>I just discovered Juan Cole and his excellent blog Informed Comment. Read an interview with Cole here, where he talks about his new book Engaging the Muslim World, and check out his speech in the video below (what I write in this article is pretty much what he says in his first part of the video).

In his book he calls for a different kind of relationship between the United States and the Muslim majority states than what we’ve been seeing in recent years. The US, from the point of view of the Muslim world (and pretty much the whole wide world), has been acting aggressively in the region. It’s quite obvious that US policy is not a force for stability.

A lot of US policy is made on poor information, poor perception and poor judgement about the Muslim world, and you see this everyday when people are discussing Muslim issues. Even when people you thought was intellectually aware of some of the things going on in the world, you get these prejudiced comments that just reeks of fear and ignorance. Check the commentary discussions here (in Swedish) for an excellent example.

Juan Cole clearly admits that there’s a lot to be done when it comes to equal rights, gender segregation and so forth in the Muslim world, but the real question to start with is this: ”How shall these problems be adressed?”
The idea that the United States can liberate Muslim women by force of arms, which has been openly and frankly stated by US military officers and so forth, is bizarre. Cole says: ”I grew up on army bases and I love the US military, but it is not liberated with regard to views of women. The idea that they’re going to liberate women is a little bit…unlikely”.
To say the least.

An interesting Bin Laden quote:
”If I hated the Western way of life I would have hit Sweden”.

The fundamentalists do not hate the US way of life. They hate the American policy, and the specific policies they don’t like is Israel-Palestine, Iraq and to some extent the Afghanistan war. It’s hard not to blame them for hating that. Too bad they are forced to violence to get their point across.

Cole is confident that the US withdrawal from Iraq will be welcomed by the Muslim world and bring new opportunities for repairing US’ relationship with those countries. However, something must be done about Palestine. We haven’t seen much there at all. People are waiting to see practical steps.

Gaza is a humanitarian disaster, and it is the result of deliberate policy. Also, it’s an obvious warcrime going on over there. They are starving Palestine’s children to get a political result, which is just sickening. And now the Israelis have plans for 75 000 new housing units in the West Bank, and Hillary Clinton says: ”We’re gonna restart the peace process”.
How the hell can you have a peace process when there’s land theft going on in front of everybody’s eyes?
The right wing government forming in Israel right now has clearly rejected the whole idea of giving back the West Bank. That issue will continue to fester and it will continue to cause terrorism.

Cole says that Israeli policy is digging its own grave and soon must suffer sanctions from Europe. Its economy is dependent on its relationship (economic, technological and diplomatic) with Europe and Israel simply cannot ignore sanctions. The problem is that it’s not happening.

Fact is that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are stateless.
Cole says:
”The minimum necessity for a dignified life in the contemporary world is citizenship in a state. Without citizenship, without a state, an individual has no real rights. You can see this, because Palestinian property is being taken at will everyday. It’s unacceptable that 3,5 million people in the West Bank and Gaza should be without citizenship, nor that refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere remain that way. And you know, it’s ironic because in 1938-39 Hitler stripped the Jews in Czechoslovakia from citizenship and they became stateless. And at the same time in 1939 the British government called for restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. And there was an uproar that you now have 100 000 newly stateless Jews and the British are not letting them go to the one place where they could get papers. So statelessness was a human rights issue in 1938-39. Statelessness should be a human rights issue today”.