Friday, September 21, 2007

Greatest Botanist and Pharmacist of the Middle Ages: IBN AL-BAITAR

Abu Muhammad Abdallah Ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Baitar Dhiya al-Din al-Malaqi IBN AL-BAITAR IBN AL BAITARIbn Al-Baitar full name (Abu Muhammad Abdallah Ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Baitar Dhiya al-Din al-Malaqi) was one of the greatest scientists of Muslim Spain and was the greatest botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages. He was born in the Spanish city of Malaqa (Malaga) towards the end of the 12th century. He learned botany from Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, a learned botanist, with whom he started collecting plants in and around Spain. In 1219 he left Spain on a plant-collecting expedition and travelled along the northern coast of Africa as far as Asia Minor. The exact modes of his travel (whether by land or sea) are not known, but the major stations he visited include Bugia, Qastantunia (Constantinople), Tunis, Tripoli, Barqa and Adalia. After 1224 he entered the service of al-Kamil, the Egyptian Governor, and was appointed chief herbalist. In 1227 al-Kamil extended his domination to Damascus, and Ibn al-Baitar accompanied him there which provided him an opportunity to collect plants in Syria His researches on plants extended over a vast area: including Arabia and Palestine, which he either visited or managed to collect plants from stations located there. He died in Damascus in 1248.

Ibn Baitar's major contribution, Kitab al-Jami fi al-Adwiya al- Mufrada, is one of the greatest botanical compilations dealing with medicinal plants in Arabic. It enjoyed a high status among botanists up to the 16th century and is a systematic work that embodies earlier works, with due criticism, and adds a great part of original contribution. The encyclopedia comprises some 1,400 different items, largely medicinal plants and vegetables, of which about 200 plants were not known earlier. The book refers to the work of some 150 authors mostly Arabic, and it also quotes about 20 early Greek scientists. It was translated into Latin and published in 1758.

His second monumental treatise Kitab al-Mlughni fi al-Adwiya al-Mufrada is an encyclopedia of medicine. The drugs are listed in accordance with their therapeutical value. Thus, its 20 different chapters deal with the plants bearing significance to diseases of head, ear, eye, etc. On surgical issues he has frequently quoted the famous Muslim surgeon, Abul Qasim Zahrawi. Besides Arabic, Baitar has given Greek and Latin names of the plants, thus facilitating transfer of knowledge.

Ibn Baitar's contributions are characterized by observation, analysis and classification and have exerted a profound influence on Eastern as well as Western botany and medicine. Though the Jami was translated/published late in the western languages as mentioned above, yet many scientists had earlier studied various parts of the book and made several references to it.

Abu Mansur ibn Tahir Al-Baghdadi

Born: about 980 in Baghdad, Iraq
Died: 1037

Al-Baghdadi is sometimes known as Ibn Tahir. His full name is Abu Mansur Abr al-Qahir ibn Tahir ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Tamini al-Shaffi al-Baghdadi. We can deduce from al-Baghdadi's last two names that he was descended from the Bani Tamim tribe, one of the Sharif tribes of ancient Arabia, and that he belonged to the Madhhab Shafi'i school of religious law. This school of law, one of the four Sunni schools, took its name from the teacher Abu 'Abd Allah as-Shafi'i (767-820) and was based on both the divine law of the Qur'an or Hadith and on human logical reasoning when no divine teachings were given.

We have a few details of al-Baghdadi's life. He was born and brought up in Baghdad but left that city to go to Nishapur (sometimes written Neyshabur in English) in the Tus region of northeastern Iran. He did not go to Nishapur alone, but was accompanied by his father who must have been a man of considerable wealth, for al-Baghdadi, without any apparent income himself, was able to spend a great deal of money on supporting scholarship and men of learning.

At this time Nishapur was, like the whole of the region around it, a place where there was little political stability as various tribes and religious groups fought with each other. When riots broke out in Nishapur, al-Baghdadi decided that he required a more peaceful place to continue his life as an academic so he moved to Asfirayin. This town was quieter and al-Baghdadi was able to teach and study in more peaceful surroundings. He was certainly considered as one of the great teachers of his time and the people of Nishapur were sad to lose the great scholar from their city.

In Asfirayin, al-Baghdadi taught for many years in the mosque. Always having sufficient wealth, he took no payment for his teachings, devoting his life to the pursuit of learning and teaching for its own sake. His writings were mainly concerned with theology, as we must assume were his teachings. However, he wrote at least two books on mathematics.

One, Kitab fi'l-misaha, is relatively unimportant. It is concerned with the measurement of lengths, areas and volumes. The second is, however, a work of major importance in the history of mathematics. This treatise, al-Takmila fi'l-Hisab, is a work in which al-Baghdadi considers different systems of arithmetic. These systems derive from counting on the fingers, the sexagesimal system, and the arithmetic of the Indian numerals and fractions. He also considers the arithmetic of irrational numbers and business arithmetic. In this work al-Baghdadi stresses the benefits of each of the systems but seems to favour the Indian numerals.

Several important results in number theory appear in the al-Takmila as do comments which allow us to obtain information on certain texts of al-Khwarizmi which are now lost. We shall discuss the number theory results in more detail below, but first let us comment on the light which the al-Takmila sheds on the problem of why Renaissance mathematicians were divided into "abacists" and "algorists" and exactly what is captured by these two names. It seems clear that those using Indian numerals used an abacus and were then called "abacists". The "algorists" followed the methods of al-Khwarizmi's lost work which, contrary to what was originally thought, is not a work on Indian numerals but rather a work on finger counting methods. This becomes clear from the references to the lost work by al-Baghdadi.

Let us now consider the number theory in al-Takmila. Al-Baghdadi gives an interesting discussion of abundant numbers, deficient numbers, perfect numbers and equivalent numbers. Suppose that, in modern notation, S(n) denotes the sum of the aliquot parts of n, that is the sum of its proper quotients. First al-Baghdadi defines perfect numbers (those number n with S(n) = n), abundant numbers (those number n with S(n) > n), and deficient numbers (those number n with S(n) < n). Of course these properties of numbers had been studied by the ancient Greeks. Al-Baghdadi gives some elementary results and then states that 945 is the smallest odd abundant number, a result usually attributed to Bachet in the early 17th century.

Nicomachus had made claims about perfect numbers in around 100 AD which were accepted, seemingly without question, in Europe up to the 16th century. However, al-Baghdadi knew that certain claims made by Nicomachus were false. Al-Baghdadi wrote (see for example [2] or [3]):-

He who affirms that there is only one perfect number in each power of 10 is wrong; there is no perfect number between ten thousand and one hundred thousand. He who affirms that all perfect numbers end with the figure 6 or 8 are right.

Next al-Baghdadi goes on to define equivalent numbers, and appears to be the first to study them. Two numbers m and n are called equivalent if S(m) = S(n). He then considers the problem: given k, find m, n with S(m) = S(n) = k. The method he gives is a pretty one. He then gives the example k = 57, obtaining S(159) = 57 and S(559) = 57. However, he missed 703, for S(703) = 57 as well.

The results that al-Baghdadi gives on amicable numbers are only a slight variations on results given earlier by Thabit ibn Qurra. In modern notation, m and n are amicable if S(n) = m, and S(m) = n. Thabit ibn Qurra's theorem is as follows: for n > 1, let pn = 3.2n -1 and qn = 9.22n-1 -1. Then if pn-1, pn, and qn are prime, then a = 2npn-1pn and b = 2nqn are amicable numbers while a is abundant and b is deficient.

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

Israel, America and Arab Delusions

by Daniel Pipes
Commentary
March 1991

In mid-January 1991, as the first bombs began to fall on Iraq, Saddam Husayn and his partisans offered two strikingly contrary interpretations of their war with the U.S.-led alliance. Sometimes-especially when justifying their own gratuitous missile attack on Israel-they present the conflict as a great conspiracy hatched by Zionists and executed by their American stooge. "This war that is being waged against us is a Zionist war," Saddam Husayn told a television interviewer at the end of January, "only here Zionism is fighting us through American blood." But when Baghdad wants to paint President Bush as the "arch-Satan" in the White House, Israel then shriveled into America's "evil cat's-paw." Obviously, only one of these characterizations of Israel can be true: either it steers Washington's Middle East policy or it serves American imperial interests-but not both.

Similar contradictions have been forwarded since the beginning of the Persian Gulf crisis. On 24 June 1990, just over a month before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a Baghdad newspaper complained that the U.S. government merely echoes decisions made in Israel, that it lacks an "independent policy" on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then, just four days later, on 28 June, another Baghdad daily proposed exactly the opposite thesis, proclaiming that the U.S. has for decades "used the Zionist entity as a tool to safeguard its interests in the region."

The Iraqis are not alone in espousing these contradictory positions. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Egyptian leader, used to declare that, if not for British help, the idea of a Zionist state would have remained a "madman's fantasy." At the same time, he subscribed to an extreme form of Jewish conspiracy theory: "three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continent." His successor, Anwar as-Sadat likewise could describe Israel as Washington's "gendarme" in the Middle East, while on other occasions maintaining that American policy puts "Israel's interests before those of the United States herself."

The Syrian government of Hafiz al-Asad also contradicts itself on relations between the U.S. and Israel. When ties to Moscow are strong, Damascus stresses the dangers of imperialist plots and variously derides Israel as "a U.S. base," America's "big stick," and "a mere U.S. aircraft carrier." In contrast, when Damascus seeks to improve relations with Washington, it blames "world Jewry" for subverting American policy. "The United States does not have a policy of its own in the Middle East," but blindly follows directives issued in Tel Aviv.

Likewise, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) cannot make up its mind. "The Zionist entity," PLO chairman Yasir 'Arafat announced in April 1990, "represents the head of the body of hostile world forces inside the Arab nation; its role is to protect the interests of those forces." But Hani al-Hasan, a top 'Arafat aide, claims that the United States "is governed by the Zionist lobby."

Do Arabs, then, see Israel as the forward bastion of Western interests or the covert power behind Western decision making? Logic requires that either Washington tells Jerusalem what to do or Jerusalem bullies Washington. Yet many Muslims-Arabs and Iranians (though few Turks) - seem to sense no contradiction between these two cherished visions of Israel. They merrily exist side-by-side-even in the same individual and in the same speech-without so much as a hint of intellectual strain or inconsistency.

Middle Eastern perceptions of Israel's place in the world have profound significance for the Arab conflict with Israel, and so repay careful analysis. That they are so starkly contradictory suggests that, even after a century of the Zionist enterprise, the Muslim peoples still have not settled on a way to understand it. This fact has many implications for Israel, and for the United States.

An Imperialist Conspiracy . . . ?

The notion that Zionism serves as a tool of the Western powers is an old one, going back at least as far as Abdülhamit II, the Ottoman king between 1876 and 1909. His was a reasonable idea: after all, St. Petersburg looked after the interests of Armenians living in his realm, Paris sponsored the Maronites, and London was allied with the Druze; so why not assume the Jews, or the Zionists, were sponsored too? The trouble was that this assumption happened not to be true. Nevertheless, the idea persisted: during the Mandatory period (1918-47), endorsement by the British of a Jewish national home in Palestine was interpreted primarily by Muslims as a way for London to protect the Suez Canal and the route to India. With India's independence in 1947, the emphasis shifted somewhat, to the maintenance of British commerce in the Middle East. According to Egypt's Muslim Brethren, the British assembled "thousands of vagabonds and aliens, bloodsuckers and pimps, and said to them, 'Take for yourselves a national home called Israel.'" Later, when the U.S. government replaced Britain as chief culprit, Washington was held responsible for the establishment of Israel. Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi of Libya has flatly asserted that "the United States created Israel," supplying it with the weapons and intelligence Israelis need to kill Arabs.

Why did British and American imperialists want Israel to exist? Arabs have a rich assortment of answers to the question. Ash-Sha'b, a leftist Egyptian newspaper, portrays Israel as a branch-office of the Central Intelligence Agency, one which requires CIA "approval and support" before taking almost any step. Ahmad Jibril (leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command) dubs Israel "America's Mideast aircraft carrier." Khalid al-Hasan, another PLO leader sees Israel as "something like a conglomerate-General Motors, for example."

And what functions does this intelligence office/aircraft carrier/multinational corporation serve? To jeopardize whatever it may be the speaker holds most dear. Thus, for Nasser, the Pan-Arab leader, Israel endangered Pan-Arab nationalism. His 1962 Charter of National Action dubbed Israel "the tool of imperialism" and "a whip in their hands to fight the struggling Arabs." In 1968 the PLO was still under Nasser's influence, so its Covenant accused Israel of being "a geographic base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, amity and progress."

For Nasser's confidant, Mohamed Heikal, Israel's main role was to control the oil trade. He held in 1964 that "the flow of Arab oil is one of the important factors in the establishment of Israel on the soil of the Arabs." Shortly afterward, Yahya Hamuda, 'Arafat's predecessor as head of the PLO, portrayed Israel as "an instrument of American imperialist colonialism which seeks to appropriate our oil."

Dependencia theorists-who see Western wealth deriving from the exploitation of poor countries-see Israel as a U.S. instrument to prevent Arabs from developing an independent economy, thereby breaking their ties of servitude to the West.

For fundamentalist Muslims, Israel is a vehicle to suppress true Islam. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902?89) held that Israel had "penetrated all the economic, military, and political affairs" of Iran with the intention to "annihilate Islam." Hizbullah, the pro-Iranian Lebanese group, characterizes Israel as the "American spearhead in our Islamic world" and (along with that other devil, the shah of Iran) one of the "two watchdogs of American imperialism." Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist group, accuses the Jews of trying to "liquidate Islam."

For Saddam Husayn, Americans deploy Israel to prevent the Arabs from becoming a powerful and modern nation. Its smear campaigns (which turn innocent research centers into weapons factories), export controls, and military aggression are all designed to keep the Arabs backward.

Israel is also accused of serving a number of other purposes. Edward Said of Columbia University, one of the PLO's unofficial spokesman in the United States, calls Israel "a device for holding Islam-and later the Soviet Union, or communism-at bay." Others point to Israel's alleged part in fomenting counter-revolutionary activities and acting as a center for a psychological warfare. Its very existence is seen as forcing the Arabs to invest in war rather than economic development, as diverting their attention from domestic issues, and as providing the reactionaries with the means to stay in power. In their most paranoid moments, some Arabs even worry about genocide.

Curiously, there is also a recessive view in which Israel in regarded not as an instrument of imperialism but as its victim-a place to which a people not wanted in Christian Europe was expelled. Yasir 'Arafat's father is quoted as observing in the late 1940s, "What is going on is colonialism. It is not the Jews. This is a game of high stakes." Salah Khalaf held that the British engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks in Palestine in the 1940s, like attacking both Arabs and Jews, thereby inciting them to armed clashes, to prolong their presence in the mandate.

This line of thinking inspires some of the wildest speculations of all. Muhammad Mahdi at-Tajir, a United Arab Emirates ambassador to Great Britain, once explained to a British writer: "It is not the Jews who created the state [of Israel]. It is an invention of their enemies, especially the British. When you wanted to get rid of them because you were afraid they would rule Britain, you put the idea in their head of creating a homeland." And this from an ambassador to the Court of St. James's! Qadhdhafi took the notion one step further, calling the creation of Israel "a big international conspiracy against the Jews." Addressing the Jews, he warned them that the Europeans "want to get rid of you and throw you in Palestine for the Arabs to eliminate you some day." To avoid this fate, Qadhdhafi urged Israelis to "leave Palestine immediately and return to [your] own countries."

To be sure, the notion of Jews as victims has never enjoyed a wide following among Muslims, possibly because it is much less useful than portraying Israel as a monstrous and all-powerful agent of imperialism. This latter view deepens hatred for the enemy, inflates the threat he poses, stimulates xenophobia, and rallies citizens to the government. It turns Israel from a parochial Middle East concern into a global problem, universalizing the Arab cause. It makes the Arabs' defeats that much more palatable; how can they beat an Israel enjoying British and American support?

Depending on their strategy toward Israel, Arab leaders under the sway of the imperialist myth conceive of Washington either as their principal nemesis or as the way to a solution. Those who plan militarily to destroy Israel are implacably hostile to the United States. To Qadhdhafi, Washington is "the bitter enemy until doomsday"; Asad deems it "the main enemy of the Arab nation"; and Baghdad Radio's Voice of the PLO chimes in with "the major enemy . . . both in the past and in the present." But Arab leaders intent on dealing diplomatically with Israel draw the opposite conclusion; if Washington makes the key decisions, they had better cultivate it. Sadat and 'Arafat followed this course in the hope that the Americans would compel Israel to do their bidding.

Whether it casts the U.S. government as enemy or ally, the imperialist theory causes Arab leaders to focus too much on the United States and too little on Israel. With the single exception of 1957 (when President Eisenhower compelled the Israelis to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula), the expectation of American pressure on Israel has invariably been disappointed. Still, the illusion lives on that the Americans might again, as 'Arafat puts it, "do what Eisenhower did." Sadat thought that Americans held "99 percent of the cards" but eventually discovered that he had to negotiate with Menachem Begin, not Jimmy Carter. Alexander Haig was considered pro-Israel; therefore, when he resigned as secretary of state in June 1982, the PLO was elated. One of 'Arafat's aides even acknowledged, "I felt as if we had won the war that night." But as the next few months showed, he was wholly mistaken.

Too little attention to Israel leads the Arabs into serious blunders. Nasser concentrated so intently on extruding American influence from the Middle East, he virtually ignored the effect of his actions on Israel; this partially explains how he blundered into the Six Day War. Similarly, leaders of the intifada on the West Bank and Gaza Strip designed their insurrection to win the sympathy of Western television audiences, and did not realize the damage this did to their cause among the Israeli electorate.

If Israel is merely Washington's pawn, a cherished slogan has to be discarded-that the Jewish lobby drives American policy. Surprisingly, Arab leaders do sometimes draw this conclusion. Deputy Prime Minister Khaddam of Syria put it clearly in 1981: "There is a deep and organic link between the United States and Israel. We are under no illusions about this. The link is not due to the 'Zionist lobby' in the United States but to the fact that it is the only friend of the United States in the area and because it represents a major base for protecting U.S. interests." In a remarkable statement eight years later, Yasir 'Arafat echoed this outlook. The Kuwaiti News Agency paraphrased him expressing the belief that "the Israeli public wants peace but the PLO's major problem is with the U.S. Administration, noting that it's the U.S. and not Israel that determines the American policy in the region, dismissing as baseless the myth of the Zionist lobby in the United States."

But, of course, this is not the only point of view.

. . . Or a Jewish One?

The alternate school of thought stipulates a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, possibly under the direction of the (fictive) Elders of Zion whose tentacles reach deep into London, Washington, and other Western capitals. In this version of the conspiracy mania, Americans do not use Israelis but instead are their dupes. And this explains an enduring Arab mystification-why the U.S. government seems to favor 4 million Jews over 150 million Arabs. Syria's Khaddam articulated this puzzlement in 1980: "What has Israel given the United States? Obviously, nothing, neither oil nor money. The reverse is true. Israel takes everything from the United States. At a time when the Arabs provide the United States with oil, money, and political support, what is the result? U.S. aid to Israel." The power of the Jewish conspiracy myth lies precisely in its explaining this enigma.

In a 1944 broadcast on Nazi-controlled Radio Berlin, the Palestinian leader Amin al-Husayni noted the strong support for Zionism found in the U.S. Congress. His comment: "No one ever thought that 140,000,000 Americans would become tools in Jewish hands." The same notion remained common in the post-war years. At the United Nations debate on the partition of Palestine, Faris al-Khuri, dean of the Arab diplomats, held that although Zionists formed only one-thirtieth of the U.S. population, "they have extended their influence into all circles." He warned Americans to "be careful for the future which awaits them." Writing about U.S. politics in his 1951 book, From Here We Learn, the Egyptian thinker Muhammad al-Ghazali asserted that "the rudder of higher politics is in the hands of the Jews." Post-war suspicion of Jewish power was so strong, recalls Miles Copeland, the late CIA operative, that American diplomacy in the Arab world during the period 1947-52 consisted largely of trying "to convince the various Foreign Offices that our Government was not under the control of the Zionists." Mawdudi, the pre-eminent fundamentalist Muslim of Pakistan, asserted that Jews rule the United States like the jinn rule mankind.

Rana Kabbani is a sophisticated Syrian woman who lived in Washington and studied at Georgetown University; the novelist Salman Rushdie praised her study, Europe's Myths of Orient, as "an important, fierce and judicious book"; married to the British journalist Patrick Seale and living in London, she has been described in Mother Jones as having "star quality: beauty, brains, and a social position." And what did this highly intelligent woman learn during her years in proximity to the institutions of American power? That the simple prejudices bandied about in her homeland are valid. "Every Arab believes that American policy towards the Middle East is made in Tel Aviv, but to discover that this was indeed the case, and not mere paranoia, was a great shock."

Governments repeat this charge too. "U.S. policy toward the Arabs," declared the Iraqi first deputy prime minister, Taha Yasin Ramadan, "is drawn up by Zionist circles." King al-Husayn of Jordan has publicly blamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby, for wrong-headed American policies in the Middle East. Syrian radio has argued that Israeli power in Washington results from "the Zionists' gold and dollars." According to it, "the Zionists financed election campaigns [of senators], gave them their racist votes, and continued to provide them with bribes to raise their hands whenever a decision desired by the Zionists needed to be made." And as if that were not enough, the Israeli government "slips dollars into their pockets."

Predictably, Henry Kissinger's Jewish background was interpreted as a mechanism for Israeli control over the American body politic. As Foreign Minister Isma'il Fahmy of Egypt put it, Kissinger "was in fact always acting on behalf of Israel." If ever he dared disagree with the Israeli government, it "brought him quickly into line."

Middle Eastern leaders sometimes portray Israel as a threat not merely to them but to all of humanity. Asad (who to this day shelters Adolf Eichmann's secretary, SS captain Alois Brunner, the leading Nazi fugitive now alive) has described the Zionists as "invaders who are threatening not just the Arab nation but the entire human race." Likewise, senior Palestine Liberation Organization figures portray themselves doing battle on behalf of all humanity. Amal, the moderate Shi'i movement in Lebanon, calls Zionism a continuing danger "to the whole of humanity." And the charter of the fundamentalist Palestinian group, Hamas, cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name and frequently reflects the message of that fraudulent text:

The enemies . . . have labored to amass astounding and influential material wealth, which has been exploited to realize their dream. They have used their wealth to gain control of the world media, news agencies, the press, broadcasting stations, etc. . . . They were behind the French revolution and the Communist revolution. . . . They instigated World War I. . . . They caused World War II. . . . It was they who gave the instructions to establish the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule over the world through them.
Taking this argument one step further, some Arabs argue that they must save the West from Zionist clutches. Saddam Husayn once declared that Arab strength vis-à-vis Israel "not only will help liberate ourselves, but . . . will liberate others in the West from the weight of the Zionist pressure they are subjected to." Once this is achieved, writes Kamil Yusuf al-Hajj, "the West would be in our grasp rather than the Zionists' . . . and the fabulous powers of the West would be within our reach instead of the Zionists'."

Fears of a grand Zionist plot tends to discourage diplomacy. If Washington is a pawn of Jerusalem, there is not much point expecting anything from Americans. Instead, leftists look to Moscow and fundamentalist Muslims renounce both great powers, feeling so much fear of Israel they cannot even imagine making peace with it.

Patterns

Three points bears noting. First, each of these two themes contains a kernel of truth. The great powers now and then have expected to benefit from Israel. As early as 1840, British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, wrote that the return of the Jewish people to Palestine would serve to check "any future evil designs of Mehemet Ali [the ruler of Egypt] or his successor." The Balfour Declaration did endorse a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The U.S. government formed a strategic partnership with Israel in the 1980s. But all this has to be put in context. Palmerston's ideas were stillborn; London quickly regretted the Balfour Declaration; and American support for Israel comes much less from putative imperialists (such as business interests or the military) than from those who feel moral or spiritual ties with the Jewish state.

Conversely, it is also true that Jews play an impressively large role in Western life. The great Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had access to the highest circles of British officialdom, while AIPAC has rightly been called "perhaps the most effective pressure group in Washington." Still, the idea of a Zionist plot rests on the faulty premise that Jews are the only Westerners favoring strong ties to Israel; in fact, of course, this "special relationship" draws on many sources-theological, moral, political, and strategic-and enjoys wide support among the Christian majority. Americans have consistently viewed good relations with Israel as an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, while the U.S. public is skeptical about foreign aid in principle, a review of forty years of history shows that "most Americans strongly support" economic and military aid to Israel. Conspiracy theorists tend to ignore these inconvenient details.

Second, myths about relations between Israel and the United States are not the only myths about Israel rampant in the Muslim world; many in the Middle East are also of two minds about Israel and the USSR. While Khalid Baqdash, leader of the Syrian Communist Party since 1936, holds that "world Jewry is ranged against the Soviet Union." To the contrary, an Egyptian daily maintains that "only the U.S.S.R. has derived benefit" from the establishment of Israel. These examples, which can be multiplied many times, show the depth of confusion about Israel.

Having it two contradictory ways at once brings The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler to mind. They portray Jews on the one hand as capitalists and middlemen who steal from the workers, and also as socialists who threaten the bankers. Here is Hitler in 1922: "Moses Kohn on the one side encourages his [employers'] association to refuse the worker's demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory incites the masses [to strike]." Just as no one seems to note the inconsistency of these claims, so is it possible for Middle East leaders, decade after decade, to make diametrically opposed statements about Israel and the United States.

Third, neither the imperialist or the Zionist interpretation is original to the Middle East; both come from Europe. The notion of Israel as a tool of imperialism goes back to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the early Bolshevik state. A Soviet document from July 1919 called Zionism "one of the branches of the imperialist counter-revolution," an idea subsequently repeated ad nauseum by the Soviet propaganda apparatus. Leonid Brezhnev told the Egyptian ambassador in 1967 that "Israel by itself was nothing. It existed for its existence on American aid, and the reason why the Americans kept Israel alive was because they wanted the oil of the Middle East. . . . The Americans could not themselves attack the Arab nation, but they could attack through Israel."

As for the notion of Israel as part of a Jewish world plot, it derives from Nazi ideology. As early as the mid-1920s, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of his suspicions about the Zionists' ultimate goals: "They do not think at all of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine to live in it someday; rather, they want a central organization for their international world cheating, withdrawn from others' reach-a refuge for convicted dregs and a college for aspiring swindlers." Already in the mid-1930s, Edward Atiyah writes, Palestinian Arabs "lapped up Fascist and Nazi lies. They saw the Zionists as the sinister world-menace of the Nazi legend, and England as a puppet power in their clutches." Many Arab leaders-including such intellectuals as Michel 'Aflaq, Shakib Arslan, and Sati' al-Husri, and politicians such as Anwar as-Sadat and Rashid 'Ali al-Gilani-also adopted this outlook.

In brief, Middle East politicians still today routinely echo the ideas of Lenin and Hitler, the men who initiated this century's most appalling political experiments.

Explaining the Paradox

The "special relationship" between the United States and Israel mystifies Arabs and Iranians. As Muslims, they fail to understand the emotional resonance of a common Bible and a host of Judeo-Christian features. As Middle Easterners, they cannot see beyond the clash of nationalisms to comprehend shared interests between countries. As citizens of authoritarian states, they miss the importance of personal, cultural, and political bonds between free peoples. Perplexed by an alliance that makes no sense, Arab observers fall back on conspiratorial explanations.

The two conspiracies share parallel premises. Both dismiss disagreements between Jerusalem and Washington as charades to fool the gullible. Both postulate lock-step agreement between the two sides, and that in turn rules out independent decisionmaking. Instead, Both see a hidden agenda, whether imperialist or Zionist. Both take a basic truth and distort it beyond recognition, transforming self-evident mutual influence into terrifying manipulation. Both twist the essential balance of the U.S.-Israel relationship into something skewed. Only one of the two parties makes decisions and the other takes orders. One is the ventriloquist, the other the dummy- it may not be clear which is which, but the fundamental relationship is absolutely certain.

At this point the theories converge, the double conspiracy becomes one, and exact roles hardly matter. Americans and Israelis are working together to rule the world, so who cares which of them is dominant, which is subservient? Not being able to discern their real roles only makes the alliance that much more sinister.

Ultimately, the U.S.-Israel alliance transcends either country to become a single malevolent entity. Saddam Husayn sees "the essence of the conspiracy" lying in the convergence of U.S. efforts to dominate the world and Israeli desires to create a Greater Israel. The two forces meld in his mind, and he refers to "America, together with Zionism, or Zionism, together with America-or any of these two alternatives" as variants of the same thing. The first military communiqué from Iraq on 17 January 1991 referred to criminal aggression carried out by "the treasonous Zionist-American enemy"; the fourth announced that "Israel and the United States are one and the same."

Here is Radio Damascus on the subject: the bond "between Israel and the United States" it pronounced in 1986, "makes Israel a U.S. tool directed against national liberation movements in the region, and also makes U.S. foreign policy a tool for implementing Israeli policy." Even Sadat, who studied the U.S.-Israeli nexus at first hand, came close to accepting this view. "Israel," he wrote in his memoirs, "had come to assume the role of the only 'power' guarding U.S. interests in the Middle East. This was a role chosen by Israel herself, or even chosen for her by the United States." Taha Yasin Ramadan came up with an even more enigmatic formulation, referring to "Israel's protégés-who created and nurtured it." The two sides are so involved in conspiracies, they can no longer be separated from each other.

The key to this thinking lies in two fantasies. (1) The Jews' economic power permits them to run American foreign policy and (2) this power is used for imperialist ends. It then follows that (3) the Zionists run U.S. policy and Washington depends heavily on Israel. Or, more succinctly: Jews rule America; Israel serves as part of their mechanism for world control. Of course, this train of thought assumes that both Lenin's and Hitler's ideas are correct-a rare combination in the West but commonplace in the Middle East.

Implications

Belief in an imperialist plot enhances American influence in the Middle East while fears of Zionist conspiracy diminish it. Hence, from the point of view of American interests, the imperialist conspiracy is preferable to the Zionist one. American politicians could do worse than remind Middle Eastern leaders of U.S. influence in Jerusalem.

From an Israeli point of view, which is less bad depends on political outlook. Israelis who hope eventually to reach a diplomatic solution with their Arab enemies clearly want Washington's imagined role to be as great as possible-even if that means bringing uncomfortable diplomatic pressures to bear on themselves. But Israelis who have given up on diplomacy may well prefer the Arabs to go it alone or even go through Moscow. Labor might point to services rendered for the U.S. military and intelligence services; contrarily, Likud might boast of its prowess in the halls of Congress.

But Israel's real interest lies in undoing distorted perceptions of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, for these prevent Muslims from treating it as a normal country. As either pawn or puppeteer, Israel lacks ordinary state interests. Whether used by or using the United States, it is connected to something too large to fit the Middle East; whether seen as an outpost of imperialism or as the headquarters of a conspiracy, the Jewish state becomes part of something too threatening to accommodate. As Saad El-Shazly, a former Egyptian army chief of staff, put it: "Because of its imperial role-its birth and being as an avowed outpost of European power in the heart of the Arab world-Israel cannot come to terms with its neighbours. The only relationship Israel can have with the Arabs is that of denial, conquest, and subjugation."

All this recalls the old demonization of Jews in Europe. And just as that demonization caused pogroms and culminated in the Nazi holocaust, so there is a parallel danger when the Jewish state is made a menace to all humanity. Only when Israel comes to be regarded as a state like any other is there a chance that its neighbors will deal with it in accordance with conventional diplomatic norms. There is little prospect of this happening soon, however. Wild claims about ties between the United States and Israel are not a fringe phenomenon in the Muslim Middle East but-as we have seen-integral to the fabric of its mainstream political life.

Still, it is important that American diplomats and politicians take every opportunity to disabuse their Arab counterparts of the idea that U.S.-Israeli relations are anything more than they appear to be. From time to time, American leaders do precisely this. For example, in a recent meeting with five U.S. senators, President Saddam Husayn of Iraq repeatedly alluded to "a large-scale campaign" in the West against Iraq. He went out of his way to goad the senators: "Is the control of the Zionist trend over you so great that it deprives you of your humanity? Has patriotism in those [Western] countries become so weak that they no longer can say what is right and what is wrong?" After listening to a barrage of such assertions, Senator Alan Simpson (Republican of Wyoming) replied: "There is no conspiracy by the U.S. government, or in England or Israel, to attack this country."

Superfluous as it may seem, this sort of reply needs to be made, and then repeated. Eventually it may pay off. Anwar as-Sadat credited his own enlightenment to just such persuasion. "My talks with Dr. Kissinger convinced me," he explained, "that he rejects the simplistic notion of some of your strategists who see-or saw-Israel as the American gendarme in this part of the world." The reiteration of such plain truths may not by itself lead other Middle East leaders to emulate Sadat in making peace with the Jewish state but breaking the Arabs' delusion about America and Israel is essential if they are ever to move in that direction.

Arabian Sex Tourism

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
October 7, 2005

Indian media have been publishing exposés documenting the foul behavior of Gulf Arabs in the southern Indian town of Hyderabad. "Fly-by-night bridegrooms" by R Akhileshwari in the Deccan Herald and "One minor girl, many Arabs" by Mohammed Wajihuddin in the Times of India are two important examples. Wajihuddin sets the stage:

They are old predators with new vigour. Often bearded, invariably in flowing robes and expensive turbans. The rich, middle-aged Arabs increasingly stalk the deprived streets of Hyderabad like medieval monarchs would stalk their harems in days that we wrongly think are history. These Viagra-enabled Arabs are perpetrating a blatant crime under the veneer of nikaah, the Islamic rules of marriage.

(I have silently corrected some typos). Wajihuddin then specifies the problem:

Misusing the sanctioned provision which allows a Muslim man to have four wives at a time, many old Arabs are not just marrying minors in Hyderabad, but marrying more than one minor in a single sitting. "The Arabs prefer teenage, virgin brides," says Jameela Nishat, who counsels and sensitises young women against the malaise.

The Arabs usually "marry" the girls for short periods, sometimes just a single night. In fact, Wajihuddin reports, marriage and divorce formalities are often prepared at the same time, thereby expediting the process for all involved. Akhileshwari notes that "their girl children are available for as little as 5,000 rupees to satisfy the lust of doddering old Arab men." Five thousand rupees, by the way, equals just a bit over US$100.

An Indian television program recently reported on a show-casing of eight prospective brides, most of them minors, at which they were offered up to their Arab suitors. "It resembled a brothel. The girls were paraded before the Arab who would lift the girls' burqa, run his fingers through their hair, gaze at their figures and converse through an interpreter," recalls one of Nishat's assistants.

Wajihuddin also offers a specific case history:

On the first of August, forty-five-year-old Al Rahman Ismail Mirza Abdul Jabbar, a sheikh from the UAE, approached a broker in these matters, seventy-year-old Zainab Bi, in the walled city, near the historic Char Minar. The broker procured Farheen Sultana and Hina Sultana, aged between thirteen and fifteen, for twenty thousand rupees [DP comment: that equals US$450]. Then he hired Qazi [DP comment: an Islamic judge, usually spelled qadi in English] Mohammed Abdul Waheed Qureshi to solemnise the marriage. The qazi, taking advantage of an Islamic provision, married the girls off to the Arab. After the wedding night with the girls, the Arab left at dawn.

So much for that "marriage."


Sunita Krishnan of Prajwala.



Sunita Krishnan, head of an anti human-trafficking organization, Prajwala, makes the only too-obvious point that girl children are not valued. "If a girl child is sold or her life ruined, it is not a national loss, that's why this is a non-issue, both for community and to society." With the exception of Maulana Hameeduddin Aqil, the head of Millat-e-Islamia (a local organization, apparently not connected the notorious Pakistani terrorist group), who speaks out against these sham marriages ("They are committing a sin. It's not nikaah, it's prostitution by another name"), the Islamic authorities in India are almost all silent about this travesty of the Shari'a.

For their part, Muslim politicians in the city of Hyderabad apparently could care less. "It's not on the poll agenda of any politician," says Mazhar Hussain, director of a social welfare organization, the Confederation of Voluntary Associations. The Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslameen, the main party of Hyderabad's Muslims, is blissfully unconcerned: "You cannot deny that the fortunes of many families have changed through such marriages," MIM's president, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, cheerfully points out.

Comments:

(1) Ironically, the girls thus proffered appear all to be Muslim – no Hindus or others need apply.

(2) The behavior of Arabs in India in some way parallels that of Japanese and Westerners in Thailand, with the notable difference that the Indian case involves marriage, an emphasis on virginity, and local authorities seemingly pleased with providing their minor girls for sex tourism.

(3) Arabian sex tourism is not exclusive to India but also takes place in other poor countries.

(4) This trade in persons is merely one dimension of a problem that prevails through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (for another dimension, see "Saudis Import Slaves to America").

(5) Concubinage, forced labor, indentured servitude, slavery – these deep problems are nowhere near being addressed in the Gulf region, much less solved. Indeed, one prominent Saudi theologian has gone so far as to state that "Slavery is a part of Islam" and whoever says it should be abolished "is an infidel." So long as such attitudes can be articulated publicly, without censure, abuses are certain to continue.

(6) The hypocrisy of this trade is perhaps its vilest aspect. Better prostitution, frankly acknowledged, than religiously-sanctioned fake marriages, for the former is understood to be a vice while the latter parades as a virtue.

(7) Wajihuddin compares the Arabian men to "medieval monarchs" and the analogy is apt. These transactions, involving Muslim minors and conducted under the auspices of Islamic law, point yet again to the dominance of premodern ways in the Muslim world and the urgent need to modernize the Islamic religion.

Ban Islam?

Ban Islam?

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
August 29, 2007

Non-Muslims occasionally raise the idea of banning the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Examples this month include calls by a political leader in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, to ban the Koran — which he compares to Hitler's Mein Kampf — and two Australian politicians, Pauline Hanson and Paul Green, demanding a moratorium on Muslim immigration.

What is one to make of these initiatives? First, some history. Precedents exist from an earlier era, when intolerant Christian governments forced Muslims to convert, notably in 16th-century Spain, and others strongly encouraged conversions, especially of the elite, as in 16th- and 17th-century Russia. In modern times, however, with freedom of expression and religion established as basic human rights, efforts to protect against intolerance by banning the Koran, Islam, or Muslims have failed.

In perhaps the most serious contemporary attempt to ban the Koran, a Hindu group argued in 1984–85 that the Islamic scriptures contain "numerous sayings, repeated in the book over and over again, which on grounds of religion promote disharmony, feeling of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different religious communities and incite people to commit violence and disturb public tranquility."

The taking of this demand, known as "The Calcutta Quran Petition," to court prompted riots and deaths in Bangladesh. The case so alarmed New Delhi that the attorney general of India himself took part in the proceedings to oppose the petition, which, not surprisingly, was dismissed.


Pim Fortuyn (1948-2002) led the most consequential effort so far to end Muslim emigration, in his case, to the Netherlands.



This early petition set the standard in terms of collecting objectionable Koranic verses. Other efforts have been more rhetorical and less operational. The most consequential was by Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands to end Muslim immigration. Had he not been assassinated in 2002, he might have ridden his issue to the prime ministry.

The coordinator of Italy's Northern League, Roberto Calderoli, wrote in 2005: "Islam has to be declared illegal until Islamists are prepared to renounce those parts of their pseudo political and religious doctrine glorifying violence and the oppression of other cultures and religions."

A British member of Parliament, Boris Johnson, pointed out in 2005 that passing a Racial and Religious Hatred Bill "must mean banning the reading — in public or private — of a great many passages of the Koran itself." His observation prompted a Muslim delegation to seek assurances, which it received, from the Home Office that no such ban would occur. Patrick Sookhdeo of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity in 2006 called for prohibiting one translation of the Koran, The Noble Koran: A New Rendering of its Meaning in English, because "it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them."

Other Western countries witnessed lesser efforts: Norway's Kristiansand Progress Party sought to ban Islam in 2004 and Germany's Bundesverband der Bürgerbewegungen sought to prohibit the Koran in 2006, arguing for its incompatibility with the German constitution. "Stop the Islamification of Denmark" demanded in early 2007 the prohibition of parts of the Koran and all mosques, calling them unconstitutional. Australia's Catch the Fire Ministries argued in 2004 that because "The Koran contradicts Christian doctrine in a number of places and, under the blasphemy law, [it] is therefore illegal."

Elsewhere, writers have made the same demands. Switzerland's Alain Jean-Mairet is the strategist of a two-part plan, popular and juridical, with the goal that "all the Islamic projects in Switzerland will prove impossible to fulfill." In France, an anonymous writer at the Liberty Vox Web site wishes to ban Islam, as does Warner Todd Huston in the United States.

The 2006 movie V for Vendetta portrays a future Britain in which the Koran is banned.

My take? I understand the security-based urge to exclude the Koran, Islam, and Muslims, but these efforts are too broad, sweeping up inspirational passages with objectionable ones, reformers with extremists, friends with foes. Also, they ignore the possibility of positive change.

More practical and focused would be to reduce the threats of jihad and Shariah by banning Islamist interpretations of the Koran, as well as Islamism and Islamists. Precedents exist. A Saudi-sponsored Koran was pulled from school libraries. Preachers have gone to jail for their interpretation of the Koran. Extreme versions of Islam are criminally prosecuted. Organizations are outlawed. Politicians have called for Islamists to leave their countries.

Islam is not the enemy, but Islamism is. Tolerate moderate Islam, but eradicate its radical variants.

Saudi Arabian Airlines Cleans Up Its Act

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
August 31, 2007

A week ago, at "Uniting to Exclude Saudi Arabian Airlines," I called on Westerners to deny the Saudi flag carrier access to their airports on the basis of an unacceptable passage in the company's English-language website (which I saved and have posted on my website):

A number of items are not allowed to be brought into the Kingdom due to religious reasons and local regulations. These include alcoholic beverages, pork and pork products, prohibited drugs and narcotics, firearms, explosives, edged weapons and pornographic materials.

Items and articles belonging to religions other than Islam are also prohibited. These may include Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with religious symbols such as the Star of David, and others.


Saudi Arabian Airline's headquarters in Jeddah.



But look again; the second paragraph of these "Customs Regulations" is now gone, has quietly vanished. (To protect against further changes, here is a link to(2) the version I saved):

A number of items are not allowed to be brought into the Kingdom due to religious reasons and local regulations. These include alcoholic beverages, pork and pork products, prohibited drugs and narcotics, firearms, explosives, edged weapons and pornographic materials.

Further, the Arabic-language version of this same page has now also been rid of the second paragraph, leaving only this one, which states exactly the same as its English translation:

هنا,ك العديد من المواد الممنوع دخولها إلى المملكة لأسباب دينية أو لقوانين محلية. من هذه المواد المشروبات الروحية، لحم الخنزير و منتجاتها، العقاقير الممنوعة و المخدرات، الاسلحة النارية، المتفجرات، اسلحة حادة، أو مواد إباحية.

Comments: (1) I am grateful to primerprez at "PRIMER-Connecticut" (where PRIMER stands for "Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting") for pointing out this change in an Aug. 29 posting, "Our Saudi ‘Friends' Respond to Criticism."

(2) As primerprez puts it, the Saudi leaders "appear to have responded amazingly quickly to criticism from Daniel Pipes."


PRIMER seeks improved reporting on the Middle East.



(3) Dropping the offending paragraph would be very welcome if it indicated a shift in policy by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one that now permits "Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with religious symbols such as the Star of David." It is less welcome if it merely cleans up the Saudia act for the outside world, as primerprez speculates is the case: "I doubt the Saudis have actually changed any of their obnoxious policies; they're just not publicizing them on the Saudi Arabian Airlines web site."

(4) I agree with this analysis – that nothing substantial has changed – for three reasons:

  • Allowing non-Islamic artifacts into the kingdom is too momentous an issue to be conceded without a fight.
  • Nor would such a change happen so suddenly, within a week.
  • The remaining "Customs Regulations" paragraph retains a more general, and therefore less offensive statement of this same restriction ("A number of items are not allowed to be brought into the Kingdom due to religious reasons"), indicating that the old policy clearly remains unchanged and in place.

(5) The decision to drop the second paragraph on customs restrictions points to the Saudi sense of vulnerability, which is not a total surprise. It's a demographically small state surrounded by predators (Iran in particular), dependent on the income of one fickle commodity. It hardly needs added complications in its relations with the U.S. and other Western governments.

(6) My call of a week ago to "unite to exclude Saudi Arabian Airlines" remains in place. As I put it then: "Western governments should demand that unless the Saudi government at least permits ‘that [religious] stuff' in, Saudia faces exclusion from the 18 airports it presently services in Europe, North America, and Japan." Saudia's access to those airports remains a weak spot that begs to be used as a mechanism to help bring a first step toward religious tolerance in Saudi Arabia.

Teach Arabic or Recruit Extremists?

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
September 5, 2007

New York City's Arabic-language public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, opens its doors this week, with special security, for 11- and 12-year-old students. One hopes that the prolonged public debate over the school's Islamist proclivities will prompt it not to promote any political or religious agendas.

Count me as skeptical, however, and for two main reasons. First is the school's genesis and personnel, about which others and I have written extensively. Second, and my topic here, is the worrisome record of taxpayer-funded Arabic-language programs from sea to shining sea.


A class at the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.



The trend is clear: pre-collegiate Arabic-language instruction, even when taxpayer funded, tends to bring along indoctrination in pan-Arab nationalism, radical Islam, or both. Note some examples:
  • Amana Academy, Alpharetta, Georgia, near Atlanta: A charter school that requires Arabic-language learning, Amana boasts of its "institutional partnership" with the Arabic Language Institute Foundation (ALIF). But ALIF forwards the learning of Arabic as a means "to convey the message of Qur'an in North America and Europe" and thus to "help the Western countries recover from the present moral decay."

  • Carver Elementary School, San Diego: A teacher, Mary-Frances Stephens, informed the school board that she taught a "segregated class" of Muslim girls and that each day she was required to release them from class for an hour of prayer, led by a Muslim teacher's aide. Ms. Stephens deemed this arrangement "clearly a violation of administrative, legislative and judicial guidelines." The school's principal, Kimberlee Kidd, replied that the teacher's aide merely prayed alongside the students and the session lasted only 15 minutes. The San Diego Unified School District investigated Ms. Stephens's allegations and rejected them, but it nonetheless changed practices at Carver, implicitly substantiating her critique. Superintendent Carl Cohn eliminated single-gender classes and reconfigured the schedule so that students can pray during lunch.

  • Charlestown High School, Massachusetts: The school's summer Arabic-language program took students on a trip to the Islamic Society of Boston, where, the Boston Globe reports, students "sat in a circle on the carpet and learned about Islam from two mosque members." One student, Peberlyn Moreta, 16, fearing that the gold cross around her neck would offend the hosts, tucked it under her T-shirt. Anti-Zionism also appeared, with the showing of the 2002 film Divine Intervention, which a critic, Jordan Hiller, has termed an "irresponsible film," "frighteningly dangerous," and containing "pure hatred" toward Israel.

  • Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, Inver Grove Heights, Minn.: Islamic Relief Worldwide, an organization that allegedly has links to jihadism and terrorism, sponsored this charter school, which requires Arabic as a second language. The academy's name openly celebrates Islamic imperialism, as Tarek ibn Ziyad led Muslim troops in their conquest of Spain in 711 A.D. Local journalists report that "a visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad [Academy] for an Islamic school" because of the women wearing hijabs, the carpeted prayer area, the school closing down for Islamic holidays, everyone keeping the Ramadan fast, the cafeteria serving halal food, classes breaking for prayer, almost all the children praying, and the constant use of "Brother" and "Sister" when adults at the school address each other.

Only in the case of the Iris Becker Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, is the Arabic-language program not obviously pursuing a political and religious agenda. Its program may actually be clean; or perhaps the minimal information about it explains the lack of known problems.

The above examples (and see my Web log entry "Other Taxpayer-Funded American Madrassas" for yet more) are all American, but similar problems predictably exist in other Western countries.

This troubling pattern points to the need for special scrutiny of publicly funded Arabic-language programs. That scrutiny should take the form of robust supervisory boards whose members are immersed in the threat of radical Islam and who have the power to shut down anything they might find objectionable.

Arabic-language instruction at the pre-collegiate level is needed, and the U.S. government rightly promotes it (for example, via the "National Security Language Initiative" on the national level or the "Foreign Language in Elementary Schools" program on a local one). As it does so, getting the instruction right becomes ever more important. Citizens, parents, and taxpayers have the right to ensure that children attending these publicly funded institutions are taught a language skill—and are not being recruited to anti-Zionism or Islamism.

America's Crash Course on Islam

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
September 11, 2007

How goes the "war on terror"? One would think that the absence of a successful dramatic terrorist operation against Westerners since the London bombings in July 2005 would be heartening. But an atmosphere of gloom predominates. A recent much-publicized Foreign Policy magazine poll of 108 American specialists, myself included, found merely 6% who agreed that "The United States is winning the war on terror." A whopping 84% disagreed.

This negativism reflects twin realities: Islamism (outside Iran) is waxing everywhere, while the civilized world is making profound mistakes — blaming itself for Muslim hatred, underestimating and appeasing the enemy. Several trends:

But there is also good news in the war, and it concerns the deepening education and spreading awareness of growing numbers of Westerners, especially on the right, about the nature of the war and the enemy. Americans are reading books, watching documentaries, keeping up with the news, and getting actively involved.

For example, the phrase "war on terror," widely accepted six years ago, is now generally seen as obsolete because it confuses a tactic with an enemy (though the term continues to be used due to the lack of consensus on a replacement).

Nor would any high American official today repeat anything like then-Secretary of State Powell's analysis one day after September 11, 2001, that the terrorist attacks "should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics; it is something that was done by terrorists."

Rather than refute such silliness, conservatives debate an issue that barely existed pre-September 11 but bears close watching for its policy implications. To one side stand those of us who see the Muslim world going through a temporary crisis and who seek ways to help modernize its religion, so that Muslims can flourish. To the other side stand those who see Islam as an irredeemable death cult and seek to ban Islam and disengage from Muslims.


The NYPD report.



More broadly, the ongoing and intense public debate about Islam has created a far more informed citizenry. Few Americans before September 11 knew such terms as jihad and fatwa, much less ijtihad, dhimmitude, or burqa. Fewer yet could discuss abrogated Koranic verses or had opinions about the Islamic nature of "honor" killings. Yet these matters are now knowledgeably discussed by bloggers, talk-show hosts, and even police departments.

The New York City Police Department last month issued an impressive report, "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat," showing that terrorism results from Islamic intellectual precursors. Whence, according to the NYPD, comes that process of radicalization? "Jihadist or jihadi-Salafi ideology is the driver that motivates" young Western-born Muslims to engage in terrorism against their own countries.

Six years ago, no police report would make such an assertion — much less use terms like "jihadi-Salafi ideology." Interestingly, the NYPD acknowledges that it needed time to reach this level of sophistication: "Where once we would have defined the initial indicator of the threat at the point where a terrorist or group of terrorists would actually plan an attack, we have now shifted our focus to a much earlier point," when the process of radicalization begins.


Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism.



Despite these advances, liberal commentators repeat inaccurate claims about "all Americans" suffering from "a huge and profound ignorance about Islam" (as the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, just put it, ironically while speaking to an Islamist convention).

The outcome of the "war on terror," I submit, will have less to do with breakthroughs in avionics or intelligence coups than with the degree to which civilized people understand the nature of their enemy and join together to fight it. That means liberals remembering, as Canada's Salim Mansur put it, that "Liberal democracy is no less an armed ideology than [is] Islamist ideology." What does the future hold: 2001's slogan of "United We Stand" or more of today's deep fracturing?

The answer may well be decisive. The historical record gives me some reason for optimism, as until now the Western democracies have prevailed. For that to happen again, learning about Islam and Muslims will be part of the requisite preparation.

Five Years of Campus Watch

by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
September 20, 2007

What has Campus Watch, a project to critique and improve Middle East studies in the United States and Canada, achieved since it opened its doors this week in 2002?

Along with like-minded organizations – the National Association of Scholars, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, National Review, and the Manhattan Institute – it assesses what professors are saying and doing, thereby helping to challenge academia's status quo.

Critiquing professors is more revolutionary than it may sound, for academics have long been spared public criticism such as that directed toward politicians, business leaders, actors, and athletes. Who would judge them? Students suppress their views to protect their careers; peers are reluctant to criticize each other, lest they in turn suffer attacks; and laymen lack the competence to judge arcane scholarship. As a result, academics have long enjoyed a unique lack of accountability.


"Ivory Towers on Sand" by Martin Kramer established the intellectual premises for Campus Watch.



If Campus Watch, headed by Winfield Myers, has interrupted this charmed academic life by exposing what Martin Kramer of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has termed the "failure of Middle Eastern studies in America," it is because we consider the work of these specialists too important to be left uncritiqued. We hover over their shoulders and remind them that their egregious statements might well end up ridiculed as our "quote of the month," or even cause them trouble when they try to win tenure or get a new job.

Academics criticized by Campus Watch generally respond by calling it names, caricaturing its purpose, and presenting themselves as victims, hoping thereby to render our work illegitimate. Remarkably, I recall not a single case when the meticulously documented and mildly presented work of Campus Watch has met with a serious and substantive rebuttal. So much for the marketplace of ideas.

As Middle East specialists themselves acknowledge, this new accountability wrought by Campus Watch has overturned their once-insular world. Their backhanded endorsements in the form of testimonials of living in abject fear of Campus Watch offer one colorful example. Another is the statement by Miriam Cooke of Duke University that "Campus Watch is the Trojan horse whose warriors are already changing the rules of the game not only in Middle East studies but also in the US University as a whole." More positively, the Taskforce on Middle East Anthropology published a handbook on professional responsibility in early 2007 that calls for the implementation of steps long encouraged by Campus Watch.

That said, the field's basic problems remain in place: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch's highest priority is to help stimulate a diversity of opinion, so that pro-American scholars – who today make up perhaps 5 percent of Middle East specialists – reach parity with the anti-Americans. This goal has two implications.

  • That professors today can no longer be expected to engage in disinterested scholarship and instruction, but must be balanced by those who will promote an alternative viewpoint. It is sad to see the ideal of objectivity crumble, but this is a reality one must adapt to.

  • That the anti-Americans do not have a monopoly on intelligence or skills, just a near-monopoly on power. The 5 percent figure does not mean that bright historians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, literature and language specialists, et al., are 19 to 1 anti-American, but that this faction has, since the late 1960s, gained a near-stranglehold over their departments.

Just as a great ocean vessel requires time to turn, so does the university, where career-tenured faculty rule. Tenure not only guarantees them decades-long job security, but it also inures professors to the demands of the market place or the wishes of students, donors, and other stakeholders.

It will take time, but there are grounds for optimism about Middle East studies, which underwent a seismic shift in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. That event led to a surge in enrollments and attracted a new sort of student to the field, one less marginal politically and more publicly ambitious. As this post-9/11 cohort wends its way through the system, expect to see significant improvements.

Campus Watch will be there to welcome them. With luck, its mission will be accomplished, and it can then close its doors.