Bias takes a nasty turn

THERE can be no doubt about this. Growing prejudice in the United States against the Muslim world took a nasty turn as a result of the stance taken by a number of prominent politicians to challenge President Bush over his administration’s seemingly innocent decision on an economic issue. As The Washington Post editorialized on February 22 “you know something fishy is going on when multiple members of Congress — House, Senate, Democrat, Republican, future presidential candidates of all stripes — spontaneously unite around an issue that none of them had known existed a week earlier.”

The issue on which such diverse forces and personalities coalesced was the purchase by Dubai Ports World, a maritime company owned by the United Arab Emirate’s Dubai, of the British P&O navigation company. The purchase meant that DPW would own port operations of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. It did not matter to the lawmakers that these operations were managed by a British company. It mattered a great deal if they were taken by a company from a Muslim country. Members of Congress promised legislation that would scuttle the purchase.

The New York Times, the other major American newspaper, sided with the opposition and cautioned against the conclusion of the intended purchase. The legislators were taking the right approach, wrote the newspaper, “and members of both parties should rally round it. Rather than using his first veto on such a wrongheaded cause, President Bush should make the bill unnecessary by acting on his own to undo the ports deal.”

That was not acceptable to President George W. Bush who called the press to his cabin on Airforce One, the presidential plane, to ask a simple question. “I want those who are questioning the deal to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a British company.” The president knew the answer: Dubai was a part of the Muslim heartland and it would not be allowed to penetrate the heart of the United States economic system.

Several lawmakers explained their opposition to the purchase of P&O by an Arab company on grounds of national security. Robert Menendez, the senator from New Jersey, went on national television to explain his opposition to the sale and why he was working with Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, to move a bill in the senate. The proposed legislation would forbid companies owned by foreign governments to run port operations in the United States.

Menendez reminded his viewers that two of the 19 hijackers who struck America on September 11, 2001, were from the UAE, that the group that planned and carried out the attacks used accounts in the UAE banks to move money around, that Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan had used Dubai as the base for his nuclear proliferation deals with Iran, Libya and North Korea. How could the administration of President Bush that had made the fight against terrorism the top priority permit the sale of a port operating company owned by a country with such links with America’s enemies, asked the senator.

It didn’t seem to matter to the lawmakers that the United Arab Emirates was a US ally that had cooperated extensively with US security operations in the war on terrorism, had supplied troops to the US-led coalition during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, had permitted the use by American navy ships of its own ports, and had sent humanitarian aid to Iraq during the present conflict. The US troops moved freely in and out of the country in their operations in Iraq. What tended to over-ride all this was the fact that the company that had purchased P&O was owned by the government of a Muslim country.

President Bush threatened to veto any legislation that came out of Congress against the deal that had been closely studied by his administration when it was being negotiated. To quote once again from The Washington Post editorial — a newspaper that had not shown much objectivity and prudence in its position on the war in Iraq: “We’re wondering if American politicians are having trouble understanding some of the basic goals of contemporary US foreign policy. A goal of democracy promotion in the Middle East, after all, is to encourage Arab countries to become economically and politically integrated with the rest of the world. What better way to do so than by encouraging Arab companies to invest in the United States? Clearly Congress doesn’t understand the basic principle since its members prefer instead to spread prejudice and misinformation.”

President Bush adopted the same line in defending the deal with the Arab company. Members of Congress “should take a look at the facts and understand the consequences of what they’re going to do”, he advised his opponents that included several prominent members of his own party including the speaker of the House of Representatives and the majority leader in the senate.

One important consequence of the furore against the UAE company would be to alienate even the moderate Muslims from the West and convince them that they were faced with a deep prejudice against their faith. The United States’ stance on the issue of the cartoons published by the Danish newspapers was appreciated by this segment of Muslim society. While the Europeans had clearly shown double standards, the American government, the country’s senior politicians and its press had shown remarkable understanding of Muslim sensitivities concerning the publication of the cartoons.

Even though the freedom of speech was enshrined in the United States constitution as the first amendment, the US public understood that that the provision had to be subjected to the sensitivities of religious and social groups. Before the controversy concerning the UAE took an ugly turn, there was consensus among policy circles in the United States that the clash of civilization predicted by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, if it did take place, would happen not in America but in Europe.

While militant Islam remained on the fringes of the Muslim society in the United States, it was much more deeply embedded in the Muslim communities that had been formed in the various countries of Europe. The Muslims in America were much more integrated in the host population than was the case with those who lived and worked across the Atlantic in Europe. The cartoon issue was portrayed by most European commentators as a clash between two systems of values. For most Europeans, freedom of speech was more important than the need to honour the sensitivities of various components of their society. This was repeatedly stated to be the reason for the republication of the cartoons by a number of prominent newspapers in the continent.

However, even this explanation held little water following the sentencing by a court in Austria of a British historian. He was given a three-year term in jail for having denied the occurrence of the Holocaust. There were laws on the books of several European countries that treated pronouncements against events such as the Holocaust as a criminal offence. In Germany, the law did not allow any favourable opinion to be expressed about Adolf Hitler. In Denmark, whose prime minister showed a remarkable lack of sensitivity to one of the most important practices in Islam, had on its books laws that prohibited the display of religious prejudice.

Why did the question of cartoons result in such an uproar in the Muslim world? According some analysts in the West, the reaction had more to do with the fact that the Muslims had been left behind economically and in terms of developing their human resources. That had created great resentment among the uneducated and unemployed masses. This resentment was directed not only against the West but also against the leaders of the Muslim society.

In taking this view in an article Thomas Friedman, the columnist and the author of the best-selling book, The World is Flat, quoted Pakistan’s Pervez Hoodbhoy extensively and approvingly. The Pakistani nuclear scientist had correctly diagnosed the reason for the economic malaise in much of the Muslim world, blaming it on poor education. But Hoodbhoy did not make the connection between the fact that “science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago” and the anger over the insult of Islam by the Danish cartoonists.

While there is a great deal of truth in the claims that Muslim societies have a lot of catching up to do in the fields of education and science, to link this with the growing bias against Islam simply means shifting the blame on to the shoulders of the victims of prejudice. The publication of the cartoons was not an expression of the right to free speech. While it is hard to pin motives, considering the politician involved in that particular episode, it is not altogether fanciful to suggest that the reason may have been to provoke a reaction in Europe against the growing presence of Islam.

After all, the newspaper that initially published the cartoons is known for its rightist ideology including the opposition to immigration and the resultant dilution of European cultures. The Danish prime minister refused to pay heed to the damage the publication of cartoons could cause to relations with Islam in Europe. This was probably a welcome development for a political figure that represented the fringe of his country’s society. A clash between Islam and the West is being deliberately provoked by some elements in Europe troubled by the presence of some 25 million Muslims in their midst.

While that is happening in Europe, it is unfortunate that some politicians in America and some important opinion-makers in that country have also taken the view that it is unhealthy for their country to admit into a strategic part of their economy an Arab-owned company. This campaign will only help to strengthen the belief that the clash between Islam and the West was finally on and that it will take place on both sides of the Atlantic.

It would have been much more prudent for political America to leave the clash between Islam and the West to take place on the soil of Europe rather than bring it to its own shores.

Guantanamo: the US gulag

THE American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water supply years ago.

So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners drank the yellow water.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.

Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross — who are prohibited by their own rules from disclosing what they find — and lawyers for the prisoners.

I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our American gulag.

On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log sheet and submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of the prison camp.

We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo, one of several camps where prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square and divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table where the prisoner would sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam mattress and a gray cotton blanket.

The Pentagon’s files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none was captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the US. The prisoners claim that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and turned over to the US for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 — a claim confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by US forces promising rewards - “enough to feed your family for life” — for any “Arab terrorist” handed over.

The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never stand up in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two suspected Al Qaeda members on the same day — at places thousands of miles apart. The primary “evidence” against another was that he was captured wearing a particular Casio watch, “which many terrorists wear.” Oddly, the same watch was being worn by the US military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families for more than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become a father since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen sunlight for months - an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told me, “I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom.” Other than the Holy Quran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have been given books.

Every prisoner I’ve interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of US captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs. “Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing,” he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest against being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard US congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort with great food. “If I eat, I condone these lies,” Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

We asked for Fawzi’s medical records so we could monitor his weight and his health. Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month, which we did. When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds to 98 pounds. Specialists in enteral feeding advised us that the continued drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was being conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital. Again, the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110 pounds. The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by medical personnel rather than by guards.

When I met Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said, “They tortured us to make us stop.” At first, he said, they punished him by taking away his “comfort items” one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him on Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto “the chair.” The officer warned that recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. “We’re going to break this hunger strike,” the officer told him.

After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more than 80 strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled water.

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I know the truth. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

The writer is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.

Our reaction to the cartoons

FOR the past one month, the Muslim world has been rocked by protest demonstrations, some peaceful and some violent, against the publication of cartoons, satirizing the Prophet (PBUH) in a humiliating manner, originally in a little known Danish newspaper.

They were subsequently reproduced by several European papers, in the name of freedom of expression. The cartoons were deeply offensive and hurtful not only to Muslims but to many non-Muslims as well who, while believing in freedom of expression, maintained that this should not become a licence for unscrupulous elements to intrude upon the religious sensitivities of others.

The claim that the publication of the satirical cartoons was designed to uphold the principle of free expression is disingenuous as is the assertion that the European media is ignorant about the depth of Muslim sensitivity to any disrespect shown to the Prophet Mohammed.

Europeans, as opposed to Americans, have had a long tradition of studying Islam since mediaeval times, an interest that led to the birth of a whole academic discipline named Orientalism or Arabism. Many European writers and thinkers, especially priests and theologians, have unfortunately misrepresented Islam and the life of the Prophet in their writings and treatises, primarily to malign Islam and ostensibly to protect Christians from its influence.

Typical among these was Lodovico Marracci, the 17th century Italian priest, who devoted 40 years of his life to studying Islam and the Quran, with the sole purpose of refuting its teachings. Even relatively more recent scholars and historians, such as Edward Gibbon, who never learnt Arabic, have been hostile to Islam and its teachings. Over the years, an extensive body of literature has accumulated in European academic institutions and research centres that has contributed much to the distorted image of Islam.

While they may not have foreseen the extent of the anger and the firestorm the cartoons provoked, the editors of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten clearly could not have been entirely unaware of the fallout of their ill-advised decision to publish them. In a full-length article by the paper’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who commissioned the cartoons, he advances a bizarre rationale for their publication (Washington Post, Feb 19). According to his thesis, the publication of the cartoons was an affirmation that the Danish Muslims had now become equal citizens and integrated in Danish society. In other words, since they routinely ridicule other religions, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism, why not take a shot at Islam as well.

However, in reality the paper is not so even-handed. According to the CBS news programme, ‘Sixty Minutes’, the editors of Jyllands-Posten recently rejected a satirical depiction of the resurrection of the Christ, fearing that it would provoke an outcry. The exercise of double standards is not limited to Denmark. This week, the British historian, David Irving, has been sentenced to three years in prison by a court in Vienna for denying that the Holocaust ever happened. Mere denial of the Holocaust or the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps in Nazi Germany is a crime in Austria as well as in Germany. So, the Europeans are not as firmly committed to the principle of freedom of expression as they claim.

However egregious the provocation caused by the cartoons might have been, the reaction of the Muslim world unfortunately has neither been dignified nor rational. Burning down embassies as happened in Syria or the destruction of property and loss of life as happened in some cities in Pakistan earns us no friends around the world. Above all, such extreme reaction was not the Prophet’s (who repeatedly forgave his tormentors and even prayed for them) way. In many cities in Pakistan, peaceful and dignified protest marches, taken over by more extreme elements, degenerated into unruly melees. Indiscriminately destroying businesses that are owned by innocent people, whether Pakistanis or foreigners, who have had no association with the offence, is not only wrong but it is also economically damaging to Pakistan and its reputation abroad.

During the past century, the world has undergone revolutionary changes, and with the arrival of information technology, nations have been interconnected as never before. Whatever is published in the media in Europe and America becomes instantly available to millions of people around the world. Also, the terrorist events of 9/11 have spawned a great deal of interest in Islam and Muslims, and many bookshops in western countries are inundated with publications on these topics. However, we can exercise no control over what is disseminated by the media or individual authors in Europe or America, and no amount of demonstrations and protests are likely to change it. They might in fact prove counterproductive.

The violent reaction is what some of the publishers and writers in their perverse way seek, as they deliberately exacerbate rather than attempt to quench the conflict. It makes them instantly famous and their otherwise prosaic publications receive a huge amount of free publicity and a boost in circulation. How many in America or Europe, for example, had heard of the Danish newspaper concerned before the storm. Unfortunately, the Europeans don’t have a monopoly on fanning the fire of religious conflict. According to published reports, Imam Abu-Laban of Denmark, sensing that his initial protests were not having any effect in the country, sent a dossier of highly inflammatory pictures that had not been published by any newspapers and were the work of racist, malignant minds in the country, to Egypt where they created a conflagration.

Some good can still come out of this distressing episode. The anguish and rage that the Muslim world has felt over the publication of the cartoon may be channelled into some useful venues. Now is the most opportune time to educate the western public about Islam and its sublime message and to remove some of the misinformation they have been fed upon for well over a millennium.

This project can only be undertaken by western Muslims scholars and academicians who may be best qualified to present the message in such a way that it would appeal to the western reader; publications that are perceived as scholarly, historic but unencumbered by the expression of overt religious devotion. This would be the best tribute to the Prophet and consistent with the glorious ideals he taught us.