As the Taliban continues to sweep across vast swaths of northern Pakistan, American pundits and officials ask incredulously, “How can their government let this happen? How can their people let this happen?” The United States looks on anxiously like a jolted passerby watching a train suddenly jump the tracks.

I was also initially shocked, but I found myself more surprised by my response than the calamitous events themselves. As the Taliban threat metastasized, my minimal sense of attachment to Pakistan began to intensify. While I had mostly kept my memories of Pakistan well out of my mind’s eye, I now began meticulously scanning these recollections, like fingers running across Braille in search of clues as to what went wrong.

After some searching, I realized that Pakistan’s existential crisis should not be seen as a shock but rather as an expected disappointment. The train of the Pakistani state did not jump the tracks; it merely arrived at the destination announced long ago by a series of indifferent conductors.

I was born in the congested southern port city of Karachi, which my parents soon left for Canada and then the United States. Every few years, we would visit our many relatives in Karachi and in the verdant capitol of Islamabad for a month or two. In sixth grade, I spent a full year in Pakistan. I have not gone back in many years; the last time I visited was only weeks before the September 11th terrorist attacks.

My happier memories of Pakistan stand in stark contrast to the grim images of dour, menacing militants that are now beamed into our retinas and burned into our consciousness.

I remember my mother’s frequent trips to teeming shopping centers, where, flanked by a phalanx of my various aunts adorned in loose, colorful headscarves, she haggled with an endless cavalcade of tailors and merchants who respectfully addressed her as baaji, or, sister.

I remember standing on the grass in the evenings, waiting for the warm air to be leavened by a cool breeze that carried the sound of overlapping and lyrical azaans sung by muezzins at local mosques.

I remember the kindness and hospitality of my aunts and uncles, who indulged my American proclivities for pizza and the like by preparing special meals and taking me to ambitiously-named imitators such as “King Burger.”

I remember nearly everyone trying to teach me the local language, Urdu, which synthesizes the sharpness of Arabic with the softness of Farsi (Persian). Even today, my father scarcely fails to remind me of Urdu’s linguistic richness or its venerated poets like Iqbal, Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose works I can understand only in translation.

Of course, these are not my only memories.

What most struck me was the astonishing and omnipresent poverty in Karachi. Beggars and amputees lined the busiest streets; masses of tents flanked the roads, surrounded by garbage picked at by youngsters and vultures; little children spat into filthy rags and wiped windshields, hoping for a handout.

In my early teens, when I had yet to bother trimming my beard, the sight of such desperation once prompted me into a fit of frustration. I recall entering a nearby bank office filled with clerks and a guard armed with an assault rifle to reflect and cool down. It was, apparently, a poor choice: the staff, fearing I was a jihadi, became nervous, and my parents had to swoop in and defuse the situation.

Worse than the poverty was the elite’s refusal to address it. A sea of garbage and huts surrounded the most opulent and magnificent houses, separated by concrete walls topped with shards of glass. In the districts of the military and business elite, homeowners hired armed guards who kept watch over their masters’ playgrounds. I imagine the scene must have been much worse in the northern rural areas that are now Taliban sanctuaries, where the government never even pretended to address the poverty created by feudal elites.

The country also suffers from a near-absence of binding nationalism. During my year there in sixth-grade private school (no respectable middle-class family sent their kids to the pitiful government schools) we performed the martial ritual of standing at attention and singing the national anthem every morning. But the whole system was handed down from the British: the uniforms, the shoes, the canteens, the headmasters — even the English, which is, absurdly, Pakistan’s official language and the only one students were allowed to speak outside of Urdu class. Pakistani education was a slavish imitation, a kind of ventriloquist nationalism in which students opened their mouths but only the echo of the ex-colonizer was heard.

I often wondered what would happen to those whose misery I impotently observed; those left for decades without the housing, food or education I was afforded. History has now caught up to the present and supplied us the answer in the form of the Taliban.

The militants, of course, assert that they are simply bringing “true Islam” to Pakistan. Even a cursory glance at Islamic precepts and the Prophet Muhammad’s own example reveal an ethos sharply at odds with the Taliban’s harsh practices which, more than anything else, reflect a history of Pashtun tribalism that precedes Islam’s arrival by centuries and constitutes the militants’ base.

The Taliban’s ascent is not a failure of Islam, but rather the failure of the Pakistani national project to fulfill the basic functions of a sovereign state; to heed the call of its great poets, who denounced inequality and called for a revival and modernization of Islamic thought.

Most Americans are, understandably, more interested in results than reasons: As the Taliban limns the outlines of Pakistan’s demise with the unforgiving scalpel of extremism, will Pakistan confront this force, or succumb to it?

It is difficult to say. Ironically, it is America’s own mode of involvement that harms its interests: Our only visible contributions there today are drones, missiles and destruction. This has produced a polarizing effect whereby any force that opposes America — regardless of its real aims — elicits sympathy from sectors of the military and the rural masses.

Pakistan may be willing to plunge a sword through its heart just to pierce the skin of American interventionism, a case of spite through national suicide.

It is also impossible to know when a people will say enough is enough. While it’s incomprehensible to most of us that any government could comport with the Taliban and its horrors, it is worth remembering that America was willing to permit the horror of slavery for almost 100 years until the slave states declared secession and initiated war.

If the people of Pakistan do choose the path of resistance to preserve their country’s future, they may find inspiration from verses that belong to their history:

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.
The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust
even before the hunter strung his bow.
Oh, God of May have mercy.
Bless these withered bodies
with the passion of your resurrection;
make their dead veins flow with blood again.
Give some tree the gift of green again.
Let one bird sing.

– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.

– Israeli Army Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan, 1983

Before [the Palestinians] very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived… We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home.

– Famous Israeli Army Commander Moshe Dayan

Israel’s official excuses for extinguishing over 1,300 Palestinian lives—half of them civilian and one-third of them children— are oft-repeated by its apologists: Hamas’ rocket fire made the invasion unavoidable, and its tactics made civilian casualties inevitable.

Do these positions dovetail with—or decapitate—history? Are they logical? Are they moral? Or are they smokescreens, designed to disguise troublesome facts about both Israel’s strategy and its very origins?

The reality behind the rockets

Israel’s first argument about Hamas’ rockets fails on several levels.

It neatly—and falsely—posits Hamas as the attacker and Israel as the defender. The only problem with this pleasant fiction is that Israel has been expelling, occupying, and imprisoning Palestinians long before Hamas even came into existence.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote in January, “Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948.”

But how did it “lose” its homeland? After unearthing their country’s declassified archives, honest Israeli scholars have pointed to an Israeli campaign of rape, murder, and ethnic cleansing that entered full swing in 1947. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said to a colleague shortly after Israel’s expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, “They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why indeed? For one country to rain down rockets on another is an unprovoked crime. But for a people without a country to fire rockets on those who forcibly took their country—and who then corralled them into camps, isolated them from the world, and regularly slaughter them with weapons far deadlier than unguided projectiles—is a rather different matter.

Just as we would not begin a 10-minute tape of a batterer abusing his wife at the nine-minute mark where she may have struck back, we cannot skip through decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, occupation, and bombardment and finger Hamas rocket fire as the starting point.

Quite apart from historical considerations, the invasion cannot be justified by rocket fire because scarcely any rockets were being fired before Israel’s own escalation. According to the Israeli military, in the ceasefire months of July, August, September, and October, the numbers of rockets fired from Gaza were one, eight, one, and two, respectively. Even those few rockets were likely fired by smaller militant groups not under Hamas’ control. In short, Hamas abided by the truce—a fact Israel recognized during those months. On November 5th, Israel itself broke the truce by launching a military operation that killed six Hamas gunmen.

On the moral level, too, the terror Israel unleashed on the Palestinian population is indefensible. A total of 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets from November 2001 to June 2008, according to a pro-Israel website. During the Gaza “war,” a total of three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets. If Israel’s recent rapid-fire slaughter of 600 civilians is “justified” by rockets that caused the death of a small number of Israeli civilians, then—applying Israel’s own logic—is Hamas not now more “justified” in continuing to launch those rockets than ever before?

How can the Israeli establishment claim the moral high ground if it borrows from the Hamas formula but ups its application of the deadly dosage one-hundred fold?

Blaming the victim

Israel’s apologists would respond here with their second argument: it is not Israel, but Hamas, that is responsible for Israel’s killing.

This, too, is specious.

Perhaps it is quaint to insist on ideas that slip out of fashion at convenient intervals, but it should be an accepted principle that those who do the killing should be held responsible for it. Israel’s partisans insist Israel is an exception (is Israel ever not an exception?) because Hamas “hides among civilians” or “uses civilians as shields” or “fires from civilian areas,” thus absolving the attacker of culpability for civilian deaths.

The force of historical truth again intercedes. The people living in Gaza’s squalid refugee camps are not there by choice or because of Hamas: they are trapped by Israel. Ethnically cleansed when Israel stole their lands in 1948, they fled to the tiny strip, which borders the sea. Then Gaza, too, was captured by Israel in 1967, leaving the people occupied by the Israeli military and surrounded by radical Jewish settlers who took the stolen land.

When this occupation “ended” in 2005 after decades of humiliation, the jailer simply moved from inside to outside the cell to better manage the inmates. Most of the Jewish settlers relocated to more stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and Israel imposed a full-scale siege on Gaza itself as a form of collective punishment when Gazans elected Hamas, as the alternative choice, Fatah, was hopelessly venal.

The siege destroyed the economy and was never lifted even during the ceasefire. Israel barred Palestinians entry into Israel for employment, closed the sea route, and shut off fuel and food aid at will, inducing widespread suffering in one of the most densely-populated spaces on earth. One Israeli official boasted of the devastating effect in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Let them suffer, the Israelis said at the time, but do not let them die. That would come later.

Even the Vatican, not often inclined to pro-Muslim utterances, was recently moved to describe Gaza as a “concentration camp.”

Thus while Israel’s apologists argue that Israel should be cleared of responsibility for civilian deaths because Hamas “chose” to engage in “civilian areas”, the truth is that the Palestinians had no choice of any areas—they are trapped within the confines of the cage Israel kicked them into by dint of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and the siege.

Even on the street level, Israel has herded Palestinian civilians for easy killing. Several extended families in one part of Gaza, Zeitoun, tell the same story: soldiers forced family members to congregate in one building, fired at it, and massacred the fleeing inhabitants even as they emerged with white flags in hand. Breaking army orders, one Israeli soldier who was in Zeitoun confessed to a British newspaper that his unit had been instructed to “fire on anything that moves.” The unit was told to “shoot first and ask questions later,” he said.

Israel did not provide Hamas with an empty meadow in Switzerland on which to duel. It did not bestow Hamas with its state-of the-art American weaponry to even the odds. It did not give civilians any exit avenues before, during, or after the “fighting.” It even began its bombardment mid-day when children were out in the open switching classes. Israel, far from concerning itself with the fate of civilians, created a dense killing corridor over a period of decades and took advantage of it.

One can argue that even in the most difficult circumstances, militant groups should do their best to avoid mingling with the civilian population during active fighting. If the majority of Palestinian civilian casualties had occurred because Hamas was grabbing civilians left and right to use as shields, there should be abundant evidence.

But where is this evidence? For all its sophisticated spying equipment, satellites, reconnaissance drones, and cameras, the Israeli government has never produced any compelling proof of such a pattern. In fact, Israel officially banned reporters from even entering Gaza during its operation. Why hide the horrific practices of Hamas from the world’s eyes?

The answer, of course, is that Israel was hiding its own horrors instead. In the few cases where this was not possible—where international institutions, such as the UN, independent relief agencies, and Reuters reporters, were involved—a pattern of a different kind emerged: Israel blew up civilians and civilian supplies, agency officials decried the attack, and Israel accused Hamas of having fired from nearby. Each time, agency representatives emphatically stated that Hamas was not operating in the area and demanded proof of Israel’s claims. None was ever forthcoming.

Only in one case—the killing of 40 civilians taking shelter at a UN building—did Israel confidently claim that it had proof of Hamas fighters firing rockets nearby. But the Israeli military soon changed its story and was forced to invent a new excuse.

As if that weren’t enough, it turns out that Israel itself repeatedly used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Even in these specific cases where Israel should have exercised restraint for sheer public-relations purposes, it displayed absolutely none. Such is the arrogance afforded overwhelming power. We can only imagine under what cruel circumstances most Palestinians, far removed from international institutions or Western journalists, were ground to dust.

This combination of history and ground reality demolishes the credibility of Israel’s excuse. For a bully to blame the victim is one thing—commonplace, even, among colonizers. But for Israel to expel its victims from their homes, force them into inhuman camps, and then fault them for dying en masse when Israel decided to kill them in a cramped cage of its own design—this is a truly novel achievement in the sphere of cruelty.

Israel is therefore no less responsible for killing civilians than slaughterhouse machinery is responsible for processing cattle.

Killing civilians as a strategy

The mountain of excuses offered by Israel strikes the honest observer as too tortuous to trek and too steep to scale. Puzzling and poring over its rationalizations is an endeavor that yields diminishing returns.

It is time to consider an obvious alternative to the official line: Israel did not “accidentally” kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians while “targeting” Hamas for launching aimless rockets. Rather, Israel purposely targeted all Palestinians because it wanted to teach them a severe lesson for not being defeated after 60 years of ongoing brutalization. The pile of civilian corpses produced by the invasion was not accidental—it was integral—to the administration of this lesson.

Advocating and applauding this approach last month was Thomas Friedman, who occasionally comments on Middle East affairs to puff and pout on Israel’s behalf from his privileged perch.

Responding to the growing perception that Israel’s stated aim of destroying Hamas outright was not feasible, Friedman defended Israel’s Gaza strategy in a January 14th New York Times column by approvingly pointing to the example of Lebanon.

In Friedman’s view, the 2006 Lebanon campaign, during which Israel killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians and 250 Hezbollah fighters, convinced Hezbollah that trading blows with Israel was a bad idea.

To dismantle Friedman’s fantasies about Lebanon—what he smugly calls “the education of Hezbollah”—would require another article. What is important for our purposes is to see how this “education” was carried out.

Hezbollah, Friedman asserts, “challenged Israel to inflict massive civilian casualties in order to hit Hezbollah fighters.” These civilians, he continues, were “intertwined” with Hezbollah, and were also, by the way, “the families and employers of the militants.”

Translation: the guilty mingled with the innocent and the innocent were practically guilty.

Therefore, concludes Friedman, “the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians…” Israel was forced to inflict “substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large” in order to faze Hezbollah.

Translation: the only thing Israel could do—“it was not pretty, but it was logical”, Friedman avers—was to strike at civilian populations and buildings in order to teach those Arabs a lesson (“educate”) about the consequences of raising their heads.

This refreshing way of thinking neatly solves any moral problems Israel’s actions might pose.

The innocent, as we have seen, were not really innocent: they were somehow related to the militants or related to someone who might have employed militants at the local bakery. Therefore, it was permissible to kill women and children as part of a careful calculation to inflict “enough pain” and make militants think twice about future resistance.

Yes, the “education” of the Arabs is not “pretty”—but who said tuition was free?

That Israel intentionally terrorizes and kills civilians should not surprise honest observers. Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, bluntly stated what Friedman, with his penchant for unctuous prose, could not bring himself to openly say about the 2006 war:

“The only good thing that happened in the last war was the relative damage caused to Lebanon’s population…The destruction of thousands of homes of ‘innocents’ preserved some of Israel’s deterrent power. The only way to prevent another war is to make it clear that should one break out, Lebanon may be razed to the ground.”

Can any honest person describe Eiland’s logic of mass terror as “self-defense?”

That this logic was also applied in Gaza was confirmed by the news side of the New York Times. In an elliptical January 18th analysis, Times’ correspondent Ethan Bronner, a pro-Israel journalist, writes about Hamas’ tactical caution during the fighting:

“The caution is at least in part because Hamas wants to keep ruling in Gaza, not return to its previous role as a pure resistance movement. Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.”

This can easily be rephrased as, “Israeli officials launched an offensive that caused average people to suffer in order to put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.” Friedman’s prayers were answered—and Eiland’s ideology, implemented.

The Times also quotes an anonymous top Israeli military official as saying, “Hamas is the dominant organization in Gaza. They are the regime and feel very connected to the people. They do not want to lose that connection to the people.”

How does one make Hamas lose “that connection to the people” in an offensive that “caused average people to suffer?” The question answers itself: kill the people.

Bronner writes that the logic behind the punishing offensive is popularly referred to within Israel as the Hebrew equivalent of “the boss has lost it”—a kind of “calculated rage” that “evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.”

It is an “image” that long ago consumed Israel proper.

A madman is by definition someone who has gone insane. Israel is a state founded on ethnic cleansing—a massive attack on civilians. Instead of confronting its original sin, it has simply repeated the same crime in various ways, each time believing that it will crush the Palestinians once and for all. Repeating the same action over and over again while expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.

The reality of a “madman who cannot be controlled” is a traumatic one. The madman declares civilians and combatants alike guilty and subjects them all to “education” through indiscriminate killing. Though the madman arrogates the right to determine the guilt of others for acts that are both in response to and dwarfed by his own far greater atrocities, the madman himself goes unquestioned. Like a convicted batterer presiding over the trial and sentencing of his victims, the Israeli “madman” judges and punishes the very people it has brutalized and dispossessed.

Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude of allowing Israel to rain down its “calculated rage” on Palestinians is applauded not only by the Israeli military and Times newspaper columnists, but also by many American liberals, whose moral senses are conveniently swallowed up by the same serpent that slips away with their spines whenever the subject of the Israeli settler-state presents itself.

Who, then, will stand up for the Palestinians? Who will control the madman?

Author of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, along with Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and other books, Finkelstein was hailed by a leading authority of Holocaust studies, the late Raul Hilberg, for his “acuity of vision and analytical power” and by prominent Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim as “as a very able, very erudite and original scholar.”

In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University because of an intimidation campaign spearheaded by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book The Case for Israel was pilloried by Finkelstein as blatant plagiarism of an earlier work Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, which was long ago exposed as a hoax.

In our hour-long phone interview on Sept. 14th, Finkelstein discussed a broad range of topics, including Gaza, the paralysis gripping the Arab world, and the reach and the limits of the Israeli lobby. He reflected on his teaching career (“I’ll almost certainly never teach again”), his pursuit of self- improvement, and the “battery of humorless lawyers” who vet his printed works, which frequently combine painstaking research with searing polemics. He also talked about his raging battles with Alan Dershowitz, who once mangled Finkelstein’s words to claim that he called his mother, a Holocaust survivor, a Nazi collaborator. Finally, acknowledging the consequences of his intellectual activism (“You speak out, you pay a price”), Finkelstein spoke about the meaning and impact of his scholarship.

Below is an edited transcript of our interview, presented as four parts.

Part One: Gaza, Diplomacy, and Arab Paralysis

Levesque-Alam: I wanted to start off talking about developments in the Gaza Strip. Taking a cursory glance at [Egyptian weekly] al-Ahram last week, it was clear that the subject on everyone’s mind, aside from the humanitarian cost being paid by residents in Gaza, is whether there is any real overarching Israeli policy or plan here. What do you think Israel is really hoping to achieve with its siege of Gaza?

Norman Finkelstein: After Salvador Allende was elected, the US said it was going to make the Chilean economy scream. The U.S tormented Nicaragua to unseat the Sandinistas. You tell the people that if you keep reelecting this government we’re going to keep strangling you, while if you elect our government we will allow you a marginal existence but still better than before.

Levesque-Alam: In that vein, there appear to be two related observations. Once, again turning to Al-Ahram, there was an analysis by Khalid Amayreh, saying that “the very legitimacy of the PA now depends on the continuation of the talks, regardless of whether progress is made or not. Needless to say, this posture is more than good news for Israel since it allows the Jewish state to keep on building settlements in the West Bank and create more irreversible facts in East Jerusalem, all under the rubric of the peace process.”

My question is, number one, do you see Fatah as fulfilling any role other than peace talks for the sake of peace talks, and two, do you think facts are being created on the ground in such a way that the two-state solution is not even a viable option anymore?

Finkelstein: I don’t get involved in internal Palestinian politics. Those are choices Palestinians have to make. This much, however, can be said. You cannot win from diplomacy what you haven’t won on the battlefield. I don’t necessarily mean an exchange of lethal weapons; mobilizing public opinion is also a potent force. A good versus a bad diplomat will make some difference. Abba Eban made some difference; I don’t want to discount it. But negotiations are the most trivial aspect of politics. What counts in politics is your ability to organize, mobilize, and bring to bear superior force — and again force doesn’t necessarily mean lethal force; there is also the force of public opinion. The so-called Palestinian leadership has not invested anytime in trying to organize its constituency either in the Occupied Territories or abroad. Nothing is going to change without such organization — it’s just silliness; for the Palestinian leadership, lucrative silliness.

Levesque-Alam: Do you see any parallels with Hezbollah and Lebanon and the way that–

Finkelstein: The comparison is striking. Hezbollah organized. Hezbollah prepared. Hezbollah analyzed and understood its enemy. Its judgment was not 100% accurate, but certainly that’s where it invested its energy, with very impressive results. When you read detailed accounts of the 2006 Lebanon war, you realize just how astonishing was its defeat of the Israeli military. Hezbollah fired about 5,000 missiles altogether at Israel or in Lebanon (anti-tank missiles); Israel delivered or fired 162,000 weapons at Lebanon (about 4,800 per day). Israel fielded about 30,000 troops; Hezbollah’s fighters numbered about 2,000 and there were about 4,000 village militia. Israel never even faced the crack Hezbollah forces which were stationed on the Litani waiting for an Israeli invasion that never happened.

Levesque-Alam: On a related note, there was an article by journalist Jonathan Cook, where he was describing some ways in which the Israeli government encourages the creation of collaborators among the Palestinians. He says that in view of the occupation and the siege and the scarcity of medical supplies and nutritional supplies, that Israel obviously denies a broad swath of Palestinians the chance to do more than subsist. And he says, “According to the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, the Shin Bet [Israeli internal secret police] is exploiting the distress of these families to pressure them to agree to collaborate in return for an exit permit.”

Finkelstein: Although the pressure to collaborate did not (to my knowledge) in the past reach to life-and-death issues, Israel has always resorted to similar tactics. If you won a scholarship to study abroad, the Shin Bet would ask you whether you would be willing to spy for them. If you said “no,” they would deny you an exit permit and you couldn’t study abroad. This is what happened to my close friend Musa Abu Hashhash after he won a scholarship in the 1980s to Manchester University in England. He had to turn down the scholarship.

Levesque-Alam: The breaking of the Gaza siege was one of the most recent striking examples of resistance by, really, a handful of activists. But it also set into sharp relief the official impotence of the Arab regimes and the surrounding Arab world to affect change all this time, where, you know, here this handful of activists is able to make at least a symbolic gesture.

To what do you attribute this sort of ongoing paralysis? Is this really a continuation of policy by the Arab regimes to just provide lip-service to the Palestinians without taking concrete action?

Finkelstein: Why should one expect more from the Saudis? The Arab regimes are completely in thrall to the United States. They would of course prefer to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of the international consensus. The Arab League has repeatedly put forth perfectly reasonable proposals to end the conflict in line with the whole of the international community. But they are not going to do more than express a preference. They’re unpopular, corrupt, and therefore dependent on the United States.

Part Two: The Israel Lobby’s Limits, the Relevance of Zionism, and Jewish-Muslim Relations

Levesque-Alam: Turning to more domestic reflections on Israel and the role of Zionism–the publication of the Walt/Mearsheimer book on the pro-Israeli lobby really gave that kind of critique of Israel and the lobby an official or “prestigious” face, and some people have said more political space has opened up to discuss the subject.

But on the other hand, at the latest AIPAC convention, there were 300 congressmen and 3 presidential candidates onhand to pay their respects, if you will, to this lobbying arm. Do you think political space has really opened up to discuss this subject without one being smeared as an anti-Semitic?

Finkelstein: You have to make a distinction between the popular level and the electoral level. At the popular level it’s quite a big difference now as compared to say a decade ago in terms of the ability to criticize Israeli policy and to reach people. It’s not difficult at all now on the popular level. If you have public meetings and so forth there’s a very receptive, or potentially receptive, audience out there. Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace not Apartheid showed this. The Israel lobby called him an anti-Semite, Holocaust-denier, supporter of Nazis and supporter of terrorism. His book still wound up at the top of the bestseller list. But the electoral level is not just about votes, it’s crucially also about money; those with lots of money get a better hearing. At the electoral level it remains quite difficult. We haven’t yet been able to translate popular feeling into an electoral mandate. That’s not unusual. You have in the United States, for example, overwhelming popular support for gun control. But at the electoral level, because of a well-organized lobby, you’re not able to translate the popular feeling into an electoral mandate. That’s also true of health care and myriad other issues.

Levesque-Alam: Some Muslims, in my view, anyway, have what I would categorize as a somewhat unhealthy obsession over the power and mystique of the Israeli lobby. But there does seem to me to be a valid concern that if these lobbying arms are pushing for certain policies, say, war in Iran, and this actually takes place, don’t you think it would create a kind of dynamic where America becomes so entrenched in wars in the Muslim world, that Israel ultimately is seen as an indispensable outpost, and through a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, becomes a great ally or unique ally whose role is considered indispensable?

Finkelstein: There is much misunderstanding about the scope and reach of the Israeli lobby. In my opinion, the Israel lobby has a significant impact on U.S. policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. U.S. elites do not derive any advantage from the occupation; they would be perfectly happy if tomorrow Israel announced that it accepts the international consensus and will withdraw to the June 1967 borders. The reason U.S. elites don’t press harder for such a settlement is the lobby.

But when we come to broad regional issues such as Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, it’s not the lobby that’s the driving force. It’s U.S. policy. You can say U.S. policy is misguided and you can say that once U.S. policy has been decided, the lobby plays a useful role in drumming up public support. But the notion that somehow Cheney and Rumsfeld were duped or coerced by the lobby into waging a war in Iraq contrary to the U.S. “national interest” is neither on its face credible nor supported by the available documentary record.

Levesque-Alam: In an interview I did with you about four years ago for Left Hook, I asked you about your description of Zionism as a response to and a reciprocation of Gentile anti-Semitism. And I asked you about the sustainability and appeal of Zionism, and you said, “it’s an interesting question that would require a subtle answer,” and you went on to catalogue some positives like the revival and preservation of the Hebrew language and then of course some of the negatives.

Given that you’ve been working on a new book on American Zionism, do you have new insights about the viability of Zionism and the future trajectory or trajectories that are available?

Finkelstein: If we are serious about trying to resolve the conflict, we should not get sidetracked by abstract ideological questions. We should take Zionism as an ideology out of the debate. Rather, we should focus on political issues. The right question is not, “Are you now or have you ever been a Zionist.” The questions should be, “Do you support the demolition of homes and torture?” “Do you support Jewish-only roads and Jewish-only settlements?” “Do you support a political settlement embraced by the entire world apart from the U.S., Israel and some South Sea atolls?”

Levesque-Alam: From a “pragmatic” Israeli viewpoint, or at least what would be considered pragmatic by Israeli leaders, given that the country’s leadership places so many eggs in one basket, basically onboard with the American “war on terror”, what kind of long-term options does Israel have to create a secure Jewish existence and a lasting peace with neighbors? Does this basically involve adhering to international law and the international consensus, or are there specifics beyond that?

Finkelstein: The possibility exists for a reasonable settlement with the Palestinians along the June 1967 borders and a “just resolution” of the refugee question. But if Israel continues to conceive itself as, and play the part of, an outpost of the U.S. in the Arab-Muslim world, even if the Israel-Palestine conflict were resolved, it’s not going to change anything fundamental, because Israel will still be on a collision course with forces in the Arab-Muslim world seeking genuine independence.

Levesque-Alam: From a personal perspective, it’s been hard for me not to notice that in the U.S. context, those leading the pack of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim invective, more often than not, seem to be Jewish academics and Jewish scholars. And proponents of the Clash thesis, or intense advocates of American war aims, or those called neoconservatives, are more often than not Jewish intellectuals.

This represents an historical reversal where before the creation of Israel, many Jewish academics took a sympathetic view of Islam and had fresh in their minds the experience of Western anti-Semitism and intolerance. But now many are lined up behind Western arguments and justifications for war and occupation that ring eerily familiar.

In your experience, has there been any ongoing debate in the American Jewish community–

Finkelstein: I don’t have any meaningful experience in the American Jewish community …

Levesque-Alam: Do you think there’s a debate between American Jewish academics?

Finkelstein: Like all intellectuals, Jewish intellectuals gravitate toward power and privilege. You don’t have to read Professor Chomsky to know this. Just read Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals. The foreign policy of the two major political parties doesn’t significantly differ. So it is not surprising that Jewish publicists would be prominent all along the mainstream political spectrum. Jewish publicists were also prominent during the McCarthy era and Cold War debates. When Commentary magazine joined the anti-communist witch-hunt and lined up with the U.S. during the Cold War, was it because of Israel? The fact that Israel is a “Jewish” state is perhaps a supplementary (bonus) factor for Jewish intellectuals, but it’s obviously not the primary one. It might also be noted that Jews such as Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein are also prominent in the marginal left supporting Palestinian rights.

Levesque-Alam: Do you think anything can be done from a Muslim perspective, Muslims in the United States, to encourage alliances and friendships between progressive Jewish and progressive Muslim voices?

Finkelstein: The new generation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States is smart, committed and reasonable. I am very optimistic on this score. Maybe the older generation is still given to conspiracy theories but not the folks I meet on college campuses. They are an impressive bunch. I recently went on speaking tour in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS). Ten universities in different cities in five days. When it was over I told them I’d never go on another FOSIS tour. “Why?,” they wondered. “Because you’re too efficient!” (I was exhausted.)

Part Three: On Teaching, Not Being a Movie Star, and Humorless Lawyers

Levesque-Alam: Turning to more personal matters, since DePaul University had denied you tenure last year, when pressure was brought to bear by Dershowitz and like-minded forces, what’s preoccupied you? Given the high marks you received from students at DePaul, do you have any plans to teach anywhere else?

Finkelstein: I’ll almost certainly never teach again. This chapter in my life is over. The first course I taught at the college level was in 1974. I started teaching consistently at the college level in 1988. Because I never had a regular position, I had very heavy teaching loads. Altogether I probably had about 7,000 students. It was a good run, but now it’s over, and I don’t know what’s next. If tomorrow a brick were to fall on my head, I still had a good life and so I have no right to complain. I did what I wanted with my life. I can’t carry on like a child. I knew what I did would have consequences; if it didn’t have consequences, everyone would do it. You speak out, you pay a price.

Levesque-Alam: I noticed on your website a rather prominent logo for the film American Radical in which you’re the main feature. Can you tell me about that film, is it still slated to come out in 2008?

Finkelstein: It’s still going to take some time. The filmmakers are decent and competent. I am not convinced that my life is of significant enough interest that it can hold an audience for an hour. The fate of the film is important to the filmmakers and I respect this. But my life is what I’ve done, what I’ve sought to accomplish, whether or not I’ve stayed true to my principles and the memory of my late parents’ martyrdom. My struggle each day is to make myself a better person. I have tried to learn from the example of Gandhi: the recognition of being a very flawed person, constantly committing blunders, yet still continuing along the path of Truth — he called it Truth, but truth was for him a much bigger category than the conventional one; it denoted conscience, purity of motive, and so forth. I struggle to make myself worthy of the support I get from people and worthy of the expectations that people have invested in me. I desperately want to be a better person, not a bigger star.

Levesque-Alam: In the context of what you mentioned, of flaws and mistakes, do you think that among them might be the tone–some people have said that even despite the outstanding scholarship, maybe the tone is too abrasive–do you think that if you could, you would go back in time and take a take a different tone and stylistic approach in some of your scholarly work?

Finkelstein: There’s some misapprehension about my modus operandi. Some people think the words flow uninterruptedly from my brain to the computer screen to the printed page. That’s not how it works. Many, many people scrutinize my manuscripts: editors, friends, comrades, experts. In recent years, all of my manuscripts have also been carefully vetted by a battery of usually humorless libel lawyers. Probably 80% of the time when something in my manuscript is flagged, and someone says, “Too much!” or “Take this out!” it goes. I’m not Shakespeare. I am not committed to every period and comma.

It’s also hard to get the right balance. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having passion and even vitriol when the circumstances warrant it. Professor Chomsky’s most memorable phrase is when he described Jeanne Kirkpatrick as the Reagan’s administration’s “chief sadist in residence” (Turning the Tide). I am not at heart an academic. I have little interest in academia. I never attended an academic conference, never delivered an academic paper. I don’t write primarily for academic journals. I became an academic because of a happy intersection. I like to teach and to do rigorous scholarship. By coincidence, those are also the main criteria for an academic career. So I found myself in the ivory tower. But teaching and scholarship were not for me means in order to succeed in the academic world, it was just a coincidence.

Part Four: Alan Dershowitz, Bar Mitzvahs, and Accomplishments

Levesque-Alam: My final question here: the other way you reach out is through your website. I noticed you take a sort of remarkable position, where you host e-mails of the most vitriolic and hateful elements who attack you. How are you able to put up with that kind of attack? I mean in one film clip, I believe you said that your mother was worried that you’ve become maybe too consumed, in a sense, by the issues you’re passionate about.

Do you find it hard to strike a balance or maintain a level of calm in the face of the kind of attacks — for instance, in one case, Alan Dershowitz chopped up a quote to claim you called your mother a Nazi collaborator. How do you deal with that kind of stuff?

Finkelstein: Knowing my late mother, if I didn’t take the first train to Cambridge and throttle Dershowitz — I’m being quite literal here — if I didn’t throttle him, she probably would have never spoken to me again.

My mother was very solicitous about my health and safety. She was a Jewish mother. But what Dershowitz said crossed the line. It’s hard to fathom the magnitude of that slander: to say that somebody who passed through the Nazi holocaust, and every single member of her family was exterminated, and her entire life, from the day she was “liberated” till her death, she grieved over the loss of her family — that now some sick sack of shit would come along, after her death and when she is no longer around to defend herself, and proclaim that my mother collaborated–or I believe she collaborated — with the murderers of her family…

So it did require immense self-control — or maybe you want to call it cowardice — for me to do nothing about it.

Dershowitz got very bad PR when he threatened a libel suit against the University of California press for publishing my book Beyond Chutzpah. He was trying to get a rise out of me so I would sue him for libel. Then he could say, “You see! Who’s suing whom for libel now?” He was trying to push me into a corner or provoke me sufficiently that I would, like a panther — which is how the Black Panther [Party] got its name — you keep pushing it back and back and back, and it retreats and retreats and retreats, and finally when it’s in a corner, it leaps out at you.

Levesque-Alam: Does the battle with Dershowitz, on an intellectual or political level, continue even now?

Finkelstein: There’s no “intellectual” battle with Dershowitz. On his part there’s no summoning of facts or elegant use of logic. It’s just bar mitzvah speeches. He doesn’t know anything, I doubt if he’s read more than a half-dozen books on the topic. I don’t entirely fault him. You can’t defend high profile spousal murderers like O.J. Simpson, high profile sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, and high profile mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic, yet still have time left over to do serious scholarship. What he does is entertainment; it’s a circus. He’s like Hitchens. No one really cares about the facts Hitchens brings to bear. He could be making one case today and the opposite case tomorrow. Would anybody notice? They’re just interested in the rococo tapestry he weaves around the facts. You don’t walk away saying, “I’ve learned X, Y or Z from Hitchens,” you walk away saying, “Wasn’t that a witty line? Wasn’t that a clever repartee?”

It’s the same thing with Dershowitz — of course, Dershowitz is not witty or clever. You don’t learn anything and you don’t expect to. I live near Coney Island. It’s like the popular sideshow “Shoot the freak.” I haven’t read a journal of intellectual opinion in years. Gandhi’s collected works come to 90 volumes. Most of it consists of letters, quite a few on diet. There’s more moral seriousness in one Gandhi letter to an anonymous correspondent on treating constipation than nearly the whole of our intellectual life.

Levesque-Alam: But do you get the sense that there’s some ongoing — okay if not an intellectual, but verbal?

Finkelstein: Everybody is terrified of Dershowitz because he wields a lot of power and is a very vindictive little man. I wasn’t afraid and, I think, did a pretty solid job of demonstrating he is a preposterous charlatan. So he got his revenge by driving me out of academia, although — in his mind — not enough to compensate for the damage I did to his name.

Levesque-Alam: A genuinely last question here, you just referenced the work that you have done in the fields you have investigated. Do you take a fundamentally positive or negative view of the change that’s possible through scholarship, specifically your scholarship? Do you think a generation or two down the line, people will be able to look back to your work and say, “This was a seminal moment,” or “This was a crucial moment for helping augur in something new, something different, something better,” to the debate and to the perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Finkelstein: In a generation I will be completely forgotten. That’s fine; not everyone can write for eternity. Most people can derive sufficient satisfaction from the knowledge of being a link in the chain. So I take the best from what preceded me, work this material over trying to improve it a little, and then it’s passed on to the next generation. I’m a link in the chain, another rung in Jacob’s ladder “that keeps going higher and higher.”

Who lives through eternity? Parents have children, the children remember their parents, their children remember their grandparents. How many great grandchildren remember great grandparents? Few of us manage to get what we secretly aspire. We fear death and we want eternity, through children or through books. But at the very best we live for a couple of generations. I recently read an interview with Woody Allen. He said he still wakes up nights dreading death. Life, he said, is a “meaningless little flicker.” In itself, he’s probably right. The only thing that gives life meaning is being part of something bigger than yourself. When you feel part of the bigger cause, you can even conceive yourself sacrificing life for it. “Who is able to deny that all that is pure and good in the world persists because of the silent death of thousands of unknown heroes and heroines!” (Gandhi)

I don’t think much about how I will be remembered. More people than you would guess are interested in a factual, rational presentation of arguments, and don’t need, and don’t want, to be persuaded by verbal pyrotechnics. How else can you account for Chomsky’s impact? Many people actually do want to figure out how the pieces fit together. Who is right and who’s wrong? Who’s telling the truth and who isn’t? Who is on the side of justice, and who is on the side of injustice? Not the verbal sallies, not the clever one-liners, not the witty repartees–but just the facts.

A sufficient number of people have found what I do useful enough that I think I can say I’ve lived a meaningful life.

“We will try to convince Pakistan…to respect [the] sovereignty of the United States — and God willing, we will convince,” State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.¹

The controversy stems from the Pakistan Army’s recent decision, leaked in a prominent Pakistani newspaper, to mount intensifying air attacks and new ground assaults against extremists hiding in American safe havens across the ocean.

American papers reported that under the new policy, the Pakistani military will no longer seek America’s permission in killing Americans, but will inform American diplomats about these killings as a friendly gesture between close allies.²

Pakistan Army General Ashfaq Kayani told reporters outside Islamabad late last night that the new strategy was justified. “We are working to prevent more attacks on the Pakistani people,” he said.³

The general’s stance signified strong Pakistani dissatisfaction with America’s reluctance to crack down on religious fundamentalists and neoconservatives, who, experts note, have deep ties to American intelligence services and military leaders. The largely unchecked extremists, experts observe, have used America to bolster the agenda of their ideological counterparts across the ocean in Israel, and to strike directly against Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world.

“We have to strike them over there so that they cannot order strikes against us here at home,” General Kayani said, referring to American firepower that has terrorized hundreds of thousands of civilians on either side of the Pak-Afghan border and in the Middle East.

As Kayani spoke, new precision attacks and commando raids were being conducted against ranches in Texas, small towns in Alaska, the offices of AIPAC and energy-related lobbying firms in Washington, D.C. Commandos were also dispatched to America’s unruly federally-administered Bible Belt, where resentment of government authority runs high.

Several high-value targets were killed in the attacks. Local media outlets claimed 50 civilians were also killed, but these assertions could not be independently verified. Pakistani officials said they would send in their own team to investigate the claims, time permitting.

Seeking to assuage domestic concerns, American officials downplayed the actions of their staunch ally. “The nation should not be upset by the statement of Pakistani General Kayani,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in an official statement.⁴ “Pakistan respect U.S. sovereignty and looks at us as partners,” she added.⁵

Regimes allied to Pakistan, including those in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Palestine, expressed support for the new Pakistani strategy, citing the need to “remove and destroy” strongholds where key militants have masterminded attacks against their countries.⁶

Informed of this, Ambassador Patterson appeared unfazed, saying, “Pakistan respects American sovereignty.” She insisted that Pakistani officials provided her with assurances that “no such order had been given” for new rules of engagement.⁷ Finally, the ambassador explained, America had already carried out its own recent military offensive that left hundreds of rural Americans dead, relieving the need for further Pakistani intervention.

But in Islamabad, Pakistani corps commanders said their new strategy would see continued implementation in the coming weeks. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one commander said that as far as Pakistan was concerned, “most things have been settled in terms of how we’re going to proceed.”⁸

1. Quote actually taken from Pakistani PM Yousaf Gilani. Reuters, Sept. 12, 2008.
2. It was actually the Pakistan daily, Dawn, which reported on the U.S. policy shift as follows: “Under this new policy, the US military will notify Pakistan’s government when it conducts raids, but will not seek its permission.” Sept. 12, 2008. Except for note 2, all the quoted statements are real quotes; only the roles have been switched.
3. Quote actually taken from US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. Dawn (Pakistan Daily), Sept. 12, 2008.
4. Quote actually taken from PM Gilani. (Source: note 3)
5. Quote actually taken from Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani. (Source: note 3)/footnote>

   U.S. officials also insisted no secret deal had been reached beforehand allowing Pakistanis to strike inside American territory. “Media reports about authorization for Pakistani raids into the U.S. are incorrect,” the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, told Fox News last night. She added that the South Asian country had “no aggressive designs or postures” toward America.Quotes actually taken from Ambassador Haqqani. (Source: note 3)

6. Quote actually taken from U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2008.
7. Quotes actually taken from Ambassador Haqqani. (Source: note 7)
8. Quote actually taken from anonymous U.S. official. (Source: note 7)

But for American Muslims, abuse and disappearance of detainees are not the defining features of the “war on terror.” Eyed by the national media with a mixture of fear, anxiety, and frustration, we face heated questions that implicitly place not just individual suspects but an entire community in the crosshairs.

The questions aimed at us fall into two broad categories: “Why aren’t more moderate Muslims condemning terrorism?” and “What is it about Islam that produces terrorists?”

As the latter question assumes an inherent relationship between Islam and terrorism, the best kind of “moderate” Muslim is apparently as far removed from Islam as Mecca is from Montana.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Anxious interviewers who press their Muslim American guests to inveigh against Islamist terrorism often appear flustered when these guests fail to utter the appropriate noises. The hapless targets sometimes forget their role in the script and fail to jump through pre-assigned verbal hoops.
But why should they? One does not, after all, apologize without having done something wrong, and one does not renounce something without having first belonged to it.

Nitpickers may protest that denouncing terrorism is not the same as renouncing or apologizing. But in a poisoned media atmosphere where the terms “Muslim” and “terrorism” are as inseparable as a bow and string, such a distinction flies off into irrelevance like an arrow without fletchings.

Applying this Muslim litmus test in a different setting demonstrates the point: If a white worker was assaulted in a black neighborhood, would he march into work the next day demanding his black colleagues “denounce” the attack?

The demand to denounce is, in short, a demand for an a priori admission of guilt.

American Muslims did not elect or appoint Islamist terrorists. Al-Qaeda is not a Muslim version of Congress.

Although the word al-Qaeda means “the base,” the label is more “aspirational” than operational, to borrow a phrase from the fine wordsmiths at the White House. The movement survives on the fringes and in the hinterlands, taking advantage of tribal customs of hospitality, preying on poverty and desperation, and terrorizing locals in lawless areas.

Indeed, the terrorist movement reviles Muslims who do not adhere to its impoverished idea of Islam and has spilt more than enough Muslim blood to prove it. So alienating is its ideology that even those Iraqis most opposed to the U.S. occupation ultimately turned to America’s help in killing al-Qaeda and away from al-Qaeda’s help in killing Americans.

Therefore, the questioners’ implicit lumping-in of Muslims anywhere and everywhere with Islamist terrorists is not only ignorant but ironic: they lend the terrorists a veneer of legitimacy not afforded them by the Muslim community in America or anywhere else.

Most perplexing, however, is that those prodding American Muslims to continually condemn violence are themselves least likely to condemn violence when it appears in a more virulent form. For while al-Qaeda killed almost 3,000 Americans on September 11th, the U.S. and its staunch ally Israel have killed tens of thousands and displaced millions in shattered communities across Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine.

From the American Muslim viewpoint, this is a particularly curious oversight.

We are, after all, ceaselessly reminded that terrorists subscribe to totalitarianism whereas America upholds democracy. But it appears that our bumptious questioners think it is the other way around: why else do they press us to answer for the crimes of fanatics whom we never chose, while rarely questioning the ease with which many of our countrymen accepted the far deadlier decisions made by elected representatives?

It is precisely because Americans live in a democratic society that there is a genuine opportunity — one not available to Muslims vis-à-vis terrorists hiding in the mountains — to oppose serious injustices, such as torture, occupation, collective punishment, and disproportionate use of force.

A disturbingly consistent failure to exercise this opportunity leaves Muslims around the world — who sometimes develop the temerity to formulate questions of their own — wondering: “Where are the moderate Americans?”

The U.S. media also wonders aloud in a tone of feigned anguish what defects within Islam “cause” terrorism. Swirling their paintbrushes in palettes of their own prejudice, sundry pundits and preachers strip Islamic ideas out of context to depict the Muslim faith in sinister hues.

This line of condemnation via questioning is particularly unctuous because the “Islam” behind today’s terrorism was once sustained by the United States. The facts about this Cold War decision have been well-documented elsewhere and require no recounting here. Suffice it to say that by backing the most radical strains of Islam and suppressing the nationalist, socialist, and secular forces that were at work in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, and elsewhere, the U.S. altered the political balance of forces in the Muslim world to disastrous effect.

It is also instructive to compare the trendy “what is wrong with Islam” approach with other examples from history.

The 20th century bore witness to unparalleled bloodshed and violence: the incineration of Japanese cities, widespread devastation of Vietnamese villages, systematic genocide of European Jews, and assaults unleashed against struggling colonies all come to mind.

If the death toll of Islamist terrorism was set against this backdrop, it would appear as but a droplet lost in the oceans, with the West’s fratricide against Jews and its depredations against ex-colonies comprising the Atlantic and Pacific of terror.

And yet, these millions of deaths did not spawn agonized questions about what is inherently “wrong” with Christianity — even though, for instance, the Nazis capitalized on anti-Semitism explicitly expressed by Martin Luther in his screed “On the Jews and their Lies.” Rather, these conflicts were framed in terms of social and political circumstances.

Even in more recent cases where religious animosity has played a supporting role in atrocities, religion has been left untouched.

When Serbian forces massacred 8,000 Muslim Bosnian men and boys as the world idly stood by in 1995, or when Christian militia given a green light by the Israeli military killed 1,000 Palestinians in refugee camps during the 1982 Lebanon war, no media personalities pored over the Bible to see what scriptures “caused” these incidents.

When Israel, buoyed by Christian fundamentalists and internal hardliners, invokes religious concepts like the “promised land” and “chosen people” to justify what late Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling aptly termed the “politicide” of Palestinians, no rhetorical questions about Christian or Jewish fundamentalism are splashed across American television screens. Indeed, the mere mention of the Palestinian plight is a taboo in American politics, prompting cries of anti-Semitism.

Only Islam, it appears, is on the dining menu, and it is cooked to order.

The chattering classes’ questioning recalls an often-invoked but rarely remembered truth: it is always easier to criticize the Other.

But this banal observation cannot suffice. In light of the vast gap in casualties and carnage, the insistence on grilling American Muslims can only be understood as a decoy, a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about unseen others.

It is, in short, the extraordinary rendition of reality.

This is a painful but clear reminder to Muslims here and elsewhere that Muslim life does not occupy the same plane as American life: that if ten, twenty, or even one hundred Muslims die for every fallen American civilian, it is not sufficient cause for introspection; and that if a Muslim plays no role in attacks on Americans, he is still subject to a harsher judgment than an American who cheers policies that leave tens of thousands of Muslims dead.

Far from rising above the moment, the media has sunk beneath what should be expected of a free press. Its loaded questions, arrayed alongside other weapons of war, herald a new age of Guantanomized discourse — one in which the crucial difference between the interrogation inside the detention center and the one outside is that a person can be released but a people remain condemned.

Fortunately for Republicans, the timidity and “good manners” that served Democrats so well in 2004 are still on full display. The Obama camp appeared paralyzed before the senator himself curtly cut short further talk about the biggest Palin pop-up: the pregnancy of her unwed 17-year-old daughter.

But do these attempts to preserve the moral aura of Sarah Palin serve America’s interests?

Consider Palin’s stance on abortion. In her view, rape and incest are insufficient reasons for granting a woman the right to choose — even, as she has said, if that woman was her own daughter.

From a safe remove, some may admire Palin’s apparently uncompromising stance on the sanctity of life: here is a woman who sticks to her principles.

But is this an honest assessment? While Americans and others around in the world heatedly debate whether life begins at conception, delivery, or somewhere in between, everyone can agree that children and adults are living beings.

Therefore, it is prudent to ask a crucial question: why is Palin so fond of unborn life but so contemptuous of those who have exited the womb?

Palin’s loyalties lie with a party that stands against health care for poorer Americans, against relief for indebted homeowners, and against tax breaks for the working and middle-classes. Why do these lives not matter?

Also standing in striking contrast to the GOP’s professed respect for unborn life is its open contempt for dark-skinned life in various corners and crevices of the globe. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, Palin’s party has cheerfully dropped or supplied bombs that have erased thousands of children from the montage of mankind.

So while Democratic centrists stay silent, they pass up a peerless opportunity to ask why the “culture of life” honors those who aren’t yet alive while making sure those who are alive don’t stay alive.

It’s also useful to compare Palin’s position on abortion with that of the next slated target in the Republican war plan: Iran. In 2005, the Iranian parliament passed a law to allow abortion of fetuses up to four months old if they exhibited signs of physical or mental handicap. But the unelected mullahs of The Iranian Guardians Council took the same view as Palin and rejected the move.

In early 2008, Iranian Grand Ayatollah Mazaheri issued a decree allowing unwed mothers the right to choose — a right Palin seeks to abolish for everyone here in America.

On the question of sexual education and resources, the Islamic Republic appears enlightened compared to the GOP’s new darling. In Tehran, Iranian citizens can find vending machines with cheap condoms and needles (AIDS is a big concern). Meanwhile, Palin is on the record as saying she would fund abstinence-only propaganda. The mullahs promote sex education in schools and for soon-to-be-brides, and state programs offer sex advice to women that would make Palin and her Christian fundamentalist admirers squeamish.

Despite Palin’s backward positions, some people are overawed by the pull of her personal dramas. Palin, they say, should be applauded for going through with a pregnancy despite a Down Syndrome diagnosis, and should be afforded privacy for her daughter’s personal affairs.

Which is all well and good — except that Palin is running on a platform of subjecting everyone else’s personal affairs to her own judgment, which she seeks to codify into federal law.

Palin’s pregnancy decision may be noble, but her attempt to deny other women the right to make their own decisions is not. Her daughter’s pregnancy may be a private matter, but her plan to deny other children real sex education would leave them and their parents facing the same “private” problem.

The reluctance of Democratic gatekeepers to pounce on Palin’s fundamentalism reflects a level of foolishness that makes John Kerry’s windsurfing adventures appear wise by comparison.

It is not necessary to trash Palin’s private life to point out the perniciousness of her politics. It is only necessary to observe that a morally “perfect” American who works to the public’s detriment is far worse than a flawed American who promotes the general good.

The first thought to zip through my mind: 17 pages? What kind of form does a Muslim need to fill out to make his religious preference clear? Is this a standardized test?

Within seconds my senses settled in and I realized that there is no such thing as a registered Muslim. The declaration of Islamic faith consists only of the following words: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger.” I have said it many times — and I am no “registered” Muslim.

The Clintonista, I concluded, was mistaken. Her novel addition to the charge — these days a serious one — of being a plain old regular Muslim was nothing more than a smattering of dirt tossed into verbal quicksand, or what Orwell might describe as an attempt to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

But before I could utter another breath I felt my soul being pulled apart from my body and whisked away. When I next opened my eyes I saw nothing but the dim outlines of an empty steel bowl placed on a bare floor. I moved a half-step before crashing against a cold barrier. I was in prison.

I hollered and yelled for an hour until a guard armed with a bitter frown and a black pistol finally appeared. “Why the hell am I here?” I demanded to know. His lips parted into a sneer as he answered: “Because you were funding your Muslim terrorist friends abroad through a fake charity.” I replied: “On what evidence?” And he pressed his finger against his lips, which then stretched into a smile: “Oh, I heard that’s a secret.”

So this was it: I was now one of dozens of men jailed in an FBI witch-hunt that targeted “terrorist” charities serving communities terrorized by war and poverty. I banged on the bars of my cage and demanded to get a lawyer or at least a meal — I had not even eaten breakfast. The guard walked away and laughed. In his mind I registered not as a human being but as a Muslim and that was reason enough to ignore me.

Before I could dip into despair the harsh glare of the sun beamed down on me in an open desert. I looked around and saw several armed men standing near a giant bulldozer and the crumbling debris of an old house they had just brought down. It appeared to be mine.

“Why have you destroyed my home?” I inquired with words sharpened on the edge of an Arab accent. The soldier answered in Hebrew but I understood. “You did not build with a legal permit,” the tallest among them said with a smirk. The Brooklyn-born settler alongside them boasted, “This land belongs to Israel.”

I was being swept aside by Israelis whose grandfathers certainly carried no “legal permits” but a great many guns when they initiated ethnic cleansing here more than fifty years ago. I tried to appeal to the soldiers’ conscience and demanded compensation. They looked puzzled: I was not of the people of the Promised Land and thus had no claim here. I registered in their eyes only as a nuisance and a Muslim.

A few seconds of silence passed before the scene changed and I heard whooping wails instantly recognizable as Arab ululation. In a dusty and decrepit town women mourned and men seethed and everyone stepped aside as a procession of American commanders marched to meet me.

“Now,” I thought to myself, “I am finally in a position of power.” But I was wrong. One of the men nodded brusquely and handed me a briefcase stuffed with several hundred Iraqi dinars. “What is this for?” I asked. He glanced at me before replying evenly through an unneeded interpreter: “The agreed-upon amount for the five civilians who died during our search mission here two weeks ago. Again, we apologize for the collateral damage.”

“Collateral damage?” I asked incredulously. “What about punishment for those responsible? What is this paltry amount of money supposed to buy the families? And what is there to buy in this destroyed country?” Again I failed to understand the natural order of things. There would be no real compensation and no real investigation. The offending soldiers had signed up to serve America and their prey had registered only as America’s Muslim collateral damage.

Soon after I found my flowing robes replaced with a suit and tie as I stood in an office. “Thank God,” I thought, “at least I am back in America.” Then I saw the website on the monitor. “Terrorist Professor Infects Campus,” blared the headline for a screed accusing me of backing “Islamo-fascist fundamentalism.”

After fumbling through the desk I found some essays and my crime became clear. Instead of goose-stepping to the official line about Muslims hating American freedom and liberties and cheeseburgers I had dared to point out policies that left a few hundred thousand Muslims dead and a few million more displaced. Assigning value to Muslim life was heretical to neoconservative clerics who thus issued online fatwahs for my removal.

I considered my options before remembering that I had none. Reminders of academic freedom and lists of scholarly sources would not stick in minds that registered only one reality: a Muslim liability.

Just as the dean knocked on the door with “pressing news” I appeared back home where it seemed barely a moment had passed. I headed to the nearest mirror to make sure that I was indeed myself: a relief.

I glanced back at the Clintonista claim on my computer screen still confident that I was not a registered Muslim. But I wondered: for how long?

To conceal my American upbringing, I wore pants in the oppressive heat (shorts were derided as “underwear” at the time), grew my hair out of its crew-cut shape, and avoided slipping into English. If the merchants pegged me as a foreigner, my uncle warned, they would be less willing to field questions about their wares and more eager to sell them at high prices.

Today, American leaders surveying options in the region display even less prudence than a child in an unfamiliar marketplace. They openly speak the language of violence, fail to ask necessary questions, and evince little concern about the costs of their decisions.

Barack Obama, emulating previous Democrats’ attempts to outflank Republicans from the right on foreign policy, calls the Pakistan-Afghanistan border the “central front in the war on terror” and pledges to send more troops. John McCain, a modern-day Captain Ahab if there ever was one, soon followed suit with vows to hunt down bin Laden at “the gates of hell.” Secretary Gates, whose military boasts a budget bigger than the next 21 nations’ combined, announced a $20 billion effort to erase enemies who have danced circles around his army in $2 sandals.

In a sense, the proposed “soft surge” is understandable. The Iraq disaster has made almost any military venture seem wise by comparison, and no one doubts that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are gaining ground quickly in the tribal belt.

But in pressing and prodding Pakistan to take greater military action alongside America, U.S. leaders reveal just how little they know about the country and the path to lasting peace.

Does the civilian government — whose “cooperation” we seek in the intensified fight — possess any real authority? What are the priorities of Pakistan’s perennially-looming institution, the army? Why should ordinary Pakistanis back an escalating war against some of their own?

Failing to answer — let alone pose — such basic questions is an open invitation to a second Iraq.
The civilian leadership’s wavering commitment in the war has American elites seething. Unable to fathom why their Pakistani “allies” do not advance like pawns in a game of chess, they miss the larger point: there is no chessboard.

A nation of 170 million people, Pakistan is deeply fractured, war or no war. Loosely bound together only by religion, the people are separated by region, culture, language, and ethnicity. Sindhis, Balochis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis are generally more concerned with local and tribal rather than national interests.

Non-Punjabis harbor bitterness toward Punjab for its unequal dispensation of resources and its command of the army — an army which lost half the country in an unjust campaign against Bengalis in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.

Most Pakistanis are worried about their immediate survival, which the federal government does little to address. The literacy rates stand at 55% and 29% for men and women, respectively. People depend heavily on local contacts and connections, with little sense of allegiance to the federal government.
This is true even among the middle class. Housing, university positions, and government jobs all depend heavily on local ties. Even the smallest matters do not escape the long shadow of nepotism: for one trip back home on the nationally-owned airline, my father had to rely on the favors of a family connection just to make sure our seats on the plane were not “given away” to someone else. My father found the whole affair unpalatable, but in the absence of honest government, what are the alternatives?

None are offered by Pakistan’s present leadership. Though it never ceases to remind anyone within earshot of its “democratic” credentials, the “new” government would be mistaken for a troupe of rotating circus clowns anywhere else. After throwing Musharraf overboard with threats of corruption charges, the leaders of the two main parties, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari, recently split because of a dispute over judges who might confront Zardari with — what else — corruption charges. Sharif, dislodged from power by Musharraf in a bloodless coup nine years ago, has himself faced corruption charges.

The scene is so dispiriting that much of the middle class simply ignores politics altogether. My mother’s side of the family, all educated and solidly middle-class, have to my recollection never evinced interest in any of the parties in light of the transparent hankering for power displayed by the politicians. Against this backdrop, the government’s cachet among its people is limited. The notion that such a fragile institution, beset by incompetence, invisibility, and cronyism, can simply wave its hands in the air and convince its citizens to become an appendage of the U.S. “war on terror” is a wild fantasy.
The government’s ability to make a case for war is also hampered by the intelligence service (ISI) and its military sponsor — another major organ of power the U.S. has failed to understand.

Just after September 11th, understanding was irrelevant: America handed Musharraf an ultimatum to back the “war on terror” and he complied. But all that is old news now and America finds itself frustrated with the Pakistan army’s ambivalence in serving as America’s most poorly-paid mercenary force.

The army’s stance is prompted by two concerns: its own interests and the nation’s interests, which are not identical but nonetheless overlap.

As is well-known, the ISI developed its prestige and power during the tenure of Islamist military dictator Zia ul-Haq, who found generous American backing and financial support for his role in the jihad against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. Less well-known is the timing of American-backed intervention: six months before the Soviets actually invaded, when the fledgling Marxist government was trying to enact crucial reforms to protect women and wrest natural resources from the control of warlords.

Once the Soviets were defeated, America’s interest in the country’s “freedom” evaporated and it began lending tacit support to the ISI’s backing of the Taliban.

Like any unaccountable institution, the ISI developed breathtaking rationales for defending the indefensible. According to the doctrine of “strategic depth”, arch-rival India had to be contained, and its access to Central Asia curtailed, through the insertion of Islamist proxies in this key conduit country.

Sections of the military still cling to this doctrine despite its manifest absurdity. Far from achieving strategic depth in Afghanistan, Pakistan has become a victim of the strategic depth achieved by Islamists, who have struck its soldiers and assets with a level of impunity India would dare not dream of.

Nonetheless, the U.S. cannot bully the Pakistani military into abandoning its militant ties. According to veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid’s new book, Descent into Chaos, Musharraf decided to retain Pakistan’s only — albeit unwieldy — form of leverage when he surmised that America was more interested in pursuing neoconservative pipe dreams in Iraq than in rebuilding Afghanistan.

Rashid also writes that the Pakistani military harbors great enmity toward Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has presided over business deals with India, and who was once banished from Pakistan for his anti-Taliban stance.

The lesson is clear. Without guarantees and concessions — such as opportunities in Afghan reconstruction — the Pakistani military has no incentive to ease its obsession over Indian ambitions or to abandon its sole means of countering those ambitions: the militants and the chaos they create.
Even the military, however, ultimately bows to another master: the masses. The clamor to see Musharraf ousted, muddily refracted in the platform of the civilian politicians, forced the generals to stand aside as one of their own was removed.

America, too, must pay heed to the street if it wants to win genuine support for the war. And yet, it does little more than mouth platitudes about “the Pakistani people.” Although most Pakistanis take a dim view of the Taliban — the secularists decisively won the NWFP regional elections — their view of American policy is even dimmer.

This is not without reason. The one uniting factor among Pakistanis is religion, and America’s attitude towards Muslims has few defenders outside of those aching to strike Muslim countries. Unrelenting support for Israel’s brutality toward Palestinians is a source of enduring anger. That this support might be occasioned by the pressure of entrenched pro-Israeli lobbies, rather than some fleeting and correctable prejudice, inspires little hope for a fair American foreign policy among Muslims anywhere. The record of atrocities in Iraq and the betrayal of American’s own values at Guantanamo scarcely require mention.

Pakistanis also have more immediate grievances. America supported Musharraf the dictator so long as he fought “America’s war.” It poured billions of dollars into military coffers but gave almost nothing to strengthen Pakistan’s civil society or infrastructure. Hundreds of innocent Pakistanis have been illegally rounded up and disappeared by their own government because of American pressure to capture terrorists.

The oft-repeated American vow, “We will fight the terrorists abroad so that we don’t have to fight them in our own streets,” has but one meaning to most Pakistanis: the fight will take place in their streets, at the expense of their security, jeopardizing their lives. The stark slogans’ implications have already been realized for about 200,000 Pakistanis forced to flee the north, where “their” army has tried to smash flies with sledgehammers.

Predictions in the world of politics are a fool’s venture, but it is not hard to see where things are headed. Unwilling to look seriously at Pakistan’s needs, America sees only one reality: the presence of terrorists and an absence of action.

One might offer a few obligatory words about the need to build schools, hospitals, and roads in Pakistan — combating terror without inflicting more terror. But why bother? Can a government that stared blankly as one of its own cities drowned really be moved to invest in the well-being of a foreign people?

As my uncle would sometimes say to merchants at the bazaar, that is asking too much.

The results of that dispossession are still on display today. Four million Palestinians live and die in controlled and caged ghettoes on less than one-fifth of the land that belonged to them, now occupied by Israel. Meanwhile, Israel allows Jews born anywhere in the world to settle this expropriated land.

But it’s one thing to prevent people from reclaiming their stolen property. It’s another to prevent them from leaving their cages altogether.

Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, as Israel denied Palestinian Fulbright scholars from getting to America, despite unprecedented civil disobedience by an American diplomat.

The chosen would-be scholars are from Gaza, a concentration camp of 1.5 million people, which Israel has subjected to collective punishment ever since Hamas won elections. Few supplies are allowed in except in the event of “emergencies,” meaning that children go malnourished, chronic diseases go untreated, and poverty and anger festers.

Israel allowed only about 60 out of 600 Gaza students accepted by foreign universities to study abroad this year. Seven Fulbright scholars were among those barred.

America tried to intervene, with Condoleezza Rice opining, “If you cannot engage young people and give them a complete horizon to their expectations and to their dreams, then I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine.”

The Israelis made noises about expediting the process but still threw up barriers. One US diplomat, fed up with delays and excuses as he tried to get two students out, sat in the middle of the Israel-Jordan border crossing in protest.

Can one imagine a similar scene unfolding in any other country “allied” to the United States? In a pristine display of the “special relationship,” America’s officials are reduced to staging acts of civil disobedience to get their way.

It didn’t work. The two students had their visas revoked after making the crossing. One of them had already reached Washington, DC, before being shipped back to Jordan.

The Israelis fumed over the incident, with a senior Foreign Ministry figure bellowing, “It’s a disgrace. If I had behaved that way at an American border crossing, I’d either be in jail or no longer in the U.S. ”

Such is the extent of Israeli narcissism: denying the wretched of the earth an education is national policy; protesting against it is a “disgrace.”

It’s a revealing episode. Israelis rant about “Palestinian hate” and the evils of Hamas’ ideology — and then lock young Palestinians in a box with Hamas and throw away the key.

As one of the dejected students said, “If I’m sitting here jobless, with no chance for education and employment, I might as well grow a beard and join the others.”

But there is a method to the madness. As one of the Palestinians students who got through said, Israel’s strangulation “splits the society” as some Palestinians with connections get out and others seethe in resentment.

It is the great hope of Israeli policy, aptly termed “politicide” by the late Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling, that the Palestinians crack apart and collapse under the accumulated weight of interminable indignities.

As the IDF chief of staff boasted to the Knesset 25 years ago, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

It has not happened — yet.

Disappointment has often been self-inflicted. Supporters have dipped their pens deeply into the inkwell of Obama’s inspiring story and written their own lines on Afghanistan, oil drilling, or the death penalty — only to see these wishful words unceremoniously erased by presidential politics or the senator’s own views.

But for American Muslims and progressive allies, both eager to see an end to the vilification of Arabs and Muslims in the United States, Obama’s mantra of hope and change barely set in before it expired.

First we witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of micro-level ethnic cleansing when two Arab women with headscarves were whisked offstage ahead of a campaign photo-op in Detroit. Then we heard Obama call false claims about his purportedly Muslim identity “smears” — as if he was accused not of belonging to an Abrahamic faith observed by more than 1.2 billion people, but of slinking out of Congress to visit a brothel. Soon after we saw the senator genuflect before AIPAC and call for a permanently Israeli Jerusalem — a vision the Jewish state has assiduously tried to realize by macro-level ethnic cleansing, purging its Arab residents.

A more recent political maneuver also turned out to be a purge: the Obama campaign’s Muslim outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, “resigned” this month after a brief stint of several days. The event went almost unnoticed.

But two sharply different responses to this episode — and the standing afforded to the authors of these responses — reveal that the senator is not alone in failing to stanch America’s anti-Islamic miasma. Rather, the shortcoming is a collective one, shared by many liberals whose prejudice against Muslims and Arab-Americans is surpassed only by an apparent disinterest in correcting it.

One response to the resignation came from James Zogby. An Arab-American Christian, Zogby’s credentials as a man rooted in his community are matchless. He helped found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He led non-sectarian campaigns to assist war victims in Palestine and Lebanon. And he serves as president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

Yet despite 30 years of community advocacy and experience, his views on Arab and Muslim issues appear in just two popular non-ethnic publications. One is the Huffington Post. The other is in Egypt.

Commenting on Asbahi’s short tenure, Zogby writes, “In the brief time he held his position we spoke almost daily. He learned so much and did so much to make Arab Americans and American Muslims feel included in the campaign.”

“Then,” Zogby observes, “it happened.” One of the many websites “monitoring” Muslims in America discovered that eight years ago Asbahi served on a board which included a controversial imam. Asbahi resigned from the board after two weeks.

Like vultures eyeing a wounded gazelle, the usual assortment of right-wing bloggers descended on Asbahi. They vilified him as a closet fundamentalist for once belonging to the Muslim Student Association, a well-established mainstream group with branches on dozens of college campuses across the U.S. and Canada.

Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal threatened to amplify the echo chamber, the walls of which reverberate with the hysterics of its associates in the right-wing “blogosphere.”

Faced with mounting pressure and bereft of support from any quarter, Asbahi and the campaign “agreed” he would relinquish his post.

This sequence of events comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with neoconservative methods. It is but a reenactment of previous attacks: the mendacious 2005 campaign to oust Columbia University professors who used Israel’s own archives to dismantle pleasant fictions about its history; the dissemination of e-mails containing crude anti-Semitic nonsense sent out in professors’ names to destroy their credibility; and the ongoing efforts to publicly intimidate universities into denying academics employment or tenure.

But amid the past few years of attacks, outrages, and, yes, smears, hurled at Muslims and Arabs in this country, one Muslim figure stands curiously unsullied: Irshad Manji. She, too, wrote about Asbahi’s dismissal, though we would do well to acquaint ourselves with the author first.

Unlike most of her coreligionists, Manji has been lavished with attention and awards by mainstream and liberal America. She garnered Oprah Winfrey’s first “Chutzpah” award, Ms. Magazine’s “Feminist for the 21st Century” seal of approval, New York University’s Wagner School “Moral Courage Project,” a column in the Huffington Post, production of a PBS documentary, and the list goes on.

In an era when Muslims find themselves boxed in by political attacks here and military assaults abroad, one wonders: what is Manji’s secret to success?

She wrote a book — and not just any book. Titled The Trouble With Islam Today, hers won applause not only from liberals but other, more interesting quarters. The Wall Street Journal praised it as “refreshingly provocative” and “deserv[ing] of the attention it is receiving.” Daniel Pipes declared, “Manji — a practicing Muslim — brings real insight to her subject.” Phyillis Chesler beamed, “Manji has written a bold, sane, passionate, compelling book.” And Alan Dershowitz announced, “Manji is a fresh, new and intriguing voice of Islamic reform.”

A fine example of damning with loud praise.

What could a Muslim have written that would delight supporters of bombing and torturing Muslims? What sweet words could have moved Daniel Pipes — who specializes in hyping anti-Islamic hysteria on Fox News and elsewhere — to welcome into his generous bosom the ideas of a “practicing Muslim?” What might motivate Alan Dershowitz, better known for backing the torture of Muslims than for reading their books, to plug Manji’s effort?

The answer lies in the content. The Trouble With Islam Today is an unhinged polemic that derides Muslims and demeans their faith. Examining a few of the book’s points should reveal what has caught the fancy of neoconservatives and liberals alike.

The author devotes two pages to comparing Osama bin Laden to Prophet Muhammad. “Is it mere happenstance,” Manji rhetorically asks, “that bin Laden spends so much time in caves, like the meditating [Prophet] did?” With penetrating and piercing logic — in the sense that one must penetrate one’s skull and pierce the cortex to succumb to it — she goes on in this vein, declaring “camel saddles” and “online transactions” twin evils. The “parallels” between Osama, the man who blesses the murder of innocent people, and Muhammad, the man who forgave the murderers of his closest companions, “continue to proliferate,” Manji insists, much to the delight of the Muslim-haters behind the curtains.

A good portion of the book is also dedicated to attacking the Quran (and the Quran alone), which the intrepid author does without any background in religious studies or a single footnote. But no matter. This book, Manji intones, is “profoundly at war with itself.” Religious texts should apparently read like do-it-yourself plumbing guides, bereft of subtlety or layers of meaning, particularly if you are trying to flush the whole thing down the toilet to boost your celebrity status among Islamophobes.

Manji’s fans must especially enjoy her excoriation of Muslims as fake victims. Muslims wallow in their “screaming self-pity,” she snickers, as though one ought to see the fuselage of cruise missiles as half-full rather than half-empty as they fly en route to the nearest wedding celebration or apartment building.

Manji’s attacks on Muslims appear almost kind next to the beating she doles out to logic itself. She surmises that since Muslims have been more harmed by Muslims than non-Muslims (based on what data or criteria, we dare not guess), there is little reason to complain about atrocities authored under the “war on terror.” She does not add whether she also ordered families of Sept. 11th victims to get over themselves when the casualties were surpassed by that year’s domestic homicides — a case of “Americans having been more harmed by Americans than non-Americans.”

Finally, Manji enjoys ridiculing dispossessed Palestinians. Ignoring over two decades of work by Jewish scholars and human rights groups on Israeli ethnic cleansing and massacres, she neatly eliminates the Palestinians altogether by dubbing them Jordanians and hails Israel for its “compassion.” It must have been precisely this “compassion” that moved 23 ANC veterans, several of them Jewish, to compare the Israeli occupation with South African apartheid during a recent visit.

Now well-acquainted with America’s favorite Muslim, let us turn to her article on the departure of Obama’s former coordinator, Mazen Asbahi.

In a Huffington Post piece, she demonstrates no concern about the vilification that enabled Asbahi’s dismissal. Indeed, she fails to mention it even once. Is this because Manji is too busy contributing to the problem to pause and reflect? Or is it because this would upset her core base — the neoconservatives who mount these smear campaigns?

Whatever the case, Manji performs her predictable pre-programmed attack routine, observing contemptuously, “…Mazen Asbahi has just resigned. I can’t say I’m disheartened. He’d been embraced by groups like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America, renowned for their conservative politics and ‘moderate’ double-speak.”

Writing a piece occasioned by attacks on one Muslim, Manji manages to magnify the insult by attacking thousands of other Muslims.

According to her politics, anyone who does not dance to the detonation of cluster bombs is already suspect. So her invective aimed at groups representing thousands of American Muslims, which she never bothers to back up with arguments, is understandable.

Not yet satisfied with herself, she goes on to pant about “most” American Muslims being stuck in a 7th century — or perhaps 10th century, depending on her mood — “time warp.” Serving as 21st century America’s doctors, teachers, engineers, shopkeepers, and plant workers, Muslims have been too busy to notice this worrisome defect.

Concluding with a few shopworn words about “moral courage” and “revolutionary ethos,” Manji polishes off her attacks on the community by invoking vague platitudes about Muslim “reform.”

This is Manji’s sole gimmick: disingenuous calls for Muslims to move forward belied by support for those pulling America backward.

What does the liberal adulation of a professional Islamophobe — one openly adored by neoconservatives, no less — say about the state of American liberalism? Will liberals come to respect and support genuine Muslim and Arab voices, like Zogby and countless unrecognized figures? Or will they continue to lazily rely on self-professed stand-ins like Irshad Manji?

If liberalism persists on its present path, it will not only alienate a targeted community in America but pave the way for further persecution.

Perfectly illustrating this point is the New York Times’ fawning characterization of Manji as “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” This is very far from the truth.

For years, many Muslim and non-Muslim voices have said bin Laden’s ideology is a freak phenomenon, fashioned in the ghoulish laboratory of Cold War politics and fed on a steady diet of American-Israeli assaults in the Middle East. At odds with more than 1,300 years of Muslim thought and history, these voices have insisted, bin Laden is a perversion of genuine Islam.

But Manji argues the opposite: bin Laden is a genuine product of Islam, which is itself perverted. Osama, we will recall, is for Manji the new Muhammad.

In showering attention and accolades on Manji, many liberals thus validate and promote the idea that extremist Islam is Islam itself. Could bin Laden dream of a greater gift? Could the neoconservatives?

Perhaps liberals find Manji’s message appealing because ascribing extremism to some innate feature of Islam “disappears” from view the consequences of American foreign policy. Invasion and occupation disappear. Torture and abuse disappear. Corpses of slaughtered civilians and carrions of neutralized nations disappear.

The desire to own a clear conscience, even one obtained through the muddiest logic, should never be underestimated.

There may be other answers: a fear of questioning the dominant narrative; of criticizing Israel; of discovering Islamic perspectives; of engaging the Other, who is often harangued but rarely heard.

Whatever the reason, American liberals would do well to stop glorifying anti-Muslim celebrities and start building relationships with honest Arab and Muslim voices.

We are waiting.