City of Brass

The Republican primary for the Presidential nomination in 2012 has begun in earnest this week. While Newt Gingrich has been the most active until now in laying the groundwork for his run, mostly by knee-kerk opposition to everything Obama does, it was Sarah Palin yesterday who really made the first move, with dramatic style - she resigned as governor of Alaska.

The decision, made ostensibly for the sake of her family's privacy, came out of the blue, and seemed to be a snap judgement rather than something carefully planned. Her political allies in the GOP and Alaskan elected officals were caught totally unawares. On her official twitter account, she only mentioned that "she had decided not to seek re-election" - just moments before her press conference about resigning. Note of course that not running for re-election is very different from resigning partway into your first, and now uncompleted, term.

Palin is now unemcumbered by having to be tethered to Alaska, which is the ultimate backwater when it comes to presidential politics. She's outgrown her state and now needs to be free to focus on the lower 48, building her following in the electoral heartland, and wooing the DC insiders. She won't be lacking for money, as she can easily pull in a fortune from doing the lecture circuit among the party faithful full-time now. She's already got her PR people working on selling her image, focusing on what she thinks the red-blooded conservative males who are voting for her want to see - and she's probably right. Plus, she needs to be closer to DC and available to the media to do pushback on the inevitable stories that erode at her image as the Maverick v2.0 - such as the insider stories that former McCain campaign aides are leaking.

To be honest, I think this is actually a pretty good decision on Palin's part. Frankly, Alaska was suffering with her being distracted by her ambition for 2012. And it benefits everyone, especially President Obama, for Palin to get more exposure. The people will see more of her and be able to draw their own conclusions. I think she had more cachet and mystique as a sitting governor than she will as just another full-time political aspirant. Now, she has to actually speak to be heard... and people will be paying attention.

Sarah Palin's overconfidence is her weakness.

Related - great analaysis at The Politico, which discusses the advantages to Palin for quitting in more detail, as well as describing how her move has split the GOP ranks.

via Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam blog, the Israeli military has boarded and forcibly confiscated the crew and cargo of a humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, carrying medicine, toys and other supplies, in international waters. The list of passengers taken hostage include journalists, American film-maker Adam Shapiro, and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who made this statement:

"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. "President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."

This is no less an act of piracy than the Somalis who boarded the Maersk Alabama. However, the likely counterargument will be that the official definition of piracy in the UNCLOS Article 101 specifically defines piracy as an act "by the crew or the passengers of a private ship", which means by definition that a nation-state can never be a pirate state if the action is performed by its naval vessels. Perhaps the Geneva Conventions are a better recourse for legal action here?

The press release from Free Gaza follows. Contacct information for the Israeli Ministries of Justice, Foreign Affairs, and the Prime Ministers office, as well as the Internatioonal Committee of the Red Cross offices in Israel, Switzerland and the USA are also provided at their site.

ISRAEL ATTACKS JUSTICE BOAT; KIDNAPS HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS; CONFISCATES MEDICINE, TOYS AND OLIVE TREES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 June 2009

For more information contact:
Greta Berlin (English)
tel: +357 99 081 767 / friends@freegaza.org
Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/Spanish):
tel: +357 99 077 820 / sahara78@hotmail.co.uk
www.FreeGaza.org

[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30pm] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.

"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. "President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."

According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are "trapped in despair." Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel's December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel's disruption of medical supplies.

"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead". Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.

Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: "No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children's toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters."

Arraf continued, "Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release."
###

As a kind of corollary to the drama over Michael Jackson's alleged conversion to Islam, there have long been rumors that Jacko was somehow affiliated with the Nation of Islam, led by controversial firebrand Louis Farrakhan. The NOI connection was just raised again after Jackson's death because apparently some of his security detail and private entourage were NOI members or had vague, unspecified "ties" to Farrakhan. As a bonus, Jackson's brother Jermaine, who converted to Islam in 1989, invoked Allah at the family press conference, causing a minor media stir. However, there's quite a big difference between Jackson being exploited or influenced by people who are NOI members, and being exploited or influenced by the NOI as an organization itself.

This is old news, really - back in December 2003, during the controversy over the child molestation charges against Jackson, his chief spokesman had resigned over "strategic differences" with Jackson's other advisers. According to various sources at the time, these other advisers included Leonard Muhammad, Farrakhan's son-in-law. A few months later in spring 2004, Jackson abruptly cleaned house by firing his lead attorneys, and also got rid of Leonard who by then was a "business manager" for Jackson's affairs. This was all orchestrated by his brother Randy, who apparently had big ideas for Jackson's future. The picture overall is a mess, but it boils down to Jackson being passed from one group of exploitative manipulators to another, all eager to leverage his fame and money for themselves. The bottom line here is that the Nation of Islam as a whole was never involved in any of these machinations, only individuals who used whatever access to Jackson they had.

The NOI is a juicy target for conspiracy theorists and of course the paranoid rants of the Islamophobia industry harpies. After all, they are militant African Americans AND muslims both - sort of a racisal and prejudicial douuble-whammy. But there's absolutely nothing to support the accusation that the NOI or even Farrakhan himself had interfered with Jackson's life, or had a role in his death. The knee-jerk hysteria about the NOI and Jackson was perfectly punctured by a column by Roland Martin for Black America Today magazine back then, in Dec 2003:

Why is this an issue? Because it's an effort to use the racially divisive history of an organization for the spin of all those involved in this sordid game.

This linkage has been seen before.

A few years ago, several members of Congress sent angry letters to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, demanding that they revoke security contracts from firms run by the NOI. It seems that many public housing complexes in Washington, D.C. and Chicago saw crime drop because of
the involvement of these security companies, but that didn't matter to the members of Congress. All they were concerned with was not awarding "taxpayer" dollars to an organization they called a hate group.

The problem with all of this is that the Nation didn't own any of these security firms. Members of the Nation - a religious group - owned the security firms. Does that mean that since I am a member of a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, if I owned a security firm and was hired to police public housing units or Jackson's Neverland ranch, the Southern Baptists are now "brainwashing" Jackson and taking over his life?

Anyone who has followed American politics and the thorny issue of race over the last 20 years could easily conclude that Farrakhan is a

polarizing figure. He has been called by white America a Jew hater and a man who considers whites to be devils. In black America, some consider him a wretched figure, while many others see him as being one black man who is unwilling to bow down the white racial supremacy. Like it or not, the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and any black member of Congress could not have pulled off the Million Man March in 1995.

But in this case, I just refuse to take the bait. This guilt by association is often used to smear individuals and drive public perception on an issue. Everyone involved knows full well that the mere mention of Jackson aligning himself with Farrakhan will force Americans to take sides.

If Jackson has hired individuals who belong to the Nation of Islam to handle some of his affairs, he has every right to do so. But please, let's get the facts straight before we begin another race war like those that emanated from the O.J. Simpson case. God knows we don't have to re-live that nightmare again.

Those words ring just as true today. In fact more so, because the paranoia about muslims in particular, and the double standard that muslim organizations are uniquely culpable for all actions of their private individual members, has become so pervasive.

It should be noted that Michael Jackson discussed his childhood, faith, and the freedom of the Sabbath, in an essay at Beliefnet in 2000.

Via Eric Martin at American Footprints - a brilliant thought experiment that clearly illustrates the vapidity of the call by Republicans such as John McCain upon President Obama to intervene more forcefully with rhetoric about the events in Iran:

But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. "We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom," Khrushchev says, "that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal."

Let us ignore the question of Khrushchev's intentions here: whether he is motivated by genuine sympathy and desire to aid the civil rights marchers, or a more cynical hope of destabilizing a rival government, or a narcissistic and self-righteous wish to take credit for the marchers' achievement in order to feel better about himself and appease his domestic critics. (And before anyone gets up in arms about "moral equivalence," let me note than I am not equating Obama's America and Khrushchev's Russia, merely noting that Obama and Khrushchev occupy structurally similar positions as leaders of distrusted rival powers.)

Let us focus only on a simple tactical question: would Khrushchev's statement aid the civil rights movement? Would it be welcomed by King and his associates? Why or why not?

And yes, the analogy to the Soviet Union is indeed apt - Iranians may admire the people of the United States for our democracy and culture, they also have a long and bitter memory of the US Government's repeated interference in their own affairs.

This is a guest post by Haroon Moghul.

Events over the last few days have deeply concerned me.

Watching the Grand Ayatollah at the top of the Islamic Republic deliver a sermon in which he made no meaningful concessions to the opposition (in fact, he made no real concessions whatsoever), I thought about how strange it is the way history works. The thesis eventually produces an antithesis. Sometimes it takes centuries, but it happens. How odd it was to find Khamenei allude to the tragic events at Karbala, where, only a few decades after the birth of Islam, Husayn, may God be pleased with him, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, was cut down (and most of his remaining family as well.) Those events have become a mainstay in much of Muslim popular culture (including throughout the Sunni world), literature and imagination and have done the same for the articulation of an unparalleled protest tradition. Yet I watched and wondered: how does the protest tradition become the state? If the state holds an increasing monopoly on religious interpretation, what happens to the protest tradition?

More meaningfully, considering the structure of Shi'i practice, what happens when the major figures of present scholarship collide, not just on matters of religious practice but politics as well? I honestly don't know, but I feel it's worth considerable reflection and should be of concern. When scholarship worries more about maintaining order than guiding and edifying, that scholarship will eventually fade -- and one wonders what then occurs. If Sistani and Khamenei disagree, publicly, about matters as important as the events of the last week (thinking hypothetically), then clearly the interests of religion and politics clash. I have not read any serious argument which considers the IranianRahbar to be greater in stature than Sistani, who is arguably the leading Shi'i cleric of our age and indeed one of the great scholars of the Muslim world.

This where I feel the history of Sunni Islam proves instructive.

Over the last 200 years, the Muslim world had been rather uniformly colonized. Very few areas escaped from direct European control; practically none escaped from some form of indirect control or regular foreign interference. This was disastrous for the Muslim world as a whole, but most disastrous for the Sunni world, as in major Sunni Muslim states, the clergy was often subordinate to the state in a way that did not hold in the Shia tradition. This proved to be a bad idea for the ages. When foreign troops landed, governments were overthrown and endowments seized, scholarship found itself without resources or strategies for recovering its previous role. Today, far too many Sunni scholars are perceived, rightly or not, as no more than outmoded tools of the domestically oppressive and internationally impotent state. They have very little credibility for this reason, which leaves an immense gap of authoritativeness often filled by extreme or marginal voices, many of which have no training in the tradition and end up agitating for positions deeply harmful to society, religiosity and human dignity.

The Shia scholarly tradition has fared much, much better. I could name only a handful -- Fadlallah, Sadr, Sistani, Montazeri, Khomeini, Khatami -- and few could argue that these were not among the most influential personalities of the Muslim world or still are today. Take for example Muhammad Khatami, who although not an ayatollah is nevertheless an 'alim (properly, a Hujjat al-Islam). Is there any Muslim cleric from the Sunni tradition who commands as much respect, admiration and influence as he does, globally speaking? He was the leader of a massive reform movement that captured the attention of the world; he broadcast a message of dialogue between civilizations that represents one of the most successful initiatives originating in the Muslim world which embraced the wider world and inspired it -- as once Islam inspired so many, so broadly. How many other scholars can do so, or could even try to? There are numerous reasons for the vigor and vitality of the Shia tradition, many of them relating to historical processes and decisions which have elevated the profile of these scholars and made them voices to be heard, not just within a select tradition but with weight on the planetary scale.

Part of the success must go to a system that produces scholars and yet depends on community supports and mutual acknowledgment, both by scholars and by "laypersons", elevating the best, most compelling and attractive personalities and minds, without instituting any kind of rigid structure or hierarchy. That flexibility and that scholastic seriousness has already been deeply threatened by the events of the last week, the full effects we will not see for years (In triumph often are the seeds of downfall, especially when we are unable to conceive the chance of overreach.) When scholars clash over politics, and one reading is privileged over another, then that privilege becomes a matter of imbalance. All the more threatening to a tradition because that privilege is tied not to stronger arguments or more persuasive reasoning but to the institutions of a state, which inevitably affect religious opinion and moral character and from there, reputation and reliability (read: the ruination of the Christian right when blinded by the might.) I am not so simplistic as to propose that there can be a clean line between religion and politics; that probably could never be accomplished, as neither religion nor politics are like Lego blocks which can be placed on opposite ends of a room. But when religion and politics become isomorphic with each other, then certainly there should be cause for concern.

I'd like to know what readers think: how does the Iranian structure and ideology of velayat-i-faqih affect the authority and prestige of other scholars, including those maraji' who are more esteemed by the community than the supreme leader himself.

Haroon Moghul is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. This post was reprinted from his personal weblog, avari, with his kind permission.