From football to property and beyond, inequality is the mother of all crises

Inequality does indeed affect us all, both physically & mentally. It's foolish to say that the poor people are happier than wealthy people. No, poor people are not happy because they have to work that much more to earn just enough to fill theirs & their children's stomachs. Then, there are education costs, housing costs, utilities, healthcare costs, & now, even the clean, drinking water costs money. Add the social exclusivity of poor people & their families due to their poverty & the life of the poor person is just hellish.

To develop & provide sustainable resources to everyone equally, the wealthy & the poor, every country needs to invest in its infrastructure & economic policies. Although, the writer of this opinion post takes a simplistic view that if Netherlands can increase taxes, & also spread its tax net, to help out the vulnerable sections of its own populations, then everyone else can, it is pretty much impossible to do that without proper practice of faith & religion.

How will religion help in alleviating poverty & instituting equality among the populace? Netherlands is a small Scandinavian country with a much smaller population than many developing countries, like Pakistan, India, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand etc. It is also a pretty much a homogeneous population, very much unlike many other developing countries around the world. Still, it's impossible to eradicate inequality because the rich control the political policy-making machine.

This eradication, or at least, alleviation of inequality, can only happen through ethical people in governments & policy-making area. Increasing taxes or spreading the tax net far & wide may help in increasing the government coffers but won't help much if that money is once again ends up in the pockets of rich executives & wealthy citizens of the country, or politicians loot that money. So, how does the general public ensure that government is full of good, ethical people? And even after identifying such honest people, can the general public act rationally enough to bring them to power & stick by them, while, they increase taxes on rich people, & use those taxes to upgrade the horrible situation the general public is living in? Remember, all this will take time, whereas, the general public will want to see substantial major changes as soon as possible.

Only ethics can help there, & ethics comes through religion. Ethical & religious people will need to become leaders & consider government coffers public money & hence, need to be spent on them.

Besides ethics & religion, huge changes in electoral policies need to be implemented. These kind of substantial changes to alleviate poverty & inequality need a good & long time frame, like a decade or more, easily. But, in most democracies, even when they are stable, a government & leader has about a few years, anywhere from 8 to 10 years to finish his / her work. Of course, that has to be done, if & when, opposition parties are silent & happy with what the government is doing (then, what's the point of the opposition party?). But, these fundamental economic & social changes can easily take couple of decades to meaningfully show any changes in the system.

So, inequality indeed adversely affects a major portion of the general populace, but alleviating or eradicating inequality requires a lot more work than simply changing the tax system (even that is huge work in itself).

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/08/football-property-prices-beyond-inequality-mother-of-all-crises-tax-lilianne-ploumen

Inequality affects all of us. I live in Amsterdam, where house prices are now rising so sharply that ordinary, hard-working people don’t get a look-in. In London, it’s been like that for years. Whole neighbourhoods are unaffordable. Century-old football clubs have become the playthings of billionaires.

And the trend continues. More and more of the world’s wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. I believe that tolerating this growing inequality will go down in history as humanity’s biggest mistake since communism.

People are essentially social animals. They can inspire each other, but they can also frustrate and discourage each other. And that’s what gross inequality does. It unravels the very fabric of our societies. It robs people of decent jobs and decent pay. And it robs them of their sense of purpose and self-worth.

In developing countries, the gap between rich and poor is far bigger. And it isn’t merely a technical issue, it is the result of political choices. Inequality is truly the mother of all crises. Whether it is conflict, climate change, economic stagnation or migration flows, inequality is always a major underlying cause.

Last autumn, the UN adopted new global goals. One of the main targets is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. To achieve that, economic growth must stay at the level it had for the past 10 years and its benefits must be far bigger than average for the poorest 40%.

The challenge we face is summed up in the slogan: “Leave no one behind”. The smartest policy here is to invest in the poorest of the poor. If we don’t, there is no way we will defeat extreme poverty by 2030. Which means we won’t generate the economic growth needed to achieve the other global goals. And we won’t reach our climate goals either.

“Leave no one behind” is also a moral imperative. In the past 25 years, globalisation has helped the world make spectacular progress on poverty. But at the same time we’ve allowed large groups to lag behind, and an even larger group to fall by the wayside completely. One of the main causes is exclusion. Whether it is on the basis of gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation, entire groups are being left out.

The mantra that no one should be left behind offers hope of a much-needed correction. It means managing globalisation properly. It means ending the unbridled power of elites. If realised, it would mean everyone could finally benefit from – and participate in – global development.

We know how to make this happen. Last year, we analysed Dutch policy to see how we could contribute more to inclusive development. It resulted in a plan of action worth €350m (£269m) that we are now putting into practice.

The plan consists of 20 measures across two areas. The first involves generating work and income for African women and young people with poor future prospects. The second consists of 10 measures to prompt robust political dialogue with developing countries on inclusive growth and development.

That dialogue is crucial, because resistance to change is often strongest precisely where change is needed most. In many poor countries, elites cling stubbornly to wealth and power until conflict, death and destruction are inevitable.

But the most powerful weapon against inequality is tax. Governments have to fight tax avoidance and tax evasion. My country has initiated the renegotiation of 23 tax treaties. We’ve proposed anti-abuse provisions to ensure that the Netherlands is no longer an attractive option for companies that want to avoid taxes. And we now forgo tax exemptions on goods and services provided under official development assistance.

At the same time, we need to broaden the tax base in the developing countries, which often rely on consumption taxes that make the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than the rich. These countries need a progressive tax regime. And for that they need assistance in administering and collecting more complex forms of taxation, such as income and wealth taxes.

Taxation is not a popular subject for politicians. But it deserves far more attention. A recent study, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee, brings further proof that higher taxation equals more happiness.

For many developing countries, the tax burden is still 10-15% of gross domestic product. According to the UN, they’ll have to raise collection to about 20% just to be able to finance their share of the global goals. In Scandinavia, the average tax burden is more than 45%. I wish the same for every country! Provided the money is spent well, of course.

So we have our work cut out. To the super rich, I say: trickle-down is dead. To the elites and the kleptocrats in poor countries, I say: there’s a limit to how high you can build the gates around your communities. The time has come to pay. Make sure the payment is in taxes.

Criminal Minds, S1E20 Quote

 This is quite common in the immigrant community in the West. Regardless of whether the host country think of itself as a melting pot (e.g. USA) or a mosaic (e.g. Canada, Australia, UK etc.), immigrants eventually forget their roots & take on the cultures & traditions of the host countries. First generation of the immigrants are usually far more resistant to this change, but their generations after them start "disguising" them to fit better in the societies of the host countries, & eventually, lose themselves in the process.

One common example is celebrating Christmas & New Year's. Everyone, from a Muslim to a Hindu to a Jew to a Buddhist to a Sikh to even an Atheist celebrate Christmas & New Year's in the West. Heck, they even celebrate or actively take part in Easter & Halloween. Of course, all these holidays do have religious backgrounds in Christianity but people of other religions start taking part in these cultural & religious celebrations because they want to fit better & be seen as a part of their host countries. In the process, they & their subsequent generations forget their own religions, roots, cultures, & traditions.

Years after Enron, business is still behaving badly

This is a good opinion piece on how ethics was the word-du-jour at the turn of the 21st century after the bankruptcies & crises of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom etc., but nowadays, it seems that the ship has not sailed much since then.

The corporate behaviour & corporate governance were supposed to improve & become much more ethically driven in the new century. However, that dream is not coming to fruition. Unscrupulous business leaders are abound & ethics & morality are out the window at most corporations around the world. Why is this so?

Here, the author of this opinion piece & I differ, as to the reasons of these unethical practices in the business world. Mr. Stern, the author of this opinion piece, takes the secular view that punishments have been feeble & lacking for those unethical business leaders, & if the punishments become stronger, then businesses would become much more ethical.

However, those punishments can only be made tougher by the judiciary branch of the government. Ironically, that branch is indirectly controlled by those same unscrupulous business leaders, who are supposed to be severely punished for their unethical practices. Business leaders make friends, lobby, & perhaps, fund the political leaders who they think will further their views & agendas in the political fields. Those political figures then pick & choose the judiciary, who are then supposed to be making new rules & punishments. Since, everyone is connected politically, nobody is going to stab anyone in the back.

Problem is that ethics & morality are arbitrarily measured in the secular world. Everyone has a different yardstick to measure them. One's ethics on a matter can be quite different from another's. This creates huge differences of opinion. For instance, one would think that a living wage for all employees should be ethically driven idea & every senior manager should lobby for it in its organization. However, that can reduce the net profits, which in turn, can affect the Earnings-Per-Share (EPS) firgures, which in turn, will reduce the value of the shares. I don't think that wealthy shareholders & institutional shareholders would be very happy with that.

Ethics & morality can only be same, when everyone, in a specific society, believes in a religion. Religion sets the same bar for ethics & morality for everyone in the society. Ethics & morality cannot exist without religion, regardless of what that religion is. Essentially, all religions preach the same basic values, so the same basic ethical guidelines would come to fruition when the society, & the business people, look to religion for their ethical compass, instead of human made laws.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/11/enron-business-behaving-badly-volkswagen-sports-direct

Respect, integrity, communication and excellence. Those were Enron’s core values, which, the energy company said, guided its behaviour as a “global corporate citizen”. We know how that story ended: bankruptcy, court cases and (unusually for the business world) custodial sentences. The once-mighty accountancy firm of Arthur Andersen was also brought down.

Over a decade later bad corporate behaviour – the stuff we find out about, anyway – continues to make front page news. That dependable, “clean diesel” Volkswagen turns out not to be so clean after all. Thomas Cook takes an age to come up with a decent and civilised response to human tragedy. And now Sports Direct is revealed to be conducting business in a brutal fashion. Boardroom practices at the company may be comically bizarre, but life in their Shirebrook warehouse is not funny at all.

The public have noticed. A survey (pdf) this week for the Institute of Business Ethics found that 39% of people think business is behaving unethically. The three biggest causes for concern are tax avoidance, executive pay and exploitative labour practices. Two-fifths of the public have given a vote of no confidence in British business. That is, potentially at least, a lot of customers.

Why, apart from the headline-grabbing scandals, is business seen in such a poor light? To some extent this represents a failure of the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) movement. Bad CSR deserves to fail and be seen for what it is – a flimsy public relations exercise. Good companies don’t need CSR programmes. They think hard about their activities and the impact they have on the world. They worry about how they make their money. Good companies make sustainable profits, and don’t externalise the costs of doing business on to the world around them.

But why does bad corporate behaviour still exist? The chances of getting found out are much higher than in the past. Everyone carrying a smartphone is equipped with a vital tool of investigative journalism.

Fearlessness, or shamelessness, may have something to do with the “risk/reward relationship”, as it is called in the financial world. The rewards for breaking the rules can be high. But the punishments are often feeble – fines (merely another cost of doing business) and loss of reputation (cushioned by a healthy bank balance and lifetime financial security).

Very few business leaders have ended up behind bars on account of their actions. “You’re going to jail!” screamed angry protesters at Dick Fuld, the former chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, in 2008. But he isn’t going to jail. He is going to his midtown Manhattan office to work for his new business, Matrix Advisors.

Perhaps bad corporate behaviour is explained by the fact that, whether they realise it or not, some senior executives are still coming to terms with the post-financial-crisis world. Deep down they fear it could all go wrong again, any time. They are in a hurry and are cutting corners. They also seek extravagant pay packages to cushion their ultimate, inevitable fall.

So, yes, sanctions have to get tougher, and the fear of punishment for wrongdoing has to increase sharply. One encouraging sign is that some responsible business leaders have had enough of the opprobrium brought on their heads by others. Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, said this week: “IoD members share the public’s outrage… I urge people to remember that Sports Direct is categorically not a representative of British business.”

He is right about that. And we as customers cannot complain if we continue to shop with businesses that at other times we might denounce loudly as unethical. We are all in this together.

My friend Steven Gauge has written a lovely play about taking up rugby again in middle age, called (perhaps inevitably) My Life as a Hooker. In one scene he is nervously running out on to the pitch for the first time in decades, and confesses to a team-mate that he is probably a bit rusty about the rules. Don’t worry, his fellow paunchy sportsman tells him: “Just cheat until you get caught.” This would have made a more accurate mission statement for Enron. Sadly, it appears to be the guiding ethos for too many people in business today.

How Pakistani-Americans are entering interfaith & interracial marriages — & making them work

In this story, published in a Pakistani newspaper, there were 3 stories of Pakistanis marrying someone non-Pakistani or even non-Muslims. I am ok with Pakistanis marrying someone other than Pakistanis. Here, I will take up the issue with one of those 3 stories. I also have an issue with a Pakistani newspaper glorifying the married lives of a Muslim woman with a Jewish man.

Firstly, Islam prefers people of the same religion marrying within the same religion. It is emphasized so much so in the Quran that "even a female Muslim slave girl is better [to become a wife of a Muslim man] than a beautiful rich non-Muslim girl." The reason is that the off-springs of that marriage, their children, will grow up to be completely confused in their religious views & may end up following no religion at all or some kind of a neo-religion, which is a mix of their parents' religions & coming up with something completely new.

This we can see in the case in the story below that the daughter of Chaudhry and Kravitz think of herself as "a quarter Muslim, quarter Jewish, & half Christian." So, the Islam is already relegated to 25% & eventually, it will be very likely completely lost when she grows & ends up marrying someone for love from another religion. They are also raising their daughter by introducing her to their respective faith traditions and "observe all holidays" including "Passover, the Jewish High Holidays ... the Eid services." Top it all of, the family also "celebrate Christmas each year" & "there’s a tree & ... presents.” The young girl is learning that that's what a Muslim is all about; celebrate Eid, Passover, Christmas, Easter. Prophet Mohammad (Peace be upon him) said that Muslims who will follow other non-Muslims will end up being raised on the Judgement Day with those non-Muslims.

Secondly, Islam prohibits a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man. The reason for this is that, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or race, the woman / wife usually ends up acquiescing to man / husband's wishes in major decision related to the family & household matters. So, children born in that family will end up with either the father's religion or no religion at all, since they will never know what being a Muslim is really about.

Thirdly, I have an issue with a Pakistani newspaper glorifying this marriage union in a Pakistani newspaper. I don't have an issue people, regardless of their religion or race, marrying whoever they want. I don't have an issue when self-proclaimed Muslims marry whoever they want, however they want, but I do have an issue when that marriage union is being publicized, by a newspaper in an Islamic country, to give legitimacy to such unreligious unions. We Pakistanis have an obsession with anything non-Pakistani & a majority of the Pakistani youths (in Pakistan & abroad) are being influenced with the neo-liberal narrative of Islam that Islam is so backward & undeveloped religion that they are willing to marry anyone, but a Pakistani & a Muslim, & some specifically reject such marriage proposals from Muslim Pakistanis.

Since, the skin colour cannot be changed, young Pakistanis are willing to do anything in their power they can do to change the circumstances to not look like Pakistani or Muslim. This thought that as long as a person is a good human, he / she is a good Muslim is a wrong thought in itself. Nobody knows the definition of "a good human". Islam teaches that whoever follows its teachings is a good human. Christians think they are good humans. Jews, Hindus, Buddhist; they all believe that they are good humans & better than the other.

If young Muslims think that Islam is a backward religion & it should be more like Christianity or Judaism, then Islam is not going to change, but yes, those young Muslims are more than welcome to become an ex-Muslim. There is no compulsion in the religion. Believe in it or don't. But don't be a hypocrite. Don't cherry-pick things from the religion & believe in something & reject the other. If you are so ashamed being a Muslim, then better to get out of it. If you want to marry a non-Muslim & celebrate every holiday of every non-Muslim & Muslim, then so be it, but better to get out of Islam & follow whatever you want to believe in. As I quoted Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H.) earlier that people who will follow others, will be resurrected on the Judgement Day, with those people. So, those "Muslims" won't be resurrected with other Muslims, but with Christians & Jews. After all, Christians & Jews are not celebrating Eids like Muslims, or Hindus are not celebrating Eid to return the actions of Muslims celebrating Holi, Christmas, Easter, Passover etc. Remember, when we try to copy others, we forget ourselves in the process & usually end up neither here nor there.

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https://www.dawn.com/news/1334329/how-pakistani-americans-are-entering-interfaith-and-interracial-marriages-and-making-them-work

...
A Muslim-Jewish marriage

When Amara Chaudhry’s parents emigrated from Lahore over four decades ago, they settled in a small American town in Appalachian Virginia. This is where Chaudhry was born and brought up.

“There were very few South Asian immigrants in town; they mostly came later in the 80s,” she says. Being different she, “experienced and witnessed a lot of discrimination from childhood through adulthood”.

She believes these experiences have informed her career choice. “That’s why I became a civil rights lawyer, and even within that I focused on criminal justice for so long, because I think that’s how racism is perpetrated primarily in the United States,” the Philadelphia-based attorney says.

She met her husband, John Kravitz when she initially came to Pennsylvania to interview for a legal job. Like many cinematic meet cutes, Kravitz and Chaudhry’s first interaction was on an elevator.

“It’s funny because I’m actually claustrophobic,” she says. But to avoid getting lost in the maze-like office building she avoided taking the stairs and met her future husband on her way up.

This was back in 2003, the couple finally tied the knot in 2013.

We ask Chaudhry if the differences in their cultures and religions was ever a concern for her parents.

“It was not something that my family ever mentioned to me,” she says. She adds that, “I have always felt as though John's extended family had a harder time with it.”

Chaudhry says that some in Kravitz’s family still seems “somewhat uncomfortable” with her and with their daughter, Laila.

She also feels that the South Asian Muslim community has been more accepting of Kravitz than the Jewish community is of her.

“John has accompanied me to several social events in the Muslim community, and I have done the same with him. My perception is that the Muslim community is very open and engaging towards John in these settings, but when I'm at a Jewish event, I feel like a get strange looks and people generally try to keep their distance. Of course, that could just be my perception.”

Chaudhry believes that even though America today is more diverse than the America she grew up in, it is still far from “post-racial”.

She sees this in her daughter’s interactions with some classmates. “My child actually attends a school that is incredibly diverse. Yet, there are still issues… She still gets teased for being darker than other Americans,” she says. This is despite Laila being “extremely light-skinned”.

Chaudhry and Kravitz are raising their daughter by introducing her to their respective faith traditions and more. “We try to observe all holidays. We observe Passover, the Jewish High Holidays... and Laila also attends the Eid services in our local mosque. But then since Christianity sort of permeates culture in the United States… we celebrate Christmas each year at my parents house; we stay overnight, there’s a tree, in the morning Laila opens presents.”

By introducing Laila to different schools of thought, Chaudhry and Kravitz have given their daughter the liberty to actively choose how she identifies. “Laila has boldly declared each holiday season that she’s a quarter Muslim, quarter Jewish and half Christian. Now mathematically that doesn’t work... But I think that’s an interesting thing because she wants to have Christmas and she wants to have Easter, so that’s how she declared it.”
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Islamophobia & a Challenge to Bill Maher - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Part 1/5)

A great series of interviews with Deepa Kumar. She puts the right perspective on how US has always been interfering with the development & politics of developing countries, especially, Islamic countries. The whole interview can easily be summarized in the last line of interview, "the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society."

Islamophobia is perpetuating lies that Islam is a backward religion because it doesn't give rights, for instance, to women. However, the problems of giving or not giving rights to women is more a cultural / political one than religious one. As Ms. Kumar says that by merely focusing on these topics & then equating these "to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics" perpetuate the notion that "all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia."

Then, fundamentalism exists in every religion, & heck, even in atheism. Atheists are some of the most fundamentalist people in this world. Every religion has its die-hard followers; there are fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhist etc. We can see how fundamentalist Buddhist killed, & still killing, poor Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. We can see how die-hard Hindus (BJP is a very fundamentalist Hindu political party) killing Muslims in India over the issue of beef. Fundamentalist Christians / right wing militias roam free in US & have killed ethnic & racial minorities (African-Americans, South Asians etc.). Their actions are not attributed to their religions & no one asks other non-fundamentalist Christians, Buddhist or Hindus to absolve / distance themselves from the actions of their fundamentalist brethren in religion.

One thing which Paul Jay refers to, which I would really like to highlight is that how the whole world has been focusing on the barbarism of ISIS in Iraq & Syria. What about the barbarism of US when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, when, as the details are coming forth now, that they were not even needed to end WW2. If one starts to scrutinize American actions all over the world, we see that barbarism of ISIS is nothing compared to what America has done all over the world.

Now, the negative stereotypes of Muslims & Islam has been around since the birth of Islam in 600 AD. They have been perpetuating these stereotypes since the Crusades when the Pope wanted to unite all Christians under the flag of Crusades & paint all Muslims as one evil group of people who have been worshipping the bad or wrong God. The sad & unfortunate part is that even Muslims now are starting to believe in these stereotypes & think that Islam is the main reason which has been keeping Muslims & Muslim societies from developing. US & its Western allies also have their hands in this that they don't want Islamic societies to develop.

Islamic societies / countries have always been ready to develop (while living within the boundaries created by Quran & Prophet's tradition), either scientifically, politically, culturally, but alien forces (US & other Western powers) have always interfered in that development. The West / Global North want dictatorships in Middle East because it serves their own purpose. So, blaming the religion of Islam or thinking that Muslims are so backward in their thoughts that this is all they can come up with, is completely wrong. At the end of the day, a Muslim anywhere in the world is just like anyone else; he / she wants to live peacefully, enjoy his / her life here, peacefully earn a living, & then die a satisfied / happy person.

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKbw4dkGQGM

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what's wrong with what Bill Maher said? Bill Maher is saying that there's a great denial of rights in much of the Muslim world, not just Islamic State, but Saudi Arabia and so on, and there isn't a lot of loud critique about it. And certainly the American left spends a lot more time critiquing the domestic right. So doesn't he have a point?

DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: Well, what Bill Maher said is a perfect example of what I call liberal Islamophobia, which is to take up liberal themes, such as human rights, women's rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, the right to free speech, and so on and makes a case of the so-called Muslim world, like it is one big monolith in which these rights are uniformly denied to people, and then proceeds to equate, in essence, the politics of ISIS with the politics of the 1.5 billion people who practice Islam, when in fact you actually look at Muslim majority countries, which is the term that I prefer, they vary widely in terms of, for instance, the status of women. In Bangladesh, for instance, we've had two women heads of state voted into power, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. But in Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive.

And so of course there are these kinds of examples from Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, where women's rights are restricted. But by focusing just on those and somehow equating this to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics, he winds up perpetuating this notion that all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia.

JAY: He does something else, too. He ascribes, essentially, fundamentalism about the Quran, and then all believers in Islam are somehow also fundamentalists.

KUMAR: Right.

JAY: But he doesn't do that for Christianity, because there's just as much craziness in the Bible as there is in the Quran, I think. ...

KUMAR: No, you know, any religious text, whether it's the Quran or the Bible and so on, can be interpreted in multiple ways. There are progressive interpretations of it and then there are reactionary interpretations of it. ...

Imagine if for every act of terror committed by a Christian fundamentalist, a far-right militia person like Wade Michael Page, who went to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot a gun at a Sikh temple and killed people and so on, now imagine if we were to generalize from Wade Michael Page to all of Christiandom, to all of the United States, and say, now everybody else should denounce this man and distance themselves from him; otherwise, you're all culpable. Now, that's completely ridiculous, and of course that would be ridiculous if we talk about Christians in the West, but apparently it's completely acceptable when it comes to talking about Muslims. And so even President Obama said moderate Muslims should separate themselves from ISIS and from other groups and so on. Why? In what way, shape, or form are regular Muslims responsible for fundamentalism any more than regular Christians are responsible for Christian fundamentalism or regular Jews for Jewish fundamentalists? You get the idea. We see those people as being the extreme wing of a particular religious interpretation.
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JAY: ... There is nothing the Islamic State has done that compares to the barbaric activity that the United States has done in Iraq and on and on, going right back to the atomic bombing of Japan. So if we're talking scale here, the Islamic State is a whisper of what the United States has done.

That being said, one does not need to hold back on describing IS as a barbaric, brutal force that the people of the region on the whole, you would think, will despise, just as much as most Afghans despise the Taliban.

KUMAR: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. ... in my book, actually, I have a pretty strong critique of the parties of political Islam, and I don't think we should be soft on that. There was a tendency back in the 1970s, when Foucault goes to Iran and so on, to see--particularly in France there was a tendency to somehow see the Islamists as being progressive and painting with progressive colors the Iranian Revolution and so forth. But I don't think that tendency exists anymore. I think, if anything, one of the first few pieces that I wrote on this topic is about the left and their attitudes towards political Islam, is how ignorant the left was in terms of, actually, Islamophobia and in terms of sort of equating the Islamists with all of Islam and all of Muslims and so forth. So I think that there is, in the United States especially, a sort of blind spot around Islamophobia and a lack of a nuanced analysis of who these groups are, why they come to power, and what the historic conditions are for their rise.

JAY: It seems to me where he is--one is this part of where he extends this to anyone who believes in Islam and tries to make Islam itself and come up with some quotes from the Quran that are particularly backward is one thing. But the second thing, which is this idea that he talks about our society having liberal values and free speech and this and that, you can argue what that's becoming and with this national surveillance state and so on, but it's still true. I mean, compared to a lot of societies, ... we can have this conversation, and we're not going to walk out and get arrested.

That being said, it's at home you have those things. The United States has 50, 60 years of supporting the worst kind of dictatorships everywhere, and particularly in the Middle East, whether it's supporting the Saudis and so on and so on. There's no support for these kind of values when it conflicts with American interests abroad.

KUMAR: Right. ... the narrative that gets constructed in the West and that Bill Maher and people like that are echoing is the clash of civilizations rhetoric, which was coined by Bernard Lewis and then popularized by Samuel Huntington, which is the idea that in the post-Cold War period, conflict would no longer be political, it will be cultural, and that there were seven or eight civilizations, each with their own unique cultures--the West and the Islamic world and so on--and that they are bound to conflict with each other.

... there are any number of problems. It's ahistorical, it's just wrong, and so on. But the problem I have with it, one problem, at least, is that it negates the fact that the rights that people do have in this country, whether you're talking about workers' rights, the rights of African Americans to vote, the right of women to vote, this didn't happen automatically because some benevolent president decided. It's people's movements, it's women fighting for 100 years and their male allies that caused suffrage, right? And, therefore, somehow to assume the liberal mantle as being the natural inheritance of what it means to be the West, starting from Greece to the present, and seeing the East, particularly Muslim majority countries, as being mired in barbarism, this is the classic language of colonialism, which whether Bill Maher knows it or not, that is what he's echoing. And, in fact, even in the East, in Iran, in Egypt, you've had Feminist movements, you've had women's rights movements, which we barely ever hear of.

JAY: Well, the roots of this go right back to the early days of the Catholic Church and the fighting against--the Crusades, and then the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it wasn't about liberal values then. It was about the true god, and they got the bad god, and we're going to fight it out. But it's kind of--the roots of it go very deep.

KUMAR: Absolutely, which is why my book is called Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and it starts with the Crusades, because every empire needs an enemy. And at least one of the motivations for the Crusades was to create this ideal Muslim enemy, which could then motivate people to go out and fight wars. But it was always--there was always a very contradictory notion of how to look at the East, because even while the Crusades are going on, you have the most horrific stereotypes of Muslims and all the rest of it.

In al-Andalus, which is the name given to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula--Spain and Portugal--you see the most advanced civilization. Remember, Europe is in the dark ages at this time, right, and here in al-Andalus you have street lighting, you have developments in science, medicine, and so on. In that region, Europeans had a very positive idea of Muslims and what they developed because they had actual contact with them. So, typically this idea of a Muslim enemy works when people have never met anybody from the Middle East or North Africa or have never traveled. And then the stereotypes can work, just as it's working in the case of ISIS and scaring people to death.

JAY: But I think one of the things that always gets missed in this conversation in the mainstream media is that these are class societies we're talking about, the Muslim societies, Arab societies. And in many of them, the classes that are in power are barbaric and they are backward and they do call up the worst of whatever you can call up in Islam, the same way you can find in Christian fanatical regimes in Latin America and other times.

KUMAR: Absolutely.
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JAY: I think part of it is ... like, if you're in any of the Muslim countries and you see what American policy in the Middle East has been, you are going to--unless you're in the elite and you somehow benefit from it, but even amongst the elites I think there's going to be resentment ... . The thing is: what else is there to have some sympathy for than the Islamist opposition? Why? Because the American policy and the Israeli policy destroyed the secular opposition.

KUMAR: That's right. And this has been happening through the course of the Cold War, when it was clear that the secular nationalists, whether you're talking about Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt or you're talking about Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, when it was discovered that they couldn't be co-opted to serve the U.S.'s interests in the region, the key policy from 1958 on with the Eisenhower doctrine was to create an Islamic bulwark to act as a counter to secular nationalism. And you read some of the accounts of what the CIA is doing, and they're putting poison into Nasser's cigarettes, they're trying to put poison into his chocolates, some of these sorts of awful things that you think happen only in the movies. But at a very systemic level what they're doing is funding and sponsoring all sorts of radical Islamist groups, all the way from Iran and across the region.

JAY: Well, and most importantly it starts with Roosevelt, the deal with the Sauds. I mean, the Saudis are the heart of all of this. And this was the deal, that the Saudis would use the defense of Mecca to be the force to spread Wahhabism throughout the region, and all this extremism is part of American policy.

KUMAR: Absolutely. In fact, the language that they used in the State Department is that they wanted the Saudi monarch to be an Islamic Pope and to use the legitimacy of being the guardians of Mecca and Medina to actually push people away from secularism. So absolutely. And Saudi Arabia had a very systematic program of Islamization, whether it was distributing Qurans for free, whether it was giving tons of petrodollars for setting up madrasas all over. Not just in the Middle East, but even in Pakistan they set up schools and colleges and send their preachers there and so forth. And the end result is the mujahideen, is al-Qaeda.

And, I mean, I think that's really important to bring up, because there's a tendency to somehow think of the parties of political Islam as being the sort of logical outcome of this region -- this is all that Muslims can produce. But if you don't talk about how left secular alternatives were systematically crushed by the U.S., by Saudi Arabia, by Israel, and so on, then you don't get a sense that these are people just like anybody else who have a range of politics.

JAY: And not only left-secular; they destroyed in Afghanistan a more normal capitalist development. They had a king that was a modernizer. They wanted to have a more modern capitalism. And they threw it all out the window to suck Russia into a war and then arming all the jihadists and, village elders who didn't know anything, give them rocket launchers, and they become the new powerbrokers. And then you wonder where the Taliban comes from.

KUMAR: Right. In fact, every single reformist and pro-democratic movement that has come into being in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. has always been on the wrong side of it, even in Saudi Arabia. There was a modest movement called the Free Princes Movement, where they wanted a constitutional monarchy. Would the U.S. have any of it? Absolutely not. They immediately dispatched forces to make sure these forces are marginalized. There was a workers movement in the Shia eastern region trying to form unions, but Aramco, at that time American-owned, would have none of it. And so they got rid of that. So every step towards creating rights for a whole group of people, from workers to women and so on and so forth, the U.S. is always been on the wrong side, including after the Arab Spring of 2011, right? So you look at the role that the U.S. is played: support the dictators till the very last second, and then back to counterrevolutionaries, whether it's Egypt and the military or it's giving the green light to Saudi Arabia to crush the resistance in Bahrain, what have you.

And so I think that framework is important, because then you start to see that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society.