Countdown
You're Not On This List...
By AAI Countdown
Volume 9, No. 15
Posted on Tuesday August 5, 2008
Walls We Must Tear Down
"The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," declared Senator Barack Obama to an audience of 200,000 during his historic speech in Berlin. Though an obvious reference to the wall that divided Germany during the decades of the Cold War, the presumptive Democratic nominee referenced newer barriers to peace, saying that "walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down." We should note that Obama’s address came the day after his visit to Israel and Palestine, where reportedly he was "driven to Ramallah in the West Bank...passing the 18-foot concrete walls of Israel’s security barrier on the way." Coincidence?
Our Principles or Our Policies?
The House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight is trying to answer the question so many Americans asked after 9/11: "Why do ‘they’ hate us?" The first section of a three-part report identifies two schools of thought: one suggests that anti-American sentiment stems from a "rejection of American culture, disagreement with American values and jealousy about American power;" the other, that resistance to U.S. global leadership stems from our actions. So do ‘they’ hate us for what America is or what America does? The report quotes testimony of Arab American Institute President, Dr. James Zogby, to sum up the overall findings "in a nutshell: ‘It’s the policies, stupid.’"
You’re Not On This List…
Foreign Policy Magazine challenged its readers to select ‘The World’s Top 20 Public Intellectuals’ and even with the vast international pool of prospective candidates, the top ten are all Muslim! These individuals hail from all over the globe—Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Iran, Bangladesh and Egypt—and most, like Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and microfinance maestro, were selected for their secular, professional talent and political thought. There is a female among the elite grouping—Iranian human rights activist, Shirin Ebadi—but no Americans or Europeans appear at the top. Writer-activist Noam Chomsky and former Vice President Al Gore came in 11th and 12th, respectively.
...You’re on This One
The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that the U.S. Terror Watch List has grown to over 1,000,000 names and includes "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters’" so that even the most prominent, like Senator Edward Kennedy and, until recently, former South African president Nelson Mandela, were routinely flagged at airports. "There’s just no excuse for a terrorist watch list with one million names on it," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program, though he argues it is "the perfect symbol for an administration whose strategy in fighting terrorism has always revolved around making everyone a suspect…[an approach] based around trying to pick a one-in-a-billion terrorist out of the population."
