For Antiwar.com, I�m Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dean Ahmed.
He is the founder of the Minaret of Freedom Institute at Minaret.org.
He�s an internationally known interdisciplinary scientist, author of Signs in the Heavens, a Muslim astronomer�s perspective on religion and science.
He�s a senior lecturer at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses on religion and progress, and on religion, science and freedom.
He also teaches a course on Islam science and development at Georgetown University for the Center on Muslim Christian Understanding.
It�s great to talk to you again, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
I guess, you know, the topic, obviously, that we need to cover is the Middle East.
But I thought, you know, before we actually get into the recent war in Gaza and so forth, you can tell us a little bit about your perspective.
You�re a libertarian, right?
And go back in the libertarian movement in this country for a long time, right?
That�s right.
I was first involved in the libertarian movement when I was in college back in the 1960s.
And does your libertarian perspective grant you kind of a different view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict than you think maybe other Palestinians with, you know, more typical political views might see it?
Well, I think that it gives me a better grounding in the principles that are involved in the problems in that part of the world.
For many of the participants, whether on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side, they only see it as a question of national identity or as being victims of violence from the other side.
Whereas I think that because of my understanding of libertarian principles and of economic theory in general, I realized that the great unspoken mover behind much of the problems there is a failure to recognize property rights.
Of individuals?
Yes, of individuals.
See, the extremists on both sides, on the Palestinian side like Hamas and on the Zionist side like the Jewish National Fund, claim that the land there is the collective property owned in trust for one religious group or another.
In fact, that is not the case.
There are some pieces of property there that are of religious significance and of value to one group or another or to both groups in some cases like the case of Hebron.
But the fact is that most of the property in Palestine is the private property of individuals and those individuals' rights, the people who have either registered titles or who have bills of sales or who have simply lived on that land for so many hundreds of years that everybody in the neighborhood knows whose land it is, they're the owners of the property and that property cannot be taken away from them except by violation of their rights.
Now, it seems kind of strange, doesn't it, that on the one side, if you're an Arab and your father, say, for example, was driven off of Palestinian land, you don't really have the right of return.
But if you were born in Russia and your great-great-great-great-great grandfather was Jewish, then you have a birthright to live in Israel.
It's perfectly okay for you to come in and move into that Arab's old house.
Well, that's basically the problem, although it's a little bit more complicated than that.
First off, it technically would have to be your great-great-great-great-grandmother since the law recognized matrilineal descent.
However, even that's no longer the case since in recent years, Israel has had such a hard time getting actual Jews by their own definition to move into the country that several years ago, they broadened the laws to allow people from Russia who had any kind of connection to the Jewish community, even if it was by marital relations, to come in so that people have actually created a new category of citizenship.
There are several different nationalities among their citizens, Jewish and Muslim and Christian.
Now they've added other for these people who are coming in from Russia who have no religious affiliation whatsoever, but who because somebody in their family married a Jew are being permitted to come in, in the belief that because of their European lineage, that they'll be more sympathetic to the European Zionist immigrants than to the indigenous Palestinian population.
Well, you know, it kind of brings up to my mind a problem that was had back in Vietnam that I guess the Americans never did realize.
It's in I think the movie Fog of War where McNamara talks about speaking to a Vietnamese general who told him, you know, we tried to get you to understand back then and you never would that this really wasn't about communism versus capitalism or democracy.
It was about the Vietnamese versus European colonialists.
And whether it was you or the French or even the Russians for that matter, if anybody had come to occupy Vietnam, it was basically a fight for independence from foreigners.
And the same sort of confusion seems to surround the Israel-Palestinian conflict where on one hand it's all about, you know, who God gave the land to back, you know, during magic land divvying up back, you know, thousands of years ago.
And on the other hand, it's basically a simple situation of colonialists and natives, of European white people coming and colonizing, you know, brown Middle Eastern land, the same as any other story from back in history.
And it seems like those kind of, those two competing narratives about the religious conflict on one hand and simply newcomer versus native, you know, European settler versus Arab conflict is perhaps really what's more important.
Well, absolutely.
And it's a shame that the fact that there's a color of religion on this has been allowed to obscure the fact that at its root, the dispute is not a religious dispute.
The modern Zionist movement, I'm talking about political Zionism now, not religious Zionism, which is a completely different thing.
The modern political Zionist movement was founded officially by Theodor Herzl, who was a non-believer.
He was an atheist.
He didn't believe the teachings of Judaism.
He didn't follow Jewish practices.
And his motivation or his model for setting up a modern state of Israel was the modern nation states of Europe.
He, like everybody else, had been horrified by the Dreyfus Affair in which a French civil servant was falsely accused of spying because he was a Jew and came to the conclusion that Jews could never get justice in Europe and that the only way that they could get justice was to have their own state and started a movement to establish a Jewish state, preferably in Palestine because of its historical significance.
But the early Zionist movement was divided about where it could be.
There were some who would have been happy to accept land in any number of places, and there actually was an attempt to try to get some land in, I believe, Uganda at one point.
But ultimately, because British imperial designs coincided with the Zionist movement's designs, the Balfour Declaration took place in 1917, where the British said that it looked with favor upon the prospect of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Right.
Now, so let's get to the recent war in Gaza.
I guess, you know, the most important thing worth covering here for anti-war radio purposes is the number killed and the number of those that were civilians.
I think it's pretty rare, unprecedented kind of thing that a state would bomb a group of people anywhere at the same time that the borders are closed and civilians are not allowed to flee.
That's a pretty rare circumstance, isn't it?
Well, it is an unusual circumstance, and it's certainly what caused one observer to say that it reminded them of the Warsaw Ghetto.
You have this captive population, and they're not allowed to leave, even as they're being attacked with an enormous amount of violence.
Of course, now there was a ceasefire declared, actually two unilateral ceasefires declared, first by Israel and then by Hamas, although I understand that the Israelis are apparently not sticking strictly to the ceasefire, and there have been some incidents of violence since.
But the point is that you have now over 1,300 Palestinians killed, and I think 13 Israelis killed, but the Palestinians have had no place to go.
Since the ceasefire, there has been a limited opening of the Rafah crossing, which is the crossing into Egypt, in order to allow some relief supplies in, although, as I understand, the number of trucks being allowed in is woefully inadequate.
I think on the first day, there were about roughly 150 trucks.
This is to feed one and a half million people.
One has to remember that the Gaza Strip is a very small and highly densely populated area.
It's about twice the size of Washington, D.C., but it has three times the population, and most of those people are not descended from the indigenous Gazans, but are descended from Palestinians who were forced to flee into Gaza when Israel took their own homes in the 1948 war and in the subsequent persecutions that followed.
So there are people who are all sitting there in Gaza, maybe two-thirds of the population are people who are sitting there in Gaza, looking over the fences into their homeland and wanting to go back.
Yeah, this is something that never really gets much play, but there's a point that I saw Pat Buchanan make on MSNBC, which was these rockets, which are being shot and do from time to time kill innocent civilians in Israel, they're being fired at former Palestinian towns.
It isn't like, as you say, these people aren't all from Gaza.
They were penned in there.
They escaped to Gaza, and now they can't escape from it.
Less than a dozen Israelis who were killed by the rockets in the several years leading up to the attack certainly should not be excused, although one has to note that the Palestinians will say, well, the Israelis that live in these settlements are all members of the Israeli army, and they can hardly be called non-combatants.
But on the other hand, we can't condemn that without also condemning the far larger number of Palestinians who had been killed by the Israelis over the same period.
And when I say far larger number, I'm talking about hundreds.
So there's a real lack of proportion here, and that's not including, of course, the 1,300 killed in the recent onslaught.
Well, you know, I read this interview with Daniel, pardon me, Norman, is it Daniel or Norman?
I always forget why.
Anyway, Finkelstein, the very controversial Finkelstein, whatever his first name is.
And anyway, he was saying that the reason that Israel launched this attack was because Gaza, pardon me, because Hamas was doing too good of a job keeping the ceasefire.
And they were basically trying to moderate and become more and more of a government and less and less of just a terrorist group.
And as we know, the rockets that were fired from Gaza during the ceasefire were not fired by Hamas, and Hamas, in fact, went and put an end to that immediately.
And what Finkelstein said was that they basically launched the attack not because of the intolerable rain of rockets down, but because there wasn't one, and because they don't want to have Hamas in the position of being the quote-unquote legitimate government of Gaza.
They only want peace on their terms, which is all the land belongs to them.
Well, I don't know.
You know, Mr. Finkelstein's arguments sound very difficult to believe on the face of them, but on the other hand, I can't come up with a better explanation.
The explanations that have been offered by Israel's defenders don't make any sense at all.
The idea that it was to crush Hamas, well, that certainly didn't work very well.
The argument that it was in order to delegitimize Hamas, that's insane.
Hamas is much more popular now than it was before the invasion.
The claim, of course, that it was in retaliation for the rockets makes the least sense of all.
If Israel was motivated by a desire for revenge, then they would have gone in and followed the Jewish law, get an eye for an eye, kill, I think before the attack there had been four or eight Israelis killed.
Okay, you go in and you kill four or eight people and say But there are other things you have to consider, and that is that it was the Israelis who broke the ceasefire when they went in on November 4th and killed a number of Hamas people and buzzed the Palestinians with their airplanes and launched bombs.
They claim that was retaliation for rocket firings by Palestinian Jihad.
Even if you ignore the fact that Palestinian Jihad is not Hamas, and I can see why one would want to do that and say, well, Hamas is responsible for keeping the ceasefire even if they're not the ones who launched the rockets.
That's a fair argument, but the fact is the reason that PIJ did that was because the Israelis had just gone in and killed two of their people in the West Bank.
Israel may claim that the West Bank is not Gaza, and so technically we're keeping the ceasefire, but that certainly is not in the spirit of the intention of the ceasefire.
Well, in fact, if you want to go by the spirit of the intention of the ceasefire, Israel never honored it for a day, because part of the ceasefire was that they would, you know, allow conflict.
Alleviate the siege.
Instead they kept a blockade the whole time.
That's right, and again, Israel could say, well, we did alleviate the siege somewhat, but if you go back and again, you follow the number of trucks that were being allowed in, and always bear in mind that all of these trucks were being allowed in through the Rafah crossing.
Israel did not open up the crossings on the Israeli side, so it was basically that the Israelis were allowing Egypt to let the trucks in.
One thing that people don't know, most people don't realize, is the Rafah crossing, while it's on the Egyptian border, under the ceasefire agreement, which was, by the way, negotiated by the Egyptians, because the Israelis and Hamas never talked to one another directly, but under that ceasefire, the agreement was that the EU, the European Union, would man those border crossings, and further, that Israel would have a veto over who gets to go through.
The Egyptians and the EU were required to report to Egypt who wanted to go through the crossing and when, and even provide real-time monitoring.
So there's no question that even though Israeli troops had been redeployed out of Gaza some time ago, Israel continues an occupation in that it has complete and total control over the borders, the airspace, et cetera.
All right, well, so where do we go from here?
I read an article in the London Times that said, ah, geez, now that the war is over, everybody in Israel, on the right and the left and all over the place, are all shrugging and saying, ah, why did we do that?
That didn't accomplish anything for us, and now we're, you know, Hamas is more popular than ever.
Well, again, we'll have to see how this plays out.
But as far as internal Israeli politics is concerned, and this is the one place where we can see what their motives may be, everyone always knows that if you can get your population to feel under attack, then it gives the hardliners an edge in the election.
Yeah, ask the Republicans.
They'll tell you.
That's right.
We've seen it here, and we know that phenomenon all too well.
So it is entirely possible that this whole thing is merely motivated by a domestic political agenda that says, let's create as much of a climate of fear as we can, and in that way open up the doors for our re-election.
Everybody has to remember that Israel always has a complex political situation, but Omer's situation was very, very weird.
He had lost a vote of confidence, but they had the election, but the winners of the election, the opposition won the election but was unable to form a coalition, and now they have to, you know, have a further round of voting.
So clearly there's a complicated political situation in Israel, and the Israelis may well be, you know, Omer and his people may think that if they toss the cards crazily enough, they might come out on top.
From what I understand, what they've done is not empower Kadima but empower the Likud party and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Right.
The thing is that, again, this kind of strategy really benefits the hardest-liners, and Netanyahu has that reputation.
And, you know, that's really important, I think, because Livni had been quoted in the press before as, for example, admitting that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, that kind of thing, where Netanyahu says that it's 1939 and Ahmadi Najad is Hitler.
Well, I'm not sure that the differences between the different parties with regard to Iran and Israel is all that great.
They seem to have been trying to play an Iran card in making their case against the Palestinians, not a war for land but part of a war on terror.
I think that the inauguration of Obama may have thrown a joker into that deck, too, so we'll have to see what happens next.
Well, that is a very important point, isn't it, that the context post-September 11th, that Israel's problem with Islamic people is the same problem that America has.
This is all one big war on terrorism, said Netanyahu when he came to America right after 9-11.
That's right.
That's a quite deliberate ploy.
And, of course, for those of us who are, of course, I am Palestinian, but those familiar with the Palestinian people, it's an especially cynical one since it overlooks the fact that on the Palestinian side are not just Muslims but Christians.
And what are the percentages there, by the way?
I'm sorry to really harp on it because it should be irrelevant, but I think for most Americans, yeah, Gaza is hardly a human being at all.
Maybe if we can point out that their souls are saved by Jesus, then they'll count for something to somebody around here.
Well, the thing is it depends on whether you're talking about the entire Palestinian population or those Palestinians still left in the area itself because of the persecution that has hit both the Muslims and the Christians very hard.
In the case of the Muslims, it has been offset to a large degree by the high Muslim birth rate, whereas for the Christians, their population as a percentage of the population has dropped dramatically.
Before the Israeli occupation, the Christians were between 10% and 30% of the population.
They're now down to between 1% and 2%.
Which is still, I guess, what, thousands or tens of thousands of people?
Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact total population of the Palestinians.
I think it's maybe close to 4 million, but let's use that as a round number anyway.
Even 1% of 4 million is going to be 40,000 people.
Well, there you go.
It's good somebody here is good at math off the top of their head.
I need a pencil and a piece of paper.
All right, so let's talk about the libertarian property rights solution here.
I assume that your take on how this should work out is going to sound a little bit different than the usual kind of mantra of the two-state solution and so forth.
Okay, well, let's first go back and ground everything in fact, because one of the things that annoys me is that sometimes people come up and they try to make what they claim is a logical argument, and technically speaking, the logic is flawless.
If you start from a false premise, you're going to end up with a bad conclusion, no matter how flawless your logic is.
Let's take a look at who owns the property at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Now, at that time, of course, the State of Israel was established partly on land that was awarded to Israel by the UN, which divided up Palestine into two parts.
It would be an Israeli state, it would be a Palestinian state, and they had given a disproportionate amount of the land compared to how much was owned by Jews and how much was owned by Muslims and Christians.
They'd given a disproportionate fraction of that land to the State of Israel.
Plus, in addition to that, during the war, Israel had conquered some additional land beyond what was awarded to it by the UN.
In that part which Israel occupied pre-1967, between 1948 and 1967, what they were in charge of in 1948, the Jewish National Fund wrote a letter to the newly formed Israeli government complaining that of the state, that it was just the State of Israel, not what is now the occupied territories, that in the State of Israel, Jews owned only less than 7% of the land.
Now, actually, this is a slight exaggeration since this would have included land that was bought from absentee landlords by the Jewish National Fund, but let's ignore that.
Let's say that Jews owned 7% of the land.
The rest of the land was roughly evenly split between state land, which, of course, the Israelis now claimed belonged to them because they owned the state and it's a Jewish state, and therefore they felt none of it should go to the Arabs.
But an approximately equal amount, which is to say about 48%, belonged to private Arab owners.
It was their title, which under Western law we'd say in fee simple.
So they complained.
They said, okay, we take the 7% that the Jewish citizens and the Jewish National Fund own, we take the 40% that state land, and we're going to claim it now for the use of Jews only, we only have only about half the land.
And therefore, since we want it to be all Jewish land, we've got to do something about the rest of it.
We're not going to be able to buy it because the Arabs are refusing to sell to us, and therefore we must use eminent domain.
Now that we're a state, you have the power of the state, and you've got to take this land away.
And in the ensuing years, use the land as a trust for the Jewish people.
In the ensuing years, by a variety of methods, including simple eminent domain, but also involving claims that any Arabs who left their property were now absentee landlords and not entitled to own the property.
Note how this undermines the claim that their purchases from absentee Arab landlords were legitimate, that that land would be added to the land of the Jewish state, plus land that was taken by military confiscation, and then finally, land that the Arabs left because of massacres, such as the massacre at Deir Yassin that would drive them off the land.
Other techniques followed, such as for the people of Jerusalem, who were never given Israeli citizenship, even after East Jerusalem was conquered in the 1967 war.
Those people were told that they would not be entitled to Israeli citizenship.
They would instead be given permanent residency.
However, subsequently, Israel threatened to take away the permanent residency from anybody who left the property.
For example, people who had gone away for studies, college students who would go away to another country to study, would come back and find that they no longer were considered permanent residents of Israel because they no longer made Jerusalem the center of their life.
Also, people from the West Bank were not allowed to marry Jerusalemites and move into the city, if they were Arabs, and of course, the right of return of the people who had fled either because of the war or because of persecution was denied.
Now, of course, this is at the same time that any Jew anywhere in the world, even if they have no connection to Palestine whatsoever, has a right of return to come and find a home there, a right that was extended even to Montgomery County, Maryland.
And then in Montgomery County, Maryland, who committed a brutal crime here, killing and then mutilating the body of a high school student, fled to Israel in order that he could escape the death penalty.
And his right of return was recognized, even though he never lived in Israel.
Well, here's the thing, though.
Basically what you're saying is that the majority of the country basically has been illegitimately taken and that there are Palestinians obviously still alive, certainly sons and daughters of people who had their land taken unjustly originally are still there and maybe even can produce a deed and these kinds of things.
On the other hand, we're kind of in a situation where, well, if it's the majority of the land was taken illegitimately, I mean not including the West Bank and Gaza, but the rest of what's Israel, at some point there's kind of nothing that can be done about it, sort of like the Indians saying they want Massachusetts back at this point kind of thing.
So there's got to be a solution besides complete pie in the sky that Israel ought to go back to being half of the size it is now in order to guarantee all these individual property claims that have been broken.
Right?
Well, there is a solution because of the following distinction.
One has to make a distinction between the Palestinians' right to their land in principle and in practice.
By that I mean that as a matter of international law as well as simple morality, not to mention libertarian theory, every Palestinian who owns land is entitled to go back to that land and to have it restored to him or her, and no Palestinian or very few Palestinians would be willing to give up that principle, that right.
However, if asked, if you said to them, okay, we recognize this land is yours, we recognize your right to it, but we're going to offer you a certain amount of money to sell it to us.
Polls have been done that indicate that while maybe 99% of the Palestinians say they would never give up their right to their land, perhaps 85% to 90% would be willing to sell it if that right were recognized and if the price were right.
This is really a recognition of reality on the ground by the Palestinians.
They're saying, look, we'll be lucky if we ever get the West Bank and Gaza.
Let's be happy with that, sell the rest, make a deal, and try to move on with our lives here it sounds like.
Yeah.
I mean, remember that a lot of them have been displaced.
Some of them have made lives elsewhere.
Some of them are living in refugee camps, but if they got what their land was worth, they would be able to make a life somewhere else instead of being stuck in the refugee camps or having to remain on the dole from the goodwill and charity of others.
So it offers at least a short-term solution.
Now, I have to admit it's only a short-term solution because even if let's say 90% of the Palestinians say, yeah, fine, you know, we won't go back, only 10% go back, the fact is Muslims still have a higher birth rate than Jews, and it's only a question of when, not if, does the Muslim population of Israel outnumber the Jewish population.
And at that point you have the following problem.
How can you have a state that is a democracy and a Jewish state and the majority are not Jews?
Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
Yes, it sure is.
And really, well, to what degree do you think that that reality, that mostly unspoken reality is behind the policy in Gaza and the West Bank as it is now?
Okay, you know, we're working toward a state.
We're just going to build giant walls crisscrossing all through the West Bank so that the land that would be a state is impossible to govern as a state.
I think that's completely behind it.
Basically the policy is that recognizing that there is no way that you can have this democratic Jewish state with mostly non-Jews in it, the policy is, well, get people to leave.
Make them as miserable as possible.
Make it impossible to live there.
Building fences so that, for example, a farmer's house is cut off from the land he cultivates and he's got no way to cross to take care of his land.
Just make life as miserable as possible in the hopes that people will leave.
As I said before, it has been successful with the Christian population.
It doesn't look like it's working on the Muslim population there.
Is it possible that, well, I don't know.
I guess to answer your rhetorical question, I could see a situation where some of the hardcore right-wingers like that guy Avigor Lieberman are successful in getting the Arab Muslim population of Israelis, kicking them out and putting them in the West Bank and or Gaza or whatever, and then just building a giant wall, giving them the West Bank and Gaza, maybe giving them a tunnel of transportation between the two.
But other than that, just keep them all out and let their growing population stay inside the West Bank and inside Gaza and just keep them out of Israel.
They could still be a democratic Jewish state that way by allowing there to be a second state.
And I guess the neighboring state would be extremely overpopulated and poor, but they wouldn't be part of Israel at that point, at least, technically, as they are now.
Yeah.
Well, that is, again, a proposed solution, the apartheid solution.
But it has some flaws in it, too.
For one thing, there are some Israelis for whom it's not acceptable.
Their view is all of Eretz Israel belongs to Israel, all of Palestine from the river to the sea, and therefore they would consider that an unacceptable compromise.
But even among people who would be willing to make some kind of a compromise, their view is, well, if you have a competitive state, you're only going to have another war later when this other state is going to declare war on you.
Which seems reasonable enough.
Yeah.
If they do it like that.
The only solution, the only way to get Israel to get realistic and to be willing to make the difficult compromises it's going to have to make is to put an end to the unconditional American aid.
As long as Israel believes it will get as much money as it asks for from the United States, no questions asked, they have no incentive to accept the more reasonable proposals that some of the intellectuals on both sides have been able to work out and that have been floated.
Not necessarily any proposal that I might put forward, but there are all kinds of proposals that can bring some measure of peace to the area, at least for the short term, but the Israelis have no real incentive to pursue them.
Right.
That gets to the influence, and I guess the relative influence, of the Israel lobby and whatever amounts to a Palestinian lobby in this country, if there is one, if they haven't all been indicted under the Patriot Act for money laundering or something by now.
Is there anyone that tells the Palestinian side of the story in Washington, D.C.?
You mean among the Palestinians?
Well, I mean, for example, in Congress.
I know that Israel has a voice among the lawmakers.
Do the Palestinians have a voice among the lawmakers at all?
There are only two congressmen that I have ever heard speak out with any frankness on this issue.
They are Dr. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
Those two, for example, during the recent massacres in Gaza, it was when the pro-Israeli movement in the United States tried to pass a piece of legislation, putting all the blame for it on the Gazans.
It was Dennis Kucinich who offered an alternative proposal that was more balanced.
It's been Dr. Ron Paul who has been making a number of interesting speeches, not only during the current crisis in Gaza, but actually throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for president that has been presenting a balanced view of the problems there and presenting, I guess you'd call it an America first policy, putting the national interest of America above a bid for the presumed domestic vote of the Zionists here in the United States.
Well, you know, as Meir Scheimer and Walt point out, one-sided, complete, no matter what sort of support for Israel by the United States is not really doing Israel any favors.
And they point at, for example, the war in Lebanon in 2006, and I'm sure you can make the same case about the war that's just happened in Gaza, that this unconditional American support that says, yeah, here's some munitions and some bullets, go to it and use RF-16s while you're at it and that kind of attitude, even if you don't take into account American interests and, you know, the motivation of terrorists who attack America and American interests into account, and you only look at Israeli interests, this is really counterproductive, it would seem like, for the long-term existence of a Jewish state there, and yet they get away with it because of the one-sided support in America, where an even-handed approach would, for example, there wouldn't be so many settlements in the West Bank, and that might anger some Israelis, but it would actually have the entire Israeli state would be probably in a much more peaceful situation if they weren't putting up new settlements all the time, which is a product, again, of American money no matter what they do.
Well, you're right.
In the long run, making certain difficult compromises would be to the benefit of both sides because of the benefits of having peace.
Right now, a lot of money is being wasted on warfare.
You know, when I mentioned before the idea about offering the Palestinians compensation for their land, one might ask, well, where's the money going to come from?
Well, right now, the United States is spending $3 billion a year in aid to Israel, and I'm not even counting the $2 billion, almost $2 billion they give to the Egyptians and the Palestinians tied into that aid to Israel, for warfare mostly.
You could spend some of that money in order to make offers of compensation for property.
In the long run, the United States could put an end to its $5 billion a year hole in its pocket.
The Israelis would get the peace dividend you've been talking about, and, of course, the Palestinians would get their homes or compensation.
All right.
Now, I guess to wrap up the interview, if I can keep you just a couple more minutes, I'd like to ask you to tell us about the Minaret of Freedom Institute and what exactly you're about.
I'm interested in – I haven't read these books, but I'm interested in these titles, Islam, Science, and Development.
It's a very interesting kind of multidisciplinary sort of study going on there, and so I'm always interested in that, people mixing science and religion together and that sort of thing, and, of course, promoting individual liberty and peace in the world.
So I guess just tell us about the institute and how people can learn more about it and get involved in what you're doing and that kind of thing.
Sure.
The Minaret of Freedom Institute is a policy research institute or think tank that was founded in 1993 with a fourfold mission of countering distortions about Islam, showing the origin of certain modern values that came out of Islamic civilization, educating both Muslims and non-Muslims on the importance of liberty and free markets, and advancing the status of Muslims, whether they live in the East or the West.
We do this through a combination of academic research and the publishing of papers and refereed journals and also doing op-ed pieces and interviews, like the interview with you, and educational forms of various sorts that have included bringing in some really major figures from the Muslim world.
For example, we had Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, who is one of the leading advocates for market reform in the Muslim world at one of our annual dinners.
Among the books that we have published, we have the one I think you're referring to before, The Signs in the Heavens, Muslim Astronomer's Perspective on Religion and Science, that takes a note of how the methods of modern science were developed in the Muslim world during the classical Islamic civilization and introduced to the West from the Muslim world when the great universities of Spain and Italy were taken over by Westerners.
We also published a book called Islam and the Discovery of Freedom, which was based on a chapter in Rose Wilder Lane's great book, The Discovery of Freedom.
Lane, of course, was a leading libertarian polemicist and journalist, and she devoted a chapter in her book to the role Islam played in the development and protection of individual human rights.
We republished Lane's original chapter with a running commentary by myself that documents the sources, scriptural and historical, for Lane's claims, corrects some mistakes she made, and essentially makes a political piece into a more academic piece.
Our most recent book is called The Islamic Rules of Order, in which we take a look at how we can improve Islamic governance, primarily the governance of Muslim organizations, but the principles can be applied to parliamentary organizations in the Muslim world as well.
One of the things that modern Muslims have not paid close attention to is the rules of order.
We in the West use Robert's Rules of Order.
It may not be perfect.
People complain about it all the time.
But you need a set of rules of order in order to keep things straight, and this provides a good supplement to the general principles of Islamic law for governance.
And so I think I'm picking up a theme here, which is that Islamic society such as it exists, and there's lots of different Islamic societies.
I don't mean to be too general in my speaking or whatever, but it sounds like your point is there's nothing so alien about this to the West that this clash of civilizations as they sell it to us is wholly unnecessary.
That's right.
There are universal values that not only can be found in both Islam and the West, but in some cases that the Westerners have actually picked up from the Muslims.
I'm going to be giving a talk actually next week at the University of Maryland that is going to be broadcast on our Scholars Chair television program, and this talk is on natural law as the convergence of religion and science.
In both science and in some religions, including the Muslim religion, there is a view of absolute laws that govern the universe, and for Muslims, these are the laws that are decreed by God, and these laws govern natural phenomena, and the job of a scientist is to study nature and figure out what these laws are that govern the natural world.
In the same way, human relationships are governed by laws that are divinely decreed by our creator, and that it is the job of the social scientist or the religious scholar to understand what those laws are and to advise people on how to live in a salubrious and beneficial manner under that natural law as well.
Well, we're not talking about anything strange or different here.
We're talking about the Ten Commandments, right?and you don't go around killing people and violating your neighbor's property rights.
Yeah, see, the people who talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition seem to forget that actually it's a Judeo-Christian Muslim tradition.
I prefer to call it the Abrahamic tradition.
The great insight of Rose Wilder Lane's book, The Discovery of Freedom, was that she identified Abrahamic teachings as the first attempt at establishing human rights.
She identified the Muslim civilization as the second attempt, and the American Revolution as the third and most successful, in her eyes, of the attempts.
They all go back to the fundamental teaching of Abraham, that is that the universe is ruled by one God who governs everything, and not by a bunch of capricious gods for whom human beings are just a plaything, but rather God who created man not as a plaything, but in all seriousness with the divine and holy mission.
All right, everybody, that's Dean Ahmed from minaret.org.
He is the president and director of the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Thanks, Scott.
