When McCain Picked Palin, Liberal Journalists Coordinated The Best Line Of Attack
By Jonathan Strong
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/when-mccain-picked-palin-liberal-journalists-coordinated-the-best-line-of-attack/In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.
But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.
The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”
Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”
“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”
Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”
Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.
“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.
Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”
Blogger Matt Yglesias sent out a new post thread with the subject, “The line on Palin.”
“John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern,” Yglesias wrote.
Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. “The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her,” Kilgore said.
Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had “openly backed” parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he sent the information as a means of promoting a story he had written for Politico.
Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get,” Hayes wrote.
Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: “I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.”
Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,” he wrote.
Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: “Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’.”
Kilgore wasn’t sold: “I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ bullshit about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way.”
Zenilman of Politico, a purportedly nonpartisan journalist, weighed in with tactical advice: “The experience attack is a stupid one. It’s absolutely the wrong tack — the tack that McCain took when he was losing, and that Hillary and Biden took all primaries.” Zenilman said Wednesday he was offering “typical offhand political analysis.”
Joe Klein of Time stopped by with an update on the latest from his magazine: “We’re reporting that she actually supported the bridge to nowhere. First flub?”
Klein, who displayed an independent streak in other circumstances (“anybody who knows me knows I do my own thinking,” he said in a Wednesday interview), seemed to exude more partisanship that day than usual.
As the morning wore on into the afternoon, some on Journolist came to believe the Palin pick had been shrewd. Palin was coming off as appealing and a maverick, they worried.
“Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.”
Ryan Avent, then blogging for the Economist and now an editor there, agreed that criticizing Palin’s experience might not work. “I really don’t think the experience argument needs to be made by the Dems. It’s completely obvious to any reasonable person. Instead, hammer away at the fact that she has terrible positions on things like choice, and on the fact that she has no ideas on the issues important to people,” he wrote.
Journolist’s founder Ezra Klein, now a blogger at the Washington Post, reached an entirely different conclusion: “I see no reason to attack Palin. I think you accurately describe Palin and attack McCain.” Klein linked to an article he had written for the American Prospect that calmly described Palin’s thin resume.
Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.
That was all on the day of the announcement.
Workers On Doomed Rig Voiced Concern About Safety
By Ian Urbina
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/us/22transocean.html?_r=1&src=mv&ref=generalA confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.
In the survey, commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”
Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, “which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance,” according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.
“At nine years old, Deepwater Horizon has never been in dry dock,” one worker told investigators. “We can only work around so much.”
“Run it, break it, fix it,” another worker said. “That’s how they work.”
According to a separate 112-page equipment assessment also commissioned by Transocean, many key components — including the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves — had not been fully inspected since 2000, even though guidelines require inspection of the preventer every three to five years.
The report cited at least 26 components and systems on the rig that were in “bad” or “poor” condition.
A spokesman for Transocean, who confirmed the existence of the reports, wrote in an e-mail message that most of the 26 components on the rig found to be in poor condition were minor and that all elements of the blowout preventer had been inspected within the required time frame by its original manufacturer, Cameron. The spokesman, Lou Colasuonno, commenting on the 33-page report about workers’ safety concerns, noted that the Deepwater Horizon had seven consecutive years without a single lost-time incident or major environmental event.
The two reports are likely to broaden the discussion of blame for the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers and led to the gusher on the seafloor that has been polluting the Gulf of Mexico for months.
Transocean has sought in federal court to limit its liability to $27 million under the limitation of liability act of 1851. Under the law, the limitation of liability is removed if the vessel owner acted negligently.
BP has been under the harshest glare for its role, but the Justice Department has said its criminal investigation of the disaster will look at the role of the many companies involved.
Together, these new reports paint a detailed picture of Transocean’s upkeep of the rig, decision-making and its personnel.
BP was leasing the rig from Transocean, and 79 of the 126 people on the rig the day it exploded were Transocean employees.
The first report focused on the its “safety culture” and was conducted by a division of Lloyd’s Register Group, a maritime and risk-management organization that dispatched two investigators to inspect the rig March 12 through 16. They conducted focus groups and one-on-one interviews with at least 40 Transocean workers.
The second report, on the status of the rig’s equipment, was produced by four investigators from a separate division of Lloyd’s Register Group, also on behalf of Transocean.
These investigators were scheduled to inspect the rig in April. While the report described workers’ concerns about safety and fears of reprisals, it did say that the rig was “relatively strong in many of the core aspects of safety management.” Workers believed teamwork on the rig was effective, and they were mostly worried about the reaction of managers off the rig.
“Almost everyone felt they could raise safety concerns and these issues would be acted upon if this was within the immediate control of the rig,” said the report, which also found that more than 97 percent of workers felt encouraged to raise ideas for safety improvements and more than 90 percent felt encouraged to participate in safety-improvement initiatives.
But investigators also said, “It must be stated at this point, however, that the workforce felt that this level of influence was restricted to issues that could be resolved directly on the rig, and that they had little influence at Divisional or Corporate levels.”
Only about half of the workers interviewed said they felt they could report actions leading to a potentially “risky” situation without reprisal.
“This fear was seen to be driven by decisions made in Houston, rather than those made by rig based leaders,” the report said.
“I’m petrified of dropping anything from heights not because I’m afraid of hurting anyone (the area is barriered off), but because I’m afraid of getting fired,” one worker wrote.
“The company is always using fear tactics,” another worker said. “All these games and your mind gets tired.”
Investigators also said “nearly everyone” among the workers they interviewed believed that Transocean’s system for tracking health and safety issues on the rig was “counter productive.”
Many workers entered fake data to try to circumvent the system, known as See, Think, Act, Reinforce, Track — or Start. As a result, the company’s perception of safety on the rig was distorted, the report concluded.
Even though it was more than a month before the explosion, the rig’s safety audit was conducted against the backdrop of what seems to have been a losing battle to control the well.
On the March visit, Lloyd’s investigators reported “a high degree of focus and activity relating to well control issues,” adding that “specialists were aboard the rig to conduct subsea explosions to help alleviate these well control issues.”
The mechanical problems discovered by investigators found problems with the rig’s ballast system that they said could directly affect the stability of the ship. They also concluded that at least one of the rig’s mud pumps was in “bad condition.”
The report also cited the rig’s malfunctioning pressure gauge and leaking parts and faulted the decision by workers to use a type of sealant “proven to be a major cause of pump bearing failure.”
Federal investigators have been focusing on the role that inadequate mud weight played in the blowout. Shortly before the explosion, workers on the rig replaced the heavy drilling mud with a lighter seawater. Drilling experts have speculated that having chosen a better mud weight could have prevented the disaster.
Transocean’s equipment report also may shed new light on why the blowout preventer failed to stop the surging well, which is one of the biggest remaining mysteries of the disaster.
Federal investigators said Tuesday at a panel that continuing to drill despite problems related to the blowout preventer might have been a violation of federal regulations that require a work stoppage if the equipment is found not to work properly.
While the equipment report says the device’s control panels were in fair condition, it also cites a range of problems, including a leaking door seal, a diaphragm on the purge air pump needing replacement and several error-response messages.
The device’s annulars, which are large valves used to control wellbore fluids, also encountered “extraordinary difficulties” surrounding their maintenance, the report said.
Despite the problems, multiple pressure tests were taken of the blowout preventer’s annulars and rams and the results were deemed “acceptable,” the report said.
The two Transocean-commissioned reports obtained by The Times echo the findings of a maintenance audit conducted by BP in September 2009. But the Transocean-commissioned reports indicate that maintenance concerns existed just days before the explosion and the rig owner was aware of them. The 2009 BP audit found that Transocean had left 390 maintenance jobs undone, requiring more than 3,500 hours of work. The BP audit also referred to the amount of deferred work as “excessive.”
As U.S. Suspends Deep-Water Oil Drilling, Other Nations Move Ahead
By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/21/AR2010072105937.htmlFew, if any, nations have paid as much attention to the safety of offshore drilling as Norway, which is surrounded by oil-rich seas.
In 40 years of offshore energy exploration, it has suffered just four spills -- none of the magnitude of the one in the Gulf of Mexico and none reaching the country's pristine tundra shores. Its government has made efforts to avoid the kinds of conflicts that have bedeviled the U.S. regulatory process by splitting off safety and environmental oversight duties from the Ministry of Petroleum Energy. A separate Climate and Pollution Agency weighs in on every decision about whether to open new areas to offshore drilling, and its inspectors examine rigs once they're operating.
Norway is doing more to study lessons from the gulf than many other nations. But it is also pushing ahead with offshore drilling plans, including the kind of deep-water drilling that the Obama administration has suspended in the United States.
"Easy oil is running out," said Hege Marie Norheim, head of Statoil's Strategic Agenda of Arctic and Subarctic Business Development Activities. "We've been exploring for oil and gas where it lies."
The strategy of continuing to exploit the economic opportunities of deep-water wells, even as the hazards they represent become clearer, is being pursued the world over. Other countries -- including Brazil, Canada, Nigeria and Angola -- are also moving forward with drilling, lured by oil reservoirs they are discovering that are two to six times as big as the average Gulf of Mexico reservoir and taking advantage of new opportunities offered by the U.S. moratorium.
"For places like Angola, Nigeria and Brazil, most of their production comes from the deep water," said Leta Smith, director of exploration and production trends at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "It's a big piece of their revenue stream."
Some of these countries stand to gain from the uncertainties in the United States prompted by the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This month, Diamond Offshore Drilling announced that it is sending one of its deep-water drilling rigs from the gulf to Egypt. The rig, which can work in water up to 10,000 feet deep, has a new contract running at least through next June. Last week, Diamond said another Gulf of Mexico rig called the Ocean Confidence would depart for Congo.
On Tuesday, Marathon Oil Chief Executive Clarence P. Cazalot Jr. said that his company might divert a rig being built in Singapore and due to be delivered to the Gulf of Mexico in December. "If I can't use it in the gulf, I won't bring it to the gulf," he said.
Moving rigs from the gulf
Diamond has said it might move more of its three remaining Gulf of Mexico rigs to foreign countries. While apologizing for the loss of jobs in the United States, Diamond Chief Executive Larry Dickerson said, "We are actively seeking international opportunities to keep our rigs fully employed."
There are many such opportunities. Brazil, already home to much of the world's deep-water drilling fleet, is signing up more rigs. It is drilling wells nearly five miles underwater -- five times deeper than BP's Macondo well -- and nearly 200 miles offshore, at the edge of its national waters. The political debate over the area known as the "pre-salt" province has focused on how to divide the royalties from such lucrative wells, not whether to curtail exploration and development.
Libya also said last month that it would continue its offshore drilling program and gave BP a green light to go ahead with new exploration wells.
Countries are making long-term plans, as well. Last week, Canada invited new bids on nine-year leases off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Nonetheless, in light of the gulf spill, many nations are struggling with how to reconcile the desire to exploit their offshore resources with renewed concerns about safety and environmental protection.
Canada has begun a comparison of its regulations with U.S. rules, and Brazil's national petroleum regulatory agency has asked firms drilling in its waters to reassess the chances of an accident taking place off its shores. In Nigeria, President Goodluck Jonathan, a former environmental official in the strife-torn, oil-rich Niger Delta, is looking for lessons from the United States.
"Whatever we do in this country will set the global scale," said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. "No one is going to build to two standards, just like the bumper in Japan cannot be lower than a bumper in the U.S."
Since the BP spill, Canada has focused on one specific drilling issue: whether to require companies operating in the Beaufort Sea to drill a relief well at the same time they start an exploratory wells, to have a quick way of killing the well if needed. Its National Energy Board canceled a May 11 hearing on the issue and announced it would begin a broad review of safety measures for energy exploration in the Arctic.
Learning from the BP spill
But a different regulatory authority, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, has already rejected the idea of drilling a relief well at the same time as an exploration well because of the risk. Sean Kelly, the board's spokesman, said in an e-mail: "A blowout can occur in a relief well, and companies need to take the same precautions drilling this well as they do for an exploration well. "
In Norway, to learn from the BP spill, the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority has assembled an 11-person team that is studying the federal inquiries into the BP spill and has begun analyzing the report issued May 27 by the Interior Department's Outer Continental Shelf Safety Board.
As director general of Norway's Climate and Pollution Agency, Ellen Hambro takes pride in the fact that her deputies report any drilling violations to the police, but notes that her petroleum unit has fewer than two dozen people and cannot compete with salaries offered by the private sector. "We are loaded with work, trying to keep the piles down," she said. She also assesses every recommendation to open new areas to offshore drilling.
But when the Norwegian government announced last month which new oil and gas prospects would be leased in the Barents, North and Norwegian seas, it included seven blocks that Hambro's agency said should be kept off-limits.
Sometimes they listen to our advice, and sometimes they don't," Hambro SAID.
Hambro said it is hard to predict whether the BP spill will reshape the world's approach to taking oil and gas from the ocean's depths.
"The worst case has just happened," she said. "We don't know yet the consequences, environmental or political."
Mainstreaming Hate
How media companies are using the Internet to make anti-Semitism respectable
By Lee Smith
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/40064/mainstreaming-hate/One reason for the surge of public criticism of Israel over the last decade is the increasing interest of American media consumers in the Middle East as U.S. involvement in the region deepened after Sept. 11. The other reason is the triumph of the Internet, which lends itself to anti-Semitic narratives. The genius of the web is its interconnectedness, the facility with which it is capable of making links based on other links, which allows a chain of unbroken and unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo to acquire the stature of fact.
As far back as 2003, David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard, was among the first to note the resurgence of anti-Semitism, “the socialism of fools,” in polite conversation, as conspiracy theorists peddled the idea that Jewish-American officials and their colleagues in the media had pressed the United States into making war with Iraq to serve the interests of Israel. From blogs and bulletin boards, Jew-baiting soon entered the mainstream publishing industry, most famously with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby. The two authors argue that there exists a group of U.S. officials, journalists, and activists—housed at institutions from The New York Times to AIPAC—who intentionally deceived the American public and subverted “true” U.S. interests on behalf of the Jewish state. As reviewers noted, the bulk of the book’s research was based on secondary sources, most of which came from the web.
If not quite as popular as adult-content sites, the anti-Israel blogosphere is a dirty little thrill that major U.S. media outfits have mainstreamed for the masses, the intellectual equivalent of the topless “Page Three” girls that British tabloids use to boost circulation. Among the dozens of blogs and websites obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby, Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss (a project of The Nation Institute), Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon, and Stephen Walt’s blog on ForeignPolicy.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) sit atop the junk-heap.
“Whenever one of these guys writes about me, I can tell without having looked at their blogs, because my inbox quickly fills with anti-Semitic invective,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and a frequent target of Weiss, Greenwald, and Walt. “Whenever I see a subject line with something like ‘You fascist Zionazi,’ it’s pretty much assured the link in the email will lead back to a post from one of these guys.”*
Some of these bloggers, like Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, were widely published journalists prior to their careers as Jew-baiters. Walt is a different case: A tenured professor of international relations at Harvard, his reputation extended no further than academic circles until The Israel Lobby put him in the middle of the national debate over U.S. Middle East policy. “I wouldn’t consider it a Middle East blog,” Foreign Policy’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, says of Walt’s work for the site. “He writes about a lot of other things. It’s a regular foreign-policy blog.”
While it is true that Walt covers a wide range of international subjects in his blog, nothing provokes the same amount of reader feedback as his posts about Israel. Last week, a post on the Russian spy scandal received 14 comments; another post during the same period, enumerating what Walt considers the “five big questions about contemporary world politics,” fared a bit better, garnering 53 responses. In the eyes of Walt’s readership, however, those five major issues are dwarfed by the significance of his post concerning the Emergency Committee for Israel, a new pro-Israel organization founded by William Kristol, which was commented on 378 times.
These numbers suggest that the purpose of Walt’s blog is to act as a magnet for the animus of a readership hostile not only to Israel but also to American figures friendly to Israel, especially American Jews. Whether that bothers the owners of The Washington Post or thrills the advertising staff is another question. Jeffrey Goldberg believes that big media companies have morally blinded themselves to the ramifications of using anti-Semitism to attract readers. “I suppose that to the managers of Foreign Policy, traffic is traffic,” Goldberg says. “But in the course of building that traffic they’re surfacing some fairly dreadful invective about Jews. I don’t think they’d be comfortable surfacing the same kind of invective about African-Americans or other groups. But there seems to be a high tolerance for hosting a Jew-baiting blog.”
One explanation for the open sewer of hate that runs through the most prestigious foreign-policy websites is that their editors have become desensitized to opinions they read every day—and that are widely echoed throughout the Arab world and in Europe. In the view of such people, anti-Semitism is simply another common inconvenience of the medium. “As with other sites on the Internet, we certainly don’t feel as though we’ve found a good solution yet to dealing with offensive speech—or, though undoubtedly less importantly, for the annoying spammers who are for some reason insistent on selling our readers ‘Tiffany’ watches, jeans and shoes,” says Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy.
While it is difficult and in some cases perhaps undesirable to keep reader-comment sections completely free of insults, racist slurs, paranoid rantings, and threats of violence, it is also the case that some authors and certain subjects, regardless of the author or argument, are more likely than others to stir up the cesspool. Robert Mackey’s The Lede blog at The New York Times serves up a steady diet of Israel-related stories that give hardcore anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic commenters a home at the paper but is energetic in removing the most egregious posts.
Commenters who are shut out at The Lede can find a welcoming home on Lobeblog, hosted by Jim Lobe, a journalist with the IPS News Agency who believes that the roots of the U.S. invasion of Iraq lay not in the White House or the Defense Department, or in U.S. dependence on Arab oil, but in a small neoconservative outfit called the Project for a New American Century, which was supposedly run by American Jews looking to direct U.S. policy on behalf of the Israeli government.
“It hasn’t been secret,” writes Carroll, a commenter on a Lobelog post, that “for a long time that we have a small cabal of US zionist operating in and manipulating the US for their vision of Israel and a group of US Neocons and other assorted special interest who never met a war they didn’t like. … What do we have to do to put an end to them? … Suicide the cabal?” On another post at the same site, a commenter named Rowan Berkeley writes: “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.” He then makes an entirely accurate observation: “Ten years ago, it would have been a safe assumption that only ‘neo-Nazis’ would say such a thing.”
What is notable about such comments is not that they are original or unusual, but that there are hundreds and thousands of them, each sicker and crazier than the next, appended like a mile-long oil slick to nearly any mainstream news story or opinion piece that mentions Israel. In addition to creating the impression of a wave of popular hatred directed against the Jewish state—an impression belied by polls that show nearly two-thirds of Americans support Israel—the commenters attempt to swamp the news with paranoid anti-Semitic rantings that are entirely detached from even the BBC’s version of reality. On Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog, there were close to 1,000 comments when the news of the Gaza flotilla incident broke. One commenter took the episode as proof that “The jewish state intends to clean itself of all non-jews. Anything that might slow the starving of the hated ones will be dealt with in the most harsh of terms. This slow-motion genocide/ethnic-cleansing is a horror to witness.” One prominent contributor to Greenwald’s blog, a commenter calling himself Shingo, also appears in the comments section at Stephen Walt’s place, where he manfully exposes Zionist lies: “There is no archeologically and historically evidence that a Jewish state did exist,” he wrote in response to a Walt post.
That comment, along with several dozen others, disappeared from FP.com yesterday, removed by site administrators after I emailed Foreign Policy’s Glasser for comment. “Walt often provokes heated debate with his blog posts, and we are attentive to making sure that offensive comments are taken down,” she later explained in an email.” Many of Shingo’s similar comments remain live, however. Another typical comment, by a reader named Cal, also disappeared after I contacted Foreign Policy. “[E]njoy your hubris reveling while you can,” he warns, “cause you know whose going to be blamed for all the damage and fallout if there is a US military involvement with Iran or if we spend more blood and treasure on Israel’s war … the ‘Jews are.” The authority that Cal cites for his creepy, conspiratorial worldview is none other than the blog’s author: “[A]s before, Walt is right, has been right. Israel stung the frog, now it’s gonna drown.”
Walt’s readers live through his posts and feed off of the legitimacy bestowed on him by mainstream American cultural institutions—Harvard, which employs him; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which published his book, and FP.com and The Washington Post Company, which host his blog. Walt and his anti-Israel blogging colleagues have become the respectable face of Jew-baiting. They’re the cesspool’s avatars.
There was a time when American publications could easily ward off the fringe population of semi-literate paranoids and shut-ins who seek admission to mainstream American intellectual life by writing crazy letters. Editors of magazines like The New Yorker didn’t particularly care what their readers had to say (the magazine had no letters section for many years), so long as they kept renewing their subscriptions, and a magazine’s prestige seemed proportionate to the lack of interest it evinced in audience feedback. Being kept in the margins, or shoved there, is the other side of the homespun success story, and no one ever has written better about thwarted American aspiration than Nathanael West. His novel Miss Lonelyhearts is about a newspaper advice columnist driven to despair over the anguished longings of his miserable readers; West’s Day of the Locust is about fringe Hollywood characters who never make the big time, a book that ends in a riot and Los Angeles in flames. What we’re seeing now on the blogs is the obscene marriage of West’s two greatest, and apparently visionary, works: Miss Lonelyhearts’s readers have repossessed the media and redeemed their self-pity and resentment with lead roles in American intellectual life—which they are intent on burning to the ground. Yet even West never dreamed that the proprietors would provide the matches.
“Walt is a throwback to the 1930s,” says Goldberg. “In the ’30s the isolationists rode the Jews as a hobby horse. They tried very hard to marginalize American citizens of the Jewish faith by questioning their loyalty. These guys don’t even understand what ancient terror they’re tapping into. What’s original, what makes this period alarming, is that The Washington Post Company would give a Jew-baiter a platform.”
Palestinians In The Arab World: Why The Silence?
by Khaled Abu Toameh
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1422/palestinians-in-arab-worldWhen was the last time the United Nations Security Council met to condemn an Arab government for its mistreatment of Palestinians?
How come groups and individuals on university campuses in the US and Canada that call themselves "pro-Palestinian" remain silent when Jordan revokes the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians?
The plight of Palestinians living in Arab countries in general, and Lebanon in particular, is one that is often ignored by the mainstream media in West.
How come they turn a blind eye to the fact that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and many more Arab countries continue to impose severe travel restrictions on Palestinians?
And where do these groups and individuals stand regarding the current debate in Lebanon about whether to grant Palestinians long-denied basic rights, including employment, social security and medical care?
Or have they not heard about this debate at all? Probably not, since the case has failed to draw the attention of most Middle East correspondents and commentators.
A news story on the Palestinians that does not include an anti-Israel angle rarely makes it to the front pages of Western newspapers.
The demolition of an Arab-owned illegal building in Jerusalem is, for most of these correspondents, much more important than the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon continue to suffer from a series of humiliating restrictions.
Not only are Palestinians living in Lebanon denied the right to own property, but they also do not qualify for health care, and are banned by law from working in a large number of jobs.
Can someone imagine what would be the reaction in the international community if Israel tomorrow passed a law that prohibits its Arab citizens from working as taxi drivers, journalists, physicians, cooks, waiters, engineers and lawyers? Or if the Israeli Ministry of Education issued a directive prohibiting Arab children from enrolling in universities and schools?
But who said that the Lebanese authorities have not done anything to "improve" the situation? In fact, the Palestinians living in that country should be grateful to the Lebanese government.
Until 2005, the law prohibited Palestinians from working in 72 professions. Now the list of jobs has been reduced to 50.
Still, Palestinians are not allowed to work as physicians, journalists, pharmacists or lawyers in Lebanon.
Ironically, it is much easier for a Palestinian to acquire American and Canadian citizenship than a passport of an Arab country. In the past, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were even entitled to Israeli citizenship if they married an Israeli citizen, or were reunited with their families inside the country.
Lebanese politicians are now debating new legislation that would grant "civil rights" to Palestinians for the first time in 62 years. The new bill includes the right to own property, social security payments and medical care.
Many Lebanese are said to be opposed to the legislation out of fear that it would pave the way for the integration of Palestinians into their society and would constitute a burden to the economy.
The heated debate has prompted parliament to postpone a vote on the bill until next month.
Nadim Khoury, director of Human Rights Watch in Beirut, said, "Lebanon has marginalized Palestinian refugees for too long and the parliament should seize this opportunity to turn the page and end discrimination against Palestinians."
Rami Khouri, a prominent Lebanese journalist, wrote in The Daily Star that "all Arab countries mistreat millions of Arab, Asian and African foreign guest workers, who often are treated little better than chattel or indentured laborers…The mistreatment, abysmal living conditions and limited work, social security and property rights of the Palestinians [in Lebanon] are a lingering moral black mark."
Foreign journalists often justify their failure to report on the suffering of Palestinians in the Arab world by citing "security concerns" and difficulty in obtaining an entry visa into an Arab country.
But these are weak and unacceptable excuses given the fact that most of them could still write about these issues from their safe offices and homes in New York, London and Paris. Isn't that what most of them are anyway doing when they are write about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
Killing Jews For Fun And For Profit: The Continuing American Adventures Of Arab Bank
http://www.thefinancialinvestigator.com/?p=142According to a 2004 civil complaint now winding its way to trial, the bank’s purported customers got ahold of Jacob “Kobi” Mandell when he and a buddy skipped school in May of 2001 to hike near the Mandell’s place in Tokoa,Israel. The professional rescuers found the pair two-days later with skulls caved in and bodies mutilated.
He was an eighth-grader.
Palestinian Hezbollah claimed those pair of victories, but according to the claim, the Popular Resistance Committees are broadly understood to have been behind the attack.
The bank’s customers also managed to reroute the currents of Gloria Kushner’s life on May 19, 2002 as she shopped in an open-air market. A suicide bomber detonated a vest full of nails, screws and bolts and Kushner caught a fair amount of them; she was among the 50 lucky ones who took the flak in their spines, jaws, eyes and knees. Three weren’t as fortunate as she was: They took in their skulls and chests and died.
Oddly, both Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed credit.
In a 2005 complaint, a 23-year old Hamas suicide bomber named Shadi Toubasi walked into the Arab-owned Matza restaurant in Haifa and detonated a bomb surrounded by nails and bolts into the late lunch crowd, leaving 15 dead and 40 wounded.
Toubasi was also a customer of the bank, according to the claim.
The bank in question is Arab Bank, an Amman, Jordan-based bank with about $50.6-billion in assets and more than $780-million in profit last year. The complaints allege that Arab Bank played a key role in what could be termed “The bureaucracy of terror.” Specifically, that the bank’s maintenance of at least seven separate accounts for Hamas-linked so-called charitable foundations facilitated the rapid transfer of donations (given by Arabs as zakat, a mandatory charitable tithe) between valid and efficient social-service groups and their sister organizations, the armed units that carry out the bombing attacks.
Just as importantly, Arab Bank allegedly also maintained the accounts that Hamas and PIJ used to pay out the families of the killed, wounded and captured operatives and leaders. The $5316 payments to the so-called martyrs (known as Shahid) were, according to the suits, remarkable recruiting mechanisms in that they represented more than a year’s wages in the poverty-racked Gaza Strip and West Bank. Indeed, the Bank used Hamas and PIJ-issued Martyrs Kits to administer payments to the families of suicide bombers.
Arab Bank also lent a material amount of prestige and gravity to the fund-raising efforts of Palestinian relief efforts. In 2002, as Saudi-led telethons raised more than $100-million for the Support of the Intifada Al Quds, the presence of Arab Bank assured donors wary of the endemic corruption of the Yassir Arafat Fatah regime that the money would at least get to a well-capitalized, professionally-run institution.
These aren’t merely the assertions of trial lawyers seeking a payday.
They largely port onto the claims the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network made in a sharply worded 2005 release that accused the bank of failing to adequately control suspicious activity and for not maintaining proper anti-money laundering programs.
The finding also carried a $24-million penalty. To comply with the escalating U.S. demands for transparency, Arab Bank ceased doing its own dollar-denominated business at its New York city branch and now conducts transactions via correspondent-banking relationships in the U.S. with J.P. Morgan Chase, HSBC and Wells Fargo. [The FI.com sought comment from all three banks, but only HSBC replied. See here.]
Arab Bank’s Washington, D.C.-based public relations counsel, Bob Chlopak, did not return an E-mail seeking comment. In the past, Chlopak–who has also done lobbying on behalf of the bank, including receiving $220,000 in 2005, the year the OCC levied its fine–has argued elsewhere that the bank provided “routine and lawful” banking activities to the likes of the Saudi Committee. [Click here for an example of Arab Bank’s motion-to-dismiss arguments.] On other occasions, Arab Bank’s lawyers have advanced less traditional arguments on its behalf, claiming that some nations view the acts that Arab Bank was purportedly party to–suicide bombings, assaults and the like–as morally acceptable given the politcal climate. [See page 40 of a 2007 letter here, in which Judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York fairly directly dispatches this argument.]
Last Wednesday, matters took a turn south for Arab Bank when Judge Gershon delivered an unsparing rebuke of Arab Bank and its efforts to avoid discovery in the Linde case. Rejecting the bank’s claim that it could not produce documents and account information about the activity in the Hamas and PIJ accounts for fear of violating privacy laws in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, Gershon noted that Lebanon and Jordan’s rules make clear that in matters of terror financing, any such privacy rules are void.
In a devastating blow, Gershon said that when and if the case gets to trial, the jury can presume “Adverse inference,” or more plainly, that Arab Bank–per the lawsuit claims–continued to knowingly provide key financial services to groups like Hamas and its leaders long after they had been designated terrorist groups in the U.S. and Europe.
This puts Arab Bank in a Morton’s Fork, caught between two very, very unpleasant choices.
On the one hand, Arab Bank can go into court in front of 12 people who have been instructed that they are hiding evidence that greatly supports their opponent’s cases in a courthouse a few miles from Ground Zero. Their ultimate liability in such a case could conceivably begin well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the Judge’s ruling, even settling out of court becomes an expensive proposition.
On the other, they walk away from it all, shut their U.S. branch at 520 Madison Avenue in Manhattan and cease doing dollar-denominated business. At that point though, they are largely shut out of the global economy in that they cannot offer their corporate customers throughout the Middle-East an ability to move money into or out of the U.S. or its currency. It is, in a sense, choosing professional suicide.
There is, of course, a third choice–Arab Bank could produce the documents and, given the repeated public and legal claims of innocence, press its interests in court.
But this is the one option they appear to have ruled out even though they have the possibility of suffering a brutal legal judgement or even a body-blow to their 80-year old banking franchise. In short, it is a curious state of affairs when disobeying the plainly written demands of a Federal Judge becomes a legal tactic.
The question, then, becomes why? How did a substantial institution like Arab Bank get on the horns of such a dilemma?
Looking at Arab Bank’s annual reports over the decades provides an answer as to how the bank could find itself in such hot water.
In a word: There is a direct line between views of the founders of Arab Bank and the provision of banking services to Hamas years after they were named terrorists. Perhaps another way of putting this is that Arab Bank was built to be the banking intermediary for the political and economic aspirations of Arab Nationalism. When the results of the Six-Day war in 1967 cast this premise into doubt, the bank philosophically aligned itself with the PLO and whatever other institutions emerged, presumably such as Hamas, that would challenge Israel.
In 1957, Arab Bank chairman Abdul Hameed Shoman led off his letter to investors in the 1956 annual report with a no-holds barred summary of the actions of “Britain, France and their puppet ‘Israel’” in attempting to exterminate “Arab Nationalism.” But for the “prowess of the Egyptians, their army and government,” per Shoman, “The invaders failed to achieve their objective.” Acknowledging that the “Zionists still cling desperately to the Gaza Strip and parts of Sinai in spite of the fact that the United Nations have repeatedly called on them to withdraw…”
The 1964 report celebrated numerous achievements of Arab unity including the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization whose mission, Shoman said, would be to seek the “Return of the occupied part of Palestine to the Arabs.”
In 1968, Shoman took the gloves off, coming close to calling for a multi-year holy war. Decrying the “Zionist Occupation” and its evil hold on “Our beloved holy places,” he argues that “With the expansionist policy of the Zionists unmasked” there was little to do for Arabs but to “Sacrifice the lives and offer the money needed for the self-defense and for the liberation of their sacred places and all their occupied territories.”
The 1970 report offers more of the same: The Black September combat between the Jordanian military and factions of the PLO was “Tragic…fighting among Arab Brethren can only hurt our cause and serve the evil designs of the Zionist enemy.”
Of course, most every bank in the U.S. also prides itself on appealing to the local tastes and mores. Banks in Boston do a good business in selling co-branded Red Sox and Patriots credit cards and in polygot New York, English is virtually a second language in many teller’s windows. Throughout the Southeast, banks happily convert into shrines to the local high-school or college football teams every autumn. So it is for Arab Bank, except instead of boosting civic pride in the local quarterback, they played a bureaucratic role in peddling dreams of an eternal paradise for the soldiers in a 60-year old war.
There is a bitter irony at the heart of Arab Bank’s troubles in the U.S. justice system.
Time spent in Arab Bank’s financial filings reveal it to be something that has become exceedingly rare on these shores: A conservative and well-run bank. Its lending practices appear to be both diverse and sound, and while it operates in 30 countries, it has never sought to minimize its retail presence, serving their clients even as civil wars and insurrections raged. Unlike the majority of its American and British peers, it appears to have viewed its balance sheet not as a trading ledger with a retail banking franchise attached, but, rather, something that should be treated with respect. To cap it off, in 2008, a year where many American banks became wards of the state, Arab Bank crossed $1-billion in earnings for the first time.
But it is all for naught. Arab Bank stared at the abyss and recently, the abyss has started staring right back.
For decades fear of the “Zionist” other served the bank well and led its managers, for both political and professional reasons, to stridently support the abolition of the state of Israel. Now, in courtroom 6D in the Eastern District of New York, years away from the twisted buses and smoking restaurant ruins in Israel, a day of reckoning may have arrived.
And somewhere in Jordan, in a server room or on a backup disc, lie a series of documents that a bank’s management are risking their professional lives to keep from the light of day.
U.S. Forces Step Up Pakistan Presence
By Julian E. Barnes
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704723604575379132838698738.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStoriesU.S. Special Operations Forces have begun venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.
The expansion of U.S. cooperation is significant given Pakistan's deep aversion to allowing foreign military forces on its territory. The Special Operations teams join the aid missions only when commanders determine there is relatively little security risk, a senior U.S. military official said, in an effort to avoid direct engagement that would call attention to U.S. participation.
The U.S. troops are allowed to defend themselves and return fire if attacked. But the official emphasized the joint missions aren't supposed to be combat operations, and the Americans often participate in civilian garb.
Pakistan has told the U.S. that troops need to keep a low profile. "Going out in the open, that has negative optics, that is something we have to work out," said a Pakistani official. "This whole exercise could be counterproductive if people see U.S. boots on the ground."
Because of Pakistan's sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly. In June 2008, top U.S. military officials announced 30 American troops would begin a military training program in Pakistan, but it took four months for Pakistan to allow the program to begin.
The first U.S. Special Operations Forces were restricted to military classrooms and training bases. Pakistan has gradually allowed more trainers into the country and allowed the mission's scope to expand. Today, the U.S. has about 120 trainers in the country, and the program is set to expand again with new joint missions to oversee small-scale development projects aimed at winning over tribal leaders, according to officials familiar with the plan.
Such aid projects are a pillar of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, which the U.S. hopes to pass on to the Pakistanis through the training missions.
U.S. military officials say if U.S. forces are able to help projects such as repairing infrastructure, distributing seeds and providing generators or solar panels, they can build trust with the Pakistani military, and encourage them to accept more training in the field.
"You have to bring something to the dance," said the senior military official. "And the way to do it is to have cash ready to do everything from force protection to other things that will protect the population."
Congressional leaders last month approved $10 million in funding for the aid missions, which will focus reconstruction projects in poor tribal areas that are off-limits to foreign civilian aid workers.
The Pakistani government has warned the Pentagon that a more visible U.S. military presence could undermine the mission of pacifying the border region, which has provided a haven for militants staging attacks in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.
The U.S. has already aroused local animosity with drone strikes targeting militants in the tribal areas, though the missile strikes have the tacit support of the Pakistani government and often aid the Pakistani army's campaign against the militants.
Providing money to U.S. troops to spend in communities they are trying to protect has been a tactic used for years to fight insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The move to accompany Pakistani forces in the field is even more significant, and repeats a pattern seen in the Philippines during the Bush administration, when Army Green Berets took a gradually more expansive role in Manila's fight against the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf in the southern islands of Mindanao.
There, the Green Berets started in a limited training role, and their initial deployment unleashed a political backlash against the Philippine president. But as the Philippine military began to improve their counterinsurgency skills, Special Operations Forces accompanied them on major offensives throughout the southern part of the archipelago.
In Pakistan, the U.S. military helps train both the regular military and the Frontier Corps, a force drawn from residents of the tribal regions but led by Pakistani Army officers.
The senior military official said the U.S. Special Operations Forces have developed a closer relationship with the Frontier Corps, and go out into the field more frequently with those units. "The Frontier Corps are more accepting partners," said the official.
For years the Frontier Corps was underfunded and struggled to provide basic equipment for its soldiers. A U.S. effort to help equip the force has made them more accepting of outside help.
Traveling with the Frontier Corps is dangerous. In February, three Army soldiers were killed in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province when a roadside bomb detonated near their convoy. The soldiers, assigned to train the Frontier Corps, were traveling out of uniform to the opening of a school that had been renovated with U.S. money.
The regular Pakistani military also operates in the tribal areas of Pakistan, but they are less willing to go on missions with U.S. forces off the base, in part because they believe appearing to accept U.S. help will make them look weak, the senior U.S. military official said. The Pakistani official said the military simply doesn't need foreign help.
During the past two years, Pakistan has stepped up military operations against the militant groups that operate in the tribal areas. Although Washington has praised the Pakistani offensives, Pentagon officials have said Pakistan's military needs help winning support among tribal elders. If successful, the joint missions and projects may help the Pakistani military retain control of areas in South Waziristan, the Swat valley and other border regions they have cleared of militants.
In Pakistan, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad will retain final approval for all projects, according to Defense officials. But congressional staffers briefed on the program said the intent is to have Pakistani military forces hand out any of the goods bought with the funding or pay any local workers hired.
"The goal is never to have a U.S. footprint on any of these efforts," said a congressional staffer.
Bangladesh Bans Arch-Jihadist's Writings
by Irfan Al-Alawi
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1430/bangladesh-bans-jihadist-writingsIn an important development for Islam in South Asia and around the world, the government of Bangladesh, a country with a population of almost 160 million, of whom 90% are Muslim, has banned the books of Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903-79).
Maududi was the most notorious advocate of radical Muslim ideology in modern South Asian history. He was born under British rule; and founded Jama'at e-Islami (JI – Community for Islam), which remains the most influential radical party in Pakistan and Bangladesh today. JI is the main support for the spread of radical doctrines from Afghanistan to Bangladesh – in which it is allied with the Deobandis, who inspire the Taliban, as well as Saudi-financed Wahhabis. Further, the acolytes of Maududi are now active in the large community of Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain, and JI has assumed a major role in American Muslim affairs, through their front group, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).
Although flattered by his followers with the honorific "maulana," or teacher – as well as the military title of "emir," or commander – Maududi was originally a journalist and had little training as a theologian. His first published book, Jihad in Islam, was issued in 1927. It contained a phrase that has become famous, or infamous, as a summary of Muslim extremism: "Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal social order… and establish its structure anew… Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe… Jihad is at the same time offensive and defensive… The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement its goal."
The works of Maududi are destructive of peaceful and traditional interpretations of Islam, and it is therefore "not correct to keep books of Mr. Maududi in mosques," Shamim Mohammad Afjal, director-general of the Islamic Foundation in Bangladesh told the British Broadcasting Corporation. Nearly 24,000 mosque libraries have begun removal of his books.
The Bangladesh government's order that the works of Maududi be removed from all mosques and libraries reflects the extent of the crisis sweeping South Asia and, to emphasize, the recent reappearance of extremism in Bangladesh itself. JI was prominent in committing frightful atrocities against local Muslims during the Bangladesh independence war of 1971, when the people of what had been East Pakistan separated politically from their then-rulers, who were separated physically from them by the breadth of India. Then as now, JI terrorists were inspired by Maududi; then, they were armed and financed by the Pakistan military government of Yahya Khan. Massacres by JI members against innocent Bangladeshis caused thousands to flee into India. Today, the government of Pakistan treats JI with deference.
Although JI remains the largest Islamist party in Bangladesh, five of its senior leaders have been arrested and charged with crimes in the 1971 campaign; and at the end of June 2010, the government detained 65 JI leaders and activists on grounds that their radicalism is seditious and harmful to Islam. Motiur Rahman Nizami, the head of JI in Bangladesh, was ordered held in custody by a prosecutor in Dhaka, the national capital. Nizami is one of several JI leaders that the current government of the Awami League, under female Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina Wajed, has said it will show committed "crimes against humanity" in 1971.
Bangladeshis have called on the government of Pakistan to acknowledge and make amends for the terrorism suffered during the 1971 war, but the Pakistani authorities have rejected any responsibility or accounting for it: The Pakistan that continues to arm radicals to fight against India in Kashmir, and that cooperates with Taliban elements in Afghanistan, will not face up to its historic guilt in Bangladesh almost 40 years ago. At a meeting held in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 2008, I added the support of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism to the demand for a Pakistani apology to the people of Bangladesh.
I pointed out then, and continue to argue today, that the trail of terrorism reaches into Pakistan and across South Asia to Bangladesh, thanks to support from rich Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. When Saudi Arabia established the Muslim World League in 1962 to spread fundamentalist doctrines among Muslims, Maududi was among its founders.
JI representative in Bangladesh, Abu Torab Muhammad Azharul Islam, denounced the official prohibition of Maududi's works as a measure against Islam and claimed that Maududi's books are "published in many countries and there have been no complaints against his writings." While it is true that radical money has placed editions of Maududi almost everywhere Muslims are found, it is hardly accurate to say there have been no complaints about the tone and content of his writings. Traditional Sunni scholars in many countries have denounced Maududi as a factor in recruitment of terrorists and a threat to the security of all Muslims. The Tariqat Council, which groups the spiritual Sufis who are a powerful element in Bangladesh, have accused JI of endangering Islam.
Bangladesh faces a very real danger from radical infiltration and incitement, as one of the several fronts on which Pakistani jihadis are active. Banning Maududi's books is an elementary act of public self-defense. But much more extensive and consequential action is needed to mobilize moderate Muslims in South Asia to turn back the radical offensive.