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Angry demonstrators in Egypt have torched a police post in the eastern city of Suez, where violence between police and protesters has ratcheted up amid a security crackdown.

Police fled the post before protesters used petrol bombs to set it on fire Thursday morning, witnesses told the Reuters news agency. Police in Suez responded to other demonstrators by firing rubber-coated bullets, water cannons and teargas.

Dozens of protesters gathered in front of a second police post later in the morning, demanding the release of relatives who were detained during a wave of unprecedented protests that authorities have failed to quell since they began on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, activists calling for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who has served as Egypt’s president for 30 years, clashed with police in the capital, Cairo, in the early hours of Thursday.

While the situation had calmed later in the morning, the protests are likely to gather momentum with the arrival of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, and a potential presidential rival to Mubarak.

Responding to a reporter’s question as he departed Vienna for Cairo, ElBaradei said on Thursday that he was ready to “lead the transition” in Egypt if asked.

“If people, in particularly young people, if they want me to lead the transition I will not let them down,” ElBaradei told journalists at Vienna airport.

But ElBaradei added: “My priority right now is to see a new Egypt and to see a new Egypt through peaceful transition.”

Demonstrators were planning another major protest for Friday, a day often used for protest in Egypt, and the Muslim Brotherhood – the country’s technically banned but largest opposition movement – said on Thursday for the first time that it would participate.

Mubarak’s whereabouts questioned

Rumours that Mubarak’s son, Gamal, had fled the country have swirled in Egypt since Tuesday, the “day of anger” that ignited the protests. But Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan, reporting from Cairo, said that Gamal remained in Cairo and was attending a meeting of the ruling National Democratic Party. Footage from that meeting were to be broadcast on television later on Thursday.

But little was known about President Mubarak’s whereabouts, and a senior government official was unable to confirm whether he was in Cairo or the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Sinai Peninsula.

“You would imagine, with what we’ve been seeing here – these are unprecedented protests, certainly unprecedented under President Mubarak’s rule – that perhaps it might be a good time to address the nation in a televised broadcast or something like that,” our correspondent said.

“There’s been no indication that he’s going to do that. Not even a televised address by the prime minister, only a brief prime ministerial press statement.”

In the statement, Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian prime minister, said that while people were free to express themselves in a peaceful manner, “there will be swift and strong intervention by police to protect national security”.

In protests that some activists have explicitly connected with the uprising in Tunisia, Egyptians have defied a government ban on political rallies and taken to the streets in the thousands across several cities to vent their anger against Mubarak’s 30-year rule and the emergency national-security laws that have been in place during his entire tenure.

Since the street protests erupted on Tuesday, police have confronted protesters with rubber-coated bullets, tear gas, water cannons and batons, and arrested more than 860 people.

An independent coalition of lawyers said that at least 1,200 people had been detained. At least six people have also been killed.

The turmoil on the streets affected even the country’s stock exchange, where trading had to be temporarily suspended on Thursday after stocks dropped more than six per cent.

Defiant protesters

Our correspondent said the protesters seemed determined and continued to gather at various locations, despite the crackdown.

Protesters have constantly regrouped, using Facebook and Twitter to galvanise and co-ordinate their demonstrations.

Calls for another big protest on Friday gathered 24,000 Facebook supporters within hours of being posted. The Muslim Brotherhood’s promise to join the protest means that police are likely to crack down harder.

Web activists seem to have acted largely independently of more organised opposition movements, including the Brotherhood, which boasts the biggest grassroots network in the country through its social and charity projects.

There have been reports of blocked Internet access and mobile service interruptions in an apparent government move to thwart protesters from communicating among themselves.

Twitter on Wednesday said its service had been blocked in Egypt. But Al Jazeera’s Nolan reported that the site was up and running on Thursday.

Jillian York, who oversees the Herdict web monitoring service at Harvard University, said that Egyptian Facebook users confirmed to her that the website was blocked. Facebook, however, said it had not recorded “major changes” in traffic from Egypt.

US response

Washington, which views Mubarak as a vital ally and bulwark of Middle Eastern peace, has called for calm and urged Egypt to make reforms to meet the protesters’ demands.

“We believe strongly that the Egyptian government has an important opportunity at this moment in time to implement political, economic and social reforms to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said that the US must strike a delicate balance.

“Egypt is by far one of the biggest beneficiaries of US foreign aid when it comes to military financing,” our Washington DC correspondent said, adding that Egypt received $1.3bn a year from the US, second only to Israel in that respect.

“It would seem then, that the US has some leverage to push the Egyptian government to not crackdown on the protesters,” Culhane said. Whether the US choses to exercise that leverage remains to be seen.

Like Tunisians, Egyptians complain about surging prices, lack of jobs, and authoritarian rulers who have relied on heavy-handed security to keep dissenting voices quiet.

Egypt’s population of about 80 million is growing by 2 per cent a year. Two thirds of the population is under 30, and that age group accounts for 90 per cent of the jobless. About 40 per cent live on less than $2 a day, and a third are illiterate.

A presidential election is due in September. Egyptians assume that the 82-year-old Mubarak plans either to remain in control or hand power to his son. Father and son both deny that Gamal, 47, is being groomed for the job.

By Aljazeera, 27 January, 2011

Thousands of Yemenis, apparently inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, staged a mass demonstration on Thursday calling on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit after being in power since 1978.

“Enough being in power for (over) 30 years,” chanted protesters in demonstrations staged by the Common Forum opposition in four different parts of the capital Sanaa.

In reference to the ouster of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the demonstrators said he was “gone in just (over) 20 years.”

But Yemeni Interior Minister Motahar Rashad al-Masri ruled out any resemblance between the protests in Yemen and the public outcry in the North African country that led to Ben Ali’s departure.

“Yemen is not like Tunisia,” he told AFP, adding that Yemen was a “democratic country” and that the demonstrations were peaceful.

But the slogans chanted in Thursday’s Sanaa demonstration which lasted for two hours were firm in demanding the departure of Saleh.

“No to extending (presidential tenure). No to bequeathing (the presidency),” chanted demonstrators, insisting that it was “time for change.”

“Common Forum go ahead. It is time for change,” proclaimed banners carried in the protests.

Opposition Al-Islah (Reform) party MP Abdulmalik al-Qasuss echoed the demands of the protesters when he addressed them.

“We gather today to demand the departure of President Saleh and his corrupt government,” he said.

A Common Forum activist said that the staging of the demonstration in four separate parts of the capital was aimed at distracting the security forces.

One area chosen for the protest was outside Sanaa University.

Security measures at the demonstrations appeared relaxed, but were tight around the interior ministry and the central bank.

Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC), meanwhile, organised four simultaneous counter demonstrations which were attended by thousands of the government’s backers.

“No to toppling democracy and the constitution,” the president’s supporters said on their banners.

On Saturday, hundreds of Sanaa University students held counter protests on campus, with some calling for Saleh to step down and others for him to remain in office.

Saleh, who has been president for decades, was re-elected in September 2006 for a seven-year mandate.

A draft amendment of the constitution, under discussion in parliament despite opposition protests, could allow him — if passed — to remain in office for life.

Saleh had urged the opposition which rejected the amendment to take part in April 27 parliamentary elections to avoid “political suicide.”

The mandate of the current parliament was extended by two years to April under a February 2009 agreement between the GPC and opposition parties to allow dialogue on political reform.

The reforms on the table included a shift from a presidential regime to a proportional representation parliamentary system and further decentralisation of government — measures that have not been implemented.

The dialogue has stalled, and a special committee set up to oversee reform has met only once.

Saleh is also accused of wanting to pass the reins of power in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state to his eldest son Ahmed, who heads the elite Presidential Guard.

But in a televised address on Sunday, Saleh denied such accusations.

“We are a republic. We reject bequeathing (the presidency)”, he said.

By Agence France Presse

27 January, 2011

© 2011 AFP

The leaked ‘Palestine Papers’ on concessions offered to Israel show the failure of the US as principal mediator and give the EU an opportunity to step up its role in peace talks, argues Spyros Danellis MEP, a member of the European Parliament’s Palestine delegation, in an opinion piece sent exclusively to EurActiv.

Spyros Danellis is a Greek MEP in the Socialists & Democrats group, He is on the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council.

”It is presumed in foreign policy circles that when a dormant peace process is re-launched, the two negotiating sides will resume where they left off. In other words, they will respect steps of progress made in earlier rounds of talks.

However, thanks to the leaked Palestine Papers it has now surfaced that this was far from the case with Israel and Palestine, not least because they show Israel rejecting increasingly desperate Palestinian concessions that crossed the red lines that were thought to form the cornerstone of their position.

Initial reactions from the Palestinian side have taken aim against its leadership for seemingly betraying long-held positions concerning the form of any final agreement. Considering, however, the unprecedented intransigence that the Palestinians were confronted with in the governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, the divulged concessions could equally be seen as ultimate attempts at salvaging the much trumpeted but ill-defended two-state solution.

What is interesting about the leaked minutes of the talks is not that Palestinians equivocated publicly; it is that Israeli negotiators – then under Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni – refused to accept Palestinian concessions that in the year 2000 would have delineated their ideal solution.

This can at least in part be attributed to the radicalisation of the settler movement and the gradual shift of Israeli politics towards the right. But it also bears the failure of the US as principal mediator, in as much as it balked at actually resisting the radicalisation that led to today’s stalemate.

The tectonic shift in the parameters of the peace process revealed in the Papers inevitably raises questions about the ability, or the willingness, of the US to guide it to a successful conclusion. In its annual $3bn weapons aid to Israel, among other provisions, the US has had the power to twist Israel’s arm in the direction of the two-state solution.

It chose not to use this leverage over its Middle Eastern partner. In contrast, it chose to use it in 2000, and while the Camp David summit was in full swing, when Israel made plans to sell an airborne early-warning radar system to China. Soon after, the Oslo process would be consigned to the annals of history.

In the years following September 11th, tensions rose and the role of the US as mediator only became less effective. George W. Bush’s road-map failed to convince the parties involved, while Barack Obama’s ambitious rhetoric was sadly succeeded by a practically hands-down acquiescence in the face of increasing illegal settlements. That a deal was not struck despite the Palestinians’ apparent offer of limiting the right of return to 10,000 refugees only serves to confirm US failure.

And where does all this leave the largest economy in the world, the 27-country strong Union that takes pride in its soft power and that only recently launched an External Action Service and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs?

The answer probably is that ‘it depends’. The role it will play in future talks – if the style of direct talks of the past is even the right way forward – will depend on the European Union’s aspirations on the global stage. It will also depend on the level of internal consensus on external matters and on its capacity to foster partnerships.

Crucially, the current impasse threatens to lead to renewed conflict and a new cycle of extremist violence. Among other things, it is an opportunity for Catherine Ashton and her European External Action Service to step up and play an active role in the peace process, with or without the US in the lead.”

Published: 26 January 2011

For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp  avid talks in 2000, the mantra of Israeli politics has been the same: “There is no Palestinian partner for peace.”

This week, the first of hundreds of leaked confidential Palestinian documents confirmed the suspicions of a growing number of observers that the rejectionists in the peace process are to be found on the Israeli, not Palestinian, side.

Some of the most revealing papers, jointly released by AlJazeera television and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, date from 2008, a relatively hopeful period in recent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

At the time, Ehud Olmert was Israel’s prime minister and had publicly committed himself to pursuing an agreement on Palestinian statehood. He was backed by the United States administration of George W. Bush, which had revived the peace process in late 2007 by hosting the Annapolis conference.

In those favorable circumstances, the papers show, Israel spurned a set of major concessions the Palestinian negotiating team offered over the following months on the most sensitive issues in the talks.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, has tried unconvincingly to deny the documents’ veracity, but has not been helped by the failure of Israeli officials to come to his aid.

According to the documents, the most significant Palestinian compromise — or “sell-out,” as many Palestinians are calling it — was on Jerusalem.

During a series of meetings over the summer of 2008, Palestinian negotiators agreed to Israel’s annexation of large swaths of East Jerusalem, including all but one of the city’s Jewish settlements and parts of the Old City itself.

It is difficult to imagine how the resulting patchwork of Palestinian enclaves in East Jerusalem, surrounded by Jewish settlements, could ever have functioned as the capital of the new state of Palestine.

At the earlier Camp David talks, according to official Israeli documents leaked to the Haaretz daily in 2008, Israel had proposed something very similar in Jerusalem: Palestinian control over what were then termed territorial “bubbles.”

In the later talks, the Palestinians also showed a willingness to renounce their claim to exclusive sovereignty over the Old City’s flashpoint of the Haram al-Sharif, the sacred compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque and is flanked by the Western Wall. An international committee overseeing the area was proposed instead.

This was probably the biggest concession of all — control of the Haram was the issue that “blew up” the Camp David talks, according to an Israeli official who was present.

Saeb Erekat, the PLO’s chief negotiator, is quoted promising Israel “the biggest Yerushalayim in history” — using the Hebrew word for Jerusalem — as his team effectively surrendered Palestinian rights enshrined in international law.

The concessions did not end there, however. The Palestinians agreed to land swaps to accommodate 70 percent of the half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and to forgo the rights of all but a few thousand Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian state was also to be demilitarized. In one of the papers recording negotiations in May 2008, Erekat asks Israel’s negotiators: “Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defense?” The Israeli answer was an emphatic “No.”

Interestingly, the Palestinian negotiators are said to have agreed to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” — a concession Israel now claims is one of the main stumbling blocks to a deal.

Israel was also insistent that Palestinians accept a land swap that would transfer a small area of Israel into the new Palestinian state along with as many as a fifth of Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens. This demand echoes a controversial “population transfer” long proposed by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister.

The Palestine Papers, as they are being called, demand a serious re-evaluation of two lingering — and erroneous — assumptions made by many Western observers about the peace process.

The first relates to the United States’ self-proclaimed role as honest broker. What shines through the documents is the reluctance of US officials to put reciprocal pressure on Israeli negotiators, even as the Palestinian team makes major concessions on core issues. Israel’s “demands” are always treated as paramount.

The second is the assumption that peace talks have fallen into abeyance chiefly because of the election nearly two years ago of a right-wing Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu. He has drawn international criticism for refusing to pay more than lip-service to Palestinian statehood.

The Americans’ goal — at least in the early stages of Netanyahu’s premiership — was to strong-arm him into bringing into his coalition Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist opposition party Kadima. She is still widely regarded as the most credible Israeli advocate for peace.

However, Livni, who was previously Olmert’s foreign minister, emerges in the leaked papers as an inflexible negotiator, dismissive of the huge concessions being made by the Palestinians. At a key moment, she turns down the Palestinians’ offer, after saying: “I really appreciate it.”

The sticking point for Livni was a handful of West Bank settlements the Palestinian negotiators refused to cede to Israel. The Palestinians have long complained that the two most significant — Maale Adumim, outside Jerusalem, and Ariel, near the Palestinian city of Nablus — would effectively cut the West Bank into three cantons, undermining any hopes of territorial contiguity.

Livni’s insistence on holding on to these settlements — after all the Palestinian compromises — suggests that there is no Israeli leader either prepared or able to reach a peace deal — unless, that is, the Palestinians cave in to almost every Israeli demand and abandon their ambitions for statehood.

One of the Palestine Papers quotes an exasperated Erekat asking a US diplomat last year: “What more can I give?”

The man with the answer may be Lieberman, who unveiled his own map of Palestinian statehood this week. It conceded a provisional state on less than half of the West Bank.

January 26, 2011

Jonathan Cook – Electronic Intifada

Related Link: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11749.shtml

Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Tunisia as a democracy in 2006.

Former US ambassador to Tunisia Robert Godec’s ominous warnings in a confidential embassy cable about his nation’s North African ally in 2008 and 2009 have an additional political juiciness when read against the backdrop of unfolding events in the country.

“Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems,” Godec said.

And in another extract, “The problem is clear: Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while president Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of president Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people.

“They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power. And, corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, first lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behaviour.

“Meanwhile, anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”

Despite these warnings from the ambassador, it was never intimated that the United States would take any action against the government, not even reducing the lucrative business relationship enjoyed by the two nations.

Choosing its words carefully

Now, as the country bubbles with political fervour after that chain of events that organically emerged from the youth, although choosing its words carefully, the superpower has backed the protesters.

“The people of Tunisia have spoken,” said state department official PJ Crowley. Endorsing the movement that toppled Zein El Abidine Ben Ali, Crowley said the US hopes for “a genuine transition to democracy” – of course strongly implying that there never was democracy there in the first place.

It is worth rewinding and noting some choice words that former US secretary of state Colin Powell had to say about the country when he visited in December 2003.

“Our bilateral relationship is very, very strong,” said Powell. “We are great admirers of Tunisia and the progress that has been achieved under president Ben Ali’s leadership.”

Just days before his trip, Human Rights Watch had urged Powell in a press release to pressure the country on human rights violations.

And it was only a few months earlier, in February of that year, that he gave his famous presentation to the UN, about the rationale to invade Iraq.

After his stirring performance listing the conclusive proof of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and his unquestionable ties to al-Qaeda, Powell completed the slam dunk by moving towards the conclusion of his speech with this, “My friends, this has been a long and a detailed presentation, and I thank you for your patience. But there is one more subject that I would like to touch on briefly, and it should be a subject of deep and continuing concern to this council: Saddam Hussein’s violations of human rights.“

‘Constructive leadership’

A visit to Tunisia by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in February 2006 proves even more revealing:

“We have a very long relationship with Tunisia,” Rumsfeld remarked after the meetings.

“Tunisia is a moderate Muslim nation that has been and is today providing very constructive leadership in the world. The struggle that’s taking place within that faith is a serious one, an important one. There’s a very small number of violent extremists on the one side against a broad, overwhelming majority of people who are moderate.”

And with regards those within the government’s ruling elite that US officials called “The Family” in one of the WikiLeaks, who it was said are above the law in the country, Rumsfeld had a glowing reference, “They have demonstrated, if one looks at this successful country…the ability to create an environment that’s hospitable to investment, to enterprise, and to opportunity for their people.” Hardly sounds like the type of country whose people’s economic desperation would lead to self-immolation.

He spoke of a “very constructive military and diplomatic co-operation” between the two nations.

“Both of our countries have been attacked by violent extremists, so we know well the stakes involved in the struggle that’s being waged.

“Tunisia has long been an important voice of moderation and tolerance in this region, and has played a key role in confronting extremists not just within this country, but in the area as well.”

The Associated Press news agency quoted Rumsfeld as saying Tunisia was a “democracy”, but that it was moving “at different paces” on the social, economic and political levels.

All three moving at such a rapid pace now, that the geo-political trade-offs, where stability trumps democracy, despite preaching the sanctity of the latter and the policy of aligning with the best worst guys around because of the national interest, no matter how they treat their own people whose freedom you claim to champion, may be up for reassessment.

What happened to that nice democratic country that Rumsfeld and Powell told us about?

By Imran Garda

January 20th, 2011.

The idea of multiculturalism has been subjected to greater criticism in recent years, especially on the grounds that it is divisive and undercuts other solidarities of society, class or nation. But a fuller understanding of the context in which the arguments for multiculturalism arose and evolved can help both address some of the simplifications that now cluster around it and achieve a more nuanced view, says Tariq Modood.

Much has changed in relation to the discussion of Britishness since my collection of essays, Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship was published in 1992. For me the most important is that the suggestion made there – that the issue of racial equality led inevitably to the bigger questions and “isms” of multiculturalism,  national identity and rethinking secularism – is now commonplace.

When the essays in Not Easy Being British… were being written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, very few observers made these connections. Most racial egalitarians thought that “multiculturalism” was not sufficiently challenging of racism; indeed that as it was merely about “steel bands, saris and samosas” it did not cut very deep into society.

Moreover, those who did think of themselves as political multiculturalists – for whom it meant more than black music, exotic dress and spicy food – saw British nationalism as the property not of the British people but of rightwing ideologues. Their main reaction to any talk of “Britishness” was to denounce it as reactionary and racist; many argued too (or instead) that as no one could define what they meant by “British” in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, the concept referred to a fiction and should not be used.

In this sense the “anti-racists” and the  “multiculturalists” were united in their rejection of the discourse of Britishness (as indeed over their view that secularism was intrinsic to anti-racism and multiculturalism). It was these views that I set out to challenge almost twenty years ago.

At the time I was in a very small minority, especially amongst racial egalitarians. The essays collected in Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship were written in my private time whilst I was working as an equal-opportunities officer at the London Borough of Hillingdon, and then at the head office of the Commission for Racial Equality. I was forever being told that the issues I was raising were unnecessary, confused and divisive – above all that they had nothing to do with racial equality. The rest of my career has more or less been spent in proving this charge mistaken. I may not have been as successful as I would have liked, but in at least three ways there has been a substantive change in the intellectual and social climate.

First, the vast majority of people now believe that a broad, serious discussion of multiculturalism, national identity and secularism is essential if Britain is to become a society in which ethnic minorities are treated with respect and are not the targets of prejudice.

Second, in the late 1980s it was still routinely controversial (especially amongst racial egalitarians) to say that most ethnic-minority people actually wanted to be British, indeed that many wanted to be British more than some white people did, and that this particularly applied to Asian Muslims. This proposition too is no longer as contentious as it used to be, though in the case of a minority of Muslims some misunderstandings persist.

Third, the post-1997 devolution of power from Westminster to Edinburgh and Cardiff (and agreement to transfer powers back to Belfast when certain conditions have been met), reflects a decline in the frequency and intensity of identification with British identity relative to Scottish, Welsh, English and (pan- or Northern-) Irish.

Against this large canvas, I have collected a set of essays from the 2000s – including two published in openDemocracy – in a companion volume to the 1992 one, entitled Still Not Easy Being British: Struggles for a Multicultural Citizenship (Trentham Books, 2010). The developments I most focus on relate to post-immigration ethno-religious differences within Britishness (as opposed to territorial and national ones). Here the story is about the rise and fall – or at least the mixed fortunes – of a communitarian multiculturalism. This article examines two key elements in this twenty-year story: the evolution of the idea and practice of multiculturalism, and British Muslims’ relationship with it; and of British Muslim identity in the context of the larger society.

Multiculturalism: past its sell-by date?

A linking theme of the essays assembled in Still Not Easy Being British... is the belief that multiculturalism is neither intellectually nor politically out of date. But to begin to make this argument it is necessary also to understand the three distinct levels at which the term “multiculturalism” (no less than “integration” or “assimilation”) operates, which are also sometimes combined.

First, there is the sociological level which acknowledges the fact that racial and ethnic groups exist in society. This acknowledgment works both in terms of minorities being told they are “different” and (from the “inside”, so to speak) of minorities having their own sense of identity. This social recognition is sometimes termed “multicultural society” in order to distinguish it from political concepts.

Second, there is the political level which is part of a wider discussion about the best response to that social reality. The prominent answers include assimilation, and liberal integration based on respect for individuals (but no political recognition of groups). Multiculturalism is another response; it bases itself not just on the equal dignity of individuals but also on the political accommodation of group identities as a means of challenging exclusionary racisms and practices and fostering respect and inclusion for demeaned groups.

Third, there is what might be called the imaginative level that projects a positive vision for society as a whole – a society remade so as to include the previously excluded or marginalised on the basis of equality and belonging. This involves enlarging the focus on exclusion and minorities to a stage where it is possible to speak of “multicultural integration” or “multicultural citizenship” (see, for example, Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory [Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2005]).

This third level – which both incorporates the sociological fact of diversity, groupness and exclusion and goes beyond notions of individual rights and political accommodation – has perhaps been least emphasised. That may be why many have come to understand multiculturalism as “only” about encouraging minority difference, without any countervailing emphasis on cross-cutting commonalities and a vision of a greater good. This has led many commentators and politicians (sometimes sincerely, sometimes cynically or polemically)  to talk of multiculturalism as divisive and productive of segregation).

A popular-academic critique of multiculturalism of this kind was already evident in the 1990s across several European countries – including those that had never embraced multiculturalism (such as France and Germany) as well as those that had (such as the Netherlands and Britain). In the following decade, especially after the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 and their sequels in Madrid (11 March 2004) and London (7 July 2005),  fears about international terrorism and associated wars and conflict coalesced with anxiety about Muslims’ failure to integrate into their “host societies”.

The discourses of anti-multiculturalism gradually increased in influence in the media and relevant policy fields, and to be at the forefront of politics. The notions of “community cohesion” and “integration” were prominent in this shift, though they overlooked  the fact that no major theorist or advocate of multiculturalism – nor any relevant policy or legislation – had promoted “separatism”. Indeed, prominent theorists of multiculturalism such as Charles Taylor and Bhikhu Parekh, as well as related policy documents such as the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain (CMEB) (2000) and enactments such as those in Canada –  universally regarded as a pioneer and exemplar of state multiculturalism – all appealed to and built on an idea of national citizenship.

True, some urged a “post-national” analysis of society and advocated transnationalism or cosmopolitanism (see, for example, Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe [Chicago University Press, 1995]); David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance [Polity, 1995]); and David Jacobson, Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997]) – though these authors are not multiculturalists in the sense being discussed here.

Hence, from a multiculturalist point of view, though not from that of its critics, the recent emphasis on cohesion and citizenship – what has been called “the civic turn” (Per Mouritsen, 2006) – is a necessary rebalancing of the political multiculturalism of the 1990s, which largely took the form of the second level of multiculturalism in the above typology (see Nasar Meer & Tariq Modood, 2009). In this view the “turn” cannot be understood simply as a move from multiculturalism to integration, as it both continues to recognise exclusion and identity as sociological facts and to persist with group consultations, representation and accommodation.

In fact, the latter have actually increased. The British government, for example, has found it necessary to increase the scale and level of consultations with Muslims in Britain since 9/11 and 7/7, though it has been dissatisfied with existing organisations and has sought to increase the number of interlocutors and the channels of communication. Even avowedly anti-multiculturalist governments have worked to increase corporatism in practice, for example with Nicholas Sarkozy’s creation of the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman (French Council of the Muslim Faith) in 2003 to represent all Muslims to the French government in matters of worship and ritual; and by the creation of the Deutsch Islam Konferenz in Germany in 2006, an exploratory body yet one with an extensive political agenda.

It cannot be denied that these bodies are partly top-down efforts to control Muslims or to channel them into certain formations and away from others; but it is clear also that such institutional processes cannot be understood within the conceptual framework of assimilation or individualist integration. In contrast, British Muslims have neither been offered nor sought a single formal institutional basis such those in France or Germany. The British arrangements are instead a mixture of semi-formal and ad hoc, yet compose a set of extended minority-majority relationships that can still best be described as “multiculturalism” (even if the term has become as unfashionable in Britain as it is elsewhere in Europe).

This multiculturalism has no single legal or policy statement (unlike Canada). It is evolutionary and multifaceted, having grown up – sometimes in contradictory ways – in response to crises as well as to mature reflection. The “multi” is an essential feature of what I am talking about, for the policy and institutional arrangements have grown out of and continue to be part of ways to address not just Muslims but a plurality of minorities. The “multi” thus refers both to the fact that a number of minority groups are within the frame, and to the fact that there are different kinds of groups – some defined by “race” or “colour” (for example, black or Asian), some by national origins (for example, Indian or Pakistani), some by religion (for example, Sikh or Muslim).

Indeed, the origins of British multiculturalism, both as an idea and as policies, lie in the experiences of African-American struggles for equality and dignity. British racial-equality thinking and policy was directly and consciously influenced by developments in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. This policy paradigm was referred to as “race relations”, and the group that policy-makers were most focused on was young black men. As the population of south Asian origin became more numerous, visible and assertive, especially in relation to their cultural-community needs, the terms “ethnicity”, “ethnic minorities” and “multiculturalism” replaced “race” in an effort to better capture a changing reality.

This history is also an important reminder that Muslim/non-Muslim relations in Britain are based upon white/non-white relations, and that no British policy-maker (or social scientist) understood “coloured immigrants” from the Commonwealth in terms of religion or expected, let alone desired, religion to have political significance.

The new political relevance of religion has come not from the state or “top-down” action but from the political mobilisation of specific minorities (or parts of minorities) who prioritised their religious identity over that of ethnicity and “colour” (which is not to say that they deemed the latter insignificant). The Sikhs were the first religious minority to politically mobilise and win concessions from the state in relation to the legal recognition of the turban. So, in many ways, Muslim political assertiveness arose in the context of an anti-racism movement, equality legislation and Sikh mobilisation – in short a political multiculturalism.

Muslims, as late arrivals, have tried to catch up with the rights and concessions already won by racial and ethnic groups. This helps explain why it sometimes looks as if multiculturalism is a movement that Muslims have virtually taken over, though at the price of damaging the support for it – perhaps even mortally.

The event in which Muslim political agency first significantly manifested itself in Britain is over the battle over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1989 and subsequent years. The “Rushdie affair”, as well as raising important issues of freedom of expression (which are not part of my concern here), revealed five important characteristics about the politics of the emergent Muslim communities.

First, Muslim politics was not created nor desired by the state but was a challenge to existing majority-minority relations from below.

Second, Muslim politics – unlike most minority struggles up to that time (though not the Sikhs’) – consisted of the nominal and actual mobilisation of a single minority; Muslims neither sought nor received support from other British minorities. They looked to the British establishment (publishers, the political class, the politicians, the law courts) to intervene on their behalf, and some of them looked for allies amongst Muslim forces outside Britain.

Third, the Rushdie affair both shifted the focus of minority-majority relations from the Atlantic to “the orient” and marked the beginning of the internationalisation of British minority-majority relations on a scale never achieved through pan-black or “global-south” solidarities. Global “subaltern” politics had arrived in Britain but in ways that few advocates of global activism had envisaged or desired. As much as it has provided a resource in a potential transnational or “ummatic” solidarity, this international association has also made life difficult for British Muslims (from Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa to terrorist networks).

Fourth, the Rushdie affair threw up both a radical and a pragmatic (or “moderate”) leadership amongst Muslims in Britain. Among evidence of the latter is a change in the way the main Muslim umbrella body generated by the campaign – the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA) – expressed  the offence which had angered Muslims. Initially it described this as “apostasy”; realising that this achieved little comprehension (let alone sympathy) amongst the political class, it soon switched to the more British term, “blasphemy”; but when that too failed to rally support, the committee spoke of “incitement to religious hatred”, echoing legislation for Northern Ireland (and that over incitement to racial hatred in Britain).

Fifth, the pragmatists were never able decisively to defeat the extremists, who continued to have some ongoing presence. There was and is no centralised authority in British Islam (or for that matter in Islam per se, especially Sunni Islam), such that access to that authority was sufficient to lead or guide Muslims. Muslim leaders who spend their time criticising extremists find themselves in a double-bind: they give even more publicity to these extremists (already often “popular” hate-figures in the media) and are criticised by the main body of Muslims for being divisive and not focusing attention on getting concessions from the state. (It has also to be said that British Muslim political culture can resemble leftwing student politics of a generation earlier – a sort of “holier-than-thou” quality, which makes it easier to win approval for radical political rhetoric than support for practical compromises.)

These five features of the Muslim campaign against The Satanic Verses remain relevant, for they are all present today. Nevertheless, a pragmatic Muslim politics has been relatively successful in achieving the goals it set itself. The lead national moderate organisation, the UKACIA, later broadened out into the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB, founded in 1998) and came to be accepted by the government and other bodies as a leading – if not the leading – voice of Muslims.

As domestic and international crises affecting British Muslims became more frequent and rose up the political agenda, the MCB became the chosen interlocutor with more regular access to senior government policy-makers than any other organisation representing a minority (religious, ethnic, or racial). The MCB’s pre-eminence began to suffer from the mid-2000s, as it grew increasingly critical of the invasion of Iraq and of the “war on terror”. The government started accusing it of failing to clearly and decisively reject extremism, and to seek alternative Muslim interlocutors.

From the early 1990s to that point, UKACIA/MCB lobbied primarily on four issues:

* mobilising and establishing a Muslim religious community voice, not subsumed under an Asian or black one, that would be heard in the corridors of national and local power – and ensuring that the UKACIA/MCB should be that voice

* securing legislation on religious discrimination and incitement to religious hatred

* persuading governments to implement socio-economic policies targeted on the severe disadvantage of Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and other Muslim groups

* getting the state to recognise and resource some Islamic schools.

All four of these goals have in part been met, especially since New Labour came to power in 1997. Although, as noted, there continues to be a problem about representativeness which particularly relates to issues of foreign policy and security

To a degree the security agenda (which can too easily be seen as anti-Muslim) has come to eclipse the Muslim equality agenda. Yet the latter has got as far as it has is because of Britain’s liberal and pragmatic political culture on matters of religion, which would have been unlikely in an order of more thoroughgoing secularism that requires the state to control religion.

Moreover, Muslims have not just pursued their own interests but utilised and extended previously existing arguments and policies in relation to racial and multicultural equality. The result is that most politically active Muslims have, in respect of domestic issues (such as discrimination in education and employment, in political representation and the media; and “Muslim-blindness” in the provision of healthcare and social services), adjusted to and become part of British political culture in general and British multiculturalist politics in particular.

The process of accommodation of Muslims into a distinctively British multiculturalism has entailed tensions and conflicts, and there may be more to come. The unfolding of a British Muslim identity has run in parallel, and it is this which forms the second part of this article.

Muslims and multiculturalism

British Muslim identity politics was, as discussed above, stimulated by the intense dispute over Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in 1989. This was a crisis that led many in Britain to think of themselves for the first time as Muslims in a public way. With any identity, for some it will be a background, while others will often foreground it, although much will depend on context. So it is with Muslims.

Even with those for whom a Muslim identity is in many contexts more than a background, it does not follow that the religious dimension will be most prominent; rather, this could be a sense of family and community, or a commitment to collective political advancement, or righting the wrongs done to Muslims. Indeed, it cannot even be assumed that “being Muslim” means the same thing to all.

Among other things, it can be understood in terms of community membership and heritage; a few simple precepts about self, compassion, justice and the afterlife; membership of a worldwide movement armed with a counter-ideology to modernity. Some Muslims are devout but apolitical; some are political but do not see their politics as being “Islamic” (indeed, may even be anti-”Islamic”).

In light of the foregoing, it is striking that Muslims in Britain today are experiencing pressures to be “British Muslims” in the same context where members of other minorities might be coming to feel an easing of identity pressures and greater freedom as individuals to “mix and match” identities. It is interesting here to note the emergence of organisations (albeit still on a modest scale) seeking to belong to the family of “public Muslims” yet thoroughly critical of a religious politics; what is particularly distinctive about them is the relative thinness of their appeal to Islam to justify a basically social-democratic politics. In principle they could just as easily seek to privatise their Muslimness – but they feel a socio-political obligation to do the opposite, to join the public constellation of Muslim identities rather than walk away from it.

Some contemporary Muslim identity politics, then, responds to (external or internal, or both) pressure in pragmatic fashion, by seeing “British Muslim” as a hyphenated identity in which each part is to be valued as important in terms of one’s principles and beliefs. It follows that to bring together two (or by extension several) identity-shaping, even identity-defining, commitments will have an effect on each of the commitments.

These will begin to interact, leading to some reinterpretation of the distinct parts, a process that often leads to scholarly engagement with the Islamic intellectual heritage. Two such areas of engagement are worth highlighting.

The first area of renewal and reinterpretation is equality and related concepts. In debates about gender equality, for example, Muslim cultural practices and assumptions have been subjected to severe critique through fresh readings of the Qur’an, the sayings and practice of the Prophet Mohammed, and Muslim history; these readings trace the emergence of conservative and restricted interpretations at moments when other interpretations could and should have been favoured (see, for example, Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry [Blackwell, 1991]).

The second area is plurality, which is emerging as an important idea in Muslim discourse. Most Muslims have no theological or conscientious problems with multi-faith citizenship – after all the Prophet Mohammed founded just such a polity. The earliest organised, settled Muslim community was in the city of Medina which was shared with Jews and others and based on an inter-communally agreed constitution. The late Zaki Badawi, one of the most learned Muslim theologians to have lived in modern Britain, once described the latter as the first example of a multicultural constitution in history in that it guaranteed autonomy to the various communities of the city.

Islam has a highly developed sense of social or ethical citizenship. It has some parallels with contemporary western “communitarian” thinking in that it emphasises duties as well as rights. This is illustrated in one of the “five pillars” of Islam, namely zakat (the obligation to give a proportion of one’s income or wealth to the poor and needy). This requirement has an inherent civic character, in that it extends beyond family or even neighbours and workmates to strangers, to an “imagined community”.

This widening sense of citizenship is reflected too in a current of thinking about Islamic modernity, chiefly from within Europe and north America, which challenges the authoritarian idea that a state is needed to enforce social citizenship or, more generally, religious law (itself very much a post-colonialist theology that seeks to place the political over the legal [the sharia]).

The Islamic-modernity argument counters by positioning the sharia not as a body of unchanging law, but as a set of ethical principles with legal conclusions that apply only to specific places and times and thus have to be continually reinterpreted; the effect is to place the ethical over the legal and the political (see Ziauddin Sardar, The Future of Muslim Civilization [Mansell, 1987] and Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam [Oxford University Press, 2005). This is an example of how scholarship can draw on extra-European heritages and reinterpret them in a context of a democratic citizenship.

As Muslims’ discussion of these matters develops, and as their discourse becomes an integral part of British debates, one positive effect could be that a broader range of Muslim voices or civic participants are able to contribute. Such a development would reflect a healthy internal variety among Muslims (as within any group), part of which is that different individuals or members will want to locate themselves variously across the representational landscape (secular, religious, close to government, distant from political parties). That, after all, is true integration; new groups should have similar opportunities to old groups and do not need to conform, or feel obliged to conform, to a special “minority” perspective.

These discursive and institutional processes have two implications. The first is that an increasing acceptance that Muslims can politically organise “as Muslims” without any sense of illegitimacy – in raising distinctive concerns or having group representation in public bodies, for example –  means allowing them to choose the paths they think appropriate at different times, in different contexts and for different ends.

The result will be a democratic constellation of organisations, networks, alliances and discourses in which there will be agreement and disagreement, in which group identity will be manifested more by way of family resemblances than the idea that one group means one voice.

The second implication is that where there is “difference” there must also be commonality. That commonality is citizenship, a citizenship seen in a plural and dispersed way. There is no contradiction here, for emphasising and cultivating what we have in common is not a denial of difference – it all depends upon what kind of commonality is arrived at, something that cannot be taken for granted. Difference and commonality are not either-or opposites but are complementary and have to be made – lived – together, giving to each its due.

More than that, commonality must be difference-friendly, and if it is not, it must be remade to be so. This does not mean as a corollary weak or indifferent national identities; on the contrary, multiculturalism requires a framework of dynamic national narratives and the ceremonies and rituals which give expression to a national identity. Minority identities are capable of generating a sense of attachment and belonging, even a sense of a “cause” for many people. If multicultural citizenship is to be equally attractive to those people, it needs a comparable (and counterbalancing) set of emotions; it cannot be merely about a legal status or a passport.

A sense of belonging to one’s country is necessary to make a success of a multicultural society. An inclusive national identity is respectful of and builds upon the identities that people value and does not trample upon them. So integration is not simply or even primarily a “minority problem”. For central to it is a citizenship and the right to make a claim on the national identity in the direction of positive difference.

An intellectual as much as a political vision of social reform and justice in the 21st century must include these aspects of multicultural citizenship. The turning of negative into positive difference should be one of the tests of social justice in this era.

Tariq Modood,

27 January 2011

About the author

Tariq Modood is professor of sociology, politics and public policy and the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol

Beirut – In December, the Online Collaborative Club of the American University of Beirut organised Blogging Lebanon, a conference for more than 150 Lebanese and Arab bloggers, e-activists, journalists, students, professors and others interested in social media. This convention demonstrated that social media is central to the Arab world today, and essential for positive change.

In the Arab world, many diplomats and politicians have started using social media tools to improve their relationships with citizens. Examples include Dubai monarch Muhammad bin Rashid, Jordan’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah, and the wife of Qatar’s emir, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned. These high-profile people all have personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter, demonstrating how much social media has evolved. Now, even diplomats and politicians are discussing society’s problems and issues online. But not everyone is finding it easy.

British Ambassador in Beirut Frances Guy spoke during the convention about difficulties that diplomats face when blogging. She herself came face-to-face with such difficulties when she blogged about the passing of spiritual Shiite leader Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and praised him, only to apologise in another blog if the “praise” offended anyone since her posts sparked extensive controversy.

Lebanese politicians have taken advantage of this social media to encourage debate and conversation on Facebook and personal blogs, and to respond directly to questions — especially from youth — about a variety of social and political issues. For example, Lebanese parliament member Nouhad Machnouk organises a weekly live discussion with youth on Facebook and has over 3,000 followers on the site.

The rise of social media — and politicians using it — may be due to the fact that mainstream media in the Arab world has lost part of its credibility because media industries are usually run by political parties. In these media outlets the news is reported and interpreted in a way that serves the interest of the party, particularly in Lebanon.

Perhaps because of this, youth have started to use the internet and online tools as one of their main sources of news and information. Accordingly, politicians have begun to go online to connect with youth and build a direct relationship with them. In this way, social media is actually reshaping how politicians relate to constituents.

In addition to becoming a meeting space for officials and their constituents, blogging has also become a forum for resourceful creativity that can reshape social norms.

This is evident in Shankaboot, an online mini-series that examines social issues in the Middle East, focusing primarily on issues facing Beirutis that are not addressed by traditional Lebanese television dramas. It is the first of its kind in the Arab world.

The series highlights issues facing the marginalised and poor, which are rarely portrayed in media. In particular, Shankaboot reflects challenges facing youth like drugs, domestic violence and unemployment. The series depicts daily life in Beirut as well as the adventures of Suleiman, the main character, a young delivery boy who crosses the city on his motorcycle.

During the Blogging Lebanon convention, Arek Dakessian, Online Content and Community Manager of Shankaboot, and Toni Oyry, the mini-series’ Project Manager, spoke about their use of social media tools to reach the general public. Shankaboot has already touched more than half a million people, including 337,000 visitors to the main website (shankaboot.com), 291,000 YouTube viewers, 18,500 Facebook friends, and 1,163 Twitter followers.

The most significant conclusion of the conference was that no one is immune to social media. Activists in Lebanon and the Arab world use it to protest human rights violations or support causes. Government officials use it to communicate and gain feedback from their constituents. “E-activists” have used it to defend bloggers, journalists and activists who have been arrested for expressing their opinions, such as Bahraini blogger Ali Abdel Imam, arrested for “spreading false information”.

In 2010, there were many similar cases of activists being arrested, as well as others using social media to come to their defence, making 2010 the year of defending public freedoms using social media in the Arab world. Held at the end of 2010, this convention was proof not only of the significance of social media, but also of the speed of its progress in the Arab world.

by Hani Naim

28 January 2011

* Hani Naim is a journalist, blogger and civil society activist. He participated in many civic campaigns in defence of human rights and public freedoms in Beirut. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 25 January 2011, www.commongroundnews.org

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government’s actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Update (3:06 UTC)

One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Its DNS A records indicate that it’s normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week.

By James Cowie

28 January, 2011

Renesys.com