The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations.

Please note: The views expressed in the articles and in CGNews-PiH are those of the authors, not of CGNews or its affiliates.

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Article #1
Title: Arab view dims on Iraq rebels
Author:Dan Murphy and Nicholas Blanford
Publication: Christian Science Monitor
Date: November 2, 2004
Murphy and Banford illustrate that "clear lines are being drawn in people's minds between what is seen as 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' resistance" in Iraq. Looking at newspaper articles and speaking with intellectuals, politicians and ordinary people across the Arab world, they demonstrate a growing criticism of violent actions committed in the name of Islam.

Article #2
Title: Fear dominant in Arab psyche
Author: Youssef M. Ibrahim
Publication: Middle East Times
Date: October 26, 2004
In a change from the many articles that focus primarily on Western "fear", Ibrahim explains how fear affects the Arab psyche. Looking at the implications of this concept, he arges that if Arab writers and pundits cannot analyze and address Arab fear, "we cannot even being to reform...And if we cannot reform, what is left of Arab civilization wll evaporate making place for a new agenda set by someone else."

Article #3
Title: Why the U.S. should engage moderate Muslims everywhere
Author: Radwan A. Masmoudi
Publication: The Daily Star
Date: October 26, 2004
"To win the war on terror, the U.S. needs the support of the majority of the 1.4 billion Muslims around the globe." In this article, Masmoudi makes four recommendations to the United States on how to reach this goal.

Article #4
Title: Why is the legacy of confrontation so strong?
Author: Rami G. Khouri
Publication: ~~Common Ground Series~~ in partnership with Al Hayat
Date: October 3, 2004
Khouri's article is the second in a series on Arab/Muslim - Western Relations commissioned by Search for Common Ground that has been running in Middle Eastern publications over the last month. His article explains why it is too simple to consider the relationship between the Arab/Muslim world and the West as "a worsening cycle of war, threats, fears, and savage killings."

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Article #1
Arab view dims on Iraq rebels
Dan Murphy and Nicholas Blanford
(CAIRO AND BEIRUT)More than a year and a half after the US invasion of Iraq, popular support in the Arab world for the insurgents is softening - somewhat.
With images of civilian casualties from US airstrikes set against insurgent slayings of unarmed Iraqi police and civilians, Arabs and the Arab media are increasingly struggling with the question of how far to support an insurgency that sometimes uses tactics they feel are immoral.
Conversations with ordinary people, intellectuals, and politicians illustrate that clearer lines are being drawn in people's minds between what is seen as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" resistance.
"People are coming ... to grips with complicated realities,'' says Abdel Moneim Said, director of Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "We can't deal with the emergence of groups like the ones who bombed Taba here in Egypt until we understand that some of these so-called resistance groups are intrinsically evil."
Egyptian militants killed 34 people in attacks on Taba, popular with Israeli tourists, and a nearby campsite on Oct. 7.
Mr. Said says that while most still see the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in stark terms, there is a growing number of regional thinkers who are also looking at the chaos of postinvasion Iraq as a partial consequence of Saddam Hussein's divide-and-rule policies and seeing some of the problems of pre-invasion Iraq reflected in their own societies.
"After three, four decades of independence we're coming to see that not all of our problems are generated from the outside," says Said. "Gradually Arab countries see it's not only independence versus occupation, it's also freedom, development, and progress or the lack of progress. We can see our societies are not what we'd like them to be."
When the US invasion began, a fairly one-dimensional view of the war's actors was held by most in the region, with its history of interventions by Western powers. Like an American western with a Mesopotamian twist, the Arab media scripted the war as the checkered headscarves of the insurgents (the white hats) against the Kevlar helmets of US airborne, infantry, and Marines (the black).
But among the events that have created doubts in some Arab minds have been the videotaped beheadings of a number of foreign contractors, the executions of 49 unarmed Iraqi military trainees last week, and the kidnapping of aid-worker Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi citizen and critic of the US invasion.
Doubts about the 'good guys'
The US remains the principal "bad guy," but the realities of an ugly war are leading to a more ambivalent attitudes towards the insurgency.
Even Lebanon's Hizbullah, a Shiite Islamist group that Washington says is a terrorist organization, has criticized the extremists. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary-general, said recently: "Indiscriminate and arbitrary acts are not resistance. The true resistance should protect its people and not kill them."
"In general the Arab people are with the Iraqi resistance,'' says Ahmed Sheikh, editor in chief of Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel that has often been criticized by US officials. "But the feedback we get is that people are very opposed to attacks like the killings of the 49 Iraqis. People know they're trying to feed their families and say it's haram [forbidden]. Attacks on US forces, though, are seen differently."
In Lebanon and Syria, among the most vocal opponents of the invasion, anger at the US remains high but is tempered by a growing sense of disgust at the brutal tactics of some insurgent groups.
"Arabs are differentiating between the legitimate resistance against foreign military occupation troops and unacceptable terrorism that is killing Iraqis or innocent foreigners," says Rami Khouri, executive editor of Beirut's English-language Daily Star newspaper. "The differentiation is very clear and very vocal."
"We abhor taking hostages, particularly women and children, and we abhor killing hostages. It's against our values, whether we are Muslims or Christians," says Mohammed Aziz Shucri, professor of international law at Damascus University. Professor Shucri says resistance attacks should be confined only to foreign troops. "Attacking civilians is not resistance against occupation."
Chibli Mallat, professor of international law at Beirut's St. Joseph University, says that public perception of the resistance in Iraq "has always been nuanced between supporting genuine acts of resistance as opposed to the killing of civilians." But recently, and somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Mallat says this distinction has come to be made by stridently anti-American groups. "Some of them have been on record recently saying this is totally unacceptable," he says.

US critics also rethink
One of them is Salim Hoss, a former Lebanese prime minister, who is a staunch critic of US Mideast policy.
On Tuesday he wrote in Lebanon's leading daily An-Nahar that some militants in Iraq are defiling the name of Islam. "Islam is a religion of forgiveness," Mr. Hoss wrote. "People should not kill others in the name of Islam because they don't know how much it hurts all Muslims."
"America is an illegal occupier, but I abhor the inhuman tactics some of these groups use," he said in a phone interview.
To be sure, there are still almost daily pictures of injured Iraqi women and children hurt in US bombings, and for many, those imagines trump any excesses by groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad.

Images on TV
And while big regional newspapers like Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and Al-Hayat were careful to point out that the 49 young Iraqi soldiers were unarmed and executed, much of the daily press in Egypt, for instance, created the impression that they were killed in a shootout.
"Many Saudis pretend that Zarqawi is an imaginary figure because they don't like a lot of what's attributed to him,'' says Mshari al-Thaidi, who writes for Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, which is published in London. "They don't want to pollute the image of the resistance, so they pretend he doesn't exist. They claim he's a figure created by the C.I.A."
"It's painful for people,'' says Al-Ahram's Said. "Even in the Ramadan evening talks among my family, there's a kind of annoyance and denunciation of the brutality, but they want to go over it quickly and get to talking about Palestine and America's failings in Iraq."
And though public opinion is drifting in a more critical direction, few expect it to have any impact on car bombings and kidnappings inside Iraq any time soon.
Radical Islamists in Iraq "are not in the game of winning popular approval for their actions," says the Daily Star's Mr. Khouri. "These are not people after audience share. They don't expect to get elected to office. The reality is that they don't care and they are operating on a different plane from the rest of the society."
**Reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah contributed from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Visit the website at: www.csmonitor.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Article #2
Fear dominant in Arab psyche
Youssef M. Ibrahim
Fear is deeply ingrained in the Arab psyche, a gene implanted in the Arab mind. There is fear of speaking, writing, reading, or even hearing the truth. It is so contagious that it affects Arab immigrants who carry this homegrown fear with them to their new domiciles, hiding behind it to avoid melting into the societies they have taken refuge in. Such fear hangs in the air, blocking oxygen to the Arab mind, dominating thinking processes, surfacing in a self-censored media, in nervous jokes, and in absurd commentary that wastes hours describing black as white.
No one is born this way, of course. Fear is an environmentally acquired characteristic. In the Arab world it is a product of unilateral rule, hereditary power in republics as well as monarchial systems, rejection of democratic culture, dominance of the male persona which eliminates women as equal partners, and a demeaning embrace of hand-kissing instead of merit as a way to climb the social ladder.
For the immigrant Arab community, these fears have become more complicated since September 11, 2001, thanks to the Western adoption of systematic persecution and singling out of Arabs and Muslims as potential terrorists, deepening racism and the treatment of others as second-class citizens.
In America today, an Arab American community of some 3 million to 4 million people has no voice because it is afraid. Having a voice means attracting attention, perhaps trouble, most Arabs will tell you, which is a total failure in the understanding of how democracies function.
In Europe, where some 35 million Arabs live, most have crawled back into cultural caves - speaking Arabic, wearing the hijab, eating Arabic, and thinking Arabic instead of opening up to the societies that had embraced them.
But fear of change is not convenient nowadays. The Arab and Muslim worlds are undergoing massive transformations that demand massive adjustments. Hordes of enemies are poised at the gates, and huge internal pressure for change lies within. Our governments, our schools, our social systems, our economies, and our very sense of ethical conduct are all failed models whose shelf life is over.
If Arab writers and pundits cannot say this, document it, and analyze it without fear, we cannot even begin to reform. And if we cannot reform, what is left of Arab civilization will evaporate making place for a new agenda set by someone else. This is happening in Iraq, and it will happen to every society that blocks the oxygen from its people.
Even when they digest news, Arab media filter it through the prism of fear, disguised as political correctness, politeness, and information ministry rules, so much so that facts become fairy tales.
The whole world, for example, has heard about an ongoing intense political crisis in Lebanon and the UN Security Council pressures on Syria to get out of there. But the official Arab media, anxious not to offend "Arab brothers," will tell you there is no crisis there, that both Lebanon and Syria are blessed with "fraternal" relations, and the whole debacle is manufactured by France and the United States who are "meddling" in internal Lebanese-Syrian affairs. Never mind that the Lebanese constitution has been altered to allow for the first time a Lebanese president to stay in office beyond his term, joining the broad ranks of Arab presidents-for-life, or that a very prominent Lebanese prime minister, none less than Rafiq Al Hariri, has resigned in protest.
The French have an expression, langue de bois, or wooden tongue, to describe this condition. It accurately profiles Arab-speak.
How many times have you read about "honor killings," which is meant to describe acts of bloody mayhem by emotionally-deformed males who murder their wives, sisters, or distant female relatives often on the whim of a rumor about misbehaving or not marrying someone the family had designated? One fails to see the origin of the word "honor" where cowardice is more appropriate. We say of countries where women are not allowed to vote, choose their future partners in life, drive, travel, or run for office, that they are preserving "Arab and Islamic tradition" when they are flagrantly violating the human rights of half of their populations.
Arab media has been very good in dishing out criticism of American double standards, which are many. We talk of bias toward and against Muslims, and all that is correct. But let us not lose perspective here. America is a robust democracy with a bad president on top, and a poor candidate challenging him. But this very same America and its pundits have described both Bush and Kerry as liars, failures, flip-flops, double-dealers, and elitists. Bush has no magical powers. He is here today but will be gone this year or in four years. Criticizing him is ordinary. Nobody goes to jail for it. There will be no midnight visitors. Can we say as much for the Arab order?
**Youssef M. Ibrahim is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group.
Source: Middle East Times
Website: www.metimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Article #3
Why the U.S. should engage moderate Muslims everywhere
Radwan A. Masmoudi
On Sept. 11, 2001, a group of 19 terrorists who called themselves Muslim but whose actions and behavior were anything but Islamic, committed a terrible crime by attacking and killing 3,000 innocent American civilians in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Since that tragic day, Americans and honorable human beings everywhere have been engaged in a struggle to stop terrorism from spreading or threatening the lives, security, peace, or freedom of people around the globe. Since that fateful event, terrorist attacks have been waged from Indonesia to Morocco and from Madrid to Istanbul. The world, it seems, is on the verge of a major confrontation between the U.S. and a group of ignorant thugs and criminals who are trying to hijack Islam, the second largest and fastest-growing religion on earth.
To defeat the terrorists, the United States must avoid even the appearance that this is a war against Islam. Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of Muslims (secular and religious, moderate and extremists) are now convinced that the "war on terror" has become a "war on Islam and Muslims." This is an extremely dangerous development that, if unchecked, will feed the extremist and radical groups with the moral and financial support they need to continue spreading fear and bloodshed. A war between the United States (or the West) and the Islamic world as a whole is exactly what Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda hoped to achieve when they planned and committed the attacks of Sept. 11. To win the war on terror, the U.S. needs the support of the majority of the 1.4 billion Muslims around the globe. It must convince them that it holds neither ill feelings nor designs towards Islam or Muslims. Doing so requires:
a. reaching out to moderate Muslim leaders everywhere, establishing trust, engaging them in a dialogue, and understanding their issues and concerns,
b. supporting moderate Muslim leaders (both religious and secular) who are calling for a modern, tolerant, peaceful and democratic interpretation of Islam,
c. exerting political, diplomatic and economic pressure on current regimes in the Arab and Muslim world to establish a truly democratic form of government, thus giving millions of people hope for a better future,
d. Showing the United States as a bastion of freedom, tolerance and democracy where people of all faiths, including and especially Muslims, can live and thrive in peace, respect and harmony within a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society.
The need for Americans to understand Islam, and the need for Muslims to understand America, has never been greater. In both camps, voices of ignorance, prejudice and stereotypes are growing stronger and creating hatred and fear. Moderate and peace-loving Christians, Muslims and Jews must bond together to work for justice, peace, harmony and respect in our shrinking global village. Nonviolent struggle for justice, freedom and equality, combined with dialogue and understanding, are the only way to address grievances, resolve disputes, or establish peace on earth.
This is where someone like Tariq Ramadan comes in. Prof. Ramadan is one of the best-known and most popular Islamic scholars and leaders on the planet today. Few other leaders connect to the disaffected Muslim youth of America, Europe and the Middle East like he does. He offers them hope and a vision for living as Muslims in the 21st century, for being true to their Islamic heritage, culture and faith while embracing modern, progressive and democratic values and ideals. If somebody like Tariq Ramadan did not exist, the U.S. would have needed to invent him. Fortunately, he exists and is more than willing to come to the United States, engage with the American public and institutions in a serious, deep and sincere dialogue that can pave the way for a greater understanding and cooperation between the United States and the Muslim world.
Last year, Prof. Tariq Ramadan was invited by the University of Notre Dame to teach Islamic history, theology and politics beginning in the fall of 2004. After accepting the offer and resigning his position at the University of Friburg in Switzerland, registering his children in a public school in Indiana, and shipping his furniture and belongings, Prof. Ramadan was informed by the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland, a few days before his departure, that his visa had been revoked. He is now stuck, bewildered, with his family, in an empty apartment in Switzerland.
Muslims around the world are watching this saga with great concern, and some are ascribing this bizarre development to anti-Islamic conspiracies. This decision was one of the most reckless and counter-productive decisions made by the Department of Homeland Security since its inception. In the interest of the United States, it should be reversed without delay.
For us to win the post-Sept. 11 ideological struggle within Islam and bridge the gulf between the West and much of the Muslim Ummah (community), we desperately need the help of people like Professor Ramadan.
Radwan A. Masmoudi is president of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID) in Washington and a regular contributor to THE DAILY STAR. The views expressed here are entirely the author's and not necessarily those of CSID or its board of directors.
Source: Middle East Times
Visit the website at: www.metimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained from the author for publication.

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Article #4
Why is the legacy of confrontation so strong?
Rami G. Khouri
Today's day-to-day news reports suggest that the overall relationship between Arab/Muslim societies and the West, especially the United States, is a worsening cycle of war, threats, fears, and savage killings. The reality is more complex, with confrontations at several levels counterbalanced by underlying compatibilities that provide potential common ground for a healthier relationship in the future. The present, however, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, is defined by warfare and angry confrontation, and many reasons explain this grim reality.
Yet it is probably worth keeping in mind that the vast majorities of people in both camps would not willingly choose and probably do not enthusiastically support the military invasions, terrorism, and other forms of violent confrontation that define many aspects of Arab/Islamic-Western ties today. The fighting is the work of relatively small minorities - but it happens because of a wider and deeper enabling environment in which older perceptions and stronger tensions persist on both sides.
If we take American-Arab or American-Middle Eastern relations as the core of the wider Islamic-Western relationship, we can identify several significant reasons why so many parties on both sides have clashed in recent years. Modern history is probably the single most important backdrop to the tensions, represented by the prevalent Middle Eastern suspicion of Western armies coming into the region to occupy, exploit, or redefine its people and countries.
Arab memories even of the Crusades, more than eight centuries earlier, remain real and politically relevant. In the past two centuries since Napoleon's armies invaded Egypt and launched the modern European colonial era in the Middle East, local public opinion remains deeply resentful of Western political and military intervention. This has been manifested again in widespread Middle Eastern opposition to the American-led war to change the Iraqi regime and redraw the political map of the region.
The bitter historical legacy of the region is compounded by four powerful associated contemporary issues: economic distress, brisk social change, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sustained tradition of Arab autocracy and dictatorship. The combination of these factors has created an Arab/Islamic landscape that is generally suspicious of Western motives, and often critical of existing indigenous regimes and elites that are seen to be created and supported by the West. In recent years, this restive, indignant, often humiliated public mood has also spawned small bands of militants who have used terror against their own regimes and the West.
The common, chronic foundation for this confrontational mindset among the average Arab or Iranian is the sense that Europeans and Americans view the Middle East purely in selfish utilitarian terms - as lands to be exploited for their mineral or commercial assets, or their strategic value in wider global contests (during the Cold War and now in the "war on terror"). The common perception across the Middle East is that Western powers for two centuries have routinely used their diplomatic power and sent their armies to occupy our lands, remove nationalist or anti-Western regimes they dislike, preserve conservative regimes and dictators they are comfortable with, maintain access to oil, or ensure Israel's superiority over all neighboring countries.
For half a century during the Cold War and the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the West broadly promoted autocratic and authoritarian Arab, Turkish, and Iranian regimes because this served the West's and Israel's purposes - without any concern for the sentiments, rights, or aspirations of ordinary citizens in this region. This has been coupled since the mid-1980s by two other factors that have increased popular opposition to the local elites and regimes and to their Western supporters. Economic stagnation, even regression in some countries, has become a volatile political force, fuelling calls to deal with the indignities of corruption, abuse of power, and widening disparities. At the same time, many in the Middle East feel that their basic cultural and religious values - let alone their national and political rights - are vulnerable to a Western-led onslaught couched in the dynamics of globalization, the communications revolution, and free trade.
This combination of historical anxiety, economic stress, and the vulnerability of one's most basic social, national, and religious identity has created masses of distressed people who have not found an outlet for their concerns in domestic political change, and thus often direct their anger - and recently their bombs - at the West.
So as indigenous Islamist, nationalist, or leftist movements emerged in recent decades, and challenged local regimes, Israel, and the US, they usually found a deep groundswell of public acclaim. Support for Nasser, Khomeini, the Palestinian resistance, Hizbollah, Mossadegh, Saddam Hussein, or even Osama Bin Laden today reflects this deep legacy of anti-Western and anti-Israeli bitterness, resentment, and indignity in Middle Eastern public opinion.
Therefore few in the Middle East believe that an American or European who talks of promoting peace, prosperity, or democracy in our region does so out of a sense that Arabs and Iranians deserve this right. Not only do many Westerners and Middle Easterners now clash military, but those who seek to work together for democracy, justice and reform are often hindered by the debilitating legacy of fear, suspicion, and anger.
The only good news in this otherwise gloomy picture is that global and regional public opinion surveys (especially the Global Values Survey) routinely confirm that Arabs/Muslims and Americans/Westerners share most of the basic values related to good governance, such as participation, accountability, justice, and equality. There is a fertile, enduring foundation of positive personal and public values that can be exploited to bring Arabs/Muslims and the West into a more constructive new relationship. But these values that provide a powerful common ground for a new relationship remain crushed under the weight of confrontation, war, and terrorism that dominate the scene today. Until the constraints of modern history are addressed and redressed, the potential for a mutually more beneficial Arab/Islamic-Western relationship will remain dormant in most spheres of life.
**Rami G. Khouri is the Executive Editor, the Daily Star newspaper, Beirut, Lebanon.
Source: This article is part of a series of views on the relationship between the Islamic/Arabic world and the West, published in partnership with the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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About CGNews-PiH
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. This service is one result of a set of working meetings held in partnership with His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal in June 2003.
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