Spring, 2013 | The Middle East Quarterly, Volume XX: Number 2, pp. 65-71 | by Eyal Zisser

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (center) with Mustafa Tlas (right) attend a ceremony at the unknown soldier monument in Damascus, October 6, 2003. The story of the Tlas family is illustrative of the turmoil afflicting Syria today. Tlas was the right-hand man of former President Hafiz al-Assad and defense minister for the younger Assad. But, Mustafa’s son, Abd al-Razzaq, has grown a Salafist beard and joined the revolt.

The outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011 surprised many people. Until that time, it seemed that the 40-year reign of the Assad dynasty, at first under its founder, Hafiz, and then under his son and heir, Bashar, had succeeded in turning Syria into a strong and stable state with governmental institutions, military, and security forces. Even social and economic systems appeared quite sturdy and effective.

Yet a year and a half of bloody fighting between the regime and the rebels has undermined most of the achievements of the Assad dynasty and turned Syria into a failing state on the verge of disintegration. Most state institutions have ceased to function. The bonds that united the various religious and ethnic communities, tribes, and regions — that took many long years of hard work to forge — are rapidly unraveling. In addition, Syria has become a kind of punching bag with foreign actors, both regional and international, intervening freely in the country’s internal affairs.

How did the revolt spread so quickly to all parts of Syria, striking such deep roots among wide segments of the Syrian society? How has the Assad regime managed, for the time being and in contrast to other Arab regimes rocked by the recent upheavals, to survive the lethal challenges facing it? And how has it been able to maintain its cohesion and strength to the point where many observers do not preclude the possibility of its ultimate survival?

The Outbreak of the Syrian Revolution

The revolution in Syria, in contrast to the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, was at its base a peasants’ revolt, a protest by the Sunni periphery against what was perceived as the Baath regime’s turning its back on the country’s rural population. Only later did the rebellion take on additional dimensions with jihadists joining the struggle because of the regime’s “heretical” Alawite nature and because of its alliance with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah. In the name of jihad, thousands of volunteers have streamed into Syria from all over the Arab and Muslim world^[1] though jihadist slogans probably did little to arouse Syrians to join the ranks of the revolution.

Revenge was another dimension that developed with time, stemming from the regime’s increasingly violent efforts to suppress the waves of protest. It is clear that the regime’s brutality served to expand the circle of participants in the revolution. Many who joined were motivated specifically by the desire to take revenge for the spilled blood of their family members and relatives or for the destruction of their home villages and towns by the regime’s forces.^[2]

Paradoxically, in the past, the Sunni rural population had been one of the regime’s foremost mainstays. It was one of the main partners in Syria’s ruling coalition of minorities and the periphery, led by members of the Alawite community, who were in turn headed by the Assad dynasty. This coalition served as the basis for the Baath revolution of March 1963, and later as the basis of support for the “Corrective Movement” and for Hafiz al-Assad’s seizure of power in November 1970.

Majed al-Muhammad (center), a rebel commander, dispenses supplies to recruits. The revolution in Syria was at its base a peasants’ revolt, a protest by the Sunni periphery against what was perceived as the Baath regime’s turning its back on the country’s rural population. Only later did the rebellion take on additional dimensions with jihadists joining the struggle because of the regime’s “heretical” Alawite nature and its alliance with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah. (Photo: Bryan Denton/The New York Times)

With the passage of time and especially from the beginning of the 2000s, it seemed as if the Syrian regime had ceased reflecting Syrian society. The regime even seemed to have turned its back on the rural areas and the periphery. Beginning in 2006, Syria experienced one of the worst droughts the state had ever known with the damage felt most intensely in the Jazira region of northeastern Syria and in the south, especially in the Hawran region and its central city of Dar’a.

These regions were also adversely affected by the government’s new economic policies, which aimed at changing the character of the Syrian economy from a socialist orientation into a “social market economy.” The aim of these policies, led by Vice Prime Minister Abdullah Dardari, was to open Syria to the world economy, encourage foreign investment, and promote activity in the domestic private sector so as to ensure economic growth and enable the regime to cope with its domestic and economic challenges: rapid growth of the population, backward infrastructure and lack of advanced industry, over-reliance on agriculture, etc. The new policy was backed by Bashar al-Assad, who seemed to have underestimated the importance of the Baath party’s socialist ideology as well as its institutions and networking, mainly in the periphery. One conclusion to be drawn from the negative reactions to this policy in the periphery was that while the Syrian regime did indeed manage to preserve its image of strength and solidity during the first decade of the 2000s, its support base was considerably narrowed. It lost the broad popular support that it had enjoyed among the Sunni population in the rural areas and the periphery after it turned its back on them.^[3]

And so, from the time the revolution broke out in March 2011 in the city of Dar’a, the rebellion spread like wildfire to all the rural areas and the periphery, including the northern part of the state, the Jazira region, and later, the agricultural towns of Homs and Hama. The revolution reached the large cities, Damascus and Aleppo, only at a much later stage.

The Tlas Family and the Town of Rastan

An illustration of this turmoil can be found in the story of the Tlas family from the small town of Rastan. Headed by Mustafa Tlas, the family was one of the pillars of the Baath regime, a living example of the close alliance between the regime and the Sunni periphery on the one hand, and between the Sunni and the Alawite officers led by the Assad dynasty on the other.

Rastan itself is the third largest town in the Homs district and numbers about 40,000 inhabitants according to a 2004 census. It is located on the main road between Aleppo and Damascus, on the segment between the towns of Homs and Hama, about 20 kilometers from Homs and 22 kilometers from Hama. Rastan’s residents earn their livings from agriculture and light industry, notably the rock quarries for which the town is known.^[4]

The town has two main clans, the Hamdan, the larger and stronger of the two, and the Firzat. The Tlas family belongs to the Hamdan clan. One of the family’s members, Abdel Qadr Tlas, served as the mukhtar (administrative head) of Rastan from the end of the Ottoman period into the French Mandate period. As a young man, Mustafa Tlas, Abdel Qadr’s son, became the ally and right hand man of Hafiz al-Assad. The two met at the Homs Military Academy, during the officers’ course in which they were enrolled after joining the Syrian army in November 1952. They were roommates during the course, and their paths never parted thereafter. They advanced in rank together and, in November 1970, seized power in Damascus with Hafiz leading and Mustafa helping him. At that time, Tlas was serving as commander in chief of the army and was quickly appointed minister of defense, a post he held until his retirement in 2004.

Tlas was in office during the brutal suppression of the Islamist revolt against the Baath regime in 1976-82, which peaked with the massacre of the citizens of Hama in February 1982. His last task was, in essence, to help Assad’s son Bashar grow into his father’s big shoes.^[5]

Tlas also established an economic empire. One of its showcases was a publishing house. He used this firm as a vehicle for publishing, in addition to works of other authors, his own “scholarly” writings, memoirs, and even poetry. Tlas married Lamya Jabiri, a member of the Aleppine aristocracy, and the couple had four children: two daughters — Nahid, who married a Saudi businessman and moved with him to Paris, and Sarya — and two sons — Firas, who became a successful businessman in Damascus, and Manaf, who chose a military career. Manaf was known as a close friend of Bashar al-Assad and served as a brigade commander in the Republican Guard Division, an elite unit formed to protect the regime.^[6]

Rastan and the Start of the Revolt

In addition to being home to the Tlas family, Rastan also serves as a faithful reflection of the Sunni periphery. It is not surprising that when the Syrian revolution broke out, the town became one of the revolt’s focal points. As early as the beginning of April 2011, the town square statue of Hafiz al-Assad was reportedly smashed to pieces as demonstrators shouted with joy.^[7] This was a symbolic act clearly expressing the town’s disengagement from the Baath regime and from the Assad dynasty. However, Rastan is too strategically located to be given up. Since it is on a main road linking northern and southern Syria and close to the towns of Homs and Hama, it became a major scene of bloody battles between the regime’s army and the insurgents, in which scores of the town’s residents were killed.

Bombed-out buildings in Aleppo, October 3, 2012, show the devastation perpetrated on civilians. The Assad regime’s brutal response to the revolt has only widened the circle of rebellion. Many who have joined the fighting are motivated by the desire to take revenge for the spilled blood of their relatives or the destruction of their homes and communities.

The protest movement in Rastan did not bypass the Tlas family. The members of the family who were officers and soldiers, like many of their friends and colleagues, could not ignore the pressure of the unfolding events or the fate suffered by their relatives, neighbors, and home town.

The first Tlas family member to join the revolt was Abd al-Razzaq Tlas, who announced his desertion from the regular Syrian army as early as June 2011. He has subsequently served as commander of the Faruq battalion associated with the Free Syrian Army, which operates in the region of Homs. As time passed, Abd al-Razzaq has become one of the closely watched symbols of the revolution. Thus, for example, innumerable interpretations were given to the fact that he has begun to grow a beard though this action did not necessarily stem from religious motives. His image was not damaged even after rumors were spread about his involvement in a sex scandal though he was apparently removed from his position as battalion commander.^[8] Additional members of the Tlas family followed him into the revolution until finally, in the summer of 2012, the reverberations reached the home of Mustafa Tlas. This was quite late in the game and only after it began to seem as if the days of the Assad regime were numbered.

During the first months of 2012, Mustafa Tlas, suffering from health problems, moved to Paris to be near his daughter Nihad. His son Firas soon followed and established contacts with opposition figures and began participating in resistance events abroad.^[9] At the beginning of July 2012, Manaf announced his defection from the ranks of the regime. In an interview with al-Arabiya news network, he explained, “I do not see myself as a senior figure in the ranks of the regime but rather as one of the sons of the Syrian Arab army who opposes barbarism and murder of innocents and the corrupt government … I hope for the establishment of a united Syria and for its rebuilding as a state that does not believe in or promote revenge, discrimination, or selfishness.”^[10] Immediately after Manaf’s defection, several opposition figures began to mention him as a possible leader of Syria after Bashar’s hoped-for fall. Other opposition figures, however, came out firmly against the idea.^[11]

The steps taken by those members of the Tlas family serve as a graphic example of what was happening all over Syria during the past year and a half. They are good indicators of how people who had been strong supporters of the Assad regime turned their backs on it when they felt that it had betrayed them or no longer served their interests.

The Survival of the Regime

Every coin and almost every story has two sides, and so it is with the story of Syria. One side of the story has to do with the fact that the insurgents’ uprising spread quickly and struck deep roots. The other side of the story has to do with the regime and the undeniable fact that it has so far been able to survive. One explanation for this focuses on the built-in weaknesses of the opposition,^[12] which is a faithful reflection of the Syrian society: Both opposition and society suffer from divisions and fragmentation based upon ethnic, religious, regional, socioeconomic, and other differences. Another explanation focuses on the international community’s lack of will or ability to intervene in Syria. A third explanation highlights the sources of the regime’s strengths, calling attention to the fact that the regime survives, not only because of its opponents’ weaknesses, but also because of the reserves of power at its disposal.

One source of the regime’s strength lies in the support it receives from the members of the minority communities, who serve as its social bases. These include the Alawites (12 percent of the population), the Druze (5 percent), and most of the Christians (13 percent). The Kurds (10 percent), including those who live in the regions bordering Turkey and Iraq, have for the most part, not turned against the government either. Many Kurds have exploited the revolution to throw off government control and advance the cause of partial Kurdish independence. Nevertheless, the Syrian Kurds as a whole have refrained from joining the ranks of the opposition or coming out openly against the Assad regime.

Another source of regime strength lies in the fact that while turmoil has come to the suburbs and the slums of Aleppo and Damascus, the revolution has not ignited among urban Syrians, including the Sunni bourgeoisie of the big cities. Most big city residents have chosen to remain on the sidelines and not support the protests, fearing that this leap would result in political instability, as happened in Iraq or Lebanon, at immense costs.

Part of the reluctance stems from the economic benefits the urban bourgeoisie enjoy, especially during recent years thanks to the regime’s economic policies. Some have to do with the bourgeoisie’s age-old resentments, reservations, and aversion toward the periphery and the rural regions and their inhabitants. The numbers of urban dwellers are considerable. Some 55.7 percent of Syrians live in cities. Around 8 million (out of the total population of 23 million) live in the country’s three large cities: Aleppo — 2.98 million; Damascus — 2.52 million; and Homs — 1.27 million. Most of the Christians live in these three cities.^[13]

Since most opposition activists come from rural areas, most incursions into the big cities, including Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, have been carried out by insurgents from nearby rural regions. They penetrate the big cities mostly through the slum neighborhoods and suburbs, which are often inhabited by recent migrants from the periphery and rural areas. These migrants generally maintain connections with relatives back home, and it is from there that the armed bands come. But because the bourgeoisie of Damascus and Aleppo have refrained from joining the insurgents,^[14] the Syrian opposition has been denied victory photos such as those from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which made it clear that the die had been cast in Egypt and that the youth were on the revolution’s side. In Syria, for the time being, the youth in the big cities prefer to remain shut up in their homes.

Another source of the regime’s strength lies in the loyalty of its institutions, in particular, the army, the security apparatuses, the state bureaucracy, and the Baath party apparatuses. Indeed, in many cases, using the party’s networks, the regime was able to recruit and mobilize local families in various areas, including Sunni neighborhoods, which have become local militias fighting for the regime. These include members of the Sunni community in particular with the emphasis on the Sunni periphery.

Loyalists in Rastan

Returning to Rastan, it is clearly not a big city but of the rebel periphery. But it is also undisputable that many of its residents remain loyal to the regime. In the Tlas family, some have joined the ranks of the rebels, but others maintain neutrality, and still others continue to work for the government. Thus, Talal Tlas serves as Syria’s deputy minister of defense and Ahmad Tlas serves as the commander of the First Corps, the most important military unit in southern Syria.^[15] And the various branches of the Tlas family continue to live together in Rastan; battles in the town take place between rebels and army forces that come from outside in order to attack.^[16]

Beside these two senior Tlas members, there are others still serving loyally as army officers, perhaps because they consider this to be in their best personal interest and a good way to advance their careers. Their position is quite different from that of the younger officers, like Abd al-Razzaq Tlas, who has his whole future before him. Joining the ranks of the revolution promises him a brilliant future should it succeed. In any case, as a young officer, he did not have nearly as many vested interests to leave behind and potentially lose. The situation of the senior and middle level officers is much different. They could lose everything, all their achievements, their ranks, pensions, possibilities for further advancement, and other benefits and privileges. Joining the revolution means sacrifice for a vague future full of unknowns. The revolutionary future holds out the promise of great rewards for the youth, but not necessarily for the symbols of the old regime.

It is clear that as long as the members of the Tlas family and people like them give the regime their support, it will be able to survive. Only about 10 percent of the army’s manpower has defected. The other 90 percent, both soldiers and officers, the great majority of whom come from the Sunni periphery, continues to stand united around the regime, giving it the breathing space it so desperately needs.

Conclusions

The story of the Tlas family and their town, Rastan, attests to the complexity of the Syrian picture. The regime is losing blood daily; little by little support for it diminishes. Since the eruption of the revolution, the trend has clearly been in one direction only. Nevertheless, the regime retains reserves of support that enable it to survive. A dramatic shift in the situation, such as Bashar’s assassination or an unexpected intervention by the international community, could give the insurgents the push they need and bring about a major change in the course of the conflict. But the example of the Tlas family and Rastan suggests that the struggle for Syria will still take a long time to unfold.

Eyal Zisser is dean of the faculty of humanities and the Yona and Dina Ettinger Chair of Contemporary Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University.

Notes:

[1] The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2012; Al-Monitor, online news, Oct. 18, 2012.

[2] Fouad Ajami, The Syrian Rebellion (Stanford: Stanford University, 2012), pp. 69-156.

[3] Eyal Zisser, “The Renewal of the ‘Struggle for Syria’: The Rise and Fall of the Ba’th Party,” Sharqiya, Fall 2011, pp. 21-9; Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry: The Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables and Their Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 131-75. For economic data, “Syria—Country Report,” Economist Intelligence Unit, Apr. 2011.

[4] The Annual Report for 2004, Central Bureau of Statistics, Prime Minister’s Office, Syrian Arab Republic, Damascus; “Syria: Mining,” Encyclopedia of the Nations, accessed Dec. 7, 2012.

[5] Mustafa Tlas, Mira’t Hayati (Damascus: Dar Tlas lil-Nashr, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 240-310; Sami Moubayed, Steel and Silk, Men and Women Who Shaped Syria, 1900-2000 (Seattle: Cune Press, 2006), pp. 89, 255.

[6] Al-Hayat (London), July 12, 2012; al-Jazeera TV (Doha), July 14, 2012.

[7] Asharq al-Awsat (London), Apr. 7, 2011; al-Arabiya TV (Dubai), Apr. 6, 7, 2011.

[8] Reuters, June 6, 7, 2011; al-Jazeera TV, June 6, 2011; BBC Radio in Arabic, Feb. 12, 2012; Aron Lund, “Holy Warriors: A Field Guide to Syria’s Jihadi Groups,” Foreign Policy, Oct. 15, 2012.

[9] Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), June 28, 2012; al-Jazeera TV, July 1, 2012.

[10] Reuters, July 14, 2012; al-Arabiya TV, July 24, 2012.

[11] Al-Hayat, July 19, 24, 2012.

[12] See, for example, BBC News, Nov. 12, 2012; Itamar Rabinovich, “The Anarchy Factor in Syria,” The Straits Times (Singapore), May 3, 2012.

[13] “General Census,” Central Bureau of Statistics, Prime Minister’s Office, Syrian Arab Republic, Damascus, accessed Dec. 21, 2012.

[14] Reuters, July 18, 19, 2012; al-Hayat, Aug. 23, 2012.

[15] Syrian TV-24, Aug. 1, 2012.

[16] “Al-Markaz al-I’lami fi Rastan,” YouTube.com, July 22, 25, 2012.

Wed, May 29, 2013 | MEForum | by Mark Durie

(picture source: barenakedislam.com)

This is the second in a four part series of posts written in response to Geert Wilders’ visit to Australia in early 2013.

In a previous post I contrasted Geert Wilders’ view that ‘Islam is the problem’ with the claims of many Muslims who preach with equal conviction that ‘Islam is the solution’, and examined evidence of the negative characteristics associated with belief in Islam, including disadvantaged human development outcomes.

These days many leaders in the West find it convenient to sweep the ‘problem’ of Islam under the carpet. Long gone are the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilders’ hero, who declared in Fear God and take your own part that values such as freedom and equality only existed in Europe because it had the military capacity to ‘beat back the Moslem invader’.

However, given the negative outcomes associated with Islam, one of which is Geert Wilders’ need for constant armed guards (some others were enumerated in the previous post), the question whether Islam is the problem or the solution is not something to be just swept under the carpet.

In the fourth and final post of this series we will consider Wilders’ policies for managing ‘the problem’. The third post, the next after this, will review an on-going dispute between critics of Islam as to whether there can be a moderate, tolerable form of Islam. On one side stand those, like Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer, who consider Islam to be essentially irredeemable. On the other side stand those, like Daniel Pipes and Barry Rubin, who argue that there are different Islams and the ‘solution’ to radical Islam is moderate Islam.

Of course there are many opinions about Islam. In this, the second post in this series, we consider two widely-held secular — and positive — perspectives on Islam which have been influential in shaping the response of secular-minded westerners to Islam. These are universalism and relativism.

Relativism holds that no one religion is true, but as different as they are, all religions are equally valid in their own way, and the differences deserve respect.

Universalism — in the sense used here — holds that the core of religions consists of a set of positive ethical values shared by all people and all faiths.

For many western secular people, universalism and relativism are so deeply embedded in their world view that they have no choice but to process Islam through the grid of these belief systems. This means they pre-judge Islam by limiting their understanding only to what their frame permits them to see. What they observe is not Islam as it really is, but as it appears through the window frame of their own beliefs. They see Islam as their world view tells them it must be.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote

“One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” (Philosophical Investigations.)

Negative Universalism

Before examining these two perspectives, we can observe that some secular people believe the core of all religions consists of negative values. This is negative religious universalism.

Bertrand Russell was a famous exponent of negative religious universalism. He said, “I regard [religion] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.” (Has Religion Made Useful Contribution to Civilization?) and “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.” (Why I am not a Christian.)

People who are invested in this view may reject the claim that ‘Islam is the problem,’ because for them ‘religion’ itself, conceived of as a unitary category, is the whole problem. They refuse to make any concessions to differences between religions, and will not concede that any one religion might be worse — or better — than another.

Others, like Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling God Delusion, believe all religions are harmful, but they are willing to concede Islam is worse than others. Dawkin’s judgement is, ‘I regard Islam as one of the great evils of the world.’

Negative universalism may be widely held among atheists, but the perspective I will focus on here is positive universalism, which is politically more influential in the west today. Although there are many who agree with Betrand Russell, outside of communist states negative universalism does not normally exercise a dominant influence on public policy.

The comfort of universalism and relativism

For many, relativism and universalism are not coherently worked-through conclusions which are arrived at after examining all the relevant evidence and comparing actual religious beliefs and practices. They are more like ideological blind spots adhered to because of the side benefits they bring. Above all, these blind spots serve to maintain world view inertia in the face of a confusing and challenging contrary evidence.

In some respects relativism and universalism can be easy and even comforting beliefs to hold because they eliminate the necessity to make up one’s mind by following or rejecting any religion, since all religions are either the same or equally valid. A universalist or a relativist can afford to think benignly of all religions and maintain an optimistic attitude about the role of religion in the world, while refraining from observing any of them.

The whole world looks rosy when you are wearing pink lenses, set in heart-shaped frames. In reality however, the two belief systems of relativism and universalism are dysfunctional because they are not reality-based: the world’s religions do not promote the same values; their values are often contradictory; many religious values are far from good by any reasonable standard; and religious teachings are not all intrinsically valid, indeed many can reasonably be judged to be true or false.

Relativism

An instance of relativism shaping public policy was a speech on religious freedom given in 2012 by Hilary’s Clinton to the Carnegie Endowment for International peace. In it Clinton asserted that people who believe they possess ultimate truth constitute the most fundamental threat to religious liberty:

“The first [argument used to block religious freedom] is that only some people should be allowed to practice their faith – those who belong to the right faith. They define religion in such a way that if you do not believe what they want you to believe, then what you are doing is not practicing religion, because there is only one definition of religion. They, and only they and the religious leaders with whom they work, are in possession of the ultimate truth.“

Clinton also sees a link between believing you have the truth and hating others:

“People can believe that they and only those like them possess the one and only truth. That’s their right. Though they do not have the right to harm those they think harbor incorrect views. But their societies pay a cost when they choose to look at others with hate or disgust.”

For Clinton, relativism is the sine qua non of religious tolerance, and tolerance the sine qua non of religious freedom. In essence she asserts that all ‘legitimate religious differences’ are valid, and should be ‘tolerated, respected and protected’. You can believe what you like, and your beliefs should be respected, but if you think you have the truth, you are an extremist, and your ‘religious differences’ are not ‘legitimate’.

Thus, when answering a question about counter-terrorism measures, Clinton stated that one should distinguish ‘legitimate’ religion from ‘extremism’:

“So I think that we need to be very thoughtful in separating out the problems posed by extremism — no matter where they’re coming from – and terrorism, from legitimate religious differences that should be tolerated, respected, and protected.”

When Clinton uses the phrase ‘no matter where they’re coming from’ she is saying that extremism is common to all religions. Religious extremism is not to be linked to any one religion, because people of all faiths or in ‘nearly every society’ may think they possess a hotline to God:

“Now, there will always be people in nearly every society who are going to believe that God is talking right to them and saying, what you really need to do is overthrow the government. What you really need to do is to kill the unbelievers. …

… it’s not just religions against one another, it’s even within religions — within Christianity, within Judaism, within Islam, within Hinduism — there are people who believe their version of that religion is the only right way to believe.

…We watched for many years the conflict in Northern Ireland against Catholics on the one side, Protestants on the other.”

(Of course Clinton’s invocation of Northern Ireland as a comparison to Muslim sectarian violence is entirely misplaced. The Northern Irish Catholic-Protestant divide notwithstanding, the combatants in that conflict were not fighting out of any conviction that ‘God was talking right to them’. IRA ideology was shaped by Marxism, not Christian theology, and the core issue for the separatists was freedom from the oppression of British rule, not upholding true religion against disbelievers.)

Clinton’s answer to the evils of extremists — defined as those who believe in religious truth — is respect. If we extend respect to the beliefs of others, treating them as worthy and valid and allowing their beliefs and practices breathing space, she believes these others are more likely to act moderately, and not adopt extremist positions:

“I think the more respect there is for the freedom of religion, the more people will find useful ways to participate in their societies. If they feel suppressed, if there is not that safety valve that they can exercise their own religion, they then oftentimes feel such anger, despair that they turn to violence. They become extremists.”

For Clinton extremism is a vicious circle. The extremist A disrespects the beliefs of B, with the result that B feels such ‘anger’ and ‘despair’ that they become extremists in their turn, disrespecting the beliefs of others. This vicious circle can be broken and turned into a virtuous circle if A chooses to respect B’s beliefs. This respect will help B feel good about themselves, with the result that they become happy and self-confident, renounce extremist ways, and extend respect to others in their turn.

One problem with Clinton’s approach is that it is underpinned by a naive view of human nature. Some oppressive religious ideologies command respect, but are allergic to reciprocating it. If you offer one hand to a hungry lion, there is no guarantee he won’t like the taste of it and devour your other hand as well.

A deeper issue is that ideas do matter. Truth is not only the prerogative of science. Good ideas deserve vigorous support, including theological ideas. Conversely, bad ideas equally deserve to be rejected and refuted. False ideas should be opposed. Some religious beliefs do not deserve respect and it is reasonable to judge some religious beliefs to be true or false. For example, it is not ‘extremism’ to reject or even condemn the religious belief that Usama Bin Ladin is in paradise enjoying his virgins. It is not ‘extremism’ to be certain that the Koran is not the word of God.

Clinton is fundamentally in error when she implies that it is not what people believe, but certainty of belief which is the great danger to religious freedom. A convinced Quaker Christian does not present the same threat to religious freedom in the world today as a convinced Salafist Muslim. They may both be equally convinced they possess the truth, but the point is not the intensity of their convictions, but what they take the truth to be.

By Clinton’s definition, Abraham Lincoln was a religious extremist and thus a threat to religious freedom in the world. The American Civil War was fought over a claim to about religious truth, namely that all people are born equal so none should be enslaved. Lincoln believed he had God’s truth on the issue of slavery, and was willing to spend the lives of hundreds of thousands to impose this truth on the South. As the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic put it, “His [i.e. God's] truth is marching on”.

In the South there were those who believed that God’s truth supported slavery. Clinton’s solution — according to her speech — would have been for each side to extend respect to the other, in the conviction that this display of tolerance would discourage everyone from becoming ‘extreme’ in their beliefs, and inspire everyone to get on well together. Bad luck for the slaves!

The essential problem and inevitable failure of Clinton’s belief system is that some religious beliefs — for example the belief that all people are created equal — are good and produce positive results. Other beliefs — such as a dogma that one class of persons is inherently inferior to another, whether women to men, or infidels to believers — do not deserve respect or tolerance.

Furthermore, there is even something threatening about Clinton’s use of the word ‘extremism’ to denigrate people who actually believe in the truth of their faith, together with her implication that these people’s beliefs are not ‘legitimate’. Clinton’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the language of tyrants, who when they persecute religious people often denigrate them as ‘extremists’. For example the Soviet Union portrayed the Salvation Army as ‘extremist’ and a ‘cult’ which engaged in mind control, a claim which was then used to justify its persecution.

The elephant in the room of Clinton’s speech is Islam, because the most significant sources of religious persecution in the world today are Islamic dogmas. (See Crucified Again, Raymond Ibrahim’s investigation of the theological roots of Islamic persecution.)

Although she steadfastly avoids naming Islam as a problem, Clinton was targeting her rhetoric at Islamic governments. Thus she praises the interim administration in Libya for advancing religious freedom and the Egyptian President Morsi for promising to govern for all Egyptians. Clinton is practicing what she preaches, extending respect to those who are at risk of extremism, no doubt in order to incite them to feel good about themselves and renounce extremist tendencies. The sad reality is that religious freedom is deteriorating in both Egypt and Lybia, and will continue to do so.

The unspoken thesis woven throughout Clinton’s whole message is that the content of Islamic belief is not the problem. For Clinton, ‘tolerance’ means respecting the beliefs of others as valid, including and especially Islam. Renouncing belief in any ultimate truth, while embracing respect for all ‘legitimate religious differences’ is to her the real solution to the problem of religious freedom, and the yardstick of valid religious belief and practice.

Clinton embodies her own recipe for coexistence. She manifests respect for Islam by not criticizing it, apparently in the hope that this will move persecuting Islamic governments towards a less ‘extreme’ — i.e. more relativistic — position like her own.

Clinton’s remedy for religious intolerance is also official US policy. The Obama administration chooses to respect, tolerate and protect Islam as an official tactic to encourage Muslims to be more tolerant and less ‘extreme’.

The risk of this strategy is that it can minimize instances of Islamic persecution and conceal its causes. This all too easily ends up becoming collusion. For example, one of the most disappointing features of Clinton’s 2012 religious freedom speech was that the US Government’s 2011 Religious Freedom Report failed to identify Egypt and Pakistan as a ‘countries of particular concern’ for religious freedom, despite all the evidence. The most plausible explanation is that the Obama Administration did not want to ‘humiliate’ their Islamist allies — inciting them to ‘anger’ and ‘despair’ — so it downplayed their prevailing patterns of religious persecution deeply rooted in Islamic dogma.

Universalism

Malcolm Fraser, a former Prime Minister of Australia, is a religious universalist.

In an opinion piece about Australia’s treatment of refugees Fraser found it repugnant that some Australians fear Muslims because they believe ‘terrorism is synonymous with Islam’, a view he rejects out of hand on the basis that all religions share the same (good) values:

“I would have no problem with religion being taught in schools, as long as children were taught about all the world’s great religions and the common thread of humanity and of humane values that runs through all those religions. A wider knowledge on these matters would be a good thing.”

President Obama also looks at the world through universalist eyes. This was reflected in his 2009 Cairo speech in which he stated that Islam’s values are American values:

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Universalism comes under pressure from the cognitive dissonance caused by the fact that people of sincere faith actually promote and live out vastly diverse values, many of which certainly would not agree with Fraser’s personal conception of universal ‘human values’. One true believer divests themselves of all their possessions to devote their life to helping the poor. Another flies a plane into a skyscraper to kill thousands. Both believers are equally sincere. They differ, not in the intensity of their beliefs, but in what their beliefs consist of. It is their contrasting, not held-in-common values which cause them to act in completely opposite ways.

(The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ was coined in 1957 by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter in When Prophecy Fails, a study of a UFO cult’s coping mechanisms when an expected apocalypse failed to eventuate.)

Managing Cognitive Dissonance: Coping Strategies

There is a cost in retaining a belief which cannot be easily reconciled with reality. The relativist and the universalist need to deploy a range of coping strategies to help them hang on to their failing world views.

One strategy is to avoid being confronted with information which could make the feelings of dissonance worse. One does not expect Malcolm Fraser spends much time browing the hadiths of Muhammad.

Another coping strategy is to demonize a bearer of bad news. Thus it can be reassuring and self-comforting for Geert Wilders to be vilified as ‘extreme right wing’. The passion of the accusation is a reflection of the depth of the anxiety standing behind it.

Another strategy is to shift blame. I have many times given addresses on the Koranic motivation for violence, after which someone in the audience has stood up and asked “What about the crusades: Christians have been violent too!” So true, but this is quite irrelevant to the challenge of understanding and engaging with Islam’s doctrines. This deflection has a purely emotional function, as it serves to reduce cognitive dissonance: by diverting attention away from stress-inducing information about Islam, it helps relieve a person of the responsibility to make a moral judgement about Islam which has challenging and perhaps frightening implications.

Sometimes blame-shifting means searching around for a surrogate cause. This was the coping mechanism played out after the Fort Hood Massacre, when Major Nidal Hasan, acting in accordance with jihad principles he had so clearly expounded in a medical seminar attacked and killed 13 fellow soldiers. After the event, President Obama pleaded with Americans not to ‘jump to conclusions’ saying, “we cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas opined ‘he’s probably just a nut case.’

Sometimes blame shifting can involve constructing elaborate alternative narratives. An example is the claim that the Palestinian conflict is the underlying cause of global jihad terrorism. Hence Malcolm Fraser’s claim that the West’s support for Israel perpetuates a breeding ground for terrorism:

“… the West’s one-sided policies relating to Israel and Palestine … is an abscess which breeds terrorists and will do so until there is a viable two-state solution.”

This view can be understood as an elaborate coping mechanism for managing the cognitive dissonance caused by the problem of Islamic violence, a phenomenon which however predates the formation of the modern state of Israel by 1400 years.

Malcolm Fraser is not alone in holding this view. Indeed it comes naturally to those who must scramble for some foothold or other to compensate for the cognitive dissonance caused by their unreal world views about religious differences. President Jimmy Carter likewise contended that ‘permanent peace in the Middle East’ will not come until Israel accepts ‘its legal borders’ (Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, p.205, p.216: see Kenneth Stein’s compelling critique of Carter’s views).

The meme which attributes Islamic terrorism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and claims that once a two-state resolution is achieved, peace will miraculously settle across the Middle East — or even, Malcolm Fraser implies, across the whole world — is given the lie by the degeneration of the so-called Arab Spring into a series of lingering bitter, bloody conflicts, none of which have anything to do with the Jews, and which are causing far more casualties than any of the wars between Israel and the Arabs.

Another example of blame shifting is Bill Clinton’s claim that Boko Haram’s murderous jihad against Nigerian Christians is due to ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’, and a vicious circle of violence: ‘it is almost impossible to cure a problem based on violence with violence.’

Another coping mechanism is to perform cognitive gymnastics which delegitimize and mask the religious identity and motivations of perpetrators of violence.

An example was the apology forced from the BBC’s Nick Robinson for observing that the Woolwich killers had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar‘ and were of ‘Muslim appearance’, descriptors which he had heard from the police. The inner logic runs like this: ‘Religions are good, so if someone does a bad thing in the name of religion, they can’t be acting with a religious motivation.’ In practice this world-view patch-up is concealed under the guise of opposing stereotyping. Robinson’s critics, while ostensibly opposing stereotyping, were propping up a world view by suppressing public acknowledgement of dissonant evidence.

Delegitimizing people of faith is one of Malcolm Fraser’s coping mechanism. He asserted that while religions are essentially good, people who act contrary to religion’s ‘universal values’ are not genuine representatives of their faith, but ‘exploiters’ of religion who ‘should be condemned.’

“We also have to recognise that, on occasions, ideologues from every religion have exploited their faith and, in the name of their faith, have preached hatred, brutality and terrorism. Wherever they come from, such people should be condemned.”

Malcolm Fraser asserts all religions preach the same (inherently good) message, but his position is unfalsifiable, because if someone were to disagree, pointing out that some people promote religious messages which are not good, he would respond by claiming that such people are not genuine people of faith, but ‘exploiters’ and ‘ideologues’.

I am reminded of the old story about the man who believed he was dead. He visited a psychiatrist who asked him “Do dead men bleed?” “No,” the man replied. The psychiatrist then took a pin and pricked the man’s finger. He looked in horror at the blood welling out of his finger tip: “Oh no! I was wrong! Dead men do bleed!”

President Bush’s public statement after the 9/11 atrocity that “Islam is Peace” (implying that the attackers were not genuine Muslims and were not motivated by Islam) is another example.

Suppression of cognitive dissonance is not merely an individual experience. It can be an epidemic, a mass psychosis, as coping mechanisms are replicated across newspapers, board rooms, government policies, talkback radio shows, family gathering and internet forums. For example, the rising hatred being directed against Israel across Europe is a societal response to manage the cognitive dissonance — and fear — caused by the rise of supremacist Islam.

When the Obama administration banned the use of the expressions ‘jihad‘ and ‘Islamic extremism’ in discussions of terrorist threats by its security officials, this was an institutional form of deligitimizing and veiling the well-attested religious motivations of terrorists. This illustrates how a cognitive coping mechanism can be played out at the highest levels of government, even through deliberate policy decisions, and filter down to change the thought patterns of society.

When newspapers and police forces repeatedly suppress Islamic motivations of crimes (see here and here) — whether in Egypt or in the West — this is a manifestation of a coping mechanism which has become a cultural trait.

Denial can be comforting. It spares one the trauma and hard work of engaging with realities which do not fit with cherished and deeply held personal beliefs, and few things are more personal than one’s beliefs about religion. But will it deliver peace and harmony?

Geert Wilders despises that tendency of western liberal thought which desperately wants to believe that all faiths are the same. For Wilders the world view and strategy held up by Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter and Malcolm Fraser are nothing but a deception which denies people the opportunity to call a spade a spade, to own the fact that it is Islam itself which constitutes a threat to religious freedom, and then to do something about it.

Wilders maintains that if something is wrong it should be opposed, and to tolerate the intolerable is to collaborate with it. (On the other hand, Muslim clerics maintain that because sharia is right, it should be promoted and even imposed with all the force and power one can muster.)

Do our relativist and universalist political leaders — who mirror the values of many of the secular western people they lead — have something valuable to offer? In the face of the challenge of Islam, is there a gain in maintaining that all religions, especially Islam, are good and noble, and anyone who disagrees is an extremist ideologue or a bigot?

The problem is that the relativist and universalist belief systems are not reasonable. They are not credible. Not being truth-based, and relying on prejudice, they demand intense, constant and costly management of cognitive dissonance. Truth is the first casualty of these coping strategies, which result in bad policy, and poor strategies which only serve to empower and cover for enemies of freedom and truth.

Shameful, painful examples abound. Consider Major Nidal Hassan, the jihadi-for-a-day, who continues to draw an army salary while the Pentagon persists in mis-classifying his killing spree, performed while shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar‘, as ‘workplace violence’. One consequence is that his wounded victims have not been granted benefits normally available to those injured in combat, such as Purple Heart retirement and preferential medical support.

If universalism and relativism are destined to fail us, because they cannot be made to fit reality, does this send us back to our two earlier options: the position of convinced Muslims, who maintain that Islam is pure, great and the solution to all human problems, or that of Geert Wilders and many like him, who assert that the religion of Islam is one of the great problems facing the world today?

There are alternative views we have yet to consider. Some critics of Islam allow for the possibility of a genuinely moderate Islam. This is something we shall consider in my next post on ‘Geert Wilder’s visit to Australia’.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Thu, March 14, 2013 | MEForum | by Mark Durie

anti-Wilders protest poster (Australia Tour 2013)

Wilders in Melbourne

Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders’ recent speaking tour in Australia brought him to my home town of Melbourne. I have been pondering his message since his visit, and this is the first of a series of blog posts which engage with it.

Wilders came to warn Australians about Islam: “I am here to tell you how Islam is changing the Netherlands and Western Europe beyond recognition. I am … here to warn Australia about the true nature of Islam.” (See the text of his speech here). Wilders turns on its head the Islamic supremacist claim that the Islamic system is superior and Islam the solution to all humankind’s problems. For Wilders, “Islam is the problem, and we should not be afraid to say so.” (Marked for Death, p.64)

To attend Wilders’ Melbourne speech, guests had to make their way past a cordon of police and a hostile collection of left-wing protestors. Once inside, they then had to pass security checks before finding a seat in the auditorium.

The ‘warm-up’ for the evening was a brilliant presentation by Sam Solomon, a former Muslim jurist, now a convert to Christianity, on the Koranic theological basis for discrimination in the socio-political realm. He argued that Islamic theology supports the systematic elevation of specific groups over others: Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women. He invited Muslims to sign his Charter of Muslim Understanding, which affirms universal principles of peaceful co-existence, human dignity and mutual respect between people.

After a brief delay, apparently due to security concerns, Geert Wilders took the podium to address the question of Islam. By the ‘Question of Islam’ I mean the question whether Islam itself is the explanation for the disadvantage faced by Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbours in the world today, including poverty, abuse of women, religious discrimination and persecution, inequality and injustice, societal failure, inferior educational and health outcomes, despotism, violence, and economic backwardness.

Examples of these disadvantages abound.

Religious Liberty Outcomes

Globally, a significant Islamic presence in a society bodes ill for the religious freedom of non-Muslims. Because Christianity is the most numerous faith in the world today, Christians are affected most by this principle. In 2007 the British Secret Service put the number of persecuted Christians in the world at 200 million. Where are the 200 million Christians located? Open Doors, an organization which advocates for persecuted Christians, maintains a watch list of 50 countries where the persecution of Christians is most intense. In four out of five of these countries, the context for persecution of Christians is Islamic. (Of the remaining 10 watch list countries, four regimes are communist-atheist, two are predominantly Christian Orthodox, one is Hindu, another Buddhist, one is run by a military junta, and in Colombia rebels persecute Christianity because it is bad for the drug trade.)

Economic Outcomes

The challenge of Islamic disadvantage is also economic. Bernard Lewis observed in What Went Wrong (p.47) that the total exports of the Arab world — minus oil — are less than Finland’s. In light of this statistic, compare the economic trajectory of South Korea — which has gone from absolute poverty to being a world leader since the Korean war ceasefire 60 years ago — to that of Egypt, which for decades has suffered worsening social services, declining living standards and increasing insecurity.

In the United Nation’s 2011 Human Development Report no Muslim state could be found in the top 25 countries for Human Development outcomes. The highest ranked majority Muslim country in the Human Development Index which does not have either significant oil resources (like Kuwait) or a sizeable non-Muslim population (like Malaysia) is the very secular Azerbaijan, placed at no. 79. In keeping with the trend, predominately Muslim Bosnia-Herzgovinia is ranked considerably lower for its Human Development Index than either Catholic Croatia or Orthodox Serbia, although these three countries share the same language. Even within individual countries Muslims are often at the bottom of the heap, from Europe to India.

Outcomes for Muslim Women

Islam is also linked to patterns of disadvantage for Muslim women.

A September 2010 study of so-called “honour killings” by Phyllis Chesler, based on media reports, found that 96% of reported European perpetrators were Muslim.

A recent Dutch report on Violence against Women in Islam, put out by Wilders’ own party, has revealed that although 5% of Holland’s population are Muslim, in September 2010 a staggering 77% of the women in Dutch women’s shelters came (they or one of their parents) from just three Muslim countries: Turkey, Morocco and Iraq.

The disadvantages facing Muslim women are not just a matter of individual acts of abuse such as domestic violence or honor killings. Systematic abuses and discriminatory practices are embedded in practices mandated by Islam itself. Examples abound, such as female circumcision, which has been claimed to be an Islamic practice by Muslim scholars; women’s inferior status as witnesses in sharia courts (a woman’s testimony is worth only half a man’s); the system of male guardianship of women and associated restrictions on the movement of women; child marriage of girls (following Muhammad’s example); the right, taught in the Qur’an, of husbands to beat their wives; discrimminatory laws determining the rights of women in marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and the 50% discount on the value of a women for the purposes of legal compensation. In all these respects and more, Muslim women are considerably worse off than both non-Muslim women and Muslim men.

Given these realities, it is reasonable to ask to what extent the religion of Islam itself is the cause of Muslim women’s unequal and inferior status.

The Claim that Islam is the Solution: the Egyptican and Iranian Experiments

Despite all the evidence to the contrary — the litany of human suffering associated with Islamic faith and practice — for decades the Muslim Brotherhood has been confidently proclaiming its utopian slogan that ‘Islam is the solution’ to the people of Egypt. Many in the Egyptian population were convinced by this message, at least enough to vote the Brotherhood into office. The result is a grand national experiment in which Islam is being put to the test.

Not only the Brotherhood, but a wide variety of Muslim organisations with global aspirations promote the view that the lack of Islam is the fundamental human problem, including the House of Saud, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jama’at, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which with its 57 member states is the “collective voice of the Muslim world” and the largest international organisation outside the United Nations itself.

With all these groups, Geert Wilders disagrees. His position is quite the opposite. Contra the Muslim Brotherhood, Wilders’ prophecy for Egypt would be that the fruits of the Arab ‘spring’ will bring a season more aptly called ‘Winter’ precisely because it is Islamic. The Brotherhood ascendancy will not usher in an era of national salvation, but only more dysfunction, worsening rights for women, more vulnerability for non-Muslims, increasing violence, insecurity and economic failure.

What we see happening today in the Muslim Brotherhood’s grand ‘Egypt experiment’ is a vindication of Wilders’ thesis. For all that he is vilified in Europe, he is being proved right in Egypt.

One of the reasons Islamic radicals opposed former President Mubarak was that Mubarak introduced laws which gave more rights to women than they had under Islamic law. For example in 2008 Egyptian women were granted greater custody rights over their children after divorce than the sharia permits, and in 2000 Egyptian women were given the right to divorce their husbands without having to prove fault, a provision which allowed women a way to escape from abusive marriages. However these protections are now being wound back by Egypt’s legislators, in the name of making Egypt more sharia-compliant (this wind-back is being strenuously opposed by Egyptian women and human rights activists).

Denial can be deadly. One of the tragedies of the Islamist Winter unfolding across the Middle East is that its coming was hastened by American foreign policy. There was a blindness in the White House about the implications of empowering radical Islam — whether in Lybia, Egypt or Syria. This was grounded in a refusal to engage with the reality that Islam itself is a real threat to the people of the Middle East.

Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the former leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, declared in June 2012 that Islam is the ‘only solution’ for mankind. He praised Ayatollah Khomeini for proving this to the world, and commented that the global Islamic awakening was inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He said “Imam Khomeini gave a great lesson to the Muslims all over the world. … Revolution had dispelled many misconceptions against Islam and depicted the true face of Islam.”

This begs the question: ‘What is the true face of Islam?’

Has the Iranian experiment vindicated the Islamic solution? What do Iranians think now that the Revolution has ‘dispelled misconceptions’ about Islam and depicted its ‘true face’ to Iranians?

I spoke recently with an Australian Anglican Bishop who reported that he is conducting confirmations involving Iranian Christians all over the city. Around the world today the Iranian diaspora is leaving Islam in droves. People are rejecting Islam in Iran too, but there it is more dangerous because the radical Islamist regime still holds power and the penalty for rejecting Islam is death.

Why are Iranians rejecting Islam? It is because Iranians have seen the ‘true face’ of Islam, up close and personal, and they have rejected the ‘Islamic solution’. They have found that Islam is the cause of so many of their difficulties and not their salvation. As a result, I have met Iranians who agree passionately with Geert Wilders. They are pleased to agree with Wilders, but not because they are Islamophobes. They are just sick and tired of all the lies.

In my next post I will consider the view that ‘the problem’ of Islam is not the religion itself, but ‘extremism’, consider how this perspective manifests itself and critique its debilitating implications.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Wed, May 22, 2013 | MEForum | By Mark Durie

On wednesday, May 22^nd in Woolwich, England, a man reported to be a British soldier was cut down by two Anglo-African Muslims wielding knives and a machete. One of the killers, speaking in a home-grown English accent, is heard (here) to say:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers, and this British soldier is one, is a eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the sharia in Muslim lands. Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather you are extreme. You the ones. When you drop a bomb, do you think it hits one person, or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family. This is the reality. By Allah if I saw your mother today with a buggy I would help her up the stairs. This is my nature. But we are forced by the Qur’an in Sura at-Tauba [Chapter 9 of the Koran], through many, many ayah [verses] throughout the Koran that [say] we must fight them as they fight us, a eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are going to die? No it’s going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we ca…, so you can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon Muhammad …

Michael Adebolajo, one of the two Islamist terrorists who butchered Lee Rigby on a London street.

Eyewitnesses said that the victim had been wearing a ‘Help for Heroes’ t-shirt. Help for Heroes is a charity to help British soldiers wounded in current conflicts.

Eyewitnesses also reported that the killers attempted to behead the soldier, and that they asked bystanders to call the police, and moved towards the police as if to attack them, as soon as they appeared.

While some said the killers were crazed, the contrary seems to be the case. They appear to have been acting in accordance with a theologically determined logic which can be understood on the basis of Islamic teachings. In the midst of perpetrating this carnage, they found time, calmly and clearly, to explain their motivations on camera.

The killer captured on video was referencing passages from Islamic sacred texts. “We must fight them as they fight us” is a phrase found repeatedly in the Koran. He specifically mentions Sura at-Tauba (chapter 9, i.e. verse 36) and ‘many, many’ other verses from the Koran, namely:

“fight the polytheists all together as they fight you all together” (Sura 9:36)

“fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you … And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for fitnah (oppression, persecution) is worse than slaughter; … if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith. ” (Sura 2:190-9)

“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” (Sura 22:39)

The Arabic word for ‘fight’ used in the Koran in these passages is qātilū which literally means fighting to kill. (See here for an explanation of the meaning of Sura 2:190-91, a passage used by Muslim jurists to justify killing.)

The reference ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ is also from the Koran (although ultimately borrowed from several passages in the Mosaic law):

And We prescribed for them therein: The life for the life, and the eye for the eye, and the nose for the nose, and the ear for the ear, and the tooth for the tooth, and for wounds retaliation. (Sura 5:45)

The Muslim killers here are invoking a religious ruling that it is permissible to fight and kill people who wage war against Muslims. As Bin Ladin put it in his letter to the American people:

“It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge.”

The belief which seems to underly the Woolwich attack is that because the British government is fighting a war against Muslims in Muslim lands, it is therefore legitimate for Muslims to wage jihad against the British. British people, who voted the government into power, are also considered to be personally culpable, which is why they ‘will never be safe’ and are told to ‘remove your government’.

The killer’s language is strikingly reminiscent of Bin Ladin’s November 2002 letter to the American people, in which he not only spoke of ‘removal’ of governments (in Muslim lands), but also explained that it was legitimate to attack American civilians because they are the ones who voted their government into power:

“… the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. … The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want. … the American army is part of the American people. … This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us. … Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. … whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.”

The phrase ‘you people will never be safe’ is reminiscent of Muhammad’s instruction to his followers to invite non-Muslims to Islam by telling them aslim taslam “Accept Islam and you will be safe” (see here). The implication is that non-Muslims are not safe because their blood and property can be taken until they convert. Thus Muhammad said to his cousin Ali, on the eve of the attack against the Jews of Khaibar:

“Fight (qātilū) until they bear testimony to the fact that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger [i.e. until they convert to Islam] and when they do that, then their blood and their riches are inviolable [safe] from your hands.” (Sahih Muslim. Book of the Merits of the Companions of the Holy Prophet 4:29:5917).

It seems the killers desired martyrdom in accordance with their beliefs, because they asked bystanders to call the police and immediately moved to attack the police when they arrived on the scene.

This slaughter on the streets of Woolwich has all the hallmarks of a theologically motivated attack, and keys to understand it can be found in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Whether the views adopted by the killers are ‘legitimate’ interpretations of the Koran and Muhammad’s teachings may be disputed. What cannot be disputed is the source where they found their inspiration.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

By Rob Harris

Michael Adebolajo was among a group of Islamist Extremists who clashed with police outside the Old Bailey in 2006. (telegraph.co.uk)

Asghar Bukhari, leader and a founding member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPAC UK) featured quite widely in the mainstream media in the aftermath of the shocking attack on Lee Rigby, a twenty-five year old soldier, in Woolwich (London, England) on May the 22^nd 2013.

Despite awareness that both Bakhari and MPAC UK possess extremist views, they nonetheless tend to be presented by the media as moderate mainstream representatives of British Islamic society.

Bukhari/MPAC hit out at British Muslim organisations

Asghar Bukhari was interviewed by the BBC on the day of the Woolwich attack. He was first asked for his response to the news of the brutal murder:

Well it’s a depressing cycle of violence, and its not going to end anytime soon. I can see some Muslim organisations have condemned the killing, and rightly so but the problem with this is that Muslim organisations have been condemning it for years, and what have they actually done…

Initially Bukhari sounds like a critic of Muslim organisations for failing to teach young people about the harmful impact of violence, perhaps, one would assume, with reference to teaching a deeper respect for the wider society in which they live. Sadly that turned out not to be the case:

Muslim organisations have failed to teach young people that there is another route for the grievance, the anger, the frustration that they feel about this government’s policies in the Muslim world… They will never teach their young people that there is a democratic way to bring a change to the foreign policy they are so aggrieved about, justifiably so.

Therefore, first and foremost Bukhari was taking issue with the way in which mainstream Muslim organisations were not attempting to focus the Muslim youth on trying to change government policy! His focus was not on addressing the disharmony between Muslims and others within British society but rather to seek a better way for Muslims to obtain their goals, a way that will hurt their interests less.

Indeed, other members of MPAC UK actually made statements criticising those Muslim organisations that condemned the slaying of Lee Rigby! For example, one Facebook statement by senior MPAC member Maryam Yaqub:

By apologising in such a stupid way these pathetic Muslims are reinforcing the enemy’s narrative, which is telling the world that these murderers did what they did because their religion makes them inherently violent and evil… Muslims are the most oppressed people on earth, we have been denied our freedom, we have been denied our equality, we have been denied any justice…

Another MPAC member posted a FB message, justifying the killing of Lee Rigby as well as explaining that the condemnations by mainstream Muslim organisations, which he characterised as apologies, were to assist Islamic preaching and conversions:

All day yesterday I hear Muslims apologising and condemning this act as if it was the most abhorrent act ever committed on British soil, and “we are sorry because yes it is our fault that a man reacted to tyrannical oppression”… They are only cowards worried about their own reputation and image. “Oh no brother this is really bad for ‘the dawah’, we must publicly condemn these acts, Islam means peace.”

Singing from the same hymn-sheet

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Asghar Bukhari’s BBC interview was the way in which he echoed the demands of Lee Rigby’s killers and other extremists:

The government can condemn it [the murder] all they want, and they can say Britain’s got to stand strong, and all the rhetoric in the world but until the government admit there is a direct link between this radicalisation happening and their foreign policy, how are we ever going to end this? There’s two culprits here.

Laying substantive blame at Britain’s door echoes almost exactly the views of Anjem Choudary, the notorious 9/11-praising Islamic cleric, who is likely to have played a part in radicalising the killers. He said:

We must concentrate on why this incident took place. That is the presence of British forces in Muslim countries and the atrocities they’ve committed…

Like Bukhari, Choudary expressed some lesser disapproval of the violence of Lee Rigby’s killing:

What he did was unusual and it’s not the kind of view that I propagate and I do not condone the use of violence…

Bukhari’s views also resemble the remarks made by Michael Adebolajo, one of the terrorists who spoke to a video camera moments after he severed the unarmed soldier’s head. Adebolajo asserted that there would be more violence until there was a change in British foreign policy, a view Bukhari had also pushed:

You think politicians are going to die? No it’s going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so you can all live in peace.

Adebolajo also stated at another point at the scene:

I apologise that women and children had to witness this today but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you.

Thus even the killer himself expressed some form of regret at the violence of the act minutes afterward.

Parsing a justification of terrorism

During the BBC News interview, did Asghar Bukhari provide an “explanation” for the killing or a justification? Explanations and justifications are easy to confuse because they can sound very similar.

The context of Bukhari’s points demonstrate he tried to pass off the justification of the terrorist atrocity as merely an explanation, by placing equal or greater blame on the conduct of the British government for the murder. This was unmistakable when he stated “There’s two culprits here.”

Notably, rather than condemning the slaying outright, he chose to place the barbaric attack within a context of “a depressing cycle of violence”, which he would of course deem the British to have begun.

Maryam Yaqub, another senior MPAC member, justified the killing of Lee Rigby more overtly despite including the adjective “horrific”, which would of course be self-evidently true of any beheading:

This incident today was horrific, but it was not because Islam teaches barbarism, it happened because it was an extreme reaction to an extreme situation. These people did what they did because they wanted to get a message across, a message that tells the world that they are sick of being oppressed, colonised, demonised, killed and murdered, simply for being Muslim.

Moreover, Bukhari’s mild criticism of the killing should be understood in a context of his past statements. He has praised terrorism, against Israel in particular:

The concept of Jihad is a beautiful thing, and logical to those with a sincere heart. It tells the human being to stand up and fight against those who bring evil and oppression on this earth, and by standing up — roll back that oppression until the people are free from it.

Selective condemnation

Are the claims by Bukhari, the killers and other extremists true to any meaningful extent? Are British troops in Afghanistan slaughtering civilian men, women and children en masse? No they are not.

The Taliban and other Islamist insurgent groups are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, as they were in the Iraqi war. For example, in 2011 the United Nations issued a report affirming that 75 percent of civilian deaths were due to insurgents. NATO and Afghan government forces were responsible for 16 percent of civilian deaths. Much of that 16 percent would be due to unintentional death as a result of bombing and drone raids, whilst the Taliban and other insurgents intentionally targeted civilian locales.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired former Commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, stated of his time fighting these Islamic insurgents:

The Taliban in southern Afghanistan are masters at shielding themselves behind the civilian population and then melting in among them for protection… The use of women to shield gunmen as they engage NATO forces is now so normal it is deemed barely worthy of comment. Schools and houses are routinely booby-trapped. Snipers shelter in houses deliberately filled with women and children.

It is quite simply a falsehood to blame the death of civilians, particularly women and children as noted by the killers of Lee Rigby, on NATO troops in Afghanistan. It should be noted that Bukhari, and his ideological partners, rarely if ever criticise the Taliban or other Islamic insurgents, despite the intentional butchery of a vastly larger number of their fellow Muslims. Those attempting to explain Islamic terrorism, reserve their ire for Western non-Muslims who kill far fewer, and typically in error.

If there is truth to the claim that foreign policy issues are the reason behind Muslim violence, then one has to wonder what are the motivations for the six days of rioting by the immigrant Muslim population in Sweden. Sweden only has 500 men in Afghanistan with the International Security Assistance Force, attempting to train the Afghani security forces.

Conclusion

Whilst MPAC UK presents itself as Muslim civil rights group, it has gained notoriety for its extremist views. It openly advocates a “political Jihad” against enemies of Islam and the West which apparently harms the Muslim world. In fact they claim any Muslim who’s not politically motivated in this way is a traitor to Islam!

Thus, MPAC UK’s criticism of other Muslim organisations, for not politicising the Muslim youth sufficiently, should be understood as an advocacy for what they term “political jihad”. Likewise, their attempts to minimise and subtly justify the slaughter of Lee Rigby is indeed a form of “political jihad”.

Rob Harris contributes articles to several websites on contentious political issues (not to be confused with the popular English novelist (1957-) of the same name). He blogs at eirael.blogspot.com. He lives in Ireland. For all the exclusive blog entries by Rob Harris, go here.

By Rob Harris

Eileen Dunne from RTE’s prime news slot (image grab)

In the aftermath of the frenzied bloodthirsty terror attack on a twenty-five year old soldier in Woolwich (London) on May the 22^nd 2013, political leaders made concerted efforts to paint a harmonious gloss on Islamic relations. Whilst the media acknowledged an Islamist element, they attempted to deflect focus from religious aspects of the attack by offering a politicised narrative, and reinforcing a view that the killers do not represent Islam.

RTE, Ireland’s state-funded national broadcaster, misrepresented the threat posed by Islamists in Britain. It was stated at least twice on RTE’s prime 6.1 (six PM) news slot that the savage murder was the first terrorist attack in mainland Britain since the 7/7 Underground Bombings in 2005! News presenter Eileen Dunne stated:

The attack in Woolwich was the first terrorist attack in mainland Britain since the Underground Bombings in July 2005. It’s led to a new debate about the threat posed to Britain by militarised radical Islamists.

Similarly, journalist Paul O’Flynn, in a pre-recorded report on the story, stated almost identically:

The moment terror returned to the streets of London. The cruel callous killing is the first terrorist attack in mainland Britain since 2005. Back then four young Islamists set off suicide bombs on public transport. 52 people died and hundreds were wounded.

Numerous other Islamist attacks on the British mainland, which went very much beyond a planning phase, have garnered substantial publicity. These include a co-ordinated attack just two weeks after 7/7, the 2007 London and Glasgow Airport attacks, and the 2008 Exeter Bombing. RTE features a very substantive amount of news content from the United Kingdom so this error represents a surprisingly large journalistic blunder.

Eileen Dunne’s claim was revised on the nine o’clock RTE News bulletin. The attack was now claimed to be the first “killing” since 2005. Paul O’Flynn’s report was also modified, and the claim was entirely removed. It is probable that complaints had been made about the factual content of RTE’s coverage.

The relevant RTE Player 6.1 video file (“First terrorist attack in mainland Britain since 2005”) remains on the website at the time of publication.

It is thought they were lone wolves similar to the suspects in the Boston Bombing.

So said Paul O’Flynn on 6.1 News, days after another suspect linked to the Boston Tsarnaev brothers, was shot dead by the FBI. The international media continues to label them as “lone wolf” terrorists, despite the gradual increase in arrests over the Boston Bombing, and the link with the Chechen region of Dagistan where Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the attention of the Russian authorities after he met a known militant Islamist.

The English Defence League

RTE’s coverage of the terrorist attack, the day after the story emerged (23^rd May), consistently labelled the English Defence League (EDL) as a “far-right” group (see RTE Player video clip entitled “UK Horror over Woolwich Murder”, which contains the relevant TV broadcast material), when reporting that there were some disturbances the previous night at a relatively modest protest in Woolwich, of approximately one hundred persons.

Asghar Bukhari (image grab from RTE news)

The label “far-right” carries essentially the same meaning as “fascist”. It also evokes neo-nazism. However, the media tends to apply the label to groups against immigration or the Islamic faith. The label is pejorative by its very nature, and as if to back up its implicit criticism, immediately afterward RTE featured an extended statement from a Muslim leader, one Asghar Bukhari of the ‘Muslim Affairs Committee UK’, a truncation of the name ‘Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK’. Bukhari stated, with reference to the Woolwich EDL protest:

And the EDL, classic kind of right-wing fascist group, have jumped on the bandwagon, and straight away they are out in the town centre…

Bukhari also brought up some highly emotive racial images to reinforce his criticism of the EDL:

What do they want from us? What do they want from the average Muslim, to hang us from the trees like what happened in the olden days to black people?

In March of this year, a critical report by Chatham House asserted that the EDL do not conform to the classic signifying features of a far-right group. Members were often found to be of a relatively high employment status, and were not alienated from the democratic process. Their preoccupation was seen to be cultural, and perhaps xenophobic, rather than characteristically racial. Overt Sikh support for the EDL is a signifier of the phenomenon.

Whether or not the EDL constitute a fascist/far-right group, it is a breach of basic journalistic standards for any broadcaster to fail to provide some reply to such sustained criticism of the group’s character.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK

RTE did not express any overt opinion of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPAC UK) but, within the context of the report, Bukhari was presented as a mainstream Islamic leader, and, by implication, the representative of a mainstream Islamic organisation. Immediately before Bukhari’s contribution on the EDL, RTE journalist Martina Fitzgerald stated:

Today local and national Muslim leaders intervened, and appealed for calm, condemning the murder in the strongest terms.

However, Bukhari was shown in the footage condemning the EDL rather than the terrorist atrocity.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK has gained notoriety for extremist views, and it is also somewhat ironic that the head figure of MPAC UK called the EDL racists and fascists, when a British All-Party Parliamentary Committee found that MPAC UK is happy to borrow traditional fascist and neo-Nazi concepts (see page 29), to reinforce their own views on Jews and Israel.

Giving broadcast time to groups and individuals known to possess extremist outlooks, which could in turn further their known political agendas, is irresponsible without advising viewers of the contentious nature of the groups and individuals.

Notably, there has been substantive criticism of television coverage in Britain, where the BBC and Channel 4 gave undue airspace to Anjem Choudary, the extremist preacher thought to be behind the radicalisation of the two killers.

Conclusions

RTE, particularly within its remit as a public service broadcaster, has a responsibility to report the news accurately. However, their news coverage suggests they have not moved beyond the ideological dogma that led them to accuse a priest in 2011 of being a predatory paedophile, on a primetime TV programme, without substantive proof. This imbalance is further compounded by giving free voice to groups and individuals, possessing divisive extremist perspectives. Commentator Eoghan Harris believes that:

Bias in RTE, as in the BBC, begins at the bottom. And to make it worse, bias invisible to the broadcasters, seems as natural as the air they breathe.

Rob Harris contributes articles to several websites on contentious political issues (not to be confused with the popular English novelist (1957-) of the same name). He blogs at eirael.blogspot.com. He lives in Ireland. For all the exclusive blog entries by Rob Harris, go here.

By Rob Harris

The latest Middle Eastern PEW study focuses to a large extent on the perception of Barak Obama and his prospective role in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The PEW study also revealed some notable findings about the opposing sides involved in the conflict. One of the more expected but still sobering findings was the confirmation that, unlike Israeli’s, a large majority of Arab-Palestinians do not favour peaceful methods to achieve independent statehood. From the report:

Israelis, on balance, believe a way can be found for an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with their country. Palestinians, on the other hand, overwhelmingly do not think this is possible, and a plurality believes armed struggle rather than negotiations or nonviolent resistance is the best way to achieve statehood.

A question of “armed struggle” or terrorism

“Armed struggle” in this instance can be understood as a politically inoffensive terminology that in effect translates as terrorism, when confronted with the reality of the conflict to-date.

Arab-Palestinian violence, particularly the actions of disciplined paramilitary groups, traditionally assault the Jewish civilian populace rather than the Israeli military. Aiming at easy “soft targets”, particularly those that are civilian, is the principle defining characteristic of terrorism, in an effort to intimidate. Thus terrorism contrasts starkly with other forms of paramilitary activity and resistance.

For example, during the Second Intifada, which constitutes the last great united Palestinian “armed struggle”, 80% of those killed on the Israeli side by Arab-Palestinians were in fact civilian. Afghanistani/Iraqi insurgents killed civilians in similar proportions.

Palestinians are more likely to say armed struggle is the best way for their people to achieve statehood (45%) than they are to say negotiations or nonviolent resistance offer the best prospect for the creation of a Palestinian state (15% each). Another 22% volunteer that a combination of these three approaches would be most effective.

In effect 67% of all Palestinians support armed struggle because 45% support it completely, whilst another 22% support it combined with political actions.

Indeed PEW received similar percentage results in 2011 concerning supportive views of suicide attacks in defence of Islam:

Palestinian Muslims, however, remain an outlier on this question: 68% say suicide attacks in defense of Islam can often or sometimes be justified, a level of support essentially unchanged from 2007.

Earlier in May, poll results indicated that 40% of Arab-Palestinians believe suicidal attacks in defence of Islam are justified. In this instance the question of justification explicitly referred to the assault of civilian targets.

Whilst those of a pro-Palestinian persuasion may take the opinion that the survey indicates a lack of faith in the present Palestinian leaders, the survey results of the same PEW poll makes it clear that this is not the case (see section entitled “The popularity of Palestinian factions amongst the populace”).

The reality is that there is strong sentiment against even a resumption of peace talks, as indicated by the widespread riots in June-July 2012. It does not bode well for Palestinian Street giving any sort of peace process a chance.

Seeking pan-Arab military assistance?

The PEW study also found that a broadly similar percentage (three quarters) of Arab-Palestinians believe that the Arab world is not doing enough to assist them in achieving independent statehood:

When asked whether Arab countries are doing too much, too little or enough to help the Palestinian people achieve statehood, three-quarters in the Palestinian territories say they are doing too little; 16% say other Arab nations are doing enough and 5% believe they are doing too much to help Palestinians achieve statehood.

Assistance to achieve statehood can of course be given in various non-violent ways. However, when viewed with regard to a sizeable majority of Arab-Palestinians supporting violence to achieve the same goal of nationhood, it can clearly be inferred that a majority of Palestinians likely support some form of pan-Arab military aid. Iran and Syria’s assistance to Hizbullah and Hamas, which are both combative belligerents against Israel, has a principally military dimension.

Indeed Abbas advised Arab leaders that the PLO is ready to make war on Israel if the rest of the Arab world does the same:

If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don’t have the ability to do it.

The finding has a degree of ambiguity but it may even reflect some desire for outright pan-Arab inter-state war with Israel. This was a common populist expectation in the Middle East some decades ago. For example, Israel’s response to Fatah’s attacks, prior to the Six Day War, triggered violent mass protests throughout the Arab world.

The popularity of Palestinian factions amongst the populace

Perhaps surprisingly, Arab-Palestinians, both in the West Bank and Gaza, have a largely positive view of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. This popularity may have been bolstered by his successful move for “Palestine” to controversially gain observer status at the United Nations General Assembly last year, a unilateral move which breached the spirit of the Oslo Accords/Resolution 242.

Palestinians express mostly positive opinions of Abbas; 61% have a favorable view and 34% have an unfavorable view of the Palestinian president. Abbas is viewed favorably by majorities in both the West Bank (57%) and Gaza (68%). His party also receives positive ratings among Palestinians; 69% have a favorable view of Fatah, while 27% express unfavorable opinions.

PEW also found that leading terrorist groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas are less popular than Abbas’ Fatah/PLO faction. However, this finding may not be seen as a positive. 11% fewer Arab-Palestinians now hold negative opinions of Hamas since the last poll was taken by PEW. It is a sizeable change:

…a majority of Palestinians (56%) holds favorable opinions of Islamic Jihad, while about a third (35%) gives the militant organization negative ratings.

Opinions of Hamas are more mixed, with 48% of Palestinians viewing the extremist group favorably and 45% saying they have an unfavorable view of Hamas. In 2011, when Pew Research last asked Palestinians about Hamas, more held negative views (56%) than expressed positive opinions (42%)…

Despite changing views, such a show of support for Fatah may nonetheless encourage Abbas to hold long-delayed elections later this year.

Perceptions of Israeli’s and Arab-Palestinians in the West

The PEW survey also focused on the contrasting international support for Arab-Palestinians and Israel.

As has long been the case, the vast majority of Arab nations are extremely hostile to Israel, whilst the United States of America still holds a firm support for the state, despite the high-intensity campaigning by Western pro-Palestinian supporters to chip away at what is an essential block of support for Israel’s very existence.

Elsewhere in the Western World opinion of the two sides of the conflict varies quite considerably:

Views are more mixed in France, Germany and Russia. For example, 40% of French respondents sympathize more with Israel, while 44% say their sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Similarly, in Germany and Russia, about as many side with Israel as side with the Palestinians, but substantial numbers in these countries do not sympathize with either side in this conflict (31% and 42%, respectively).

The image PEW presents is one that may give a small ray of hope to those that support Israel because broad public stances on the conflict have not dramatically changed since 2007, despite the high-intensity campaigning by Western pro-Palestinian supporters:

For the most part, there has been little change in perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years.

In mainland Europe, the image is varied. Germany has seen a notable increase in support for the Palestinian cause, whilst in France support for Israel has surprisingly increased in recent years. Russia has a sizeable pro-Israel support base despite decades of hostility from officialdom within the USSR.

The report finds that almost twice as many British people support the Palestinians over that of Israel. The finding reinforces the view that the British stand out as perhaps the most anti-Israel collective in the Western world, where many British academics, journalists and politicians have taken a leading and longstanding role in Israel’s delegitimisation.

Rob Harris contributes articles to several websites on contentious political issues (not to be confused with the popular English novelist (1957-) of the same name). He blogs at eirael.blogspot.com. He lives in Ireland. For all the exclusive blog entries by Rob Harris, go here.

By Rob Harris

Horrific scene of the first explosion that went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

With news that the April 15^th terrorist assault on the Boston Marathon killed three, including an eight year old boy, and caused over one hundred and eighty to be injured (some critically), those touched by the tragedy and horror of this bloodthirsty indiscriminate attack on innocent civilians will of course be speculating a great deal on the source of the terrorism.

Definitive assertions would of course be unjustified at this stage but it is reasonably certain that the terrorist attack came from one of arguably three politically distinctive categories of terrorism.

An ethical conundrum!

Jeffrey Goldberg, a popular American journalist of genuine repute, wrote three hours after the Boston attack that it was improper for journalists to speculate on the source of the attack. Goldberg explained thus:

Shortly after the 2011 shootings in Norway, I asked publicly whether a Mumbai-type attack had visited Europe, the implication being that Muslim terrorists were behind the atrocity. It was perfectly plausible to suggest that Muslim terrorists were to blame — except that they weren’t. I learned my lesson.

Goldberg, like many others within the media, suggested prematurely that the 2011 Norway massacre by Anders Behring Breivik was likely an Islamic terrorist attack. The irony that an individual opposing Islamism actually committed the Norwegian slaughter generated a particularly smug form of the left-wing carping, and widespread use of the Islamophobia charge, despite the mainstream media’s traditional reluctance to refer to religion, particularly when it comes to Islamist terrorism.

One can easily envisage a scenario where idle speculation can incite violence against a specific religious group within a highly emotivised society after such a traumatic event. However, there is an opposing ethical credo within journalism, namely providing the truth. Speculation based on well-informed guesswork may not qualify as absolute truth on what occurred. However, it is still innately truthful, and an essential element within everyday journalism.

There is also a slightly patronising quality to the “no speculation” argument because it suggests an educated public does not have sufficient maturity to conduct itself with an appropriate sense of rectitude. Although it is wise at this stage to avoid making any firm judgement on the origins of the attack, speculation still has a place for a public that relies on the media for basic information on all manner of events. It can be done responsibly by stressing the provisional nature of such assertions, and especially by presenting the matter in a non-sensationalistic fashion.

The fact that the massacre has been welcomed by individual Muslims and various Islamic factions ought to be deemed a greater source of concern, if reprisals against the Islamic community are truly a possibility.

Domestic terrorism

Numerous journalists have speculated that American right-wing extremists are responsible because the assault occurred on Tax Day, tax being an issue politicised in American politics perhaps to a greater extent than that of most other nations, partly due to being a traditionally low-tax economy that focused on a philosophy of small governance. A more European scale of governance, funded by the taxpayer is seen as impacting on liberty on a number of levels.

The attack also coincides with Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, which commemorates the anniversary of the earliest battles for the American War of Independence, giving further credence to the right-wing extremists claim. However, prima facie, it seems that such a historic date would be more likely the cause of celebration for patriot groups, rather than a time to generate such widespread infamy in America.

On the other hand, some individuals or groups may of course see the date as a symbolic starting-point for further conflict with what they deem to be a State that has turned tyrannical, and in breach of the values espoused in the US Constitution. However, such groups tend to favour very symbolic targets, such as government institutions as well as certain organisations (e.g. abortion clinics) and related events that have a distinctive political character that they deem to be objectionable.

The prospect of an Islamist attack

There is some reason to tentatively suspect that the attack is originated from an Islamic source, be it a group, or an American citizen/convert:

A Middle East counter-terrorism official based in Jordan said the blasts “carry the hallmark of an organised terrorist group, like al-Qaeda”. He did not give actual evidence linking al-Qaeda to the bombing.

“From the little information available, one can say it was a well-coordinated, well-targeted and near-simultaneous attack,” he said.

The counter-terrorism official highlighted the fact that the massacre featured the dual-assault hallmarks of an Islamist attack. This strategy of maximising casualties has become near ubiquitous for such groups. However, it should be noted that this same technique has also been used by other terrorist groups in the past, including the IRA.

It has been reported that the authorities investigating the case may suspect al Qaeda or an affiliated group although evidence is lacking at this early stage, and the search for a specific motivation remains open. Richard DesLauriers, the FBI agent in command of the investigation, stated that fragments recovered from the bombsite suggest the bombs were a specific pressure cooker based design that was recommended in al Qaeda’s magazine Inspire because they are easy to construct, can make use of widely available materials, and avoid detection from sniffer dogs. Such bombs have been used in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It has also been noted that Abdallah Dhu-al-Bajadin, a senior al Qaeda weapons specialist, made threats against the US last month. This coincided with a rash of threats from other al Qaeda affiliated sources.

The Inspire connection also rears its head with an article attributed to Abu Musab al-Suri, a well known Syrian terrorist, which described sports events as being one of “the most important enemy targets” in the US.

Islamists have shown a tendency to target the city of New York since the 1993 World Trade Centre attack. It took on a symbolic dimension, being the most successful Islamic attack on non-ambassadorial US soil until 9/11. This fact would make Boston a less likely target for Islamists, although it could perhaps become more attractive from a terrorist perspective since the city clearly possessed a lower rank of security, and numerous plots to attack New York since 9/11 were prevented.

The prospect of state-sanctioned terrorism

It tends to be the case that terrorist groups rapidly claim responsibility after an attack takes place. The objective for any terrorist group is to maximise gain in terms of political capital, and to bolster a fearsome reputation. Making the claim soon after a horrified public response, to what is typically a most callous act of murder, will inevitably burn the identity of the terrorist group into the collective consciousness of a society. The fact that no group or individual has claimed responsibility is puzzling, and leaves open the possibility that the attack might involve a foreign nation.

Iran has not been mentioned to a significant extent in the media as a possible source for the assault. This is peculiar since it is a fact that their attacks on foreign soil, involving their elite Quds Force (part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard), and closely allied Hizbullah, have greatly increased in the last number of years. Indeed an attack in 2011 on the Saudi Ambassador to the United States is likely to have had Iranian/Quds origins.

It is thought the United States has been involved in extensive efforts to prevent Iran developing nuclear weaponry. In parallel, it has introduced increasing rounds of sanctions against the Islamic State, which have been taking an ever-increasing toll on its economy since 2012.

One would speculate that such an attack would have a degree of sophistication but the terrorists having used relatively crude technology, suggesting that an inexperienced individual or individuals constructed the bombs, works against the theory. However, some security experts have speculated in the media that the use of inexperienced bomb makers could be intentional, with the aim of enhancing the possibility of escaping detection by Homeland Security.

Coda

Regardless of the source of this attack, the Boston Massacre is a tragic reminder of what terrorism truly constitutes.

Terrorism is the act of assaulting what are so often purely civilian events. In this instance it was a marathon in Boston, where competitors and bystanders were the sole target. It cannot even be said by apologists that this is an attack simply on Americans, over some sort of domestic or foreign policy, for the event attracts many international visitors. It is terrorism designed to maximise the carnage of innocents, be they men, women, children or infants.

The harm visited on the city will no doubt scar the victims, their families, and the greater community of Boston for years to come, giving rise to fear where there was once implicit trust. Yet it’s a community that has long possessed a strong individual identity, one that will surely survive the malign purpose of the instigators, whosoever they may be.

Update (19/4)

A dramatic sequence of events in the search for the Boston Marathon bombers has claimed the life of one police officer, and led to areas of Boston being placed in lockdown. The older of the suspects has been killed in a shootout with police. The younger second suspect continues to evade police despite a vast manhunt, which some speculate is due in part to the impact of social media.

The suspects were identified as brothers Tamerlan (26) and Dzhokhar (19) Tsarnaev, from Dagestan, a federal republic within the Russian Federation, which neighbours Chechnya. The brothers lived in the US for nearly a decade.

Dagestan is a principally Muslim region that has had substantive issues with Islamic insurgency and terrorism in recent decades, spilling over from chechnya, where there has been protracted conflict in an effort to gain independence. Whilst the conflict there has not threatened the US, regional Chechen fighters constitute part of the membership of certain groups fighting against the US presence in Afghanistan, with some believing Chechen rebels have links with al Qaeda.

The belief in an Islamist motive behind the attack has been strengthened, with an aunt of the brothers stating that Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a devout Muslim two years ago, while US government officials state that he travelled to Russia last year and returned to the US six months later. Similarly strong expressions of faith were made by the bothers on the Internet, with the suspects also expressing pride in their ethnic Chechen origins, and a desire to see independence from Russia.

Rob Harris contributes articles to several websites on contentious political issues (not to be confused with the popular English novelist (1957-) of the same name). He blogs at eirael.blogspot.com. He lives in Ireland. For all the exclusive blog entries by Rob Harris, go here.

By Rob Harris

(source: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East website, http://spme.net/)

In April 2013 the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) became the first European trade union involved with education and academia to adopt a resolution calling on its members to “cease all cultural and academic collaboration with Israel”. The boycott includes any co-operative research programs with Israeli institutions, and also proscribes the exchange of students between the nations.

The resolution also calls on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), an umbrella organisation representing some 55 Irish trade unions of which the TUI is affiliated, to “step up its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the apartheid State of Israel boycotting Israeli academia until it ends the embargo of Gaza, withdraws from the West Bank, and abides by all anti-Israel UN resolutions.” The ICTU has officially boycotted Israel since 2009, and has already gone out of its way to demonise the Jewish State with extremely one-sided pro-boycott conferences.

The TUI motion also instructs the Union’s executive to institute an information programme to justify the boycott. To use their own Orwellian language, it will be “an awareness campaign amongst TUI members on the need for a full boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel”. It will likely invoke the dubious apartheid claims that led to the boycott in the first instance, in an attempt to reinforce the ideology behind the motion, and guarantee its continued support in the face of objections.

Assertions of the leading BDS advocates

According to the Jerusalem Post

The motion was raised by Jim Roche, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology and member of the fringe groups Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) and Gaza Action, and seconded by the vice-president of the TUI Gerry Quinn. […]

David Landy, a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, member of the radical IPSC and founder of Academics for Palestine, called on other unions to follow suit. […]

He said it was “nonsense” that boycotts stifle academic principles.

“Undoubtedly apologists for Israeli apartheid will complain that such motions stifle academic freedom, but this is nonsense.”

So Mr. Landy haughtily deems it a “nonsense” that the boycott will discourage the free movement of academics and students, a valued principle within the academic world, and likewise it is a “nonsense” that it will discourage the free exchange of information and research? If his assertions are correct then why has he and his colleagues advocated a boycott that seeks to isolate Israeli academia and students?

“The Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israel is an institutional boycott, not a boycott of individuals.”

Does Mr. Landy have no notion of the fact that academic institutions are composed of individuals both working and studying within them? When Israeli students attend schools from childhood, will they not almost inevitably be Israeli schools? What exactly does Mr. Landy and his IPSC colleagues foresee as happening when their motion proscribes the exchange of students with Israeli institutions? Clearly the real nonsense is the claim by boycott advocates that the process won’t harm individual Israeli students.

Israel and Arab-Palestinian education

Both Landy and Roche assert that Israel is somehow destroying the Palestinian education system, to the extent of even boycotting it:

“Ironically, those that will jump to complain about this motion will have no words of condemnation for the de facto boycott imposed on Palestinian education by Israel, nor for its continuing attacks on Palestinian education, students and educators,” Landy said.

Does such an assertion have any substantive basis in fact? Perhaps not, for literacy in the West Bank was at 88% before Israel administered the territory. It has now risen to 93%, comparing favourably with neighbouring Jordan.

Furthermore, university education was non-existent in the West Bank prior to Israel’s presence. Israel built six third level institutions to serve Arab-Palestinians. Several were temporarily closed during the Second Intifada as they were being used to advance the cause of conflict.

One example of third-level incitement is Al Najah University, which featured perhaps the most debased exhibit celebrating the death of Israeli civilians. It became a centre for Hamas’ al-Qassam brigade, and yielded numerous suicide bombers from amongst its student body.

Jim Roche and David Landy

Two chief advocates for the TUI boycott have become quite well known in Ireland for extremist views.

Jim Roche (right) with Dr. Ahmed Muhaisen, Head of the Department of Architecture (left) after Roche’s lecture at IUG. Jim Roche was invited to the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) where he delivered a lecture on his work in architectural practice and his teaching at Dublin Institute of Technology. (source: www.dit.ie)

Jim Roche is a veteran of the flotillas that attempted to break the legal Israeli embargo on Gaza. He is a senior member of the jihadist-supporting Irish Anti-War Movement. His views echo that of the basest pro-Palestinian propaganda. He has openly perpetuated the long-disproven assertion that Arab-Palestinians in Gaza are starving, which was untrue even before Israel lifted all food import restrictions in June 2010.

Mr. Roche postulates fanciful notions, claiming Israel “has erased and continues to erase indigenous Palestinian architectural heritage from the physical landscape and collective consciousness….”, whilst ignoring the destruction to the holiest Jewish sites through the decades. He not only inverted the sequence of events leading to the Operation Pillar of Cloud conflict in 2012 but actually congratulated Hamas on showing ‘restraint’ while it was indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians:

…what is remarkable about the current escalation, purely manufactured by Israel for internal electoral reasons, is the resilience and restraint shown by the Gazan people and its elected government.

Roche opposes all sanctions against Iran, and speaking after the successful TUI vote, he stated:

I am very pleased that this motion was passed with such support by TUI members, especially coming the day after Israeli occupation forces shot and killed two Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank.

Would this happen to be the same teenagers who threw petrol bombs at an armed Israeli checkpoint in the darkness of night? Haaretz reported that they were carrying seven incendiary devices, despite describing them as “unarmed”!

David Landy (source: www.tcd.ie/)

David Landy is a figurehead of the Irish pro-Palestinian movement. It has been suggested that he has a rather problematic stance toward his own Jewish identity. Indeed Landy wrote a book on the very issue, entitled “Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights”, which taps into the increasingly vocal negation of Jewish identity in the Jewish quarter of the anti-Zionist movement. A review by Professor Philip Mendes, also featuring a similarly themed book, states that:

Both authors rightly suggest that their samples are involved in creating alternative communities of Jews who reject Israel. These communities give them a sense of belonging and mutual support that was denied to them in the mainstream Jewish community. This then begs the question of what if anything distinguishes their anti-Zionist beliefs from the views of anti-Zionists who aren’t Jewish…

Double standards, Irish style

Whether or not one thinks Israel is violating the rights of Arab-Palestinians, the singling out of this small nation above all others must surely seem an oddity to all but those who obsessively hate Israel.

Numerous Irish academic institutions have strong links with regimes that possess dubious human rights records. Moreover, one would think this issue would be a source of even mild concern to those supposedly interested in human rights because these links have grown ever stronger, such as with Russia, and particularly China, the developments of which have been well publicised. Consequently, the obsession over a few rather tenuous academic links with Israel is outlandish, to say the least.

As musician and academic Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh noted, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm in a letter to the Irish Times

Cover of Landy’s book “Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights – Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel” (Zed Books 2011, www.zedbooks.co.uk/)

There seems to have been no discussion of the extensive academic ties that Trinity College, Dublin Institute of Technology and University College, Dublin all have with Russia and China, despite the former country’s illegal occupation of parts of the sovereign state of Georgia… This is all the more surprising given that it was the Dublin Colleges Branch of the TUI that sponsored the anti-Israel motion.

Neither were any corresponding demands placed by members of the TUI onto the opposing Arab-Palestinian side. It should be recalled that the Arab-Palestinian education system & academia has been used to incite extreme hatred and violence throughout the Palestinian populace for decades, thereby dealing a death-blow to any chance of a peace process, thanks to a permanently radicalised populace. It would seem that even an education system using children in endeavours to exterminate another state, going as far as to institute militaristic camps is not worthy of censure!

On prejudice and discrimination

The notion that the TUI boycott is an assault on Israel, rather than an attempt to weaken any sense of a perceived occupation, is well founded. The boycott extends to all Israeli institutions, rather than merely those involved with the West Bank or Samaria and Judea. The organisation Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine, which unites both Israeli and Palestinian workers and attempts to foster dialogue, noted the indiscriminate nature of the TUI boycott resolution:

The resolution does not specifically call for a boycott of Israeli academics or students who are, for example, based in the occupied territories. The boycott covers all Israelis, even those students and academics who oppose the occupation and who support self-determination for the Palestinians.

Similarly, one wonders what is to be achieved by including a cultural aspect to the boycott. Proponents argue that any manifestation of Israeli culture “whitewashes the occupation”. However, it can easily be inferred that behind such senseless words an uglier truth lies. These individuals are afraid that we will see Israeli people as human beings rather than as bloodthirsty monsters so often portrayed on the news.

Interestingly, British academic unions considering a similar boycott received legal advice that it might be in breach of European Union anti-discrimination laws. BDS was found to be illegal by the French Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights upheld this ruling. However, it is unclear whether the TUI will be challenged on their boycott.

Some implications for Ireland

It should not be thought that the arguments of BDS advocates were overwhelmingly superior simply because the TUI vote was unanimously in favour of a boycott. Rather it is a somewhat unexpected conclusion that there would be little if any dissent to the boycott motion because pro-Palestinianism is by far the pre-dominant paradigm in Ireland when it comes to any discussion on this Middle Eastern conflict. Moreover, there appears to have been no speakers voicing opposing anti-boycott views at the TUI conference. Sadly the voices of a fanatical well-funded terrorist-applauding element have undue influence on the debate in Ireland in the absence of any substantive defence of Israel by opposing sides.

The boycott could have profoundly divisive implications. It may lead to TUI members singling out Israeli exchange students, and refuse to assist them as has occurred in other boycott scenarios. In 2009 a lecturer at NUI Maynooth mounted an unofficial boycott of Israel which was discovered when his refusal to assist an Israeli student was reported in the media. It may even cause industrial unrest if an employee of the TUI is disciplined for refusing to work with Israeli students or institutions since no Irish colleges appear to endorse a boycott.

The boycott also comes at a time when recession-hit Ireland has been increasingly looking to Israel due to its economic model, which is weathering the economic downturn.

Israel’s record when it comes to academic achievement can be justifiably described as outstanding. It ranks as the second best educated nation in the world according to the OECD, and one of the more remarkable aspects of those going along with the agitators of such a boycott is the inability to conceive of the way in which Israel substantively contributes to world academia, and scientific innovation, where it is known for its strides in health care.

Education is a key element in any nation’s economic recovery, and whilst Ireland can no doubt exploit opportunities with other nations, Israel still stands out in a number of key respects. It has the largest per capita number of third level and PhD graduates in the world. It is a world leader in science and high technology as evidenced by its remarkable showing on the NASDAQ which is almost comparable in scale to that of the entire EU, whilst it also gained substantive inward investment from multinationals. These are the very areas of industry in which Ireland seeks to advance, and to position itself.

The BDS movement seeks to isolate Israel economically, academically and culturally, in a quest to bring a remarkable nation to its knees. Whether or not such an action is deemed offensive from a moral perspective, simply from a position of self-interest, boycotting Israel’s education and academia is likely to make Ireland the worse off if it takes hold and spreads to other Irish academic unions in the long run.

Rob Harris contributes articles to several websites on contentious political issues (not to be confused with the popular English novelist (1957-) of the same name). He blogs at eirael.blogspot.com. He lives in Ireland. For all the exclusive blog entries by Rob Harris, go here.

Feb 27, 2013 | By Veysel Ayhan

This article was first published in the Turkey Analyst, vol. 6 no. 4 (www.turkeyanalyst.org), a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center. © Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center, 2013.

The battle over the Syrian town Ras al-Ain on the border to Turkey and the recent cease-fire agreement between the Syrian opposition and the Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD) have major implications for Turkey, affecting its relations with the Kurds in Syria, and with parts of the opposition. The battle over Ras al-Ain has not only resulted in the Kurds seeing Turkey as their enemy, but has also led some Syrian opposition leaders to question the role that Turkey plays in their country. The standing of Turkey has been negatively affected as the notion that Turkey could be of assistance in ending the intensified ethnic, religious or sectarian strife that can be expected after the downfall of al-Assad has been dealt a blow at Ras al-Ain.

Background

On November 8, 2012, Syrian opposition forces of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and of the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front launched an attack against the Kurdish militia in Ras al-Ain, an ethnically mixed town of Kurds, Arabs and other ethnic groups on the border to Turkey. The control of Ras al-Ain, Serê Kaniyê in Kurdish, had been taken over by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) following the withdrawal of the troops of the Syrian government in July 2012. The PYD had refused to join in the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, instead concentrating on strengthening the Kurdish hold over parts of northeastern Syria. With the attempt of the rebel troops to seize control over the town, the tension between the Kurds and Arabs flared up in heavy fighting.

The FSA and Islamic Liberation front units were repelled by the Popular Protection Units (YPG) of the PYD, but the attacks were resumed on January 16. The Kurdish militia was once again able to repel the attempt of the Islamic Liberation front and FSA units to gain control of Ras al-Ain, and on February 17 another cease fire, the fifth in a row, was declared.

The opposition troops that engaged the Kurds in the fighting over the control of Ras al-Ain were mainly drawn from the local jihadist group Ghorbaa al-Sham and the al-Nusra front alongside FSA units and fighters from Arab clans of the region. The cease-fire was brokered by the intervention of opposition leaders, chief among them Michel Kilo, who have become increasingly concerned that the Syrian popular uprising is going to degenerate into an ethnic strife between Arabs and Kurds, and who want to promote a dialogue with the Kurds. In order to bring about the cease-fire, the rebel representatives had to apply pressure on the groups that have assembled under the umbrella of the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front. The Islamic Liberation Front operates independently of FSA and the Syrian National Council, and it includes Salafist groups and jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. However, to speak of a front is somewhat misleading; even though the various Islamist groups in Syria want to demonstrate a determination to form a united a political front, they nonetheless lack a centralized military organization structure.

The cease-fire agreement stipulates that the armed forces withdraw from Ras al-Ain and that a council composed of civilians that represent the various ethnic groups in the town is formed; the control of the border to Turkey is supposed to be handed over to this council that is yet to be formed. The agreement furthermore stipulates that the FSA and YPG jointly assume control over the checkpoints at the entrance to the town. So far, however, the groups of the Islamic Liberation front that have seized the border posts have not turned over their control to the FSA or to the PYD. The border post to Turkey is currently controlled by Ghorbaa al-Sham while the al-Nusra front maintains a military office a short distance from the border to Turkey.

Implications

The battle over Ras al-Ain and the recent cease-fire agreement have major implications for Turkey, affecting its relations with the Kurds in Syria, and with parts of the opposition. Even though the Kurdish fighters were not solely drawn from the PYD, the result of the fighting at which the group has succeeded in demonstrating its military prowess, is that the PYD has gained in stature and legitimacy; the PYD has strengthened its position among the Syrian Kurds, which is an unwelcome development for Turkey that has made clear that it cannot tolerate that the PYD, which is seen as close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), establishes control in the border area. On February 26, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that “the integrity of Syria is very important for us. We cannot tolerate an entity of northern Syria. That would give us different rights. We will not tolerate any formation that damages this integrity, whether it is autonomy, or whether or not it is legal.” Statements such as these are being taken as proof by Kurdish groups that Turkey has lent support to the Arab forces.

As to why the fighting erupted in the first place, the explanations diverge. The Arab side has leveled the accusation that the PYD had been supported by the regime in Damascus, and had acted on its behalf in Ras al-Ain. The Kurdish side on the other hand, accuses Turkey of having declared war against them using Islamist forces. Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that the battle over Ras al-Ain represents a watershed moment in the Syrian uprising; it has demonstrated that it has the potential to degenerate into an Arab-Kurdish war, and it has sown seeds of mistrust between the two ethnic groups. However, the cease fire agreement that has been brokered — although tenuous — reflects the new awareness that the Arab-Kurdish relationship needs to be mended. For the first time, an official relationship has been established between the PYD and the Free Syrian Army, and the two have committed to maintaining what amounts to a joint control of Ras al-Ain.

The agreement not only means that the PYD seeks to dispel the impression that it acts in concert with the regime of Bashar al-Assad; it also amounts to a joint attempt of the FSA and PYD to circumscribe the nefarious influence of jihadist and Salafist groups, even though the latter are yet to be dislodged from the checkpoints and the border post to Turkey that they continue to control.

Indeed, there is a rift between some of the Arab forces of the uprising and those of the Islamic Liberation Front; many of the fighters among the ranks of the latter are non-Syrians, and they are accused by some Syrian Arabs of not realizing that engaging in a fight with the Kurds risks igniting an ethnic conflagration that would not be in the interest of the revolution.

Conclusions

As for Turkey, the battle over Ras al-Ain and the subsequent cease-fire agreement has several negative ramifications. The PYD has emerged stronger than it was before the fighting started, having asserted its authority; the Kurdish group has also established a formal relationship with the main force of the Syrian revolution. And there is a growing realization within the FSA that attacking the Kurds is not to benefit of their cause, and that Turkey’s preoccupation with countering the influence of the PYD is deflecting attention and resources from the goal of unseating al-Assad from power.

There is a new perception in Syrian opposition circles that Turkey’s effort to undermine the PYD is only contributing to prolonging the life of the al-Assad regime and that it also contributes to sapping the international support for the revolution. The battle over Ras al-Ain has thus not only resulted in the Kurds seeing Turkey as their enemy, but has also led some Syrian opposition leaders to question the role that Turkey plays in their country.

At the very least, the standing of Turkey has been negatively affected as the notion that Turkey could be of assistance in ending the intensified ethnic, religious or sectarian strife that can be expected after the downfall of al-Assad has been dealt a blow at Ras al-Ain.

Dr. Veysel Ayhan is Associate Professor and President of International Middle East Peace Research Center.