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HE FOLLOWING is an excerpt from a roundtable discussion that aired on November 25, 2007, on the WBAI-NY radio program Equal Time for Freethought. Produced by Barry F. Seidman, coeditor of the anthology. Toward a New Political Humanism, this portion was facilitated by Paul Eckstein, professor of philosophy at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. Participants included Gilbert Achcar, professor at the London School

of Oriental and African Studies and author of The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder; Larry Pintak, author of Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas and Deepa Kumar, professor of media studies at Rutgers University and author of several articles on Islamophobia, the media, and the "war on terror." This condensed excerpt has been specially adapted for the Humanist.

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Paul Eckstein: We're talking about how the Democratic Party doesn't really seem to be in any kind of position to make a significant change in the policies that have been followed by the current administration. I really wonder whether we could expect much in the way of moderating influences, should the Democrats win the next presidential election. Deepa Kumar: I want to connect this to a point made earlier, and that is (of Americans not having) a long historical memory. Because, if you look at the twentieth century, there is a tendency to look at the Democratic Party as a peace party and that isn't true. It was Woodrow Wilson who took the United States into the First World War, running on a platform that he would not take us to war; of course, he gets elected and takes us to war. The Second World War, we have Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat. Then Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and then Jimmy Carter comes along with a policy that continues the legacy of previous administrations. In all of these cases, what becomes clear is that while there are differences of style and rhetoric, fundamentally, the two parties are war parties because they both get their funding from the same sources. Democrats and Republicans are both very much agreed that the United States has a legitimate right to pursue this so-called war on terror. And more recently, both parties voted to make the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. That is step one towards legitimizing war on Iran. So I really think the hope is in the people's movement and antiwar movement. Look at Vietnam. What is it that ultimately led to the United States pulling out? It was a couple of things. First it was resistance within the country that was being occupied. It was the National Liberation Front in Vietnam that showed that the United States could not go in, despite its power and strength, and simply steamroU people. In 1968 the Tet Offensive showed quite clearly that the administration's argument, "Just a few more troops, a few more troops and we will win," was a lie. It really has a resonance today when you're talking about the surge and so on. What happened in that context is you had a strong antiwar movement composed of students on various campuses but also, crucially, sections of the militarysoldiers who were turning their guns against their officers, who were refusing to fight in that unjust war. I think you're seeing that today as well. The Iraq Veterans Against the War group is calling the lie to what's going on in Iraq, and I think it's from there that we can actually build the momentum needed to stop the plans that both Democrats and Republicans have for the Middle East.

Eckstein: One of the differences I see between what happened during the Vietnam era and what happens now is the enormous difference in the kind of television coverage that takes place in the United States, with respect to what's actually happening on the ground. The Vietnam War was in our living rooms every night and we could see what was going on; whereas today you don't get those kinds of pictures in the American media about the enormoas destruction that's taken place in Iraq. What you get instead, of course, are embedded correspondents. And that's a fundamental shift in the way the war is covered. Larry Pintak: Certainly in the lead-up to the Iraq war during the first year or twoAmericans received completely antiseptic coverage and had no real sense of what was going on. Now, it's inordinately dangerous for Western or Arab correspondents to cover that conflict. The militants first started targeting Western journalists because they saw them as an extension of the U.S. war machinethey saw the kind of coverage the Americans were turning out. Now the militants target everyone because they have their own media operations and they want their version of truth to be the only version of truth. But what is an even bigger factor is that the communications landscape outside the United States has changed dramatically. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the U.S. Marine involvement in Lebanon, the birth of Hezbollahall of that took place in a way that Arabs were watching, but the Arabs and the broader Muslim world were all dependent on West-

ern media for their news coverage. So the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982they saw that through a Western lens. They were horrified, but it was framed in a Western way and not through an Arab reporting it. Now, they see everything through an Arab or Muslim lens. So whether it was the US. siege of Fallujah, where the American media were reporting it embedded with the

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Marines, well, the Arab reporters were in Fallujah with the defenders, with the civilians. And this is where the idea that an American peace movement is going to change the world is very simplistic. Because it may have an impact on getting the United States out of Iraq or preventing the United States from bombing Iran, but the reality is that the landscape in the world has changed to such an extent. You have this vast labyrinth of communications tools that link people around the world instantaneously and that's changed everything. Eckstein: So where does this leave us? The policy debates seem to be split between factions that want to reestablish control by being super aggressive, and a faction which wants to try to reestablish control by somehow manipulating situations through third parties. It strikes me as a period that is really fraught with crisis and danger. While we're on this subject, one of the things we were talking about was the balance of forces in Pakistan. In the final analysis, what's happening is that lots of people who were frustrated over Pervez Musharraf's regime and its ties to the reactionary policies of the United States felt that there were no viable alternatives except for Islamist kinds of organizations. The progressive forces tend to be rather small. One of the things we all know is that part of the reason the progressive forces tend to be small throughout the Muslim world is because they were systematically eliminated during the Cold War era by the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for hegemony. So what we wound up doing in effect was destroying most of the progressive forces that might have been able to play it genuinely. Is there is a viable Left left in any of these countries? Gilbert Achcar: Well, first of all it's important to add an element to what you said about the fact that the United States was instrumental in repressing, defeating whatever kind of Left progressive movement you had in this part of the world. 1 think it's very important to add that there is much more than that actually and it's the fact that the United States used Islamic fundamentalism in order to defeat this movement. The United States had been promoting for decades

Islamic fundamentalism through its key alliance with the Saudi Kingdom, which is by far the most fundamentalist, most reactionary, obscurantist, anti-women state in the world; and this is a key U.S. ally. The people in the West do not realize that enough because when you realize that, you can measure the extent of hypocrisy behind all these speeches and discourses about Iran. In many respects, regarding the situation of womenwhich is a very important criterion to gauge democracyIran, comparatively speaking, is far better than the Saudi Kingdom. But the Saudi Kingdom is the key ally of the United States, and these are the people who have fostered Islamic fundamentalism against the Egyptian Nationalist Movement led by Nasser, the Arab nationalist movement, all kinds of nationalist and left-wing progressive movements and the communist movement in Muslim countries. And what is now going on is that the United States is reaping the fruits of what it had been promoting for all this time. Now we're in a very difficult situation. For the time being, the progressives have been reduced to marginality, to a very small movement. Islamic fundamentalists have been able to absorb or to attract, to channel all the mass resentment against Western domination, as well as repressive and corrupt local governments. And you can have a sense of the major setback from a progressive point of view when you compare the kind of forces that were waging the struggle against Western imperialism or aggressive Israeli policy in the area in the 1960s, and what you've got today. Kumar: I think the first step in actually ensuring peace in the Middle East or anywhere else is for the United States to get out of there, because it has never played a progressive role in that region and it is not doing so now. If anything, the United States is exacerbating sectarian differences, threatening to bring about a region-wide conflict between Shi'a and Sunni. So the first step is the United States bringing back all its troops, shutting down all its bases. Now out of this, magically, there is not going to appear a Left, but I think that will create the conditions under which Left traditions which are strong in the Middle Eastcan begin to start taking hold again. Despite all their mistakes and problems and so on, they've done some good work in leading strikes and struggles in the working class as well as student movements. Eckstein: But you don't actually expect that to happen; that were simply going to get out of the Middle East and shut down all our bases? The fact is everybody knows that the reason we're there, unlike the situation in Vietnam, is

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because there's a genuine resource at stake that has a profound impact on the world economy. Nobody in Washington is going to say, "Oh, well, we're just going to have to pull out of the region." Kumar: As was said earlier, the Iraq war has cost over $1 trillion. Yet we do not have health insurance in this country for 47 million people. Schools are deteriorating, bridges

constitution and so forth. So you have figures like him who have been referred to as Islamic modernists. And then there are those like Rashid Rida, who takes part of what both al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh said but offer a conservative worldview. Rida then lays the basis for the Salafi movement, a very strict sectarian interpretation of the Quran. And when you put both those in the same camp, it explains nothing as much as it explains everything. Achcar: When people use the term Islamic fundamentalism, they do not refer to al-Afghani. They refer to people that you can label as fundamentalist. That is the tradition of Rida, the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood and all those organizations and people who call for Sharia to be implemented as the key solution to everything. That is why 1 stick to this term (fundamentalism), because this is a much better term for the education of Western audiences than whatever other label. It avoids giving the impression that this is a peculiarity of Islam (like in the term Tslamism') and points to the fact that we are dealing with a phenomenon common to most, if not all religionsincluding Christianity and ludaism. But of course, even when you speak of Protestant fundamentalism, you shouldn't mix up everything and everyone who is Protestant under this label, so it's the same with Islamic fundamentalism. Organizations like those I mentioned, or like Hezbollah or Hamas, whatever the differences between them, are all fundamentalist organizations because they adhere to a fundamentalist type of program with their ambition of imposing the religious remodeling of society as a solution to everything. Kumar: I would disagree with that and prefer instead to use the term "political Islam" to describe a modern phenomenon where Islam is reinterpreted to serve a political goal. Look for instance at Khomeini's particular interpretation of Shi'a Islam. Traditionally, under the Shi'a sect there has been a tendency towards political passivity and quietism. Wait, suffer, wait for the next messiah to come along, flagellation, and so on. Well, what you see is that people like Ali Shariati, RuhoUa Khomeini, and so on, turned that around and said that, "No, actually there is a genuine position to stand up against the Shah." So they have taken Islam and they have interpreted it in a way that suits their political objectives. I think the real fundamentalists are the Taliban, the Jihadi Salafis in Pakistan, and so on. Why? Look at what they actually did. These are fantastically antimodern forces, right? When the Taliban takes power, they shred any sort of
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An M1A1 Abramstank in Baghdad, Iraq

and levies are crumbling due to disrepair, and so on. There are so many problems that could be addressed right here, and 1 think that demand of getting the United States out of the Middle East has to come from a people's movement. That is where it is going to come from; if at all, if it is going to succeed. But 1 want to go back to what was said earlier about fundamentalism. I do not like the term "fundamentalism" because it's so broad. It cannot explain the particular historical conditions that have given rise to a variety of groups and parties. Islamist groups span the gamut from the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party in Turkey, to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Jihadi Salafists in Pakistan, and Hamas and Hezbollah. Each of these groups were born of different circumstances and have different politics, tactics, and strategies. Some are fundamentalist, others are not. The return to IslamIslamic revivalism, if you w i l l happens in a modern context. In the nineteenth century, you had people like [Jamal al-Din] al-Afghani. He was an Islamic modernist who looked at the incursions that Western colonialism made in the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire and said, "Alright, we're going to go back to the fundamentals of Islam, but we also have to look at what is good in the West and emulate that." And so he called for a

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WI constitution that existed; there is no more modern nationstate. All they're interested in is in warfare, religion, and some basic commerce. They get rid of everything modern. They prevent people from watching films, they force women to wear the veil, and they enact a fundamentalist program in a very literal sense. You compare that to Iran, which has all the trappings of a modern nation. It's involved in international politics, promotes a capitalist economy, and 80 percent of women are educated. That is not true of what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. And that's why we need to reserve the term fundamentalism for those who are really fundamentalist. Political Islam, as it emerges in the 1970s in various countries around the world, is a modern phenomenon and it recruited highly educated people like engineers and doctors who turned to Islam to find a solution to the crises that their societies were in. These recruits had a modern outlook and orientation and are not fundamentalist in the strict sense of the term. Pintak: It is a reflection of the way in which we reduce things to categories, and we reduce our foreign policy to black and white. This is how we end up with foreign policies where people are being driven into the arms of Islamist movements, people becoming radicalized where these governments very successfully eviscerate the secular opposition. last year, it was a complicated situation. For progressives in the United States the question was, which side do we take? I think with a lot of criticism, you've got to support Hezbollah against the Israeli invasion. Similarly in Iraq, look at the forces that are fighting in the resistance movement. As Arundhati Roy put it, these are not forces that would welcome progressives. But if you have to sit down and wait for an anti-sexist, pro-gay, secular, democratic resistance movement to come about, you'll have to wait a while. During the Cold War, the United States saw progressive nationalists and others on the Left as a threat and did all in their power to marginalize these forces, including supporting and funding Islamists. The result then is that you have a much weakened Left in the region. So, for us in the West, we have to make a choice and decide who is the greater threat; who is the greater force of destruction? Is it the United States that is responsible for over 2.5 million Iraqi deaths since 1991, or the Islamists? And T think in that context, the term fundamentalism confuses people in the Left in the United States, because we would never support fundamentalists here, so why support them there? Achcar: Relabeling movements is not the way to educate people on the Left. You have to educate people about this very simple idea that the U.S. government has no business

Regarding the Situation of women, Iran is far better than the Saudi Kingdom,
You want to call that a leftist opposition or a mainstream opposition, it is the opposition that is representative of other voices. And so they set up dichotomies of us or them. There's no choice in the middle because those people are in jail, they are in exile, they have disappeared, whatever it may be. And by the United States buying into this black-and-white mentalityand we have historically in the Middle East we end up with good guys and bad guys. Kumar: The word fundamentalism itself comes from the Protestant movement in the early twentieth century, and was really an attempt to translate and understand the Bible literally. Of course, in the context of the advanced West, to actually do that is fundamentally reactionary. And I think for those of us in the antiwar movement in the United States, you have to look at the connotations that a word like that has when it has come from Christian fundamentalism, because I cannot think of any instance in the United States where we (the Left) would be on the side of the fundamentahsts regarding any political actions they engage in. On the other hand, the situation of the Middle East is much more complicated. So when Israel invaded Lebanon
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in occupying other countries, even if these countries are 100 percent fundamentalist. I have no problem being antiwar if I'm faced with a fundamentalist movement fighting a foreign imperialistic invasion because I cannot see any justification for the United States to occupy any country in the world, whatever kind of movement you have there. I stood against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan though I hadn't the slightest sympathy for the Taliban. Standing against imperialist war and occupation should not be conflated with supporting the forces fighting it on the spot, in the same way that respecting a people's right to self-determination does not mean that you support whatever choices they make. Pintak: The world is a messy place. As long as we look for simplistic solutions, it is only going to get worse. We're having a conversation about Islam and Christianity, so I'll muddle things by throwing in Buddhism as well. There is a Buddhist prayer that says, "May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness." I'll just warrant that if we thought a little bit more about how things actually look to other people out there and what they felt about things, maybe our country and our world would be a happier place. GI
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