All praises belong to Allah! Today is a great day for Islam. The President of the United States of America is a Muslim! The greatest nation is now ruled by the greatest religion. I congratulate you, Brother Barack, for pulling the wool over the eyes of the infidel, and I encourage you, now, to go ahead and tell them (y)our little secret. I remember when we first met. It was at the 1429th annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Islamic Conquests! (S.A.I.C!) and you came by with your lovely second wife, Maryam bint Masud – did you tell Michelle about her yet? – and told all of us that you had gotten yourself elected to the U.S. Senate by pretending to be a Christian, and were now setting your sights on the American Presidency. You came to tell us that if we prayed for you, and more importantly, gave you $ 600 million dollars in donations at your website, you had a chance of being elected President of the United States. I don’t remember what day it was but I remember we had just gotten done watching Little Mosque on the Prairie and I was imagining Sitara Hewitt converting to Islam so I could take my parents to propose to her parents for her hand in marriage. Anyway, let me be the first to apologize for the way we treated you then. I can’t believe we didn’t take you seriously and instead ending up giving our money to Ron Paul (because he is a medical doctor and we like medical doctors more than we like lawyers). See, I thought you were, as black people say, "just playin." I mean, you have to understand that we’re Muslims, and we aren’t used to winning at anything, so when you were talking about how you had a "legitimate shot" at the Presidency, I won’t lie, I thought you were talking about something else. So what do you say? Let bygones be bygones? I know we, as the kids say, "chumped you" – see I’m trying to ingratiate myself to your style – but there is no reason for there to be, as they say, "beef" between us. I mean, don’t you think you already got enough revenge against us? Consider: – You just refused to say, "There is nothing wrong with being a Muslim." (I mean we had to wait till Marty Peretz and Colin Powell for someone to say it out loud). – As the New York Times reported you stopped hanging out with Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison. – Your people told those Michigan Muslim girls wearing headscarves to get the hell out of the picture. (Thanks for apologizing though, "bro"). – You went to visit churches and synagogues but never a mosque. – You let your first Muslim outreach advisor resign just because he had served, for a little while, on some board, with some shady character. – The only imam you met was the one that President Bush hangs out with. There are more imams in the world!

– And, finally, what was up with returning the laddoos I sent you? Those little yellow balls of sweetmeat were expensive! You know I went all the way to Jackson Heights to get them?  Man they even had the little aluminum foil hats on them! Damn right I was bitter, but you know what, we ignored you and you threw us under the bus, so we’re all even. Now you are the man and we just want to cuddle up to you. Seriously, Brother Barack, you have no idea how popular you became in the Global Islamic Conspiracy. You might not believe me but we were nervous for you the whole time. We really thought that people were going to figure out that you were Malcolm X’s son. I bet my brother seven dinars that (Shaykh) Spike Lee was going to spill the beans on that one! Phew. We also got scared there for a little while when the pundits started saying that you’d be treated like an apostate in the Muslim world. I was eating hummus with the wives when I heard about that and I totally flipped. I couldn’t go to any of them for a week. They were about to riot. Thank God that turned out to be a false alarm. So, Brother Barack, now you are President of America, the most powerful man in the world, ruling – despite all contrary evidence – in the name of Islam, I have one simple request that you need to fulfill. Mind you, it isn’t really a request, but a demand, because if you don’t oblige, I’m going to go to the ayatollahs and get them to declare you a non-Muslim. It is this: immediately annex South America and appoint me governor of Brazil. I really wish to bring Islam to those people (no, this has nothing to do with my desire for super models). I await your response. Jazakallah, Your Fellow Believer in al-Islaam 

Related: Muslamism May Spell the Death of the West; Muslim! Now Available in Insult Form

The post As-Salam-Alaykum Brother Barack! You Can Tell ‘Em Now appeared first on Jewcy.

Just last week, pastor Rick Warren of California, author of the Purpose Driven Life, and head of the 22,000 strong Saddlebrook Church, held a conversation about religion and values with the two presidential candidates. The event was covered by every major news station. Among pundits and bloggers it was critiqued and evaluated as if it was a proper presidential debate. Barack Obama and John McCain talked about Jesus Christ and abortion and homosexuality; partly in neutral terms, and partly within the context of Christian theology.

We are religiously permissive in the United States and over the last decade the general view has been to let religious people bring religion into the public sphere. For example, Bush introduced the Faith Based Initiative in 2000 without much opposition and Obama recently suggested that he'd be willing to continue it albeit with a overhaul (probably since most of the money in the Bush initiative behaved very racially), and was again met with little opposition.

Having said that, it seems that the days of such permissiveness towards bringing religion into the public sphere might be coming to an end. The Rick Warren debate, in other words, might be a farewell party for American Christianity in the political sphere. To substantiate this assertion I direct your attention to the Pew Forum which recently concluded a survey about Americans' views about religion in politics.

It shows that in 1996, 43% of Americans felt that Churches should stay out of politics; today, that number is at 52% and its trending upward. In other words, the more religion gets introduced into the public sphere, the more Americans want it out (the survey notes that conservatives are the ones most changing their views about this, now at levels similar to moderates and liberals).

It seems that religious Americans are remembering again Jefferson's idea that the wall of separation between religion and state exists in order to protect religion. What happens when religion stuffs itself into the political sphere too long? You may want to ask a theocratic state like Iran. Only 1.4% of the population attends the Friday prayer in the Islamic Oligarchy. (This number is actually lower than the Church attendance number in those purportedly hedonistic European nations).

The post Americans Remember That Church & State Are Separate appeared first on Jewcy.

Its findings show that an extremist can come from among British nationals, both born and naturalized, or from among asylum seekers, or illegal immigrants. An extremist can come from a non-practicing milieu, or can be a religious novice or he can be a zealous convert. They can be Pakistani, Caucasian, or Middle Eastern; male or female; younger or older; single or married with children. In other words terrorists "are a diverse collection of individuals, fitting no single demographic profile, nor do they all follow a typical pathway to violent extremism."

In essence, then, the MI5 doesn't know what external markers identify a person who has become obsessed with killing in the name of Islam, just that there are these days some people who kill in the name of Islam.

Thanks MI5.

The post The MI5 States The Obvious: Terrorists are a Diverse Collection of Individuals! appeared first on Jewcy.

"My suggestion to Obama: forget Berlin, go to Mecca. If you really want to be seen in a Kennedy / Reagan light in the diplomatic arena, you should use your popularity and your unique heritage to address the Christian and Muslim worlds. A thoughtful speech that focuses on our similarities, rather than our differences, is clearly needed between both communities of faith. Kennedy and Reagan in their speeches addressed the major foreign policy concerns of our country. Obama has the opportunity to do something similar if he takes up this challenge. However, the issue is much trickier and more dangerous than either Kennedy or Reagan had to face. Instead of disarming conventional and nuclear weapons, Obama has to disarm fear and prejudice on both sides, Christian and Muslim." 

Putting aside the various security and bigotry related reasons (Saudis don't allow non-Muslims in Mecca) that this can't happen, Campbell is, on the whole, right. When JFK went to Germany, it was the country at the heart of the conflict between Communism and the West. Today, Germany plays no role in the greater conflict enveloping the world — that of West versus Islam. In other words, if Obama wants to make something as historic as JFK's speech, he needs to tackle the perception that there is a war between Islam and Christendom, and he needs to make such a speech in a Muslim country. Where I disagree with Campbell is that Obama needs to go to Mecca (or to Tehran). JFK didn't go to Moscow or Beijing. Obama needs to find a place near to Mecca, with a sufficiently Islamic flavor, where the principles he wants to espouse — those of open government and freedom of conscience and trust-building — are present in sufficient qualities among the people. The recent (secular) democratic mini-revolution in Pakistan suggests that it is one such place. Pakistan has the benefit, unlike Egypt and Jordan and other Muslim countries where the democratic spirit is also high, of actually having a democratic government by virtue of having removed their tyrant. Security would be the only issue but there is no reason that it can't be surmounted. I also recommend Pakistan because Obama went there in college, has friends from Pakistan and his mother worked for Pakistani development in the World Bank, so that he has serious connections to the country. He can say that he witnessed Pakistan under Islamist Tyranny under General Zia ul Haq, and begin from there. Pakistan, incidentally, also happens to be the place where the so-called confrontation between Mecca and Washington is the most blatant. Obama should consider it. But wait till he's elected.

The post Obama’s Brandenburg Should Be In Pakistan appeared first on Jewcy.

Getting bogged down in Afghanistan would be infinitely worse for the national interest than any Iraq.

The post Barack Bonaparte: Obama’s Afghan Scheming Could Lead to a Disaster of Napoleonic Proportions appeared first on Jewcy.

I was both amused and irritated by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's recent article at the Huffington Post about single-sex education and its relationship to sexual polarity and eroticism. His basic argument is that going to school with the opposite sex from an early age desensitizes the two genders towards one another, which disposes people not to marry, and if they do, dulls their erotic intimacy. It also has the effect of making boys seek out the more beautiful girls – and vise versa – which creates a hierarchy of beauty.

Noble sentiments: fairness for ugly people; more marriages; more sex for married people. Unfortunately, all of these sentiments then rest upon Biblical gender essentialism. Here it is:

This is why the Bible insists on certain incontrovertible differences that must forever remain between men and women. It says that men cannot wear a woman's clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5) and men are not to uproot the hair on their faces (Leviticus 19:27) (yes, that is the reason we Rabbis have such undeniably sexy beards). Even in external appearance, men and women are supposed to look different. In the Jewish religion, men and women sit separately in the synagogue, with a literal divider down the middle, all designed to heighten, while never overdoing, the sexual divide.

Now, if an Orthodox Jew (or an orthodox Muslim who believes the same kind of stuff) wants to think that increasing the gulf between men and women is the best way of advancing their sex lives, hey, by all means, feel free to do so. What they can't do, though, is to get past the simple fact that for great parts of history — and in the Muslim word even today — gender essentialism has been the essential backbone of oppression.

A while back I wrote a piece on Jewcy about honor(less) killings among Muslims. It's a subject that I've confronted frequently in my life (largely because it really messes me up). In my piece, I tried to suggest that not just patriarchy, but many varieties of oppression itself, are historically rooted in Manichean readings of gender:

At this point I started to wonder: how did the idea of "I am better than you" originate in the first place? More importantly, how is that idea perpetuated? The only thought that I kept coming back to, one that I am starting to believe very deeply, is that somewhere along the way every system of inequality and supremacism justifies itself by positing the existence of a purportedly "natural" inequality between man and woman, the original dualism. Man equals strong, woman equals weak, and thus lordship, supremacy, mastery, control, power, all become tied to this purportedly "natural" difference.

Now, people like the good Rabbi, Christian priests, and Muslim clerics, have had thousands of years of attempting to prove that gender essentialism doesn't engender gender supremacy (always the supremacy of males). They have utterly and thoroughly failed.

I am not sure why, then, they should get another chance, even if they are now able to repackage their gender essentialism with 'hip' terms like 'sexual polarity.' Give me a break.

What we should be really focusing on is trying to emphasize the shared humanity of men and women. Why should we believe that a man's desires or fetishes are any different from a woman's? Just because our parts look different? Again: we tried looking at the world like that, and all we did was alienate women — and excise them from legal, literary, social, and cultural spheres of society.

There is something even more pernicious in the Rabbi's comments, though, and since he's focusing on the Jewish-American community he probably doesn't realize it, but the argument he's advancing is precisely the argument used to advance the burqa.

Just in case we don't know what a burqa is — it covers a woman from head to foot in a cloth, often even covering her eyes. It's that thing everyone from the Huffington Post to ultra-right Evangelicals and Jews are always trying to "save" those "poor Muslims" from.

I was talking to a prominent Muslim cleric a few years ago and we were discussing Islamic modest dress, specifically the hijab and niqab. He is a very honest and learned man and is always willing to accept multiple readings of scripture. At the conclusion of our conversation, he conceded that there were multiple ways of reading the Quranic Arabic upon which veiling is premised.

Lacking any further scriptural support for his position, he proposed the Rabbi's argument: "If my woman is covered, it makes me more wont to have sex with her when we're alone."

At which point I proceeded to lose respect for him.

Nevermind how pathetic it is to rest one's religiosity — or salvation — upon one's groin; the fact is, if you accept the idea that men will find women more arousing when they are not always in front of their eyes, you will very soon have men who will say a) remove these women from places where us men hang out or b) if they must be around then cover them up in black so its like they are not here.

The world has seen enough of that.

The rabbi no doubt has good intentions, as do the many Muslim leaders who espouse similar sentiments. However, the way to create more warmth and empathy between men and women isn't to separate them, but to cultivate and raise and rejoice in them as if they were essentially — here's where that word is useful — the same creature.

God is one. So should be us humans.

The post Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Throws On His Burqa appeared first on Jewcy.

Muslim bigwigs — especially since 9/11 — are the ones who go to the international public relations conferences. These are always promised to be genuine and honest discussions about the issues of the age: something about healing the rift between Islam and the West, something about a "dialogue" of civilizations, something about harmony of reason and revelation. They always have long and verbose titles.

Unfortunately, as two recent PR conferences show, such events are rarely true attempts to imbue the Muslim majority world with the spirit of liberty, inquiry and freedom of the kind that helped make it a world-historical religion. What they turn out to be, more often than not, is a showcase for dictators and theocratic stooges to wallow in self-pity.

Just last week, the elaborately titled 3^rd Annual International Conference on the Muslim World and the West opened in Kuala Lampur. Such Muslim luminaries as Turkey's Ekmeleddin Ihsanouglu (head of the 55 member Organization of the Islamic Conference and a member of the Post-Islamist AKP Party), Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (which, if you haven't heard, is not a dictatorship anymore), and Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al-Faisal, were in attendance.

So what kind of principles did these political leaders from three great Muslim nations put forward? Joshua Trevino was there and in the aptly titled piece — Speechless in Kuala Lampur — reveals that one of their primary interests was proving that there is no such thing as freedom of expression.

In other words, rather than acting as leaders, these men played to the lowest common denominator: They peddled, pandered, dare I say, got down on their knees and gave a sumptuous blowjob to the guy who starts spitting when he hears words like 'Geert Wilders', 'Danish Cartoons', or 'Salman Rushdie'. Not one of them could manage to stand up and show Muslims that the best reaction to people like Wilders is to let them spout their ignorant head of steam while averting one's gaze. In fact, when it came to Wilders' movie (the subject of plenty of debate here at Jewcy) most Muslims in the West did simply turn a blind eye to it. Rather than use Western Muslims as an example, these three so-called leaders chose to give legitimacy to the idea that when people invoke religion to engage in violence against artists and poets and filmmakers they are doing a service to their faith. Shameful stuff.

Could it be that the Kuala Lampur conference was just a fluke, and others will be better? Not if Saudi Arabia's recent interfaith conference, held a week before the Kuala Lampur meeting, is any indication. The Saudi king's conference was focused not on relations between Islam and the West, but among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. And from external appearances, it looked promising: a conference in Mecca! a few steps from the Holy Mosque! with not only Jews invited, but even prominent Shia leaders as well as other, mostly spiritual leaders of Islam! So, how did it go?

Well, let's check in with Guardian journalist Riazat Butt, who was there. A quick glance of her report reveals that shortly after King Abdullah's adequately harmonious tidings of tolerance, he was contradicted by the Grand Mufti of his own state, according to whom:

[D]ialogue with other religions was a way to bring non-Muslims into Islam. The cleric, who is the highest official of religious law, told the delegates that converting people to Islam was the ultimate goal of dialogue, a point he made several times. "It is the opportunity to disseminate the principles of Islam. Islam advocates dialogue among people, especially calling them to the path of Allah."

In other words, no one had told the most important religious leader in the room that tolerance is different from evangelism. The contradiction was so thick that Ms. Butt, a journalist, was forced to follow up her report with a blog-piece, where she called the views at the conference "dogmatic, intolerant and inflexible." (There was also the issue that no one really bothered to take the point about not bringing politics into religion very seriously, but let's not go there for now).

Light-hearted ribbing aside, there is a very serious issue underlying these two failed conferences, namely that neither political leaders (as with the Malaysian conference) nor religious leaders (as with the Saudi conference) are making any real effort to clean up their houses. Political leaders use these conferences to score cheap points before the audience. Religious leaders use the venues to galvanize their followers' evangelist zeal. In the process, the very real issues of women's emancipation, treatment of minorities, and separation of mosque and state go wholly ignored.

What these conferences show is that the very idea of international Islamic conferences is completely irrelevant. There is no such thing as top-down change. It is usually just pageantry or farce. If there is reason to have hope about resolving thorny issues in the Muslim world in liberal and democratic directions, that hope doesn't reside with Muslim leaders. It resides with average people who live and suffer through extremism and oppression, and thus can understand the value of qualities like generosity, tolerance, and openness, in ways no dictator or theocrat ever could.

The post International Islamic Conferences Are A Sad Farce appeared first on Jewcy.

Daniel Koffler says that when it comes to foreign policy, neoconservatism is neither liberal internationalism, nor illiberal expansionism, but really just an elitist and intellectual project, defined primarily by its belligerence, exceptionalism and (Straussian) secrecy. Koffler comes up with this third category because he is intent on showing that neoconservatism is not a "movement" like the other two foreign policy views, and therefore cannot quite qualify as a "nationalism."

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that neoconservatism is a conspiratorial cabal. In Koffler's words: "an exclusively elite movement with limited membership."

That gives neoconservative foreign policy too much credit. Intellectual and elitist movements (even conspiracies) usually have some kind of identifiable structure to them. Yet, neoconservative foreign policy, since 2001, has been a morass of empty slogans and ambiguous declarations. It has been an idea in construction. It was never settled on where it was going. It was for this reason that it put forward nebulous ideas like "terror" and "axis of evil" and "doctrine of integration" and "with us or against us." If anything, neoconservatism is the 21^st century version of 19^th century nativism, the 1920s Red Scare and 1950s McCarthyism — yet another instance of America panicking in the face of a global encounter.

We know this because before 9/11, and before being elected President, the Bush foreign policy shop had said that that they would not focus on international humanitarianism as Clinton had done (I believe this was in Rice's Foreign Affairs article in 2000). Yet, after 9/11, humanitarianism — in the form of "nation-building" — was the first thing out of the neoconservatives' mouths (which as Ahmed Rashid points out they then botched). No rhyme, no reason. That's why one day Bush was talking about Islamofascists and the next acknowledging that the term wasn't accurate, why one day we were entering Iraq because of WMD and the next day because of Saddam's links with Al-Qaeda. That's why one day we were declaring war on all state-sponsors of terror and the next day we were hobnobbing with Saudi Arabia.

Now, nearly every faction —- from neo-conservatives to liberal hawks to libertarians (like Koffler) — objects to understanding neoconservative foreign policy as inherently devoid of any content. Neoconservatives themselves reject this idea because they think it smacks of confusion, and my, it couldn't be that they had no idea what they were doing. Liberal hawks reject it because they feel extra guilty for being duped by a movement that had no idea what it was doing. People like Koffler reject this reading because in order to justify their preferred projects it is more effective to demonize neoconservatives as a cabal than to recognize them as people who had little idea of what to do when thrust into Hillary Clinton's 3 AM scenarios.

As much as I'd like to believe that neoconservatism was a conspiracy that broke out after 9/11, the more reasonable explanation is that the people we had in charge were utter incompetents who, when confronted by the world coming to their shores, didn't know what to do, so they did everything under the sun. Pre-emptive war? Yes, we do that! Humanitarian war? We do that too! 100 years war? That too! Nation-building? Sure, why not! Empire? Fuck yeah! (as a Bush advisor told Ron Suskind in slightly different terms). War on terror? Check! World War IV? If we include Iran, yeah baby!

The fact is, and as pitiable as it sounds, on 9/11 America got hit in the head with a mallet, and rather than taking a moment to get a sense of who we were, our government started behaving like a punch drunk boxer.

Neoconservatism foreign policy is 21^st century American hyperventilation. It is panic, and panic is a far worse characteristic in a government than institutional corruption. People like Koffler who actually oppose neoconservatism shouldn't give it historiographical credit.

The post Is Neoconservatism Even A Doctrine At All? appeared first on Jewcy.

More than a year before 9/11, veteran journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, wrote a book called Taliban. It described the rampant extremism in Afghanistan and asked the US to consider an immediate nation-building intervention. That warning went ignored — with disastrous results.

His recent book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, is informed by nearly a decade observing and evaluating US policy in south and central Asia, and finding it baffling. Bin Laden is still free; the Taliban are expanding into Pakistan and Afghanistan; despite the increasing number of terrorists with verifiable links to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan, nothing is being done to address the underlying issues there; and no one is paying any attention to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tukmenistan and Uzbekistan, despite the fact that these countries exhibit many of the same (and some unique) characteristics that led to problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these developments, in Rashid's reckoning, was inevitable. Mishandling and misjudgment by the Bush administration has abetted and enabled various ills that make the world unsafe. American failure to comprehensively defeat terrorism is America's own fault.

According to Rashid, the Bush administration's decision to project its power in Mesopotamia, at the cost of not attending to far more urgent issues in south and central Asia, is among the greatest strategic blunders any American president has made. Shifting the theater so quickly and suddenly after the invasion of Afghanistan — for example, US troops that liberated Qandahar from the Taliban were moved to Iraq within three months — led the US to outsource its job of eliminating terrorism to a disingenuous dictator in Pakistan and a still inchoate Afghan democracy. Both led to disastrous results. Pakistan's General Musharraf and ISI either turned a blind eye to terrorists or tried to co-opt them to advance their own agendas, while a better than token investment in nation-building in Afghanistan — which would have cost a pittance compared to the war in Iraq — could have stemmed many of the wounds that festered into security crises today. Instead, the US abandoned Afghanistan, thereby allowing the Taliban to mount a powerful insurgency that will cost huge quantities of money and human life to roll back.

Such errors of grand strategy were compounded by smaller-scale but non-trivial errors. As a Pakistani citizen who traveled widely throughout central Asia, Rashid can testify first-hand to the practical consequences of America's rubbishing and violations of the Geneva Convention, the imperial language of its officials; unnecessary maligning of the religion of Islam, and the usurpation of the State Department's customary prerogatives by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon — which played a direct causal role in the collapse of any serious commitment to nation-building well before any US soldiers touched down in Afghanistan.

Yet Rashid did not write this book to admonish. He is genuinely disturbed by the perpetuation of terrorist power, not to mention the continuing paucity of liberty, economic opportunity, and human rights that citizens of South and Central Asia face daily. His positive proposals for American policy are extensive in range, thoroughly grounded empirically, and ought to be required reading by members of the American foreign policy community.

I'll focus on just one of his positive suggestions. Rashid traveled through FATA — Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas — with a Pashtun guide. He describes the region as "terrorism central," and not only the near certain secret redoubt of not only Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but also the base of operations of numerous terrorists and terror suspects spread throughout the world, whose identities Rashid lists. He argues that there are two possible ways of dealing with the threats based in FATA. The first is dispatching a military force to defeat the militants in an outright confrontation. This option has slim odds of success; the Pakistani military already tried it and failed, and external invaders are even less likely than Musharraf's army to have the requisite tactical and political support to succeed.

The second option — the viable one — highlights the indispensability of Rashid's book. FATA is one of those hinterlands of the globe that suffered through the transition from ethnic tribalism and economic feudalism to a nation-state paradigm. The literacy rate there is only 17% (3% for women!), there are no economic, opportunities, no legal system apart from an arbitrary mish-mash of tribal decision-making nominally supplemented by a statutory scheme inherited from the British Raj, and no educational system apart from whatever the mullahs could provide. There have never been political parties, much less a political culture, in the region. FATA exists outside of the sphere of international law and outside of the reach of the governments Kabul and Islamabad, its only political order the spiritual thrall of extremist religious leaders and the brute force of warlords. who use intimidation to impose themselves. In other words, it is the absolutely ideal sanctuary for al Qaeda and other stateless criminals gangs — even better, arguably, than al Qaeda's other sometime homes in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and since the American invasion, Iraq).

Clearly, therefore, an effective means of shutting down terrorism in south and central Asia is to integrate regions like FATA into the international economic community. And indeed, Rashid notes that there were proposals in recent years for a referendum in FATA which would have allowed it to either become an independent province associated with Pakistan or choose to become part of the NWFP province. Naturally, those entreaties were shunted aside by Musharraf, the man the Bush administration foolishly treated as their number one counter-terrorist.

The US could begin to address to the challenge of FATA today by reviving discussion about FATA's provincial status with the democratic parties now in power in Pakistan, who are completely befuddled by the problem of what to do with the region, and are passively allowing the tribal leaders there to extend Sharia law over secular legal opposition.

That proposal for FATA is only one of many constructive ideas in Descent Into Chaos. Rashid's long-standing relationships with the leading political figures of south and central Asia, his fluency with US policy, and his decades-long experience with the region, make the a necessary resource for anyone interested in the post 9/11 world. It should be slipped onto the essential reading lists of the foreign policy experts advising John McCain and Barack Obama.

The post Jewcy Review: Descent into Chaos By Ahmed Rashid appeared first on Jewcy.

The selection of Houda Nonoo was made by decree on Wednesday and reported by local media in the Gulf Arab kingdom on Friday.

The decree, published by the official Bahraini News Agency, did not state which nation Nonoo would be appointed to but media reports have said that the US is her likely destination.

Nonoo, 43, said she would undertake the role "first of all as a Bahraini" and that she was not chosen because of her religion.

Bahraini media had speculated over Nonoo's selection for the past few months.

Nonoo, a businesswoman and mother of two children, has served as a legislator in Bahrain's all-appointed 40-member Shura Council for three years.

More on that at Al-Jazeera English, and if you follow the link, there is mention of a synagogue for the country's 40 Jews. There is also mention that Bahrain is planning on giving full citizenship rights to Jewish returnees. The idea of "full-citizenship" in the Gulf states is an important one because these countries are extremely reluctant to let immigrants come in and acquire citizenship—kind of like Switzerland, but worse. The fact that Jews who have presumably been gone for decades will be welcomed back as full citizens is a sign that Bahrain is open to recognizing the historical connection that Jews had to the land, which is interesting because even Muslims who don't have a connection to the land can't just come in and become citizens.

I do not think that this in any way means a thawing of relationship with Israel, as last year Bahrain stripped one of its athletes of citizenship after he participated in a race in Israel.

There is, however, an attempt by the Arab states to begin engaging with Jews. Kuwait is planning on building a "1001 Tower"—yes, like the Arabian Nights—the top of which will house a mosque, synagogue and church. Saudi Arabia's ruler recently called for inter-faith dialogue inclusive of Jews which was welcomed by Israel's Chief Rabbi. Qatar, another tiny state, home of Al-Jazeera and Yusuf al-Qardawi, held another inter-faith meeting at which rabbis from Israel were present.

This piece of news comes at the heels of the grim article in the NYTimes about the last Jews in Babylon.

Related at Jewcy: Joseph Braude on Jews and Arabic Music

The post Bahrain Appoints Jewish Ambassador, Plans to Offer Full Citizenship Rights to Jewish Returnees appeared first on Jewcy.