Salman Rushdie knows first-hand what it’s like to stir up controversy in the Muslim world. In 1989, the year following the publication of his critically acclaimed novel, The Satanic Verses, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death due to the book’s supposedly blasphemous nature. Lest Rushdie mistakenly believe that the Islamic Republic has let bygones be bygones, the bounty on Rushdie’s head has, as of two weeks ago, been raised to $3.3 million. So when Rushdie stopped by the Daily Show last week to promote his new memoir, Joseph Anton, which recounts his life under the shadow of Khomeini’s death warrant, it seemed like a pertinent question for host Jon Stewart to ask in light of the protests, riots, and even deaths occurring throughout the Muslim world over the anti-Islam “Innocence of Muslims” movie trailer posted to YouTube:

Does your heart go out to him, or do you feel like, oh, this guy was trying to be provocative and you were not trying to be provocative. What is the difference in your mind?

Rushdie offered a wonderful response with which I couldn’t agree more:

Look, we have to defend his right to free speech. You have to. Because, you know, the First Amendment is one of the most valuable things we have. But that doesn’t mean we can’t say he’s a jerk, because even jerks have the right to free speech, but they’re still jerks.

Change all of those third-person pronouns above to their feminine forms, and Rushdie could just as well have been talking about anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller, whose latest campaign involves running ads throughout the New York City subway system which exclaim:

At the risk of seeming gratuitously contrarian, I have to admit that I don’t really see what all of the hubbub is about surrounding Geller’s ads. First, we live in the United States, a free society in which the rights enshrined in the First Amendment are held as sacrosanct, and rightly so. This being the case, we Americans are going to inevitably come across statements and images that many of us find offensive. Just last week, I was fortunate enough to find myself driving behind a “pro-life” box truck with images of aborted fetuses plastered all over it. I didn’t care for this at all, but that’s the price one pays to live in a country with liberal interpretations of protected speech. The same can be said of Geller’s ads. Sure the message may be abhorrent, but look around – there’s plenty of speech floating around just waiting to offend your sensibilities (see, e.g., the internet).

Second, Geller’s ads are exactly what we should expect from her by now. This is the same woman who found her fame in 2010 protesting and maligning the Park51 Islamic community center, or as Geller eloquently termed it, the “911 Mega Mosque at Ground Zero.”  This is also the same woman who called President Obama the “love child” of Malcolm X and a “Mohammedan” who “will do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords.” So she’s clearly a bit off-kilter. Why, again, should I care about some cockamamie Ayn Rand-inspired subway poster? That’s right, I shouldn’t. And neither should you. (According to NPR’s affiliate in New York City, most subway commuters are doing exactly this, “rushing by without paying much attention.”)

If only Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy and other like-minded, sticker-wielding vandals could have followed suit. Instead, she defaced an ad with pink spray paint and was summarily arrested and charged with criminal mischief, making graffiti, and possessing a graffiti instrument – all before the watchful eye of a New York Post cameraman. Eltahawy was hardly the first to vandalize the ads, but certainly the most conspicuous. Because of this, Eltahawy may have inadvertently brought even more attention to an ad campaign that should have been limited to New Yorkers bored enough to read subway advertising. Even more disconcerting – to me, at least – is that this self-professed liberal ran roughshod over a core element of liberal society without batting an eye. Indeed, she attempted to justify her behavior in terms of the very Constitutional amendment she disregarded.

It’s a fair question to ask: If the ads in question are so repugnant, why not cover them up with stickers and paint? It’s an even easier question to answer: Because free speech is so important to maintaining a free, open, and just society that we must fight the impulse to suppress speech, especially that which we find disagreeable. This, of course, means that some among us will use their free speech in a way that is not only uncomfortable (see, e.g., fetus-truck anecdote above) but incredibly painful to others. Just ask the families of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan who want nothing more than to bury their loved ones with dignity and respect, only to have their funerals accosted by members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

But there is no right to not be offended; nor should there be. We Americans should be thankful that we live in a country in which Pamela Geller and her ilk can say vile and sordid things about Muslims, just as Muslims (and others, like me, who believe Geller’s posters are truly a waste of paper and ink) should be thankful that they have the right to counter Geller’s vitriol with yet more speech. Eltahawy and others’ attempts to deface or destroy Geller’s ads have no place in a free society and should be denounced just as vociferously as the ads themselves.

In my last blog post, I argued that the differences between Mitt Romney’s and Barack Obama’s stances toward Iran were negligible. In his recent visit to Israel, the Republican presidential hopeful reiterated these similarities with one significant exception.

Mitt Romney, when looking for weaknesses to exploit in President Obama’s Iran policy, has often described current US policy toward the Islamic Republic as feckless. What we need, according to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is military credibility: “Only when the Ayatollahs no longer have doubts about America’s resolve will they abandon their nuclear ambitions.” When it comes to putting that oft-referenced other option on the table, we simply aren’t convincing. What would a President Romney do to reassert American military credibility vis-à-vis a country that simply refuses to bend to the will of the US and its allies? Among other things, he would “restore the regular presence of aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region simultaneously.”

Osama bin Laden maven Peter Bergen argued last week that it’s time to declare victory against al-Qaeda “and move on to focus on the essential challenges now facing America, notably the country’s sputtering economy.” Bergen maintains that the United States’ “quasi-war” with the jihadist organization will continue indefinitely into the future for the simple reasons that we’re not going to succeed in killing or capturing (most likely killing) every last member of al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda isn’t going to surrender. Therefore, Bergen continues, because al-Qaeda is on the ropes and America’s defenses are robust, we ought to declare victory and call it a day.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to say something that hasn’t already been said about Egypt’s presidential election. Here’s the news, though, in case you’ve missed it: The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate (officially of the Freedom and Justice Party), Mohamed Mursi, has taken the prize, edging out the more secular member of the old guard, Ahmad Shafiq, by a slim margin—a million or so votes, according to initial tallies.

With the aid of al-Qaeda “baseball cards,” Barack Obama personally approves of every drone strike in Yemen and Somalia, and has the final say on approximately a third of those in Pakistan. Who are the targets of these attacks? Suspected al-Qaeda militants, of course, and those deemed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, among whom are “military-age males … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” This cheery sneak peek behind the scenes of America’s ongoing war against al-Qaeda (or “War on Terror” or “Overseas Contingency Operations” or whatever you want to call it) is compliments of a 6,000-word piece by the New York Times and “three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers,” who helped shed a little light on one of the most opaque components of Obama’s national security policy—especially for an administration that was supposed to usher in a new era of transparency.

There’s plenty of red meat for the administration’s critics on both the left and the right. And there is, I believe, plenty to recommend from both. I’ll start with the left. Yes, as Glenn Greenwald and others have argued, it’s troubling to say the least that, according to the Obama administration’s take, being a male of military age—whatever that means; I didn’t see a definition in the Times piece—in a strike zone is sufficient grounds for being characterized as a combatant, and thus fair game in a drone strike. Aside from seeming to be ethically problematic, this revelation helps explain the Obama administration’s curiously low figures for civilian deaths. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, made headlines last year when he claimed,

There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.

As politicians are fond of saying, this just doesn’t meet the smell test. Micah Zenko over at the Atlantic has done the grunt work and gathered estimates from four research organizations on the number of civilians killed by drones in Pakistan alone:

• New America Foundation: 66;
• Long Wars Journal: 44;
• University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth: 24; and
•  Bureau of Investigative Journalism: 200 (approximately).

That’s more like it. And as for the contention that if you’re in the same room as a suspected al-Qaeda militant, you’re probably up to no good—this is probably generally true, but not necessarily so. See, for instance, this Harper’s Magazine collection of statements by family members of drone victims who claim their loved ones were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here’s one account:

I am approximately forty-six years old, though I do not know the exact date of my birth. I am a malice of my tribe, meaning that I am a man of responsibility among my people. One of my brother’s sons, Din Mohammed, whom I was very fond of, was killed by a drone missile on March 17, 2011. He was one of about forty people who died in this strike. Din Mohammed was twenty-five years old when he died. These men were gathered together for a jirga, a gathering of tribal elders to solve disputes. This particular jirga was to solve a disagreement over chromite, a mineral mined in Waziristan. My nephew was attending the jirga because he was involved in the transport and sale of this mineral. My brother, Din Mohammed’s father, arrived at the scene of the strike shortly following the attack. He saw death all around him, and then he found his own son. My brother had to bring his son back home in pieces. That was all that remained of Din Mohammed.

As for those on the right side of the political spectrum (and even Democrats, very recently), I think they’re right to complain about the steady stream of leaks emanating from the White House, which, all too conveniently, tend to be very flattering in their portrayal of the President and his national security policies. Right-wing pundit Charles Krauthammer, for instance, writes in the Washington Post that the Times article could just as easily have been mistaken for a White House press release. After all, the vast majority of the former administration officials who spoke on the record had nice things to say about the President, as did the battery of officials still in office, namely, Tom Donilon (National Security Adviser), Eric Holder (Attorney General), Harold Koh (Legal Adviser of the State Department), John Brennan (Homeland Security Adviser), and Jeh Johnson (General Counsel of the Defense Department).

But in the end, I believe the drone program has been a success—in Pakistan. Putting aside legal arguments (for which I’ll defer to the lawyers among us), look at the effects the US drone campaign has had on al-Qaeda Central (AQC), the organization responsible for 9/11. AQC has been decimated, evidenced most recently by the killing of AQC’s number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who counterterrorism analyst Jarret Brachman describes as al-Qaeda’s “Theological-Defender-in-Chief.” In the same post, Brachman questions al-Qaeda’s ability to endure without an “iron-fisted traffic cop” like Abu Yahya.

They speed. They run red lights. They get road rage. Al-Qaida, just like every other system, requires some enforcement mechanism, something to keep people honest and in line.

That was Abu Yahya al-Libi.  And there is nobody else in al-Qaida that has a global presence who can wield the power like Abu Yahya.  He could pick people up or smash them down.  People respected his authoritaaaay.

So as far as AQC is concerned, they seem to be pretty well out of commission, at least in the short term. The big, glaring caveat to the “drones have been a success” line is AQC’s branch in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Indeed, the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt reported last week that Abu Yahya’s death has only accelerated a power shift from ACQ to AQAP, which has tripled in size in the last few years—growing from about 200-300 members at the end of 2009 to more than 1,000 today. What else has grown in the past few years, correlating very nice with the increasing number of AQAP recruits? Drone strikes. Despite their notable effectiveness in Pakistan and their obvious benefits (e.g., no US soldiers are put in harm’s way, they’re relatively cheap, and they’re relatively accurate) drones aren’t a panacea for America’s fight against al-Qaeda, at least not in the Arabian Peninsula. I’ll close with an excerpt from a recent article by the Post entitled, “In Yemen, U.S. Airstrikes Breed Anger, and Sympathy for al-Qaeda.”

According to his relatives, the man was a 19-year-old named Nasser Salim who was tending to his farm when Quso arrived in his vehicle. Quso knew Salim’s family and was greeting him when the missiles landed.

“He was torn to pieces,” said Salim’s uncle, Abu Baker Aidaroos, 30, a Yemeni soldier. “He was not part of al-Qaeda. But by America’s standards, just because he knew Fahd al-Quso, he deserved to die with him.”

Out of anger, Aidaroos said, he left his unit in Abyan province, the nexus of the fight against the militants. Today, instead of fighting al-Qaeda, he sympathizes with the group — not out of support for its ideology, he insists, but out of hatred for the United States.

This post was originally published at Aslan Media.

The Cemetery was first established during the Civil War on the grounds of  an Arlington estate passed down to Mary Anna Custis. Shortly after the Civil War began in 1861, Mary Anna and her husband of 30 years, Robert E. Lee (yes, that one), left their home. Federal troops occupied the estate, using the Custis-Lee Mansion (popularly known as Arlington House) as their headquarters.  As a program from the Cemetery recounts,

In 1864, Washington D.C. was flooded with wounded and dead soldiers from the North and the South. On May 13, the first military burial took place in what is now Section 27. By the end of the Civil War there were nearly 16,000 dead buried on the old plantation.

Today, almost 150 years and many wars later, there are over 250,000 service members laid to rest in the Cemetery. Just pause for a second and ruminate on the size of that figure. A useful point of comparison for me is that my hometown (and capital of the Confederacy), Richmond, Virginia has a population of a little over 200,000. For those of you who have been to D.C., and the National Mall in particular, you’ll instantly recognize the scope of Arlington Cemetery’s expanse if you take a gander at this satellite imagery (Zoom out a couple of clicks and you’ll see the Mall just northeast of the Cemetery). If you zoom in, you’ll begin to see little while specks that almost look like stippling. Those, of course, are the perfectly arranged rows of grave markers. Rows and rows and rows of grave markers. It’s incredible. And regardless of your feelings about any war in particular, there’s something to be said for being thankful that others have fought and died on your behalf.

My girlfriend and I recently paid a visit to Arlington Cemetery for the first time a couple of weeks ago. None of the pictures she took adequately capture the immensity of the grounds. That’s not for a lack of photography skills; the area is beautifully wooded and is characterized by gorgeous rolling hills befitting such hallowed ground. Here are a couple of her attempts, though:

I’d have to say that my favorite section of the Cemetery (if I can put it that way) is Section 60, the area dedicated to those who have died since September 11, 2001. This Section, above all others, made me feel something. Sure, seeing the seemingly endless grave markers of those who died in Vietnam and the World Wars made me reflect and think about sacrifice and loss, but only in an intellectual way. These wars are too far removed to pull at my heartstrings. These wars don’t affect me emotionally. Not like Section 60. How can you not get a lump in your throat looking at headstones of men and women–kids, really–your age and younger who were cut down in the prime of their lives, very likely in a horrendous manner. How can you not get even just a little teary-eyed when you see the photo collages, notes, and mementos that those who have been left behind–mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, children, siblings–leave for the person they’ll never see again, except in memories. We saw one such woman in Section 60 during our visit. From her age and the average age of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d guess she was a mother. She was simply sitting there, by herself, in a folding chair, beneath an umbrella, facing a headstone.

I’m not sure how many servicemen and women are buried in Section 60. But there was an all too thick binder filled with the names and locations of the occupants of the Section. This should give you a good idea:

While this post is unusual for this blog in that it takes a slight detour through American history, it is, unfortunately, still very pertinent given the United States’ recently concluded misadventure in Iraq. For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to have strategic interests in the region, and will, therefore, continue to involve itself in the region’s affairs. Nonetheless, though there are just and necessary reasons for going to war, one can only hope that they are few and far between.

This post was originally published at Aslan Media.

My computer is on the fritz—by which I mean, it’s dying. It’s six-plus years old now, so it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, but I wanted to offer some sort of explanation for this shorter-than-usual  post. Not to worry, though. I’ll be able to get my hands on a new laptop in no time now that I’ve transitioned from my internship at the American Enterprise Institute to a job (that’s right!) as a technical writer for a small federal contracting firm that specializes in defense-related issues. So that’s the update portion of the post. Onto the underwear.

Here are some quick thoughts* on the latest iteration of underwear bombing attempts emanating from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen:

• Who leaked the details of this intelligence coup? As Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online points out, “This is the kind of leak that gets people killed.” Not only that, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta put it, “When these leaks take place, I can’t tell you how much they damage our ability to be able to pursue our intelligence efforts.” One can be sure that AQAP’s vetting process is going to be a bit more thorough after this highly publicized embarrassment, to the detriment of Western citizens’ safety.

• The successful infiltration of AQAP, reportedly by Saudi intelligence, highlights the importance of working with partners whose clandestine agents share the same language and culture as their intended targets.

• Could the new, metal-less, “custom-fit” underwear bomb have gotten by the TSA? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says, no: “In today’s date with all the various layers we have, in all likelihood, it would not have succeeded.” Others are less sanguine. We’ll likely never know, but one thing is clear: AQAP and other like-minded groups will continue to adapt, forcing the United States to continue spending billions of dollars on the newest and most advanced security measures.

• Finally, I think we Americans owe a debt of gratitude to the covert operative who infiltrated AQAP and allowed us to ask the question, “Would our security have detected the bomb?” Were it not for this person, we might have found out the hard way and much too late.

*Here’s some insight into my blogging methodology: Whenever I think of a good subject for a blog post, I usually do a lot of background research to get up to speed on the latest developments surrounding the issue and find out what those in the know have had to say about it. When my computer takes about five minutes to load a single webpage, however, I have to resort to “quick thoughts.”

This post was originally published at Aslan Media.

I like debates. And (respectful) disagreements. So when articles and essays serve as the inspiration for a post of mine here on my blog, I’m almost always offering a critique. (See, for instance, here and here and here.) This time, however, I’ll offer an endorsement. Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist who was physically and sexually assaulted by the Egyptian police last November, has written an excellent piece for Foreign Policy on the plight of women from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula. In “Why Do They Hate Us,” Eltahawy provides a bevy of cringe-worthy anecdotes and statistics to back up her contention that the revolutions convulsing the Arab world have not truly begun until they include completely new “revolutions of thought—social, sexual, and cultural revolutions that topple the Mubaraks in our minds as well as our bedrooms.”

I recommend you read the entire thing, but here’s a taste of what makes Mona (and many others) believe a women’s revolution is in order:

• More than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt—including my mother and all but one of her six sisters—have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty.
• An article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained … And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.”
• Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom … Morocco, often touted for its “progressive” family law … ranks 129; according to Morocco’s Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.
• It’s easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament.
• Yes, Saudi Arabia, the country where a gang-rape survivor was sentenced to jail for agreeing to get into a car with an unrelated male and needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where a woman who broke the ban on driving was sentenced to 10 lashes and again needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where women still can’t vote or run in elections, yet it’s considered “progress” that a royal decree promised to enfranchise them for almost completely symbolic local elections in—wait for it—2015.
• In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, more than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they’d experienced sexual harassment and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women.
• Tyrants oppress, beat, and torture all. We know. But these officers reserved “virginity tests” for female activists: rape disguised as a medical doctor inserting his fingers into their vaginal opening in search of hymens. (The doctor was sued and eventually acquitted in March.)

Okay, I’ve got just two quibbles. First, it would have been nice if this essay had been published in the Arabic edition of Al-Masry Al-Youm. Sure, Foreign Policy is translated into Arabic, but I’d venture to say Al-Masry Al-Youm and similar outlets have a much wider circulation in the Arab world. So it seems that Eltahawy is preaching to the Western choir. If it’s a feminist revolution in the Arab world that she wants, perhaps she ought to direct her energy and arguments towards… the Arabs in the Arab world. She says, after all, that

The Arab uprisings may have been sparked by an Arab man—Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in desperation—but they will be finished by Arab women.

My second quibble would be her use of the word “hate.” When she writes sentences like, “Poor or rich, we [Arab countries] all hate our women” or asks, “How much does Saudi Arabia hate women?” or declares, “Yes: They hate us. It must be said,” it strikes me as a bit hyperbolic and tends to detract from her argument. I’m not so sure that the injustice women face in the Arab world is due to “hate.” More likely—and a point Eltahawy herself makes—is that Arab men are imbedded in a “toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.”

Despite these minor flaws, Mona is right. The plight of women in the Arab world cannot be simply explained away in terms of cultural relativism. There’s something to be said, I think, for respecting cultural differences (France’s ban on the veil is, um, misguided), but not when said differences consist of the harassment, abuse, and discrimination documented in Mona’s piece.

This post was originally published at Aslan Media.