Analysis

Views on the News – 21 Nov 2015

Headlines:

  • Paris Muslims Complain of Ostracism after Terror Attacks
  • Muslim Americans: Current Political Climate Worse than After 9/11
  • Pakistan-US Relations: What Issues does Pakistan’s Military Face?

Paris Muslims Complain of Ostracism after Terror Attacks

These are tough times for France’s Muslims. Muslims were among both the dead and the hundreds of wounded in the Paris attacks. Muslims across Paris and the world also reacted with shock, horror and anger at the indiscriminate slaughter. In the French capital, Muslims have visited the makeshift shrines of flowers and candles outside the Bataclan concert hall and the cafes where the attackers mowed down victims in cold blood. And all Parisians of every religion are having to adjust to a whole new post-attacks atmosphere of heightened angst and suspicion. Armed police in thick bulletproof vests cordoned off roads around the Grand Mosque in Paris for Friday prayers and patted down worshippers, scanning them with metal detectors in the cold, driving rain. Soldiers wearing camouflage gear and cradling automatic rifles also patrolled. But unlike other French, some Muslims also feel the additional burden of having to justify and defend themselves and their community and point out their Islam bears no relation to that of the violent zealots. They worry that some non-Muslims can’t see the difference between them and Islamic State killers. Cold, hard stares and, in rare cases, physical assaults that some Muslims have faced since the bloodshed are reinforcing concerns that some in France are now lumping all Muslims together. “Out on the streets, we’re scared,” Soraya Moumen, a Muslim woman in her twenties, said on her way to prayers at the Grand Mosque. “We feel people are adding one and one to make three, thinking that all Muslims are terrorists.” A Muslim group that tracks Islamophobia in France has reported a fresh spike of hate crimes since the attacks, although not as large as that which followed the slaughter in January of cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo magazine and shoppers at a kosher grocery in Paris that left 17 victims dead. The southern port city of Marseille saw both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic violence after the latest attacks, with a veiled woman punched and slashed with a box cutter as she left the subway. Attacks have also been reported on Muslim meeting places and shops elsewhere in France. [Source: Yahoo]

Are not Muslims of France citizens of the republic? Do they not have the right to be protected from bigots? With local elections fast approaching, the situation for the Muslim community is bound to worsen. Already far right politicians aided by the French media are exploiting tensions to paint Muslim citizens in a negative light in an effort to boost their chances in the upcoming regional elections.

 

Muslim Americans: Current Political Climate Worse than After 9/11

It was never this bad, not even after 9/11. That’s what many Muslims and Arab-Americans are saying about the tenor of comments made by presidential candidates on down to local officials about how to treat members of their community in the wake of ISIS’ rampage in Paris. Over the past week, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump said he would consider compelling Muslims to register in “databases” and that some mosques might be shut; fellow Republican candidate Ben Carson compared some Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs,” and Democrat David Bowers, mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, evoked the internment of Japanese in WWII to explain his anti-refugee policy. “We are operating in an atmosphere of hysteria and fear,” said Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director for the Council on American Islamic Relations. “I have never seen it like this, not even after 9/11.” Muslim and civil rights activists attribute the charged environment not only to the horrific attacks in France and to 14 grinding years of the war on terror at home and abroad. They also blame it on the fact that the latest attacks come during a political campaign that dovetails with years of strife and inflammatory rhetoric on the immigration issue. Today, with no one to unite the Republican Party and put a lid on its more outspoken elements, the loudest, and in some cases ugliest, voices are at times prevailing. “The sense we get now is that it’s not only worse for Arabs and Muslims,” said Abed Ayoub, national policy director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The sense we get now is that it’s worse for all immigrant and brown communities as a whole.” Ayoub said the current climate stands in stark contrast to the broad political reaction that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks, in which terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. At that time, Republican President George W. Bush endeavored to tamp down anti-Muslim sentiment. Six days after the Twin Towers fell, Bush spoke at the Islamic Center, a famous mosque and Islamic cultural hub in Washington, in defense of American Muslims and Islam. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” “The anti-Muslim situation right now is so much hotter, in fact, than it was after 9/11 that it’s a little bit astounding,” said Heidie Beidrich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which studies and reports on extremist groups. “We’ve never seen so many politicians making such outrageous Islamophobic comments both as concerns refugees who are coming here as well as just Muslims in general,” Beidrich said. “Some of the things, for example, that Donald Trump is talking about, (like) registering Muslim Americans, are just shocking and ignorant and certainly not what the United States is about.” [Source: CNN]

American politicians across the political spectrum are displaying their true feelings towards Islam and Muslims. Bigotry and demagoguery now pervade much of the debate regarding the role of Muslims in America. However, no one has the sagacity to challenge America’s foreign policy misadventures in the Muslim world, which is the root cause of blow-back that America and its allies are witnessing.

 

Pakistan-US Relations: What Issues does Pakistan’s Military Face?

Pakistan Army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif’s trip to Washington is his second in less than a year. This time, the significance of his trip was slightly dented when an unnamed Pentagon official revealed the visit was requested by Gen Sharif, not Washington. But observers have not missed the fact that more doors are being opened for him in Washington than for most other military chiefs from elsewhere in the world. Apart from nearly the entire US military leadership, Gen Sharif has also held meetings with Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and the head of the CIA, John Brennan. Coming as it does on the heels of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit, such a reception for the army chief appears to support the view that it’s the military and not the politicians who control Pakistan’s defence and foreign affairs. “Given the current reality of power management in Pakistan, it is only natural that the Americans would want to talk to the military when it comes to discussing their chief concerns in this region,” says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based defence analyst. “The Americans would like to talk about counter-terrorism, or Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, or issues related to the transfer of military hardware and security funds – these are all areas which are controlled by the military,” he says. Pakistan depends on the US for the bulk of its military hardware and security funds. But over the last few years it has also attracted flak from some quarters in Washington for its “double-dealing” in Afghanistan. The Americans want Pakistan to eliminate militant infrastructure, including the Afghanistan-focused Haqqani network, the India-focused Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) and their various affiliates. They have also been pushing Pakistan to use its leverage with the Taliban to open peace talks with Kabul. The second round of an intra-Afghan dialogue facilitated by Pakistan with US and Chinese support was abandoned in July when Kabul blamed Pakistan for hiding the news of Taliban chief Mullah Omar’s death. Pakistan blamed Afghan intelligence for deliberately leaking this news to scuttle the talks. There is also the issue of nuclear weapons, which fall in the exclusive domain of the military. “The Americans will certainly have raised the issue of Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal which at the current rate may become the third or even the second largest in the world by 2020,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, another defence analyst based in Islamabad. Americans have been concerned about Pakistan’s short-range battlefield nuclear weapons falling into militant hands, as well as its long-range weapons that can hit targets as far away as the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean where India’s nuclear arsenal may have been stacked, she says. In return, there have been suggestions by some American think-tanks that Pakistan could be offered membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), with legitimate access to nuclear research and technology. So how is the US likely to respond to this security calculus? There have been veiled warnings that the US may block some $300m in coalition support funds owed to Pakistan if the US Department of Defence fails to certify that Pakistanis are acting against the Haqqani network. But analysts suspect Pakistan will stick to its guns, knowing that the Western powers have their hands full with IS at the moment and will continue to depend on Pakistan to deliver in Afghanistan. [Source: BBC]

Sharif joins a long list of traitors that feel no shame in surrendering Pakistan’s immense strength before Washington, and that too for a measly sum. Sharif’s visit coincides with America’s decline in multiple parts of the world, especially the Middle East. Rather than force a course independent of Washington, Sharif looks to widen America’s foreign policy aperture through further concessions.