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Stunning New Print Edition of CounterPunch Will the US Labor Movement Rise Again in Chicago? Or is this just a power play at the top? JoAnn Wypijewski details what's really at stake in the great showdown as some of labor's most powerful bosses threaten to quit the AFL-CIO. No-holds-barred profiles of the SIEU's Andy Stern, Hoffa of the Teamsters and the other "insurgents". Jeffrey St Clair tells the incredible saga of the $30 billion bailout of Boeing. How the scandal reached the White House and Don Rumsfeld screamed, Let the woman take the fall. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the Judy Miller story. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch's Hot New T-Shirts for Women! Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by Kathy Kelly Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories July 18, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Can Congressional Republicans End Bush's Wars?   July 15 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Don't You Dare Call It Treason Jeffrey St. Clair Sticky Fingers: the Making of Halliburton Paul Craig Roberts Economic Treason Harry Browne "What They Do to Us, They Will Do to You": Shell Oil in Mayo, Ireland Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron A Warning from Israel Andrew Rubin End of the Enlightenment: an Open Letter to Stephen Plaut Patrick Cockburn Iraq's Ghost Battalions J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Changes in Selma: Standing Up to Racism in the South Fred Gardner A Professional Bust Christopher Brauchli An Olympic Feat: How to "Double" Aid with No New Money Chris Floyd The Great Iraq Oil Giveaway Ben Tripp The Dark Incontinent Col. Dan Smith General Abizaid, I'm Glad You Asked Jason Leopold What Did Rove Say and When Did He Say It? Jack Random Miller Time Norman Solomon War and Venture Capitalism George Ochenski Liberate Montana's Rivers: Come One, Come All! Website of the Weekend Vote for CounterPuncher David Vest   July 14, 2005 Jeffrey St. Clair Sticky Fingers: the Making of Halliburton Subcomandante Marcos This is What Will Do and How We Shall Do It: the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona Dave Lindorff No More Moral Relativism: the US is a Terrorist State Joshua Frank Rove Agency: Liberals and the CIA Jude Wanniski Those 8 Black Pages: What's the Real Story on Karl Rove? Dave Zirin Storming the Castle Kevin Zeese Exit Strategy: Within Reach? Robert Jensen War Myths and the Press Reza Fiyouzat A Worldwide Call to Free Akbar Ganji Carol Norris Governor Paranoid: Schwarzenegger Comes Unhinged Website of the Day Nate Osborn: Heroic Human Rights Activist and CounterPuncher   July 13, 2005 Brian Cloughley Cold Blooded Murders in Iraq George Galloway We Can't Separate the London Bombings from the Political Backdrop Carlos Fierro A Supreme Waste of Time Sarah Knopp Hate on the Border Norman Solomon "Isolated Pockets of Problems": the Fake Optimism of Washington's Warriors Mickey Z. Water on the Brain Jim Minick The Right Tree in the Right Place Pat Williams American Indian Education for All Andrew N. Rubin Life Behind the Wall: "We are No Longer Able to See the Sun Set" Website of the Day "London's Burning": the Mikey Mix   July 12, 2005 Laith al-Saud Voices of Resistance: an Interview with Dr. Mohammed al-Obaidi of Iraq's Peoples' Struggle Movement Kara N. Tina "This is How We Do It": Report from the Gleneagles Battlefield William A. Cook The London Bombings: Why Has It Come to This? Jack Bratich 2 Live Cruise: Tom Cruise v. Big Pharma Amina Mire The Problem with Speaking in the Name of Others Dick J. Reavis Lessons from the Christian Jihadists: the Virtues of Burning Crosses and Colored Smoke Kevin Zeese Depleted Uranium: States Take Action to Protect Their Vets Paul Craig Roberts No-Think Nation Website of the Day Coke Gags Indian Artist   July 9 / 11, 2005 Alexander Cockburn After the Bombings Uri Avnery War of the Colors in Israel Sheldon Rampton Blaming Galloway: Rhetoric vs. Reality in London Bill Christison Hiroshima's 60th Anniversary and Nukes in Iran: an Opportunity or Just More Hand-wringing from the Peace Movement? Robert Fisk Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed Stephen Winspear Collateral Damage in London? Saul Landau Mission Accomplished: Iraq is Broken Behrooz Ghamari Thomas Friedman's Muslim Problem Karl Beitel False Promises and Real Debt Relief Brian Concannon, Jr. Throwing Gasoline on Haiti's Fires Fred Gardner Sentencing Season John Whitlow And What Does the Market Say? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The London Blasts: Who's Being Transformed, Them or Us? Lila Rajiva Witches and Bastards Laura Carlsen CAFTA: Deepening the Inequities Jackie Corr Ted Turner and Jiminy Cricket Dave Lindorff "My Brother Went Over There Gung Ho; Now He's Just Bitter" N. D. Jayaprakash Why the CIA Tried to Kill Chou En Lai at the Bandung Conference Seth Sandronsky Meet the "Truth Tour": Rightwing Radio Hosts Go to Iraq Norman Madarasz The Choking of Brazil's Worker Party Ben Tripp The Inevitability of George W. Bush Poets' Basement Louise, Albert, Landau, Davies and Engel Website of the Weekend The Mother of All Enemies Lists   July 8, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception Tariq Ali The London Bombings: Why They Happened Monica Benderman One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality Rick Jahnkow Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement Christopher Brauchli Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra Kim Peterson Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror Joshua Frank Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments? Norman Solomon Messages from the Carnage Website of the Day An Interview with Ray McGovern July 7, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr John Walsh More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry Mike Marqusee Message from London Gilad Atzmon London's Burning Nicole Colson Showdown at the Supreme Court Jack Random Judith Miller, Anti-Hero Norman Solomon Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War Len Colodny Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig? Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr     July 6, 2005 Elaine Cassel Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair Sean Donahue Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor Jeremy R. Hammond State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard Joshua Frank Will Rove be Indicted? Ali Khan The "Gift" of US Democratization Michael Dickinson Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers Norman Solomon How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility Dave Zirin Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad Gary Leupp Accusing Ahmadinejad Website of the Day Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"     July 5, 2005 Behrooz Ghamari What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency Elaine Cassel Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor Ron Jacobs Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice Bob Libal The Right's Assault on Academia Dr. Peter Rost Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO Mark Engler The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee? Gideon Levy They Broke the Public's Heart Dave Zirin The Great Olympics Scam Sameer Dossani The Trouble with Gleneagles     July 2 / 4, 2005 Alexander Cockburn "Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi? Lenni Brenner Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July Laura Carlsen Zapatista's Red Alert James Petras The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment William A. Cook Kings of Serpents Brian Cloughley Quagmire of the Vanities Saul Landau The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership Tom Crumpacker Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles? Greg Moses Dylan's America Dr. Susan Block My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service Fran Shor Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land Fred Gardner Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer Moshe Adler The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs David Model The Downing Street Memo: So What's New? Seth Sandronsky California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style Ramzy Baroud Managed Democracy in the Middle East Suzan Mazur Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton Ben Tripp Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap Justin Taylor Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint" Brendan Bailey Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Louise Website of the Weekend Radical Reference     July 1, 2005 Christopher Brauchli With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf Pat Williams What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver Gary Leupp Summer Surprise? John Stauber Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie John Chuckman The Blessings of Canada Justicia y Paz Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least! Cockburn / St. Clair It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court   June 30, 2005 Kathy Kelly An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis John Stauber Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America Virginia Rodino All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement Jason Leopold Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy Dave Lindorff What Was Bush Thinking? Greg Moses Racism at Cape Cod Norman Solomon Memo to the Iraq War Joshua Frank Israel's Theocrats Alexander Cockburn The Political Function of PBS   June 29, 2005 Mike Schaefer How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq Sharon Smith Democrats Shift into Reverse Sam Husseini A Quick Way to End the Insurgency John Stauber Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton Ahmad Faruqui Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan? Linda S. Heard Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo Stew Albert Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero Ray McGovern Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course     June 28, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts A Defeat Bred in Deceit Landau / Hassen Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics John A. Murphy Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania Mike Whitney More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents CounterPunch News Service JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook? Dave Zirin Pining for the Pistons Dave Lindorff Showtime in Washington Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Bloody Mess     June 27, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans Mike Marqusee G8: Who are the Hijackers? Mark Scaramella When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz Leigh Saavedra Press Apologists for Torture Kathy Kelly Where is the UN? June 25 / 26, 2005 Alexander Cockburn The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals Jennifer Van Bergen America's Parallel Legal Systems George Corsetti This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo Kevin Zeese Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids P. Sainath Russian Roulette in Vidharbha John Stauber How to Bury a Mad Cow Scott Handleman Gay in the Third World Tom Barry The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists John Walsh Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places Justin E.H. Smith The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution Alan Wallis The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood Ben Tripp Negative Space: an Artful Lesson Frederick B. Hudson Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock Poets' Basement Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert     June 24, 2005 Ray McGovern The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed" Jorge Mariscal "They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq Desiree Hellegers Portland vs. the FBI Zeynep Toufe What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It? Joshua Frank Call Him Senator Con Job David Lindorff Which Flag Would Jesus Burn? Michael Neumann Victory and Recruitment Website of the Day Gagging Dr. Dean June 23, 2005 Christopher Brauchli Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge Clay Conrad Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform Standard Schaefer A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism P. Sainath Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks Mark Engler CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death Norman Solomon Voluntary Amnesia in America Cockburn / St. Clair Frank Calzon Kathy Kelly Where You Stand Determines What You See   June 22, 2005 Kevin Zeese The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner William S. Lind Afghanistan: the Other War Arsalan Iftikhar Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act Dan Nagengast Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas David Krieger To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World Kathleen & Bill Christison Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making     June 21, 2005 Brian Cloughley Destroy the Unbelievers! Mike Whitney President Disconnect Dave Lindorff Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway? Mark Weisbrot Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez Matthew R. Simmons The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis Dave Zirin The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man" Virginia Rodino The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment Paul Craig Roberts A War Waged by Liars and Morons   June 20, 2005 Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Tariq Ali To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel! Mickey Z. WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo William Blum Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends Gary Leupp Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq Jason Leopold Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War Dave Lindorff Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Uri Avnery Condi and Hamas Website of the Day Crimes Against Poetry                                                       Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

July 18, 2005 Did Thomas Friedman Flunk History? A Muslim Problem By M. SHAHID ALAM It appears that Mr. Thomas Friedman has a Muslim problem. He has a great deal of trouble thinking straight when writing about Muslims; and, as the New York Times' resident expert on Islam, he displays this malaise frequently, often twice a week. In the wake of the recent bombings in London ­ as atrocious as bombings get anywhere ­ Mr. Friedman sums up his thoughts on this terrible tragedy in the title of his column of July 8, 2005, "If it's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution." The conditional 'If' is merely a distraction. I could say that it is a deceptive ploy, but I will be more charitable. It is perhaps the last gasp of Mr. Friedman's conscience, mortified by his own mendacity. Always the faithful acolyte of Bernard Lewis, Mr. Friedman interprets every Muslim act of violence against the West (and that includes Israel) as the herald of a clash of civilizations. In his own words, when "Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, a potential walking bomb." First, consider the inflammatory assertion about every Muslim in the West suddenly becoming "a potential walking bomb." If this were true, imagine the horror of Westerners at the thought of some 60 million potential walking bombs threatening their neighborhoods. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of Westerners did not start looking upon their Muslim neighbors as "walking bombs" after the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid or London. Despite the high-pitched alarms raised in very high places, the overwhelming majority of Europeans and Americans knew better than Mr. Friedman. It appears that Mr. Friedman is propounding a new thesis on civilizational wars. 'The Muslim extremists,' he charges, 'are starting a civilizational war. It all begins when they bomb our cities, forcing us to treat all Muslims here as potential terrorists. This is going to pit us against them. And that is a civilizational problem.' The terrorist acts of a few Muslims are terrible tragedies: but do they have a history behind them? Is there a history of Western provocations in the Muslim world? Does the Western world at any point enter the historical chain of causation that now drives a few sane Muslims to acts of terrorism? The only history that Friedman will acknowledge is one of Western innocence. There is no blowback: hence, no Western responsibility, no Western guilt. Mr. Friedman speaks on this authoritatively and with clarity. The Muslims world has produced a "jihadist death cult in its midst." "If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere." His two-fold verdict is clear. Inexplicably, the Muslims have produced a death cult, a religious frenzy, that is driving those infected by it to kill innocent Westerners without provocation. Equally bad, the Muslims have done nothing to condemn, to root out this death cult they have spawned. There is not even a hint of history in these words. The historical amnesia is truly astounding. Does Mr. Friedman know any history? Of course, he does; but the history he knows is better forgotten if he is to succeed in demonizing the Muslim world. The oppressors choose to forget the history of their depredations, or substitute a civilizing mission for their history of brutalities, bombings, massacres, ethnic cleansings and expropriations. It is the oppressed peoples who know the history of their oppression: they know it because they have endured it. Its history is seared into their memory, their individual and collective memory. Indeed, they can liberate themselves only by memorializing this history. Which part of the history of the Muslim world should I recall for the benefit of Mr. Friedman? I will not begin with the Crusades or the forced conversion of the Spanish Muslims and their eventual expulsion from Spain. That is not the history behind the "jihadist death cult." I could begin with the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 in lands inhabited by Palestinians; the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel; Israel's pre-emptive war of 1967 against three Arab states; the meticulously planned destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967; the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, stretching from 1982 to 2000; the massacre of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s; the devastation of Chechnya in 1996 and since 1999; the brutalities against Kashmiris since the 1990s; the deadly sanctions against Iraq from 1990 to 1993 which killed one and a half million Iraqis; the pogrom against Gujarati Muslims in 2002; the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003 which has already killed more than 200,000 Iraqis. Clearly, there is a lot that Mr. Friedman has to forget, to erase from his history books. Mr. Friedman's memory only goes back to the latest terrorist attacks of Muslims against Western targets. That is not say by any stretch that these terrorist attacks are defensible. Clearly, they are not. But they will not be stopped by willfully and perversely erasing the layered history behind these acts. They will not be stopped by more wars and more occupations. If Mr. Friedman would unplug his ears, that is the clear message flowing everyday from the American or American-supported occupations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Frustrated by what he sees as the unwillingness of the Muslim world to smash the "jihadist (read: Islamic) death cult," Mr. Friedman issues a dire warning: 'Smash your cultists or we will do it for you. We will do it in a "rough and crude way," by denying visas to Muslims and making every Muslim in our midst "guilty until proven innocent."' This clinches my point that Mr. Friedman cannot think straight when he talks about Muslims. Apparently, he does not realize that his proposal to deny visas to nearly a quarter of the world's population would seriously jeopardize globalization ­ his own pet project. Incidentally, this also raises another question. Why wasn't Mr. Friedman pushing his visa proposal after 9-11? But, in those heady days he was too busy peddling the war against Iraq as the panacea for the troubles of America and Israel. What is Mr. Friedman's agenda in all this? No doubt, he will claim he is a man of peace: no less than George Bush or Ariel Sharon. We know that Mr. Friedman is no naïf; neither are we gullible fools. Mr. Friedman can sense that the history he tries so hard to camouflage ­ the history of Western domination over the Muslim world ­ may change before his eyes. He has been hoping that the United States can forestall this by wars, by occupying and re-making the Arab world, a second, deeper Balkanization of the Middle East that his neoconservative allies have been pushing under the rubric of democratization. Already that project is in tatters. Despite all their inane rhetoric about fighting the terrorists in Baghdad, the policy makers in Washington know that their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are spawning more terrorists than they can handle, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists have struck Western targets in Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, Karachi, Madrid, and now London. The United States could have leveraged these terrorist acts to strike Iran or Syria or both. But these plans are now on hold. Even Mr. Friedman admits that "there is no obvious target to retaliate against." One has to add, the targets are obvious enough, but they look much harder after Iraq. In desperation, Mr. Friedman has now issued two new threats. He is warning Muslims living in the West, 'If your coreligionists do not stop their terrorist attacks against us, we will hold you hostages here.' To the Muslims living outside the Western world his message is equally sanguine, "Smash the terrorists or forget about ever setting foot in the United States." Perhaps, judging from the endless rush of visa applicants at US consulates in Muslim countries, Mr. Friedman thinks this will bring the Muslim masses to their senses. In every street, every neighborhood, Arabs, Pakistanis and Indonesians will form anti-terrorist vigilante groups, and hunt down the terrorists. If this works out, it could be the cleverest coup since the marketing of Coke and Pepsi to the hungry masses in the Third World. Regrettably, the visa proposal will not work. The United States has already mobilized nearly every Muslim government ­ with their armies, police and secret services ­ to catch the Muslim terrorists. Not that the Musharrafs and Mubaraks have failed. Indeed, they have caught 'terrorists' by the truck loads, and dispatched many of them ex post haste to Washington. In this enterprise, it is the United States that has failed. It has been producing terrorists much faster than the 'good Muslims' can catch them. Perhaps, after Madrid and London the rhetoric about fighting the terrorists in Baghdad is beginning to strain even the ears of the faithful in the red states. Perhaps, the faithful are now ready for a new tune. Perhaps, in time the Muslim world will take Mr. Friedman's advice, suppress terrorism, and deny business visas to Americans unless the United States pulls out its troops from every Muslim country. After that Mr. Friedman might wish he had thought a little harder about the law of unintended consequences! M. Shahid Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University, is a regular contributor to CounterPunch.org. Some of his CounterPunch essays are now available in a book, Is There An Islamic Problem (Kuala Lumpur: The Other Press, 2004). He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.