The Common Ground News Service, August 16, 2005
Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
August 16, 2005
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.
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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:
1. "Expanding the rules of war - to Iraq" by Chris Binkley
Writer Chris Binkley, considers the rules of war as they apply in Iraq. Finding the United States has turned to certain extra-legal measures in this conflict, he makes some suggestions for how to "rehabilitate" the world's image of the U.S. in this regard.
(Source: CGNews-PiH, August 16, 2005)
2. "The Arabs need to care more about public diplomacy" by William Fisher
William Fisher, who has managed economic development programs in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, turns the tables on the common argument that the U.S. needs to improve public diplomacy and asks Arab countries to do the same. Interestingly, he thinks the U.S. can help.
(Source: The Daily Star, August 08, 2005)
3. "Rage against the killing of the light" by Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon, author of the new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," uses Cindy Sheehan's death to remind us of the how the loss of loved ones affects those in America and Iraq in the same way.
(Source: Jordan Times, August 14, 2005)
4. "King Fahd and Saudi friendship with the United States" by James J. Zogby
James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), looks at the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia historically in guide King Abdullah as he takes over.
(Source: Arab American Institute, August 8, 2005)
5. "British literature offers few answers to July 7" by Graham Bowley
Graham Bowley, journalist and frequent contributor to the International Herald Tribune, investigates the literary roots of the July bombings in London.
(Source: International Herald Tribune, August 10, 2005)
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ARTICLE 1
Expanding the rules of war - to Iraq
Chris Binkley
The Battle of Solferino, fought in 1859, caused so many deaths and casualties in such a brief period of time that the carnage disgusted even Emperor Napoleon III of France, who had agreed to a war of convenience with Italy to oust the Austrians from Piedmont in exchange for territory occupied by Italy in the south of France.
The battle was said to have seen brutal behavior and the killings of prisoners of war by both sides, prompting Henri Dunant, a businessman, to form an international society to protect prisoners of war and care for the wounded - today's International Red Cross - through the first Geneva Conventions. Subsequent additions to the treaty banned chemical weapons and biological warfare, introduced more rules for the protection of prisoners of war and civilians and rules regarding the behavior of soldiers in wartime, including such banal, but important requirements, as wearing uniforms.
How things have changed. In Iraq, in the present day, the carnage of war is now almost exclusively inflicted on civilians, as insurgents, who are supposedly fighting to free the country of American imperialism, kill on average 30 Iraqis a day. These monstrous tactics are understood by most analysts as an example of asymmetric warfare, in which the terrorists, who understand they cannot defeat the United States militarily, resort to simple carnage in order to destabilize the political process and/or cause public opinion in democratic countries to capitulate (as they managed to do in Spain). The U.S. has also turned to extra-legal, if less deadly, tactics, arguing that because the insurgents have no legal status, and because they are so dangerous, the U.S. has the right to jail indefinitely captured insurgents in Iraq. Yet it contradicts itself, stating that these actions are legal because the U.S. is at war - a term that lends some legitimacy to the Iraqi insurgents, and designates them as opponents for the military (and thus deserving of Geneva protections), instead of Iraqi and American police forces.
To some, these are murky legal problems best left to grey-bearded scholars, but attention to them now could be one way of reducing the level of violence in Iraq. The U.S. has a strong interest in stopping the daily Iraqi horror show because of the instability it is generating - yet military and terrorism experts generally agree that attacks on civilians can never be stopped, even with hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. and Iraqi troops. There is simply no way, even in a closed, authoritarian society, for every bomb to be intercepted.
It may be time for the U.S. to take a page from Henri Dunant, and attempt to restrain, rather than attempt to end, the bloodshed. If the terrorists could be convinced to cease their attacks on civilian targets, and attack only military ones, not only would the sickening flow of civilian blood stop, but a great deal of the fear and instability paralyzing Iraq would also disappear, allowing the political process to move forward. The insurgents of course would require something in return, since killing civilians is one of the only tactics they have at their disposal that U.S. might cannot counter. Doubtless, native Iraqi insurgents would much prefer to kill U.S. soldiers instead of other Iraqis - the proof that they would rather do so is that wide scale attacks on civilians did not begin until more than a year and a half after the invasion. If they believed they could accomplish this goal, they might cease such attacks. Thus, in return for an agreement to stop targeting civilians, the U.S. could agree to restrain itself when attacking insurgent positions, by, for instance, abandoning the use of disproportionate force, such as the use of air power or heavy armor when attacking insurgent positions, making the war less asymmetric in nature. Or, as Israel has done, the U.S. could release prisoners, or at least promise to try, rather than indefinitely imprison, captured insurgents.
In this manner, not only would the conflict be steered away from civilians, but the U.S. would show that it is truly a nation that believes in the rule of law, bolstering its position in Iraq. More importantly, creating a legal framework that restrains the allowable scope of violence would be a concrete step toward ending the conflict. And the insurgents would be given something they most crave - a certain political legitimacy, which would flow to them as a direct result of participation in negotiations and their agreement to be bound by any legal framework at all, and because Iraqis might be more willing to support their efforts if they were directed purely at forcing the American army out of Iraq. Broader negotiations with Iraqi and American authorities would be a logical, but not strictly necessary, next step.
There is no getting away from the fact that opening any kind of dialogue with the insurgents would be extremely distasteful - for both Americans and many Iraqis - as it would seem to lend legitimacy to the tactic of deliberately killing civilians. But the fact is many experts both within the military and without believe the insurgents' tactics may well prove undefeatable, giving rise to an even bloodier civil war in Iraq. At some point the thousands of lives already destroyed and the thousands of lives likely to be lost must be weighed against the unknown consequences of granting terrorists any kind of serious legal recognition.
It may turn out that the insurgents break the agreement, and that attacks on civilians continue. For far too many already, it is an effective and justified tactic. But by bringing the Iraqi insurgents into some sort of legal framework that disallows attacks on civilians, the U.S. might divide the Iraqi insurgency, and strike a lethal blow to terrorism by making it easier to root out, with the help of less homicidal ex-comrades, the terrorists who continue to kill civilians indiscriminately. Such an agreement could even have an effect on other, non-Iraq based terrorist organizations.
Taking such a step would be bold and risky. But it would do much to rehabilitate the world's image of the U.S. as a country that flouts and ignores international law and international institutions. And considering the bloody chaos that Iraq is becoming, as well as continually eroding domestic support for the war, the administration has little to lose. The only ones who certainly will are those suffering the most in Iraq - Iraqi civilians.
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* Chris Binkley is a freelance writer.
Source: This article was written for CGNews-PiH, August 16, 2005
Visit Search for Common Ground at www.sfcg.org.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 2
The Arabs need to care more about public diplomacy
William Fisher
It's only a small stretch to argue that the only thing less effective than U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East is the pathetic effort of the Arab world to communicate anything credible to American and other Western audiences. The reasons are numerous. Many of the people who work in the mid- to upper-levels of Arab governments are either technocrats or owe their jobs to cronyism, and are often ill equipped to carry out their tasks There are many bright, technically proficient men and women serving in communications-related jobs in Arab governments, but they are largely employed in putting out propaganda for domestic consumption on state-owned media. These governments do not have formal public diplomacy programs.
There is also the fact that, as a collectivity, Arab states find it impossible to agree on much; so, for example, the Arab League has little to communicate, even if it does have a public diplomacy program. Finally, any Arab communication strategy must overcome Western prejudices against the Arab world, so that it would take considerable skills, and serious resources, for Arab states to be heard and believed.
Yet, absent any public diplomacy initiative from the Arabs, its conversation with the West will continue to be a dialogue of the deaf. All the more reason why Arab governments need to know about a new private-sector American program: the first-ever Master's degree in Public Diplomacy, just launched by the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
But how, governments may ask, can an American program help Arab public diplomacy? One of the program's "Toolbox" courses offers an example: "The rhetoric of war, peace and religion" will look in a non-partisan way at cross-cultural rhetoric. The two professors developing this course have specialized in analyzing messages from both sides of the equation. Their research and instruction focuses on the motivations and roots surrounding conflict, American versus Middle Eastern ways of war (from the U.S. concepts of presidential checks and balances to motivations of national honor), to the role of rogue states as global players and the messages of their actors.
The program will also offer special topics courses. For example, a Middle East-centered course called "media diplomacy" looks at the role of non-state media actors in cultivating favorable images abroad, from examination of the "CNN effect" - the impact of cable and satellite television such as Al-Jazeera in shaping public opinion in and of the Middle East - to cyber diplomacy and the role of official Web sites.
There are two core courses devoted to examining comparative global and historical practices of public diplomacy. There is also an international broadcasting course that includes guest lecturers from around the world, who discuss their strategies, tactics, successes and failures in using this tool for public diplomacy. USC is also working to create a scholarship to fund to help Middle Eastern mid-career professionals, including government employees, to study in the Master's program.
Joshua S. Fouts, executive director of USC's Center on Public Diplomacy, says, "Because we are an academic institution, we do not have an agenda of training people to think a certain way about the U.S. or the U.S. government."
Why should Arab governments care? The reasons might seem obvious, but are, arguably, not being appreciated in the Arab world. In the West, three things are "known" about Arabs: first, Arabs are terrorists, and terrorists are Muslims; second, Arabs care only about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and America's failure to "fix it;" and, third, Arabs control the price of petrol at the pump. People in the United States or France or Germany or the United Kingdom know virtually nothing about Arab traditions, civilization, scholarship, arts and literature, sense of family and hospitality.
Yet Arabs make up substantial minorities of the populations of Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Informing indigenous populations there might help keep more Arabs and Muslims from becoming second-class citizens.
Moreover, the West is the principal investor in Arab economies and the principal customer for Middle East exports. Western countries pump billions of dollars of aid into North Africa and the Middle East. And, if all that were not enough, there is the issue of pride: The Middle East has much to be proud of and should feel an obligation to let others know that.
These days, it's hard for any voice to be heard. But it's even harder if no one is trying. And, among Arab nations, no one is really trying. Just about the only time the West hears anything about Arabs and Muslims - aside from bombs exploding - is through media reports about brutal, repressive governments, prisoners being tortured or disappearing, elections being rigged, or an Arab League Summit breaking up because of squabbles.
As a matter of simple self-interest, it's time for the Arabs states to begin reversing this flow of negative information. In exactly the same way the U.S. now finds itself in a very long-term struggle to win hearts and minds in the Middle East, the Middle East faces a no less daunting challenge in getting the West to begin to understand its own priorities. This can't be done quickly. But it can't be done ever if someone doesn't make a start.
That will require will and skill and knowledge not currently present. That's why the USC initiative is important.
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* William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He wrote this commentary for the Daily Star.
Source: The Daily Star, August 8, 2005.
Visit the Daily Star at www.dailystar.com.lb.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 3
Rage against the killing of the light
Norman Solomon
Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in US history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head.
Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet "most of all" war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.
President George W. Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America's war dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: Close enough to exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in chief's persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.
What's going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity. And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been en route to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to enormous media attention a few miles from the vacationing president's accommodations.
At this point, Bush's spinners are desperate to divert the media spotlight from Sheehan. But other bereft mothers arriving in Crawford will hardly be more compatible with war-making myths.
Consider the perspective of Celeste Zappala, whose oldest son Sherwood Baker was a sergeant in the Pennsylvania national guard when he died 16 months ago in Baghdad. She is a co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, and what she has to say is gut wrenching and infuriating: "George Bush talks about caring about the troops who get killed in Iraq. Sherwood was killed protecting the people looking for weapons of mass destruction on April 26, 2004. This was one month after Bush was joking [at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, on March 24] about looking for weapons of mass destruction. And then my Sherwood is dead trying to protect people looking for them because Bush said it was so important to the safety of our country."
Disregarding the tacit conventions of jingoistic newspeak, Zappala adds: "I don't want anyone else to go through this, not an American, not an Iraqi, no one. As a person of faith, I firmly believe we have the ability to provide better answers on how to resolve conflict than what Bush is offering us. I've tried to meet with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, I was turned away by armed guards. It's incumbent upon everybody to take responsibility about what is happening in our country. I have no recourse but to go to Crawford to do what I can to change the disastrous course we are currently on and to bear witness to the true costs of this war."
The true costs. Not the lies of omission.
War PR and war grief have collided at the Crawford crossroads at a time when the Bush administration is in the midst of launching its scam about supposed plans to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a spokesman for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "he did not know how many extra troops might be needed during the referendum and election period through the end of this year." The AP dispatch added: "Other officials have said that once the election period has passed and the troop total recedes to the 138,000 level, a further reduction in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 is possible next spring and summer. That could change, however, if the insurgency intensifies or an insufficient number of US-trained Iraqi security forces prove themselves battle-ready."
When a mass killer is at the helm of the ship of state, taking a bow now and again while "Hail to the Chief" booms from big brass bands, a significant portion of the country's population feels revulsion. And often a sense of powerlessness - a triumph for media manipulation. Passivity is the health of the manipulative media state.
Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala have joined with others in Crawford to insist that death is not a message for more death - that we can understand death as a profound reality check, imploring us to affirm and defend life. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," Dylan Thomas wrote. The unavoidable dying of life is bad enough. The killing is unacceptable.
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* Norman Solomon is author of the new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Excerpts are posted at: www.WarMadeEasy.com He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
Source: The Jordan Times, August 14, 2005.
Visit the Jordan Times at www.jordantimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 4
King Fahd and Saudi friendship with the United States
James J. Zogby
The first of my many visits to Saudi Arabia was in 1981. Therefore, for most of the time that I have known the kingdom and its people, Fahd Ben Abdulaziz Al Saud was king and a friend of the United States.
Saudis and "experts" in the affairs of the country will make their own assessments of his reign. I write merely as an American friend and an observer. What's clear to me is that during the time of King Fahd, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia made remarkable progress, faced significant challenges, and was forced to make critical and difficult decisions. In order to begin to define the legacy of King Fahd's rule, I believe that it is important to weigh all of these factors in the balance: The progress, the challenges, and the fateful decisions - since they are all intimately connected to one another.
While US critics of the kingdom (and there are a few) deride the country's traditionalism, it is important to consider how rapidly the country has been transformed. Within the past half-century, for example, the population of Saudi Arabia grew from 3.5 million to over 24 million. During that same time, its capital, Riyadh, was transformed from a desert outpost of several thousand to a modern metropolis of four million.
King Fahd's reign, which covered about half of this period, oversaw much of this expansion and its massive investment in infrastructure, social services, and development. Such rapid modernisation and urbanisation, inevitably, created social and cultural strains and pressures for change.
While dealing with these internal factors, the kingdom was also being confronted by dramatic external challenges that also had internal consequences. The Iranian revolution posed not only a regional security threat to Saudi Arabia and its Arab Gulf allies, but, an internal threat, as well, as became clear in the wake of Iranian-inspired violent clashes in Mecca in the early 1980s. Further complicating Gulf stability was the long, bloody, and costly Iran-Iraq war and the 1990 Iraq invasion and occupation of Kuwait. These regional challenges were not the only crises roiling the Arab world and impacting Saudi society during the period of King Fahd's rule. There was, of course, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The initially homegrown Afghan resistance against the Soviets inspired broad support among Muslims, including Saudis. Lebanon's long civil war, compounded by Israel's brutal invasion, bombardment, and occupations took a toll, as did the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, culminating in 1987 in the first Palestinian Intifada.
In the face of all these challenges and crises, King Fahd made a strategic decision to deepen the political and military ties that already existed between the US and Saudi Arabia, support a moderate course of action in international affairs, and foster continued domestic development, all the while attempting to balance domestic pressure (both those resulting inevitably from social change and those occurring in reaction to external events).
It was, as we say, "a tough row to hoe." But as his leadership was challenged, King Fahd responded with decisions to protect his country, its traditions and role, and its development.
The US and Saudi-backed Afghan resistance defeated the Soviets and, in Desert Storm, Kuwait was liberated. The Saudi-supported Taif accords brought an end to Lebanon's terrible decade and one-half of war. King Fahd also took leadership on the Palestinian issue in proposing the historic 1982 Fahd peace plan and providing critical support for the convening of the US-led Madrid peace conference.
Even in years of declining oil revenues, domestic development programmes continued and, later in King Fahd's rule, initial steps were taken towards internal reform. Too small for some, too threatening to others, these steps, nevertheless, have laid the foundation for further advances.
While confronting challenges and making critical decisions, King Fahd attempted to make the best of an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances, many beyond his control. The deplorable behaviour of Saddam Hussein, the unpredictable nature of the revolutionary Iranians, the failures of the United States (to "stay the course" in post-Soviet Afghanistan, to be more vigorous in pressing for peace in the post-Madrid era, to restrain aggressive Israeli behaviour in the occupied lands and Lebanon, and to act in a more consultative manner with friends and allies in the region), all compounded the difficulties faced not only by Saudi Arabia.
Through it all, the kingdom, under King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah, remained resolute allies of the US - even as their friendship was tested and challenged by some at home and abroad.
King Abdullah, Fahd's partner for many years, now assumes the mantle of leadership, facing many of the same challenges and building on the foundation he helped to prepare with his predecessor. As he proceeds, King Abdullah will need to continue to face down the threat of domestic terror, while moving forward with his domestic reform agenda and finding new ways to expand job creation for an ever-growing Saudi population. He will also need to work hard to strengthen ties and resolve outstanding issues with Saudi Arabia's Gulf partners.
The US can help, of course, principally by relieving pressures on the entire region created by the Iraq debacle and the lack of real progress in establishing Palestinian rights. It's the least we can do to reward the friendship and provide support for an ally.
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* James J. Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI).
Source: Arab American Institute, August 8, 2005
Visit the Arab American Institute at www.aaiusa.org
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 5
Letter from Britain: British literature offers few answers to July 7
Graham Bowley
Immigrants' lives in modern Britain have been chronicled in abundance in a string of recent novels. But have books like "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith and "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali captured correctly - or even touched upon - the forces that produced the London bombers of July 7 and the attackers of July 21?
Like the United States after Sept. 11 and the Netherlands after the daylight murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Britain has been grappling with what these horrific events say about it as a country and as a society. With the disclosure a few days after July 7 that the bombers had been homegrown, the questions have grown more urgent.
A nation with a powerful literary tradition, the British are accustomed to finding answers to these sorts of existential quandaries in the writings of their novelists. But while Britain has a growing fiction of multiculturalism, it has only begun to wrestle with the deeper social tensions between immigrants and natives that the bombings seem to have exposed.
"White Teeth" is perhaps the most critically acclaimed of the recent novels. Set in the melting pot of north London, it is a riot of racial engagement as creeds and communities interact successfully. Some of Smith's characters join a radical group, but Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or Kevin, is comical rather than menacing. The story is far from being a journey toward nihilism.
"Brick Lane" is a gloomier tale about a woman from Bangladesh in London's East End. It includes a group of Islamic extremists, but Nazneen, the protagonist, never takes that path.
"Both of these books celebrate the idea of multicultural London," said Kasia Boddy, a lecturer in contemporary fiction at University College London. "They are about the joys of multiculturalism."
The fact that they were best sellers suggests that these are the kind of positive stories about immigration that the audiences they are written for want to read.
The British book-buying public, and, more widely, the Western one, want to be told that assimilation or multiculturalism works, Boddy said.
Two other chroniclers of the immigrant experience, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, describe this positive yearning for the new homeland. Rushdie, according to Boddy, distinguishes between "proper London," iconic sites like Big Ben or King's Cross that his characters want to visit, and "improper London," the mundane suburbs where they actually
have to live.
In "The Enigma of Arrival," Naipaul's protagonist expects to experience a Thomas Hardy-like bucolic England, but instead finds a modern countryside in flux.
Such characters may be disappointed in their new home. But none put on a backpack and set off to blow up the great symbolic sites of the society.
"If one is to presuppose some kind of nihilism" in the calculation bombers make, "that is not present at all in my experience in modern British multicultural literature," said Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of The Economist, who was a judge for the Man Booker Prize last year.
None of the 132 novels she read that were entered for the prize, she said, "came anywhere near" describing the forces that drove the Islamist extremists to kill on July 7.
"You may have to look back to the great 19th-century writers who portrayed the struggle between the individual and the forces of the world or God to find the same kind of relationship and despair between a single human being and his environment," she said.
But while current published novelists may steer clear of describing the Islamist extremists' urges, the terrorists' urge has long been present in literature, said Alex Houen, lecturer in English Literature and American Studies at Sheffield University and author of "Terrorism
and Modern Literature."
In the late 19th century, shortly after the first detonation of dynamite, Irish republicans attacked prime London sites like Victoria Station, Nelson's Column, Parliament and the Tower of London, he said.
The bombings bred a spate of what were called "dynamite novels." But the period with the strongest parallels to today's events, Houen said, came at the turn of the last century, when anarchists carried out assassination attempts across Europe and London was home to a group of international terrorists bent on anarchic destruction. They inspired Joseph Conrad to write "The Secret Agent," in which anarchists attack modern notions of science by trying to blow up Greenwich Observatory.
One reason for the current deficit of novels about Islamist terrorism may be that fiction about immigration mostly concerns London rather than places like Beeston, for example, the poor Leeds neighborhood that produced some of the July 7 bombers.
Another reason, noted John Sutherland, one of Britain's leading critics, is that "fiction is not a quick response" business. There may be books about Islamist terrorism out there; they just haven't been finished, or if finished they haven't come off the presses yet.
One book about terrorism that was punctual was a new thriller, "Incendiary," by Christopher Cleave, about an attack by Islamist extremists on a soccer stadium in north London. By chance it was published on July 7, the day of the London bombs.
Cleave suggests one important reason for not writing about terrorism. "Any book featuring terrorism is inevitably going to do two things: It will present the issues in an original way - which might be challenging, entertaining, or even therapeutic - but it will also contribute to the focusing of our minds on the terrorist agenda rather than our own, which is the terrorists' aim. As a writer, therefore, you need to be pretty sure that your book has a significantly useful
new thing to say about the post-9/11 world before you put it out there."
Cleave's book was timely, but even this story is told from the white middle-class point of view of the heroine whose family is killed. It deals primarily with the aftermath, and not the forces that created the attackers.
"It has something to say about the shamefulness of holding the 'Muslim community' responsible for the sins of a very few individuals," Cleave said, "and in that sense it addresses factors contributing to the alienation of Muslims, but it doesn't really get further than that." A
story about struggle, in the end it, too, has a bright, life-fulfilling message, like "White Teeth" and "Brick Lane."
In the starker world after 7/7, the message may be about to change.
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* Graham Bowley is a journalist and frequent writer for the International Herald Tribune.
Source: International Herald Tribune, August 10, 2005.
Visit the IHT at www.iht.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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