"The Siege of Mecca" is a mixed bag, but necessary read

I've disappeared for quite a while, because I've been preparing a couple of new things for this blog. First and foremost, I've been reading through The Siege of Mecca: the 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine by Yaroslav Trofimov.

It's an engaging and, in my opinion, essential guide to how Islamism has evolved in recent decades. At it's core, it revolves around the massive importance and implications of a brief hostage situation in the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 (as the title suggests). This act of terrorism occurs in a context seemingly disconnected to the modern War on Terror - the location seems somewhat unusual, but odder still are the players. The leader of rebels was Juhayman, a Bedouin with only informal Islamic training who held a grudge against the Saudi state because of its betrayal of his parent's generation of Bedouin. Ignited by fanatical claims of the Mahdi's return (a pseudo-messianic aspect of Sunni Islam), he led a band along with a man believed to be the Mahdi into the spiritual center of the Islamic world, to take it hostage in the first shot of what was supposed to be an apocalyptic war against the Saudi state.

Ultimately, the real power of this work lies in how it describes the shifting alliances of political forces in the Islamic world. Until this act of terrorism, however, Islamist ideals clearly wanted to reform states, rather than demolish them. Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Arab world that placated Islamist interests with favors extended to Muslims and even in some cases incorporated aspects of Islamic religious law into conduct laws were previously safe. They were model states, even if none had quite reached the state idealized by Islamist groups - the substitution of virtually all political power for merely a circuit directing and focusing Islamic legal ideas. Raised in an environment of contempt for the Saudi government, Juhayman was already distrustful of the state, but his botched revolution would eventually begin a process of severing Islamism from state intentions, as many of the pseudo-Islamist policies were slowly revealed to be merely staged attempts at gaining legitimacy.

Initially, Juhayman attempted to bring the alleged Mahdi to Saudi-backed ulama (Islamic clerics some of which are given positions of great importance by states such as Saudi Arabia), but ultimately the resistance of the ulama to declare the chosen man to be the Mahdi cemented biases against them among the more extreme Islamist factions. Western fashions had begun prevailing among certain groups and minorities of Shiites continued to live (uncomfortably, but still) on the Arabian Peninsula, about which the Saudi-backed ulama had failed to act, according to the growing extremist forces. The failure to recognize the Mahdi, out of fear of sharing greater power with Juhayman and upsetting the delicate balance the Saudis had attempted to create established a clearer understanding of their motivations for Juhayman and other Islamists in Saudi Arabia.

In short, the Saudi-backed ulama had become part of the government, and with their authority delivered from the state, they sought to maintain its security, even at the cost of perceived Islamic ideals. The gradual shift of government into an increasingly theocratic structure had to an extent backfired, with religious authorities becoming more political, rather than politicians becoming more religious. Essentially, existing state authorities could never be purified, only replaced. Even a state as unbelievably theocratic (in that religion is a clear driving force in its authority and legal system) as Saudi Arabia is not theocratic enough, as it has been tainted by a monarchy with worldly aims, such as maintenance of the house of Saud's political power.

As a result, the history of Islamic movements is cleft in two - between those that pre-existed Juhayman's startling rebellion against mere pseudo-theocracy (such as the current government of Iran, which is quite friendly with the idea of theocracy negotiating with politics) and those that follow (such as the Taliban, Al-Qaida, and other familiar names, which larger oppose all known governments). Likewise, Juhayman's radical breaking from theocracy-light has been largely confined to the Sunni Islamic world, while the Iran-dominated Shiites have not need of his political philosophies, as they had already achieved some degree of Islamist government prior to his conquest of the mosque.

In any case, the illuminating aspects of this book are counterbalanced by its failure to understand the nuances of anti-Americanism. Islamism is largely fueled by a reaction to American dominance and abuse of power, but to leave the issue there is somewhat simplistic. In its political context, Islamism frequently depends on a coalition of related counter-American groups. The Islamic Revolution in Iran succeeded because of a fusion of both liberal and conservative elements directed against the Shah (and it was only after his ousting that the leftist communists and socialists were massacred by the Islamists who then exercised total control of the future government). In many ways, this was an additional change among the Islamists during Juhayman's failed revolution - dissatisfied anti-colonial youth even with leftist leanings became attracted to their positions. In this highly non-nationalistic context, leftist youths' contempt for the American government for both perceived slights and factual pseudo-colonial wrongs goes unbalanced against concern to separate this from contempt for the American people or for modern culture, because the latter are understood as completely distinct from the former (or at the least adequately distinct).

The section of Trofimov's book I found most illuminating in this regard concerned an anecdote about the American embassy in Tripoli, Libya, after it had been raided by Islamists and Islamists-inspired youths:

The following day, just after embassy personel managed to reattach the dislodged front door, a young Libyan man arrived and started pounding at the entrance. One of the rioters who attacked the building the previous day, he surveyed the damage with glee, proud of a job well done. Then he told McCavitt [the American ambassador] he needed a visa to return to a college he was attending in upstate New York. Once McCavitt slammed the door with a curse, the flustered Libyan started screaming in English: "You can't do this to me!"

The implications that Trofimov seems to be trying to draw are that this behavior is laughable, because the young man was simultaneously an active participant in an almost violent protest against perceived and real American militarism and a student embedded in American culture and educational institutions. On closer examination, this reveals at least as much about Trofimov as the student.

The student clearly saw less of a contradiction, as he opposed the American government's actions, but not the American people and his interactions with them in terms of education, if not also financially. This seems to be the part of a classic Muslim left-wing youth's political life, as they are drawn into co-ordination with Islamists in the very limited situations where both hold contempt for the American government. Alternatively, the fact that Trofimov sees this as ridiculous shows that he equates the two - the American people are the American government, a surprisingly nationalistic thought.

More importantly, Trofimov's writing shows that he can not entertain the idea that some Muslims might not make this mental equation of government and entire society, which, as I've explained before, is a key aspect of how Islamists have garnered even remotely enough support to exert the control they have in the Islamic world and the world at large. In short, this misunderstanding of the intentions of Islamists' political allies by Trofimov and his ilk (such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, I suspect) has led to a situation where many American policy-makers simply can not figure out a method of defusing the Islamist bloc. Without any ideas, they turn to what they know best which is usually war, which in the end only gives the Islamists more support.

In short, we need a new generation of leaders who can see the flaws in Trofimov's and others' seemingly rational analysis of the Islamist bloc, if we want a lasting solution to the problem of one of the big three.

Rand Paul's White Privilege

I am white and I admit that I have experienced privilege.

I say this because not enough white people say it. Not enough whites want to learn from the advantages that they have had and at least attempt to peer into the shoes of some one whose great-grandparents may have been slaves, or whose grandparents were banned from immigrating to the US, or who is mistakenly or not-so-mistakenly branded as something less than human and merely illegal.

My ancestors were "pig-in-the-parlor" Irish, dissident Alsatians, poor Southern Whites with Cherokee aunts, and other square pegs to eighteenth century America's round wholes. They did not have it easy in the least. But they did not have to deal with the sheer amount of discrimination, hostility, and overt inequality, which for millions of others were daily reminders of their irreversible identity as people of color. For them, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a breath of fresh air, which has since been stifled by the right wing's return to coded talk of states' rights and increasingly overt returns to Jim Crow policies, if Arizona's SB 1070 is any indication.

Now, a challenger to the Republican Party Machine in Kentucky, thinks he is leading us into a new era of freedom by "questioning" the impacts of the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation. Dr. Rand Paul has never had to think about how life would be if he lived under the provisions he envisions as expansive and libertarian - for people of color and to a lesser extent all other minorities this constitutes a massive loss. If the private sphere no longer must serve all Americans, then mobility becomes a nightmare, since there's no guarantee that a restaurant will serve you or that a store will let you use its facilities. Confined much more tightly to present neighborhoods, ghettos, and self-segregated areas, minorities could easily be reduced to much lower living standards. There's no guarantee that a bank will give any of them a loan, or that business associations will allow them into their little clubs.

Ironically, Paul's answer to these questions is that the public institutions, meanwhile, under this ideal version of the Civil Rights Act, would have been integrated and filled the role of sustaining the economic strength and social incorporation of minority communities. No should trust him in saying this, because, as his libertarian background suggests, he cannot even commit to support of basic universal measures that guarantee such egalitarianism - such as a minimum wage.

This is becoming the new face of the right in American politics as Republicans are purged from the Republican party - a new front for the reinstatement of Jim Crow.

Targeting Weapons Not Ideas

The unsurprising reaction to the Christmas Day (attempted) bombing has been more restrictions on travel, more troops in a relatively innocent Middle Eastern country, and generally more of the same. Obama, how you've failed us.

Since this marks now the third attempted terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11 which managed to only be thwarted by passengers, people are asking once again how can the TSA prevent would-be terrorists from bringing various explosives on board. There's quite a precedent for this sort of recoiling in the face of an utter failure of a terrorist act - the Shoe Bomber nearly caused matches and lighters to be more strictly controlled, and the London-based cell that attempted to create a lethal chemicals in the lavatory famously caused the ban on liquids (with varying forms, from either all liquids being banned as in parts of Europe, to the lighter American ban that restricts passengers to only three ounce containers). So what exactly are the recommended changes this time around? Well, according to one expert:

There are two machines that might -- and I say might -- have revealed the old bomb in the underwear ploy. One is the machine, which we encountered in the airport in Paris and is in a few airports in the US, that puffs air at you and analyzes the atmosphere for chemical residue. The other one is the X-ray machine, which was very controversial in the US for the prudish reason that it showed the faint outline of genitalia.

Are we honestly reaching the point where essentially strip-searching people is being debated? Both are fairly invasive procedures, and yes I've been subjected to both while flying in the United States. The ultimate irony is that the paragraph a few lines above this intense search for methods to prevent terrorist suspects from bringing dangerous chemicals or devices onto planes, the same expert mentioned that:

And yet, what we have so far is incredibly expensive and cumbersome security procedures that can be easily circumvented by your average Joe Terrorist. I have always wondered, for example, how metal detectors would respond to explosives made of plastic. Answer? They don't. I have also wondered why, since it is well known that one must remove one's shoes at airport, any terrorist would put explosives in his or her shoe. Answer? They don't: they sew the bomb in their underwear.

Truly what we have here is a failure of the imagination with this expert specifically and on almost every party in this debate generally - humans solve puzzles naturally, what we need to target is the motivation, not the ultimate action. That isn't to suggest that we resort to criminalizing the idea of terrorism (to an extent that's already happened, it seems), but that we should attempt preventative measures that start before people board planes - that start with addressing why such a large percentage of the Muslim world is so angry at Americans and the West. This isn't, as that expert says, "cooperation and meekness in the face of jihadi fanaticism," this is actually addressing the problem instead of ignoring the conflict and preventing it from affecting Americans outside of airport security.

Obama's landmark speech earlier this year to the Islamic world seemed to be the end of a long violent campaign against Muslim nations, and the beginning of a dialogue and a constructive solution. Hopefully this single failed attack won't break the nascent reconciliation and boost the chances of a war in Yemen.

Inflated Sense of Self-Importance?

Since the tea party protests the entire conservative wing of the American political a clear sense of entitlement has become not just a common theme in rightist circles, but the predominant basis of post-tea-party politics. In fact, the tea parties, often seen as a massive tantrum of sorts against the victory of the emerging Democratic coalition, Obama, the rise of a leftwing voting generation replacing a conservative base, in short a society-wide rejection the conservative ideology which had dominated for the past several decades.

The largest symptom of this is a vicious denial of their nature as a minority, and violent assertions that they are "fighting" for a populist cause, not a shrinking section of the population motivated primarily by bigotry. In spite of all electoral trends, polling data, and other evidence that suggests a slow but steady decline of the current Republican alliance between social conservatives, libertarian neo-liberals, and imperialist neo-conservatives, the emerging new right wing order imagines itself as the champion of the people. Why else do conservatives feel empowered to threaten centrist Blue Dogs? As the New York Times has printed:

So Michael Steele, Republican Party chairman, and Dick Armey, former House Republican majority leader, have already shifted their focus to the 2010 mid-term elections and beyond, hoping to use the health bill to galvanize their base and fill campaign coffers.

An admirable strategy, if they hadn't pulled out every last gimmick in the last election trying to stem the tide of the anti-Republican backlash. They have drained every iota of the potentially-republican-voting angry conservative base, and in the process decimated the political landscape in much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains - all of the conservative third parties have disappeared into a reliable Republican fold already. Beyond having mined their ideological base to exhaustion, they have become so reliant on reactionaries that they have alienated a huge section of the centrist vote and irreparably lost an entire generation. Roughly two thirds of the voters my age support same-sex marriage, and that's not including those that support or prefer a watered down civil union compromise. Beyond even more entrenched openness that Republicans shy away from on issues of race, gender, or sexuality, the coming political battle over the legal definition of marriage shows a Republican policy that will lose any significant support from the growing "millennial" demographic.

Beyond all of these more detailed concerns over how such an electoral strategy is doomed to abysmal failure, the majority of Americans want health care. Every poll in the past ten years has shown this issue as a growing concern, and now, with a majority supporting a public option and the Obama administration leading congressional Republicans by 15% (and growing) on this issue, the Republicans think they can claim exclusive rights to a popular movement.

Moreover, this older ideological frame the Republicans have returned to embracing, that of a persecuted minority against the liberal establishment, loses all its credibility with this newer argument - that Republicans are the true Americans. Republicans are casting themselves as the majority and sole legitimate heir apparent of American political thought, and at the same time, a hated group hunted by the dark shadowy liberal conspiracy (as if we were that organized). It harkens back to the same inconsistency slacktivist points out time and time again - that America is the shining (Christian) city on a hill and yet also Babylon, only instead of the religious dualism of America as Christian example to all and fallen nation, it occupies a nationalistic frame of mind, where America is righteous and courageous against the evils of the world and yet poisoned from within by traitors of various stripes, false Americans all.

While the Republicans are clearly burning their bridges now, they still have considerable power - enough to disrupt almost any legislation in the Senate, a nearly packed Supreme Court, a surprisingly passive Democratic counterbalance in the White House and to a lesser extent the Congress, and a shocking hold on the media. This is the Republican party at its most dangerous, because they have just begun their fall from power, and they still have the potential to strike back. The perfect motives have arisen just as a palingenic and ultranationalist strain (read: pseudo-fascist) ideology has moved from the background into the forefront of their dreams of an American future. The next few years are going to be the hardest and most dangerous, and while the Republicans are down and are losing face, this may be their dangerous, for that precise reason.

EDIT: Yes, I know, this. Is any one really surprised that the Dixiecrats are angry at the Democrats? Angry enough to not vote with them on anything of consequence? Angry enough to leave the party? This is just the last of the fallout of the party realignment started with the Southern Strategy during the Nixon administration. As in, nearly forty years ago.

Additionally, the data about popular support for a public option is from here.

Alternate Reality

In the wake of the tragedy at Fort Hood, the right in America has spent hours deconstructing the event, largely because it both undermines their assumptions about the world and also confirms their fantasies about Islamic Extremism. How it operates in the latter fashion is clear - a Muslim man shot several soldiers in an army camp in Texas, killing many of them. And yet, there's a clear element of disbelief and incomprehension, strewn amidst the calls for mandatory debriefings of Muslim soldiers and the increasingly too familiar demands for identification and surveillance of the entire Muslim American community.

Major Nadil Malik Hasan was a native-born American citizen. Fox News returned to that point several times, unable to reconcile it with his actions. Why can't they accept that an American who had faced relatively constant attacks on his character because of his religion become angry with this country? Why can't they accept that though his course of action was truly disgusting and deserving all the reprimand in the world, that his politics had a basis in an utterly human response to their cultural bigotry?

This goes beyond their forced blindness to their enemies' perception of the United States and resultant political opposition. To its core, islamophobic reaction to 9/11 in America has built its base over nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment, casting undocumented immigrants, even non-Muslims from Haïti, as security threats. Within a matter of weeks of that terrorist attack, the legal immigration status of the actual perpetrators of that attack was forgotten, and hundreds of undocumented Muslims were being rounded up because of their religion.

The status of terrorist and Muslim becoming the same fit into a larger narrative of both being foreign. The Bush era undermining of attempts to study domestic terrorism and explanation of the Iraq War as a fight against "them" over there so "they" don't fight us here all contributed to a perception of Islamism as not only an ideology introduced from far away countries, but tied to foreigners and outsiders, never members of American society. This reconciled with an equation of terrorism and Islam by an overarching xenophobia, casting all of these weakly related ideologies and statuses as inherently linked and inherently outside of the American experience.

Already, however, the far right has continued to build up this illusion of utter foreignness of Islamism. Leading Republicans have pronounced this a sign of how thoroughly the American military has been "infiltrated", infected with Muslims as the subtext to this statement. Considering Hasan joined the army in 1995, long before the War on Terror, and was a native-born American, this talk of ideological contamination rings false. He didn't arrive from a distant shore bringing harsh words for the American military. He found himself rejected and trapped within the military and turned to violence as a solution.

In response to the various parts of the case which contradict a narrative of Islamism in favor of a more complex interaction between anti-military sentiment, instability, and a religious justification, various pundits have labeled this as an act purely driven by religion. Retired General Barry McCaffrey has already claimed that murders as a response to an unwilling redeployment. In spite of serving in the Vietnam War, the killing of fellow military servicemen as a desperate attempt to avoid deployment seems a completely foreign attitude for him.

As per usual, the right wing perception of the event has a limited basis in reality and largely ignores evidence contradictory to a larger worldview with xenophobia as a central pillar of their understanding of the universe. They're living in an alternate reality, where the political correctness of the American military is making them too nice to Muslims.

A War Against Itself

In the wake of the First World War, Europe was a mess. Millions had died both directly from the war and indirectly from the Spanish Flu which had massacred the civilian population and the military alike, their resistance weakened by food and supply shortages.

What truly left Europe so devastated, however, was the shift from "traditional" means of warfare that had slowly accumulated over centuries into modern warfare, complete with machines that could kill with the press of a cliché button. Death had become automated and that had destabilized the complex power balances that had kept things running slowly before the war.

Something similar has happened in the American Media.

Instead of "traditional" censorship, where governments would flood the media with propaganda, out-competing alternative viewpoints, and threaten often at gunpoint those who had broken through the government's control.

Now we have something more automated. A censorship based on quiet omissions and a slow choking off of information, leaving what little information seeps through undecipherable, without context. While the mechanization of war roared into a European continent which had enjoyed a previously quite peaceful century and became inescapable as the horrors of the Great War embedded themselves in the politics and arts of the twenties, the subtle gaining of these means of censorship have gone largely unnoticed.

We are in the worst kind of danger. The kind you cannot see coming.

We should have known when it was England the reported more heavily on our own 2000 election and the following controversy. We should have realized what was happening when our media differed so radically from the rest of the world's total lack of the steady drumbeat into the Iraq War. We should have acted when the Pentagon irradiated entire Iraqi cities and the Gap bought members of congress to keep it's caged workers on Saipan working for scarily low wages.

What happens when the media starts refusing to cover bombs being built here, instead of just them going off over there?

(World on Fire coming by Friday, I swear!)

The old one-two

I've written before in depth about the split among the loose "bundle" of bottom-up anti-democratic movements throughout North America, particularly the United States, but a clear shift appears to be happening: the race-based communalists are facing growing heat from the mainstream, a very reasonable result given their overt violence and general disregard for their appearance within the media, and perhaps more fundamentally their inability to radically differentiate themselves from earlier race-based politics (Classical Fascism, any one?).

So, I think we can consider the Birthers and their even more radical splinters that haven't seen as much media exposure as in retreat. The partial media blackout on right wing terrorism has kept many of the less savory events involving them outside of the public eye or reduced their impact (most notably, James F. Lindsay's insanity, Richard Poplawski's rampage, the James von Brunn attack, and the mess surrounding James G. Cummings).

Alternatively, we have to wonder if we're too late to stall even this movement. Our own government is now party to this, specifically the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which has essentially transformed sections of our border with Mexico into a police state. A culture where being non-white, speaking a language other than English in public, and similar racially-charged non-criminal acts have become suspect, sparking a complex spectrum spanning from the ICE, official government agents ignoring our own laws, into non-governmental organizations involved in this mess and rouge individuals attempting to appease both groups resorting to unspeakable acts.

Nonetheless, the mainstream seems to be catching on, albeit slowly, to the kind of insanity going on here. PACs aiming at reform of this situation are developing, in a large part because of the spots of this movement that are showing through the media giants' mysterious silence.

Meanwhile, something entirely different appears to be happening to the religious counterparts. Coverage of the Dominionists and the Dispensationalists has been practically nonexistent on the major stations since the election last November (and it only came up then in relation to Sarah Palin's ties to the Assemblies of God and Robert Muthee, and that was incredibly spotty in coverage). An optimist might conclude that this is because the religious communalists aren't as violent or well-organized or widespread; that we've lucked out with one branch of this macro-movement self-destructing while the other never took off.

Realists, however, will notice a similar pattern of individuals within the movement radicalized into violence (as the Tiller Murder and others as recently as less than a week ago), a similar development of cult-like phenomena en masse, ridiculous visions of their own in-group's infallibility, and the same transmission of fringe ideology into the mainstream. In spite of all this, where is the equivalent media attention on these self-proclaimed defenders of virtue?

And yes, just as coverage began to surface of the ICE's routine abuses, Eric Prince, founder and head of XE, originally called Blackwater, has been found to have given out orders, which were followed, to murder members of the organization suspected of acting as informants to the federal government about official misconduct. Incited by Prince, a number of murders of Iraqi civilians drive soldiers, trapped between a failing public system and corrupt private system, to tell the government of the wrongs done by themselves or their company. This only prompted Prince to push XE into a deadly spiral of growing body counts.

Who would have thought? A mercenary organization permeated with a neo-crusader mentality developing murderous intent and becoming corruptly dangerous.

We need to bring the second movement out of the shadows, because it's just as big and just as dangerous as its more illuminated cousin.

Counting Down

Things are getting even worse - we have Fox News having guests that outright compare interracial marriage to inter-species "marriage". Elsewhere, the media attack is reaching a fever pitch, with the "Birthers" receiving more attention than they ever dreamed of.

Away from the prying cameras of mainstream news channels, we're seeing widespread military war games by civilian minutemen groups in Northern Idaho. South, towards the border, we have threats of massacres of illegal immigrants (this from a group with ties to murderer who misidentified legal immigrants with no connections with drugs or gangs with illegal immigrants running a gang financed by drug running) now approaching routine, but still fresh enough that they retain an elaborate flavor. Miles of landmines, they say; gunning down children, they say.

Is any one taking the Department of Homeland Security Memo seriously yet? They're plotting something, and you know it.