On a quest for secular piety: Reviewing Tarek Fatah's Chasing a Mirage
by Justin Podur, ZNet, June 22, 2008.

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM's basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

Seymour Hersh - The New Yorker

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

War Enters the Classrooms
Jon Elmer
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36439
GAZA CITY, Feb 5 (IPS) - The United Nations has indefinitely suspended elementary school classes for tens of thousands of Gaza City's children following a weekend of unprecedented factional violence, which turned this isolated enclave into a war zone and left at least 27 dead and 250 wounded.
John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said, "we try to balance the risk of violence to kids and parents on the one hand, and the need for these kids to get an education on the other."
"The intensity of the fighting was such that we had no choice," Ging told reporters in Gaza.

U.S. BACKING FOR FATAH INCITES CLASH IN GAZA
IPS - Inter Press Service
Feb 2, 2007 Friday
BY Jon Elmer And Nora Barrows-friedman
GAZA CITY, Feb 2 2007
Violence resumed in the Gaza strip Thursday, only two days after a ceasefire ended a bloody week of factional fighting that left more than 30 Palestinians dead.
The fighting occurred as Washington officials announced plans to deliver an additional $86.4 million to support Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The death toll reached six, with more than 60 wounded. Fighters loyal to the elected Hamas government -- the Interior Ministry's Executive Force and the Islamist Movement's militia, the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades -- battled the Fatah security forces loyal to Abbas.

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Dissident Voice
September 1, 2006

In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.

Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East

The Sunday Times September 03, 2006
Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv, and Sarah Baxter, New York

THREATENED by a potentially nuclear-armed Tehran, Israel is preparing for a possible war with both Iran and Syria, according to Israeli political and military sources.

The conflict with Hezbollah has led to a strategic rethink in Israel. A key conclusion is that too much attention has been paid to Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank instead of the two biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the region, who pose a far greater danger to Israel’s existence, defence insiders say.

From International Viewpoint Online
Gilbert Achcar

The resolution adopted by the UN Security Council on August 11, 2006 fully satisfies neither Israel nor Washington nor Hezbollah. This does not mean that it is "fair and balanced": it only means that it is a temporary expression of a military stalemate. Hezbollah could not inflict a major military defeat on Israel, a possibility that was always excluded by the utterly disproportionate balance of forces in the same way that it was impossible for the Vietnamese resistance to inflict a major military defeat on the U.S.; but neither could Israel inflict a major military defeat, or actually any defeat whatsoever, on Hezbollah.

ZNet | Israel/Palestine

by Greg Albo; The Bullet; July 17, 2006

The last few weeks, and indeed days, has seen an enormous escalation in the conflict in the Middle East. Israel has re-occupied the Gaza strip, led an all-out assault on Lebanon in an effort to destroy Hezbollah and reshape the political authorities in Lebanon, and threatened both Syria and Jordan with military and aircraft deployments. Israel has done so unilaterally and illegally, invoking its own doctrine of 'pre-emptive intervention', without sanction of the United Nations Security Council.

ZNet | Israel/Palestine

by Gilbert Achcar and Paola Mirenda; July 16, 2006

Q. Since last Wednesday, the Israeli Army has been imposing a siege on Lebanon and bombarding the country as a result of the abduction of two of its soldiers and the killing of seven others by a Lebanese Hezbollah commando unit. Israel's reaction was predictable, even in its disproportion. What are the political and strategic reasons that can be seen behind this action by Hezbollah?

LEFT TURN ARTICLES
www.leftturn.org

Lebanon’s Shia: In the Eye of the Storm
by Bilal El-Amine

God has always had little mercy to spare the poor Shia Muslims of Lebanon. They suffered centuries of seamless persecution often accompanied by extreme poverty, cast away far from the religious centers of Shi’ism in Iraq and Iran. With the exception of the 10th Century when sympathetic dynasties ruled the region, Lebanon’s Shia existed on the margins of history, making an appearance only as victims. So much so that Shi’ism itself became in practice a religion of the dispossessed and disinherited, of the denial and longing for justice. A small and vulnerable minority living in a sea of Sunnis, their religious leaders long advocated a politics of “quietism,” a state best described as either outright submission to authority however unjust or complete withdrawal from the political sphere. A politics of keep your head low, don’t rock the boat, and one day the long-awaited mahdi will return to make things right.