Free Republic

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future. Vali Nasr. Norton. 304 pages. $25.95. Shiite Muslims have a saying: ''Every day is Ashura, and every city is Karbala.'' The adage evokes the murder of Husayn, the prophet Mohammed's grandson and, according to Shiites, his rightful successor. More generally, the phrase recalls Shiites' collective identity as the underdog, a neglected and often persecuted minority. Every year, on the 10th day of the first month of the Islamic calendar, Shiites worldwide mark Ashura, the day that commemorates Husayn's death in the Iraqi city of Karbala in 680 A.D. From...

ESCONDIDO – Longtime Escondido resident Vojin Joksimovich has traded his authority as a nuclear safety specialist and risk analyst to deal in the power of words. In his new book, “Revenge of the Prophet: How Clinton and his Predecessors Empowered Radical Islam” (Regina Orthodox Press), Joksimovich outlines for readers how he believes Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks rose from obscurity to become a global threat during the Clinton years. He says that Clinton and others' lack of resolve to fight terrorism helped encourage terrorists. Though the book's title puts President Clinton in the hot seat, Joksimovich stressed...

Referring to the Israeli war with Hizbollah the Indonesion president is quoted as saying "This war must stop, or it will radicalize the Muslim world, even those of us who are moderate today," said Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who leads the world's most populous Muslim country. "From there, it will be just one step away to that ultimate nightmare: a clash of civilizations." The title of the article is "Muslims press U.N. for truce in Lebanon."

Global battle is for hearts and minds, prime minister says British Prime Minister Tony Blair: "This is a global fight about global values."******************************LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- The conflict in the Middle East, as well as others involving Muslim extremists, revolve around "modernization within Islam" and whether the Western system of values can "beat theirs," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech Tuesday.Speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Blair went on to say that the struggle was between moderate, benign values versus the hatred and intolerance of fundamentalism."Even the issue of Israel is just part of...

Survey reveals Muslim views on violence Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Up to 1.3 percent of Indonesian Muslims nationwide admit using violence against people or objects they consider contradictory to their beliefs, a survey found, with more than 40 percent ready to wage war for their faith. Acts of violence in the survey on religion and violence by the Center for Islamic and Social Studies (PPIM) ranged from 0.1 percent of respondents admitting their involvement in demolishing or arson of churches constructed without official permits, to 1.3 percent who committed "intimidation" against those they considered had blasphemed Islam....

" ... I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief. The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it. It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in...

MANY IN THE WEST see the mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah, now in its fourth week, as another episode in a tedious saga of an Arab-Jewish conflict that began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a political version of the “original sin”. The conventional wisdom in the West is that the whole tale would end if Israel were to return the occupied territories to the Palestinians, allowing them to create a state of their own. But that analysis does not reflect the Middle East’s new realities. All the wars in that region of the past century,...

Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan: There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006 . Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the...

Why this difference? Why is it that while the ancient civilizations of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, were submerged and forgotten, that of Iran survived, and reemerged in a different form? Various answers have been offered to this question. One suggestion is that the difference is language. The peoples of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, spoke various forms of Aramaic. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Arabic, and the transition from Aramaic to Arabic was much easier than would have been the transition from Persian, an Indo-European language, to Arabic. There is some force in that argument. But then Coptic, the language...

July 31, 2006, 7:15 a.m. Fukuyama's Second ThoughtsAt a Crossroads. By Jonah Goldberg When Samuel P. Huntington, author of the famous “clash of civilizations” thesis, was accused of being too simplistic, he pled guilty as charged. But, he countered, any serious attempt to explain complex phenomena — never mind the grand sweep of world history — would have to be simplistic. “When people think seriously,” he said, “they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’” Since the end...

Tuesday's front-page New York Times headline on Hezbollah/Israeli fighting -- "International Force Is Favored, But No Nation Commits Troops" -- was widely received with giggling "Well, duh's!" In a way, it was funny. While the Europeans agreed that international troops should be sent in to stop the fighting, the article ended with a quote that "The Germans recommended the French, the French recommended the Egyptians, and so on." But if one scratches just beneath the surface of the headlines, the great strategic failure of America since Sept. 11, 2001 can be detected in the fourth paragraph of the N.Y. Times...

The Opening Round of Iran's War Against the West Dore Gold Dore Gold is the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and served as Israel's ambassador to the UN from 1997 to 1999. Since the 1982 Lebanon War, the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly demanded that all foreign forces leave Lebanese territory. This evacuation of outside armies and terrorist groups was rightly seen as the prerequisite for the pacification of the volatile Israel-Lebanon border and the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty. It was disturbing to see Secretary-General Kofi Annan shaking hands with Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah...

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...

A Chinese intelligence officer is engaged in covertly aiding the ruling Palestinian Hamas terrorist group, according to a Paris-based intelligence newsletter picked up by the Washington Post’s Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough on June 19. They identify Gong Xiaosheng as a Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) official who has worked out of Ramallah since Nov. 2002, first with Yasser Arafat and latterly helping Hamas. It was Gong who arrianged for Mahmoud al-Zahar to be invited to Beijing shortly after his appointment as Hamas foreign minister. The report says Gong is a strategic agent “trained in Division 8 of the...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An al Qaeda-led group said Iran was trying to destroy Sunni Muslims in Iraq and blasted the Islamic republic for hosting a conference of Iraq's neighbours, according to an Internet statement on Monday. "Safavids (Shi'ites) in Iran want to support the new Iraqi apostate government to achieve their historic dream to ... destroy Sunnis in Iraq and create the Shi'ite crescent in the region," said the statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council. "To do that they will compromise with crusaders on their alleged nuclear programme," added the statement posted on a Web site often used by Islamist...

Though banned by Ataturk as part of an effort to modernize the Turkish republic and empower women, polygamy remains widespread in this deeply religious and rural Kurdish region of southeastern Anatolia, home to one-third of Turkey's 71 million people. The practice is generally accepted under the Koran. Polygamy is creating cultural clashes in a country struggling to reconcile the secularism of the republic with its Muslim traditions. It also risks undermining Turkey's drive to gain entry into the European Union. "The E.U. is looking for any excuse not to let Turkey in, and polygamy reinforces the stereotype of Turkey as...

Translation of Major al-Qaeda Book that Outlines Its Plan for Defeating U.S. and Its Allies The genre of “strategic studies”—the name given by jihadi ideologues to their books and articles on the strengths and weakness of the jihadi movement and those of its enemies—had, until recently, been neglected by Western governments and analysts involved with counterterrorism. In 2004, Hegghammer and Lia called attention to the genre (which they dubbed “jihadi strategic studies”) and usefully commented on its features (Hegghammer and Lia, SCT, 2004). More recently, Brachman and McCants demonstrated how this genre can be used to identify and exploit the...

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press titled "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other" indicated that a large portion of Muslims around the world are nuts. The survey interviewed Muslims in two groups of countries: six with longstanding, mainly Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey) and four in Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Britain, Spain). The majority of Muslims polled believe that the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were carried out by either Jews or mutant X-Men. The proportions range from...

The War for the WorldThroughout history there have been many wars in diverse places and as knowledge increased the inventions of man made them deadlier, so deadly that in this modern age of advanced technologies war has become unthinkable - almost. The last century also brought many wars and conflicts including World War I. Referred to as “The Great War” it was to be “the war to end all wars” or as the French would say; “la der des der“(the last of the last). But time has a way of resetting itself and history of replaying itself. It would be...

The present fighting is part of a fourth war for Iraq: Gulf War I, the twelve years of no-fly zones, the three-week war in 2003, and now the three-year-old insurrection that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein.But this last and most desperate struggle, unlike the others, is being waged on several fronts. First, of course, is the fighting itself to preserve the elected democracy of Iraq. Twenty-five-hundred Americans have died for that idea — the chance of freedom for 26 million Iraqis, and the more long-term notion that the Arab Middle East’s first democracy will end the false dichotomy of...