Shame of the House of Saud: Shadows over Mecca

Previously unseen photographs reveal how religious zealots obsessed with idolatory have colluded with developers to destroy Islam's diverse heritage. By Daniel Howden The Independent, London There is a growing shadow being cast over Islam's holiest site. Only a few metres from the walls of the Grand Mosque in Mecca skyscrapers are reaching further into the sky, slowly blocking out the light. These enormous and garish newcomers now dwarf the elegant black granite of the Kaaba, the focal point of the four million Muslims' annual Haj pilgrimage. The tower blocks are the latest and largest evidence of the destruction of Islamic heritage that has wiped almost all of the historic city from the physical landscape. As revealed in The Independent last August,the historic cities of Mecca and Medina are under an unprecedented assault from religious zealots and their commercial backers. Writing in response to the article, Prince Turki al-Faisal said that Saudi Arabia was spending more than $19bn (£11bn) preserving and maintaining these two holy sites. "[We are aware] how important the preservation of this heritage is, not just to us but to the millions of Muslims from around the world who visit the two holy mosques every year. It is hardly something we are going to allow to be destroyed." This rebuttal sits at odds with a series of previously unseen photographs, published today, that document the demolition of key archaeological sites and their replacement with skyscrapers. Saudi religious authorities have overseen a decades-long demolition campaign that has cleared the way for developers to embark on a building spree of multi-storey hotels, restaurants, shopping centres and luxury apartment blocks on a scale unseen outside Dubai. The driving force behind this historical demolition is Wahhabism ­ the austere state faith that the House of Saud brought with it when Ibn Saud conquered the Arabian peninsula in the 1920s. The Wahhabis live in fanatical fear that places of historical or religious interest could give rise to alternative forms of pilgrimage or worship. Their obsession with combating idolatry has seen them flatten all evidence of a past that does not agree with their interpretation of Islam. Irfan Ahmed al-Alawi, the chairman of the Islamic Heritage Foundation, set up to help protect the holy sites, says the case of the grave of Amina bint Wahb, the mother of the Prophet, found in 1998, is typical of what has happened. "It was bulldozed in Abwa and gasoline was poured on it. Even though thousands of petitions throughout the Muslim world were sent, nothing could stop this action." Today there are fewer than 20 structures remaining in Mecca that date back to the time of the Prophet 1,400 years ago. The litany of this lost history includes the house of Khadijah, the wife of the Prophet, demolished to make way for public lavatories; the house of Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion, now the site of the local Hilton hotel; the house of Ali-Oraid, the grandson of the Prophet, and the Mosque of abu-Qubais, now the location of the King's palace in Mecca. Yet the same oil-rich dynasty that pumped money into the Taliban regime as they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan six years ago has so far avoided international criticism for similar acts of vandalism at home. Mai Yamani, author of The Cradle of Islam, said it was time for other Muslim governments to ignore the al-Sauds' oil wealth and clout and speak out. " What is alarming about this is that the world doesn't question the al-Sauds' custodianship of Islam's two holy places. These are the sites that are of such importance to over one billion Muslims and yet their destruction is being ignored," she said. "When the Prophet was insulted by Danish cartoonists thousands of people went into the streets to protest. The sites related to the Prophet are part of their heritage and religion but we see no concern from Muslims." Lay people, and in some cases even US senators could be forgiven for thinking that the House of Saud has been the guardian of the two holy places for time immemorial. In fact, it is only 80 years since the tribal chieftain Ibn Saud occupied Mecca and Medina. The House of Saud has been bound to Wahhabism since the 18th century religious reformer Mohamed Ibn Abdul-Wahab signed a pact with Mohammed bin Saud in 1744. Wahab's warrior zealots helped to conquer a kingdom for the tribal chieftains. The House of Saud got its wealth and power, and the clerics got the vehicle of state they needed to spread their fundamentalist ideology around the world. The ruler of this fledgling kingdom needed the legitimacy afforded by declaring himself " custodian of the two holy places". But that legitimacy has come at an enormous price for the diversity of Muslims who look to Mecca for guidance. Once in charge, the Wahhabists wasted little time in censoring the Haj. As early as 1929, Egyptian pilgrims were refused permission to celebrate the colourful Mahmal rites and more than 30 were killed. At the time Egypt severed diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Few governments have stood up to them since. Instead, the homogenisation of Islam's holiest sites was allowed to accelerate into a demolition campaign that now threatens the birthplace of the Prophet itself. The site survived the early reign of Ibn Saud 50 years ago when the architect for the planned library persuaded the absolute ruler to allow him to preserve the remains under the new structure. Saudi authorities now plan to "update" the site with a car park that would mean concreting over the remains. "The al-Sauds need to rein in the Wahhabists now," warns Dr Yamani. "Mecca used to be a symbol of Muslim diversity and it needs to be again." But with oil prices and profits, at record highs, there is little sign the House of Saud is listening. Sami Angawi, a Hijazi architect who has devoted his life to a largely doomed effort to preserve what remains of the history of the world's greatest pilgrimage sites, said that the final farewell to Mecca was imminent. " What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina." Mecca's skyline Giant cranes and half-constructed skyscrapers tower over the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Six new property developments, including the Bin Laden group's Zam Zam Tower, are transforming the character of Islam's holiest city ISLAMIC HERITAGE FOUNDATION Mountain of light The mountain of light, or al-Nour, is next in the Wahhabis' sights. Home to the Hira'a cave, it was here that the Prophet is said to have received the first verses of the Koran. Hardline clerics want it destroyed to stop pilgrims visiting. At the foot of the hill there is a Wahhabi fatwa: " The Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) did not permit us to climb on to this hill, not to pray here, not to touch stones, and tie knots on trees..." ISLAMIC HERITAGE FOUNDATION The Prophet's wife's grave The ruins in the foreground are the remains of the grave of the Prophet's wife, Al Baqi, destroyed in the 1950s. The mutawi religious police are present night and day to prevent anyone placing flowers on the site, or even praying in the proximity of the graves THE ISLAMIC HERITAGE FOUNDATION Al Oraid Mosque The 1,200-year-old mosque, site of the grave of the Prophet's grandson al-Oraid, is seen here being dynamited. Gathered around the site are Saudi religious police with their distinctive red scarves, who appear to be celebrating THE ISLAMIC HERITAGE FOUNDATION There is a growing shadow being cast over Islam's holiest site. Only a few metres from the walls of the Grand Mosque in Mecca skyscrapers are reaching further into the sky, slowly blocking out the light. These enormous and garish newcomers now dwarf the elegant black granite of the Kaaba, the focal point of the four million Muslims' annual Haj pilgrimage. The tower blocks are the latest and largest evidence of the destruction of Islamic heritage that has wiped almost all of the historic city from the physical landscape. As revealed in The Independent last August,the historic cities of Mecca and Medina are under an unprecedented assault from religious zealots and their commercial backers. Writing in response to the article, Prince Turki al-Faisal said that Saudi Arabia was spending more than $19bn (£11bn) preserving and maintaining these two holy sites. "[We are aware] how important the preservation of this heritage is, not just to us but to the millions of Muslims from around the world who visit the two holy mosques every year. It is hardly something we are going to allow to be destroyed." This rebuttal sits at odds with a series of previously unseen photographs, published today, that document the demolition of key archaeological sites and their replacement with skyscrapers. Saudi religious authorities have overseen a decades-long demolition campaign that has cleared the way for developers to embark on a building spree of multi-storey hotels, restaurants, shopping centres and luxury apartment blocks on a scale unseen outside Dubai. The driving force behind this historical demolition is Wahhabism ­ the austere state faith that the House of Saud brought with it when Ibn Saud conquered the Arabian peninsula in the 1920s. The Wahhabis live in fanatical fear that places of historical or religious interest could give rise to alternative forms of pilgrimage or worship. Their obsession with combating idolatry has seen them flatten all evidence of a past that does not agree with their interpretation of Islam. Irfan Ahmed al-Alawi, the chairman of the Islamic Heritage Foundation, set up to help protect the holy sites, says the case of the grave of Amina bint Wahb, the mother of the Prophet, found in 1998, is typical of what has happened. "It was bulldozed in Abwa and gasoline was poured on it. Even though thousands of petitions throughout the Muslim world were sent, nothing could stop this action." Today there are fewer than 20 structures remaining in Mecca that date back to the time of the Prophet 1,400 years ago. The litany of this lost history includes the house of Khadijah, the wife of the Prophet, demolished to make way for public lavatories; the house of Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion, now the site of the local Hilton hotel; the house of Ali-Oraid, the grandson of the Prophet, and the Mosque of abu-Qubais, now the location of the King's palace in Mecca. Yet the same oil-rich dynasty that pumped money into the Taliban regime as they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan six years ago has so far avoided international criticism for similar acts of vandalism at home. Mai Yamani, author of The Cradle of Islam, said it was time for other Muslim governments to ignore the al-Sauds' oil wealth and clout and speak out. " What is alarming about this is that the world doesn't question the al-Sauds' custodianship of Islam's two holy places. These are the sites that are of such importance to over one billion Muslims and yet their destruction is being ignored," she said. "When the Prophet was insulted by Danish cartoonists thousands of people went into the streets to protest. The sites related to the Prophet are part of their heritage and religion but we see no concern from Muslims." Lay people, and in some cases even US senators could be forgiven for thinking that the House of Saud has been the guardian of the two holy places for time immemorial. In fact, it is only 80 years since the tribal chieftain Ibn Saud occupied Mecca and Medina. The House of Saud has been bound to Wahhabism since the 18th century religious reformer Mohamed Ibn Abdul-Wahab signed a pact with Mohammed bin Saud in 1744. Wahab's warrior zealots helped to conquer a kingdom for the tribal chieftains. The House of Saud got its wealth and power, and the clerics got the vehicle of state they needed to spread their fundamentalist ideology around the world. The ruler of this fledgling kingdom needed the legitimacy afforded by declaring himself " custodian of the two holy places". But that legitimacy has come at an enormous price for the diversity of Muslims who look to Mecca for guidance. Once in charge, the Wahhabists wasted little time in censoring the Haj. As early as 1929, Egyptian pilgrims were refused permission to celebrate the colourful Mahmal rites and more than 30 were killed. At the time Egypt severed diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Few governments have stood up to them since. Instead, the homogenisation of Islam's holiest sites was allowed to accelerate into a demolition campaign that now threatens the birthplace of the Prophet itself. The site survived the early reign of Ibn Saud 50 years ago when the architect for the planned library persuaded the absolute ruler to allow him to preserve the remains under the new structure. Saudi authorities now plan to "update" the site with a car park that would mean concreting over the remains. "The al-Sauds need to rein in the Wahhabists now," warns Dr Yamani. "Mecca used to be a symbol of Muslim diversity and it needs to be again." But with oil prices and profits, at record highs, there is little sign the House of Saud is listening. Sami Angawi, a Hijazi architect who has devoted his life to a largely doomed effort to preserve what remains of the history of the world's greatest pilgrimage sites, said that the final farewell to Mecca was imminent. " What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina."

At Heart of Iraqi Impasse, a Family Feud

Militia-Backed Shiite Factions Vie for Political Dominance

By Jonathan Finer Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 19, 2006; A01

NAJAF, Iraq -- On one side of the grinding political deadlock over who should lead Iraq's next government is a plain-spoken cleric with the puffed cheeks and patchy beard of youth, a fiery icon of the downtrodden with an exalted family name: al-Sadr.

On the other is a wizened mullah from the clerical old guard, whose al-Hakim clan founded Iraq's largest political party and whose scholarly air belies a reputation for ruthlessness.

Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim head the two leading dynasties of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, whose spiritual home is this ancient southern city. They operate the country's two largest Shiite militias -- the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, respectively -- each with more than 10,000 men under arms. And they are heirs to rival movements that for generations have competed, sometimes violently, for supremacy in the hearts and minds of their long-persecuted people.

The two men are now on opposing sides of the dispute over whether Ibrahim al-Jafari should retain his post as prime minister. The impasse remains unresolved despite months of negotiation and intense U.S. pressure, and hinges not only on myriad political factors but on the two clerics' family feud.

"Iraqi clerical Shiism tends to run in families and has for a long time," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and expert on Shiite Islam. "Throughout the 20th century the Sadr and Hakim families have been maybe the most prominent examples and have vied for influence. Here they are again."

Their divergent politics mean the dispute over the prime minister's post has wide-ranging and complex implications for the future of Iraq, and for the U.S. presence here.

The coalition of Shiite parties that won the most votes in Iraq's Dec. 15 elections has nearly fractured over its choice of Jafari as nominee for prime minister. Sadr, whose political allies control about 30 seats in the new legislature, has lined up behind Jafari, believing him more likely to push the Americans to depart Iraq soon. Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which also holds about 30 seats, has been working to install its own candidate, Adel Abdul Mahdi.

Despite being groomed for decades by the government of Iran, Hakim has largely embraced the United States since the 2003 invasion and has profited from it. His Supreme Council party works closely with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and controls several ministries in Iraq's lame-duck transitional government.

Sadr, meanwhile, has battled the U.S. presence. In 2003, an Iraqi judge issued a murder warrant for Sadr in connection with the killing in Najaf of a rival cleric with ties to the United States. Two years ago, his Mahdi Army militiamen fought U.S. forces here and in Baghdad. U.S. diplomats and commanders say they number Sadr and his militia among the gravest threats to Iraq's security, and none has met with him directly.

"We will never negotiate under occupation," said Sayyid Riyadh Nouri, who heads Sadr's political committee and is married to the cleric's sister. "We do not participate with people who violate our democracy."

Sadr and his followers paint the Supreme Council as a foreign movement; its founders were exiled in Iran when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In a rare interview with a Washington Post reporter soon after Baghdad fell three years ago, Sadr said Iraq should be governed by those who did not flee Hussein's rule. He also has been critical of clerics who remained in Iraq but suffered Hussein's oppression silently.

"The difference is simple: The Hakim family decided to get out of Iraq to fight the former regime, while the Sadr family stayed inside and openly defied Saddam," said Sahib al-Amiry, head of the Sadr-run God's Martyr Foundation. He denied frequent reports that Sadr also receives substantial support from Iran. "Our only relationship with Iran is as a neighbor," he said.

Both Sadr and Hakim owe their strength to a mix of religious legitimacy and impeccable bloodlines. Both wear the black turban that signifies their status as putative descendants of the prophet Muhammad.

Sadr lost brothers, an uncle and his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, at the hands of Hussein's Sunni-dominated security forces. Hakim says more than 60 family members were killed in recent decades -- including his brother, former Supreme Council leader Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who was obliterated by a car bomb outside Najaf's Imam Ali shrine in 2003. In the past half-century, members of both families have held the revered rank of grand ayatollah, the top position in Najaf's Shiite religious hierarchy.

"There is a great role for these families in the history of Shiite Iraq because of the stands they have taken for the people and the price they have paid," Amar al-Hakim, 36, said in an interview in an office across the street from a large shrine commemorating the killing of his uncle, Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim.

Leaders in both camps are quick to point out that stereotypes of the two Shiite factions have not always held true. While Sadr and his father were heroes to Iraq's working class, Sadr's grandfather was known for his religious scholarship. The two families are also intertwined by marriage: Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim's wife is a cousin of Moqtada al-Sadr.

The dispute over Jafari "is not really about families. It is about different ideas for Iraq," said Amar Hakim, citing the Supreme Council's push to form an autonomous state in mostly Shiite southern Iraq. Sadr's followers fear such a move would split the country apart.

While his bloodlines are unquestioned, Sadr, in his early thirties, lacks the seminary training and polish of a top cleric. He draws followers from the Shiite underclass, whose speech patterns are echoed in his own. His base is concentrated in the teeming Baghdad slum of Sadr City, named for his father, where up to 10 percent of Iraq's population lives. His main mosque is in Kufa, a poorer city adjoining Najaf.

Following the model of the Lebanese party and guerrilla movement Hezbollah, Sadr has won support by catering to the needy and maintaining a force of men with guns. His satellite offices across the country have become first stops for Shiites evicted from their neighborhoods in mounting sectarian violence.

In Kufa last week, members of his God's Martyr Foundation were operating a squalid halfway house for displaced Shiites in an abandoned hotel, providing protection and doling out food to 51 families.

"We are all here under his protection," said Iptihal Abbas, who arrived with four children of male family members who were killed by gunmen in the Shiite town of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "Everyone else ignored us, including the government and the Americans."

While also operating charitable organizations, the Supreme Council is a more modern political movement, with a satellite television channel and an unmatched grass-roots organization and cultural programs overseen by Amar Hakim, who made a widely publicized visit to the United States last year.

"We have 80 offices from Basra to Sulaymaniyah," he said. "We have 1,000 mosques in Iraq and 5,000 clergymen linked to us. We have 1,500 women activists. We have educational foundations, schools and charities."

The marjiya , a council of senior Shiite clerics based in Najaf, has urged the two sides to mend the rift that has dominated Iraqi politics since the U.S. invasion. And on Tuesday, a senior aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most influential cleric in Iraq, said patience with Shiite politicians was wearing thin.

"The ones harmed by this delay are the Iraqi people. . . . The Green Zone is soothing, and the Iraqi street is another thing," said the aide, Ahmed al-Safi, referring to the fortified section of Baghdad that houses the Iraqi and American military leaderships. "When the marjiya order or give signals, you should understand it. The marjiya might be forced to be involved more. The marjiya have made it clear on several occasions the importance of speeding up the formation of a government."

But concern is mounting across southern Iraq that if Jafari is pushed aside, the Mahdi Army will occupy the streets. Last August, after Sadr's Najaf office was burned by a mob, his followers blamed the Supreme Council's Badr Brigade. The next day, the Mahdi Army attacked Badr offices across the south before Sadr and Hakim called for calm. Both sides have in recent days asked supporters to maintain order regardless of who is named prime minister, but aides have said they would not rule out armed unrest.

"It is not our official policy," said Amiry, of the Sadr foundation. "But maybe some people will express their stance that way."

Baghdad mosques become vigilante forts as sectarianism divides suburbs

onathan Steele in Baghdad with additional reporting by an Iraqi journalist Friday April 21, 2006 The Guardian

In the wave of sectarian violence that has hit Iraq since the destruction of one of the country's holiest shrines in February, many mosques around Baghdad have become training grounds and weapons stores as much as places of prayer.

More significantly, they are now seen as the preserve of a single sect - the meeting place and bastion of one or other beleaguered community. The al-Nour mosque in Baghdad's western suburb of al-Jihad used to have both Shia and Sunni worshippers. "Only one Shia comes to the mosque now," said Adnan, a young guard who did not want to give his real name. He and other Sunnis are on watch each night to defend the mosque.

Neighbourhood vigilantes first sprang up in Baghdad's middle- and upper-class suburbs in the looting and lawless chaos following Saddam Hussein's downfall. Residents mounted checkpoints to protect homes and shops. The new vigilantes are on guard to protect mosques and lives.

The first wave of violence after the destruction of the shrine in Samarra, which is sacred to Shias, targeted Sunni mosques. Sunnis accused the large Shia militias - the Badr organisation linked to the interior ministry and the Mahdi army of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - of leading or condoning the raids.

People, rather than buildings, became the next target. Hundreds of Baghdad Sunnis have been abducted and murdered in recent weeks, usually by armed men turning up at night, knocking on doors and seizing people. Sunnis wonder how the killers can so easily defy Baghdad's nightly curfew if they are not linked to the police.

With their high roofs and minarets, mosques have become the best places from which defenders can keep watch, and alert neighbours to get their guns and join the defence.

Adnan's brother was wounded by two bullets in a raid on the al-Nour mosque four days after the Samarra attack. Another guard was killed. "We only had Kalashnikov rifles. Now we have more powerful weapons," Adnan said.

Sunnis have no large armed formations of their own. The neighbourhood vigilantes operate as small separate groups. "There are other volunteers who take turns, up to 50 of us here," said Adnan.

As yet the Sunni militias are primarily defensive. They are not formally linked to the anti-occupation insurgency. Indeed, at the al-Nour mosque, Adnan stressed, the guards are not anti-American. "The plan is that if US forces come on their own, the guards should not fire on them. If it's only Iraqis, they should," he said.

The same rules apply in the nearby district of al-Furat, which unlike al-Jihad is almost entirely Sunni. "The elders have told the Americans they will not attack them if they come in. Only Iraqi forces will be hit. Since Samarra no Iraqi forces have gone into al-Furat. They know they will be massacred," a resident said.

As Baghdad splits up into no-go areas for the Iraqi police, the danger is that the groundwork is being laid for a civil war in the city. If sectarian violence increased, the separate mosque defenders could start coordinating, turning the city into a jigsaw of no-go areas, like Beirut in the 1980s. They could also make common cause with the insurgents and turn against the Americans.

"This is our biggest problem, the militias and the untrustworthiness of the official security forces. It could easily turn into fiefdoms, each area with its own militia," warned Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni who serves as interim speaker of the new parliament.

Despite the rising sectarian suspicions in suburbs such as al-Jihad, Sheikh Hussein, the mosque's imam, still preaches in favour of tolerance. In a recent sermon he urged Iraqis to remain united. "It's the occupation which wants us to fight each other," he told worshippers.

His words may have come too late. Al-Jihad's two Shia mosques have become mirror images of al-Nour. They are strongholds of armed Shias. "Although I live here, it isn't safe for me to visit either of them," Adnan said. His worry is not the Shia reaction, but what his own side would think: "When I come out, something might happen. The Sunnis are watching the Shia mosques closely."

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)

By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920) "You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you! -- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically -- producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) -- but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical sense -- over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.

Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the 1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of the new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the Russians then occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded nearly 12,000. More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the IRA and Gama'a al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two leading control-centers of the world economy -- the City of London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced a reorganization of the global reinsurance industry.

Read more....

Are women human?

In her new book, leading feminist Catharine MacKinnon argues that women are still treated more like "things" than people. She talks to Stuart Jeffries about her war on pornography - and whether men and women can ever really connect

Stuart Jeffries

Wednesday April 12, 2006 Guardian

Of all the provocative passages in Catharine MacKinnon's new book Are Women Human? the following hit me hardest. She writes: "[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody."

Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists' points of view, I ask MacKinnon? "Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren't even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don't, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction." She takes a well-earned breath.

Why does MacKinnon matter? She is undeniably one of feminism's most significant figures, a ferociously tough-minded lawyer and academic who has sought to use the law to clamp down on sexual harassment and pornography. She's a bracing woman, who calls her philosophy "feminism unmodified" and thinks wimpish guff such as post-feminism does women no good at all. Many hate her for this. Camille Paglia, for instance, charges that MacKinnon and her late collaborator Andrea Dworkin are responsible for "totalitarian excesses" in sexual harassment regulations and that their "nightmarish sexual delusions" have invaded American workplaces and schools and warped their views on pornography. Naomi Wolf branded her a "victim feminist". "Victim feminism," claims Wolf, "urges women to identify with powerlessness, even at the expense of taking responsibility for the power they do possess." In The Morning After, Katie Roiphe wrote that MacKinnon had an "image of woman as child" and attacked her for allegedly portraying all women as potential victims and all men as potential predators. Others have called her a fascist proponent of sexual correctness. Some have put words in her mouth - notably the claim that she thinks all heterosexual intercourse is rape: she does not. Some think she is right and that until sex inequality is tackled legally as MacKinnon proposes, women will continue to be raped, murdered and served up as masturbation fantasies for men. I couldn't wait to meet her.

We are sitting in a 15th-floor hotel cafe overlooking London. I suffer from vertigo and so MacKinnon has kindly suggested that I sit facing her rather than the plummet to my death. But I still feel dizzy from confronting the chasm that she has opened up in the relations between men and women. If I have ever felt affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction (and I doubt this), I will not today. I'd prefer smelling salts. MacKinnon, by contrast, looks a little like Tippi Hedren and seems vexingly imperturbable and more sartorially put together in her green silk trousers and other designer duds than anyone who has just flown across the Atlantic to publicise a book has a right to be.

Doesn't what you have said, I ask weakly, make any heterosexual act problematic? "It problematises those that take place under conditions of sex inequality, yes." But they all do, don't they? Certainly, according to MacKinnon's philosophy. "In a certain structural sense. In the same way that, say, friendships between black people and white people in societies that are racist do."

Perhaps there's an innocent space, I ask hopefully, where men and women can - she interrupts: "Yes! People work it out with great difficulty. But the first step is not to deny that it's there." The "it", I presume, is sexual inequality. (Incidentally, my interrupted question would have ended "get it on in a beautiful non-patriarchal way".)

Women's inequality is the new book's great theme, and MacKinnon's lifelong cause. Each country proclaims its commitment to equality and, in her view, hardly any delivers it substantively to women. "You don't have countries saying that, 'Yes, we have sex discrimination here and we want it. We're entitled to it and we enjoy it.' You don't have them saying that; you have them doing it."

This, she argues, is because countries favour an Aristotelian notion of equality whereby likes are treated as alike and unlikes unalike. Hence gender neutrality for sex, colourblindness for race. Her simple point is that this formal equality doesn't help women. It is, instead, "an extremely smart trick".

Her self-appointed job is to expose that trick. "We're now in a stage where people want to believe that there is equality. They'd rather deny inequality than face it down so that they can actually live it. My task is to support their belief in that equality while at the same time unmasking everything around them that is making it impossible for them actually to live in it."

MacKinnon's answer to her book's title, Are Women Human? is no. She writes: "If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre)? ..."

Her list of outrages, past and present, goes on. It's a favourite, if grim, rhetorical device. It is as though averting her gaze from the worst of women's sufferings would be a betrayal, not just of murdered and living sisters, but of her own intellectual integrity and the trajectory it has taken since she was radicalised as a Yale political science grad student in the 70s. Today, a globally renowned feminist lawyer and academic who will turn 60 in October, she remains passionately faithful to her cause.

One gets little sense from reading the book that the lot of women has improved in recent decades. True, she praises Sweden for deciding in 1999 that prostitution was male violence against women and as a result criminalised the buying of sex and decriminalised the selling of sex because "gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them". Otherwise, she contends, unenlightened men still write the laws. And when, for instance, they write laws on rape they make what she believes are grotesquely sexist assumptions. "The assumption," she says, "is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal. That's the assumption - and I think it ought to be thought about, and in particular what consent then means. It means acquiescence. It means passivity. You can be semi-knocked out. You can be dead in some jurisdictions."

I almost choke on my mineral water. Dead and giving consent? "Sex with a dead body is necrophilia but it isn't regarded as rape." Oh, I see. "You can be semi-comatose, not to mention married in many places, and be regarded as consenting whenever sex takes place."

MacKinnon thinks consent in rape cases should be irrelevant. Women are so unfree that even if a woman is shown to have given consent to sex, that should never be enough to secure an acquittal. Why? "My view is that when there is force or substantially coercive circumstances between the parties, individual consent is beside the point; that if someone is forced into sex, that ought to be enough. The British common law approach has tended to be that you need both force and absence of consent. If we didn't have so much pornography in society and people actually believed women when they said they didn't consent, that would be one thing. But that isn't what we've got."

What does she mean - how does pornography affect this? "Pornography affects people's belief in rape myths. So for example if a woman says 'I didn't consent' and people have been viewing pornography, they believe rape myths and believe the woman did consent no matter what she said. That when she said no, she meant yes. When she said she didn't want to, that meant more beer. When she said she would prefer to go home, that means she's a lesbian who needs to be given a good corrective experience. Pornography promotes these rape myths and desensitises people to violence against women so that you need more violence to become sexually aroused if you're a pornography consumer. This is very well documented." Her 1993 book, Only Words, proselytised for this view, opposing the US constitution's first amendment interpretation of pornography as protected speech. MacKinnon rather considered it hate speech, one that she and Dworkin defined as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words", but also one with real power - notably, to cause the rape and murder of women.

It's a contentious view but if it were true, why not censor pornography? "Our approach is not to ban, but to offer a civil remedy to people who can prove they were harmed - rather than empowering the police and putting people in jail, which doesn't do any good anyway. Pornographers keep their businesses going in jail."

This has been MacKinnon's feminist approach to porn for a quarter of a century: the victims of porn need to be empowered by law to seek remedies for harm they suffered, existing male-framed laws being inadequate to the challenge.

But an opportunity to try a civil rights approach arose when MacKinnon and Dworkin were teaching a course on pornography at the University of Minnesota. They were asked to testify at a hearing to decide in which part of Minneapolis pornography could be sold. "They were asking, 'Are we going to put it over here or over there?' and we said, 'Women and children are going to be harmed wherever you put it'." So the two women instead drew up an anti-pornography law for the city whereby, as she says, "the people who are hurt should be able to hold the people who are hurting them responsible for that harm". The law defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allowed women who claimed harm from pornography to sue the producers and distributors in civil court for damages. Better such remedies, argues MacKinnon, than the obscenity approach to restricting porn common in Britain and Commonwealth countries, which she derides in her book: "It cares more about whether men blush than whether women bleed."

Civil law, she says, is more effective. For example, she was asked to represent raped Bosnian and Croat women in a lawsuit against Radovan Karadzic. The result has been Kadic v Karadzic, and she is very proud of it. "We have an injunction against this man ever engaging in genocide again and people he's in contact with ever doing it again. We were also awarded $745m, which he has and our clients are entitled to. That's two forms of civil relief that actually could make a change in the situation." The important word there, surely, is "could".

She has remained, then, true to the civil remedy approach she and Dworkin devised decades ago. Could she describe her relationship with the late feminist once described as being to patriarchy what Marx was to capitalism? "You want me to sum up 30 years of my life?"

I'm intrigued by their friendship because Dworkin was clearly a catalyst and a kindred spirit - even though it is hard to imagine dungaree-clad Andrea and Nicole Farhi-adoring Catharine going clothes shopping together. How did you meet? "I read [Dworkin's book] Women Hating, admired it and called her." At the time, MacKinnon, the bright daughter of a Republican congressman from Minnesota, was working on her PhD in political science at Yale, having already studied at Yale's Law School. What did she admire? "I had read the book The Story of O in graduate school and thought that it was extremely significant politically. [The Story of O is a fantasy of female submission about a Parisian woman who is blindfolded, chained, whipped, branded, made to wear a mask, and taught to be "constantly available" for oral, vaginal, and/or anal intercourse. It has been described as the ultimate objectification of women.] It raised the question of how much of your freedom you could give away. I'd been been told by people in political science that, 'People here think you're very bright but also that you're a little bit crazy'. Then I read what Andrea Dworkin wrote about The Story of O. And basically that gave me my mind back, and I haven't lost it since."

Others have not been so sure. Some thought Dworkin and MacKinnon were a little bit crazy. They were derided, often by fellow American feminists, for in effect lining up with with the conservative right against porn. MacKinnon was attacked for her views on sexual harassment. In her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), she argued it should be treated as a form of discrimination under the US Civil Rights Act - something the Supreme Court accepted in 1986. Camille Paglia, for instance, contended in a Time article that MacKinnon and Dworkin's fears about sexual harassment were overstated. But then her article was entitled A Call for Lustiness.

MacKinnon's lustiness or otherwise is not something she will discuss. If she has a current beau who affirms himself, as he must, by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction, she won't tell me about that. There is no chance of her discussing with me her intriguing relationship with former professor of Sanskrit Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, to whom she was engaged for years. He reportedly once described her as "God", which must have been nice. Masson had trained as a psychoanalyst and became project director of the Freud Archives, but was removed after setting out a heretical view about Freud and child abuse. According to his website, Masson now has a wife and family and writes books called Dogs Never Lie About Love, Elephants Weep and the Pig Who Sang to the Moon, about the emotional lives of animals. I may be wrong, but I don't imagine they clutter MacKinnon's night stand.

If she won't discuss her private life, then what about public assaults? MacKinnon is especially exercised by attacks from fellow feminists. "It's particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There's always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you. It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down."

Is pornography always wrong in MacKinnon's view? "If you actually think about it," she says, "what is sexual between people is, up close, not particularly visible. Therefore you have to do things to it to make it acceptable by a camera. So already there's an intrusion. Most people, when they are having an intimate experience, don't have someone hanging out with a camera there. And if there is someone hanging out with a camera, what is most intimate about that experience and most equal between the people is not accessible to that camera.

"If you've got that material being sold, there are people who are not intimate to the experience who are experiencing it. How equal is that? Your sex is being bought by somebody over there. You're now a thing in relation to people experiencing you sexually. How equal is that?"

But surely lesbian and gay porn at least eludes such criticisms? MacKinnon disagrees. "There's a good book by Christopher Kendal which studies the real content of gay male pornography and the children who are violated to make it as well as the men who are used in the industry. I recommend it." How about lesbian pornography - made for, by and about lesbians? MacKinnon says most of it is "sold in liquor stores and mostly it is men who are its consumers".

"Some of it is about a real aspiration to recapture women's sexuality for women, no doubt," she concedes. "The fact is that the materials themselves in general are about the use of women for sex and when women are being used for sex that is about a male-dominant model of sex, whether men are doing it or not. It's not biological. It's about sex roles. Anyone can play them."

The Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-porn stance has not been widely adopted. Civil libertarians dislike it, some feminists loathe it, and American courts have held that the US constitution should treat pornography as protected speech, even if it does all the harm that MacKinnon argues it does. "They've said the more harm, the more protection. Because that just shows you how effective the pornography is as speech. Brilliant! Right?"

MacKinnon believes that while her approach to constraining porn is ignored, the global industry has become far bigger business than when she first started fighting it a quarter of a century ago. It's difficult to be accurate about its size, argues Mackinnon, because so much of it is run by organised crime. It is regularly estimated at an annual $20bn (£14bn) which makes porn bigger than Hollywood. But it is likely to be significantly higher, particularly because the porn business has profited from the rise of the internet and subscription TV. In January last year US trade magazine Adult Video News estimated that the industry made $12.6bn in 2005 in the US alone and that more than $2.5bn of that was just from the internet, but these figures may well be underestimates.

"Pornographers have made common cause with the media and the legal system. This means that the industry has extended its reach even further. There's just nothing in their way. So women and children are being increasingly violated to make it and more and more of them are being abused through its use.

"Pornographers have even more control of the public space than they did before. And popular culture is increasingly adapting itself to the fact that more and more people are pornography consumers. So everything in culture has to change to respond to that or it won't succeed - it's the way capitalism works."

She sounds like a nay-sayer on the fringes of capitalism's degrading free-for-all. It is a departure from her usual posture: the marginalised voice of reason. "You are ever more the turn in the punch bowl when you say what it takes to make it, which is abuse and violation of women and children and some men. You're raining on their parade when you point out that the people around them are being treated in ever more misogynistic ways, including violent ones. People don't want to hear it because they're having too good a time."

MacKinnon's book ends with a wonderful rhetorical essay called Women's September 11. It points out that roughly the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year as were killed in the Twin Towers (between 2,800 and 3,000). But those killings provoked no parallel war on terror.

So what does MacKinnon think should be done? She writes that violence against women "qualifies as a casus belli and a form of terrorism every bit as much as the events of September 11 do". Is she serious that violence against women should be treated as a war? "I think only because it's men doing it against women that it isn't seen as a war." I feel another twinge of vertigo.

It only occurs to me when I'm back on the ground that the war on terror may not be a good blueprint - it having been, you know, demonstrably counterproductive. Just before the interview ended, she said to me: "I have to say I have some sympathy for governments trying to address something as hard as terrorism, having attempted to address something as hard as violence against women for a long time." It would be good if MacKinnon had more success in her war than Bush and Blair have had in theirs.

· Are Women Human? is published by Harvard University Press, price £22.95.

To balance the scales

In becoming a star vehicle The Yacoubian Building has lost much of its bite, writes Mohamed El-Assyouti

Alaa El-Aswani's novel 'Imaret Ya'koubian ( The Yacoubian Building ) became an instant bestseller. It has already gone through some seven editions and has been translated into six languages, with eight more translations underway. The film rights were quickly snapped up by scriptwriter Wahid Hamed, and the project became his son Marwan's directorial debut. It is also the Good News Film and Music Company's first production, commanding the biggest budget in Egyptian film history.

El-Aswani's diagnosis of Egyptian life over half a century includes moral decadence, political corruption, growing poverty rates and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And in adapting the novel for the screen the characters become embodiments of these maladies, as well as the vehicles to explain them.

Zaki Abdel-Aal El-Dessouqi (Adel Imam) is the son of a pasha, a former minister, the scion of an aristocratic family. He spent much of his youth in Paris. At 65 he continues to live off his inheritance, a drunkard who is obsessed with women and who ends up being robbed by a prostitute. Yet it is El-Dessouqi who saves the orphaned shop assistant Buthaina (Hind Sabri) by marrying her. Though he does not doubt he is a sinner he has hope in God's mercy, and strives never to hurt anyone but himself. At least half of the film's 165 minutes are dedicated to this character, played by superstar Imam, and the script makes no bones about the fact that, whatever El-Dessouqi's faults, he is the good guy of this story.

Hajj Mohamed Azzam (Nour El-Sherif) acts as a sort of foil for El-Dessouqi. Beginning life as a humble shoeshine, he is now a wealthy drug dealer, the owner of several smart shoe shops and automobile agencies. Seeking to secure the monopoly import agency of a major Japanese car manufacturer, he pays government minister Kamal El-Fouli (Khaled Saleh) LE1 million in order to guarantee his election to parliament. Later he has to pay LE100 million a year in bribes to ensure that his automobile and drug businesses do not become the subject of investigations. Like El-Dessouqi, he has a taste for intoxicants, but hashish not alcohol, since he believes hashish is permitted by God. He also enjoys the company of women, and secretly marries the veiled widow Soad (Somaya El-Khashab), whose husband was killed in Iraq. But he forbids her to see her six-year-old son, and insists she must not get pregnant. When she does, he hires a group of thugs to force her to have an abortion.

Hajj Azzam may observe all the Muslim rituals, but he is insidiously evil, and the poor are his victims as he pursues wealth and power, though in the end he too becomes pawn to the corrupt politicians.

Over the last two decades El-Sherif has been a TV rather than film star. Tellingly, he gets half the screen time allocated to Imam. These two characters, played by the biggest names in a glittering cast, are simple variations of the kind of roles both actors have made their own. The playboy with a heart of gold is a character Imam has played in several films while in Hajj Azzam El-Sherif finds an extension of the roles he has played in some of the most popular Ramadan serials. Both, then, are cast within their existing screen personae.

Taha El-Shazli (Mohamed Imam) is the son of the doorman who is refused entry to the Police Academy because of his low social status. His reaction is to turn towards religious fundamentalism. Following his torture and rape by the police he undergoes terrorist training. The character intended to embody the impact of corruption on the downtrodden poor is given as much screen time as Azzam. The cinema debut of Adel Imam's son, El-Shazli is the character that undergoes the most dramatic transformation. Imam junior's performance was unfortunately weak in a role that demanded some experience in front of a camera.

Hatim El-Rashidi (Khaled El-Sawi) is a well- known journalist whose homosexuality is an open secret. He uses his wealth and position to lure a police soldier Abd Rabu (Basim Samra) into a relationship. The soldier brings his wife and child to live on the roof of the building. This storyline is allocated the least screen time, though the 12 or so scenes involving El-Sawi and Samra boast the best performances in the film, and constitute a break with Egyptian cinema's taboo on homosexuality. El-Dessouqi provides one of the film's few laughs when he calls Abd Rabu "a tiger, making an amazing sprint up the stairs". In the film's only flashback, an attempt is made to explain El-Rashidi's homosexuality as the result of his being molested as a child.

Another set of characters represents the Christian minority. Singer Christine (Yousra) and lawyer Fikri Abdel-Shaheed (Youssef Dawoud) are El-Dessouqi's life-long friends, the former having once been his lover -- another taboo broached obliquely. By contrast El-Dessouqi's servant Fanous (Ahmed Ratib), and his brother, the tailor Malak Armanious (Ahmed Bedeir, in a superb Shylock- like performance), try to take revenge on the society in which they find themselves a poor minority by scheming to take over El-Dessouqi's flat, allying themselves with his El-Dessouqi's sister Dawlat (Isaad Younis).

Talal, the Syrian store owner for whom Buthaina works, pays his assistants for sexual favours. He joins El-Dessouqi, Azzam and El-Rashidi in illustrating how sexual exchange is commodified. Yet it is El-Dessouqi who is condemned by society because he pays prostitutes rather than buying a wife, or abusing his employees. El-Shazli's marriage is arranged by the terrorist cell he joins as a way of ensuring his loyalty. Yet of all these it is El-Dessouqi who is the one capable of loving, both in the past -- Christine -- and present -- Buthaina.

El-Dessouqi, who calls himself the "last respectable man" in one scene, is also the only one incapable of harming others. He refuses to take his lawyer's advice and hire thugs to evict his sister from the flat she has connived to deprive him of, since as the son of a pasha he believes he must behave with decency. Given the moral superiority he is granted in the script, El-Dessouqi has licence to judge the others. Not only does he call a spade a spade -- using terms like "prostitute", "pimp", "tiger" -- he pretends descent from the most noble origins.

Azzam, a who once shined shoes but is now a billionaire, is automatically corrupt. Dawlat is "evil" because she once led a promiscuous life and now that she is getting old is too bitter to let her brother live in peace. El-Dessouqi's joke about El-Rashidi's homosexuality -- similar to a scene in Al-Irhab wal Kebab (Terrorism and Kebab, 1992) also written by Hamid -- seems to have been included to reassure the audience that the star has not softened his homophobia.

Not only is Imam's character the good guy in this world, he is also the one to be redeemed. El-Dessouqi speaks to God while drunk in one scene, recalling Adli (Mahmoud Hemeida) praying in a speech to a high-angle camera in Osama Fawzi's Bahib El-Sima (I Love Cinema, 2004). El-Dessouqi is to have a 20 to 100 per cent discount on his sins because God is "Forgiving and Merciful".

Certainly the film appears to pass moral judgments. Abd Rabu is punished by fate when his son Wael dies, so deserts El-Rashidi. The latter, abandoned, picks up a young man from the street who murders him.

The corrupt MP Azzam, who victimises the poor widow he has married, is blackmailed by the corrupt government represented by El-Fouli. The vendetta between the Islamic fundamentalists and the police forces continues as El-Shazli and the policeman who was responsible for his torture and rape kill one another. What goes around comes around. But not quite. As the narrator, Yehia El-Fakharani, makes clear in the opening scene, the film depicts events and characters from 1995. Parliamentarians and ministers like Azzam and El-Fouli, then, are long gone, replaced by less obviously corrupt ones, less fat and with better hair styles.

The film seems at times to want it both ways -- corruption is dead, long live corruption. For the new corrupt can at least boast of their tolerance and democratic values by allowing the release of such a film, while the public can vent their anger on fictional rather than real characters.

The script's choice of condemning corruption in the fictional world may hide an agenda of allying itself with corruption in reality. After all, we can take Minister El-Fouli's hints that he is only a messenger representing a group as a mere bluff, since we never see any other corrupt minister or official. So with the real El-Fouli removed, the government is corruption free.

The four main storylines hardly ever intersect and the shifts from one storyline to another seem arbitrary. That the protagonists inhibit the same building is often the only dramatic justification for following their different fates. Director Marwan Hamid, cinematographer Samih Selim, art director Fawzi El-Awamri, costume designer Nahid Nasrallah and editor Khaled Maari all excelled in their respective departments. There is enough work in the film to make it more than the sum of its news headline- like storylines and soap opera narratives. It is close to director Salah Abu Seif's best moral tales based on Naguib Mahfouz novels.

Yet the price of bringing a novel like The Yacoubian Building to the screen is high. Having cost LE30 million, the producer Good News, headed by media mogul Emadeddin Adib, would have done everything possible to guarantee revenues. No risks were taken as far as letting any messages miss their mark, and it was inevitable that the film would become a star vehicle. While overstatement in journalism is sometimes necessary, in a big budget cinema it is indispensable.

Perhaps the most damaging compromise, allowing the film to become a vehicle for Imam and his son, was necessary for it to be made in the first place. The audience might remember Imam's adventures as El-Dessouqi, and his speeches about the negative changes faced by both the Yacoubian building and the country. But these are simply replays of scenes and lines seen and heard in tens of earlier films. They are yet one more episode in the redundant Imam serial. While this might save the biggest budget Egyptian film yet at the box office, in terms of artistic merit it was a huge price to pay.

THE IRAN PLANS

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? Issue of 2006-04-17Posted 2006-04-08

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars. .

Read more....

Pro-Life Nation

By Jack Hitt

The New York Times

Sunday 09 April 2006

It was a sunny mid-afternoon in a shiny new global-economy mall in San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, and a young woman I was hoping to meet appeared to be getting cold feet. She had agreed to rendezvous with a go-between not far from the Payless shoe store and then come to a nearby hotel to talk to me. She was an hour late. Alone in the hotel lobby, I was feeling nervous; I was stood up the day before by another woman in a similar situation. I had been warned that interviewing anyone who had had an abortion in El Salvador would be difficult. The problem was not simply that in this very Catholic country a shy 24-year-old unmarried woman might feel shame telling her story to an older man. There was also the criminal stigma. And this was why I had come to El Salvador: Abortion is a serious felony here for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years.

More than a dozen countries have liberalized their abortion laws in recent years, including South Africa, Switzerland, Cambodia and Chad. In a handful of others, including Russia and the United States (or parts of it), the movement has been toward criminalizing more and different types of abortions. In South Dakota, the governor recently signed the most restrictive abortion bill since the Supreme Court ruled in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, that state laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional. The South Dakota law, which its backers acknowledge is designed to test Roe v. Wade in the courts, forbids abortion, including those cases in which the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. Only if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother is the procedure permitted. A similar though less restrictive bill is now making its way through the Mississippi Legislature.

In this new movement toward criminalization, El Salvador is in the vanguard. The array of exceptions that tend to exist even in countries where abortion is circumscribed - rape, incest, fetal malformation, life of the mother - don't apply in El Salvador. They were rejected in the late 1990's, in a period after the country's long civil war ended. The country's penal system was revamped and its constitution was amended. Abortion is now absolutely forbidden in every possible circumstance. No exceptions.

There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus - the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet.

I was on my sixth cup of coffee when I spotted my contacts - two abortion rights advocates who work in the region and a local nurse who had heard this young woman's story. They entered the lobby surrounding another woman like Secret Service agents. A quick glance let me know that I shouldn't make a premature appearance. Even as I retreated to some large sofas, I could hear the Spanish flying - words of comfort, of being brave, of the importance that others understand what is happening in El Salvador. At last the retinue approached. I was not quite ready for what I saw. The woman, I had been told, lived in a hovel in a very poor part of the town. Somehow that had put a certain picture in my head. I don't know, call it sexism. I just didn't expect to see a tall and strikingly beautiful woman with the kind of big grin that could very well appear in one of those full-page ads you might see in an airline magazine inviting people to "Vacation in El Salvador!"

We chatted briefly about the one thing I knew we had in common - malls - before we went up to a quiet hotel room, where she and I could talk. One intermediary acted as our interpreter. I agreed to call her by her initials, D.C.; she is afraid to be identified by name, though she did agree to be photographed. (While it was impossible to confirm every detail of her story, I did later see legal records that corroborated her description of events.) D.C. sat down, and now that we were ready to talk about her experience, she started to cry. She wiped her eyes several times with a paper napkin. She spent a few minutes folding and twisting it. D.C. crossed her ankles and stared down at the shrinking napkin, now tightly compacted into a large pill. Then she began to tell me her story.

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Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi

Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability By Thomas E. Ricks

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, April 10, 2006; A01

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

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Cutting and Running in Baghdad

By Robert Dreyfuss

Too late, the urgency of the crisis in Iraq, and the sheer ugliness of its civil war, seems finally to be dawning on the Bush administration. As usual, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their stalwart secretaries of state and defense, are johnnies-come-lately in their ability to understand how far gone Iraq is. Perhaps, as has been the case in the past, that is because they continue flagrantly to disregard what they are told by analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq, with a rising sense of alarm, the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and other agencies warned the Bush-Cheney team that the destruction of Iraq's central government could tumble the country into a civil war. In 2004, of course, the president famously dismissed such CIA warnings as "just a guess." Well, guess what, Mr. President? It's civil war. And it isn't pretty.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a leading know-nothing on Iraq -- it was her utter ignorance of the Middle East as national security adviser through 2004 that allowed the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to get away with so much -- jetted to Baghdad in a hurry over the weekend. She dragged along Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, gallantly sleeping on the floor of her own plane while giving him her bed. No doubt, the Rice-Straw voyage to Britain's old colonial stomping grounds in Baghdad was the result of a panicky summons from the U.S. ambassador-cum-proconsul in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who seems to be at his wit's end in trying to solve the Rubik's Cube of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic political puzzle. Ambassador Khalilzad spent most of 2005 cozying up to the religious Shiites of Iraq while thundering about the threat of the Sunni-led insurgency. Late last year, however, he began -- imperceptibly at first, then with some speed -- maneuvering to switch sides: first pledging to talk to the former Baathists and to Sunni resistance groups, then ordering U.S. troops to attack the most heinous outcroppings of the Shiite fundamentalists' terror-torture-and-militias apparatus.

Finally, in advance of summoning Rice, the ambassador threw down the gauntlet once and for all. Led by Khalilzad, the United States has definitively broken with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the hopelessly incompetent religious fanatic that Washington helped bring back to Iraq in the first place, installing him as puppet prime minister of the interim government created (after months of back-stabbing and deal-making) in the aftermath of the January 2005 elections. Khalilzad seems to have discovered what just about everyone else in Iraq already knew: that Jaafari is closely allied to the Iranians.

In a recent interview in the Washington Post, Khalilzad slammed Iran and its Shiite allies, accusing the Iranian military and secret service of sponsoring the militias, paramilitary forces, and death squads wreaking havoc in Baghdad and across southern Iraq. "Our judgment is that training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is a presence of people associated with [Iran's] Revolutionary Guard and with the MOIS," he said, using the initials for Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Khalilzad spent much of last week busily delivering letters from President Bush -- letters, no doubt, that he wrote himself, and persuaded the less-than-knowledge-based President then to sign -- to various Iraqi political figures, in which Bush declared that the American Empire no longer has any use for Jaafari's services as prime minister. (Delivered to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the guiding power behind Iraq's Shiite religious party, the letter was officiously left unopened, and an aide to Sistani told reporters that the ayatollah was most unhappy with U.S. "meddling" in Iraqi politics. As if occupying the country with 130,000 troops isn't meddling.)

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An Arab-American Gets "Dubai'd"

By James C. Zogby

t r u t h o u t Perspective

Thursday 06 April 2006

For over 20 years, Sami Merhi, a Lebanese immigrant businessman in New Jersey, worked to support his local Democratic party. He raised money, volunteered in campaigns and participated in party functions.

Two weeks ago, his county party leadership rewarded Merhi's efforts by endorsing his candidacy for Freeholder (a county supervisor position). It was, Sami said, one of the proudest days of his life as a US citizen - the fulfillment of the American dream.

The very next day, a state legislator, Gary Shaer, attacked the endorsement, pointing to a four-year-old New York Times story in which Merhi was quoted as saying that the 9-11 attacks on the US were different from terror attacks against Israel. Shaer and a few others argued that if Merhi's name remained on the ballot, New Jersey's Jewish voters might not vote for the Democratic ticket.

For four years now, Merhi has insisted that the Times quote was partial and inaccurate. He has made clear that he opposes all forms of terrorism, including attacks on Israeli civilians. But it has been for naught.

Shaer's denunciation of Merhi was followed quickly by equally harsh criticism from New Jersey's newly appointed Democratic senator, Robert Menendez, who is also running for election in November. Menendez's rejection of Merhi was seconded by a spokesperson for the New Jersey Democratic governor, Jon Corzine. Upping the ante, Menendez's Republican opponent Tom Kean joined the fray, chiding Democrats for placing the Arab-American on their ballot.

No one listened to Merhi's denials, and none of these leaders even spoke to him. As momentum against his candidacy grew, one local newspaper likened it to "mob rule." And some Arab-Americans termed the effort a "political lynching."

County Democratic leaders who know Sami Merhi recognized that the charges against him were both unfounded and unfair. Driven, however, by fear that a campaign would be mobilized against their entire ticket, they resolved to rescind Merhi's nomination.

Sami Merhi was "Dubai'd." That's when you are demonized by unfounded allegations spread by opponents seeking political advantage and then dumped by so-called friends who fear defending you. It is a kind of political terrorism that mixes fear, character assassination, and crass politics.

The county Democrats who dumped Merhi hoped that this would be the end of the story, that they could now, as one noted, focus on "winning in November." But the matter is not over. There are lessons to be learned from this sordid affair. And there will be consequences, as well. First, the lessons.

Politics, shorn of personal loyalty and principle, becomes a crass and hollow exercise. Those Democrats who know Merhi and knew the charges against him were unfair should have defended him. Call me naïve, but I believe that voters reward truth and loyalty. Running away from a friend, at the first hint of trouble, is both cowardly and weak. Voters sense that. They might well ask, "If these leaders can't defend a friend, how can I count on them to fight for me?"

Gary Shaer was wrong. Jewish voters are not an intolerant bloc. Merhi had significant support from Jewish leaders who knew him from business and interfaith activity. The demographics of Northern New Jersey are changing. While that state's Jewish community remains a substantial force, there is a growing Arab-American and South Asian Muslim community now demanding recognition. As former President Bill Clinton demonstrated, the Democratic Party can and must find a way to accommodate Arab-Americans and American Jews - both of whom he cultivated and both of whom supported his Presidency. At the first sign of trouble, instead of submitting to threats, New Jersey's Democratic leaders should have worked to bring both communities together. Zero-sum politics, that, in effect, excludes one group, is not a recipe for winning elections.

That said, there may well be consequences to dropping Sami Merhi from the ticket in November, and not only in New Jersey. Arab-American voters who are both energized and empowered in several key states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, to mention a few), show no sign they will accept being victimized again by the politics of exclusion they endured in the 1980s. Back then, candidates rejected their contributions and shunned their endorsements.

Having been horrified by the bigoted rhetoric that characterized the Dubai ports debate, in which Arab businessmen were compared with "skinheads" and "the devil," many Arab-Americans are not inclined to walk over Merhi's body to vote for his replacement in November.

In the real world of politics, however, the game is never over and opportunities always exist to set a new course. After the Merhi affair, however, the situation does become more complicated.

Happily, some efforts are being made. This past week, New Jersey Democratic Governor Jon Corzine met with Arab-American leaders, including Sami Merhi, in an effort to clear the air. The Governor has continued his outreach effort, meeting one on one with Merhi later in the week. And Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell, a consistent defender of Merhi, addressing a major gathering of New Jersey's Jewish community, called for reaching out and including "our Arab brothers and sisters." These steps mark a beginning. Much work remains to be done to heal the breach, but one senses that this story is not yet over. -------- For comments and questions, contact James Zogby jzogby@aaiusa.org.

Bellydancing out, cinema in, says Hamas

Chris McGreal in Gaza City

Thursday April 6, 2006 Guardian

Attallah Abu al-Sibbah is keen to demonstrate that Hamas is not the Taliban. As the new Palestinian culture minister, he will not be ordering the dynamiting of statues nor forbidding prayers to anyone but Allah. But there are limits - and bellydancing is one of them."Bellydancing is naked women. This is not Islamic. The Egyptians come here and do it. And there are a lot of Russian bellydancers in Egypt and they come here too," said Mr Sibbah, 58, an Islamic scholar who joined the cabinet of the Hamas government installed last week.

"People do it indoors, in secret. There's lots of it," he said.

"If the phenomenon of bellydancing spreads our people might react against it by killing people. We don't want our people to become like the Taliban."

While foreign governments are exercised over Hamas's views on Israel, the Islamist party says its primary agenda is domestic reform. It was elected amid a backlash against corruption and maladministration, and is committed to cleaning up government.

But it also says it intends to clean up society, and that is Mr Sibbah's job. For a start he will ban casinos and see if there is a way to ban the sale of alcohol. He also wants segregation of men and women in places of public entertainment and an end to what he sees as rampant "nakedness".

"There was an Egyptian singer who came and there was big trouble because she was not properly dressed, and some people wanted her and some people didn't," he said.

"There's moral corruption. The blue films Israel sends us are quite corrupting. We have to resist them.

"And we're not going to allow books with any pictures of Madonna in bed." The Gaza strip's three big cinemas closed at the beginning of the first intifada in 1987, and never reopened. Mr Sibbah thinks they should start showing films again but he is concerned about what the viewers will see.

"I would open cinemas. It could be an education and help people live better. Hollywood is not all bad. Titanic was a good film, a human film," he said, apparently having cast from his mind the scenes of Kate Winslet disrobed.

But he is less sure about the Oscar-nominated Palestinian film, Paradise Now, which shows the preparation of suicide bombers for an attack on Israelis.

The film's questioning of suicide attacks does not sit well with a party that glorifies such deaths.

"There are problems, there are some scenes, some observations, some pictures. We can negotiate. I will see it first. If I need to cut it I will cut. This is normal. Every country has censors. But we have no problem showing it," he said.

Mr Sibbah sees moral purification as central to the struggle against Israel, a conflict that has dominated his life. He was just six weeks old when the Israeli army arrived in his village near Ashkelon.

"I have been back several times. All of our village was bulldozed. There is only a petrol station there now," he said.

His family settled in Rafah refugee camp, on the southern tip of the Gaza strip where Mr Sibbah grew up to teach in a United Nations school for some 15 years and then lecture in law at the Islamic university.

Mr Sibbah was jailed five times by the Israelis, for a total of three years, as a result of his Hamas activities.

But he is keen to demonstrate that Hamas respects all religions.

"We're not the Taliban. We love Jesus. We love Moses," he said, before summoning a Christian worker at the ministry to demonstrate his good intentions.

Abuline Darsi duly arrived, head uncovered and a silver crucifix dangling from her neck.

"She's our sister," said Mr Sibbah. "She's our employee here. We're not going to do anything bad to her."

Ms Darsi shuffled awkwardly. Was she concerned when Hamas came to power? "A little bit, as a Christian. Now it's changed. Now I've met the minister," she said, and darted off.

The ideas interview: Phyllis Chesler

Feminism has failed Muslim women by colluding in their oppression, the US author tells John Sutherland

John Sutherland

Tuesday April 4, 2006 Guardian

In 1961, Phyllis Chesler agreed to marry her college sweetheart, a young, westernised Muslim man who had come to study in the US. At his request, they married and lived in his home country, Afghanistan. "When we arrived in the country they took my American passport away - very typical with foreign wives," she says. "Then I found myself clapped up in very posh purdah. Here I was in this gorgeous country, but I wasn't supposed to go out without the chauffeur and without servants in tow and other women of the family."Of course, I made regular escapes and I saw how women were treated and I saw how the children of co-wives competed with each other for inheritance and attention. And I saw how women mistreated their female servants. I saw, at first hand, that polygamy was not a good thing. My father-in-law turned out to have three wives and 21 children. He was a very dapper fellow, also westernised on the surface like my husband - in America. But my husband became an easterner overnight in Afghanistan. I was really shocked." She returned to America in December 1961 and, she has written, "kissed the ground at New York City's Idlewild airport".

Chesler's experiences in Afghanistan have helped shape her thoughts about the failure of feminism to engage with what she sees as the oppression of women in Islamic countries. After "40 years on the front lines" of feminism - she is now emerita professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York - her current project means that she gets a "chilly" reception from fellow feminists. It does not help, perhaps, that her latest book is called The Death of Feminism.

Isn't the title somewhat stark? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say there are trends in feminism that she, personally, finds disturbing?

"I am still a feminist," she insists. "The reason that I have announced the death of feminism, which I agree is stark, is that from my point of view, looking at mainstream feminism in the west - in the universities, in the media, among academics and the socalled intelligentsia - there is a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid. So you have many contemporary feminists who say, 'We have to be multiculturally relativist. We cannot uphold a single, or absolute, standard of human rights. And, therefore, we can't condemn Islamic culture, because their countries have been previously colonised. By us.' I disagree."

But are the Islamic nations as culturally monolithic as Chesler suggests? Wasn't Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take a particularly tendentious example, secular? And didn't it offer professional careers for women? "I don't think that makes any big difference. Saddam's regime gassed Kurds and perpetrated genocide. His men kidnapped women and prostitutes off the streets and subjected them to private rape sessions. So merely because his Iraq was religiously secular, and women had certain rights, doesn't mean that we as intelligent western publics should be condoning genocidal states."

Western feminism's failure to confront the problems raised by Islam, Chesler believes, is a result of the creation of a hierarchy of sins, "an intellectual culture in which racism trumps gender concerns". The example she cites as the embodiment of wrongheaded priorities is "gay and lesbian movement activists rooting for the Palestinians who, meanwhile, are very busy persecuting homosexuals, who in turn are fleeing to Israel for political asylum".

The result, she argues, is that "instead of telling the truth about Islam and demanding that the Muslim world observes certain standards, you have westerners beating their breasts and saying, 'We can't judge you, we can't expose you, we can't challenge you.' And here in the west you have a dangerous misuse of western concepts such as religious tolerance and cultural sensitivity so that one kind of hate speech is seen as something that must be rigorously protected. That means, principally, lies about America and lies about Jews."

Chesler's critics say the vehemence of her language points to Islamophobia. A piece she wrote last month for the controversial webzine Frontpage.com suggested that "a small but organised number of Muslim-Americans and Mulim immigrants ... are currently seeking to begin the Islamisation of America". It went on to compare the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan to Hitler. The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled "the point of total dementia".

Chesler will not accept the Islamophobe label. She claims it is a blanket term used to silence those who portray Islam accurately, and bemoans feminism's embrace of what she sees as misguided causes."Feminism began to fail when they began to say, 'We can't judge barbarism. We can't even call it barbarism, because the barbarians will be offended'," she says. Feminism has become just one part of a wider anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist movement, "so much so that many feminists are now much more concerned with the occupation of a country that doesn't exist - namely Palestine - than they are concerned with the occupation of women's bodies worldwide".

But, paradoxically, Chesler's criticisms of feminist preoccupation with a wider world do not prevent her arguing for a feminist foreign policy: it's just that she believes the foreign policy should concentrate on the issues she is passionate about.

"American feminism hasn't taken on these international issues because of its fear of being branded racist," she says. "But many Muslim feminists and dissidents are totally supportive of what I'm trying to do, because they say that here is finally a western feminist who will not abandon us on the basis of cultural relativity. The attention of the American feminist movement has been forced to focus for far too long on issues like abortion or gay and lesbian rights. I totally support this. But in so doing they have neglected other real issues, such as the needs of working people.

"This is simply not enough, given the moment in history in which we find ourselves. What feminism must do is spell out something that might be called a feminist foreign policy. So that, for example, if we make a trade or a peace treaty with a country, we ought to build into that treaty a commitment not - for example - to genitally mutilate girls who live in that country. This is not easy. But I would like feminists to think very globally and very strategically and very long-term. It's one thing to write an article now and again, but what are we, as feminists, actually going to do?"

· Phyllis Chesler's The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom, is published in the US by Palgrave Macmillan.