You would think the murder of three Christian worshippers in Nice — a 60 year-old woman, the 55 year-old sexton and a 44 year-old Brazilian-born mother of three — coming on the heels of the beheading of a schoolteacher in a Parisian suburb, would convince American and British journalists and opinion writers that France really has an Islamic terrorism problem, and it’s not a figment of President Emmanuel Macron’s imagination.
But no. (more…)
Emmanuel Macron is the most liberal president France has had since the 1970s, when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing legalized abortion and made contraceptives commercially available. Yet there has been a tendency on the left to blow every hint of Macronist illiberalism out of proportion.
Macron did not, on balance, cut public spending. He raised welfare benefits, extended unemployment insurance to the self-employed and penalized companies that made excessive use of short-term contracts. But he also liberalized labor law, to make it easier for firms to hire and fire workers, and abolished a wealth tax few millionaires paid, which earned him the moniker “president of the rich”.
Police largely tolerated the so-called Yellow Vests protests against Macron in 2018, but left-wing critics seized on a few instances of police violence to argue the president couldn’t stand criticism.
Now that Macron is taking a harder line against Islamic extremism, following the beheading of a French teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils, John Lichfield reports for Politico Europe that the same tendency is rearing its head on the (American) left.
The New York Times claims Macron has ordered a “broad government crackdown against Muslim individuals and groups.” The World Socialist Web Site, in a widely retweeted story, accuses Macron of “whipping up … anti-Muslim hysteria.” An American sociologist who researches white supremacists laments that French officials “respond to violent extremism with violent extremism.”
What is this “broad crackdown”? Macron’s government has closed a mosque, which was run by a radical imam. A number of arrests have been made. “Anti-Muslim hysteria”? 51 more Islamic organizations are being investigated for alleged extremist sympathies. What about “violent extremism”? There are plans to take away the French passports of 231 foreign-born criminals.
Some of this may be an overreaction. Expelling dual citizens will be difficult if their countries of origin refuse to take them back. The rhetoric of Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has not been helpful. He believes France is fighting a “civil war” against Islamists.
But — the convictions of the woke American left notwithstanding — words are not violence, and anyway Macron himself hasn’t gone so far. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron has startled observers with a number of policies that might seem to contradict his previously held beliefs.
Despite being pro-EU, he blocked membership talks with Albania and North Macedonia. Once clear-eyed on the Russian threat, Macron now argues for dialogue with Moscow and calls Islamic terror NATO’s number-one enemy. He even made a point of attacking political Islam.
Some hear dog whistles to the far right, assume bad faith and call Macron an Islamophobe. That is unfair to the most liberal president France has had since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. (more…)
This could have gone a lot worse. The speech Donald Trump gave on Islam and terror in Riyadh on Sunday was surprisingly intelligent.
According to his prepared remarks, the president rejected the clash-of-civilizations paradigm some of his fanatical underlings, like Steve Bannon, have promoted.
“This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects or different civilizations,” Trump told an assembly of Muslim leaders.
This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.
That is quite right — and a reversal from Trump’s previous rhetoric.
Like many Republicans, Trump inflated the Islamic terror threat, making it sound as if America’s survival depended on its defeat. The reality is that it is closer to crime. Terrorist attacks are horrible, but they seldom kill many Westerners. (more…)
Donald Trump has always had a difficult relationship with the truth. His sheer volume of daily falsehoods overwhelms an unprepared news media — and buries unsavory stories which the Republican would prefer to keep hidden.
Trump even manages to construct entire narratives via a steady diet of alternative facts delivered to his supporters.
This weekend, we saw something new: For the first time, those falsehoods came together to generate, enact and justify policy.
Here is a brief overview of the alternative facts (previously known as lies) underpinning the travel ban which has thrown international travel into chaos and capriciously interrupted thousands of lives. (more…)
Angela Merkel’s proposal to ban the burqa has caught some of her foreign admirers by surprise.
A headline at the left-leaning Vox reads, “Germany’s famously tolerant chancellor just proposed a burqa ban,” implying it is both intolerant and out of character for Merkel.
Vox is right when it argues the timing is political. Merkel recently announced she will seek a fourth term as chancellor next year and is facing criticism of her immigration policy from the right.
But this is not an about-face. If anything, her open-doors immigration policy was. (more…)
As the Trump transition rolls along, the infamous “Muslim ban” has returned to the forefront.
It all started on December 7, 2015, when then-candidate Donald Trump spoke to supporters after the San Bernardino mass shooting. He advocated a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This proposal is still on his website.
It has been willfully forgotten or explained away since, but the fact remains: Trump’s first instinct was to call for a Muslim ban of indeterminate length.
It doesn’t stop there. Even in July, Trump said his plan had undergone an “expansion” and would bar individuals from places “compromised by terrorism.” This includes NATO allies like France and Germany. They “totally” meet this definition, Trump said, because they “allowed people to come into their territory.” (more…)
Certainly, the end of this year’s Ramadan will go down as one of the century’s bloodiest. First Istanbul; then Dhaka, rounded off by Baghdad, Qatif, Medina and Jeddah. It’s not wholly clear just how much the Islamic State controlled or directed these attacks or merely inspired them, but owing to their scale, scope and timing they are worth examining in the wider context of the geopolitical view of Sunni supremacist terrorism.
Thus we must embark upon the road of understanding, of causation and explanation, to pinpoint sources and posit solutions. We needn’t empathize with the madness, only know that it has its own form of rationality it is playing by. (more…)
Five years later, the dismal record of the Arab Spring is all too apparent. Syria burns, Egypt’s new pharaoh goes from strength to strength while the Gulf monarchs, having launched war in Yemen, have rarely seemed so lethal. Democracy, it is clear, did not sweep in with the revolutions of the 2011-12.
But that’s no reason to dismiss the spring entirely. All such wide-scale events have resonance. For better or worse, the Arab world is certainly different and in some slim ways even improved since 2011.
Here now is the geopolitical review of the Arab Spring. (more…)
Since Samuel Huntington unveiled his “Clash of Civilization” thesis in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article, a cottage industry of critiques have emerged to challenge it. Great thinkers, such as Amartya Sen, Amin Maalouf and Edward Said, have expended time and ink to refute Huntington’s controversial thesis. For the most part, these works have presented rationale critiques that focus on theoretical problems raised by Samuel Huntington’s board game like simplification of geopolitics and global history. Few of these critiques have, however, tried to counter Huntington’s argument with primary source research or been as readable as Ian Almond’s Two Faiths One Banner: When Muslims Marches with Christians Across Europe’s Battlegrounds (2011).
In this slim book, Almond shows that European history is far more muddled than Huntington’s depiction of one overarching “clash” between two visions of Abrahamic monotheism. Indeed the individual motivations and allegiances proves far to complex to paint with even the most vivid neoconservative or Marxist brush strokes. In making this argument, Almond cuts across wide historical periods, as well as the politics of several different centuries, demonstrating a mastery of facts, figures and a flair for colorful details.
The success of Almond’s argument lies in its exclusive focus on military campaigns and the colorful historical figures associated with these efforts. Beginning in eleventh century Andalusia and ending with the Crimean War in the mid-ninenteenth century, the book examines periods in which Muslim and Christian groups were fighting together rather than against one another in various battlefields. Rather than antagonistic civilizations, Almond’s reading of history suggests that individual units and individuals often had distinct allegiances that would surprise those eager to fit the world into neat left-wing or right-wing paradigms. (more…)
President Mohamed Morsi’s removal from office this week jeopardizes his Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt. But the army’s political intervention might have an impact beyond the country.
The Brotherhood’s experience in Egypt forces likeminded political groups across the Middle East to assess the value of obtaining their goals through a democratic process over means of armed aggression. Abiding by the democratic process got the Brotherhood ejected from the system while the Afghan Taliban’s commitment to armed resistance got them a seat at the negotiating table. (more…)
The balance of power between Shia and Sunni has shifted since the 2003 Iraq War. A bold new strategy of isolating Iran while simultaneously reaching out to and cutting a nuclear deal with it could reset the balance in the region and allow the United States to recalibrate their Middle East as well as global strategy.
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States have had a Sunni-centric approach to the Middle East that has hobbled their diplomatic flexibility. It is time for this to stop.
The proxy war between Shiites and Sunnis has been ongoing since 2003 but after Iraq finally shifted closer to Iran, a new battleground was certain to emerge. It now seems obvious that battleground is Syria. While much of what transpires there is clearly complex, it is also apparent that Iran is backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Saudi Arabia is supporting the rebels. A resurgent Turkey is also shifting to an outwardly hostile position toward the Assad regime.
This represents an opportunity for the United States that is being squandered. (more…)
The fragile political power-sharing arrangement imposed by American forces during the Iraqi occupation is at a renewed risk of collapse. Recent moves by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite backers have considerably threatened the state’s sensative coalition structure, which couples a Shia prime minister with Sunni and Kurdish deputies, a Sunni parliamentary speaker with Shia and Kurdish deputies, and a Kurdish president with Shia and Sunni vice presidents.
When American troops left Iraq less than a week ago, the long disgruntled Sunni establishment was on the defensive almost immediately, as deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, leader of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, was issued a stop work order Monday by Maliki’s office. Citing only “administrative irregularities” and the ambiguous charge of traveling without informing the government, Mutlaq is now effectively barred from entering the cabinet.
More recently, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a former general secretary of the country’s largest Sunni Islamist bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has fled to the semi-autonomous Kurdish north after being issued an arrest warrant for allegedly running a hit squad targeting government officials. Hashimi has called the allegations “absurd” and describes them as a smear campaign led by Maliki and his Shia backers who control the state’s Interior Ministry.
While Prime Minister Maliki called Wednesday for Kurdish authorities to hand over Hashimi for trial, the Sunni leader thanked Iraq’s Kurdish president Jalal Talabani on Tuesday for a promise of security as he weighs leaving the country.
The move puts Talabani in the middle of a renewed sectarian divide that has already seen the powerful Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, which controls nine ministerial posts and 82 parliamentary seats, suspend its participation in national unity cabinet meetings. (more…)
As the last few thousand American soldiers pack up their gear and look forward to spending the holidays with family and friends, commanders in Iraq worry about the potential fallout.
Most of the attention about future security threats in Iraq has focused on two main points of friction: the reestablishment of Al Qaeda as a strong and deadly terrorist group and the possibility of Arabs and Kurds fighting one another in the flashpoint city of Kirkuk. Jeffrey Buchanan, spokesman for the American forces in Iraq, recently made his concern about Al Qaeda in Iraq clear in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “I cringe whenever anybody makes a pronouncement that Al Qaeda is on its last legs.”
Major General Buchanan is not alone in this viewpoint. Indeed, it would be especially difficult for the United States to forget that Al Qaeda still controls a few hundred fighters in northern Iraq with suicide bombings on provincial government buildings to back that assertion up. And while the terrorist group is not what it used to be in terms of its operational capability, strong leadership and bases of operations, the social and political conditions that helped spawn Iraq’s Al Qaeda in the first place is nowhere near resolved. A substantial percentage of the Sunni Arab community looks at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with the utmost suspicion, constantly raising objections to his consolidation of power and his arrest of Sunnis across the country.
Al Qaeda is not the only militant group operating in Iraq however nor is it considered by some experts to be even the most powerful or dangerous.
To people who monitor Iraq on a daily basis and continue to see the bombings in residential areas, assassinations against Iraqi government officials and the taking and killing of Iraqi hostages, this statement may be hard to wrap one’s mind around. Kidnappings, indiscriminate shootings and roadside bombings have, after all, been used by Al Qaeda to generate news coverage from the Iraqi and international press.
But we should not — and for the sake of American and Iraqi security within the country, cannot — forget about the many Shia militias that are still making a splash in southern Iraq and in Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army used to be the most headline grabbing Shia militia out there before it was creamed by a 2008 joint American-Iraqi military operation against it in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra. The Mahdi Army, now renamed the Promised Day Brigades, is still out there wrecking havoc if it needs to but two other militia organizations are just as slick — the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (“League of the Righteous”) and Kata’ib Hezbollah, a group that is funded and trained by Iranian external security forces according to American authorities.
It was Kata’ib Hezbollah, nor Ṣadr’s group, that spiked American casualties in Iraq this summer when fifteen soldiers were killed by rocket propelled improvised bombs and roadside explosives. Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq is an offshoot of Ṣadr’s Mahdi Army and known for its deadly sniper attacks on foreign troops since 2007, some of which have been uploaded to the Internet for aspiring militants to see.
What will become of these three militias once the United States military is fully out of Iraq? They that they are only launching attacks on coalition forces in order to convince them to leave. If that is so, will they cease their violent operations the day after American soldiers pack up and head to Kuwait? With Baghdad still expecting to host a few thousand private security contractors and thousands of State Department personnel, this is an open question. It is anyone’s guess whether American diplomats and contractors will be perceived as an extension of the occupation by these fanatics.
Kata’ib Hezbollah‘s closeness to Tehran is another reason to doubt that it will lay down its arms and join the Iraqi political process once America leaves. Iran hopes to gain influence in Iraq and prevent it from resurging as a strategic adversary as it was under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime.
None of this is to disparage President Barak Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan. He was simply following the Status of Forces Agreement signed by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Rather, it is a reminder to both the Iraqi government and its ally in Washington that Al Qaeda is not the only insurgent force willing to fragment the country for its own objectives.
In a surprise announcement by Gulf Arab leaders last week, the Gulf Cooperation Council welcomed proposals by Jordan and Morocco to enter into the alliance. The GCC, consisting of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has been wracked by internal protest against monarchial rule since the Arab Spring began in Tunisia last January.
The Al Khalifa Sunni ruling family of Bahrain is still experiencing its most extensive period of civil unrest since earlier in the decade when Shiites rose up against the monarchy for an extension of political rights.
Saudi Arabia, the most powerful state in the GCC, continues to dispatch police to its restive Eastern Province where the bulk of its oil reserves are located, in order to crackdown on Shia protests there. UAE authorities have launched arrest raids against human rights defenders and civil society activists, most of whom come from the emirates’ wealthy clientele. Oman under Sultan Qaboos bin Said has been relatively peaceful compared to demonstrations that have turned violent elsewhere yet residents in the quiet Gulf sultanate are taking to the streets. Oil rich Kuwait is dragging its feet on providing citizenship to thousands of people who, although not Kuwaiti in origin, have moved to the small Gulf state to improve their lives.
The monarchies of the Persian Gulf are thus nervous about the type of political developments occurring around them, and in some cases, within their own borders. Saudis and emirates, who are preferably on the side of regional stability, have already acted in concert with the GCC to quell Bahrain’s protest movement. The offering of a GCC bid to Jordan and Morocco could be another tact to add new members and defend the alliance.
Why Jordan and Morocco? Like the GCC overall, both are pro-Western regimes boasting strong intelligence and military relationships with the United States. Both are indeed monarchies, which would suit them well in a club that is composed exclusively of kings and sultans. Both also happen to be countries with large Sunni populations, which would undoubtedly help Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners unite the region’s Sunni community against encroaching Iranian influence.
But if Jordan and Morocco are welcomed to join, why not Egypt, Iraq or Yemen? Geographically speaking, Iraq and Yemen would be far more preferable than Jordan, which is not even considered a Persian Gulf nation to begin with. Iraq also happens to sit atop the region’s second largest pool of oil, a product which would fill the pockets of the GCC with billions of dollars more in revenue.
While Yemen’s oil production is scheduled to dry out completely in the next decade, Yemenis still possess more oil than the Jordanians, who rely almost completely on foreign aid to sustain their infrastructure and fund their government.
Post-Mubarak Egypt, still in its infant stage of democracy and trying to reassert itself as an independent power, was notably absent as well, straining ties between Egypt and its traditional Gulf backers. Yemen, with all of its domestic problems and a nationwide protest movement of its own, remains the ugly sister on the outside looking in.
The Jordanian and Moroccan bids should therefore be seen as a political strategy rather than an example of economic unification. Surrounded by an ascending Shia government in Iraq and the loss of a strategic ally in Hosni Mubarak, Gulf royals are nervous.
How the United States and Europe fit into this equation is still to be determined. Indeed, it is important to remember that just because Jordan and Morocco are encouraged to apply doesn’t mean that both will find a new home in the GCC. Yet if their applications are accepted, the regional balance of power will be tilted more toward the Sunni states.
