16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learnt a Lot, April 2, 2005
This review is from: Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali (Paperback)
As a solitary, anguished New Yorker, afflicted by the nightmares of this world, I found the Ali-Barsamian conversation both refreshing and cheery. To be honest I learnt a great deal and can now read the NYT more critically. I have never read such material on Pakistan, Iraq and, yes, Israel. I am not Jewish, but have been sympathetic to Israel because of the past. No longer. The flow of the conversation is hypnotic and I strongly agreed with Eduardo Galeano's cover comment referring to the book as a feast to which all are invited...a comment, incidentally, which attracted me to the book in the first place.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Calm, intelligent, erudite...., June 14, 2006
This review is from: Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali (Paperback)
The American public, Ali notes, rarely have their media place American foreign policy in historical context. How did terrorist Muslim fundamentalism arise? Well, the U.S. encouraged it, funded it, in the Muslim world during the Cold War, against such Arab nationalists like Nasser who threatened U.S. hegemony over the oil supply.. The modern fundamentalist movement in Indonesia blossomed when the U.S. backed General Suharto seized power in 1965 and the CIA gave lists of suspected communists, to Muslim fundamentalist groups in the country. Such groups and the Indonesian mlilitary massacred about one million people, mostly poor peasants. Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, also had the largest Communist party in the world outside of the Soviet Union and China. However, with Suharto's massacres, the secular left in Indonesia was crushed and Muslim fundamentalists were left as the only alternative to the barbaric Suharto regime. Hence today, Muslim fundamentalists, including the Al Qaeda elements among them, are the pre-dominant opposition groups in Indonesia. In Egypt, the late President Sadat used Muslim fundamentalists to crush his secular leftist opponents. In Pakistan, Ali writes, Muslim fundamentalists gained influence by the use of the weapons and money that was being funneled throughout Pakistan throughout the 1980's because of the Afghan war. Such groups have been rampaging about the country terrorizing people, part of the reason why Pakistan is such a basket case now.
Then there was Afghanistan. From 1979-92, the U.S., directly and indirectly through the Pakistani military, gave a couple billion dollars to the Afghan Muslim funamentalist warlords and "Arab Afghan" fighters such as those led by Bin Laden. These groups, of course, later morphed into groups like Al Qaeda. Ali notes that Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, bragged to a French newspaper in the late 90's, about his role in causing the Soviet Union to collapse by his support of this war. When asked about the side affects of these activities--the formation of the Taliban, the unleashing of Bin Laden, etc--Brzezinski declared to the effect that the collapse of the Soviet Union was more important than "a few stirred up Muslims." Zbig, the great warrior, of course, made these comments before 9-11.
Religious fundamentalism has arisen to pre-dominance because secular possibilities for reform have been destroyed. Certainly the corporate globalization policies enforced by the IMF and World Bank, make the possibilities for attacking concentrated economic power in the third world, very limited. So secular politicians (Ali gives the example of the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments in Pakistan) have mainly devoted themselves to embezzling and getting favors from foreign corporations and the U.S. In free market India, the Hindu fundamentalist party BJP which was in power from 1998-2005, distracted the increasingly impoverished Hindu masses, by turning them against the even worse impoverished Indian Muslim population. A prime result of this was the massacre of several thousand Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat, by Hindu mobs in early 2002, as the BJP controlled state government and police authorities sat by and watched and encouraged them. V.S. Naipaul was initially friendly to the BJP, Ali says, but was not in favor of the Gujarat butchery.
Islamic terror will continue as long as major grievances exist. Ali quotes former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg as pointing out that so long as Israel makes life unbearable for Palestinians, with the "collective punishments," the virtual elimination of economic activity, letting people die for want of medical attention while they wait five hours at check points, imprisoned without charge and tortured, etc., some Palestinians are going to be motivated to engage in suicide bombing.. Moreover ,Ali notes, a rallying cry against the U.S. will be lost by terrorist groups, when the U.S. stops giving military weapons to Israel to use to torture and kill Palestinians on Palestinian land and steal all their water and land. The Palestinian "state," the Oslo accords envisioned, and what the Camp David offer of 2000 consisted, much deceit to the contrary, is essentially the plan of the "Kadima" government today i.e. imprisoning Palestinians within isolated ghettos in the West Bank and imprisoning in the hellhole of Gaza while Israel steals all the resources,.
The ability to quell revolutions against oligarchies in the area, is part of the reason why the U.S. keeps its largest military base outside the U.S. in Ureid, Qatar, Ali notes. The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan is one of these cases, Ali notes. In the 60's, when Nasser's favorite journalist Mohammed Heikal was publicly making fun of King Hussein for turning Jordan into an American protectorate, the immortal King pointed out how the Ba'ath party in Iraq (pro-Nasser at the time), came to power in 1963, with American aid. The CIA provided lists of suspected Communists for the party, of whom Saddam Hussein was then head of security, to kill. King Hussein himself was getting lots of CIA aid at the time, so he was in a position to know.
The importance of education about the merits and future contours of a socialist society, is critical, Ali writes. When unrestrained free market policies caused a severe economic depression in Argentina in late 2001, revolutionary-style neighborhood assemblies were formed and stuff, but there was no real idea about what should happen next, so the old regime was essentially able to regain power, while promising to avoid adhering to IMF dictates.
We really need is a mass anti-imperialist movement, comprising people who are not necessarily socialists but still decent nonetheless. We need something along the lines of the American Anti-Imperialist league of which Mark Twain was such a powerful voice or along the lines of the movement calling attention to the killing of millions of Congolese at the turn of the twentieth century by the Belgians.
Ali has some very harsh words for the "House Arab" intellectuals. He discusses the relationship of literature to culture and politics in the Arab world...
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A COURAGEOUS AND EXCITING BOOK, April 2, 2005
This review is from: Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali (Paperback)
I had not read any books by Tariq Ali, but now intend to do so.Usually I read him on the Counterpunch website, but here he expands at length on many themes, including the role of poetry.
As a person of Jewish origin I was especially pleased by what he wrote in this book on Israel and the fact that he quoted Israeli dissident and newspapers to support his argument, something rarely done in the US press or even in the Italian media (I live in Rome). I am well aware that those of us who criticize Israel are often described as 'self-hating Jews'. I don't hate myself but I do hate those who coined the phrase. Ali's description of Zionism is hardly a surprise and I would recommend his detractors to read 'Zionism contra Israel' by Nathan Weinstock which I read in a Maspero edition during my teen years in Paris a long time ago.
I also greatly enjoyed Ali's blunt and refreshing remarks about the 'house Arabs'....Fouad Ajami and Kanaan Makiya....does that make him a 'self-hating Arab'?
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