Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
October 4, 2005

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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. “Clinton's global initiative,” by James J. Zogby
James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, reports on a new initiative launched by former US president Bill Clinton to address and seek solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems. One of the concerns addressed was the need to promote economic investment and environmental protection in Gaza.
(Source: Jordan Times, September 27, 2005)

2. “A different path after 9/11,” by Mona Eltahawy
Mona Eltahawy, columnist for the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, and frequent contributor to opinion pages in the US and abroad, begins her article with the controversial statement “Osama Bin Laden did the Muslim world a favor.” Instead of talking about those who joined his cause, Eltahawy looks instead at those Muslims who are choosing their own paths.
(Source: Asharq Alawsat, September 27, 2005)

3. “Humility should be part of Hughes' brief” by Rami G. Khouri
Rami G. Khouri, who has a regular column in the Daily Star, questions the success of the global war on terror. Khouri advices new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Karen Hughes, to add two P’s to her platform: policy and perception, two flaws he feels should be corrected in order to make her role successful.
(Source: Daily Star staff, September 14, 2005)

4. “Is Al Qaeda asking to negotiate?” by Allen J. Zerkin
Allen J. Zerkin, a research fellow at New York University's Center for Catastrophic Preparedness and Response and an adjunct professor at its Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, asks whether some sort of political engagement might succeed where military might has failed in stopping Al Qaeda. Giving examples of successful political engagement with terrorists in other regions, he suggests that, using back channels, “we should seek to determine if Bin Laden would withdraw his fatwa against Americans in exchange for certain policy changes.”
(Source: Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2005)

5. “Does increasing democracy undercut terrorists?” by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor at Harvard University and author of 'The Power Game: A Washington Novel,' advocates using soft power and “steady progress of democratization and freedom” to raise the voice and efficacy of moderates in the Middle East. He suggests that the value the United States can add is no longer military, but instead, as columnist David Brooks observed, "the tendency to imagine new worlds."
(Source: Christian Science Monitor, September 22, 2005)

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ARTICLE 1
Clinton's global initiative
James J. Zogby

WASHINGTON, DC - Bill Clinton was a great president, who appears to be on the path to becoming a great ex-president. Despite personal foibles for which he paid dearly during his eight years in office, Clinton, as president, continued to provide leadership in international peace-making, to oversee a period of extraordinary economic expansion and lead a national effort to heal the US' racial, ethnic and religious divides.

It is fascinating that after five years, while George W. Bush is still struggling to define his presidency and defend his leadership in foreign and domestic affairs, Clinton almost effortlessly has taken to the world stage to launch a global effort to address and seek solutions for an array of critical issues: extreme poverty, climate change, problems in governance and religion as a source of conflict.

The inaugural meeting of what is called the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was convened last week in New York City. It was an extraordinary gathering on several levels. The vision that inspired the conference was breathtaking in scope, the list of participants was impressive and diverse, and the conference's outcomes, announced at the end of three days of meetings, were of real consequence.

Alternatively referred to as “Davos with a difference” or the creation of a “new global NGO” (non-governmental organisation), the CGI featured not only in-depth plenary discussions which brought together 40 heads of state, and almost 1,000 religious and business leaders, heads of NGOs, and activists and academics with expertise in each of the topics under consideration. Each session also concluded with the announcement of “commitments” made by the conference's participants. In other words, the CGI not only defined what needed to be done, but required those in attendance to commit to specific programmes to address these needs.

It was this “homework”, as Clinton termed the required “commitments”, that made the CGI different. As the former president noted in his closing remarks, “I asked you here because I think that all of us have an unprecedented amount of power to solve problems, save lives and help people see the future.... I also hope you will leave here with a sense of humility about how much better we could do.”

Motivated by this vision and Clinton's inspirational prodding, the commitments made were as varied and significant as the conference's participants.

Some pledged millions of dollars to promote peace studies or produce programmes encouraging dialogue among religions. Tens of millions were committed to fund microenterprise loans to promote job creation in targeted countries. Still others pledged creative approaches to reduce pollution through the use of renewable energy resources. There were programmes announced to help eliminate corruption in government, improve health services, and empower women in developing countries.

Of special concern to the Arab world was Clinton's focus on economic investment and environmental protection in Gaza. He urged participants to commit to promoting projects in Gaza that would utilise alternative energy sources, thereby reducing pollution, and to support “terrorism insurance” for Gaza that would provide protection for foreign investors in that area's struggling economy. By the conference's closing day, Clinton announced that he had been able to secure “commitments” that would address both concerns.

In fact, after three days of meetings, Clinton told the assembled conferees that he had received 190 commitments totalling $1.25 billion in pledges. And this is just the beginning. The former president's goal is to secure between 500 to 1,000 commitments to action each year. If such an effort can be sustained for a decade, he noted, “we can make a huge dent in some of the world's biggest problems”.

Clearly, the success of the entire venture was due to the charismatic appeal of the former president. Who else, one participant observed, could draw 40 heads of state (competing with the United Nations General Assembly meeting across town) and the vast array of experts, leaders, and activists who turned out for the conference. And who else could have cajoled and/or inspired such an outpouring of commitments to act.

The CGI represents a bold new step for the former president. It is a declaration that he is not yet finished with public service. Instead of retiring, he will expand his role on the world stage. Like Jimmy Carter before him, Clinton is determined to use and even build on the prestige of his post-presidency in order to make a difference. But unlike Carter, Clinton, ever the organiser and teacher, seeks to expand his outreach to bring thousands to join him in a global effort to address critical issues. And so it was that last week we saw a great president on his way to defining his role as an even greater former president.

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* James J. Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute.
Source: Jordan Times, September 27, 2005
Visit the website 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 2
A different path after 9/11
Mona Eltahawy

CAIRO - Osama Bin Laden did the Muslim world a favor. Yes, I am serious. And no, I am not a Muslim militant who is celebrating an imagined victory against Dar al-Harb.

Bin Laden and his terrorist cohorts did us a favour because they shook us free of the defensiveness and denial that for decades had overshadowed an essential conversation about our religion and what had become of it.

That was not their goal of course. They assumed the sight of the twin towers collapsing would spur other jihadis to outdo or at least match their bloodletting. Some have tried. But a young Muslim man I met here recently convinced me that 9/11 had set others on a different course altogether.

Two years ago, when he was just 19, Fouad Gehad went to an Afghan refugee camp. He was not looking for directions to al-Qaeda but to speak to Afghan refugees who had seen al-Qaeda’s leader.

“My mission in life is to prove Osama Bin Laden exists,” Fouad, told me. To that end, he shot video tape of refugees recounting their stories of Bin Laden and on his return to Egypt paid out of his own pocket to hire an auditorium and a projection screen to show fellow Egyptians his footage.

Fouad was fed up of the conspiracy theories that painted Bin Laden as an American invention. Even after al-Qaeda released a video tape celebrating the attacks, some Muslims thought Bin Laden was an American agent who shot his videos in an American studio with a poster of the Afghan mountains as a backdrop.

Proving the existence of Bin Laden was Fouad’s way of holding up a mirror to the Muslim world to make it see what is had refused to acknowledge for too long. He had initially gone to Iran to see the effects of political Islam on that country and got first hand accounts from Iranians and the Afghans he met at the refugee camp.

"9/11 started the questions – is it Islam? Is it Muslims? Is it something in the Quran? What is it that led to 9/11?” Fouad explained.

When I say that 9/11 was good for the Muslim world, I have not flippantly forgotten the awful loss of life on that day. When I say the attacks were good for Muslims I do not regard with complacency the lives lost in the war on Afghanistan and the war on Iraq, which the Bush administration disastrously linked to the 9/11 attacks.

And when I say that 9/11 was good for Muslims I have not forgotten our curtailed civil liberties in the U.S., the thousands of Muslim men detained and deported on minor immigration violations and the higher levels of Islamophobia.

But I look above and beyond these tragedies to the importance of Fouad’s questions.

We are all too familiar with the young men who set out looking for holy war but we hear little of the young Muslim men and women who have set off in the opposite direction, determined to find their own answers.

Our young men and women who choose the opposite direction must be celebrated not only for their refreshing individuality but also for their courage in challenging the old and stale ways of thinking that too easily stifle any attempts to question. Without questioning we will remain forever stuck.

Why are we so stuck? The answer to that question alone could fill dozens of books but I got a brief response a few days ago when I came across another young man whose outlook seemed to be the complete opposite of Fouad’s.

He was the young taxi driver who took me home recently. As soon as I stepped into his cab, I realized that he was an almost perfect caricature of a fundamentalist.

He wore a white skull cap, a white galabiya which no doubt reached his mid-calf and of course he was listening to a fiery sermon on the car stereo.

The angry imam on the tape was of course relating the story of a battle from Muslim history. The louder his voice got, the more I could see why we were stuck – this was not the first time that the story of this particular battle was being retold and no doubt it would be retold again and again. And that is our problem. We are stuck in the past, unable to look ahead because of the stories we don’t stop telling each other about the past.

As if on cue, the fiery preacher ended his sermon as I was paying and getting out of the taxi. He ended by railing against a ban the government was trying to impose on tapes such as this recording. I wish he had ended by exhorting the listeners of his sermon to look ahead and not look back. We fill the heads of our young with so stories of so many victories from the past, real and imagined, that they can barely look ahead.

The attacks on 9/11 and subsequent attacks in Europe and the Middle East put us squarely in the here and now and forced us to look forward. They put into starkly horrific relief ideas such as “jihad” and “infidel” which for too long were too meekly challenged in the Muslim world.

Tackling those ideas head on and asking Fouad’s questions is good for everyone, not just the Muslim world. The questions and debates sparked by 9/11 render ineffectual the “us” and “them” offered by both President Bush and Bin Laden. We have all been victims of terrorism, East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim.

The more Muslims ask the questions, lead the debates and hold the mirror up to ourselves, the more you will hear about young men like Fouad, who do not tread the tired and bloody jihad path but forge their own trails toward telling the truth to the Muslim world.

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* Mona Eltahawy was a correspondent for the Reuters News Agency in Cairo and Jerusalem and also wrote for the Guardian newspaper from the Middle East. Mona is also a frequent contributor to opinion pages in the US and abroad.
Source: Asharq Alawsat, September 27, 2005
Visit the website at www.asharqalawsat.com/english
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 3
Humility should be part of Hughes' brief
Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT - I was both heartened and disappointed, on the fourth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, to see the United States mark the moment with a combination of continued military attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, persistent threats against Iran and Syria, and the swearing in of Karen Hughes as the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Has the American-led "global war on terror" been a success, or even a suitable policy response, since 2001? Have the governments and societies of the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe - the three main incubators of Osama bin Laden-type terrorism - done enough to contain and end this terror scourge? The balance sheet on global security and stability seems erratic these days, as terrorism has expanded into one of the world's fastest growing and increasingly outsourced and franchised industries.

So will Hughes and her new public diplomacy department do better at reducing terror than the other American policies of the last four years? One hopes so, but the initial signs are mixed. Hughes and her department are a potentially very important development in the strained relations between the U.S. and much of the rest of the world, especially Arab and Islamic societies. This is a mature and welcomed sign that the Bush administration grasps more clearly that its armed forces and threatening diplomacy cannot be the primary instruments of its interactions with societies with whom it has quarrels.

But I fear that if some early distortions, gaps and misguided operating principles are not quickly amended, she and her efforts could turn out to be another howling waste of time and money. It is important therefore for Arabs and Muslims to engage Hughes in the same constructive spirit with which she now approaches our societies, but without the flaws that may hobble her horse before it gets out of the barn.

She has said in her spin-smooth manner that the U.S. approach to public diplomacy towards the Arab and Islamic world will comprise four E's: Education, Empowerment, Engagement and Exchanges. This sensible and useful approach will reinforce the mostly positive views of basic American values that a majority of Arabs and Muslims already hold. But it is unlikely on its own to make any significant dents in the widely critical views of American foreign policy held by most people in the Arab and Islamic world.

I would humbly suggest that she expand her four E's with two P's: Policy and Perception, reflecting the two serious flaws that she should quickly fix in Washington's public diplomacy approach, if she expects her department to have any impact beyond her president's speeches on American military bases.

The "perception" flaw is simply that U.S. public diplomacy efforts seem to rest heavily on the assumption that if Arabs and Muslims had a better knowledge of American values and foreign or domestic policies, they would have a more positive image of the U.S. If she has not done so already she should read the dozens of surveys and analyses of Arab and Islamic public opinion that repeatedly confirm how we Arabs and Muslims admire and even emulate most American values, including freedom, democracy, the rule of law and entrepreneurship. (If her staff do not have the Web sites for her to check out, I recommend she start by googling the work of Shibli Telhami, John Zogby, the Global Values Survey, and the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, among many others.) She would quickly discover that the idea that the problem is mainly in how Arabs and Muslims perceive America is both wrong and insultingly racist. If this deep flaw is not corrected quickly, someone should hand Hughes a gun with which to shoot her horse and put it out if its imminent misery.

The second problematic issue in the U.S. public diplomacy approach, "policy," is actually the apparent total absence of understanding as to how American foreign policy in the world impacts the minds and attitudes of Arabs and Muslims.

The criticisms of the U.S. that dominate this region and most of the rest of the world reflect policy resentments, not perception problems. Dozens of good scholarly studies confirming this are also available.

At her swearing in ceremony last week, Hughes said, "I believe there is no more urgent challenge for America's national security and for a more peaceful future for all the world's children than the need to foster greater respect, understanding and a sense of common interest and common values between Americans and people of different countries, cultures and faiths."

Well, actually, there is a more urgent challenge, and it falls into one of those slightly awkward P's, because most of the world's children and adults already relate to American society and people with "respect, understanding and a sense of common interest and common values."

The more urgent challenge she should grasp is for the U.S., as the world's dominant power, to pursue foreign policies that respect a single standard of law and morality applicable to all people and countries, rather than pursuing policies that tend often to be erratic, expedient, inconsistent, and sometimes hypocritical and against the grain of the global consensus.

Hughes and her public diplomacy department represent a potentially historic new wrinkle in U.S. foreign policy, which is badly in need of new ideas and directions. If Washington really wants to engage the world on policy, values and our children's common future, we should all respond enthusiastically and help nudge the U.S. out of its unilateral military approach to promoting global peace and security. If Washington wants only to elucidate to us why we misunderstand American values and intentions, it should cancel the whole spectacle before it wastes time and money and generates more resentment. This horse can run, if it is powered by honesty and humility.

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* Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for The Daily Star
Source: Daily Star staff, September 14, 2005
Visit 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 4
Is Al Qaeda asking to negotiate?
Allen J. Zerkin

NEW YORK – Isn’t it clear by now that the U.S. and its allies are not likely to be able to wipe out Al Qaeda or ensure that we are not attacked again domestically? As the British acknowledged in July, the London attacks were just a matter of when, not if. To be sure, the terrorists can't win this war, but neither can we.

The most serious risk is that Al Qaeda will sooner or later be able to attack us with a biological or nuclear weapon, not merely the conventional bombs used in London and Madrid or the suicide car bombs being used to such gruesome effect in Iraq during the last few days. Long-term strategies to win Muslim hearts and minds — through democratization, public diplomacy and greater economic opportunity — are therefore likely to be a case of too little, too late. Even if, somehow, many are won over, such strategies will have no effect on the recruits who are being drawn to Al Qaeda every day, especially among Sunni populations where U.S. troops are stationed.

So is there a Plan B? The most recent videotaped message from Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second-in-command, broadcast Aug. 4, is a reminder that there could be — in the form of some sort of political engagement.

Unthinkable? In his message, Zawahiri referred to Osama bin Laden's April 2004 offer of a truce to any European country that made a commitment to stop "attacking Muslims, or intervening in their affairs." European governments immediately dismissed the offer. Why?

For starters, because the West believes there is nothing to be negotiated when it comes to Al Qaeda. Terrorist acts are either senseless violence (which means there is nothing to talk about) or part of a plan to destroy our way of life (which is nonnegotiable). As White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "Terrorists will use any excuse to carry out evil attacks on innocent human beings."

It's also believed that a truce is impossible because Bin Laden and c

Posted by Evelin at October 5, 2005 08:51 AM