The ruling by the International Criminal Court to indict President Omar Al-Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity is correct, unfortunately, the physical location of the court is not. Here is where the unrelenting unease springs from: the ICC is not simply a judicial body but an extension of political entities, the most powerful of which, are the European Union and the United States. The court’s seat is in the Hague in Netherlands and is based on a treaty signed in Rome, Italy — but the proceedings can take place anywhere. Just like European colonialism.

Europe and the United States have lost all legitimacy in the Arab Middle East because of their inability to act or even speak against the war crimes being committed on a daily basis against the Palestinians. The International Criminal Court will definitely not seek Israeli officials like Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni for war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon. The court will not try Israeli officials for stealing Palestinian lands while housing Palestinians in refugee camps for the past 40 years in the West Bank and Gaza under military occupation, nor will it try Israeli officials for using white phosphorus and cluster bombs in civilian areas, whose usage contravenes the Geneva Convention, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively.

Herein lies the tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has not only destroyed Palestine but it has also stymied and stunted regional political progress and social modernization, both of which are dependent on healthy internal debate and strong external connections. Like the case of Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, Arab secular democrats should have been aided by Western governments and groups. The natural allies of Arab secular democrats, however, are radioactive and off limits because of their blind support of Israel and its inhumane occupation. Instead of being strengthened by working with European and American pro-democracy groups, Arab democrats and secularists are discredited and shunned if seen to be too close to the United States and Europe. The concentration of Arab dictators and autocrats, and by extension President Bashir himself, is a direct result of this democracy deficit in the Middle East. Arab democrats, secularist and Islamist, must work harder for democracy in the Arab world and look elsewhere for external collaboration with democratic governments, especially in Turkey and India.

American and European groups and officials, hoping to have more influence on Sudan and other Arab countries, must work to stem the tide of extremism by promoting justice, equality and peace in all countries in the region, including Israel. The widespread wariness of American and European designs on the region has rendered the ruling by the ICC largely symbolic. The people of Sudan, while distrustful of the regime, are even more suspicious of the sudden Western concern for Arab lives. The people of the Arab world couldn’t agree more. The Arab governments are just too busy propping up each other, lest they all be indicted for war crimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22qaddafi.html?_r=1&hp;

Being an Arab-American is, at times, excruciatingly painful. One would think that simply being oneself, as the ubiquitous tropes remind us, is easy. But for me, yet again, my Arabness has trumped my American identity and precluded me from an American experience that I was genuinely looking forward to. It is hard to reconcile the Arab and the American when one is killing the other within me. It is hard to understand how I was burying the Gaza dead, my relatives whose loss is mine, while I partially paid for the weapons and elected the government that brought about their death.

I left for work and walked out into a parallel universe of people excited and inspired by the inauguration. Callers to NPR talkshows hyperventilated about tears flying, crowds crushing, inspiring words, convention halls and gathering places from Juno to DC. But I was not excited, nor inspired. My original zeal for the Obama campaign has been tinged with a dash of disappointment after a few interesting choices for his cabinet and later marred to the point of disillusionment and despair after his response to the Gaza massacre: another President, another war, more ambivalence, equivocation and prevarication. As I listened to snippets of his speech for the rest of the day, I knew I didn’t miss much. And while I am as American as I am Arab, I knew that I did the right thing. Today Gaza needed me more than Washington, DC.

The one state solution has been gaining credence among intellectuals and the general populations in Israel/Palestine (especially Palestinians) because the two-state solution looks increasingly impossible to implement. Dividing Jerusalem, dismantling Jewish settlements in the West Bank, establishing a Palestinian state bisected by Israel are all insurmountable obstacles to a two-state solution that immediately disappear in a one-state solution.

In a one-state solution reconciliation can truly begin and Jew and gentile Israeli, Muslim and Christian Palestinian, Arab, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi can all coexist. Jews don’t have to be evacuated from Hebron and other holy cities in the West Bank, Palestinians can live in Tel Aviv, Yaffa, or Nazareth. The Holy Land will finally retain its sacred status once more.

The presence of 300,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and 200,000 others in East Jerusalem living in Jewish-only settlements, driving on Jewish-only roads makes the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem increasingly difficult. How the International community expects Israel to relocate 10% of Israel’s Jewish population back into Israel is not clear. Furthermore, it is unlikely that ideologically driven and fiercely religious settlers will opt to live in peace in the Palestinian state. Dividing Jerusalem into two cities is extremely painful for those who love the city whether Palestinian or Israeli.

Extremists on both sides will see their power sapped as soon as there is a resolution and peace on the horizon. According to some polls a majority of Palestinians and a substantial population of Israelis would support a binational state and this is before any public or educational campaign to inform and educate the respective publics of the advantages of a one state solution.

The state of Israel/Palestine could guarantee the rights of all its citizens and have a strong secular and democratic constitution that would be the envy and partner of the entire Middle East. The current round of violence has shown how the Palestinians’ dreams have been stifled by war and how Israel’s democracy has turned into Apartheid. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a century old which is comparatively short to South Africa’s and North Ireland’s centuries long fight for equality. Yet, today, both South Africa and Ireland are among the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world.

While human beings are social animals who evolved to live cooperatively and peacefully in large groups ranging from tribes to nations and while they have evolved the capacity for sacrifice and risk taking in the interest of the larger group, they have also evolved to be racist, discriminatory and gruesomely violent against other tribes or nations. Humans have killed, maimed, and cleansed the earth of competing nations to secure more resources and power for their own. This unfortunate aspect of human nature stems from the fact that human groups who do not compete for survival simply get outcompeted by other more violent groups. It is undeniable that brave promoters of justice still exist within a nation such as the Israelis Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy, Nomika Zion, and Amira Haas have demonstrated in Israel’s Gaza war, but the vast majority of people in a nation are cowardly, self-absorbed, slavish and opportunistic. While learned cultures play a part in educating and modifying human nature, human nature is more instinctual, more potent and more enduring. As culture changes over centuries, human nature is molded over millions of years. The latter fact would explain why people of varied and discrete nations such as WWII Japan and Germany, Antebellum America, Early Egypt, the Ottoman and Roman Empires, looked away as their nations pillaged, killed, enslaved.

At the same time, humans are rational and have a strong sense of self preservation which is why no people would walk to their certain national death by provoking an equally powerful enemy unless their survival hinged upon it. This is the reason why the cold war which lasted forty years never materialized a charred world as far as the United States and the Soviet Union are concerned and it is also why India, as much as it would like to give Pakistan an Israel-style drubbing, will not. Deterrence works. Modern examples are too numerous to delineate but here goes a few: American public opinion turned against the genocide of Vietnam and the illegal invasion of Iraq only after significant American casualties returned home; Sudan’s government of Omar El Bashir only started taking the rebels in Darfur seriously after he was indicted for war crimes in the Hague; South African Apartheid ended only after a significant economic blockade was enforced on the White-dominated government. Iran and Syria helped foment the insurgency in Iraq because they knew if Iraq were a picnic, they would be next. The neoconservatives were already calling Syria a low-lying fruit even as the carnage in Iraq was intensifying. These examples are not given to promote war but to demonstrate a clear-eyed unsentimental calculus of the situation at hand. Peace is desirable and achievable but only between to equal partners, both of whom have much to lose from war.

To negotiate with Israel, the Arabs need a deterrence capability. Israel must have something to lose beside its 13 soldiers to 1200 Palestinians. First, it is Arabs who must confront Israel and not just Palestinians, because Arabs have a shared cultural, historical and socioliguistic ties that bind all Arab nations together. From the onset of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab world has been deeply involved. Finally the Arabs must be part of the solution because Palestine is part of the Arab nation, and human nature will not allow its abandonment. In order to stop Palestinians from becoming the next American Indians and to prevent the territories from turning into the next Indian reservations, the Arab countries must be able to deter Israel’s onslaught in three main ways.

First, Arab governments must be overthrown. Only democratically-elected governments are responsive to the people no matter how corrupt, inefficient, and slow. Second, Arabs must build their military deterrence such as Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran are doing at the moment. Finally, the focal point of Israel’s strength, the United States pro-Israel community, must be chipped at, its media monopoly diluted and organized lobbying counterbalanced. Arab and Muslim Americans can affect the outcome of this conflict and effect an Israeli-Palestinian peace more easily than any other group of Arabs or Muslims in the world.

This must be done in two and simultaneous ways, Arab and Muslim Americans must raise money to establish grants and scholarships to create incentives for young Arab and Muslim Americans to go into fields related to media, communications, journalism and entertainment. Visibility is everything in the media war. Second, Arab and Muslim Americans must organize and form a powerful lobby that will allow Congressmen, Senators and Representatives, to oppose Israel without committing hari kari. I have written about an Arab/Muslim Lobby on KABOBfest before here and here. We have a sympathetic president who has given audience to Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said but he is no good if the US Congress opposes him every step of the way. Arabs and Muslim Americans must work on their deterrence, simply educating an uninterested and unaffected American public about Israel’s atrocities will get us nowhere.

The Islamic Courts Union is crude and conservative but most Somalis welcomed a government after the lawlessness that has persisted in Somalia with the absence of a formal government since 1991. The United States under the guise of fighting terrorism supported an Ethiopian-backed counterinsurgency that has unseated the government and left Somalia divided once more between warlords. The fear of Islamists has once more driven the West, mainly the United States, to implement policies that run counter to its national interests, which in this case would be the stability of one of the most important maritime corridors in the world, transporting most of the oil destined to Europe and North America from the Middle East.

Similarly, in Algeria, the Front Islamique du Salut won the Algerian elections in 1991 but France supported its secular rival, the Front de Liberation Nationale, to prevent the FIS from assuming power. The French intervention started a ten year civil war that still scars the Mediterranean nation. The civil war also created a vacuum that allowed the birth of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (Al-Qaeda in North Africa), akin to the birth of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in Iraq after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But Somalia and Algeria are by no means isolated incidents. Fear of Islamists has all but paralyzed Bush’s democratic agenda in the Middle East, after the victory of Hamas and the better than expected showing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. These moderate Islamists parties tend to have wide popular support because of their organization and lack of corruption. In a region that boasts “Till death do us part” presidents, Islamist parties are the only alternative in town. Their ability to organize in mosques and provide charities for schools and hospitals makes them capable of organizing under the cover of nonpolitical organizations whereas secular political parties are quickly snuffed out. Furthermore, Middle Eastern dictators have smelled the Western aversion to Islamists so they tout their Islamists as the only alternative to their lamentable but necessary rule.

So far Western opposition to Islamists has been based on three main points. First, Islamists are only using democracy to get to power. The famous line during the Algerian elections was that, “Islamists are in favor of one man, one vote, one time”. Well, that may be a risk worth taking. When Hosni Mubarak and Qadafi have been in power since 1981 and 1979, and Bashar al-Assad of Syria took over in 2001 from his father (and these are the republics), then we can risk an Islamist party that may not give up power. Second is that Islamists are anti-Israel. Again, the way that relations between the Arab world and Israel are, not much would change with Islamists coming to power in Arab countries, possibly with the exception of Egypt and Jordan who have peace treaties with Israel. Even that is not a given, the Justice and Development Party is in power in Turkey and has not cut off Turkey’s military and economic ties with Israel. Finally, Islamists do not respect human rights and will impose sharia’ law. The latter is perhaps the worst reason because the secular governments with their contempt for democracy and civil society have curtailed every human right in the Middle East, from freedom of speech to women’s rights, from minority rights to religious freedom.
In Gaza, Hamas did not rush to enforce sharia law and neither did the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, nor is sharia law a part of Hizbullah platform for Lebanon. Islamist parties have shown themselves to be pragmatic and real alternatives to the sclerotic, calcified secular parties of the 1970s. Any road to democracy in the Middle East will have to include Islamist parties because of their popularity and their organization, their relatively blank slates and also due to the fact that secular parties are most ruthlessly crushed by the sitting Arab governments. Islamists coming to power through the ballot box will reinvigorate the civil societies of the region and allow competition for government. The democratic process itself will act as a moderating force and as we have seen with the Republican Party, political parties need to be sent to the wilderness after a long sojourn in power.

Of course, Friedman forgets to mention that Muslims and their leaders from around the world roundly condemned the Mumbai terrorist attacks. From President Mubarak of Egypt to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, from the Council of British Muslims to the Austrian Muslim Society (Islamishe Glaubensgameinschaft), even Ahmedinejad of Iran piled on his condemnation of the attacks. Not a single Arab or Pakistani newspaper that I looked up omitted to write a heated rebuke of the attacks on November 29th before anyone knew which group was behind the attacks and before the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the New York Times even mentioned the issue. “Islam Would Never Condone the Acts of Barbarity in Mumbai,” blared the Lebanese Daily Star. “No civilized person can be anything but revolted and sickened by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai,” bemoaned the Saudi Arab News. Indeed the reaction from the Middle East and surrounding Muslim countries was swift in its rejection of the crimes.

Alas, Thomas Friedman saw an opportunity to embarrass the Muslim community and its moral prevarication vis-a-vis terrorism instead of acknowledging a community in distress, genuinely outraged. Perhaps what is most interesting is that Friedman gave no examples of other people who marched in outrage of their fringes committing terrorism. Did the Irish or the Basques march out in protest every time a bomb blew up in Belfast or Madrid? Did Israelis and American Jews come out in protest every time a new settlement was built in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank? Did Americans go out in mass protest when it was published that as many as a million Iraqis and perhaps many more have died since the invasion of Iraq by the “coalition of the willing?”

Thomas Friedman, himself, never submitted an apology to his readers regarding how mistaken he was about the Iraq war. Of course, he subjected us to his racist analogies, although, there is no doubt that he didn’t realize the hubris and the arrogance underlying them. His pottery barn analogies in 2003 were simply nauseating, “I am among those who think that this is a job worth doing but…the first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it.” Of course, we broke Iraq and we certainly don’t own it. Thomas Friedman, our own “liberal” Bush apologist, did not understand in 2003 and nor does he now that you don’t own a country just because you invade it, that you are not responsible for every terrorist attack perpetrated by Muslims just because you are a Muslim, and that the best way to end terrorism whether in South Asia or in the Middle East or in the Basque region is by resolving the underlying conflicts, not by further humiliating and polarizing their populations.

The main obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the lack of an organized Arab American lobby that can push against the influence of the powerful pro-Israel Lobby. If Senators and House Representatives could vote their conscience without fear of retribution by a pro-Israel Lobby that has been consistently voted as the second most powerful lobby in the country, then we would see a very different American foreign policy, one that is much more in tune with American national interests. The lobby’s grip on Congress is its ace in the hole, guaranteeing that no matter how sympathetic a president is to the Palestinian cause, s/he will be thwarted at every turn. I think there is no reason why Arab/Muslim Americans and our friends are not fighting more forcefully against the Israel Lobby except perhaps for fear of failure. But as I see it, we have already failed a hundred times by virtue of our inaction.

Looking at existing Arab/Muslim American political organizations, we see a few, mostly bad, options that could be up to the task at hand. There is the ADC (Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee) but it is mostly concerned with Arab American civil liberties and does little to lobby the government in foreign policy, which is just as well because it serves an important function. CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) and MPAC (Muslim Political Action Committee) both are very well organized but they are both civil liberties groups that represent Muslim Americans in the same way that ADC addresses discrimination against Arab Americans. Two other groups are strong enough to compete on the national stage: CNI (the Council for National Interest) and AAI (the Arab American Institute). The Arab American Institute works to bring money and exposure to Arab Americans running for office and to mobilize Arab American citizens to get involved in the political process and vote. The Council for National Interest has a strong foreign policy-focused agenda, namely and specifically, to bring about a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and to support democracy in the Middle East (www.cnionline.org).

The Council for the National Interest is the closest to an Arab American Lobby. Its main disadvantage is that it is not a lobby in the narrow sense of the word: it is not a political action committee (PAC) which means it cannot fund Congressional campaigns. However, its advantages are many. It was established in 1989 by Paul Findley and Pete McClosky, both of whom are former Congressmen. Its board of directors boasts a list of Who’s Who in American politics. There are the two aforementioned Congressmen, James Abourezk, a former Senator from South Dakota, Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew, and former Ambassadors Robert Keeley and Eugene Birds. CNI is the most qualified organization to lead the fight against AIPAC, although it is weak, malnourished, underfunded and sclerotic but its heart is in the right place and with a good fund-raising effort, it will be perfect. Fellow KABOBer Will brought up another potential candidate, AAPER (the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights), which is an organization started by a bright Palestinian American graduate of Georgetown Law School. The problem with AAPER is the same problem with every organization I have listed above: it tries to educate the American public.

Every organization I have listed above (except MPAC) is a 501©3 organization which seeks to educate the American public and cannot endorse nor fund candidates running for office. That is, unfortunately, a waste of time. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too remote and too complicated and the American public doesn’t care and neither should they as they don’t realize the role of the United States in the conflict. Arab-Americans should emulate the success of the pro-Israel lobby by working mainly with Congress. Furthermore education will follow when Senators and Representatives start speaking on MSNBC and CNN about Palestinian rights and Israeli transgression without fear for their posts. As of now, every American politician speaking on television will invariably toe the Likud line.

Finally, CNI’s best asset (something that AAPER lacks) is its line up of former Congressmen, themselves defeated by the efforts of AIPAC, and Ambassadors, having seen first hand the devastation wrought by our foreign policy. CNI is well established in DC politics, if still weak, having been working for a Palestinian state since its founding in 1989. I spoke to the director, Eugene Bird, and he was very interested into transforming it into a PAC as soon as they could raise enough money. The former American officials are also important in calming an anxious American public weary of financially supporting Arab/Muslim causes. Most importantly, they are a perfect cover for Arab/Muslim-Americans who are willing to throw large amounts of cash at a lobby that works but fear the accusation of funding terrorism. As money is the most important part of a lobby, an organization run by former Congressmen and Senators would certainly grease the money wheels. Plus they make killer cartoons.

What do you guys think?

Our treatment of African Americans in the past, including Slavery and Jim Crow Laws, coupled with regretful events such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the high number of African American inmates, the high penalty for crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine, the endless stream of fatal police brutality and the small number of African American college graduates have all contributed to an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism in the African-American community, of which Reverend Wright is merely a symptom.

We have to confront these subjects head on and address them fairly. Obama’s presidency and Reverend Wright’s sometimes shameful rants have exposed a tremendous fault line as well as a golden opportunity to begin to understand, and see from, the other’s perspective. As much as Obama’s candidacy has made us feel proud and optimistic about our nation’s transcendence of race, Reverend Wright’s sermons will make us recoil from our ugly reflection in the mirror. But both images are true.

We must begin to answer the questions that are implicit in these infamous sermons. Was September 11 a response to our own actions abroad or did they attack us because we are a beacon of liberty as president Bush would have us believe? Do we owe the African-American community an apology as a nation; do we owe them a museum? Where is the National Museum of the African-American Slave? It doesn’t exist but the National Holocaust Museum (a memorial of a crime not perpetrated in US soil) is in Washington, DC.

While emasculated media organizations and frightened, disheveled Democrats tried to out-Rove Karl, Obama said, “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.”

Yes, on October 2nd, 2002, a mere nine days before 77 senators committed our nation to a fight on the other side of the world against a secular dictatorship, hated by and itself at war with Islamists, a dictatorship with no connections to the September 11 attacks or AlQaeda, Obama said, “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Yes, even then I loved Barack Obama. More recently I am inspired by his talk of hope. I am heartened by his high-mindedness even amid the vitriol being unleashed by the Clinton campaign. I am moved by his quiet anger at Clinton’s mud-slinging style of politics.

And until last night, I felt that Obama was graced by God, himself. I admit it. Perhaps it is because the problems we face are so monumental and overwhelming. Because the injustice that we are provoking and incurring is so damning that we need a Moses, a Mohammed, a Jesus or a Buddha to extricate ourselves from burning Baghdad, bondaged Palestine, bottomless deficits, Chinese lenders, stagflation, overcrowded prisons and crumbling America. Obama spoke to us in the language of kindness. He preached hope and unity. He extolled African Americans in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a shrine of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, for tolerating homophobia and anti-Semitism. He is a product of Christianity and Islam, of whites and blacks, of Old World and New World, he is God’s gift to a tried and tired nation.

That is, until March 4th when he lost Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio to a mere mortal and not a magnanimous one at that. It was easy to forgive him his early losses: he was an unknown battling against the heir to the throne. He was David battling Goliath and a redeemed Ishmael under Abraham’s knife. He was the disparate Arab Armies of Mecca that defeated the Persians and the Romans. He was the American pilgrims who won the revolutionary war against all odds. Yes, his wins in Iowa and Super Tuesday were miraculous, nothing short of divine intervention. Obama’s win was simply a matter of people acquainting themselves with him and falling under his baraka, blessings in Arabic.

On March 4th, Obama broke my heart. I thought of him as I thought of myself once; if someone got to know me and what I was about, he would not turn away. I was wrong on both accounts. Like a jilted lover I saw the illusion of destiny vaporized before my eyes.

I wanted so badly to believe and so I did but I forgot that I am not a believer but naturally a skeptic. I don’t believe in the prophets before Obama and I don’t believe in his prophecy. And so I will still support him, not as a Godsend but as the human that he is. He gets my vote because he understands that the war in Iraq is why our economy is on its knees, our health is poor and our infrastructure is crumbling. He gets my vote because in a field of presidential contenders whose byline reads “complicit in Bush’s war,” his reads, “I don’t oppose all Wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”