Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below the Common Ground News Bulletin: 16 - 22 September 2008.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
Common Ground News Bulletin: 16 - 22 September 2008
Inside this edition 16 - 22 September 2008
Keep Israel and Syria talking
by Bilal Y. Saab and Bruce Riedel
Brookings Institute research analyst Bilal Saab and senior fellow and author Bruce Riedel evaluate the opportunity for ongoing Syrian-Israeli negotiations despite the recent military deployments on both sides of the border.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008)
Female film company unveils Saudi Arabia
by Danya M. Alhamrani
Danya Alhamrani, co-founder of Eggdancer Productions, explains how she and her partner are using film to dispel the myths surrounding Saudi Arabia.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008)
~Youth Views~ Between Israel and Lebanon
by Zohar Shechtman
Zohar Shechtman, a 13-year-old Israeli student from Hulon imagines her life in 2018. Shechtman’s essay was a winner of OneVoice’s “Imagine: 2018” contest.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008)
Getting smart on Pakistan
by Robert M. Hathaway
Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was inaugurated as Pakistan’s president last week following Pervez Musharraf’s resignation. Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, considers whether current changes in Pakistani politics will herald “a new beginning for Pakistan, and a new era in US-Pakistan relations.”
(Source: Middle East Progress, 11 September 2008)
Warith Deen Muhammad: the imam that cared
by Zahed Amanullah
Zahed Amanullah, associate editor of altmuslim.com, looks back at the life of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, an influential Muslim American leader, following his death last week.
(Source: altmuslim.com, 10 September 2008)
Keep Israel and Syria talking
Bilal Y. Saab and Bruce Riedel
Washington, DC - The indirect negotiations between Syria and Israel that began last May have gone as far as they can. Their purpose – to break the ice between the two states after eight years of not talking, and to test one another’s resolve over certain issues – has been achieved. Now, Syrian President Bashar Assad wants to move forward, as evidenced in his proposal to Israel for direct peace talks at a recent four-way summit in Damascus involving Syria, Turkey, France and Qatar.
But Assad knows there are still two big uncertainties surrounding the prospects of a historic peace deal with the Israelis: the position of the next US administration and the results of a possible Israeli election. While Assad is grateful for the role Turkey has played so far in hosting four rounds of negotiations (a fifth is scheduled for 18-19 September, according to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan), and for France’s pledge of help in any direct Syrian-Israeli talks, he is only interested in a peace agreement with Israel if it is mediated by the United States.
An agreement endorsed by Washington would not only guarantee the return of the Golan to Syria (in exchange for a long-term security deal with Israel), but also – and perhaps more significantly – end Syria’s isolation in the world. The most important lesson Bashar Assad learned from his father is that good relations with Washington, more than any other foreign capital, serve Syria’s strategic interests. But, until a new US administration is in place, he knows there’s little point in proceeding with the negotiations he’s proposing.
Uncertainties besiege the Israeli home front, too, and Assad is waiting for the future of Israel’s government to be decided – something that is likely to be contingent on an election – for assurance that the next prime minister will be on the same track as Ehud Olmert.
So between now and the election of an American president in November, and the selection of a new Israeli prime minister some time in the next half year, it’s a delicate waiting game for Syria and Israel.
In the meantime, however, tensions between Syria and Israel remain high, even two years after the inconclusive conflict between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. Israel has remained deeply concerned about Syria’s role in rearming the Shi’a militant group in anticipation of a second round.
Senior Israeli defence officials believe that with their current deployment, the Syrians would be able to airdrop commandos into the Golan and take over several hills there within hours. To prepare for this eventuality, Israel recently launched large-scale military exercises with live ammunition in the Golan Heights.
“There is reinforcement on the other side”, said Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who closely observed the drills. “It’s not by chance that we are training intensively on a major scale.” In response to the drills, Syria immediately put its military on high alert.
>From a military perspective, it is unlikely that Syria and Israel would embark on an all-out war in the short or medium term. Despite Syria’s recent upgrade of its air- and coastal-defence systems, its acquisition of the most advanced anti-tank hardware from Moscow, and its development of asymmetrical fighting capabilities, its military is still no match for the Israel Defense Forces. The Syrian leadership is fully aware that any direct military encounter between the two states would result in a clear Israeli victory.
While Israel may have no big concerns about a conventional military confrontation with Syria, it does worry about the latter’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) and its surface-to-surface missiles. Syria has been developing its CBW capability since the 1980s and has gained the capacity in recent years to launch large numbers of medium and long-range rockets. If tipped with chemical or biological warheads, these rockets could cause significant damage and terror in Israel.
Do these military considerations rule out any chance of war, then?
Not necessarily. Conflict between the two countries could still occur over a miscalculation or a misinterpretation. Not since the early 1980s has there been such danger of escalation should one side mistake the other’s intention.
To avert any dangerous miscalculations, Israel and Syria need to keep meeting and talking. As long as the situation on the ground remains volatile, the indirect negotiations still underway in Turkey are important, because they reduce the risks of misinterpretation and misunderstanding between the two states. This is the real value of the role Turkey has been playing to date.
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Bilal Y. Saab is a research analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Bruce O. Riedel is a senior fellow at the Saban Center and author of the new book The Search for al Qaeda (Brookings Institution Press). This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Female film company unveils Saudi Arabia
Danya M. Alhamrani
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia - In the summer of 2006, I partnered with my friend Dania Nassief to establish our own production company in Jeddah. We wanted to tell the world the stories hardly ever told of Saudi life and culture.
The paper chase was long and drawn out. Currently, Saudi Arabian regulations require the general manager of a production company to be male. As women, we not only wanted to own the production company ourselves, but we also wanted to manage it. It took us some time to petition the government for this right. But finally, two years later, Dania and I are licensed and practicing.
Our goal at Eggdancer Productions is to produce inquiring and moving programs that examine social, cultural and religious issues. We believe in using the media to affect social change and are committed to fostering dialogue and greater understanding amongst the people of this region, and to bring their stories, concerns, values and ideas to the rest of the world.
Most people probably wouldn’t put Saudi Arabia on their list of vacation destinations. Unless you’re coming for work or pilgrimage, there is no easy way to get into Saudi as a tourist. In general, people don’t get to see Saudi Arabia unless it’s in the news where it is usually painted in a less than flattering light.
Eggdancer Production, serving as the field coordinator for a programme on the Travel Channel, recently had the opportunity to show the world a little bit about Saudi Arabia – that Saudi women can be strong in charge, that we have malls similar to those in America, and that we like to enjoy our time with family and friends, like everyone else. I had won the first-ever “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations FAN-atic Special” casting call competition for a television show on the Travel Channel. The contest required individuals to send in videotapes explaining why the show’s host, chef and author, Anthony Bourdain, should visit the contestants’ hometowns.
When I first met him in New York City as he was vetting the contestants, Tony asked me repeatedly whether I thought he would have fun in Saudi, reflecting a common bias in Western media that Saudi Arabia does not value leisure and recreation, and that local inhabitants are sombre, serious, or even evil.
When he arrived in Jeddah, we dined together at a local fast food restaurant, went fishing for fresh fish in the desert, and played air hockey at the local Red Sea Mall. His answer to my frequent question – “So, are you having fun?” – was a resounding “yes”.
Although Tony never spoke to me about his expectations of Saudi Arabia, in the narration of his Jeddah episode he commented how he was surprised to find that Saudis were people with a sense of humour and who could laugh at themselves: “There’s a cheerful, whimsical, good-humoured and sophisticated atmosphere very much at odds with the kinds of humourless fanaticism I was led to expect”.
I think Tony’s revelation helped a lot of people see a different side of Saudis than that depicted on television or in movies.
In other attempts to transform perceptions, we have filmed people performing the Hajj for the documentary, The Straight Path: Pillars of Islam, a teacher’s aid for high school and university students in the West. Using interviews and observational footage filmed in colourful locations in Mecca, the documentary introduces a non-Muslim audience to the basic tenants of a Muslim’s faith.
We are in a unique position because of our ability to understand both the Eastern and Western mentality and to navigate seamlessly between both worlds. Although I live in Saudi Arabia now, I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, and spent many summers there with my mother’s side of the family. I later went to school at both the University of San Diego and San Diego Sate University. I still spend a lot of time in the United States visiting friends and family whenever I get the chance. And Dania lived in the UK for a few years while she was attending graduate school.
We are lucky to be on the ground in Saudi. It is difficult to obtain visas and shooting permissions when coming from abroad, and in a time when all eyes are on Saudi Arabia, we are able to leave our offices, cameras in hand, and tell the story without going through that hassle.
Most stories in or about Saudi Arabia are done from the perspective of non-Arabs or non-Muslims, and are sensationalised versions of the same story being told over and over. We want to tell different stories, from the perspective of the people on this side of the world, tailored for a western audience so that we might do our part to help build bridges of understanding between these different parts of the world.
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* Danya M. Alhamrani is a co-founder, along with Dania Nassief, of Eggdancer Productions, an independent film and television production company based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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~Youth Views~ Between Israel and Lebanon
Zohar Shechtman
This article was written for the “Imagine 2018” essay competition (www.imagine2018.org), which asked Israelis and Palestinians to visualise what the region would look like in 10 years if a peace agreement were to be signed in 2008.
Hulon, Israel - I am driving; the road is quiet. I turn the radio on and a familiar song is playing. He liked this song, liked it a lot…. I remember that ever since he was little he liked this song; he knew all the words by heart, words I will never get to hear him say again.
Part of coping with a loss this hard, losing a son, is dealing with the title that will always float above your head, like an eternal label, with the words “Bereaved Mother” written on it.
Today I am going to meet a woman who is going through what I am going through: the feeling, the label, and worst of all, the yearning. But I lost my son in the Israeli Defence Force and she is from Lebanon.
If I had received this request at another time, I don’t really think I would have agreed. I don’t think I would have understood and been aware that she is probably living, like me, with the burden of bereavement. And still, I have some misgivings about the meeting – how will it actually be to meet her? Will I be able to feel free enough to honestly talk heart to heart?
We agreed on the details of the meeting last Thursday. At noon, at the Peace Park, where there used to be an Israeli Defense Force base. And now we are both a few meters from the same place, where we both lost our sons – the border.
I arrive and see that she is already there. I had expected her to look different – to be wearing religious clothes. But she is sitting there, in jeans and a T-shirt, not that much different from me.
“Hello”, I say and smile at her. She smiles back.
We start talking and, surprisingly enough, the conversation is in fluent Hebrew and includes more than our common interest for which we set the meeting. We talk about everything, openly and comfortably. Our daily routine is not that different, and I actually really like her – a woman with a positive attitude, wisdom and great abilities.
When our meeting is over, we decide to stay in touch. I really hope we can do it despite the distance. And still, even if we can’t, this meeting gave me a new perspective, a more open train of thought, and one insight that I will never forget – a human being is a human being. We are alive, we scream, we cry, we laugh, we love, we get hurt, we are human beings. It has nothing to do with gender, race or religion.
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* Zohar Shechtman is a 13-year-old student from Hulon, Israel. She is a member of Tzofim, the Israel Scouts. This article was written for the “Imagine 2018” essay competition (www.imagine2018.org), and is distributed by the Common Ground News Service in collaboration with One Voice (www.onevoicemovement.org).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 16 September 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Getting smart on Pakistan
Robert M. Hathaway
Washington, DC - The inauguration earlier this week of Asif Ali Zardari as Pakistan’s president offers the possibility – but hardly the certainty – of a new beginning for Pakistan, and a new era in US-Pakistan relations.
Zardari’s election gives Pakistanis an opportunity to move beyond the passions and antipathies of the Pervez Musharraf years. It offers them a chance – one last chance – to get serious about dealing with the grave problems confronting their country. The United States can and should help with these efforts.
During the past year and a half, one political crisis after another has distracted Pakistanis from squarely facing the huge economic and security challenges that threaten their nation. Large swaths of Pakistan are no longer under the effective control of the state. Armed insurgents regularly employ terror tactics and remind Pakistanis just how incapable of providing basic security their government is.
Spiralling food prices mean that growing numbers of Pakistanis go to bed hungry. Power blackouts are daily occurrences and have jolted the industrial base of the country. The educational system is dysfunctional, the judicial system corrupt. Young men cannot find jobs and are ready targets for extremist recruiters.
If Pakistan does not begin to address these problems in a systematic and sustained fashion, this nation of 165 million people – the world’s sixth most populous country – could go off the rails. And vital US interests would be jeopardised.
Is Zardari up to the task?
Doubts abound, both at home and abroad. If he is to erase those reservations, he could do no better than to live up to the fine promises he made in an article in The Washington Post last week. In that article, Zardari laid out his vision of a “democratic, moderate and progressive” Pakistan. An early test of his intentions will be whether he voluntarily surrenders the vast powers of the presidency that Musharraf had accumulated for himself and which have been used to bring down a succession of elected governments.
The Bush administration belatedly recognised that a Pakistan policy built around Musharraf was a dead end. It has welcomed Zardari’s election, all the more so since it has considerable worries about Nawaz Sharif, the leader of Pakistan’s other principal political party.
But Washington must avoid both words and actions that would allow Zardari’s political opponents to label him “America’s man”. Unfortunately, that epitaph is the kiss of death in Pakistan. Instead of linking itself to one individual or party, the United States must work to sustain democratic governance and the rule of law in Pakistan.
In the days and weeks ahead, the administration must make clear its expectations of Pakistan. The good news is that – contrary to what Pakistanis widely believe – the United States wants for Pakistan the very same things most Pakistanis desire: a stable government responsive to their wishes, a prosperous economy that meets the needs of the meekest as well as the mightiest, a judicial system that dispenses impartial justice, an end to extremist-sponsored violence and peace with its neighbours.
If the country’s new political leadership is prepared to move Pakistan in this direction, Pakistanis have every right to look to the United States for substantial assistance in strengthening their economy, providing for the education of their young people, making quality health care available to all Pakistanis, and working with Pakistan in a multitude of other ways to build a modern, prosperous country.
In the United States, there is widespread support for generous and long-term assistance to Pakistan. Bipartisan legislation, the Biden-Lugar bill now under consideration on Capitol Hill, envisions a tripling of US assistance during the next decade. Prospects for its adoption are promising.
In one respect, however, the Biden-Lugar bill does not go far enough. The single most useful thing the United States can do to help Pakistan succeed is to put Pakistanis to work. And the single most effective step toward this end Washington could take would be to eliminate its current punitive tariff policies on Pakistani exports.
As it currently stands, US trade policy actually discriminates against Pakistan. US tariffs on Pakistani textiles – easily Pakistan’s most important export – are far steeper than on similar goods from other countries. As Edward Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute has pointed out, each container of exported towels puts 500 Pakistani men and women to work.
Yet, textile exports from literally dozens of developing countries around the world face lower US tariffs than do Pakistani textiles. The least we could do is to level the playing field for Pakistani goods.
Similarly, many rich countries enjoy US trade benefits not available to Pakistan. Last year, Pakistani exports to the United States totalled not much more than a quarter of the value of Sweden’s exports. Yet the $365 million in tariff duties we imposed on Pakistan was almost three times the figure we extracted from Swedish goods. No wonder many Pakistanis disbelieve our protestations of good intentions toward their country.
It makes good political, economic, and strategic sense for the United States to move – and quickly – to give Pakistani textile exports preferred tariff status – or at least parity with their competitors. Doing so will not be easy. Entrenched US interests will denounce the idea as too costly for American industry and too destructive of American jobs. But surely a way can be found to meet the legitimate concerns of US companies and workers. As the United States seeks to help Pakistan, trade parity should be at the top of the next administration’s agenda.
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* Robert M. Hathaway is the director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from Middle East Progress and can be accessed at ( http://middleeastprogress.org ).
Source: Middle East Progress, 11 September 2008, http://middleeastprogress.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Warith Deen Muhammad: the imam that cared
Zahed Amanullah
London - Muslim leaders in the United States often find themselves in the media spotlight, with all the attendant fanfare and occasional controversy. For the past few decades, however, one major Muslim American leader managed to keep a low profile while at the same time leaving a lasting impression on the greater Muslim American landscape. That man was Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, who rose to prominence through the Nation of Islam led by his father, Elijah Muhammad, to become a globally recognised Muslim leader.
He died last week at the age of 74.
WD Mohammed eventually rose to prominence in both African-American and immigrant Muslim communities, became the first Muslim to offer an invocation in the US Senate, and served in leadership positions of countless Muslim and interfaith organisations. His unlikely journey over 30 years ago from the socio-politically motivated Nation to mainstream Islam – one which the majority of approximately 2 million African American Muslims followed – remains his most awe-inspiring achievement, one that balanced pride in American ideals with the responsibility to make it a better country.
Even though he was seen as the natural successor for leadership within the Nation of Islam, WD Mohammad became increasingly open about his rejection of his father’s teachings: the divinity of blacks, the divine origins of Nation founder Wallace Fard Muhammad as “Saviour Allah incarnate”, and the belief that whites were the Devil incarnate. While serving time in prison for conscientious objection to the military draft, Mohammad studied the Qur’an and built up the courage to confront his father’s teachings, even as he was groomed to succeed him. Once released from prison, his rejoined the leadership of his father’s movement, all the while his doubts growing stronger.
His refusal to endorse the unorthodox teachings of the Nation, combined with his open confrontation of corruption within it, kept him in obscurity among other leaders of the group. It was not until ten years later, after the death of his father, that WD Mohammad was able to ascend to leadership and begin turning the movement towards the vision he had spent the last decade crafting. By 1977, he formally broke the Nation away from its original teachings and discarded the name, leaving it and its few remaining believers to Minister Louis Farrakhan, who runs a much smaller Nation to this day.
While WD Mohammad was determined to re-orient his organisation towards orthodox Islam, he did so without rejecting the positive teachings that the Nation brought to that community, such as self-reliance and personal discipline. “[He] was able to do two remarkable things”, says Sulayman Nyang, a professor of African Studies at Howard University. “One [was] the re-Islamisation of the movement; the second, the re-Americanisation of the movement.”
Under his leadership, Imam Mohammad’s community reached out to other faith groups, stressed civic engagement as a means of self-empowerment, and worked for economic self-sufficiency. By some accounts, the community under his influence grew to nearly one million people.
Imam Mohammad’s influence, however, was felt outside the African-American Muslim community as well. While some immigrant Muslims were (and still are) unaware of what WD Muhammad gave to their community, his influence was most profoundly felt within Muslim leadership. As he reached out to predominantly immigrant Muslim organisations, he brought the lessons of nearly a half-century of organisation and vision-making to the table.
After his invocation to the US Senate in 1993, he led two more for President Bill Clinton. He shared a stage with Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama in 1999, addressing 100,000 people at the Vatican. In 2000, he had a public reconciliation with Louis Farrakhan, though that was seen as a sign of the Nation’s increasing subordination to the global, mainstream Islam Mohammed steered his community towards.
Towards the end of his life, Imam Mohammad stepped down from day-to-day leadership of the now-decentralised community that his father once tightly controlled. Shunning the spotlight until the end, WD Mohammad found refuge in an organisation called The Mosque Cares, where he spent his remaining days speaking about Islam and the need to create bridges of understanding between different faith and ethnic communities.
“I don’t have a PhD”, he said. “I don’t have a master’s degree. I don’t even have a BA”, he once remarked to a room of Muslim teenagers. “But I’m connected to something mighty great. It makes me respectable, honourable in the company of kings, queens and presidents”.
“His intrinsic intelligence and high academic acumen made him wise, but his kind heart and charitable character is what made him so beloved”, remarked Congressman Andre Carson. “I extend my sympathies to his family and friends as they mourn his passing”. Carson, who is one of two Muslims currently in Congress, embodies the spirit of public service Mohammed tried to instil in Muslim Americans, one that combines a core Islamic spirituality with a universal sense of service to humanity. The sea change he led within the African American Muslim community will not likely be repeated. But it must be preserved.
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* Zahed Amanullah, based in London, is associate editor of altmuslim.com. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from almuslim.com.
Source: altmuslim.com, 10 September 2008, www.altmuslim.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.