So, Mike Huckabee has gone to occupied East Jerusalem, hosted by a group of Israeli extremists and religious fanatics, and declared that, as AP puts it, “the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.” The former Governor of Arkansas and GOP presidential nomination candidate is quoted as saying, "The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

He has uttered such wicked twaddle many times in the past. In 2007, Huckabee is reported to have “stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives…” This of course suggests the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories into other Arab areas, for the convenience of Israel and to fulfill Huckabee’s political and, I have no doubt, religious fantasies.

Just to clarify, then, Huckabee thinks that it is “unrealistic” to establish a Palestinian state in Palestine – the place where most Palestinians live, where the population of the occupied territories is overwhelmingly Palestinian, and where both international law and international, Arab and Palestinian consensus, and the majority of Israelis if one is to believe the polls, believe a Palestinian state should be established – and that it should be “somewhere else” because all of Palestine constitutes simply “the Jewish homeland.” Apparently he also thinks it is “realistic,” for more than 5 million Palestinians to simply pick up and leave their homes, or be forced out, and relocate “somewhere else.”

Unfortunately, we need not wonder where such ridiculous ideas come from, or what motivates them. Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian preacher, a former staffer of TV huckster James Robison, an adherent of “Bible inerrancy,” an obscurantist creationist opposed to science, and, judging from his attitudes on the Middle East, quite possibly a pre-millennial dispensationalist to boot. His comments opposing Palestinian national rights and supporting not only the occupation but the annexation and ethnic cleansing of the occupied territories are usually couched in terms of Israel’s “security,” but his, shall we say, unrealistic or even surreal attitudes could well betray the weird dogma of what is often wrongly called “Christian Zionism.”

This is generally derived from pre-millennial dispensationalism, a bizarre strand of Christian theology which holds that all of history is divided up into a series of discrete teleological dispensations, and that we are currently living at the last stages of the final dispensation leading up to the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Many adherents of this prodigious delusion believe that the complete control by Jews of all of “the [biblical] land of Israel” (now completely and conveniently conflated with precise territory of mandatory Palestine between the two world wars) is required before Armageddon, Apocalypse and the return of Christ to rule over the kingdom of heaven on earth or some such gobbledygook. No prizes for guessing what then happens to the Jews and all others who do not instantly convert to the cause of Jesus (hence, this is anything but Zionism no matter what these fanatics and those Jewish Israelis and freinds of Israel who foolishly accept their tainted support may care to tell themselves or others).

Huckabee’s madness in this instance is particularly shameless and off the wall, but at its heart, it represents a very widespread symptom and shares several key features with all other efforts to think up some kind of alternative scenario to ending the occupation and having two states living side-by-side in peace. Huckabee’s solution – simply move the Palestinians out – joins the ranks of all of those “solutions” to the conflict that are completely unacceptable to one of the two parties. It’s certainly wackier, more ruthless and indeed evil than most, but insofar as it is completely unworkable, a nonstarter and utterly unimaginable given the complete resistance any such idea would meet, it ultimately belongs in the same category as other all the other unworkable notions that ignore the basic national interests of one of the two parties. The bottom line is this: any scenario that does not address the minimal requirements of both Israelis and Palestinians is not an idea for ending the conflict or a “solution” at all. They are placeholders, substitutes for having an idea, excuses for avoiding the most difficult choices facing Israelis and Palestinians, and their allies around the world.

Anything that falls short of full recognition of Israel in its internationally recognized borders won’t fly – and that includes Hamas’ hudna, the idea of an Islamic state, and the idea of a single democratic state. It’s obvious that Israelis won’t accept any of these, and will fight bitterly, vigorously and virtually unanimously against them. Anything that falls short of ending the occupation and the establishment of a fully sovereign, viable Palestinian state – and that includes any notion a provisional or limited statehood, a modified, pacified occupation, or the return of Gaza to Egypt and parts of the West Bank to Jordan – won’t be accepted by the Palestinians and the other Arabs, and they will fight bitterly, vigorously and virtually unanimously against them too.

Huckabee’s comments are particularly ridiculous, but they’re useful in reminding us of the clear distinction between workable and unworkable ideas. In formal logic, this is described as a “reductio ad absurdum,” a proposition that inevitably leads to a self-contradictory conclusion. It takes Israel’s security arguments to their logical extreme and envisages not only the permanent denial of Palestinian national rights, but the removal and relocation of the Palestinians themselves. There are plenty of other “ideas” for resolving the conflict that take reasonable propositions and spin them out to their logical conclusions, oblivious to fundamental realities. Not all unworkable ideas are equally silly, equally fatuous or equally immoral. However, if they are completely unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of people on one side or the other, they are equally unworkable and equally useless.

In my last posting I praised the Sixth Fatah General Congress for its unity on the two most important national issues facing the Palestinian people: the identity of the leadership and the national strategy for liberation and ending the occupation. Some Ibishblog readers complained that the retention by acclamation of President Mahmoud Abbas was not a good thing, and that unity in support of a ?corrupt and failed? leadership was not a plus for the organization or for the Palestinian people. A few more words on the benefits and pitfalls of national and organizational unity are therefore in order.

All other things being equal, national unity is an important collective and strategic goal under virtually any circumstance. However, unity is only of paramount importance when it is in the service of a functional policy or system. The question of unity is therefore subject to the condition of political functionality: if unity helps to achieve an indispensable national goal, then it is of paramount importance; if it is an insurmountable obstacle to an overriding national imperative, then it cannot be considered of the first importance. Sometimes, history teaches, functional national unity can only be achieved following a period of deep, sometimes even severe, disunity in order to achieve the primacy of a reasonable political approach over an unreasonable one. Lincoln?s famous dictum that ?a house divided against itself cannot stand,? was made in plain view of one of the most violent internecine civil conflicts in recent human history, and eventually came to constitute a rallying cry for the majority of Americans against a minority hell-bent on unworkable and unacceptable policies and practices. When political dysfunctionality becomes overwhelming, sometimes unity cannot, and even should not, be achieved or maintained.

In the present Palestinian context, national disunity is mainly expressed through the split between the PA and Hamas politically and between the ruling entities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively. This disunity is the product of a failed experiment in political cohabitation and divided government following two contradictory election results, the 2005 presidential election won overwhelmingly by President Abbas and the 2006 parliamentary elections that returned a solid majority for Hamas MPs. As I?ve noted many times in the past, these results divided Palestinian government between two parties which are pursuing not only incompatible but flatly contradictory agendas on both the national strategy for liberation and the character of Palestinian society. It was completely impossible that they should be able to find a modus vivendi for sharing power, especially since the inclusion of Hamas in the government led directly and inevitably to international isolation for the entire Palestinian leadership and all the Palestinian territories.

Since the violent split in the Palestinian house in the summer of 2007, it has become commonplace among many Palestinians, especially in the Diaspora, and their allies around the world, to refuse to choose sides between these two irreconcilable and contradictory agendas and to simply call for national unity at all costs. It is extremely appealing to do so as it is, among other things, a copout on the essential choice Palestinians and their supporters face between the nationalist agenda that seeks a negotiated agreement with Israel to end the occupation and the Islamist agenda that seeks confrontation until ?victory? (whatever that means). Here in the United States in particular, the national unity imperative allows people to avoid all the most difficult questions in favor of a position that is hard to argue with and is ostensibly above reproach. This is also the position, more or less, of several key Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who have been pressuring the Palestinians on all sides to reestablish national unity at all costs. This policy is driven by their own political discomfort, based largely on their internal domestic politics, with the Palestinian split and the profound political pressure resulting from the war in Gaza (which was a predictable consequence of the split).

The problem, of course, is that national unity between the PLO and Hamas is as impossible now as it was in 2006-2007. It is still the case that the internal and national liberation agendas of the two organizations are contradictory, and still the case that Hamas? behavior is largely driven by its ambition to marginalize and replace the PLO and all nationalist parties as the dominant Palestinian political formation and the international address for all things Palestine. The talks in Cairo have gone nowhere because agreement between these two positions is a practical impossibility. In addition, any arrangement that allowed Hamas to resume a role in government throughout the occupied territories would almost certainly result in the resumption of broad-based international isolation for all the Palestinian organizations and for the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Until Hamas seriously amends its policies such that it can be seen as a legitimate interlocutor by the international community (and, for that matter, for the Arab states as a practical reality), and accepts the goal of achieving a two-state end of conflict agreement with Israel and the legitimacy of existing Palestinian agreements, the costs of national reunification and reconciliation outweigh the benefits.

In many if not most Palestinian and pro-Palestinian circles, this is a heretical opinion, but if thought about seriously, it is also readily understood. The practical consequences of such a reconciliation, in the absence of significant policy adjustments from Hamas, would certainly be disastrous, especially a return to the crippling period of international isolation the Palestinians endured in 2006-2007. National disunity is exceptionally unfortunate, but surely the international isolation of all the leading Palestinian national parties is worse than the isolation of some, and obviously it would be of no benefit to the Palestinian people if the West Bank were to be subjected to the same treatment Gaza has been suffering under since the summer of 2007.

Moreover, from a practical point of view, everything serious the Palestinians can accomplish to improve their lot both in terms of living conditions and with regard to diplomatic progress towards independence requires negotiations with Israel. The painful reality is that Israel is in a position to block almost anything the Palestinians try to do to develop their society or move significantly in the direction of statehood. A situation in which the Israelis refuse to discuss anything meaningful with the entire Palestinian government will mean, in effect, paralysis not only at the diplomatic level, but also in terms of institution building, economic development and most, if not all, registers of national and civic life. As I noted in my recent posting about economic development, significant steps can be taken under the current circumstances, but without an end to the occupation, most necessary economic, institutional and political development of Palestinian society will remain impossible. What needs to be done now, and urgently, is to lay the groundwork for independence diplomatically in terms of the political register, and on the ground in terms of institutional, infrastructural and economic development in so far as possible.

Nobody wants to hear or read such words, and I don?t blame them, yet every serious person knows that this is, in fact, the reality that the Palestinians must face and deal with if they are serious about advancing their national interests. Only those who indulge in extravagant fantasies about an Islamic state from the river to the sea or a single democratic state to replace Israel can fail to understand these ineluctable facts. The bottom line is this: as long as Hamas continues to cling to policies that are completely dysfunctional and can only damage rather than advance the Palestinian national interest in practice, and as long as their inclusion in government sentences all the Palestinian national leadership and the whole of the occupied territories to international isolation, then disunity is, in fact, preferable to reunification. Better that only some elements of a people or national patrimony go charging suicidally off a cliff than for the entirety to do so in the name of unity.

Which brings us back to the question of the Fatah General Congress, and the retention of President Abbas as party leader by acclamation and without any significant challenge. I counted it among ?the good? elements coming out of the Congress, and it would seem that I need to explain this in a little more detail. I don?t have any illusions about the failings of Abu Mazen as a political leader, which are numerous and which I spelled out in some detail elsewhere. However, political parties, and for good reason, rarely dispense with sitting presidents, and naturally this proved to be another example. In addition, the practical alternative would have been a long, drawn out, possibly catastrophic, and perhaps even indecisive leadership battle that might have either split the movement irrevocably or resulted in an even less appealing and capable figure emerging as the new leader. One need only look at some of the individuals who showed party clout at the Congress to understand that for all his failings, Abbas is far from the least attractive person in a position of considerable influence in Fatah. Moreover, while he was retained by acclimation, Fatah cadres immediately began to agitate for the removal of the non-Fatah Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad. In other words, the general thrust of the Congress was not to replace the Fatah leadership (although some long-standing figures did lose their positions), but rather to try to extend the grip of leadership on Palestinian government.

By backing, at a considerable political cost to himself, Fayyad?s position as Prime Minister, Abbas is allowing the PA to begin to move beyond the corruption and inefficiency of the Arafat era. By all serious accounts, Fayyad has begun the painful and complicated processes of both anticorruption and good governance on the one hand and serious institution building in preparation for independence on the other hand. Fatah?s leadership on its own did not prove capable of doing this, but it has proved capable of facilitating it, and providing the political basis for sound, or at least much sounder, administration. Failing to recognize this aspect of Abbas? presidency is to miss the biggest of big picture items. Under his leadership, Fatah is no longer synonymous with the PA, which is good for both the party and the government, and this has taken considerable political will to accomplish and to maintain. The practical and economic benefits of this policy are now on display in the West Bank, and although I don?t think the results are as dramatic as some people have maintained, they?re obviously very significant and should be built upon and not squandered. The new professional Palestinian security services, according to all serious disinterested observers, have provided a new quality of life in towns like Nablus and Jenin, and are an indispensable element for economic and institutional development and for the pullback and eventual permanent withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian areas.

The unity, even unanimity, displayed at the Fatah Congress regarding Abbas? position and, even more importantly, the national strategy of independence through negotiations was therefore unity of the best possible kind, in service of policies and practices that not only advance the national interests of the Palestinians, but are indispensable for that advancement. This was unity in the service of functional, practical policies that have both immediate and long-term beneficial consequences. It?s not a pretty picture, I grant, as I laid out in my last posting, and contains plenty of bad and ugly elements as well as good ones, but under the circumstances, on the biggest issues at stake, and compared to the practical alternatives, it was unity and unanimity that was both useful and well advised. In an ideal world, everything would be completely different, including the personalities at the helm of Fatah, not to mention Hamas, Israel and the Arab states. In the real world, the choices are between actually existing alternatives. In this case, the unity demonstrated by Fatah on Abbas? leadership and on the national strategy was far preferable to any realistic alternatives. With regard to the broader Palestinian split between the PLO and Hamas, reconciliation without significant policy adjustments by Hamas would not only be disadvantageous to the Palestinian national interest, it could, and probably would, be catastrophic.

The value of unity depends on the purposes it serves. All other things being equal, it is an exceptionally important value to be pursued, but in some cases, a measure of disunity that allows partial functionality is better than a form of ?unity? that dictates a complete paralysis and failure by definition, as Lincoln acknowledged at Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858. His friends and allies were convinced that it was his ?house divided? speech that cost Lincoln the Senate seat for which he was standing when he delivered it. In 1866, Leonard Swett observed, “Nothing could have been more unfortunate or inappropriate; it was saying first the wrong thing, yet he saw it was an abstract truth, but standing by the speech would ultimately find him in the right place.” Lincoln?s speech concluded, ?Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come,? and so it proved. There are times when the imperative of national unity must give way to insistence on reasonable policies without which the most essential elements of the national interest cannot be advanced or maintained. Palestinian national unity must indeed be restored, and as soon as possible, but not at all costs; it must be accomplished in a manner that allows the national agenda of ending the occupation and establishing an independent state to proceed and not atrophy or collapse.

Ibishblog postings today resume after slightly more than a week of well-earned downtime, and large quantities of Amontillado. During the past few days, most of my attention and TV appearances have been focused on the Sixth Fatah General Congress in Bethlehem. The Congress proved to be something of a Rorschach blot, with most observers seeing whatever it is they wish to see in the event. Die hard Fatah supporters declared the party reborn with a stunning display of political prowess and “democracy in action.” The Palestinian and Arab far-right and ultra-left viewed this Congress of “quislings and collaborators” as demonstrating that Fatah are nothing more than, well, quislings and collaborators. The Israeli right, led by Foreign Minister Lieberman, saw in the same Congress irrefutable evidence of the inherent “extremism” of Fatah, and declared the peace process (as always) “dead.” What remains of the Israeli peace camp, however, was largely impressed, seeing in it further proof that Israel has “a peace partner” in the PLO. Western observers were largely silent and, apparently, oblivious. All read their scripts most convincingly.

It’s not surprising, of course, that everybody finds what they’re looking for in such a large and overdetermined event. If you look hard enough, you can find whatever it is you need in any gathering this large and sustained. Nonetheless, we can certainly distinguish the good, the bad and the ugly coming out of the Congress, which has left almost everyone agreeing that Fatah in general and President Mahmoud Abbas in particular have been significantly strengthened by the Congress.

First, the good. Some observers doubted whether, after 20 years, Fatah was even capable of convening a conference at all, and indeed it was. Some questioned whether it could be held in Palestine, whether or not the Israelis would permit such a thing, and whether Fatah even needed an Arab government to organize the event for them in one of their capitals, as with all previous Fatah Congresses. In the end, the organization was able to pull it off, and in Palestine, which is a very significant development in Palestinian political history. Other than those two core facts, the biggest headlines coming out of the Congress were that the leadership at the most senior level, specifically President Abbas, was retained by acclamation with almost no significant opposition, and that the national strategy of seeking a negotiated agreement with Israel to end the occupation and the conflict was also virtually unchallenged. Therefore, while there was significant disunity on many issues, some dissension and squabbling, and definite and obvious divisions within the organization, on the two most crucial points — the identity of the leadership and the essence of the national strategy — there was virtually unanimous unity. All other divisions are relatively insignificant when there is virtual unanimity on the only things that really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Additional positive elements included the fact that the election of the most important committees in Fatah were actually contested with some significant figures failing to win important positions. Most notably Abu Alla’ did not get elected to the Central Committee in spite of his prominence and seniority. He immediately began to complain about irregularities and fraud, but it comes across very much as sour grapes in context, which is not to say that the process was perfectly clean, but rather that his objections appear to be based more on the outcome than on the process.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call the process either transparent or democratic, but it was a very large step in that direction. The biggest question mark seems to relate to who was qualified to vote, which is an issue that tends to bedevil political parties and was a marked feature of the hotly contested Democratic Party presidential primary campaign last year. Fatah should not be smug about transparency, accountability or democratic processes, as it continues to be sorely lacking in all three when compared with any standards to which a popular party should always aspire. However, the Fatah Congress stood in marked contrast to what goes on in much of the Arab world, and specifically in dramatic contrast to the decision-making and leadership processes of Hamas, which are entirely secret, murky and subterranean. For all of its flaws, the Fatah Congress was held in the open, in public and on television.

Moreover, some elements of the disunity and dissension at the Congress were actually healthy, and should be considered part of the good that came out of it. Public squabbling is what political parties do, or at least should do. Debate and disagreement are essential elements of a healthy political party and polity. Again, the contrast at this Congress in terms of tolerating dissent within the ranks stands in contrast to much of political activity in the rest of the Arab world, anything that tends to happen in and around Hamas, and even the way Fatah used to treat internal criticism during the Arafat era.

Which brings us to the ugly. Two elements stand out to me as particularly ugly in the Congress. The first has to do with the collective insanity regarding the death of the late Yasser Arafat. In the lead up to the Congress, Farouk Qaddumi attempted to sabotage the entire event by making bizarre and entirely unsubstantiated charges that Pres. Abbas, Mohammed Dahlan and other senior Fatah leaders had conspired with Israel to assassinate Arafat. Obviously, very few people believe this preposterous conspiracy theory, and it did little to damage the Congress in the event (Pres. Abbas was wise to extend a rhetorical olive branch to the wild-eyed accuser towards the end of the Congress and seize the moral high ground). However, the Congress did appoint a committee to look into what it deemed “the assassination of President Arafat.” It’s really extraordinary how people need to convince themselves that Arafat was murdered in order to make of him a martyr who died for the cause. Fortunately, there is nothing whatsoever mysterious about Arafat’s death: a sick old man, living in squalor, having endured decades of hardship and numerous serious injuries, slowly wasting away before our eyes on television, finally dies. When a sick old man who deteriorates in public finally dies, only the most paranoid worldview can turn this into a mysterious and highly suspicious event. Fatah was right to wave aside Qaddumi’s hysterical accusations, but it is extremely unfortunate that, as an organization, it continues to buy into the notion that Arafat could not simply die the normal death of a sick, old man, but had to have been murdered. It would have been infinitely healthier and more honest to simply tell themselves and the Palestinian people that, as any sensible person readily understands, Pres. Arafat passed away due to natural circumstances after a long and difficult life and a lengthy illness. There appears to be a political and collective need to dramatize this decisive moment in Palestinian political history by turning it into an assassination and a mystery when it was neither.

The second ugly element is the lack of accountability vis-à-vis corruption and incompetence. President Abbas acknowledged “mistakes” and vowed to correct them, but no mechanism really has been put in place for that. Of course, Palestinians can always insist that as long as they are stateless and without proper governance mechanisms of an independent country, policing corruption is very difficult. However, no one can doubt that Fatah got itself into the mess it has been in significantly by not tackling the problem of corruption in any systematic manner. Indeed, serious anticorruption measures and good, clean governance has required the Palestinian Authority to look beyond Fatah to nonmembers like Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who has begun to put in place the building blocks of a tight ship. The fact that he’s not a party member and, perhaps also, his insistence on non-corrupt government has made him a very unpopular person in some Fatah circles, and it is disheartening that one of the first calls to come out of the organization after the Congress adjourned was for the replacement of the Prime Minister. It’s vital that a re-energized Fatah is not able to unseat the most competent, serious and effective administrator Palestinian society has yet had at the helm.

Which leaves us with the bad. In my view, the worst aspect of the Congress was the retention and even enhancement of influence and power by some individuals who have proven either incompetent or corrupt, or both. In particular, the prominence of Dahlan is troubling given his strong reputation for corrupt practices and his evident incompetence in his main area of responsibility, which was security in Gaza. At the Congress, he attempted to blame everyone else, especially Pres. Abbas, for the military loss of Gaza to Hamas. This is entirely unconvincing in my view. His fellow warlord, so to speak, Jibril Rajoub, also demonstrated political clout during the Congress. If Fatah is going to successfully reform itself, it can’t be led at the most senior levels by security chieftains, especially those with a reputation for brutality and/or corruption. Such individuals evidently have a significant constituency within the organization, and one could argue that therefore they have a right to prominence and influence. Be that as it may, it is entirely unfortunate that some dubious individuals emerged strengthened and rejuvenated by the Congress and were able to demonstrate more influence than they probably deserve.

One final note: several observers have noted that the Fatah General Congress can and should be seen as part of the run-up to the 2010 elections which thus far is the only thing that Fatah and Hamas have been able to agree on in their Cairo negotiations. I told an Arabic language TV station on Tuesday that while this is true, I don’t believe that Hamas will be willing to allow elections to go forward, given the freefall in their political fortunes in the aftermath of the Gaza war and, especially, the Obama re-engagement in the peace process. The Fatah Congress having been largely successful compounds the likelihood that Hamas will refuse to go forward with any elections unless there is a dramatic transformation of Palestinian public opinion. And, indeed, as the Congress drew to a close, on cue Hamas leaders announced that no elections could take place unless and until Palestinian reconciliation had first been achieved. This, of course, is simply a way of saying no, and I expect that position to continue for the foreseeable future as under the current circumstances defeat is virtually inevitable for Hamas.

On another Arabic language TV show yesterday, an old friend of mine asked me on the air whether or not, in that case, the PA might hold separate elections in the West Bank in 2010, even if Hamas refuses to allow them in Gaza. It’s an interesting idea, but I think it has at least as many pitfalls as positives. It would reify the division in Palestine and suggest that there are two legitimate governments and two legitimate authorities, “us over here and them over there,” so to speak. This is probably not in Fatah’s interests, and definitely not in the Palestinian national interest. What Palestinians need, and on schedule, in January 2010 as agreed, are elections that will clarify the Palestinian national direction following the 2005 presidential election that was decisively won by Pres. Abbas with 63% opercent of the vote and the 2006 parliamentary elections in which Hamas-backed candidates got 44% of the vote. Divided government and shared authority between two parties with not only incompatible but contradictory platforms on both the strategy for national liberation and on the nature of Palestinian society proved, inevitably, a practical impossibility. Since the divided government experiment collapsed in the summer of 2007 in violence, Palestinians have required another election to clarify legitimate political authority in their society. As it stands, the two parties have agreed to hold this election in 2010, and, in its own interests and the Palestinian national interest, Fatah should adamantly stick by that agenda. Hamas, as I say, is extremely unlikely to live up to its word and accept those elections. If they block the elections, Hamas should pay the full political price for that, as they are now paying the political price for other decisions that may have been useful to them as an ideological and power-oriented party, but were disastrous for the Palestinian people.

A reader asks me, “why do you think the Arab American community has not enjoyed greater success at building and working within multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-issue coalitions, be they political, social, or cultural? And do you believe, as I would argue, that some of our community’s spokespersons and intellectuals have actually undermined effective coalition building by imposing political litmus tests on our potential allies and partners?”

The first and greatest problem is that the Arab-American community is, for the most part, itself not engaged and organized. It’s very hard to build coalitions with other communities when you don’t even want to work together most of the time on most issues. Arab-Americans are a small community, but disproportionately successful, enjoying higher average incomes, levels of education and success in almost all fields of life than most other Americans. We have thrived in this country. However, for very complicated reasons Arab-Americans resist coming together to work effectively in the political system in our own country. Lots of Arab-Americans have had individual success in the political world, but the conundrum is that those who have been successful in the mainstream of American political life have not wanted to be part, at least in a very central way, of an organized ethnic political constituency, while those who have wanted to organize along community lines have tended to be ineffective and often drawn to the fringes of American political life. The exceptions on both sides of the divide are much fewer than the general rule which tends to hold that Arab-Americans who are successful in American political life keep a distance from the community, whereas Arab-Americans who focus on the community tend to be, as one observer used to say, “addicted to failure.”

This is not terribly surprising, given that, on the one hand, Arab-American political figures, especially politicians and candidates, who wish to be successful need to rely on support largely not connected to the Arab-American community (because it is small and dispersed), while Arab-American community organizations are trying to represent a community that, for very complicated reasons, often doesn’t want to be represented (or will, in effect, reject any effort practically to represent it). The reasons for this resistance are far too complicated to explicate in a blog postings such as this, but they definitely include the fact that Arab Americans came to the United States from different parts of the Middle East at different times and for different reasons, and that political divisions in the Arab world continue to inform far too much Arab American political thinking, activity and rivalry. It’s also certainly true that many Arabs left the Middle East precisely to get away from the kind of political tensions and repression that have characterized the politics of the Arab world for at least 100 years if not much longer, in which political life has been a terrain of failure, betrayal, defeat, corruption, brutality and chronic nepotism. It?s fair to say that there is a distinctly paranoid streak to a good deal of Arab and Arab-American political thinking, but it would also in fairness have to be noted that they came by it honestly.

Because of this, people who put themselves forward as political actors are generally viewed with deep suspicion by both Arabs and Arab-Americans, with the assumption that there is always “someone behind” them or some extraneous agenda at work, which there often is. Coupled with this cynicism is a completely false but very widespread sense, which is even promoted by some academic “political scientists,” among the Arab-Americans that the American political system is somehow closed to us, that the obstacles are too great or the challenges too overwhelming for Arab-Americans to have any success in influencing politics and policy as a community. This nonsense is very deeply rooted even in the practical behavior and attitudes of people who believe that they have overcome the suspicion that we simply can’t be effective in our own country.

On top of all of this, there is the serious and additional complication that the Arab-American identity is rejected, or at least downplayed, by many of its potential constituents. In other words, many people we think we are talking about when we refer to the Arab-Americans do not accept this honor, so to speak, and consider themselves either entirely or primarily defined by another identity, which might be religious, sub-ethnic, national, or even in terms of area or village of origin. Others prefer to think of themselves as “unhyphenated Americans.” Many Arab-Americans come from minority communities that are to some extent or another alienated from Arab nationalist discourse that was in vogue at the time of the political and rhetorical formation of the Arab-American identity beginning in the late 1960s. It seems quite clear that large sections of the community, or perhaps one should say the potential community, never felt included or enfranchised by this identity and the rhetoric surrounding it. Every Middle Eastern conflict and dispute has exacerbated divisions among Arab-Americans. These and additional barriers have prevented Arab-Americans from building strong community organizations that could form effective, powerful coalitions with other ethnic and interest group communities.

However, I do think the questioner makes a strong point: Arab-Americans have restricted both their own ability to organize within the community and their ability to form effective coalitions more broadly by imposing a powerful litmus test on everything and everyone — Palestine. Since I spent the majority of my professional career, and my time presently, working on this issue, I really cannot be accused at all of downplaying or failing to see the significance of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian issue and national movement have not always enjoyed a healthy relationship with the other Arabs, with both parties suffering as a consequence of some of the distortions that have been produced. I think the Arab-American tendency to use Palestine and positions on issues involving Israel, the right of return, and fidelity to an Arab nationalist narrative that focuses on the Palestinian nakba as a litmus test for everything has also had very serious negative consequences. This kind of litmus test is part of the alienation of some significant elements of what ought to be core constituencies of the Arab-American identity but which resist identification or engagement. It has also impeded Arab Americans from developing strong working relations with other constituencies. At the same time, it is certainly the case that one of the major obstacles Arab Americans have faced in engaging in mainstream American political life is opposition from pro-Israel constituencies that impose litmus tests of their own which virtually no Arab-American can possibly meet, and historically anyone supportive of the Palestinian national cause has been branded an extremist, a terrorist supporter or some such exclusionary label.

It strikes me that we are generally speaking moving beyond that era, since a majority of Jewish Americans and a majority of Arab Americans seem to strongly agree (though many have yet to recognize this) as does the rest of the country and the policy community in Washington that there is a strong American, Israeli and Palestinian interest in a negotiated peace based on two states. There are those, myself included, in both the Jewish and Arab American communities who essentially propose a new litmus test distinguishing those on all sides who are interested in a reasonable, achievable peace agreement and those who wish to fight on until the bitter end (whatever that might be). The only purpose of such a litmus test regarding peace is to recognize that Jewish and Arab Americans who want a peace agreement have more in common with each other than with their brethren who prefer conflict and occupation. It is specific to the issue of Palestine, and is consistent with not only majority opinions, but also US government policy and strong efforts on the part of the Obama administration. However it doesn?t and shouldn?t be applied to any of the other crucial issues on which Arab Americans have to be engaged including anti-discrimination work, civil rights, civil liberties, counterterrorism, combating defamation and promoting the national interest in general.

I don’t think the problem has always been simply having too few and too small national organizations, or conversation-stopping litmus tests, but also the bitter legacy of a disinterest in issues involving other communities. When questions of racial profiling and systematic discrimination against the Arab-American community were raised following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Arab American organizations (I was Communications Director of ADC at the time) found ourselves rushing to join a well-established civil rights coalition, largely led by African American and Latino groups, that had been prioritizing the issue of profiling for years. Arab-Americans and their organizations had been, in general and in point of fact, absent from this constituency until 9/11. We then immediately had to try to place our concerns alongside those of communities that had been building a case against domestic police profiling in inner cities and on highways — that was in many ways quite distinct from the counterterrorism profiling Arab-Americans were concerned with — essentially to our benefit and at their risk. I was involved in many early meetings following September 11, 2001 during which Arab-Americans tried to make the case to this well-established anti-profiling constituency that our issues out to be included in proposed legislation and other major policy interventions on the question. The civil rights community struggled with this issue, since including “counterterrorism” and “national security” issues along with domestic law enforcement abuses seriously threatened the prospects of success on an issue on which these organizations have been focusing for over a decade. Entirely to their credit, and I think essentially as a matter of principle, this African-American and Latino led civil rights coalition did agree to include Arab-American profiling concerns in both legislative language and policy interventions generally.

I don’t think Arab-Americans can be faulted or singled out for focusing on their own issues, but the fact that we didn’t realize that we had a vested interest in getting seriously involved with the civil rights community before our own civil rights and liberties were called into question can only be regarded as a serious and historical error and oversight. The challenge is finding the balance between the kind of total assimilation into an unhyphenated American identity that many successful Arab-American political candidates and others have relied upon for successful engagement with broader American society, and the obsessive, single-minded focus on a very narrow ethnic national narrative that alienates not only most other Americans but a great many Arab Americans as well.

In other words, the challenge is to give both sides of the hyphen their due. This require those who believe they can avoid the consequences of their ethnic identity because they downplay, ignore or deny it will have to realize ? as the conservative, Lebanese-American, Christian, wealthy, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa discovered when he was a victim of airport profiling in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks ? that there is nothing outside the whale. However we define ourselves, in practice our fellow Americans will view us primarily as Arab-Americans, and our fortunes are inherently linked to each other. However it will also require those who are enjoying the rights, but not recognizing the responsibilities, of American citizenship, who live as Arabs in America but not in reality as Arab Americans, and who remain angry at their own country and alienated from its political system and civic life to realize that there is no point in being angry at ?the Americans? because we are, in fact the Americans.

It is becoming increasingly common in American political commentary as Islamophobic rhetoric has developed as a genre of the "paranoid style" of American politics, to hear or read that Islam encourages Muslims to lie to nonbelievers, and that therefore no one of Muslim heritage should be believed, particularly when they adopt moderate or constructive stances. This is, of course, immediately familiar to anyone with a familiarity with Western anti-Semitism, which has always held that Jews are religiously authorized to lie to, steal from or even kill Christians and other non-Jews. Like most forms of contemporary American Islamophobic rhetoric, this calumny about generalized and religiously sanctioned systematic dishonesty has been transferred wholesale from Jews to Muslims. The idea that the doctrine of "taqiyya" constitutes a carte blanche for all Muslims to lie to all non-Muslims is at the heart of this slander.

In discussing the overdetermined and relatively complex set of interpretations ascribed to taqiyya by various Muslim traditions and authorities over the centuries, I am certainly going out of my depth (but much less so than those who have been abusing the term for bigoted political purposes). I have maintained a healthy distance from the details of Islamic jurisprudence, and it must be to those with expertise in the area to offer a more definitive account. But some basic facts can be readily explained. First, taqiyya is a minor, and not a major, doctrine in Islam, and it is likely that most people who have been raised in the faith both at the present and historically never even hear about it. While understandings, interpretations and applications of the doctrine have, like almost all aspects of every major religion, been overdetermined and variegated over space and time, the essential concept underlying taqiyya is simple and has analogues in every single major religion. It essentially holds that it is permissible to lie about one’s religious affiliations in order to prevent immediate physical harm or death. If there is a major religion that does not contain a doctrine that might permit someone to recant at the stake or before the axe, I am not aware of it.

The doctrine has been of particular interest and relevancy to minority religious traditions, denominations and sects in the Islamic world, and can be said to have been mainly analyzed, defined and employed by Shiites, Sufi sects and other smaller Muslim denominations that have historically faced persecution by intolerant Sunni majorities or religious or political establishments. Indeed, in anti-Shiite rhetoric from Sunni bigots, historically taqiyya has been used to criticize Shiism and sometimes even to imply (as Islamophobes are now doing to Muslims in general) that they are simply, as a collectivity and for doctrinal reasons, systematically dishonest. Therefore, while a number of major Sunni Muslim commentators have agreed that taqiyya would allow a Muslim to disavow his or her religious beliefs in order to avoid immediate physical harm or death, it has more typically served in Sunni rhetoric over the years as a criticism or even calumny against Shiites, and therefore has had a generally negative connotation for the majority of Muslims historically.

There is no need for anyone raised in mainstream Muslim traditions anywhere to do any research to flatly and firmly refute the idea that Muslims generally perceive taqiyya as a doctrine that permits them to lie to nonbelievers (except possibly under the most extreme and unlikely circumstances, for which most people would require no theoretical rationalization, I might add). I was raised in a house steeped in Muslim traditions, including both traditional and Sufi forms of Sunni Islam, and I never once heard the term until it was dug up by Islamophobes post-9/11 and presented as evidence of the inherent duplicity of all Muslims throughout the world.

There are two competing versions of post-9/11 misinterpretations of taqiyya in American political discourse. The first — which holds that taqiyya simply authorizes Muslims to lie to all non-Muslims at will — is promoted by outright bigots and overt Islamophobes who know perfectly well that this isn’t true, but who are engaged in a campaign of spreading fear and hatred against a community which, for a variety of reasons, they fear and hate. It has been a very simple task to bat aside this crude and obviously preposterous calumny from the likes of Robert Spencer and his repulsive ilk. Exposing bigots of this level of crudeness is a fantastically simple proposition, and people like Spencer actually announce themselves as hateful, prejudiced and thoroughly dishonest propagandists to any fair-minded reader within a few sentences.

The second account of the way the doctrine of taqiyya supposedly functions in the post-9/11 environment holds that it is not mainstream Muslims, but "radical Islam," or Islamists generally, who are using it as a political weapon in a civilizational jihad against the West. The practical effect of this allegation is extremely similar to that of the more crude version, because it suggests that radical Muslims feel religiously authorized to lie about their beliefs to nonbelievers, not only to preserve life and limb, but, as is frequently alleged, "to advance the cause of Islam," and that in therefore no Muslim Americans can be regarded as sincere. Even though, in this account, taqiyya is only perceived in this way by "radical Islam," as opposed to mainstream Islam, when it is alleged that people are willing to use a religious doctrine that permits widespread and systematic deception, doubt is instantly raised about who among the Muslim Americans is genuinely mainstream or moderate, and who are actually radicals employing this version of taqiyya.

This misunderstanding (sometimes clearly deliberate, at other times apparently erroneous) of the ways in which taqiyya does and does not function in Muslim or even Islamist rhetoric was reflected in an exchange I had with in April with Doug Farah, who sometimes does some useful reporting but who is deeply over his head when he tries to delve into Islamism, as he has repeatedly demonstrated. Interestingly, I agreed with his overall point in the blog posting in question that negotiations with Islamists is a dangerous business. However, he alleged that taqiyya, "blesses the concept of disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies from the enemy and the infidel," and that it is "fully embraced by radical Islamists (including the Muslim Brotherhood)." He never discussed the extent to which he believes this concept is partly or not at all embraced by "non-radical Muslims." He originally justified this allegation by linking to "a paper" that was simply a pathetic and ignorant anti-Arab racist rant by a man whose main qualification is that he is “a resident of Sydney." Farah has now changed the link on his own site to refer to another "paper," this time more scholarly but not very much less embarrassing. The link to the original overtly racist and idiotic "paper," which really is a masterpiece of taqiyya-hysteria and Islamophobia generally, and which Farah found authoritative, is still on the posting on "the counterterrorism blog," which Farah helps run, although he did take it off his own site. The point is that while this accusation about taqiyya is frequently and casually made among both Islamophobes and some ill-informed and self-appointed campaigners against "radical Islam," I have yet to see any evidence that Sunni Islamists actually do endorse the use of taqiyya to justify systematic and blatant deception.

Obviously all political and religious fanatics are not to be trusted, since their fanaticism tends to allow them to justify any number of abhorrent means (lying among them) through an obsessive commitment to achieving their ends. The idea that political Islamists, Muslim radicals and the like are fully prepared to lie isn’t in the least surprising or even really debatable. Only the most naïve and childlike people would believe for a second that fanaticism of any variety promotes honesty — to the contrary, the greater the certainty about the rightness of the cause, the more likely anyone is to engage in practices that are obviously otherwise outrageous. Yet the question of taqiyya is relevant, since it is used to overtly or implicitly undermine the credibility of anyone with any degree of Muslim heritage. It has even been implied by some on the ultra-right that President Obama is "practicing taqiyya" when he "poses as a professed Christian." Agnostics and secularists such as myself may thereby also, as both Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes have claimed about me, be accused of being secretly or objectively a "jihadist cadre." Since this understanding of taqiyya began to develop in Islamophobic and "counterterrorism" circles post-9/11, it has increasingly served as little more than a code word for the idea that Muslims, and even anyone with any Muslim heritage, are all actual or potential liars. Therefore, the question of whether or not the contemporary Sunni Islamist movement in any or all of its present iterations accepts and promotes the version of taqiyya as defined by Farah above, and so many others is, in fact, significant.

As I already agreed, I am not a scholar of Islamic philosophy, theology, fiqh or anything of the kind, and that therefore a more definitive answer must come from someone else. However, evidence from the "taqiyya-peddlers" that Sunni Islamists promote the concept in the manner they describe is slim to none, and it seems to be simply an allegation and assertion. One scours the credible and sophisticated scholarly literature on the rise of the Sunni Islamist movements — ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Salafist groups; to the nationalistic armed Islamist militias (both Sunni and Shiite) such as Hamas, Hezbollah or the Iraqi militias; to the Deobandi-derived Islamist organizations in South and Central Asia such as the Taliban; to the most extreme of all, the takfiri, self-described "salafist-jihadist" groups such as Al Qaeda — for evidence of their interest in and use of the concept of taqiyya in vain. In the definitive book, "The Columbia World Dictionary of Islamism" (Columbia University, 2007), the concept is mentioned only once, in a passing reference to a Turkish Sufi order. In Gilles Kepel’s classic "Jihad" (Harvard University Press, 2002), the concept does not appear at all. Neither is it mentioned in Richard P. Mitchell’s pioneering study of the Muslim Brotherhood, "The Society of The Muslim Brothers," (Oxford University Press, 1969), or in the more recent account of MB history in Adnan Mussallam’s "From Secularism to Jihad" (Praeger Publishers, 2005). Nor in Brynjar Lia’s excellent "Architect of Global Jihad" (Columbia University Press, 2008). Nor in Ahmad Rashid’s fine piece of journalism, "Jihad: the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia," (Penguin Books, 2003). Nor in Olivier Roy’s "Globalized Islam" (Columbia University Press, 2004). Nor in Fawaz Gerges’ "The Far Enemy" (Cambridge University Press, 2005), or his excellent follow-up, "Journey of the Jihadist" (Harcourt Books, 2006). Nor does it appear in Rudolph Peters’ "Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam," (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996). While admittedly this is hardly an exhaustive review of the literature on contemporary Islamism and its sources, both classical and modern, it seems almost unimaginable that the distinguished scholars who wrote these definitive analyses would have all completely missed, and not even so much as mentioned, this alleged reliance on taqiyya as a political tool and religious justification by Islamists and "radical Muslims."

Nor have only the credible, serious scholars of Islam and the Islamist movements mysteriously failed to understand the supposed centrality of taqiyya in contemporary Islamism, so have many hostile and far less credible or qualified commentators with obvious political agendas. Daniel Pipes, for example, makes no mention of taqiyya in his paranoid rant "Militant Islam Reaches America" (W.W. Norton, 2003). Steven Emerson, unquestionably the most influential pioneer of the idea of a dangerous Islamist fifth column in the United States, similarly failed to mention it at all, either in "American Jihad" (Free Press, 2002), or his follow-up "Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US" (Prometheus Books, 2006).

While admitting that I am not a scholar of this subject, I do pay attention and I have seen no references to taqiyya in a positive manner from almost any Sunni Islamist sources. It might possibly be true, given the range of discourse among the world’s over 1 billion Muslims, that, as Raymond Ibrahim has claimed, "some ulema expanded the meaning of taqiyya to also permit general lying in order to advance any cause beneficial to Islam," but he does not provide any reference and I have been unable to locate any. More to the point, even the most extreme of the Islamists do not seem to understand taqiyya in this way at all, on those rare occasions that they do touch on the issue. Ibrahim’s own book, "The Al Qaeda Reader" (Broadway Books, 2007), contains a useful, predictably disturbing and often repulsive series of translations from the most extreme Islamists in the world. Among them are excerpts from a tract called "Loyalty and Enmity: An Inherited Doctrine and a Lost Reality," by Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second-in-command and chief ideologue and propagandist for Al Qaeda. In it, Zawahiri touches on the question of taqiyya, approvingly quoting the classical commentator Al-Hassan as holding that, "taqiyya is permitted only should one fear being killed, scarred or severely harmed. But who ever is forced into apostasy, it is his right to resist and refuse to respond to any utterance of infidelity, if he can." Zawahiri concludes that regarding taqiyya, "Should a Muslim encounter circumstances that expose him to murder, scarring, or severe injury, he may utter some words to stay the infidels’ torments. But he must not undertake any initiative to support them, commit sin, or enable them through any deed or killing or fighting against Muslims. Nobler for him that he should endure the torments, even if they are the cause of his death."

Therefore, even the most extreme and fanatical of the Sunni Islamists, and Zawahiri is the exemplar of this fringe, regard taqiyya as an extremely limited dispensation to do with avoiding immediate physical injury or death, and strongly encourage enduring pain, injury and death as opposed to lying or deception. As far as less extreme Sunni Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and some other Salafists, their interest in taqiyya seems limited to very occasionally using it as an element of anti-Shiite rhetoric. I wouldn’t put anything past fanatical extremists like Al Qaeda, but even an Islamist as extreme as Zawahiri does not, as a matter of fact, promote the idea that taqiyya can be used as a generalized system of lying and deception to advance the interests of Islam.

The entire purpose behind this whole campaign of misrepresentation regarding taqiyya was summed up by the Islamophobic fanatic Robert Spencer in his shameless screed, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" (Regnery Publishing, 2005). At the end of his passage on taqiyya, Spencer concludes: "Remember that the next time you see a Muslim spokesman on television professing his friendship with non-Muslim Americans and his loyalty to the United States. Of course, he may be telling the truth — but he may not be telling the whole truth or he may be just lying." Spencer is also famous for repeatedly insisting that there is no reliable method of distinguishing moderate from extremist Muslims.

Of course I wholeheartedly embrace skepticism and I would urge anyone that the next time they see anyone on television professing anything to consider that they may be lying (and if it is Robert Spencer, one may be quite certain that he is). Especially when dealing at the political level, it’s best to assume that one is not necessarily receiving the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from anyone and everyone. However, individuals and institutions establish their credibility through consistency of word and deed, and by taking principled stances that are difficult and incur personal and professional costs. In other words, generalized skepticism is a good idea, but that doesn’t mean assuming that everyone is always lying, or surrendering the rational ability to readily discern who is more or less truthful and sincere, or who deserves and has earned the right to be taken seriously and who may be dismissed as a hack, flack or wacko. Successfully making these distinctions is at the very core of any kind of effective civic and political engagement, and everyone is properly always judging everyone else on these bases.

What Robert Spencer (ironically by lying) and his colleagues are trying to do is to foreclose any possibility for anyone in or from the Muslim American community from developing such credibility and to insist that we are all, no matter what we say and especially if our views are reasonable, moderate and constructive, quite possibly or even probably lying because Islam tells us to do so. This ghastly idea has built steam in certain quarters in the United States over the past few years and needs to be more thoroughly rebutted by scholars and experts in the field. Simply put the Islamophobes, by accusing Muslims, even the radicals, of having a doctrine that religiously encourages systematic deception, are themselves lying. It is a core element of a shameless campaign to prevent the Muslim American community from building a thriving, successful and fully-engaged life in our own country.

Yesterday I suggested that religion and politics are being increasingly conflated in an irrational and unhealthy manner in the Arab world, while at the same time the factor of money is being, in an equally irrational and unhealthy fashion, bifurcated from the political register. If the role of religion in politics is a commonplace in most societies, certainly the role of money is ubiquitous and universal. This makes any conversation about the role of money in a given political culture or set of systems necessarily reductive, incomplete and insufficient. Having admitted at the outset that I am only going to be considering some of the aspects of this ubiquitous and omnipresent factor in political life in the Arab world (as with everywhere else), I do believe there is something highly significant, and in many ways disturbing, about the way many Arabs and Arab Americans regard the relationship between personal finances and political opinions and activities.

Obviously, money is at the heart of any political system. In developed societies, patronage is still the grease that oils the wheels of the political machine. In developing societies, patronage is often all-important, and when the constituency consists mainly of very poor people with meager means and urgent requirements, the ability to provide services and patronage are often the keys to the kingdom. Patronage, along with repression, are the principal means by which the authoritarian Arab governments retain power. Wealthy oil-exporting Gulf states are in a better position to provide the most generous carrots to their citizens, and expatriate foreign workers as well in terms of employment and other benefits. However, even relatively impoverished Arab states such as Egypt have built enormous bureaucracies that seem more geared to providing government employment to a large proportion of the citizenry than to performing the work and services of government. In many instances, there is a lack of social and humanitarian services, and Islamist parties have benefited greatly from filling this void in places like southern Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, parts of Egypt and elsewhere. Just as the Arab regimes and the Islamist opposition groups are fighting over whether Islam dictates loyalty or opposition to the governments, they are also competing at the level of patronage and social services.

It is also worth pointing out that, along with its strategic geographic location and the cultural and religious significance of the so-called ?holy land,? the excessive and almost entirely negative attention of the great powers to the Middle East over the past century has largely been based on money, that is to say the massive oil reserves of the Persian Gulf region (also known as ?The Prize?). For example, while it would be silly to think that the war in Iraq was launched by the Bush administration in an effort to seize control of Iraq?s oil resources, it would be equally foolish not to recognize that the main American role in the Middle East is to secure the oil supplies of the region which are the lifeblood of the global economy as a whole. Therefore, while the Iraq war was not primarily driven by any desire to seize the oil fields of Iraq, that conflict and the entire American military and commercial presence in the Persian Gulf region takes place entirely in the context of the strategic nature of the area?s oil and natural gas resources and is therefore indeed about money.

Through a combination of historical accident and political design — with the exceptions of Iraq, Iran and, to some extent also Saudi Arabia — most of the oil-rich states are sparsely populated, while most of the heavily populated countries of the Middle East do not possess large reserves of oil or natural gas. The effect has been twofold: first, it means that most of the oil wealth has been concentrated among a very small group of Arabs with the vast majority largely cut off from its benefits, a reality that has reflected itself in a great deal of resentment and worse; second, it has meant that the ability of oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to influence Arab religious and political opinion through religious, educational and media institutions has had a significant impact on the rest of the region that would otherwise have been quite impossible. Saudi Arabia?s financial clout and oil reserves make it the only Arab state that has any real leverage in dealing with Washington, and has propelled that country in recent years into a leadership position to which most other Arab states have, however grudgingly, acquiesced.

I mention these fairly commonplace, obvious and even to some extent random elements of the role of money in contemporary Arab political life essentially to acknowledge they are significant and get them out of the way, lest anyone feel that the Ibishblog is unaware of any of this, so that we may come to what I feel is a singular dysfunction in contemporary Arab perceptions of the relationship between personal finances and political attitudes. I keep repeating, perhaps ad nauseam, that religion and politics are being dangerously conflated in contemporary Arab political life, but I am equally dismayed that money, and in this case I mean specifically individual wealth and resources, are being bifurcated from the political register in a manner that reflects a serious distortion of reality.

I am not referring here to the use of money and patronage by governments. The way governments and ruling families behave reflects both the universal requirement of political authority to provide patronage and, particularly in the Gulf states, the persistence of patron-client relationships rooted in deep-seated traditions, as opposed to professional or institutional modes of interaction that characterize most modern societies. Obviously, the institutionalization and bureaucratization of patronage systems that reward ability and commitment and create systems of meritocracy instead of allegiance and personal, clan or tribal loyalty would be preferable, but patronage by governments and rulers is a universal phenomenon. It can be improved — in the Middle East quite dramatically — but cannot be eliminated as a practical matter. Patronage is not the same thing as corruption, and it can be used in the service of well functioning and meritocratic systems.

What is more striking about contemporary Arab political culture is the extent to which so many Arabs and Arab Americans seem to feel there is no natural or logical relationship between methods of making (or indeed spending) money and deeply held political opinions. I have to admit that I don?t know enough about the myriad political cultures around the world to form any definitive judgment about how unique or extreme this phenomenon may be among the Arabs as compared with other peoples, but I have a very strong sense that we have achieved a rare degree of bifurcation between personal finances and political attitudes. The levels of hypocrisy, insincerity and shameless deception and self-deception in this regard that I have encountered among wealthy and well-to-do Arabs in the Middle East and Arab Americans can only be described as scandalous. In contemporary Arab political culture there seems to be a generalized acceptance, at least among the bourgeoisie, that any means of making money is legitimate and that there is no relationship between political attitudes, affiliations and goals on the one hand and business activities on the other. What is even more amazing is that no one seems to be shocked by, or even notice the astonishing irreconcilability between what so many wealthy or prominent Arabs and Arab-Americans say and apparently believe, and what they then actually do with most of their time and effort.

I can think off the top of my head of literally scores of examples of Arabs and Arab Americans who railed and raged against the Iraq war, and then proceeded to make money, in some cases many millions, in its service. I can think of hundreds of examples of people who express nothing but vitriol against the United States government and anyone in the Arab-American community who engages respectfully with it at the policy level, but who think nothing at the same time of entering into contracts with government agencies such as the departments of State and Defense, among many others. I know many young people in our community whose education and upbringing was literally paid for by their parents working in the service of either the US or Arab governments actively promoting and pursuing policies that both and they and their children denounce, abhor and despise. I?m not suggesting that anyone should agree with US foreign policy or the behavior of Arab states, or not denounce, abhor or despise them if they so choose. What I am suggesting is that it is a sort of political schizophrenia, to put it kindly, to nonchalantly base one?s livelihood on entities and programs with which one is otherwise obsessed with passionately hating. There is nothing wrong with accepting government contracts that support the Iraq war if one is in support of or even ambivalent about it. There is nothing wrong with opposing and denouncing the war, as I did beginning in late 2001 when I began to publicly predict the United States would make an enormous blunder and invade Iraq. But there is something absolutely bizarre about combining the two and finding nothing unusual or remarkable in this, and to have an entire community ? or at least one socio-economic class in an entire community ? behave as if they do not notice or do not care about this fantastic degree of hypocrisy.

Obviously, some people have no choice. Some people do what they must to feed their families, and they cannot be blamed for that. Soldiers, sworn officers, government officials, etc. are bound to uphold the policy decisions of political leaderships or, in some cases, have the option of resigning ? but it is asking a great deal to sacrifice an ongoing career to make a temporary political point. I am not talking about working-class people with few options, or individuals who have entered into a sworn relationship with a government whose policies they may disagree with but which they are bound to obey. I am talking about people with many options, people who work themselves, or younger people whose parents work, for or have lucrative contracts with, organizations and governments in the United States and the Arab world whose policies and activities they despise and denounce. There appears to be a special zone of irresponsibility or, more precisely, unaccountability, when it comes to any form of commercial activity or financial transaction. The incompatibility of a political stridency that militates strongly against those for whom and for what people are actually working appears to have been normalized among a certain class of Arabs and Arab Americans.

The most galling aspect of it all is that a fair number of individuals (or members of their nuclear family) making a handsome living off of Arab regimes or US government agencies and organizations turn out to be among the fiercest critics of anyone who takes a more constructive approach towards dealing with governments, not for profit, but for achieving positive policy changes and political progress. In some quarters it is implicitly held to be immoral to try to develop a positive, constructive working relationship on policy with the US or Arab governments, but completely proper to enter into for-profit relationships that support and enable existing policies and only serve to pad individual bank accounts. There is no need to name individuals here. The point is not to indict any specific persons or families in the Middle East or in the United States, and besides the list would simply be too long to endure compiling, even based on nothing more than my own personal knowledge and experience. The point is that this bifurcation of the realm of commercial activities from the register of political commitments and affiliations is a significant problem in contemporary Arab and Arab-American political culture, and the source of some of the most outrageous hypocrisy and double-speak imaginable.

The only thing that can be added in defense of individuals and families that take pride in vociferously denouncing governments and policies while shamelessly making tidy profits out of the same activities or institutions is that this hypocrisy is basically mimicking the behavior of many of the Arab regimes themselves. Insofar as such people have been influenced by the political culture fostered by the governments of the Arab world, perhaps they can be forgiven for believing that it is perfectly normal and respectable to say one thing and do the opposite. Very few Arab states have been honest with their publics about the way they perceive their national interests and their actual diplomatic positions. Instead, official and semiofficial media in the Arab world generally speaking promote a worldview that is strongly at variance, if not indeed the polar opposite, of the way their governments actually perceive regional realities and their national interests.

The government of Egypt, for example, was absolutely unable to explain to the Egyptian people during the Gaza war why it could not consider opening the Rafah border crossing even though those reasons were readily intelligible to anyone who understood the way the Egyptian government perceives its strategic situation and fundamental national interests. If the Egyptian government, or official or semiofficial media, ever really tried to explain its actual national security policies and the logic that underlies them to the Egyptian public, I am not aware of it. Even during the confrontation with Hezbollah after the Gaza war, the main Egyptian government position was that Hezbollah?s actions in Egypt and Gaza were unacceptable because in effect they aided Israel. It?s possible that this argument might have worked for some Egyptians in this one instance, but it only underscores the extraordinary gap between official and semiofficial Egyptian rhetoric about national interests and foreign policies and the actual policies and interests pursued by the Egyptian government.

I am not singling Egypt out as a particularly egregious case, since I think almost all Arab states engage in this exceptionally misguided behavior, which only leads rapidly to destroying their credibility and ability to communicate effectively with their own people about national interests and policies. But, given my complaint that a large number of wealthy and well-to-do Arabs and Arab Americans say one thing politically and do something else commercially, it seems only fair to point out that the Arab governments themselves have pioneered the bifurcation of what one says and what one does. Applied to governments, this produces an irreconcilable gap between official rhetoric and actual policy; applied to individuals, it produces an irreconcilable gap between political pronouncements and personal financial and commercial behavior. Hypocrisy is universal, and the Arabs have no monopoly on it. But some governments and individuals seem determined to achieve levels of hypocrisy and self-delusion bordering on schizophrenia.

As an important follow-up to my last two postings, I think we need to consider in a little more detail the role of two crucial factors in contemporary Arab politics: religion and money. I would argue that whereas increasingly religion and politics are being conflated in an irrational and unhealthy manner, the factor of money, particularly individual and family finances and fortunes, is being, in an equally irrational and unhealthy fashion, bifurcated from the political register in much of contemporary Arab political culture. In this posting I?m going to deal in a little more depth with the problem of religion and politics in the Arab world. I will come to the question of money in my next posting.

In my posting on “why the Arabs don’t revolt?” I argued that one of the factors preventing many Arabs from engaging in Iranian-style mass protests was concern over the potential for widespread social unrest leading to the seizure of power by religious extremists. In fact, the increasing conflation of the religious and political registers of individual and social life cuts in both directions: it spurs a certain kind of opposition to governments through “revolutionary” Muslim organizations, and without question Islamists now constitute the most powerful, and in some cases the only effective, opposition movements in many Arab states. However, religion is also deployed by governments to legitimate their authority and undermine challenges to ruling elites. Arab states, quite literally, employ large numbers of clerics who, no matter how socially conservative and reactionary, are loyal and preach loyalty to the regimes, and to spare no opportunity to remind the Muslim faithful of the unacceptability of ?fitna? and rebellion against authority. Of course, politicized Salafists like the Muslim Brothers, and all those who follow the logic of Sayyid Qutb et al, reject this idea out of hand, since they regard present Arab societies as at least insufficiently Islamic, if not outrightly in a condition of ?jahiliyya? (pre-Islamic ignorance). However, the traditional attitude in most Islamic societies has tended to hold that political authority should be respected as a default and matter of course, and that challenging such authority is more dangerous to social cohesion and a supposedly “Islamic way of life” than the occasional or even chronic misuse of power.

Therefore, the governments not only undermine pressure for either meaningful reforms or widespread social unrest by ensuring that the main opposition groups are religious extremists with limited popular appeal and very alarming qualities in the minds of much of the rest of society, they also appeal to traditional aspects of Islamic thought about the relationship between political power and clerical authority, especially in Sunni traditions. While many in the West seem not to understand this, with some interesting and important exceptions, the general rule in the Muslim world historically has been a clear distinction between the political power of sultans, emirs and the other civic authorities versus the clerical authority wielded by Muslim judges, scholars and experts in Islamic law. As I’ve noted before, this distinction between civil and clerical authority has been very differently constructed in the Islamic world than it has been in Western societies, sometimes leading Westerners, and indeed Muslims as well, to assert or presume that there has never been any “separation of mosque and state.” In some senses, of course, this is true, but this has rarely meant that clerical authority and political authority have been synonymous. Indeed, it’s probably the case that Ayatollah Khomeini’s radical concept of “vilayyat e-faqih,” or the rule of the jurisprudential scholars, (essentially the notion that a clerical authority ought to have the final sway in the political realm above and beyond more overtly political leadership) was not only a unique (and possibly uniquely unfortunate) innovation in Islamic political philosophy, but it also has been the most recent major contribution to philosophical/theological political theory in the Islamic tradition. The practical application of this novel concept is now fully on display in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities.

Abdel Karim Soroush has argued that while Shiite communities have tended towards accepting what he has termed ?divine politics,? or political forms of religious authority, Sunni traditions generally have not. He also claims that conversely Shiites have been more inclined to philosophical and scientific empiricism while Sunnis have tended more towards deterministic and divine-will explanations of natural and social phenomena (this second point seems far more debatable to me, but plausible enough to take seriously). There is obviously an element of the reductive generalization in any such observation, particularly when one considers the enormous scientific and philosophical achievements of earlier Sunni Muslim civilizations. However, in the contemporary world, this observation does at least partially help to explain why Shiite Islamist parties in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have been so much more successful at building political authority within their own societies and communities than Arab Sunni Islamists of whatever variety. And, of course, Arab governments have shamelessly used not only legitimate concerns about Iranian hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, but also completely bigoted and indefensible anti-Shiite sentiments — and even paranoia — in their efforts to combat Islamist opposition groups, including Sunni organizations, and to set Sunni and Shiite Muslims against each other for their own benefit. These tactics have been reasonably successful in curbing, for example, the popularity of Hezbollah among some Arab Sunnis who might otherwise be more enthusiastic about the organization, and to undermine Arab Sunni allies of Iran such as Hamas.

Therefore, the conflation of the religious and the political has been used to almost entirely ill effect by both governments and Islamist opposition groups. Governments use official Islam to legitimate their power and behavior. Islamist opposition groups use their own revolutionary versions of Islam to destabilize the governments and seek power in order to impose reactionary theocratic or quasi-theocratic new regimes. In both instances, the interests of Arab societies and the prospects for their healthy and progressive development are greatly damaged by the excessive emphasis on religious legitimation by both autocratic governments and reactionary opposition groups. It is hard to imagine a more unhealthy situation than one in which official government-sponsored clerics tell the Arab publics not to question their leaders too strongly because it would be some kind of un-Islamic fitna, while at the same time Islamist clerics tell people it is their religious duty to pursue reactionary theocratic dictatorships. Of course there are plenty of apolitical forms of Islam in the Middle East, ranging from mystical Sufis to Salafists concerned only with their own personal conduct. But apolitical religiosity is no social or political solution either. The only way forward is the reconstitution of the Arab center and center-left, and the reintroduction of a robust Arab secular discourse and political narrative. The dysfunctional authoritarian regimes, in so far as they continue to resist reform, are incapable of building prosperous, pluralistic and thriving societies. As long as the Islamists are the only plausible alternative, the prospect that they may come to power is likely to remain anathema to enough of the citizenry of the Arab states that the current regimes can continue to limp along for the foreseeable future. This dynamic has been a key factor in creating the Arab political stagnation of recent decades, and guarantees that it will continue until an alternative to this unacceptable binary is allowed to develop.

Real hope for a better political future in the Arab world demands and requires the de-coupling of religion and politics, or at least a return to the widespread recognition of earlier decades that these are, in fact, distinct registers of political and social life. Islam is a religion, not a political program, which is why even though it has been in existence since the 1920s, the oldest Muslim Brotherhood organization, the MB of Egypt, has never been able to come up with anything remotely resembling a program of governance, economic development or anything of the kind, and has relied almost entirely on the vapid, meaningless and indeed politically ludicrous slogan ?Islam huwa al-haal? (?Islam is the solution?). There is no question that the Arabs are and will remain for the foreseeable future a deeply religious people and that Islam will continue to be a potent force at all levels of society, and will be used by all sources of authority to legitimate their actions (even Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Qaddafi and other relatively secular leaders frequently invoked Islam whenever they became desperate). Obviously, religion is not going to go away and Islam is going to remain a potent force in Arab society.

However, the conflation of the political and religious registers by both governments and Islamist opposition groups lies at the very heart of the present Arab malaise, and constitutes one of the most significant barriers to overcoming the ongoing stagnation of Arab politics and culture. In most Arab societies for most of the 20th century, there was a much healthier attitude about the relationship between religion and politics. There is no reason that the Arabs cannot regain and indeed improve upon previous widespread understandings that religion and politics may be related but they are not, and cannot be allowed to become, synonymous. The key to recuperating an Arab center and center-left political narrative that recognizes and promotes an understanding of this distinction, and which again champions secularism in the Arab world, will probably depend on the willingness and ability of existing governments to recognize that if they continue to leave the Arab peoples with the unacceptable binary presently available, at best they will continue to preside over stagnation and degeneration, and at worst they will be the ones responsible for the ultimate victory of their reactionary, theocratic opponents.

A reader of the Ibishblog asks me, ?Don?t you think that your opinions are severely disconnected from those of Middle Easterners living in the Middle East?? I think this is the most interesting and complex question anyone has yet to ask me since I started blogging a few weeks ago.

First of all, I think it?s important to note that opinions in the Middle East vary widely. I?m sure that a very large number of people in the Middle East don?t agree with a lot of what I have to say, but given my strong connections to the Middle East, my upbringing in Beirut, my wide range of experiences, etc., I don?t think one can describe them as ?severely disconnected.? To be sure, there is a kind of received wisdom in the region, especially regarding questions about Palestine, that is not only dominant but hegemonic, and might be described as ?The Narrative.? A lot of what I say challenges and deviates from ?The Narrative,? but any form of political discourse that amounts to a regurgitation, in whatever form, of the essential elements of ?The Narrative? might constitute an opinion, but it does not constitute thinking. The reality is that both internally within their own societies, and externally with regard to regional and international dynamics, Arabs generally speaking don?t have a great deal of power, and tend to cling tenaciously to ?The Narrative? in many cases as an alternative to the admittedly painful process of considering what our real situation and our actual options in fact are. However, strict adherence to a rigid and received narrative is the very antithesis of thinking, as it necessitates a kind of fidelity to certain constructs that may be imaginary, anachronistic, no longer relevant or simply mythological. This is a perfect example of the veritable ?box? the hoary cliché urges one to think outside of.

There are, of course, many brave and important voices in the Middle East itself that do deviate from ?The Narrative,? but many more who, in spite of knowing better and speaking sense privately, have exercised self-censorship because of the hegemonic power it wields, and an even larger number who prefer the comfort it provides to the pain of confronting some fairly harsh elements of existing realities. However, since any hegemonic narrative constitutes an insuperable obstacle to clearheaded and imaginative strategic thinking, I believe confronting ?The Narrative,? insofar as its serves to impede rather than enhance Arab national interests and social and economic development, is an overriding and paramount imperative. Obviously, this has already and will continue to annoy a great many people. However, there are many others who are greatly appreciative of the willingness of some of us to begin to think outside the confines of the received wisdom of the contemporary Arab national narrative.

What is fascinating is that there sometimes seems to be more of an appetite for this kind of sincere reconsideration of where the Arabs are, where they are going and what they need, in the Arab world than in the Arab diaspora. Diaspora communities tend to cling more tenaciously to received wisdoms and hegemonic narratives imported in a derivative manner from their countries of origin during the time of their migration. These ideas often get fixed and clung to with an emotional intensity that isn?t necessarily found within the societies of origin themselves. In the Arab world, governments can be relied upon to enforce ?The Narrative,? whereas in the diaspora, social pressure and self-censorship seem to be even more powerful than any mukhabarat. My colleagues and I at the American Task Force on Palestine, for example, have been gratified that the organization is generally very well-regarded and very well-received in Palestine, where the need for a serious Palestinian-American policy organization in Washington that tries to work within the system to advance Palestinian as well as American national interests, is readily understood. It is my very strong impression that there is a great deal more skepticism in the Palestinian and Arab diaspora in the United States about such a project, and considerable hostility in certain quarters to the very idea of working with and within the foreign-policy establishment of our own country to promote both Palestinian and American interests.

Most of my career has been geared towards securing an end to the occupation, the creation of a Palestinian state, improved relations between the US and the Arab world, and challenging and debunking Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in the West, and I certainly think that the vast majority of Arabs would strongly support these goals. There may be some misunderstanding on the part of some people, whether living in the Middle East or as Arabs in the United States, about how these aims can best be pursued in the United States by Arab Americans. There is no question that I am part of a fairly small group of people within our community that is deliberately and methodically pursuing a new approach to advancing these goals, based on new strategies, new language, and new attitudes. I think it would be quite unreasonable for anyone in the Middle East to suggest that Arab Americans are not well positioned to develop effective strategies for pursuing these common goals that may not be immediately obvious, or even easy to understand, from a strictly Middle Eastern point of view (even one currently residing somewhere in the United States). The point is that we cannot proceed any longer on the basis of a derivative discourse. Arab Americans need their own approach, based on a commitment to the American national interest and to working within the system, to promote these essential goals. Arab Americans who remain strictly committed to various iterations of ?The Narrative,? and who retain an essentially oppositional and hostile attitude towards the American government and political system have guaranteed their own irrelevancy and failure.

On the other hand, when it comes to my own personal deep commitment to secularism and agnosticism, there may indeed be a profound disconnect from generalized attitudes in the Arab world. I believe that Arabs at almost every level of society have tended, over the past 30 years or so, to erroneously and potentially catastrophically conflate the registers of the religious and the political. It is here, I think, that a strong disconnect may actually exist not only in terms of goals and interests, but rather at the level of fundamental beliefs and values. When I was a boy in Beirut in the 1960s and 70s, secularism ? by which I mean the strict neutrality of the state on matters concerning religion ? was certainly not a universal value by any means, but was a highly respected and legitimate position adopted by a great deal of the intelligentsia, political elite and ordinary people. Since the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamism, a generalized deterioration in the appreciation of the distinction between the political and the religious registers of individual and social life has been positively disastrous. It threatens, if it goes any further, to become absolutely catastrophic, and I will have more to say about this in one of my very next postings.

Sadiq al-Azm and other leading intellectuals continue to bemoan this cultural degeneration, which has promoted a religiosity shorn of spirituality and universal human values, and is instead obsessed with regulating daily activities and restricting the range of choices available to people in a most preposterous, irrational and abusive manner. This has been accompanied by an intellectual deterioration, a lack of sophisticated engagement with much of what is most useful in the intellectual development of the rest of the world (and not just the West by any means), and an intensification of a closing down of what might be called Arab discourse in general. In other words, the Arab world has generally speaking been degenerating rather than progressing over the past few decades. Obviously, there are important exceptions to this, and I wouldn?t want to engage in any reductive stereotyping or fail to acknowledge the (sadly limited) pockets of genuine intellectual, political and artistic dynamism that continue to thrive in spite of a generalized cultural degeneration. There are plenty of inspirational people, groups and institutions in the Arab world, and no reason to be simplistically pessimistic. However, the general trends and the basic realities are, for the most part, getting worse and not better.

If this sounds harsh, that?s because it is. Between the hegemonic political straitjacket of ?The Narrative? and the resurgence of a new, obscurantist and reactionary form of Islam, the Arab world has entered into a period of unprecedented malaise. If many people in the Middle East find all of this somehow comforting or positive, here we certainly disagree. I suppose it?s possible that in this sense, some of my opinions are indeed severely disconnected from those of some Middle Easterners living in the Middle East. Like James Joyce?s Stephen Dedalus ? and with exactly the same spirit and multivalent range of meanings, refuting both teleological fantasies regarding the will of God, and the deterministic and hegemonic primacy of ?The Narrative? ? I wish to tell our own Arab Garrett Abu-Deasys: ?History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.?

Several people have been urging me to do a posting on the Ibishblog on question of why the Arab publics, who live under a collection of despotic regimes, one-party states, failed and semi-failed states, absolute monarchies, military juntas and family/tribal fiefdoms haven’t ever (or at least in living memory) publicly revolted in the same way that so many Iranians have taken to the streets in defense of their rights and for more open, transparent government. Obviously, this is an extremely complex and over-determined question, but I think it might be worth pointing out some of the more obvious factors that have inhibited rebellion of the Iranian variety in the Arab world.

First, it’s worth pointing out that with a couple of exceptions, most notably Lebanon which has a very weird, deeply flawed and sectarian but nonetheless democratic system, people in the Arab world generally know perfectly well that they don’t have any meaningful political or civil rights. Hamid Dabashi has been one of the most forceful commentators in describing, I think perfectly accurately, the uprising in Iran against the ruling elite as being essentially a "civil rights movement." In other words, what has driven Iranians into the streets in defiance of government oppression is a sense that rights that they believed that they had have suddenly and blatantly been taken from them in the most crude and indeed brutal manner. Until the recent election fraud/military coup, or however one wants to characterize the grotesque usurpation from within the system that has taken place within Iran, most Iranians did believe that they possessed a set of limited but reliable civil and political rights within the rubric of the "Islamic Republic." In other words, they believed that they were free to choose in elections between approved candidates willing to operate within the essential framework of the Iranian political system (one commentator aptly describe the range of choices available as analogous to an American conservative gamut running roughly from figures approximating Bob Dole-style moderate conservatism all the way to the David Duke-KKK extreme right).

Following the crude and blatant election fraud, the Iranian public has essentially been told, "April fool, your votes don’t count." Following the crackdown on demonstrations after the first few days of tolerated dissent, they’ve similarly been informed that the right to protest, freely assemble, and express grievances towards their government were also illusory and have been, in effect, canceled. The same applies to other forms of civil rights, such as free speech within certain limits, freedom of conscience and other elements of post-revolution Iran that were supposed to give meaning to the republican part of the "Islamic Republic." Mousavi has said that the present crisis is a test of whether "Islamic republicanism" is actually a possibility, or is an oxymoron. Unsurprisingly, the latter is increasingly proving to be obviously the case, as theocracy and not only democracy, but also pluralism and civil rights, simply do not go together. The situation has been made worse by the fact that the entire fiasco is being driven by an internal takeover within the regime by a military/intelligence clique dependent on, and appointed and led by Ayatollah Khamenei, usurping the authority of a more traditional clerical and revolutionary elite within the Iranian ruling circles. The people in the streets are outraged that their votes don’t count, they’re not allowed to protest, and their supposed right to free speech and assembly have been canceled (if they ever really existed in practice at all). Clerics in Qom and other religious establishment figures are appalled to find that a bureaucratic national security state clique has usurped power entirely and marginalized the old guard of the "Islamic Republic." When people feel that their rights have been suddenly taken away from them, or that a new and unaccountable clique has seized power, outrage is the inevitable response.

None of this applies in the Arab world. The sad fact is that the Arabs know full well that they don’t have meaningful political or civil rights, with a very limited exception of Lebanon (and, in some odd and also very limited ways, in the West Bank and Iraq too, but under conditions of internal strife and occupation). The sad truth is that in almost all cases, Arabs know that their votes don’t count, that they don’t have freedom of speech, assembly or conscience, and that they live under strictly authoritarian or totalitarian systems. In some cases these are enforced with sheer brutality, and in other cases with financial rewards for quiescence as an additional inducement to passivity. In all cases, the sticks are well-known and frequently used, in other cases (mainly the oil-exporting Gulf countries) the carrots are also very enticing. The combination seems to have been extremely effective, at least for now.

A second factor, which may be even more important, are extremely legitimate fears of the consequences of open rebellion in the Arab world. The two likely consequences of such rebellion in many cases, at least in the minds of many people, are even more unpalatable than the dysfunctional and heavy-handed states currently in place. In every Arab country, the principal opposition is the Islamist ultra-right. They have very strong support, but it certainly limited in almost every country to a distinct minority, in few cases exceeding 20-25% of public opinion at most. The rest of society is deeply disturbed at the prospect of theocratic rule by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or analogous organizations. I think there is a very real, and extremely realistic and accurate, sense that replacing existing regimes with Islamist revolutionary governments would be anything but an improvement on the present situation for most people. It could well be argued that the Arab regimes have promoted exactly this situation by systematically cracking down on all liberal and left-of-center opposition groups while allowing religious extremists a degree of political space in which to operate and organize. All of this, of course, was with the enthusiastic support of the West which always preferred, especially during the Cold War, religious conservatives to anything smacking of socialism.

Obviously, it is socially more difficult to interfere with organizations that hide behind religious structures in order to operate, but it’s also politically useful for governments to have unreasonable and extremist opponents who will fail to appeal to a majority of sensible people. The details vary from country to country, but in almost every case the center and the left has been persecuted, marginalized and crushed (or discredited by being co-opted by the regimes), while the religious right has been allowed a certain degree of space to operate within mosques and Islamic institutions, and for certain complex historical reasons has risen in every single Arab country to constitute the main, and in many cases the only, properly organized opposition. I think a very large number of Arabs prefer to continue to deal with the devil they know to be highly problematic in their own governments, as opposed to a devil they know to be even worse in the Islamist opposition groups. It is almost certain that, given the paucity of centrist and leftist organizations that are organized and effective, any public uprising that effectively destabilized existing governments would open the door almost inevitably to the rise of extreme Islamist parties to power. The Iranian case may have emboldened Arab Islamists, but it has certainly spooked the general Arab public in the same way.

The other alternative, obviously, is open-ended civil conflict and failed-state status. Lebanon and Iraq are already at the very least semi-failed states. Somalia is absolutely a failed state. It isn’t very difficult to imagine that widespread civil unrest, if it didn’t result quickly in the seizure of power by Islamist extremists which would be more oppressive, brutal and obscurantist than existing governments, would give way to open-ended chaos and failed-state status. These alternatives certainly explain the otherwise confounding ability of the Ba’athist regime in Syria to continue to survive in spite of all of its myriad failings, inadequacies and unacceptability. Assad survives in an authoritarian, unpopular and sectarian minority-dominated Alawite regime because the two alternatives are deemed by most Syrians and regional actors as absolutely unacceptable: Muslim Brotherhood takeover or Iraq-style chaos. Indeed, not only does this prevent (along with shameless repression by the regime itself) the Syrian public from taking to the streets as the Iranians have done, but also prompted Syria’s main regional rivals and opponents — Saudi Arabia and Israel — to intervene with the Bush administration to argue strongly against a campaign of regime change during the era of neoconservative intoxication in Washington between 2002-2004.

The Arab center and left finds itself in the unpalatable position of having to choose between working within the systems that provide an unacceptably limited space for civil society and political pluralism versus adopting positions and strategies that would, under the present circumstances, only serve to usher in a period of either theocratic dictatorship or generalized chaos. Some, especially on the far left, seem to have convinced themselves that the best way to move towards the center and the left in the Arab world is to charge headlong towards the extreme right. This seems absolutely irrational, and the prospects of progressive change under Islamist rule strike me very strongly as much more implausible than gradual reform within the admittedly unacceptable existing political structures in most Arab states. You could call it a Hobson’s choice, or a devil’s bargain, or anything you like, but in the real political world one must seriously consider the practical consequences of the real choices that have to be made. Obviously what is required is for the Arab center and left to work diligently, patiently and boldly to create more space for political pluralism and civil society within existing structures and to use whatever limited reforms are currently underway or being contemplated, and always push for ever greater reforms, and to rebuild a progressive Arab political narrative and agenda that can serve as an alternative to both abusive authoritarian regimes and the obviously far worse option of theocratic dictatorship.

At some point, the dam will burst and there will be significant, perhaps even radical change in the Arab Middle East. If the Arab regimes do not begin to seriously move to create more space for civil society, political pluralism and the ability of the center and the left to begin to rebuild their organizations, narratives and agendas, then the flood will be an Islamist one. This is in the interests neither of the present governments nor of the general publics of the Arab world, and must be avoided at all costs. Both the regimes and the center and left opposition groups must also, in order to avoid such a catastrophe, move beyond the monomaniacal obsession with the conflict with Israel, and begin to pay serious attention to domestic social, economic and political development in the Arab world. This doesn’t mean abandoning the cause of Palestine, by any means. It means augmenting concern and support for the Palestinians with a healthy understanding that the Arab world has a panoply problems with which it must deal, and that governments must not hide behind the conflict to resist reform, while the center and the left must not give way to abandoning its broader social, political and economic agenda in order to simply support anything and everything (at present, usually Islamist) that presents itself as the vanguard of "the resistance." The day may come, and soon, when the Arab public demands and achieves major change in their societies, and even revolt against their governments, but it must never be the case that the Arabs are, so to speak, "revolting."

Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli jazz musician, proponent of a single Israeli-Palestinian state, and political charlatan. His article, recently published on multiple websites, "Thinking Outside of the Secular Box," represents the very worst in neo-Orientalist and frankly racist objectification of Arabs, Muslims and especially Palestinians, and is one of the weakest defenses for supporting the Islamist ultra-right yet produced from the Western left. It embodies, I think, almost everything that is worst about the way some Western leftists approach questions involving the Muslim world generally and Palestine in particular. The entire article is worth carefully reading as an index of how not to approach solidarity with Palestinians and other Arab or Muslim peoples and causes.

Atzmon begins by making a categorical assertion that Westerners and Muslims are simply fundamentally different categories of people, since, “Our human conditions are imposed on us; we are a product of our culture.” It is unrealistic and unfair, he suggests, for Westerners or any other liberals, leftists or progressives to hold Palestinians or other Muslims to any universal standards of human rights, particularly the social and political pluralism inherent in secularism, since “secularism is in itself a natural outcome of Christian culture.” Atzmon apparently believes that only Christian societies can have governments that are neutral on matters of religion. “Islam and Judaism, unlike Christianity," he argues, "are tribally orientated belief systems.” I won’t pass any judgment on questions involving Judaism, although this doesn’t correspond with the Judaism I have experienced from most Jews I have met and dealt with in my life. However, the notion that Islam is essentially a "tribally-oriented belief system" is simply preposterous. Islam is a universalist faith that, at least theologically, is categorically and unequivocally opposed to ethno-centrism, racism, tribalism or anything of the kind. It’s certainly true that in much of the postcolonial world in Asia and Africa in which the majority of Muslims live, tribal systems dominate cultural and political structures, but this is extraneous to the logic and systems of thought built-in to most forms of Islamic theology. The two phenomena are parallel and co-exist, but are in many ways more contradictory than complementary.

Not only are Muslims incapable of being secularists and are inherently tribalist, not only culturally but in terms of the essence of the theology of their religion, “Like in the case of Rabbinical Judaism, that is totally foreign to the spirit of Enlightenment, Islam is largely estranged to those values of Eurocentric Modernism and rationality.” I have to admit to feeling personally insulted by this absolutely disgusting regurgitation of blatant racism by Atzmon. I think it’s perfectly true that religious faith and superstition have a complex and often contentious relationship with Enlightenment rationalism and modernity in general, but this is certainly not unique to Judaism or Islam, and it is readily to be found in Christian societies, and most certainly here in the United States. There is no question that the entire postcolonial world is struggling to come to grips with a modernity that is largely the product of Western history over the past 600 years, and has spread through different means, largely colonial, throughout the world. However, the idea that Islam and the Muslims are therefore incapable of becoming fully-interpolated modern subjects imbued with both of the essence of their traditional faith and the reality of their full and equal participation in a modern, rational post-Enlightenment global society is simply insulting as well as positively idiotic.

Atzmon then extrapolates this ridiculous line of thinking to the question of Palestine writing, "I have recently accused a genuine Leftist and good activist of being an Islamophobe for blaming Hamas for being ‘reactionary’.” If it is “Islamophobic” to call the fundamentalist religious ultra-right “reactionary,” then neither term has any meaning whatsoever. Atzmon tries to justify his opposition to recognizing the political nature of Hamas’ ideology by arguing that, “in Islam there is no real separation between the spiritual and the political. The notion of political Islam (Islamism) may as well be a Western delusional reading of Islam. I pointed out that Political Islam, and even the rare implementation of ‘armed jihad’, are merely Islam in practice.” To call this extremely simplistic would be far too generous. In fact, it’s a caricature, and an Orientalist (in the worst sense of the term) and indeed a racist one. In fact, without going into the details, throughout almost all of Islamic history there has been a clear distinction between political and clerical authority, and while this distinction has taken on very different forms than those in the West, it is completely false to suggest that Muslims have not and cannot embrace a separation between the political and the religious registers of social life. It is to suggest, among other things, that all Muslims are naturally Islamists, that Arab and Muslim secularists are frauds and phonies, and that all the progressive movements in the Middle East over the past hundred years and more are fundamentally inauthentic and illegitimate.

Atzmon asserts that Hamas is not only the actual leadership of the Palestinian people, and the authentic, genuine and popular expression of Palestinian social and political sentiment, but that any questioning of this idea is simply racist Western liberals imposing their own narrow values on the Palestinian people: “Rather than loving ourselves through the Palestinians and at their expense, we need to accept Palestinians for what they are and support them for who they are regardless of our own views on things. This is the only real form of solidarity.” Atzmon might put down his saxophone long enough to start to understand that most Palestinians, while certainly a conservative people and fairly religious, are, have been and remain essentially secular in their political orientation. The majority of Palestinians have never been Islamist in their essential political outlook, and it remains so to this day, with the PLO remaining significantly more popular than Hamas in most opinion polls over the past 15 years. The parliamentary election victory by Hamas in 2006, with 44% of the votes cast for candidates running under their auspices, hardly represents a decisive victory for Islamism or against secularism, rationalism and Enlightenment values among Palestinians. The result was the product of a series of deeply overdetermined factors, including frustration with lack of progress on peace and independence, disgust with corruption and mismanagement by Fatah, local political concerns, and many other factors. It also occurred at a moment of Hamas’ maximum organizational power and popularity, and an internal implosion within Fatah. At any rate, the idea that Palestinians, like all other Arabs and Muslims, are basically at heart reactionary Islamists permanently and inevitably alienated from secularism, rationalism and all aspects of the Enlightenment is a familiar theme of Western racist discourse, and it isn’t any less repulsive coming from a Jewish Israeli leftist than it would be from a mustachioed British colonial colonel.

Having pronounced Palestinians to be irretrievably reactionary, Islamist and alienated from rationalism, the Enlightenment and modernity, Atzmon urges his readers to embrace this imaginary and deliciously exotic Arab pet, since, "If we claim to be compassionate about people we better learn to love them for what they are rather than what we expect them to be." Of course, Atzmon is in love with the Palestinians who behave as he expects them to, that is to say the reactionary fundamentalist ultra-right of Hamas and its core Islamist supporters. As for the rest of the Palestinians, he just doesn’t recognize their authenticity or legitimacy.

All of this is painfully reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s outrageous refusal to draw any distinctions between elements of the Iraqi resistance to the American occupation she was willing to support even during the time of Zarqawi’s campaign the mass murder of Iraqis and snuff videos on the Internet among other mind boggling abuses and atrocities (all in the name of the most vicious reactionary agenda imaginable). Roy said simply, "the Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle," without drawing any distinctions or making any effort to distinguish between groups operating in Iraq with a radically different goals and methods, including Zarqawi’s forces of pure, unmitigated evil. She rationalized this irredeemably unprincipled position by arguing, "if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity,” which is an absolutely ridiculous formulation that suggests there can be no space between what may be difficult to stomach versus what is absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances, and which completely ignores the question of what the ultimate agenda behind such actions in fact is.

Atzmon’s racism is simply breathtaking. He actually wants the Palestinians and the other Muslims to be anti-rational, anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment and supporters of ultra-right-wing, reactionary religious fundamentalist parties. Why he wants this, only he can say. But if he has the courage of his convictions, Atzmon should convert to an ultraconservative version of Islam, leave his hip London jazz scene and move to Gaza or better yet southern Afghanistan, become an armed member of a salafist-jihadist gang, and possibly start wearing a burqa.