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Category: Islam

  • Australian Islamic body cancels forum with Taliban officials after heavy criticism from Afghan community

    Australian Federation of Islamic Councils says event due to feature two senior Taliban representatives was not intended to ‘legitimise any group’

    The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (Afic) has cancelled its planned online forum that was due to include two senior Taliban representatives, after it faced heavy criticism from within the Muslim and Afghan communities.

    “I genuinely thought it was a joke,” said Mariam Veiszadeh, a lawyer and community rights advocate from the Afghan-Australian community.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Student loan system has disadvantaged almost 100,000 Muslim students

    Almost 100,000 Muslim students have been negatively affected by the current student loan system, according to new research.

    Interim results from a survey by Muslim Census found that many Muslim students reported that tuition fees and loans had directly impacted their studies. This is because many Muslims do not take on loans with interest as it’s forbidden in Islam by Riba. The researchers urged the government that Alternative Student Finance (ASF) is needed to prevent further inequality.

    ASF is a model of funding that does not accrue interest where students who feel unable to take traditional loans instead make contributions to the education of future students.

    Deprived of an education

    Muslim Census has already received 36,000 responses to its survey. So far, the results show that one in ten Muslims who would qualify for university miss out because they can’t get ASF.

    Furthermore, around one in six Muslim respondents said they have had to self-finance university because they can’t use the current loans system. Those self-financing said this meant they’d been restricted in the courses and universities they could choose. Additionally, many mentioned the stress of having to work while studying to make ends meet.

    In February, student Deenah Yasmi told The Canary she had not taken out a student loan due to her religion, and was instead funding her education through her family and a part-time job at Wilko. She said:

    It’s an important matter in the sense that people take religion really seriously and large Uni fees. People who desire to do things like become a doctor to save lives cannot as they are too scared to be in debt or go against religious beliefs.

    I find it extremely hard and stressful to go to Uni and get this degree as me and my family are constantly thinking about paying for tuition and where we can find the money.

    The only bursary I’ve received from Uni is the low income one which was not a lot at all.

    Huge impact

    A 2017/2018 report by AdvanceHE recorded that around 8.9% of university students are Muslim – about 36,665 a year. Researchers at Muslim Census extrapolated their results to estimate around 6,000 Muslim students a year are self-funding, and 4,000 may be having to forgo university entirely.

    The number of students impacted could add up to nearly 100,000 over the ten years since university fees went up to £9,000 a year.

    Additionally. four in five Muslim students who had taken on a traditional student loan reported that it had affected their mental health and made them feel they had compromised their faith.

    Alternative Student Finance

    Back in 2014, the government said it would offer an ASF option that would be “compatible with moral and religious beliefs“. David Cameron himself said:

    Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan simply because of their religion.

    Despite the promises, no ASF has since been introduced.

    Along with several other advocacy groups, Muslim Census is calling for ASF to be introduced by September 2022 to make this year the last cohort of impacted Muslim students.

    Rizwan Yusoof, director of services of National Zakat Foundation – one of the organisations that facilitated the survey – said:

    With Muslim communities especially affected by economic deprivation, improving the life chances of 10,000 students annually through granting them equal access to funding a degree would help to break the cycle of inter-generational poverty, and demonstrate the government has a meaningful commitment to deliver on it’s aim of levelling up equality of opportunity.

    Discrimination

    Out of the 36,000 respondents, 71% said they felt the current student finance system discriminates against Muslims.

    Sadiq Dorasat, co-founder of Muslim Census, said:

    This response vividly demonstrates the widespread very high real life cost resulting from lack of Alternative Student Finance.

    We estimate about 100,000 students have been disenfranchised to date since the introduction of higher £9,000 annual fees in September 2012. We therefore urge our government to bring in ASF by September 2022 so further cohorts are not so deprived.

    Featured image via CX Insight / Unsplash

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Invoking memories of Darul Islam

    The reports of anxiety and fear as the Taliban marched through to claim rule in Afghanistan and the crescendo of reports of the targeting of women has invoked memories of stories people told me about living under the rule of Kahar Muzakkar’s Darul Islam/Tentara Islam (henceforth DI/TI) in South Sulawesi. This fraction of Indonesia’s post-colonial Islamic state movement, first established by Kartosuwirjo in West Java in the 1950s, held power over much of rural South Sulawesi (including what is now Southeast Sulawesi Province) until the early 1960s. My doctoral research on Sorowako, in the northern mountains of South Sulawesi, concerned the social and economic impacts of a foreign-owned nickel mine that had just been opened by President Suharto. I arrived in 1978, and the local population were still smarting from the forced loss of their land and livelihoods. But when I sat down to yarn with people, they were compelled to tell me also about their suffering under what they termed the ‘gerombolan’ (‘gang’). This area had been close to one of the key centres of Kahar’s movement (Kolaka in Sulawesi Tenggara):  the rebel troops had forcibly moved the people from the western shore of Lake Matano, the end point of the road to Malili on the coast, to a remote location on the wild side of the lake—which the people termed the penyingkiran (evacuation site). They explained to me that the guerrilla fighters wanted to ensure local populations could not be forced to provide sustenance to the guerrillas’ enemy, the Indonesian army (TNI) troops. Local people’s accounts of DI/TI, who lived among them exercising authority and control for over a decade, always feature stories about actions that are harsh, even cruel.

    Islam in Sorowako

    The ‘orang asli Sorowako,‘ as they called themselves, had been Islamised by functionaries from the Kerajaan Luwu deployed as colonial officials by the Dutch after they extended direct control over the interior regions of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsular around 1906.  From the early 1950s DI/TI forcibly Islamised Christian villagers around Lake Matano who had been relocated there from further up the mountains. Villages and ripening fields on the lake shore were burned as people were forced to flee.

    The text of proclamation of Islamic State of Indonesia on Wikicommons

    Life in the jungle refuge was full of privation, and over the years I learned about the ways the DI/TI impacted on individual lives. The current stories of young Afghani women being forcibly married to Taliban fighters, or people hiding their daughters as the fighters rolled into their towns brought to mind the personal stories of forced marriages to DI/TI fighters recounted by many of my friends in Sorowako. One very independent woman raising her now adult (disabled) son on her own had been forcibly married in this manner. I asked a family member if the marriage lasted after the cease fire with government troops in 1962.  I was told: ‘she pushed the stairs away from the (stilt) house’ i.e. a strong message to the husband ‘don’t come back’. People gossiped about a ‘wrong marriage’ of a friend: wrong according to the rules of the bilateral kinship system which stressess generational relations. Prior to their marriage he had called her ‘aunt’—that is she was the generation above him, not on ‘cousin’ level. Her father, a village leader, married her off quickly to avoid her forcible marriage to a DI/TI soldier. No doubt many of these marriages were polygynous, both within the DI/TI -controlled territory and in their home villages, and this alone would have given parents reason to fear them. Collecting genealogies, I came across quite a few men who had been DI/TI fighters. The charismatic rebel leader Kahar was himself polygynous (practiced poligami) having 9, or some accounts say 12, wives—and this excessive sexuality was an aspect of his hyper-masculinised charisma.

    Photo of Kahar Muzakkar, the leader of the Sulawesi rebellion from 1950-1965. KamielahK on Wikicommons

    There were many stories of kidnapping, especially people from the government-controlled towns who had expertise the rebels desired—such as accountants, teachers and agricultural experts—to set up their alternative administration. Government was in accord with a document establishing shariah law as the basis of the Makalua charter. It contained provisions, similar to that of the Taliban, based on misogynistic readings of Islamic texts, on the fikih (Islamic jurisprudence) that supported a God-ordained male privilege. Women were forced to wear head coverings and live basically domestic lives. The Makalua charter allowed forced polygyny (poligami), indeed people who rejected polygyny could be prosecuted, and no offer of marriage could be refused, save that the man was a juvenile, impotent, diseased or of bad character. It had harsh provisions for regulating relations between the sexes, and a broad interpretation of zina (sexual acts outside marriage): I heard personal accounts from people who witnessed women accused of adultery being buried to the waist and stoned to death (dirajam).  Other people graphically gestured to describe the practice of cutting off hands as punishment for theft.

    Kahar has been described as a Muslim socialist and his rule also expressed a kind of ‘radical egalitarianism’ in that he sought to stamp out the power of Bugis nobility and the cultural trappings of their authority, which were an exercise of power that the pre-Islamic religion deemed ordained by the Gods of the Upper world. The corpus of pre-Islamic beliefs and rituals that validated social hierarchy and noble privilege and power and were divinely ordained and ritual life harkened back to the sacred cycle, La Galigo. DI/TI troops burned the houses of the nobility that symbolically encoded their status, and which housed sacred regalia. They banned syncretic ritual practices, melded with Islamic rituals for birth, death, marriage and activities such as farming and house construction. People of noble birth were targeted. A very confident Bugis noble woman form Malili told me she had been kidnapped as a 10 year- old child and held captive in the jungle ‘sleeping under the trees’ for three years. She recounted that she continuously scolded her captors and refused to bend to their world view. Just a few years ago, a friend who was in a ‘nostalgic’ mode told a story of seeing a DI/TI rebel walk up the stairs of a house and shoot the owner in his doorway, According to her, this was because they were of noble birth.

    What allowed for despotism and misogynistic tyranny?

    What makes this possible? Kahar’s rule over the Islamic state that he proclaimed relied on the Makalua charter, which was ostensibly based on the fikih: their understanding of Islamic law and what they believed to be Syariah. The elevation of a version of Islamic law (understood as God’s law and so not subject to debate) justified cruel summary justice. The Makalua charter and the ideology that it was the direct interpretation of the words of God justified this arbitrary behaviour, including the cruel and arbitrary treatment of women, and notably, control of their sexuality and public movement. This style of textual interpretation that the DI/TI and Taliban share is known in Indonesian as ‘Islam garis keras (hard-line Islam’). Former president and head of NU, Abdurahman Wahid (Gus Dur) reminded us that while the Qu’ran is the word of God it is always known through human interpretation—and scholars of Islam in the many educational institutions throughout Indonesia delight in textual debate

    The people of Sorowako are today very observant Muslims, and acknowledge that the years under DI/TI rule led them to intensify their piety. A common view was that although they professed Islam by the 1950s, they had not been very pious. The threshold for conversion had been very low in South Sulawesi: recite the shahada, renounce eating pork and get circumcised. When I asked whether they supported the rebels, many people responded: yes, because it championed the elevation of Islam. Many are well-educated, working for the mining company or in other middle-class occupations, and their modernist and tolerant mode of Islamic practice is of the kind common to Indonesia’s urban middle classes. The village imam stressed an important point, from their contemporary understanding of piety. He said that the DI/TI compelled women to wear head covering: the women today, including young women, all wear head-covering (jilbab), but now it has more meaning as they do it from their own religious knowledge.

    Memory activism—why not DI/TI?

    The DI/TI came soon after the very traumatic events of the Japanese occupation, which is remembered as very brutal in this area. It also followed the 1947 Westerling massacres of the anti-colonial struggle. Memory activism is a notable political movement in in contemporary Indonesia, much of it focussing on the brutal mass killings of accused communists in 1965-6, associated with the power struggle that resulted in Suharto assuming the presidency. After his fall in 1998, memories of the suffering and lingering claims of injustice rapidly surfaced, especially among local populations (and especially in East Java) with remembrance of unmasked mass graves and slaughter sites serving as mnemonic devices to keep those memories alive. In Sorowako memories of the years of suffering under DI/TI go very deep and have not been supplanted by the more recent traumatic memories of the loss of their land and livelihoods under the Suharto regime’s foreign investment provisions. They do, however, acknowledge that the discourse of the threat of communism that was deployed by the New Order as a form of social and political control constrained their courage to oppose their dispossession to make way for the foreign-owned mine. A group of young people are now exploring the history of their community, including its’ history and culture before the development of the project and its associated suffering.  They reported the same experience that I did when I asked about the past: the old people wish to recount their suffering under DI/TI.

    Related

    Taliban rule restored in Afghanistan: security implications for Indonesia

    The loyalty of some Islamist groups to AQ, and by extension, the Taliban, is evident from the content posted on their respective affiliated websites and publications.

    V. Arianti and Muh. Taufiqurrohman 31 August, 2021

    The failure to address the events of the DI/TI years continue to have political consequences today.  A descendant of Kahar Muzakkar has won political office, for example, on platforms that echo some of the tenets of Kahar’s movement and calling on the deceased Kahar’s enduring charisma. In the case of Sorowako the Christian Karongsi’e, who prior to the 1950s lived in a neighbouring village on the shores of Lake Matano, began to return to the mining town that had grown up on the shores of the lake. Their village had been burned at the same time as Sorowako and they had been forcibly Islamised and taken to the refuge site (so as not to provide assistance to government troops). In around 1960 they had been rescued from the penyingkiran (evacuation site) by the TNI (Indonesian army) and taken to Malili. From there they dispersed into Central Sulawesi—and were fearful to return until after Reformasi. They trickled back and established a settlement (considered illegal by the local government and the mining company) and pressed claims for compensation for their lands, forcibly abandoned during the DI/TI period and now incorporated into the mine concession area (used for residences and a golf course). The land ‘compensation’ has been controversial since the 1970s, but the company considers the process complete with the group who self-identify as the orang asli Sorowako, who are Muslim. They have had difficulty gaining formal recognition of their claims to indigeneity and for consequent privileges in the mining community.

    The Karongsi’e who have come back since 1998 argue that they have been dispossessed by the mining development and their claims have been taken up by international and national NGOs who support their status as the indigenous people in East Luwu. These claims are accepted by the current local government. A 2016 report of KOMNASHAM (Indonesian Commission in Human Rights) on’ indigenous people in forest areas’ focused on the Karongsi’e to the exclusion of the orang asli Sorowako (even though the groups are linked through kinship and marriage, language and shared history in the pre-colonial and colonial eras). The erroneous description in that report draws on accounts of the historical experience of the orang asli Sorowako at the hands of the mining company, confusingly attributing this experience to Karongsi’e. Significantly, it fails to account for their fundamental dispossession by the DI/TI. They are represented as dispossessed by the mining development. The KOMNASHAM report follows the ‘script’ set out by the AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, the principle advocacy group for customary rights), which calls for  ‘inventorising’ claims,  including mapping graves. The identity of Karongsi’e as Christian is downplayed as adherence to a world religion does not fit the AMAN script. Meanwhile, the people of Sorowako regularly travel back to the cemetery at the penyingkiran, to clean graves before important Islamic holidays. There are a lot of graves, many of babies and children. Like people in areas of political killings in 1964-5, the act of clearing their loved ones’ graves triggers the memories of the years of suffering under DI/TII rule.

    But the violence of the DI/TI which occurred in South and Southeast Sulawesi (and linked movements in West Java and Aceh), a quotidian occurrence over around 15 years, have not been the subject of contemporary memory activism. Perhaps current political sensitivities around political Islam preclude addressing the trauma of those years. But reports from Afghanistan and contemporary memory activism teach us that memories of trauma run deep, as I and others have found among the Sulawesi survivors of DI/TI.

    The author has published extensively on this topic over many decades. Not all that scholarship has been digitised yet, so we encourage readers to seek out, in particular, her 1983 journal article   “Living in the hutan: jungle village life under the Darul Islam” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, vol 17. pp. 208-229. Professor Robinson has also recently published Mosques and Imams:  Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia (2020) Singapore: NUS press.

    The post Invoking memories of Darul Islam appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • Taliban ‘journalism rules’ open way to censorship, persecution, warns RSF

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it is very disturbed by the “11 journalism rules” that the Taliban announced at a meeting with news media on September 19.

    The rules that Afghan journalists will now have to implement are vaguely worded, dangerous and liable to be used to persecute them, the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog said.

    Working as a journalist will now mean complying strictly with the 11 rules unveiled by Qari Mohammad Yousuf Ahmadi, the interim director of the Government Media and Information Centre (GMIC).

    At first blush, some of them might seem reasonable, as they include an obligation to respect “the truth” and not “distort the content of the information”, said RSF.

    But in reality they were “extremely dangerous” because they opened the way to censorship and persecution.

    “Decreed without any consultation with journalists, these new rules are spine-chilling because of the coercive use that can be made of them, and they bode ill for the future of journalistic independence and pluralism in Afghanistan,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

    “They establish a regulatory framework based on principles and methods that contradict the practice of journalism and leave room for oppressive interpretation, instead of providing a protective framework allowing journalists — including women — to go back to work in acceptable conditions.

    ‘Tyranny and persecution’
    “These rules open the way to tyranny and persecution.”

    The first three rules, which forbid journalists to broadcast or publish stories that are “contrary to Islam,” “insult national figures” or violate “privacy,” are loosely based on Afghanistan’s existing national media law, which also incorporated a requirement to comply with international norms, including Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    The absence of this requirement in the new rules opens the door to censorship and repression, because there is no indication as to who determines, or on what basis it is determined, that a comment or a report is contrary to Islam or disrespectful to a national figure.

    Three of the rules tell journalists to conform to what are understood to be ethical principles:

    • They must “not try to distort news content”;
    • They must “respect journalistic principles”; and
    • They “must ensure that their reporting is balanced”.

    But the absence of reference to recognised international norms means that these rules can also be misused or interpreted arbitrarily.

    Rules 7 and 8 facilitate a return to news control or even prior censorship, which has not existed in Afghanistan for the past 20 years.

    ‘Handled carefully’
    They state that, “matters that have not been confirmed by officials at the time of broadcasting or publication should be treated with care” and that “matters that could have a negative impact on the public’s attitude or affect morale should be handled carefully when being broadcast or published”.

    The danger of a return to news control or prior censorship is enhanced by the last two rules (10 and 11), which reveal that the GMIC has “designed a specific form to make it easier for media outlets and journalists to prepare their reports in accordance with the regulations,” and that from now on, media outlets must “prepare detailed reports in coordination with the GMIC”.

    The nature of these “detailed reports” has yet to be revealed.

    The ninth rule, requiring media outlets to “adhere to the principle of neutrality in what they disseminate” and “only publish the truth,” could be open to a wide range of interpretations and further exposes journalists to arbitrary reprisals.

    Afghanistan was ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index that RSF published in April.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Taliban rule restored in Afghanistan: security implications for Indonesia

    In the Indonesian Islamist extremist landscape, support for the Taliban—as it seeks to restore the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan following the US’ withdrawal from the country—has mainly accrued from groups and individuals that have followed Al-Qaeda’s (AQ) stance in rejecting the legitimacy of the now defunct “caliphate” declared by the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq in 2014.  Moreover, support for the Taliban in the Indonesian context has traditionally been closely associated with the support for AQ, given the former has provided sanctuaries for AQ for several decades. As such, how will the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan be interpreted by Al-Qaeda supporters in Indonesia? By extension, what are the security implications for the country?

    Support for Taliban

    The Indonesian pro-AQ camp consists of, among others, Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI), Jama’ah Ansharusy Syariah (JAS) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), all groups which have aspired to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia. Their loyalty to AQ, and by extension, the Taliban, is evident from the content posted on their respective affiliated websites and publications. In 2007, Arrahmah Media, linked to MMI, published a translated book titled The Giant Man: Biography of Mullah Umar. The book, an ode to the Taliban leader who founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is currently still sold on several e-commerce platforms in Indonesia. Based on our observations, the groups’ affiliated websites have also regularly provided updates on the progress of the Taliban over the decades.

    Following its recent takeover, JAS was the first pro-AQ local extremist group to officially congratulate the Taliban. In fact, JAS’ public lauding on its official website of the Taliban’s territorial successes stretches back to March 2020, when it congratulated the Taliban on its “victory” in the high-level peace talks held in Doha in February 2020, that led to the US’ commitment to a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. JAS also congratulated the people of Afghanistan, who it claimed would soon enjoy the liberty and freedom of living under Islamic law (Sharia).  Following the Taliban’s takeover of the capital Kabul, JAS again lauded the group, encouraging Muslims around the world, including in Indonesia, to celebrate its victory.

    Research by PAKAR, an Indonesian NGO that studies terrorism, has also revealed that some pro-AQ former terrorist inmates have been staunch supporters of the Taliban in recent years.  They have kept themselves updated on the progress of the Taliban’s military operations and recently re-circulated congratulatory messages from AQ affiliated groups—Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS) of Syria and Al-Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen—heralding the Taliban’s success in retaking Afghanistan.

    Euphoria over the Taliban’s “victory” is also apparent in the online discourse of pro-AQ groups in Indonesia, which has suggested the Taliban should unite Muslims around the world and establish a global caliphate, including conquering the capital cities London and Washington. In the Indonesian context, there were some online suggestions to unite the jihadists under Daulah Islam Sumatra (an Islamic State of Sumatra).  There were also suggestions the Taliban should open a “branch” in Indonesia, and assist in the establishment of an Islamic state in the country.  Meanwhile on the ground, some Islamist elements in Poso, Central Sulawesi, such as supporters of the banned Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders Front/FPI), and ex-combatants from the Poso communal conflict in the early 2000s, have called on Muslims to pledge their allegiance (bai’at) to the Taliban.

    In contrast to the exuberance of the pro-AQ Indonesian elements, the International Centre of Political Violence Research (ICPVTR) data suggests the pro-IS camp in Indonesia has repudiated the Taliban takeover as a “victory”. It has labelled the Taliban as murtad (apostates) and being pro-Shia and pro-US, in addition to being antagonistic towards IS Khorasan, an IS affiliate based in Afghanistan. PAKAR’s research shows some supporters of pro-IS groups, the Jamaah Ansharud Daulah (JAD) and Jamaah Ansharul Khilafah (JAK), assert that the Taliban is a thaghut (tyrant Muslim state that does not enforce Sharia) as its emirate is premised on the concept of a nation-state (nationalism), and thus has deviated from the teachings of AQ founder Osama bin Laden.  Such reactions are to be expected, as IS supporters still long for the restoration of the group’s now defunct “Caliphate”.

    Security Implications

    The support from Indonesian extremist networks for the Taliban has several security implications.  First, the success of the Taliban may re-energise the Indonesian pro-AQ groups in pursuing their long-held strategy, which combines non-military (social and political) and military (armed jihad) elements.  In the past decade, the aforementioned Indonesian groups have conformed to a long-term strategy that seeks the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia.  The non-military element primarily entails winning the hearts and minds of local communities through social activities (dakwah/religious outreach, charities, education) and active involvement in the political realm. The latter aims to introduce sharia into the Indonesian political and legal system (by participating in elections, rallies, as well as lobbying the government and parliament on Islamic issues).

    The military element is manifested in abstaining from plotting attacks within the country (for JI, this was especially the case when Para Wijayanto led the group from 2009 to 2019), while at the same time discreetly sending their members to gain military experience in Syria as part of their i’dad programme (military training).  JI, the group with the most serious military preparation, believes that jihad should be waged when it is militarily ready and has the support of the community; all of which requires patience. In a critical difference, patience has been a source of contention between the Indonesian AQ and IS elements.  Those who are not patient are typically associated with the latter whose networks have preferred random attacks in Indonesia with little preparations.

    Second, some pro-AQ individuals have emerged to express their intention for hijrah (migration) to Afghanistan so as to receive training from the Taliban and to use such skills to establish an Islamic state back in Indonesia.  If this materialises, it will pose a serious security threat to Indonesia in the long term as returning jihadists will be more emboldened by their Afghan training, in a similar way that the old JI Afghan alumni network in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Third, the Indonesian jihadists may copy and implement Taliban’s strategy and tactics—as described in the latter’s tradecraft manuals (such as guerrilla tactics) circulated in the Indonesian online domain—although such prospects remain remote.  Almost a decade ago, the Taliban’s 12-page manual titled “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: The Prison Break: How to Turn Fantasy to Reality” was translated into Indonesian and posted in several Indonesian extremist websites in 2012. This manual might have inspired Fadli Sadama, the commander of Kumpulan Mujahidin Indonesia (KMI) – a branch of JI in North Sumatra led by Toni Togar – to mastermind a jail break in Medan in July 2013. A total of 218 inmates, including 15 terrorists, fled from prison then.  Fifteen prison officers were also briefly taken hostage.  The incident resulted in five casualties including two prison wardens.

    Related

    The Neo-JI threat: Jema’ah Islamiyah’s resurgence in Indonesia follows an old playbook

    Indonesia should not be lulled by Neo-JI’s seemingly peaceful development.

    Alif Satria 16 August, 2019

    Currently, it does not appear that the Taliban’s latest tradecraft manuals have been translated into Indonesian.  The lack of such translated manuals may be a sign of current weak enthusiasm to implement the manual in the Indonesian context, but it may be a matter of time before such translations appear. How these translated manuals are eventually utilised may impact on the future strategy and tactics which the pro-AQ camp would adopt in Indonesia.

    Concluding Remarks

    The pro-AQ elements’ general celebration of the Taliban takeover is not unqualified. As the Taliban transforms itself into a governing authority and seeks international recognition, Indonesian pro-AQ groups could possibly reject some of the potential political compromises that the Taliban will have to make along the way. Our online observation shows that individuals in this camp have questioned the Taliban’s efforts in seeking alliances with China, Russia, and Iran, all of which the pro-AQ camp also deem as enemies of Islam, along with the US and its allies. Furthermore, they have also dismissed reports on various concessions the Taliban has apparently made with these countries.

    Overall, however, the pro-AQ groups in Indonesia will likely continue to be inspired by the Taliban’s “success” and remain committed to their own long-term goal of setting up an Islamic state in Indonesia.  This means they may not be inclined to conduct attacks in Indonesia for the time being, with the exception of some rogue elements within JI who lack patience and have plotted attacks in parts of the country recently.

    The post Taliban rule restored in Afghanistan: security implications for Indonesia appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • Extricating Indonesian children from ISIS influence abroad

    “Rocket attacks happened, and I don’t know… I ran away and didn’t see anyone from my family”, said Faruq, an Indonesian boy in al-Hol camp, Syria in a BBC report, February 2020. He and two other boys, Yusuf and Nasa, aged around 10 to 12 years old, were separated from their parents and family when ISIS’s last stronghold, Baghouz, fell in March 2019. They have lived in al-Hol camp ever since, without guardians.  Until this day, we do not know what the future holds for these children.

    In February 2020, the Indonesian government announced it will not repatriate citizens who joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The government, however, opened the possibility for repatriation of unaccompanied children under ten years of age on a case-by-case basis. It has been more than a year since the announcement and no significant progress has been made, partly due to the worsening COVID-19 situation in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Indonesian children continue to live under squalid conditions amidst health and safety crises inside the camps.

    Indonesian pro-ISIS groups also exist in other ISIS-claimed territories, including in the Philippines, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The latter case is timely to discuss. A small number of Indonesians have arrived in the ISIS ‘Khorasan’ since 2017, some bringing their family along with them. As of early August 2021, there are eleven Indonesian pro-ISIS detainees in Kabul, Afghanistan, at least three of them are children under ten years of age. There has been discussion about their transfer from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) prison to the custody of the Indonesian embassy, but this was cancelled after the Taliban takeover on 15 August 2021. The Taliban reportedly freed some pro-ISIS and pro-al-Qaeda prisoners, including the eleven Indonesians. No one knows what happened to the children or what kind of life they must face in the midst of the ensuing chaos.

    Dire conditions in Syrian camps

    A recent IPAC report shows there were 555 Indonesians in al-Hol, al-Roj, and some Kurdish prisons, according to a census that took place in June 2019. Children were a large part of that population. There were 367 Indonesian children under eighteen, 75 per cent of whom were under ten. ISIS was active in recruiting and mobilising families, including women and children, after its establishment in mid-2014. Hundreds of Indonesian families were sold on the high hopes of living under the true, prosperous, and just Islamic state. The reality turned out to be far from it. The capital city, Raqqa, fell in 2017 and Baghouz was taken over in March 2019. Thousands of their supporters were displaced to camps and prisons managed by US-backed militia, the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF).

    The living conditions were already poor, but became even more dire as COVID-19 hit. Access to nutritious meals, water, hygiene, and medical facilities is scarce. The restriction of mobility during the pandemic further delayed distribution of aid and basic necessities, and forced some health clinics to shut down due to limited medical personnel. Consequently, eight children died within a week in August 2020 due to malnutrition and limited health facilities. It was reportedly three times higher the death toll rate for children since the beginning of 2020.

    Confinement in camps is also affecting the children’s psychological well-being, partly due to post-war trauma, but also because of the constant threats of violence inside the camps. Pro-ISIS women have been reported to burn tents or beat to death those accused of  violating ISIS law, as seen in the case of Sudarmini, a pregnant Indonesian  woman who was found beaten to death in July 2019. ISIS sleeper cells are smuggled inside, conducting killings and even a public beheading in early 2021, escalating the tension inside the camp. Sexual violence is also prevalent, despite limited documentation.

    The future is gloomy for these children. They receive no education but only indoctrination from pro-ISIS women. The UN and other humanitarian organisations have repeatedly call on governments to repatriate their nationals, especially children, but efforts so far remain insufficient. In March 2021, the National Anti-Terror Agency, BNPT, said it will conduct on-site identification and verification processes once the travel ban is lifted, but the chance is slim today amidst the worsening COVID-19 situation worldwide. The data verification is one thing, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done before repatriation takes place, and it should start immediately.

    Government’s challenges

    Repatriation of the children is not an easy process. Challenges include the definition of children eligible for repatriation, citizenship and data verification, risk assessments, diplomatic issues, and competing bureaucratic interests.

    The Indonesian government has hinted at the possibility of repatriation for unaccompanied children under ten years of age. But such a requirement can be problematic on the ground. For instance, in the case of Faruk, Yusuf and Nasa, who were already close to or older than the ten-year-old threshold when the interview took place: have their rights to get a better life and future already vanished? Faruq, Yusuf, and Nasa are not isolated cases. The IPAC report shows there are 34 unaccompanied children under eighteen; nineteen were under ten years of age as of June 2019.

    There were also 22 child brides, some with babies and toddlers, who possibly will not be regarded as “children” anymore, according to the citizenship law. Their children, however, will be granted Indonesian citizenship. The child protection law mandates the state protect every citizen under eighteen, regardless of their marital status, and thus the child brides, along with their babies, should be accorded full rights as children. But again, with the narrow eligibility for child repatriation, will they have a chance to come home?

    Related

    Why Indonesia banned ISIS

    Indonesia’s ban of ISIS was motivated by more than fear of returning fighters, writes Dominic Berger.

    Dominic Berger 01 October, 2014

    Data verification can be a real challenge as many camp residents lost their legal documents due to war or had them confiscated when they first arrived in IS territory. Those who decided to stay may use false identities or have deliberately destroyed their legal documents. The Indonesian government could use other methods of data verification, for instance by working with the Kurdish government who has done census and collected biometric data for some nationals in 2020 and 2021.

    Another obstacle is diplomatic. Indonesia maintains ties with the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad, which does not recognise the Kurdish-led territory where the camps are located. Building communication and cooperation with the Kurdish government is seen as potentially harmful to Jakarta’s relationship with Damascus. Nevertheless, in August 2017, Indonesia successfully worked with the Kurdish government in Rojava in repatriating its 18 nationals, without affecting the relationship with Assad’s government. Humanitarian organisations in al-Hol also pointed out that working through proxies is possible, even repatriation through Damascus, as done by Albania, Kosovo, Russia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.

    Repatriation increasing the security risk?

    The most complex challenges in repatriation are institutional differences in their approach and interests. Security agencies such as the police, BIN, and BNPT, continue to weigh the risk of child repatriation. Other institutions, especially those with a greater focus on child protection, are more concerned with the methods of repatriation, not whether it should be done.

    The perception of a risk to the state increases with age. Infants and toddlers may pose little risk to Indonesia’s security, but older children are assumed to have greater risk as they may receive indoctrination and military training from ISIS. ISIS indoctrination is ongoing and targets young children inside the camp. The government needs to move fast because the longer it delays, the fewer children will be under ten years of age. A thorough risk assessment therefore needed, as well as good work with the children’s family and community, and a well-planned and sustainable rehabilitation and reintegration programs.

    Indonesia has experience in handling child deportees and returnees in 2017, as well as the domestic cases of children exposed to extremism, as seen in the case of seven children of the 2018 Surabaya bombing. Lessons learned from post-conflict intervention projects in Aceh, Ambon, and Poso can be an important reference for future work. Children from Syrian camps might face entirely different situations, with different degrees of trauma. But prior-hands-on experience is a good starting point.

    The rehabilitation and reintegration programs also need to be supported with a good policy framework. The Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection tried to fill the gap by issuing a 2019 ministerial regulation on guidelines for protecting children from radicalism and terrorism, which includes steps for prevention, reeducation, and provisions for social, psychosocial, and psychological rehabilitation for children within extremist networks. However, implementation remains uncertain. On the other hand, The National Action Plan on P/CVE, signed by President Joko Widodo in January 2021, claimed to have incorporated child protection principles, despite no provisions on child deportees, returnees, or those stranded abroad.

    All and all, the Indonesian government needs to have a real plan on the repatriation of Indonesian children in Syrian camps, with a clear roadmap and timeline. It can start with a small number of children to ease the monitoring process and develop better rehabilitation and reintegration programs ahead. Unaccompanied children under ten will number less than ten in 2021, and it is a good number to start with. These children cannot wait any longer as they grow up with grievances and disappointment with society and their government under ISIS indoctrination. Bringing them home is the only option that addresses both the humanitarian and security aim of weakening Indonesian links to terrorist networks abroad.

    This article derives from IPAC report No. 72 with the same title “Extricating Indonesian Children from ISIS Influence Abroad”, full report can be accessed here.

    The post Extricating Indonesian children from ISIS influence abroad appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • The woman on a mission to expose torture in Thailand’s troubled south

    Despite the risks, Anchana Heemmina wants justice for victims of the Malay Muslims’ decades-old insurgency – and for herself

    Much of Anchana Heemmina’s work involves listening to stories of immeasurable pain, all part of her campaign to stop the cycle of violence that has long haunted Thailand’s troubled southern provinces.

    Her work striving for human rights and to prevent torture by state authorities has put Heemmina’s life in danger.

    I was scared that the comments would get so bad that they would encourage people to kill me

    Related: Bridging the language divide in Thailand’s strife-torn deep south

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Jawi: identity and controversy

    This article is based on seminar titled “Jawi: sacred and secular,” which will be presented in the ANU Malaysia Institute Seminar Series 2021 on Tuesday, 27 July, 2021 – 17:00 to 18:10 (AEST). You can register to attend the seminar via the event page.

    One of the controversies that embroiled Malaysia’s Pakatan Harapan government came from a rather unexpected source—Jawi. This adapted Arabic script was, from at least the 16th century the most common way of writing Malay, but has been displaced over the course of the 20th century by Rumi, or Roman script. The move from Jawi to Rumi as the default representation ofthe Malay language occurred not as a result of colonial policy, but from Malays themselves as part of a modernising agenda. It was the Kongres Bahasa of 1954 that ratified the use of Rumi alongside Jawi in the name of progress, and the Barisan Nasional governments of the 1970s and 80s that sidelined Jawi within the national curriculum.

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    In 2019, when it emerged that the Ministry of Education—then headed by Dr Maszlee Malik, who was already suspected in some quarters for being a crypto-Islamist—had introduced several pages on Jawi in the Bahasa Malaysia textbook for Standard Four, outrage ensued. Some—most prominently Chinese-language educationalists—saw this as the Islamisation of the government curriculum by stealth. Others—most prominently Malay ethnochauvinists—asserted that Jawi script was intrinsically Islamic and should not be profaned by being taught to non-Muslims. Many other Malaysians (myself included) were rather bemused that Jawi had become a lightning rod for identitarian fury, particularly given the content of the textbook pages in question.

    Figure 1: A Tweet shows some of the controversial text book images.

    These [see Fig. 1] were staunchly (and even comically) nationalistic and secular: Cikgu Yazid (Malay) teaching schoolchildren Chun Han (Chinese) and Aidil (Malay) to read the word “Malaysia” written in Jawi on stamps; Gauri’s older brother (Indian) showing her the words “ringgit Malaysia” and “Bank Negara Malaysia” in Jawi on the banknotes; and another pupil (ethnicity unspecified!) learning to read the national motto (‘Bersekutu bertambah mutu’) in Jawi. A bystander blissfully ignorant of Malaysia’s toxic mix of racial, linguistic and religious politics might ask: what could there be to object to here?

    In seeking to reintroduce Jawi to the national curriculum in 2019, the PH Ministry for Education seems to have been attempting to return to the way things were in the first Mahathir era. Up to the early 1980s, Malaysian government curriculum textbooks framed Jawi script as part of Bahasa Malaysia, a national rather than communal attribute, linguistic rather than religious. One 1983 Standard Three Jawi textbook, for instance, depicts a multiethnic group of uniformed schoolgirls—Salmah (Malay), Uzmah (Malay), Ah Moi (Chinese) and Kumari (Indian) [see Fig. 2]. It also has a reading comprehension featuring a dog, which would likely not pass muster now, as many Malay Muslims regard dogs as unclean.

    Figure 2: Bottom right, the 1983 text book with illustrations of multiethnic school girls; and top left, Muslim children learning Jawi on the cover of a 2014 Jawi textbook.

    This secular nationalist orientation changed after Jawi was removed from the compulsory curriculum in the mid-1980s. Although it was once taught only taught as an additional subject, especially in Islamic schools, after its removal the production of textbooks was taken over by private companies, and emphasised the supposedly intrinsically Islamic nature of the script. The 2014 textbook intended for six year olds, for instance, features a girl in a headscarf and two boys wearing songkok on the cover. Within, the guidance for teachers stresses learning about the Prophet’s life, and about Islamic ethics and conduct. Here, Jawi, Islam and Malayness are firmly intertwined.

    Figure 3: Advertisement for Tiger Beer. With permission from the Malaysia Design Archive.

    While there is certainly a close and abiding association between Islam and Jawi, since the Arabic language and script are intrinsic to the Qur‘an, in its centuries long presence in Southeast Asia Jawi has been used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, for all sorts of purposes. Some of those most exercised by the 2019 controversy may have been surprised to know that, for instance, Jawi was used for to advertise beer in the 1930s (“Tiger Beer… keeps you strong and healthy”) [Figure 3], to promote Chinese-made soya sauce to multiethnic consumers in the 1950s (“enjoyed by Malays, Chinese and Indians”) [Figure 4], and for erotica in the 1960s (Godaan Wanita et al).

    Figure 4: Kicap Cap Kuda Terbang advertisement, Majlis, 4 August 1950.

    Even earlier than this, when Jawi was the only script for Malay, it was used as a matter of course for secular literature, like the perennially popular Panji tales, set in a pre-Islamic Java [Figure 5], as well as for Islamic texts. It is only now, when Malay in Rumi occupies all secular cultural space—dime novels, comic books, newspapers, advertisements—that Jawi has come to be seen as exclusively Islamic.

    Figure 5: 19th century Malay Panji manuscript from Kelantan, British Library.

    At the height of Malaysia’s Covid epidemic, exacerbated by an increasingly dysfunctional government, the Jawi controversy of 2019 seems trivial and distant. But language—and by extension scripts used for languages—in education have always been highly contentious issues in Malaysia, with real-world consequences. The Jawi controversy may have been a factor in Dr Maszlee’s resignation, and perhaps served as a bellwether for the fragility of the PH coalition. The furore over a few seemingly innocuous pages in a textbook provide an indication of just how polarised Malaysian society has become, of just how difficult it is for Salmah, Uzmah, Ah Moi and Kumari to walk together to school, or for their elders to enjoy a meal together.

    The post Jawi: identity and controversy appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • Turkey says EU headscarf ruling ‘grants legitimacy to racism’

    Allowing businesses to ban item of clothing at work will exclude Muslim women and encourage Islamophobia, critics say

    Turkey’s cabinet ministers have criticised a European Union court’s decision to allow employers to ban headscarves from their workplaces, saying it is “a blow to the rights of Muslim women” and that it would “grant legitimacy to racism”.

    The EU’s highest court, the European court of justice (ECJ), on Thursday ruled that private employers can ban workers from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves in their workplaces.

    Related: Les Hijabeuses: the female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Malawi Pride and press freedoms in Palestine: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Words Alone will not End Anti-Muslim Terror in Canada 

    The killing of a Muslim family on June 6 in Ontario, Canada, again presented an opportunity for Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to brand himself as a voice of reason and communal harmony. However, Trudeau’s amiable and reassuring language is designed to veil a sinister reality which has, for many years, hidden the true face of Canadian politics.

    “This was a terrorist attack, motivated by hatred, in the heart of one of our communities,” Trudeau told Parliament, two days after a Canadian terrorist, Nathaniel Veltman, deliberately struck a Canadian Muslim family at an intersection in London, Ontario. Only a young boy survived the attack which killed his parents, sister and grandmother. The 9-year-old boy remains in critical condition.

    The Prime Minister, whose brand of friendly and progressive liberal facade is often juxtaposed with the rise of conservative, populist politics in much of the Western hemisphere, went on speaking as if an activist advocating human rights and equality for all. “If anyone thinks racism and hatred don’t exist in this country, I want to say this: How do we explain such violence to a child in a hospital? How can we look families in the eye and say ‘Islamophobia isn’t real’?”, Trudeau said.

    Ironically, it took years of pressure and concerted lobbying from many civil society organizations, progressive and Muslim groups to finally convince Trudeau to designate January 29 as the ‘National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia’. This specific date was chosen to commemorate the terrorist attack by a Canadian citizen on a Quebec City mosque in 2017. Six Canadian Muslims were killed and 19 others were injured in the hate crime in the Grand Mosque.

    That attack, too, was an opportunity for Trudeau to rail against terrorism and hate.  Ultimately, it was all empty rhetoric, as the Canadian government has done little to rectify the dangerous phenomenon. This lack of meaningful action makes the government complicit in the rising Islamophobia and hate crimes in Canada.

    By way of explaining his rejection of recognizing January 29 as the day of ‘action on Islamophobia’, Trudeau told Radio-Canada that, while it is “important to underline intolerance directed at people of faith,” he wished to “avoid that type of backlash that we’ve seen when we take these kinds of actions,” since the perpetrators of hate crimes are “still a small intolerant minority”. Jingoism aside, Trudeau was essentially arguing that recognition and action against Islamophobia were unnecessary as they may give too much attention to a small and hateful ‘minority’.

    Trudeau is utterly wrong. A report submitted by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief in November last year showed that a majority of Canadians – 52% – believe that Muslims cannot be trusted, while 42% feel that discrimination against Muslims – read: racism – is mainly the fault of Muslims themselves.

    The UN findings are part of a long trajectory of violence and racism targeting Canadian Muslims. A Gallup Poll published in 2011 has already debunked the ‘small minority’ claim. Canadian Muslims – 48% – along with American Muslims – 52 % – feel disrespected within their societies. This ‘disrespect’ manifests itself in numerous ways, much of it unreported, occasionally making news when it translates into outright violence. Indeed, there is plenty of that too.

    Official Canadian police reports demonstrate that hate crimes against Canada’s Muslims are on the rise, with 166 such incidents reported in 2018, 181 in 2019 and so on, with violent crimes becoming more intense and bloodier with time.

    Sadly, anti-Muslim terrorism in Canada is likely to increase in the future, not only because hate crime statistics show an upward trajectory, but because anti-Muslim sentiments often take center stage in government and media as well.

    Negative depictions of Islam and Muslims in Canadian media must not be grouped under the designation of ‘mainstream Western media bias’, as media fear-mongering is penetrating the very psyche of large sections of Canadian society. Many Canadian politicians, even in Trudeau’s own party, often exploit this alarming phenomenon to feed their political ambitions.

    Various Canadian provinces have either passed or drafted laws that specifically target Canada’s Muslim minorities, for example, Quebec’s Bill 62, which restricts the wearing of the niqab in public buildings. Outrageously, the Bill, which was passed by Quebec’s Liberal government in October 2017, followed the bloody attack on the Grand Mosque in Quebec City. Instead of fighting Islamophobia, Quebec’s officials provided it with a legal and moral justification.

    While feeding Islamophobia at home, Trudeau persistently rages against human rights violators in China, the Middle East and around the world. As Chinese columnist Mu Lu rightly argued in Global Times, Canada uses “human rights as a stick to beat others.” While the same claim can also be made regarding the misuse of human rights as a foreign policy tool by other Western leaders, Trudeau is often successful in presenting his human rights concerns as genuine.

    If Trudeau is, indeed, genuine in his desire to root out anti-Muslim terrorism from Canada, he should start by cleansing his own party of hate speech, end all attempts at criminalizing Islam and Muslims and ban hate speech against Muslims in the media.

    Terrorism will not end as a result of pomposity but through real action. Trudeau seems to have much of the former and none of the latter.

    The post Words Alone will not End Anti-Muslim Terror in Canada  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sadia Hussein: the FGM survivor who is saving girls from the knife

    Being cut, aged 10, led to extraordinary pain and complications in childbirth. Now Hussein’s campaign to end mutilation has led to a staggering change in attitudes

    Sadia Hussein had been in labour for three days when she felt she could take no more. She could hear her mother crying in the distance, pleading with God to save her daughter’s life.

    But even though things were clearly not progressing as they should have been, the women in her small Kenyan village were resistant to the idea of sending her to hospital. Her mother told her that doctors would “tear her apart” with a pair of scissors; that, at home, they could at least use a razor. “So now, on top of the overwhelming pain of labour, there was this continuous cutting,” Hussein recalls.

    I said ‘You are my mother, but you are not the mother of my daughter. I will decide what should happen to my daughter’

    The day of circumcision, the wedding night, and the birth of a baby
    Are the three feminine sorrows!
    I cry for help as my battered flesh tears.
    No mercy. Push! They say,
    It is only feminine pain,
    And feminine pain perishes.

    A mother can call the radio, and say: ‘I gave birth to 15 kids and I never saw all the complications you’re talking about.’ I will still know how to challenge her

    Related: Kenyan efforts to end FGM suffer blow with victims paraded in ‘open defiance’

    Related: ‘On a rampage’: the African women fighting to end FGM

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Les Hijabeuses: the female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban

    Young players excluded from matches because of their religious dress find a way to play on and encourage other hijab-wearing women into the sport

    Founé Diawara was 15 years old when she was first told she could not wear her hijab in a football match.

    It was an important game. She had recently got into the team of a club in Meaux, the town north-east of Paris where she grew up, and they were playing a local rival. Diawara had been wearing her hijab during training, but as she was about to walk on to the pitch, the referee said she must remove it if she wanted to play.

    Founé Diawara during a training session at Montreuil football pitch in the suburbs of Paris.
    Les Hijabeuses (from left): Zamya, Founé Diawara and Hawa Doucouré

    I’m not a woman wearing a hijab playing football, just a woman who loves football

    Les Hijabeuses at a training session

    Karthoum Dembélé, Hawa Doucouré and other players from Les Hijabeuses at the Women’s Urban Cup, a football tournament organised by Urban Jeunesse Academy

    Les Hijabeuses at the Women’s Urban Cup

    Bouchra Chaïb training at Montreuil football pitch

    Les Hijabeuses during a training session at Montreuil football pitch. The group share the ground with other young people from the area

    Les Hijabeuses and a community organiser for the Citizen’s Alliance, which helped set up the group

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The politics of banning FPI

    For almost four years, the government of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has been steadily ramping up its efforts to roll back Islamist influence within Indonesia’s political system and society.  Although the anti-Islamist campaign has not been formally declared or been given a name, it has nonetheless been systematic and concerted.  It has included the investigation and prosecution of leading Islamist leaders, restrictions upon Islamists within the public service, closure of websites and social media pages, and the proscription of Islamist organisations.

    The boldest move in this campaign took place in the last days of 2020, when the Jokowi government announced the banning of the Islamic Defenders’ Front (Front Pembela Islam or FPI).  FPI was by far the largest and best-known Islamist organisation to be so targeted – it claimed a membership of seven million, had branches in every province and broad networks across the Muslim community.  The ban was the culmination of two months of sharpening confrontation between the government and FPI and its fiery spiritual leader, Habib Rizieq Syihab, who had returned to Indonesia in November 2020 from three years’ virtual exile in Saudi Arabia. He drew large crowds wherever he spoke.  Six FPI guards were shot by police in early November in a clash between Rizieq’s security detail and a police surveillance team, and a week later Rizieq was arrested and put on trial – he was found guilty in late May on one charge of breaching public health protocols and jailed for eight months. Six other senior FPI leaders were also jailed for the same offence.  (All are likely to be released in the next month or so due to time already served in detention.)

    This showdown between the government and Islamist groups is not without political and security risk. Jokowi has been vulnerable to Islamist criticism and mobilisation in the past and he and his governing coalition appear determined to drive organisations and movements such as FPI to the margins of national life.  If the Muslim community comes to see the FPI ban as anti-Islam (rather than just anti-Islamist), the government could suffer a backlash.  There is also the possibility of former FPI members and sympathisers becoming further radicalised and more violent as a result of the state’s action.

    In this article, we examine the public’s reaction to the crackdown using data from a Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI) survey from mid-April commissioned by ANU as part of a research project into religious polarisation in Indonesia, but other data from the Saiful Mujani Research Consultancy (SMRC) will also be used.

    A clear majority of the public approves of the government’s actions in banning FPI.  Moreover, community dislike of FPI and of several other Islamist groups has strengthened over the past year, suggesting that the government is winning the politics of its battle with Islamism, at least in the short term.  More broadly, we will argue that the limited opposition to FPI’s proscription is indicative of shrinking political support for Islamism over the past five years and an endorsement of government efforts to sideline Islamists. We will explore where FPI’s basis of support lies and the reasons for the apparent ebb in public sympathy.

    FPI’s Vigilante Islamism

    Since its formation in 1998, FPI’s central feature was its ability to mobilise on the streets and take direct action against those who it saw as acting contrary to Islamic principles.  Vigilante attacks on nightclubs, brothels, gambling dens and so-called ‘deviant’ Islamic groups such as Ahmadiyah or the Shia were common, as also was the intimidation of and sometimes serious assaults upon liberal-minded Muslims, non-Muslims and even social-media critics of FPI. Scores of FPI members have been arrested and jailed for violence and Rizieq himself was twice jailed in the 2000s.  Despite its thuggish behaviour, FPI has often been courted by prominent political and business figures, and even used on occasions by the police and security agencies to ‘maintain’ law and order.

    FPI’s influence reached its highpoint in 2016-2017 when it played a pivotal role in mobilising 100,000s of Muslims in Jakarta against the Christian Chinese governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (‘Ahok’), ultimately resulting in his defeat in the ensuing gubernatorial election. The massive protests shook the Jokowi government, giving rise to fears that Islamists, after many decades of fragmentation and peripheral activism, were now in a position to shape national politics.  Soon after the Jakarta elections, the government began moving against its Islamist opponents.  Many Islamists came under investigation: some were jailed while others quietly removed themselves from public view.  Rizieq himself went off to Saudi Arabia in April 2017 to escape prosecution on multiple charges.  The Islamist organisation, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, was banned by the government in July 2017.

    The government gave four reasons for outlawing FPI on 31 December last year: it had forfeited its legal status after its registration as a community organisation had lapsed; some of its members had been involved in terrorism and other criminal activity; it had often committed acts of communal vigilantism; and it had violated the principles of the 1945 Constitution, the state ideology Pancasila and the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. The government followed up with a range of other measures, including freezing all FPI’s bank accounts, closing its social media sites, and warning the media not to publish any information from FPI sources.  The public’s reaction to the banning and the government’s explanations is worth exploring further

    Public Responses

    The April 2021 LSI survey involved 1620 respondents across all provinces of Indonesia.  When asked if they were aware of FPI’s banning, a surprisingly high 48% said they did not know, even though news of this and related matters had dominated the media for months.  Of the 52% who were aware of the ban, 63% approved and 28% were against [see figure one].  By comparison, a February 2021 national survey by SMRC found that 77% of respondents were aware of the ban. Of those, 59% agreed with the ban and 35% disagreed.  This suggests that roughly twice as many people approve of the ban as disapprove of it, and that over the past few months, opinion in favour of the government’s actions has strengthened.

    Figure One: Attitude to the banning of FPI (April 2021 LSI Survey)

    A breakdown of the figures gives a clearer picture of where FPI’s support lies.  Of Indonesia’s ethnic groups, the Buginese, based mainly in South Sulawesi, and the Sundanese concentrated in West Java were the most disapproving of the ban (66% and 43% respectively).  The Betawi community in the Greater Jakarta region, which has been a major source of FPI recruitment, was unexpectedly evenly divided on the ban, with 45% agreeing with it and 41% disagreeing.  Those with higher education levels were most likely to know about the ban (75%) as well as disapprove of it (32%).  Also surprising was that some 75% of under-25-year-old respondents favoured the ban.

    The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) was the only Islamic party that had a majority of its supporters opposing the ban (55%), with 29% endorsing it.  This reflects the close ties that developed between PKS and FPI during the anti-Ahok demonstrations and the 2019 election campaigns.  Opinion among supporters of the three other Islamic parties was pro-banning: the National Mandate Party (PAN) supporters were 42% in favour, 37% against; the United Development Party (PPP) was 59% in favour, 18% against; and the National Awakening Party (PKB) was 77% in agreement and only 19% against [see figure two]. More broadly, 59% of Muslim respondents backed the ban (31% were opposed), whereas 97% of non-Muslims favoured it – a predictable outcome given FPI’s long sectarian agitation against religious minorities.

    Figure Two: Attitude to the banning of FPI ban by party, with party affiliation on basis of voting in 2019 legislative election (April 2021 LSI Survey)

    Perhaps even more revealing of the equivocation felt in the Muslim community towards FPI was the results of “thermometer” questions in which respondents were asked how warmly or coolly they feel towards an array of religious and political organisations. [see figure three] Whereas the major Islamic organisations rated highly—Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) 77% and Muhammadiyah 64%—FPI was ranked in the “cool” lower half of the thermometer on 44%.  Notably, respondents felt more warmly towards the Chinese (46%) than to FPI, which was ironic given FPI’s frequent disparagement of the Chinese community.  A related question about which groups respondents objected to having as neighbours found FPI the sixth most unpopular at 24%, comparing unfavourably with supposedly ‘disliked’ minorities such as the Chinese and Christians (both 18%).

    Figure Three: Feeling thermometer asking respondents how warmly they feel towards a range of religious groups (April 2021 LSI Survey)

    A glance at historical survey data shows that FPI’s profile and public approval has fluctuated widely since its formation in 1998.  An LSI survey for The Asia Foundation in 2010 found that approval of FPI was 15% in 2005, 20% in 2006, 13% in 2007 and 16% in 2010.

    Respondents in the April 2021 LSI survey were asked retrospectively what they thought of FPI’s actions in 2016 when it was the vanguard of the 212 movement: 46% said they agreed with its attitude towards Ahok; 36% disagreed. Support was strongest among young people, with highest levels of support coming in the 22-25-year bracket (54.4%), and then the under-21s (53.1%). The April 2021 figures show under-21s continue to be the strongest supporters of FPI, with 37.1% disapproving of the ban, but 22-25-year-olds were now those most in favour of the ban, with a massive 75% approval rating for the measure, compared to the average of 28% across all age groups.  So, by far the biggest drop in support for FPI has been among young adults.

    Interestingly, those with a university education were most likely to say that they disapproved of the FPI’s actions in 2016 (48% of respondents compared to 34% overall). But this same group were also most likely to disagree with the ban on FPI (32.5%). Given that this is a reversal of the general trend of decline in support for FPI, it is likely that this opposition to the banning of FPI is driven not by greater support for FPI, but by disapproval of the government’s actions. There are certainly some high-profile Muslim and civil society leaders who have spoken out strongly against the ban, arguing either that it is legally questionable or is an excessively repressive way to deal with militant Islamists.

    Related

    Between throwing rocks and a hard place: FPI and the Jakarta riots

    Clouds are gathering for the hard-line Islamic group.

    Ian Wilson 02 June, 2019

    The dramatic shift in public opinion, and especially Muslim attitudes, towards FPI over the past five years appears due to a number of factors.  In 2016, FPI successfully exploited community anger towards Ahok, particularly relating to his supposed blasphemy against Islam, and portrayed itself as protecting the dignity of the faith against denigration by a prominent non-Muslim. But with Ahok’s 2017 defeat and subsequent jailing, much of the emotion dissipated from this issue, and along with it, approbation for FPI.  Rizieq’s relocation to Saudi Arabia in 2017 left a vacuum in FPI’s leadership and a drop in its activities.

    The fall in support for FPI this year appears heavily influenced by the organisation’s flouting of public health protocols in connection with Rizieq’s return to Indonesia in November 2020.  Despite strict provisions regarding social distancing, hand sanitation and mask wearing, massive crowds greeted Rizieq when he arrived in Jakarta, paralysing the airport and causing traffic chaos in the city for much of the day. A few days later, thousands thronged to witness his daughter’s wedding ceremony and hear his sermon marking the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday.  An SMRC survey in late November 2020 found that almost half their respondents knew of the airport and wedding crowds and, of those, 77% felt that law enforcement and the Jakarta government should halt such events and disperse attendees.  The April 2021 LSI survey asked those who agreed with the ban why they did so: 25% said it was because FPI caused social disturbance; 24% mentioned its violent behaviour; 19% said it was an illegal organisation; and 15% said it had breached public health codes. (see figure four)  Interestingly, only 10% regarded FPI as a radical organisation and a meagre 2% felt it was terrorist.  These latter two points are significant because the government has used FPI’s alleged radicalisation as grounds for proscription, suggesting that the public is sceptical.

    Figure Four: Reasons for agreeing with the banning of FPI among respondents aware of the ban (April 2021 LSI Survey)

    All of this survey data points to a certain fragility in FPI’s support.  FPI does have a solid constituency of at least around 15%, based on historical survey data. On occasions when FPI is able to capture and amplify anger or anxiety in the broader community on an issue, such as that of blasphemy during the 2016-2017 Jakarta election, its approval can spike.  But at other times, its propensity for virulent rhetoric, intimidation and violence leads to public disapproval and censure.  Over the past six months, its flouting of public health restrictions has further shrunk goodwill towards it.

    The Jokowi government was undoubtedly aware of survey results on FPI prior to outlawing it—Coordinating Minister for Politics, Security and Law, Mahfud MD, cited polling as indicating public support when the ban was announced.  The April LSI survey data presented here will no doubt further convince the government that its strike against FPI has been a resounding political success.  It has effectively removed its most potent Islamist opponent and won public plaudits for doing so.  Other Islamist groups are now wary of crossing the government, lest they also become targets.  Rizieq, one of the government’s most vexatious critics, is in jail with a tarnished reputation.  Many advocates of religious tolerance and pluralism will, perhaps paradoxically given their usual concern with democratic rights, also welcome the demise of such a provocative and militant group.

    But the longer-term consequences of banning of FPI may be a greater cause for concern.  Many millions of Islamists remain convinced of the correctness of FPI’s actions, as is evident from roughly 30% of survey respondents who think it was unjustly dealt with.  Many in this group are likely to see the Jokowi government and indeed the Indonesian state as increasingly hostile towards them.  The risk of growing resentment and extremism is high, as also is the possibility of political retribution should a more Islamically inclined president come to office in a future election with Islamist support.

    The post The politics of banning FPI appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • China’s Uyghurs living in a ‘dystopian hellscape’, says Amnesty report

    Widespread internment, torture and rights abuses have been claimed by former detainees as Beijing continues a policy of denial

    Amnesty International has collected new evidence of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China, which it says has become a “dystopian hellscape” for hundreds of thousands of Muslims subjected to mass internment and torture.

    The human rights organisation has collected more than 50 new accounts from Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who claim to have been subjected to mass internment and torture in police stations and camps in the region.

    Related: ‘Nobody wants this job now’: the gentle leaders of China’s Uighur exiles – in pictures

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Muslims around the world celebrate Eid against a backdrop of resistance

    This year’s Eid al-Fitr comes at a time when Muslims around the world are coming together in solidarity. Gaza is under siege from a settler-colonial state. The treatment of Uighur Muslims in detention camps has been declared a ‘crime against humanity’. Black Muslims face multiple oppressions. Kashmiri Muslims continue to live under occupation. Queer Muslims face persecution and rejection.

    As ever, Muslims have come together to express grief and hope.

    Palestine

    Palestinian activist Muhammad Smiry shared an image of people praying together:

    Author Elif Shafak shared thoughts on the heartbreak of Eid celebrations in Palestine:

    Others expressed hope for justice:

    Grief and hope

    Celebrations were beset by grief:

    Others turned to strategies for activism as a source of comfort:

    The co-founder of Free Rohingya Coalition, a network of Rohingya refugees, shared this message:

    Community

    Many others made connections between different communities of Muslims:

     

     

    Joy

    The horrors of colonialism, racism, and neoliberalism are plain to see. What we can also see, however, is the commitment of Muslims across the world to community and solidarity. Resistance is an act tethered in a hope for a better future. It acts as a balm for a painful present, and a too-often erased history.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Raimond Klavins

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The US Needs to Stop Treating Ramadan Like a National Security Issue

    People attend the first Friday prayers of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 16, 2021. Makram El-Amin called for justice for those that were lost to police violence in the Friday sermon.

    Like many Muslims, I remember feeling excited as a child each year when Ramadan came around. Though I didn’t entirely understand the purpose of fasting, I was proud of being Muslim and was eager to emulate my parents. Since I began fasting in second grade, Ramadan has been a core part of my practice of Islam.

    While there is great diversity among Muslims around the globe, the holy month of Ramadan has the power of uniting the entire Ummah (the Arabic word for Muslim community) in a collective observance of fasting and prayer each year. It is this solidarity in worship of Allah that is so evocative of the hadith — the traditions and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), in which he said: “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When any part of the body suffers, the rest of the body comes to its defense.”

    In the current climate of globe-spanning Islamophobia and Muslim suffering, however, acting as one body has become difficult if not impossible. The omnipresent lens of national security subjects our entire faith community to state surveillance, harassment and dehumanizing discourse in media, making it even more difficult for Muslims to reach across existing barriers of race, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic differences.

    A recent Vox article titled “9 questions about the Muslim holy month you were too embarrassed to ask” offered answers to questions about the meaning of Ramadan, how Muslims fast and how to be supportive of a friend who is fasting. The final question, however, was, “So if you’re not supposed to get angry or complain or gossip during Ramadan, how come terrorist attacks by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda always seem to spike during Ramadan?” The Vox author’s tongue-in-cheek response was “because terrorists are assholes.”

    The structure of that Vox article seemed aimed at implying that the final question about terrorism followed logically from the others, but in reality, it had no legitimate place in that article. Whereas the preceding questions convey legitimate information about Ramadan, the last question served only to reproduce the constant cultural fixation on the supposed connection between Islam and terrorism.

    The Vox article was by no means alone in suggesting a connection between Ramadan and an increase in terrorist attacks — a Google search with the question “does terrorism increase during Ramadan” yields many results. Although empirical claims about this increase in terrorist activity abound, the possibility that something other than Ramadan might account for it is conspicuously absent from any of the responses. The question is consistently posed without any context or alternative hypotheses — leaving Ramadan as the sole explanation for any violence.

    An article in The Atlantic titled “Is ISIS More Violent During Ramadan?” is paradigmatic. In seeking answers, this article refers to a 2015 University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) report which examined data on over a decade of attacks by ISIS and other prior existing terrorist groups. This report concluded that “while major attacks have taken place during Ramadan, we have also observed major attacks outside the month of Ramadan, and periods during which Ramadan was relatively calm. Thus, it remains an open question whether Ramadan is a period of heightened risk.” But one unanswered question remains: What was the impetus was for assuming a connection between Ramadan and violence in the first place, other than Islamophobic tropes about Muslims as inherently violent?

    An academic article titled “Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence” explores this question from a wider perspective. According to the authors, “The Islamic calendar provides an opportunity to illuminate the impact of religious practices on violence because the calendar regulates the timing of society-wide observance and because the religious meaning of specific days changes predictably and annually, creating sufficient variation to assess its effect.” While the authors make what sounds like a rational argument, the argument assumes that the Islamic calendar, in the final analysis, will have the most determining impact on any instances of violence that take place during Ramadan.

    This study ultimately concludes that rather than fostering violence, the Islamic calendar is a force for restraining it. This is because, the authors reason, potential perpetrators rely on societal support and judgements about the appropriateness of committing acts of violence during or on significant Muslim holidays. In this case, the authors reach a seemingly positive conclusion, using empirical data to support findings that provide a strong rebuttal to the assumed link between Ramadan and terrorism. However, the research question assumes in the first place that there is an impulse or will to violence within Muslim communities that the Islamic calendar is somehow regulating.

    The persistence of the debate around whether the holy month of Ramadan is a motivator for violence highlights a phenomenon that has been omnipresent in the “war on terror” — the framing of Islam as a national security threat, which then serves as justification for extreme interventions by the state.

    With Islam securitized, its followers, and its practices are seen first and foremost as potential security threats. This imposition of the lens of national security over the actions of Muslims and Muslim communities includes what amounts to an invasion of the private space that is formed by community religious observance. Empirical validity or not aside, the pervasive scrutiny that these spaces are subject to puts practitioners of Islam in the impossible position of having to defend and justify their religion rather than simply practice it. The unifying power of Ramadan should lie in solidarity of belief that transcends difference, not in a common posture of defensiveness that has been imposed on the religion and its adherents from outside.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Refugees and the Armenian genocide: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UN condemns one year detention of Nigerian humanist Mubarak Bala

    Prominent figure has been detained since April 2020 without charge and is accused of blasphemy

    The United Nations has condemned Nigerian authorities for failing to release a prominent humanist accused of blasphemy, who has been detained for a year without charge.

    Mubarak Bala, the president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested at his home in Kaduna state on 28 April 2020 and taken to neighbouring Kano, where calls for action against him had been made by religious figures.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Solzhenitsyn: Everyone’s Pain in the Neck

    When you are too close to something, someone, you are not the best analyst. Your feelings get in the way. You reveal more about who you are than who or what you love/hate. But you can see better from afar. That sums up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, despite accurately predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being instrumental in achieving that, was deeply flawed in his understanding of his nemesis, provided really bad advice on how to extricate the huge Eurasian, multinational entity from its many crises, and contributed to the suffering of, in the first place, his beloved Russians. Hardly the most Christian act for the devout soul he claimed to be.

    Live not by the lie! is a great sound byte, but lacks any prescription about how to live, and how to get rid of the lies. His prescription was to break up the Soviet federation, keep only the Slavic bits, ethnically cleanse the whole complex web of life, privatize everything (slowly!), keep the safety net, and cut the military budget. That’s more or less what happened, but everyone (except US-Israel) was unhappy with the results. Amazingly, he insisted all the time that he was not interested in politics, that he was ‘above politics’, but, oh yes, politics must be based on morality and don’t forget to destroy communism. Let the reader who expects this book [Gulag] to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. The lady doth protest too much.

    Yes, morality trumps politics. But that is the US liberal rally cry, too. Biden would agree, though US presidents despised Solzhenitsyn, and from Ford (Solzhenitsyn is a goddam horse’s ass), to Reagan (Solzhenitsyn loved him), right up to Bush II, refused to fete him at the White House. And who has a good word for US pious human rights activism? The results of US ‘morality’ in politics has been a disaster. Solzhenitsyn was blind to his own highly politicized life and work, even as he fired off diatribes to the Central Committee, the Writers Union, sundry western media, blinded by intense anticommunism, which did nothing to improve the lot of his people, a biblical figure like Samson, who brought the temple crashing down around, killing one and all.

    Solzhenitsyn led a truly remarkable life: humble beginnings, university, war, prison camps, return to Moscow, writer, dissident, Nobel prize, celebrity abroad, triumphal return, the ear of Putin. When I first heard his voice when he hit the world stage in 1974, he was a bete noire for me, expelled in 1974 by the Soviets, celebrated by imperialists, THE angry anticommunist. A dour, unpleasant face, scraggly beard. Women were attracted to his grim, macho, crusader energy, but I suspect he didn’t have any real friends.

    Babyboomer truth

    The 1970s for my generation were heady days: the liberation (not ‘defeat’) of Vietnam brought a long overdue realism to East-West relations, the flowering of detente. Though the Soviet Union by then did not attract the fervent left-wing enthusiasts of the 1930s-40s, its longstanding policy of peace and disarmament was finally embraced, not only by young people, but even by US politicians! The Soviets had been proven right: imperialism is nasty business, and mercifully the US was in a rare period of remorse, even repentance, for its warlike behavior. Solzhenitsyn would have none of this.

    Despite his hysterical soap opera, I ‘caught the bug’ and became a sovietophile, fascinated at the real, live experiment to build a noncapitalist modern society. I learned Russian, studied Russian/ Soviet history, trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. No question, lots of chaff, but lots of nuggets of a better way too. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was jarring and so full of anticommunist hatred, it felt like, it was a replay of the odious McCarthyism of the 1950s. When he was soon dismissed by everyone as a reactionary crank, I put him aside, wanting to see and judge Soviet reality for myself. I did, and was both disturbed and, despite misgivings, confirmed in my belief that socialism was the way forward, and that the Soviet Union, though flawed, was the key to that future, hardly ‘radiant’ but not a prison full of unhappy slaves. Then Afghanistan, Gorbachev, and — poof! — the Soviet Union was gone. No key. No future. Thatcherism. TINA. The collapse of the left, invasions, wars, arms race ad infinitum.

    What went wrong? One of the worst things about the Soviet Union had been its state-imposed atheism. I witnessed the Soviet Union at its most smug, prudish, and at the same time, paranoid in the 1970s. Revolutions were succeeding, mostly, in Africa (Ethiopia, Angola), Asia, but Maoist China and the dissident movement challenged Sovietism. Though economic frustrations were pressing, there was no room for debate about the radical reforms which clearly were needed. Intellectual life required lip-service to orthodoxy. Yes, lies. But what politicians speak the truth?

    Roschild-Clausewitz truth

    Despite all this evidence, I knew that any positive future for mankind required some kind of socialism. Marx (Solzhenitsyn’s advice to Soviet leaders was to chuck Marx) taught me that. But how to get there? Russia’s revolution ultimately failed. Christianity was already down there with the Russian revolution as a failure, reduced to irrelevance under capitalism. My own journey since then led me to Islam, as much a radical shift as becoming a communist. Unlike Christianity and Judaism (at least in their present form), Islam is still against usury. And reading about the Prophet while in a hospital bed in Tashkent in the 1990s, after ‘the Fall’, showed me a world figure almost for the first time, as our western upbringing, whether Christian or secular, has no room for such a real life revolutionary.

    The Judaic prophets, followed by Jesus and Muhammad, and the nineteenth century secular prophet of revolution Marx, rejected usury and interest, as representing ill-gotten gain, with good reason. Marx condemned this mode of extraction of surplus as the highest form of fetishism, based on private property and exploitation of labor. They all rejected this exploitation on a moral basis as unjust, insisting that morality be embedded in the economy, a principle which was abandoned when capitalism took hold. While Judaism and Christianity adapted, Islam did not. (All of this seems to have passed Solzhenitsyn by.)

    Interest, and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause of the current world financial crisis; A corollary to Rothschild’s dictum about money and politics (Give me control of a nation’s currency and I’ve got control of its politics), and Clausewitz’s dictum about politics and war (War is the continuation of politics) is: Bankers determines politics in the interest (sic) of waging war. Interest is the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars today in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis. QED.

    And what stands in the way? However beleaguered? Islam. AND it is under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy Islam. Just as the socialist world was, from the get-go, under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy any shred of communism. I finally started to read some Solzhenitsyn. (I’m a sucker for Nobel prizes.) Cancer Ward (1965) was thought-provoking, well written, critical but without Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of the system swamping the text. It turns out it was almost published in 1966 in the Soviet Union, but the neoStalinists in the leadership stalled it until Solzhenitsyn gave up and went into high gear with his jeremiad.

    Then I struggled through some of Gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s first wife Natalia Reshetovskaya in an interview with Le Figaro in 1974, called Gulag merely a collection of camp folklore, an unscholarly study of a narrow theme blown out of all proportion in West. Solzhenitsyn used facts that supported his preconceived notions. Gulag is very uneven, hardly a text worthy of the highest literary award. I dare anyone to read Gulag‘s three volumes. This Nobel gift is surely the most underread, especially by Russians. It does have merit, but more as the story of how suffering leads to transcendence, belief in God. Solzhenitsyn is a born-again Orthodox Christian and his subsequent work is infused with this spirituality. Gulag was just something Solzhenitsyn had to do before he got on to his real love – Russian history. His August 1914 is up there with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but was dismissed in the West as ‘medieval rubbish’.1

    Yes, Stalinism was a blight on humanity. But that one tyrant doesn’t disprove the iron logic of socialism. The things that Hitler did right (full employment, control of the economy and money supply, connection with the land, uniting the nation) are all socialistic. I was more struck by Solzhenitsyn’s transformation in prison, his and other prisoners’ belief that prison is where they felt free-est, that they are grateful for it. Freedom is not ‘more consumption’. On the contrary, it is freedom from things. The key to freedom and happiness is self-restraint. The paradox of the golden rule: liberty points the way to virtue and heroism. Liberty devoid of responsibility is the road to ruin. If we shirk responsibility, evil triumphs. Great message, but Solzhenitsyn is now remembered, if at all, as the dour Gulag guy. Without the hope.

    Could i keep it up? The day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet–the hard, rocky bottom which is the same for all–was the beginning of the most important years in my life, which put the finishing touches to my character. Life is more than just the physical day-to-day reality. Our relationships take place on a different level too. The fortunate few are graced with this kind of insight.

    Suddenly, the reactionary crank who shouted ‘live not by the lie!’ until the Soviet walls came tumblin’ down, loathed and despised by both communists and capitalists, was making sense. His message of spirituality and hope is universal.

    Default to truth

    Truth sayers are never popular, and are usually unpleasant people. Harry Markopolos, the man who exposed Madoff, is a classic example. A ‘quant guy’, only numbers, so as not to make a ‘Neville Chamberlain mistake’. He had solid proof of the financial theft going on, but was dismissed as a crank until Madoff had, well, ‘made off’ with millions, and the whole banking system collapsed in 2008. All his efforts had little effect and no one remembers him. Unlike Markopolos, Solzhenitsyn had the trump card of anticommunism that allowed this unpleasant truth teller his (brief) moment of fame in the West.

    We have an inner program in our make-up to default to truth.You give the benefit of the doubt, often accepting lies in the interest of social harmony, the compassion gene. A survival mechanism. People are excellent judges of who is telling the truth (90% of the time). Only 10% of the time do we mistakenly accuse someone of lying. Solzhenitsyn came to believe that everything was a lie in the Soviet Union, that citizens were too stupid or brainwashed to see that. One of those 10%.2

    Solzhenitsyn is the classic truth sayer. But his truth was flawed. He was even sued (successfully) for libel in 1983 for implying that a notorious American publisher of smut, Alexander Flegon, had KGB connections. He was fixated on destroying the Soviet system, to replace it with what? a theocracy? Certainly not western consumerism. The result of his Reagan-like anticommunism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was worse than he imagined it would be, and led to the ‘third time of troubles’ 1985-2000 (no 1 in 1600, no 2 in 1917). Mr Truthie whined, went home in the aftermath, was politely ignored, then became a grudging fan of Putin. So Solzhenitsyn and I came to the same view, but mine from a Marxist perspective, which according to Solzhenitsyn is evil and wrong.

    Solzhenitsyn’s rapid eclipse in post-Soviet Russia suggests that Russians were/are quite capable of seeing the great lie that lay at the root of his great ‘Truth’: communism was not all bad and was superior to the West in many ways. 60% of Russia believe that 30 years after its collapse. Solzhenitsyn became a comical figure in Moscow — a sort of The End Is Nigh, sandwich-board old man with feet of clay.3

    Enlightenment truths

    Solzhenitsyn was right about the real problem being the Enlightenment, ‘materialism’ and godlessness. Yes, communism was/is the logical end of the Enlightenment game. Get rid of the exploiters and we all live happily ever after (or, for Solzhenitsyn, as prisoners in a living hell). And it’s wrong to divorce morality from political, to dismiss categories of Good and Evil from our discourse. There are fundamental truths. My Rothschild-Clausewitz clincher in the first place.

    But his understanding of Marx must have been from rigid Stalinist textbooks, because Marx’s ‘materialism’ is an indictment of capitalism, a freeing of humanity from material cares, needs. And that’s precisely what Solzhenitsyn is after too. Solzhenitsyn was a communist true believer but a bad Marxist. His prescription from his retreat in Vermont was ‘defeat the godless communists’. No room for detente, no tolerance for the Evil Empire. Ironically, Reagan was talked out of any special meeting with Solzhenitsyn at the White House by Kissinger, despite Solzhenitsyn’s approval of Reagan. (By then, Solzhenitsyn’s fervent Orthodox Christianity was an embarrassment to everyone, including evangelical Bush II.)

    So the Soviet critique — that Solzhenitsyn was a dupe of the imperialists — was more or less true, as Solzhenitsyn had no use for imperialism of any kind and yet relied on the imperialists to destroy communism. He loathed communism and approved of capitalism. Solzhenitsyn was wrong about communism = evil, but not about his broader critique of the Enlightenment.

    Islamic truths

    Solzhenitsyn gave no thought to Islam, even though it was clear to all that a genuine theocracy, Solzhenitsyn’s implied ‘good society’, came about on the Soviet Union’s southern border, even as the faux communist utopias (both the Soviet Union and Afghanistan) were disintegrating. Shia Iran pretty much fills Solzhenitsyn’s checklist.4 Though persecuted, Iran was distant enough and with a strong enough culture to resist the capitalist trap, and its 1979 revolution was overwhelmingly popular, unlike the mini-revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, which was really more a palace coup.

    On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn was recommending that the Soviet government abandon its Muslim republics and unite only the ‘good’ Slavs. No room for Islam in Solzhenitsyn’s god’s earthly kingdom. The most Solzhenitsyn did was to taunt the West after 9/11, describing radical Islam as an understandable reaction to western secularism and inequalities of wealth. But by then no one was listening.

    Contrast this with Iran at the time, where the revolution reached out to likeminded (i.e., anti-imperialist) nations, including the Soviet Union. In 1988, just a year and a half before he died, Ayatollah Khomeini reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, in a gesture of anti-imperialist solidarity. This was at a time of war against Iraq and continued subversion of Iran by the US and Israel. The Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize the new Islamic government in 1979, but Khomeini ruled that close relations with atheist Soviet Union were not Islamic, and then the Soviet Union sold arms to both Iraq and Iran during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, as if to prove his point. But as religion became acceptable in Gorbachev’s perestroika, Khomeini sent Gorbachev his only written message to a foreign leader. An Iranian delegation to Moscow brought a sincere offer of support to the faltering Soviet leader. The Ayatollah warned him not to trust the West, which should have been crystal, crystal to Gorbachev, as the last Soviet troops were retreating in a hail of US-made bullets, as Afghan basmachi (the Soviets’ term for 1920s mujahideen) were downing Soviet helicopters with Reagan’s gift of Stinger missiles. Khomeini: “If you hope, at this juncture, to cut the economic Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any ill of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase.” Gorbachev dismissed the offer as interfering with Soviet internal affairs.

    What was Solzhenitsyn doing then? He was exhorting Reagan to kill as many commies as possible. So who is the religious leader genuinely committed to peace? Solzhenitsyn had fewer illusions about the West at this point, but his illusions about socialism/ communism were alive and well. He was soon bemoaning the post-Soviet oligarchy, but his tears were crocodile tears. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran are already playing key roles in establishing a new anti-imperialist reality, building on the first step taken by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988. The world’s problems will only be solved based on a new geopolitical reality with Russia and Iran at its heart, the kernel of truth in the Ayatollah’s historic gesture in 1988. No thanks to ‘apolitical’ Solzhenitsyn.

    Solzhenitsyn was wrong about socialism, wrong about nonSlavs and non-Christians, but right about the godless West, and the need for morality to be the foundation of our economics, politics, art. His writings are ‘true’ only if you believe that (and if you ignore his anticommunism). The West couldn’t abide Solzhenitsyn’s fire-and-brimstone Orthodox Christianity, his denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism (though it loved his anticommunism). The West can’t abide Iran’s fire-and-brimstone Islam, its denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism, and, what’s worse, its enmity with US-Israel. Which, to remind the reader, was the basis of Soviet foreign policy, which was why it had to be destroyed. And just like communism, Islamic resistance to imperialism must be destroyed. Solzhenitsyn’s vision was of a religious leadership of society. But Solzhenitsyn is no perennialist. It’s my (Slavic Orthodox) road or no road.

    Solzhenitsyn denounced the West for its immorality and said we must return to a truly Christian society. Everyone laughed at him. Couldn’t he see that the West was godless? But the current crises are making it clearer every day that Solzhenitsyn was right about a moral foundation for our society. And it is Iran that is an important experiment in building a new world order with spirituality at its core, much like the secular Soviet Union was in its day, but minus God. Both have a wealth of experience to share. They were/are not the ‘enemy’. We are our own worst enemy, and we must repent and atone for our sins. Amen.

    Is Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 more robust than Russia’s 1917? Is it perhaps the logical end of the Enlightenment journey from capitalism to communism? That nagging suspicion of mine about legislating atheism being, well, wrong suggests to me that Iran has a fighting chance. That is if US-Israel don’t succeed in destroying it first. As for Solzhenitsyn’s hope for a Christian moral Russia, that’s at least as iffy. By the late 1980s, Christianity was restored and Russians flocked to churches to be baptized. But interest soon waned. Since 2017, atheists have gone from from 7% to 14% of the population. Is it the fault of Soviet godlessness or just the same drift to godlessness everywhere (except the Muslim world)? After an initial flurry of baptizing in the 1990s, Orthodoxy never really caught on. But both nationalism and Islam are alive and well in Russia.

    My biggest gripe with Solzhenitsyn is the way he interprets Truth as a thing, an end, that a Word can vanquish Evil. No! Truth is the process of bring thought, action into harmony with the divine will (Stoicism), the dialectic of history (Marxism). There are moral values underlying our actions, and if the actions are in harmony with God, with the world, that correspondence will be true. But Solzhenitsyn’s equating the Soviet Union with Evil, and (once he had experienced it) the West too, and then the new Russia, suggests the flaw, the great lie, in his thinking. In his Nobel prize speech, Solzhenitsyn whines about solipsistic writers, exhorting writers to imitate in microcosm the original creator’s making of the real world, to sense more keenly the harmony of world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it, to communicate this to mankind. Great stuff, but he’s hoisted on his own (anticommunist) petard. His rueful attitude to post-Soviet Russia suggests his truth was conditional, subjective, after all. Where is God’s will in post-Soviet reality, Russian or the West? His fetishizing the old (Russian, of course) saw: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, my foot. How about ‘5 chess moves ahead well analyzed’, ‘don’t shake the boat’, ‘a stitch in time’?

    Peasant truth

    Solzhenitsyn was a master of media manipulation. He delayed his return to Russia until 1994 and then came via Alaska to Magadan, considered the capital of the gulag, as a member of the zek nation-within-a-nation. He kissed the ground and intoned: “Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy ground. The need for purification comes from repentance for both individual and national transgressions of the Soviet era.” Then by train, with lots of pit stops along the way, the BBC in tow.

    But he was given a dose of his own truthiness at one Siberian stop by a babushka: “It is you and your writing that started it all and brought our country to the verge of collapse and devastation. Russia doesn’t need you. So go back to your blessed America.”

    Unfazed, Solzhenitsyn shot back: “To my dying day I will keep fighting against the evil ideology that was capable of slaying a third of my country.” Solzhenitsyn saw — with horror — that communism has remained in our hearts, in our souls and in our minds. But Russians complicit in Soviet ‘evils’ (i.e., everyone) resent this self-righteous jeremiad.

    Heritage Foundation’s Ariel Cohen strips Solzhenitsyn’s vision bare: “This revived orthodox world view makes Russia closer to China and the Muslim world. The Polish pope was shunned, but the ayatollahs, Hamas and even Chinese Godless Communists are embraced. Catholicism and Protestantism are declared alien, while Islam is hailed as an ‘authentic’ religion of Russia.”5

    There are bits of truth in both these thrusts, and self-serving lies. Use your own judgment of who’s really telling the truth.

    And compare Solzhenitsyn’s fate with Vaclav Havel, whose life had a similar trajectory as writer, dissident and underminer of socialism, and who became figurehead president of a Disneyland NATO satrap. In contrast, and to his credit, Solzhenitsyn refused such token public political plums (he refused Yeltsin’s offer of the Order of St Andrew from a state authority that had brought Russia to its present state of ruin) and predicted: “If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the US will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”6

    My truth — thinking 5 chess moves ahead to try to align with the universal moral truth – tells me he’s finally got it right.

    1. Raymond Rosenthal, ‘Solzhenitsyn and the defeated’ Nation, February 12, 1973.
    2. Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers (2019). We are good at recognizing when someone tells the truth, but lousy at discerning liars. We miss them 90% of the time.
    3. Sunday Times Bookshop, February 15, 1998.
    4. The Sunni equivalent is not tribal monarchy Saudi Arabia, but the ill-fated Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
    5. The new cool war’, May 17, 2006. see ed Edward Ericson jr and Alexis Klimoff, The Soul and barbed wire: An introduction to Solzhenitsyn, 2008, p237.
    6. 1994 interview and Der Spiegel in 2007. Op. cit., p237.
    The post Solzhenitsyn: Everyone’s Pain in the Neck first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Solzhenitsyn: Everyone’s Pain in the Neck

    When you are too close to something, someone, you are not the best analyst. Your feelings get in the way. You reveal more about who you are than who or what you love/hate. But you can see better from afar. That sums up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, despite accurately predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being instrumental in achieving that, was deeply flawed in his understanding of his nemesis, provided really bad advice on how to extricate the huge Eurasian, multinational entity from its many crises, and contributed to the suffering of, in the first place, his beloved Russians. Hardly the most Christian act for the devout soul he claimed to be.

    Live not by the lie! is a great sound byte, but lacks any prescription about how to live, and how to get rid of the lies. His prescription was to break up the Soviet federation, keep only the Slavic bits, ethnically cleanse the whole complex web of life, privatize everything (slowly!), keep the safety net, and cut the military budget. That’s more or less what happened, but everyone (except US-Israel) was unhappy with the results. Amazingly, he insisted all the time that he was not interested in politics, that he was ‘above politics’, but, oh yes, politics must be based on morality and don’t forget to destroy communism. Let the reader who expects this book [Gulag] to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. The lady doth protest too much.

    Yes, morality trumps politics. But that is the US liberal rally cry, too. Biden would agree, though US presidents despised Solzhenitsyn, and from Ford (Solzhenitsyn is a goddam horse’s ass), to Reagan (Solzhenitsyn loved him), right up to Bush II, refused to fete him at the White House. And who has a good word for US pious human rights activism? The results of US ‘morality’ in politics has been a disaster. Solzhenitsyn was blind to his own highly politicized life and work, even as he fired off diatribes to the Central Committee, the Writers Union, sundry western media, blinded by intense anticommunism, which did nothing to improve the lot of his people, a biblical figure like Samson, who brought the temple crashing down around, killing one and all.

    Solzhenitsyn led a truly remarkable life: humble beginnings, university, war, prison camps, return to Moscow, writer, dissident, Nobel prize, celebrity abroad, triumphal return, the ear of Putin. When I first heard his voice when he hit the world stage in 1974, he was a bete noire for me, expelled in 1974 by the Soviets, celebrated by imperialists, THE angry anticommunist. A dour, unpleasant face, scraggly beard. Women were attracted to his grim, macho, crusader energy, but I suspect he didn’t have any real friends.

    Babyboomer truth

    The 1970s for my generation were heady days: the liberation (not ‘defeat’) of Vietnam brought a long overdue realism to East-West relations, the flowering of detente. Though the Soviet Union by then did not attract the fervent left-wing enthusiasts of the 1930s-40s, its longstanding policy of peace and disarmament was finally embraced, not only by young people, but even by US politicians! The Soviets had been proven right: imperialism is nasty business, and mercifully the US was in a rare period of remorse, even repentance, for its warlike behavior. Solzhenitsyn would have none of this.

    Despite his hysterical soap opera, I ‘caught the bug’ and became a sovietophile, fascinated at the real, live experiment to build a noncapitalist modern society. I learned Russian, studied Russian/ Soviet history, trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. No question, lots of chaff, but lots of nuggets of a better way too. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was jarring and so full of anticommunist hatred, it felt like, it was a replay of the odious McCarthyism of the 1950s. When he was soon dismissed by everyone as a reactionary crank, I put him aside, wanting to see and judge Soviet reality for myself. I did, and was both disturbed and, despite misgivings, confirmed in my belief that socialism was the way forward, and that the Soviet Union, though flawed, was the key to that future, hardly ‘radiant’ but not a prison full of unhappy slaves. Then Afghanistan, Gorbachev, and — poof! — the Soviet Union was gone. No key. No future. Thatcherism. TINA. The collapse of the left, invasions, wars, arms race ad infinitum.

    What went wrong? One of the worst things about the Soviet Union had been its state-imposed atheism. I witnessed the Soviet Union at its most smug, prudish, and at the same time, paranoid in the 1970s. Revolutions were succeeding, mostly, in Africa (Ethiopia, Angola), Asia, but Maoist China and the dissident movement challenged Sovietism. Though economic frustrations were pressing, there was no room for debate about the radical reforms which clearly were needed. Intellectual life required lip-service to orthodoxy. Yes, lies. But what politicians speak the truth?

    Roschild-Clausewitz truth

    Despite all this evidence, I knew that any positive future for mankind required some kind of socialism. Marx (Solzhenitsyn’s advice to Soviet leaders was to chuck Marx) taught me that. But how to get there? Russia’s revolution ultimately failed. Christianity was already down there with the Russian revolution as a failure, reduced to irrelevance under capitalism. My own journey since then led me to Islam, as much a radical shift as becoming a communist. Unlike Christianity and Judaism (at least in their present form), Islam is still against usury. And reading about the Prophet while in a hospital bed in Tashkent in the 1990s, after ‘the Fall’, showed me a world figure almost for the first time, as our western upbringing, whether Christian or secular, has no room for such a real life revolutionary.

    The Judaic prophets, followed by Jesus and Muhammad, and the nineteenth century secular prophet of revolution Marx, rejected usury and interest, as representing ill-gotten gain, with good reason. Marx condemned this mode of extraction of surplus as the highest form of fetishism, based on private property and exploitation of labor. They all rejected this exploitation on a moral basis as unjust, insisting that morality be embedded in the economy, a principle which was abandoned when capitalism took hold. While Judaism and Christianity adapted, Islam did not. (All of this seems to have passed Solzhenitsyn by.)

    Interest, and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause of the current world financial crisis; A corollary to Rothschild’s dictum about money and politics (Give me control of a nation’s currency and I’ve got control of its politics), and Clausewitz’s dictum about politics and war (War is the continuation of politics) is: Bankers determines politics in the interest (sic) of waging war. Interest is the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars today in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis. QED.

    And what stands in the way? However beleaguered? Islam. AND it is under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy Islam. Just as the socialist world was, from the get-go, under intense pressure, subversion, occupation where necessary, to destroy any shred of communism. I finally started to read some Solzhenitsyn. (I’m a sucker for Nobel prizes.) Cancer Ward (1965) was thought-provoking, well written, critical but without Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of the system swamping the text. It turns out it was almost published in 1966 in the Soviet Union, but the neoStalinists in the leadership stalled it until Solzhenitsyn gave up and went into high gear with his jeremiad.

    Then I struggled through some of Gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s first wife Natalia Reshetovskaya in an interview with Le Figaro in 1974, called Gulag merely a collection of camp folklore, an unscholarly study of a narrow theme blown out of all proportion in West. Solzhenitsyn used facts that supported his preconceived notions. Gulag is very uneven, hardly a text worthy of the highest literary award. I dare anyone to read Gulag‘s three volumes. This Nobel gift is surely the most underread, especially by Russians. It does have merit, but more as the story of how suffering leads to transcendence, belief in God. Solzhenitsyn is a born-again Orthodox Christian and his subsequent work is infused with this spirituality. Gulag was just something Solzhenitsyn had to do before he got on to his real love – Russian history. His August 1914 is up there with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but was dismissed in the West as ‘medieval rubbish’.

    Yes, Stalinism was a blight on humanity. But that one tyrant doesn’t disprove the iron logic of socialism. The things that Hitler did right (full employment, control of the economy and money supply, connection with the land, uniting the nation) are all socialistic. I was more struck by Solzhenitsyn’s transformation in prison, his and other prisoners’ belief that prison is where they felt free-est, that they are grateful for it. Freedom is not ‘more consumption’. On the contrary, it is freedom from things. The key to freedom and happiness is self-restraint. The paradox of the golden rule: liberty points the way to virtue and heroism. Liberty devoid of responsibility is the road to ruin. If we shirk responsibility, evil triumphs. Great message, but Solzhenitsyn is now remembered, if at all, as the dour Gulag guy. Without the hope.

    Could i keep it up? The day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet–the hard, rocky bottom which is the same for all–was the beginning of the most important years in my life, which put the finishing touches to my character. Life is more than just the physical day-to-day reality. Our relationships take place on a different level too. The fortunate few are graced with this kind of insight.

    Suddenly, the reactionary crank who shouted ‘live not by the lie!’ until the Soviet walls came tumblin’ down, loathed and despised by both communists and capitalists, was making sense. His message of spirituality and hope is universal.

    Default to truth

    Truth sayers are never popular, and are usually unpleasant people. Harry Markopolos, the man who exposed Madoff, is a classic example. A ‘quant guy’, only numbers, so as not to make a ‘Neville Chamberlain mistake’. He had solid proof of the financial theft going on, but was dismissed as a crank until Madoff had, well, ‘made off’ with millions, and the whole banking system collapsed in 2008. All his efforts had little effect and no one remembers him. Unlike Markopolos, Solzhenitsyn had the trump card of anticommunism that allowed this unpleasant truth teller his (brief) moment of fame in the West.

    We have an inner program in our make-up to default to truth.You give the benefit of the doubt, often accepting lies in the interest of social harmony, the compassion gene. A survival mechanism. People are excellent judges of who is telling the truth (90% of the time). Only 10% of the time do we mistakenly accuse someone of lying. Solzhenitsyn came to believe that everything was a lie in the Soviet Union, that citizens were too stupid or brainwashed to see that. One of those 10%.

    Solzhenitsyn is the classic truth sayer. But his truth was flawed. He was even sued (successfully) for libel in 1983 for implying that a notorious American publisher of smut, Alexander Flegon, had KGB connections. He was fixated on destroying the Soviet system, to replace it with what? a theocracy? Certainly not western consumerism. The result of his Reagan-like anticommunism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was worse than he imagined it would be, and led to the ‘third time of troubles’ 1985-2000 (no 1 in 1600, no 2 in 1917). Mr Truthie whined, went home in the aftermath, was politely ignored, then became a grudging fan of Putin. So Solzhenitsyn and I came to the same view, but mine from a Marxist perspective, which according to Solzhenitsyn is evil and wrong.

    Solzhenitsyn’s rapid eclipse in post-Soviet Russia suggests that Russians were/are quite capable of seeing the great lie that lay at the root of his great ‘Truth’: communism was not all bad and was superior to the West in many ways. 60% of Russia believe that 30 years after its collapse. Solzhenitsyn became a comical figure in Moscow — a sort of The End Is Nigh, sandwich-board old man with feet of clay.

    Enlightenment truths

    Solzhenitsyn was right about the real problem being the Enlightenment, ‘materialism’ and godlessness. Yes, communism was/is the logical end of the Enlightenment game. Get rid of the exploiters and we all live happily ever after (or, for Solzhenitsyn, as prisoners in a living hell). And it’s wrong to divorce morality from political, to dismiss categories of Good and Evil from our discourse. There are fundamental truths. My Rothschild-Clausewitz clincher in the first place.

    But his understanding of Marx must have been from rigid Stalinist textbooks, because Marx’s ‘materialism’ is an indictment of capitalism, a freeing of humanity from material cares, needs. And that’s precisely what Solzhenitsyn is after too. Solzhenitsyn was a communist true believer but a bad Marxist. His prescription from his retreat in Vermont was ‘defeat the godless communists’. No room for detente, no tolerance for the Evil Empire. Ironically, Reagan was talked out of any special meeting with Solzhenitsyn at the White House by Kissinger, despite Solzhenitsyn’s approval of Reagan. (By then, Solzhenitsyn’s fervent Orthodox Christianity was an embarrassment to everyone, including evangelical Bush II.)

    So the Soviet critique — that Solzhenitsyn was a dupe of the imperialists — was more or less true, as Solzhenitsyn had no use for imperialism of any kind and yet relied on the imperialists to destroy communism. He loathed communism and approved of capitalism. Solzhenitsyn was wrong about communism = evil, but not about his broader critique of the Enlightenment.

    Islamic truths

    Solzhenitsyn gave no thought to Islam, even though it was clear to all that a genuine theocracy, Solzhenitsyn’s implied ‘good society’, came about on the Soviet Union’s southern border, even as the faux communist utopias (both the Soviet Union and Afghanistan) were disintegrating. Shia Iran pretty much fills Solzhenitsyn’s checklist. Though persecuted, Iran was distant enough and with a strong enough culture to resist the capitalist trap, and its 1979 revolution was overwhelmingly popular, unlike the mini-revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, which was really more a palace coup.

    On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn was recommending that the Soviet government abandon its Muslim republics and unite only the ‘good’ Slavs. No room for Islam in Solzhenitsyn’s god’s earthly kingdom. The most Solzhenitsyn did was to taunt the West after 9/11, describing radical Islam as an understandable reaction to western secularism and inequalities of wealth. But by then no one was listening.

    Contrast this with Iran at the time, where the revolution reached out to likeminded (i.e., anti-imperialist) nations, including the Soviet Union. In 1988, just a year and a half before he died, Ayatollah Khomeini reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, in a gesture of anti-imperialist solidarity. This was at a time of war against Iraq and continued subversion of Iran by the US and Israel. The Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize the new Islamic government in 1979, but Khomeini ruled that close relations with atheist Soviet Union were not Islamic, and then the Soviet Union sold arms to both Iraq and Iran during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, as if to prove his point. But as religion became acceptable in Gorbachev’s perestroika, Khomeini sent Gorbachev his only written message to a foreign leader. An Iranian delegation to Moscow brought a sincere offer of support to the faltering Soviet leader. The Ayatollah warned him not to trust the West, which should have been crystal, crystal to Gorbachev, as the last Soviet troops were retreating in a hail of US-made bullets, as Afghan basmachi (the Soviets’ term for 1920s mujahideen) were downing Soviet helicopters with Reagan’s gift of Stinger missiles. Khomeini: “If you hope, at this juncture, to cut the economic Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any ill of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase.” Gorbachev dismissed the offer as interfering with Soviet internal affairs.

    What was Solzhenitsyn doing then? He was exhorting Reagan to kill as many commies as possible. So who is the religious leader genuinely committed to peace? Solzhenitsyn had fewer illusions about the West at this point, but his illusions about socialism/ communism were alive and well. He was soon bemoaning the post-Soviet oligarchy, but his tears were crocodile tears. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran are already playing key roles in establishing a new anti-imperialist reality, building on the first step taken by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988. The world’s problems will only be solved based on a new geopolitical reality with Russia and Iran at its heart, the kernel of truth in the Ayatollah’s historic gesture in 1988. No thanks to ‘apolitical’ Solzhenitsyn.

    Solzhenitsyn was wrong about socialism, wrong about nonSlavs and non-Christians, but right about the godless West, and the need for morality to be the foundation of our economics, politics, art. His writings are ‘true’ only if you believe that (and if you ignore his anticommunism). The West couldn’t abide Solzhenitsyn’s fire-and-brimstone Orthodox Christianity, his denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism (though it loved his anticommunism). The West can’t abide Iran’s fire-and-brimstone Islam, its denunciation of western society’s decadent materialism, and, what’s worse, its enmity with US-Israel. Which, to remind the reader, was the basis of Soviet foreign policy, which was why it had to be destroyed. And just like communism, Islamic resistance to imperialism must be destroyed. Solzhenitsyn’s vision was of a religious leadership of society. But Solzhenitsyn is no perennialist. It’s my (Slavic Orthodox) road or no road.

    Solzhenitsyn denounced the West for its immorality and said we must return to a truly Christian society. Everyone laughed at him. Couldn’t he see that the West was godless? But the current crises are making it clearer every day that Solzhenitsyn was right about a moral foundation for our society. And it is Iran that is an important experiment in building a new world order with spirituality at its core, much like the secular Soviet Union was in its day, but minus God. Both have a wealth of experience to share. They were/are not the ‘enemy’. We are our own worst enemy, and we must repent and atone for our sins. Amen.

    Is Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 more robust than Russia’s 1917? Is it perhaps the logical end of the Enlightenment journey from capitalism to communism? That nagging suspicion of mine about legislating atheism being, well, wrong suggests to me that Iran has a fighting chance. That is if US-Israel don’t succeed in destroying it first. As for Solzhenitsyn’s hope for a Christian moral Russia, that’s at least as iffy. By the late 1980s, Christianity was restored and Russians flocked to churches to be baptized. But interest soon waned. Since 2017, atheists have gone from from 7% to 14% of the population. Is it the fault of Soviet godlessness or just the same drift to godlessness everywhere (except the Muslim world)? After an initial flurry of baptizing in the 1990s, Orthodoxy never really caught on. But both nationalism and Islam are alive and well in Russia.

    My biggest gripe with Solzhenitsyn is the way he interprets Truth as a thing, an end, that a Word can vanquish Evil. No! Truth is the process of bring thought, action into harmony with the divine will (Stoicism), the dialectic of history (Marxism). There are moral values underlying our actions, and if the actions are in harmony with God, with the world, that correspondence will be true. But Solzhenitsyn’s equating the Soviet Union with Evil, and (once he had experienced it) the West too, and then the new Russia, suggests the flaw, the great lie, in his thinking. In his Nobel prize speech, Solzhenitsyn whines about solipsistic writers, exhorting writers to imitate in microcosm the original creator’s making of the real world, to sense more keenly the harmony of world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it, to communicate this to mankind. Great stuff, but he’s hoisted on his own (anticommunist) petard. His rueful attitude to post-Soviet Russia suggests his truth was conditional, subjective, after all. Where is God’s will in post-Soviet reality, Russian or the West? His fetishizing the old (Russian, of course) saw: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, my foot. How about ‘5 chess moves ahead well analyzed’, ‘don’t shake the boat’, ‘a stitch in time’?

    Peasant truth

    Solzhenitsyn was a master of media manipulation. He delayed his return to Russia until 1994 and then came via Alaska to Magadan, considered the capital of the gulag, as a member of the zek nation-within-a-nation. He kissed the ground and intoned: “Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy ground. The need for purification comes from repentance for both individual and national transgressions of the Soviet era.” Then by train, with lots of pit stops along the way, the BBC in tow.

    But he was given a dose of his own truthiness at one Siberian stop by a babushka: “It is you and your writing that started it all and brought our country to the verge of collapse and devastation. Russia doesn’t need you. So go back to your blessed America.”

    Unfazed, Solzhenitsyn shot back: “To my dying day I will keep fighting against the evil ideology that was capable of slaying a third of my country.” Solzhenitsyn saw — with horror — that communism has remained in our hearts, in our souls and in our minds. But Russians complicit in Soviet ‘evils’ (i.e., everyone) resent this self-righteous jeremiad.

    Heritage Foundation’s Ariel Cohen strips Solzhenitsyn’s vision bare: “This revived orthodox world view makes Russia closer to China and the Muslim world. The Polish pope was shunned, but the ayatollahs, Hamas and even Chinese Godless Communists are embraced. Catholicism and Protestantism are declared alien, while Islam is hailed as an ‘authentic’ religion of Russia.”

    There are bits of truth in both these thrusts, and self-serving lies. Use your own judgment of who’s really telling the truth.

    And compare Solzhenitsyn’s fate with Vaclav Havel, whose life had a similar trajectory as writer, dissident and underminer of socialism, and who became figurehead president of a Disneyland NATO satrap. In contrast, and to his credit, Solzhenitsyn refused such token public political plums (he refused Yeltsin’s offer of the Order of St Andrew from a state authority that had brought Russia to its present state of ruin) and predicted: “If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the US will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

    My truth — thinking 5 chess moves ahead to try to align with the universal moral truth – tells me he’s finally got it right.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 at 7:46pm and is filed under Capitalism, Christianity, Communism/Marxism/Maoism, History, Islam, Judaism, Russia, Socialism, The Soviet Union.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Continuing the War in Syria

    The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism held a hearing on April 15, 2021, on “10 Years of War: Examining the Ongoing Conflict in Syria.” As is customary of American exceptionalism, the feasibility of regime change in Damascus was not left undiscussed.

    Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who is the top Republican on the subcommittee, explicitly called for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. “The Assad regime is illegitimate and should be replaced,” said Wilson. Omar Alshogre, Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force, also remained uncompromising in his insistence on the overthrow of the government, saying the 2011 uprising in Syria was inspired by USA’s “democratic” tradition.

    Fantasies of Regime Change

    Continued talk about regime change in Syria is unmoored from reality. Those begging the US to overthrow the Assad regime with guns and bombs fail to see how the involvement of external powers has led to sheer devastation. Far from being “democratic”, USA has been fuelling a viciously sectarian war in Syria.

    While initial periods of the 2011 uprising expressed the discontent of the Syrian people against Assad’s neoliberal authoritarianism, Euro-American interventionism soon gave a sectarian character to the rebellion. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Islamist organization — played a lead role in the revolt from the very first moment, dominating the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed in early October 2011, which the US and its Western allies immediately apotheo­sized as “the leading interlocutor of the opposition with the international community.” The SNC, pro­claimed the West, would be “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” — a potential government-in-exile.

    The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the SNC’s military wing. “What we are aiming for is a revolution with a political wing, repre­sented by the SNC, and a military wing, represented by the FSA,” Col. Aref Hammoud, a Turkey-based commander with the FSA, told the Wall Street Journal. Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar — this money being used, as then SNC President Burhan Ghalioun said, “to help equip the Free Syrian Army.”

    Molham al-Drobi, a senior council member and a representative of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood on the council, stated that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were funding the council to the tune of $40 million per month. Weren’t all of these states presided over by princes, emirs, and kings, who preferred to govern by decree, eschewing any form of democratic participation? While the Gulf Arab monarchies funded the rebels of Syria to overthrow Assad’s dictatorship, Washington muttered not a word of criticism against them.

    Then President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar, Kuwait and UAE are autocracies and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of these states inherit power from their families — just as Bashar has done — and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahhabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we were made to believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?

    The FSA — touted as “moderate rebels” by the West — was inevitably going to be sectarian insofar it was dominated by Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Sunni monarchies. It had virtually no representation among the roughly 30% of Syria’s population that wasn’t Sunni. Most FSA brigades used religious rhetoric and were named after heroic figures or events in Sunni Islamic history. Many of the par­ticipating groups had strong Islamist agendas, and some groups had similar ideologies as other jihadi groups, following the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam.

    Among the FSA’s Islamist members was the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which existed “on the ground” working “under the FSA umbrella.” One of the Brotherhood-affiliated guerilla groups was the Tawheed Division, which led the fight against the Syrian government in Aleppo. One FSA com­mander told recruits: “Those whose intentions are not for God, they had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.” This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.

    As western powers provided arms to the supposedly moderate opposition, a striking development occurred. The opposition to Assad became a fragmented movement dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al-Qa’ida franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters whose uniting factor was Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. The Saudis saw the Islamic Front as capable of fighting pro-Assad forces as well as ISIS, but Riyadh’s objections to the latter appeared to be based on its independence of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia, Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, or any dissenting Sunni.

    The “moderate” rebels were completely marginalized. Their plan since 2011 had been to force a full-scale Western military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they lacked an alternative strategy. The US, Britain and France did not have many options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that they helped create in Syria. At other times, they repackaged some rebel warlords, thinking they would be considered “moderates” simply because they were backed by the West and its regional allies.

    Reviving Jihadis

    In February 2021, the US government media organization Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) conducted an interview with Abu Mohammad-al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the latest among the name-changing jihadis the mainstream press still refers to as Syria’s “moderate opposition.” Martin Smith’s exchange with Jolani is a piece of a documentary on Jolani that PBS’ Frontline program plans to air in the future.

    The HTS was formed in 2017 out of the remaining jihadi groups that had gathered in Idlib in 2015. The main pillar of the HTS is the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and before that the Jabhat al-Nusra. The other groups that joined the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to create the HTS include the four main omnibus jihadi groups: the Jabhat Ansar al-Din, the Jaysh al-Sunna, the Liwa al-Haq and the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki. These are hardened groups of fighters, many of them coming in and out of each other’s platforms and even fighting each other viciously.

    For the past several years, the HTS has tried to rebrand itself as “moderate”. In 2015, after it became the dominant force in Idlib, the outfit took on its new name and withdrew its pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda. It claimed to be a Syrian nationalist force with an Islamic ideology. But this is merely a superficial change. It continues to propagate the view that the Syrian state must be based on Sharia law and the general orientation of the 100,000 to 200,000 “radical” fighters inside Idlib is towards al-Qaeda. This is something that is accepted even by the US government, which has otherwise used these fighters in its geopolitical games against the government in Damascus.

    Jolani was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al-Nusra. The State Department declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2013. This designation still stands. Jolani now runs what he calls a “salvation government” in Idlib, the remaining retreat of Islamist extremists in northwestern Syria. He remains an Islamist theocrat determined to impose Sharia law on secular Syria, but he is committed to fighting Assad and so shares “common interests with the United States and the West,” as PBS puts it.

    PBS’s attempt to legitimate Jolani was not a one-off. This was made clear on April 7, 2021, with the publication by the New York Times of an article by its Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard based on an HTS-sponsored visit last month to Idlib. Comparing Jolani’s Islamist front favorably to the Islamic ISIS, Hubbard writes: “H.T.S. is not pushing for the immediate creation of an Islamic state and does not field morality police officers to enforce strict social codes.” He failed to mention the numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances and the rest of the inexcusable stuff these groups get up to.

    Efforts to portray the Jolani and the HTS as the new representative of “moderate rebels” in Syria are another PR ploy on the part of USA to continue its war in Syria. In an interview on March 8, 2021, James Jeffrey, who served as US ambassador under both Republican and Democrat administrations and most recently as special representative for Syria during the presidency of Donald Trump, has been quoted as saying that HTS has been an “an asset” to America’s strategy in Idlib. To quote Jeffery, “They [HTS] are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.” USA will continue to revive jihadis as long as the Assad government remains in power.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2021 at 7:04am and is filed under Anti-war, Imperialism, Islam, Syria, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Continuing the War in Syria

    The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism held a hearing on April 15, 2021, on “10 Years of War: Examining the Ongoing Conflict in Syria.” As is customary of American exceptionalism, the feasibility of regime change in Damascus was not left undiscussed.

    Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who is the top Republican on the subcommittee, explicitly called for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. “The Assad regime is illegitimate and should be replaced,” said Wilson. Omar Alshogre, Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force, also remained uncompromising in his insistence on the overthrow of the government, saying the 2011 uprising in Syria was inspired by USA’s “democratic” tradition.

    Fantasies of Regime Change

    Continued talk about regime change in Syria is unmoored from reality. Those begging the US to overthrow the Assad regime with guns and bombs fail to see how the involvement of external powers has led to sheer devastation. Far from being “democratic”, USA has been fuelling a viciously sectarian war in Syria.

    While initial periods of the 2011 uprising expressed the discontent of the Syrian people against Assad’s neoliberal authoritarianism, Euro-American interventionism soon gave a sectarian character to the rebellion. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Islamist organization — played a lead role in the revolt from the very first moment, dominating the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed in early October 2011, which the US and its Western allies immediately apotheo­sized as “the leading interlocutor of the opposition with the international community.” The SNC, pro­claimed the West, would be “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” — a potential government-in-exile.

    The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the SNC’s military wing. “What we are aiming for is a revolution with a political wing, repre­sented by the SNC, and a military wing, represented by the FSA,” Col. Aref Hammoud, a Turkey-based commander with the FSA, told the Wall Street Journal. Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar — this money being used, as then SNC President Burhan Ghalioun said, “to help equip the Free Syrian Army.”

    Molham al-Drobi, a senior council member and a representative of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood on the council, stated that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were funding the council to the tune of $40 million per month. Weren’t all of these states presided over by princes, emirs, and kings, who preferred to govern by decree, eschewing any form of democratic participation? While the Gulf Arab monarchies funded the rebels of Syria to overthrow Assad’s dictatorship, Washington muttered not a word of criticism against them.

    Then President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar, Kuwait and UAE are autocracies and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of these states inherit power from their families — just as Bashar has done — and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahhabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we were made to believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?

    The FSA — touted as “moderate rebels” by the West — was inevitably going to be sectarian insofar it was dominated by Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Sunni monarchies. It had virtually no representation among the roughly 30% of Syria’s population that wasn’t Sunni. Most FSA brigades used religious rhetoric and were named after heroic figures or events in Sunni Islamic history. Many of the par­ticipating groups had strong Islamist agendas, and some groups had similar ideologies as other jihadi groups, following the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam.

    Among the FSA’s Islamist members was the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which existed “on the ground” working “under the FSA umbrella.” One of the Brotherhood-affiliated guerilla groups was the Tawheed Division, which led the fight against the Syrian government in Aleppo. One FSA com­mander told recruits: “Those whose intentions are not for God, they had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.” This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.

    As western powers provided arms to the supposedly moderate opposition, a striking development occurred. The opposition to Assad became a fragmented movement dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al-Qa’ida franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters whose uniting factor was Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. The Saudis saw the Islamic Front as capable of fighting pro-Assad forces as well as ISIS, but Riyadh’s objections to the latter appeared to be based on its independence of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia, Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, or any dissenting Sunni.

    The “moderate” rebels were completely marginalized. Their plan since 2011 had been to force a full-scale Western military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they lacked an alternative strategy. The US, Britain and France did not have many options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that they helped create in Syria. At other times, they repackaged some rebel warlords, thinking they would be considered “moderates” simply because they were backed by the West and its regional allies.

    Reviving Jihadis

    In February 2021, the US government media organization Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) conducted an interview with Abu Mohammad-al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the latest among the name-changing jihadis the mainstream press still refers to as Syria’s “moderate opposition.” Martin Smith’s exchange with Jolani is a piece of a documentary on Jolani that PBS’ Frontline program plans to air in the future.

    The HTS was formed in 2017 out of the remaining jihadi groups that had gathered in Idlib in 2015. The main pillar of the HTS is the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and before that the Jabhat al-Nusra. The other groups that joined the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to create the HTS include the four main omnibus jihadi groups: the Jabhat Ansar al-Din, the Jaysh al-Sunna, the Liwa al-Haq and the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki. These are hardened groups of fighters, many of them coming in and out of each other’s platforms and even fighting each other viciously.

    For the past several years, the HTS has tried to rebrand itself as “moderate”. In 2015, after it became the dominant force in Idlib, the outfit took on its new name and withdrew its pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda. It claimed to be a Syrian nationalist force with an Islamic ideology. But this is merely a superficial change. It continues to propagate the view that the Syrian state must be based on Sharia law and the general orientation of the 100,000 to 200,000 “radical” fighters inside Idlib is towards al-Qaeda. This is something that is accepted even by the US government, which has otherwise used these fighters in its geopolitical games against the government in Damascus.

    Jolani was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al-Nusra. The State Department declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2013. This designation still stands. Jolani now runs what he calls a “salvation government” in Idlib, the remaining retreat of Islamist extremists in northwestern Syria. He remains an Islamist theocrat determined to impose Sharia law on secular Syria, but he is committed to fighting Assad and so shares “common interests with the United States and the West,” as PBS puts it.

    PBS’s attempt to legitimate Jolani was not a one-off. This was made clear on April 7, 2021, with the publication by the New York Times of an article by its Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard based on an HTS-sponsored visit last month to Idlib. Comparing Jolani’s Islamist front favorably to the Islamic ISIS, Hubbard writes: “H.T.S. is not pushing for the immediate creation of an Islamic state and does not field morality police officers to enforce strict social codes.” He failed to mention the numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances and the rest of the inexcusable stuff these groups get up to.

    Efforts to portray the Jolani and the HTS as the new representative of “moderate rebels” in Syria are another PR ploy on the part of USA to continue its war in Syria. In an interview on March 8, 2021, James Jeffrey, who served as US ambassador under both Republican and Democrat administrations and most recently as special representative for Syria during the presidency of Donald Trump, has been quoted as saying that HTS has been an “an asset” to America’s strategy in Idlib. To quote Jeffery, “They [HTS] are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.” USA will continue to revive jihadis as long as the Assad government remains in power.

    The post Continuing the War in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Yemen, Myanmar and George Floyd: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Campaigners call for global response to ‘unprecedented’ oppression in Xinjiang

    Human Rights Watch urges more coordination by governments to tackle China’s treatment of Turkic Muslims

    The Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, where it has escalated its oppression of Turkic Muslims to unprecedented levels, Human Rights Watch has said, as the NGO called on governments to take direct action against officials and companies that profit from labour in the region.

    HRW also recommended the EU delay ratifying its recent trade agreement with China until forced labour allegations were investigated, victims compensated, and there was “substantial progress toward holding perpetrators to account”.

    Related: There’s a good chance your cotton T-shirt was made with Uyghur slave labor | Jewher Ilham

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Seyran Ateş: ‘I’m not a traitor – I’m fighting for progressive Islam’

    A new film documents the life and faith of the Turkish-German human rights lawyer and advocate of liberal Muslim worship

    For Seyran Ateş, restrictions on daily life as a result of the Covid pandemic have had little impact. The Turkish-German human rights lawyer and advocate for progressive Islam has been unable to move freely for 15 years because of death threats. “I’m surprised people feel so frustrated over just a few weeks or months,” she says with a smile.

    Ateş has been under police protection since 2006 because of the risk to her life from extreme Islamists, Turkish-Kurdish nationalists and German rightwing extremists. Two fatwas have been issued against her and she is accused of being a terrorist by the Erdoğan government in Turkey.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Killing Yemen


    The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.

    Origins of War

    Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.

    From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.

    The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.

    Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.

    American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.

    The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.

    It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.

    The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.

    Genocide

    Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.

    The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.

    Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

    Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.

    In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.

    Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.

    With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 5:25pm and is filed under Genocide, Islam, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Killing Yemen


    The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.

    Origins of War

    Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.

    From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.

    The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.

    Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.

    American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.

    The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.

    It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.

    The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.

    Genocide

    Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.

    The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.

    Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

    Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.

    In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.

    Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.

    With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.

    The post Killing Yemen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • School drops legal action after Muslim girl told her skirt was too long

    Exclusive: Siham Hamud’s father says he is pleased Uxbridge high school listened to the family’s concerns

    A school that had threatened the parents of a Muslim schoolgirl with legal action after she wore a skirt that was deemed “too long” has dropped its legal challenge and apologised.

    Siham Hamud, 12, had described being bullied for her religious beliefs after being sent home every day in December from Uxbridge high school in Hillingdon, west London, and told to only come back when she wore a shorter skirt.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.