which are Top Secret Codeword material as intelligence sources and methods, despite the fact that everyone in the world knows what they are. (The techniques are not original: all of them were copied from the Inquisition, the Gestapo, and the KGB.)

Now perhaps some future court might decide that these methods, as applied to people whose status generally makes them “non-torturable,” actually exceeded the President’s powers, even in wartime. But not only would that decision be wrong on its face — since those powers have no limits — but even bringing the case would be wrong. As all our Wise Men agree, no senior official should ever be held legally accountable for actions in the name of national security, no matter how horrible those actions might be.

So now is the moment for the President-elect to confute his critics, and demonstrate that he has the toughness needed to deal with the Islamofascist threat, no matter who its agents may be.

Mark Kleiman: Torture: A modest proposal