This is a two part posting. On Thursday, I sent around an article by Graham E. Fuller in the January, 2008 edition of Foreign Policy: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cm... color="#0000ff">“A World Without Islam”. Fuller has a resume a yard long. He is a double degree Harvard Grad, spent two decades at State as a diplomat in manly Middle Eastern and Muslim countries, did a tour in the CIA. He became Vice Chair of the infamous National Intelligence Council-the crew that writes those appeasing National Intelligence Estimates. Then he retired and did a tour as a Middle East policy wonk at the RAND Corporation and became a pundit and author of copious articles and books. Graham’s latest magnus opus is “The Future of Political Islam”. One reviewer at Amazon.com had this to say about Graham’s book:
Graham Fuller has written an illuminating and important book on the relationship between Islam, a religion, and Islamism, a “religous-cultural-political framework for engagement on issues.” Most Americans, it would seem, associate Muslims with fanatic bomb-throwers. Fuller points out the diversity of Islam and its adherents and examines some of the reasons why Muslim states and political movements are so often failures in the modern world — when 1,000 years ago they were in the vanguard of civilization.
Amidst many other ideas, Fuller cites, from a UN study, three crisis areas for the Arab world. Lack of political freedom, low level of education, and the low social status of women. He postulates a choice among Islamists. They can continue to ossify or they can find ways to use Islam constructively to confront these crisis areas. This is the challenge of Islam, and the challenge of the U.S. and the West is to help ensure that the choice is the latter and not the former.
This is enough to make you gag.
Graham is a member of the Middle East Policy Council that is populated with experts who are Arabists and philo-Islamics. People like John Esposito of the Georgetown Muslim Christian Understanding Institute bankrolled by Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal and Gary Sick, former Carter NSC expert and buddy of the Islamic Republic of Iran at Columbia U’s, School of Public and International affairs. Check out his bio and connections on this SourceWatch entry. So, I promptly sent it off to a bunch of allies and got back some interesting assessments. This first posting is from Rebecca Bynum, editor of the New English Review on their blog, The Iconoclast. She gives us the bottom line of Graham’s pompous apologia for Islam. Bat Ye’or, noted Islamic scholar and expert on dhimmitude in an email to me simply said :
“Never read anything so stupid!!
The second posting is from Hugh Fitzgerald the brilliant Islamic analyst for writes for JihadWatch and posts frequently at the Iconoclast blog of the New English Review.
Rebecca Bynum, The Iconoclast, January 3, 2008
Following in the footsteps of Michael Scheuer, who now advises the Paul campaign, the author of the following article entitled, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cm... color="#0000ff">A World Without Islam,published at Foreign Policy magazine is Graham E. Fuller a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting, completely absolves the enemy ideology from any responsibility for terrorism. He is currently adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He argues that the existence of Islam has made no appreciable impact on world history except as a positive “uniting” force that made things more difficult for Western imperialism. I have excerpted the ending (thanks to Jerry Gordon):

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