By Barry Rubin

A nineteen-year-old man is to be beheaded for a bad joke interpreted as blasphemy. A father is accused of killing his son because he converted to another religion. They are not Muslims but Christians; the place is France in the mid-1700s.

There was a time when Europe often behaved in ways parallel to that of Muslim-majority countries today. Yet by the 1700s this was changing. In the former case, the king and even Catholic bishops failed to save the unfortunate Chevalier de la Barre but the outcry led to the end of such actions. In the latter, the immediate reaction was to sentence the father, Monsieur Calas, to death for murder, soon changed–by outraged public opinion–to freeing him as victim of an unjust frame-up merely because he was a Protestant.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

It’s bizarre. We hear all this belly-aching about how awful it was to dump Afghanistan after the Soviets were evicted. And it was awful to leave Afghanistan in the hands of the Mujahideen.

But now we hear that we should abandon Iraq “immediately.” The result would be the same as abandoning Afghanistan: the vacuum would be filled by Islamist terrorists.

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By Jonathan Spyer

Over the last two months, Israeli security forces have arrested six young Arab men suspected of seeking to form an extreme Islamist cell for the purpose of carrying out high-profile terror attacks in the capital. Two of the six held Israeli citizenship, while the other four were residents of east Jerusalem. It appears that they were radicalized through involvement in an Islamic study circle and via the Internet. Two Arab Israeli citizens from the town of Rahat were arrested in recent weeks on similar suspicions.

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By Barry Rubin

The number-one mistake people make trying to understand the Middle East is refusing to believe folks here think differently from themselves.

Virtually every development in the Middle East should remind us of this reality.

Yet as Captain Ahab hunted the white whale, as prospectors hunt for gold, as…well, you get the idea, so is the hunt for the great Arab moderate. There are Arab moderates, some very smart and brave people. The problem is none are in positions of power and all must shut up or face repression and being defined by fellows as enemies of the people.

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by E. Haldun Solmazturk*

Policymakers and future historians may get whiplash from divergent analyses of where Turkey is headed. Some Turkish writers—The Turkish Daily News‘ Mustafa Akyol and Zaman’s Ali Aslan, for example — argue that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) have succeeded at melding Islam to modern democracy. Other writers — The Turkish Daily News’ Yusuf Kanlı or the Washington Institute’s Soner Cagaptay — are far more suspicious.

—The Editors

At the heart of the political debate in Turkey lies the tension between Islam and secularism. Is the former democratic and the latter, at least in Turkey, autocratic? Ömer Taşpinar, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute, recently argued this case in Foreign Affairs (”The Old Turks’ Revolt,” November/December 2007). His thesis is trendy in certain circles, but it is dishonest. He bases his argument on false assumptions, cherry-picks data, and ignores context. What results is not so much scholarship as propaganda.

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By Barry Rubin

Here’s the most important thing I can tell you about the Middle East.

For more than a half-century, the region’s politics revolved around Arab nationalism. Individual states sought to have influence, leadership, or just to survive. The Arab-Israeli conflict was an important issue in this framework, though not the sole or even the most significant one.

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By Phyllis Chesler

What happened to the old New Left? How did it become a supporter of totalitarianism, Islamist fascism, nihilist isolationism, and the narrowest of party lines? When did it lose its “decency” and moral sanity? A growing number of us have been asking these questions for a long time and more have joined us since 9/11. …

Continue reading…

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by Daniel Pipes*

“Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist,” said socialist Hugo Chávez during a visit to Tehran last November, celebrating his alliance with Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Che Guevara’s son Camilo, who also visited Tehran last year, declared that his father would have “supported the country in its current struggle against the United States.” They followed in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, who in a 2001 visit told his hosts that “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.” For his part, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (”Carlos the Jackal”) wrote in his book L’islam révolutionnaire (”Revolutionary Islam”) that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”

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By Phyllis Chesler

Just as more and more information becomes seemingly available, we nevertheless seem to know less and less. Today, one has to know as much as a physician in order to make one’s own personal medical decisions. One must possess an advanced degree in history, Middle East Studies, political science, or law, in order to be able to evaluate what newspapers print daily.

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By Barry Rubin

Golda Meir once said that a bad press was better than a good epitaph. In other words, pragmatic considerations must take precedence over public relations.

Sometimes it seems as if contemporary Israeli governments have forgotten that concept. Yet in general, especially where it counts, this principle continues to prevail in Israel.

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By Phyllis Chesler

For years now I have maintained that the hottest and most important war is the war of ideas or rather the propaganda war unleashed by ideologues in both the East and the West. The Arab and Islamist world is canny, strategic, and clever; they are also unbelievably bold liars. (Remember the Al Dura Affaire and the alleged massacre in Jenin). The politically correct West falls for the lies and treats them as sacred political truth.

Here are some recent examples of how the West is actively and foolishly collaborating in Big Lies to its own disadvantage.

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by Saliba Sarsar and David B. Strohmetz*

Last year was a tumultuous one for democracy in Muslim-majority countries. On July 22, 2007, despite Turkish military warnings three months earlier about the danger to secularism posed by the impending election,[1] the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi — AKP) won the Turkish parliamentary elections, leading Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to proclaim “democracy, security, and stability” to be the real winners.”[2] Then, on November 3, 2007, General Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, suspending the constitution. Shortly after, assassins gunned down Benazir Bhutto, the leading secular oppositionist. Such events demonstrate not just the fragility of democracy in Muslim countries, but the complicated role that the military plays in such states — sometimes as a protector of secularism, but frequently, as an enforcer of the power of anti-democratic regimes.

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By Curtis R. Ryan

While democracy has proven to be a fragile and elusive form of politics in the modern Arab world, Islamist movements have flourished–ranging from grass-roots pro-democracy activism to militant jihadism and terrorism. Whether Arab politics witnesses more political liberalization in the near future will depend in large part on the nature of Islamist movements, as well as ruling regimes’ reactions to them. This article examines the broad range of Islamist alternatives within one of the more liberalizing Arab states–the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan–with a view to understanding the depth and breadth of Islamist forms of political mobilization.

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by Daniel Pipes*

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen — and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?“) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

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by R. John Matthies*

What is to account for the success of Europe’s Far Right? The attention the news media have devoted to the story of Islam in Europe has never been greater. And displeasure over concessions granted to Europe’s Muslims, fear and loathing of Shari‘a (Islamic) law — and fears that Europe, in the rush to embrace the Other, may lose herself — appear to be driving the continent’s electoral agenda. These concerns have sprung from items as ridiculous as Fortis Bank’s decision to do away with pig mascot Knorbert (for fear of offending Muslims) to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s declaration that adoption of elements of Shari‘a law in the UK “seems unavoidable” — and would, in fact, be a great help to maintain social cohesion. In any case, it appears that a growing number are sufficiently discouraged by the imposition of the multicultural gag to take Europe’s latest war of religion to the voting booth. It is also the case, for many, that the persons who best speak to the continent’s concerns are not those moderate (or secular) Muslims who talk of assimilation, but the leading lights of Europe’s Far Right — and the growing host of Muslim-baiters who sit in public office.

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