Islam - "Holding Islam Accountable"

Refreshingly, we are hearing this call more and more.

As is vividly illustrated by the book's title,Mr. Ajami makes no bones as to where his sympathies lie. By deposing a bloodthirsty tyrant and enabling his brutalized subjects to put him on trial, he argues, the United States has established, for the first time in modern Arab history, "the precedent of holding a ruler responsible for the follies and crimes of his regime," without which there can be no civil society. This, together with the liberation of Iraq's long-oppressed Shiite and Kurdish communities to play their overdue roles in their country's future, has sown the seeds of Iraq's potential transition, if not that of the wider Middle East, to a freer and more and accountable political system.

Mr. Ajami is by no means oblivious to the immensity of the task undertaken by the United States, nor does he preclude the possibility of a colossal failure. On the contrary, as a longtime critic of pan-Arabism, he is keenly aware of the malignant hypocrisies that continue to mar Arab politics to the present day, not least the total indifference of the Arab regimes to the fate of ordinary Iraqis, their tacit endorsement of Islamist terrorism so long as it is not directed against themselves, and their readiness to espouse virulent anti-Americanism despite a heavy reliance on U.S. political, military, and financial support. He is particularly scathing of President Mubarak of Egypt, who "took America's coin but ran afoul of America's purposes," and Jordan's King Abdullah II, a quintessential product of the "elite American prep schools and the ways of modernity" who "opened the door to bigotry, lent it his authority." He is similarly contemptuous of the hypocrisy of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a spiritual guide of the Muslim Brothers and one of today's most influential Islamic thinkers, who in the summer of 2004 stipulated that the killing of American civilians in Iraq was "obligatory on all Muslims," even as he was living "in the safety in Qatar - among Americans of every profession present in that principality." And when terror came to Qatar the following year - in the form of a car bomb attack on a British theater group performing in the emirate - Qaradawi minced no words in condemning "such criminal deeds."

You may recall Qaradawi is the good friend of London's mayor, Red Ken Linvingstone. Just one more reason it's called Londonistan.
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