**October 14-15, 2006 FEMA Emergency Management Higher Education Project
Activity Report**

\(1\) CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS:

Gerges, Fawaz A. \"Stoking Muslim Anger.\" International Herald Tribune,
October 13, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/13/opinion/edgerges.php]{.underline}](http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/13/opinion/edgerges.php)

\[Excerpt: \"While the U.S. debate over Iraq focuses mainly on the
effects of the American military presence on Al Qaeda and its
affiliates, the Bush administration has little appreciation for how its
involvement in Iraq, as well as its staunch support of Israel, is
radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion. In the past few weeks I have
interviewed scores of Muslim activists, human-rights advocates,
Islamists, liberals and ordinary citizens. Most have been telling me
that the West, particularly the United States, is waging a modern
crusade against Islam. From high school teachers to taxi drivers,
America is seen as a new colonial power. Few Muslims accept the American
narrative that touts democracy and freedom. They view America\'s
military presence in the Arab heartland as a sinister plot to divide the
world of Islam and subjugate Muslims.\"\]

Islamica Magazine. \"Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI,\" October 15,
2006. Accessed at:

<http://www.islamicamagazine.com/online-analysis/open-letter-to-his-holiness-pope-benedict-xvi.html>

\[\"Islamica Magazine note: \"In an unprecedented move, an Open Letter
signed by 38 leading Muslim scholars and leaders will be sent to Pope
Benedict XVI on October 15, 2006. The letter\...is the first of its kind
in several centuries\....Christianity and Islam make up more than half
of humankind in a rapidly interconnected world, the letter states, and
it is imperative that both sides share a responsibility for peace to
move the debate away from the anger of the streets toward a frank and
sincere dialogue of hearts and minds that furthers understanding and
respect between the two religious traditions.\" An English language
version of the letter is accessible at the link above.\]

Mahfud, Choirul. \"Bring Islam Down to Earth.\" Common Ground News
Service, October 3, 2006 At:

<http://www.islamicamagazine.com/online-analysis/bring-islam-down-to-earth.html>

\[Excerpt: \"It is time for Muslims all over the world, particularly in
Indonesia, to let go the numbers-based religious model, and begin to
demonstrate religiosity. This requires bringing Islam down to earth -
upholding amr ma\'ruf, nahi munkar (enjoying what is just, forbidding
what is wrong): being polite, defend the oppressed, helping the poor,
rejecting violence, fighting corruption and terrorism, and spreading
peace throughout their country, and the world.\"\]

Rauch, Jonathan. \"The Terror War Is An Honor War.\" National Journal,
October 13, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm]{.underline}](http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm)

\[Note: Article is an excursion on \"honor\" theme laid down in James
Bowman\'s new book \"Honor: A History.\" Article excerpts: \"Outside the
West, traditional honor codes remain strong, and nowhere is that more
true than in the Muslim world\.... Today\'s militant jihadism takes the
ethic of honor to extremes, fixating on manly ferocity and glorious
vengeance. Thus, Bowman writes, \"America and its allies are engaged in
a battle against an Islamist enemy that is the product of one of the
world\'s great unreconstructed and unreformed honor cultures.\" Jihadism
wages not only a religious war but a cultural one, aiming to redeem,
through deeds of bravery and defiance, the honor of an Islam whose glory
has shamefully faded. It aims, further, to uphold a masculine honor code
that the West\'s decadent, feminizing influence threatens to
undermine\.... Nor can militant Islamists settle with the West. When the
post-honor West says, \"Come, now, give up this foolishness, join our
club, be free and rich,\" they hear something more like, \"Be our
poodle, sit at our feet, enjoy the fruits of capitulation.\" Admonitions
that bellicosity accomplishes nothing miss the point, which is that the
very act of fighting (\"resistance\") redeems honor and therefore
accomplishes what matters most. The West thus finds itself an unwilling,
and in many respects unwitting, participant in an honor feud. Clashes of
interest can end in compromise, but honor feuds proffer no logical end
of destruction\... \'There\'s no, to use a fashionable term, exit
strategy,\' Bowman said in an interview. Americans are naive if we
assume that honor cultures yearn for freedom on our terms, and remiss if
we underestimate their capacity for self-defeating belligerence.\"\]

St. Antony\'s-Princeton Conference. \"Muslims in Europe Post 9/11 -
Understanding and Responding to the Islamic World.\" Oxford, UK, April
35-26, 2003. Accessed at:

[[http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/princeton/index.shtml]{.underline}](http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/princeton/index.shtml)

\[Conference presentations have been transcribed and papers made
available, as well as a report on the conference - all accessible at the
URL noted above. Quite a collection.\]

\(2\) GLOBAL WARMING:

Marks, Kathy. \"Fires and Worst Drought in 100 Years Wake Australia Up
To the Reality of Climate Change. The Independent (UK), October 14,
2006. Accessed at:

[[http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/article1870837.ece]{.underline}](http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/article1870837.ece)

\[Excerpt: \"Scientists warned the bushfire threat would increase over
coming decades, as climate change brought more frequent hot weather,
accompanied by less rainfall.\"\]

\(3\) NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION - NORTH KOREA:

Manchester, Josh. \"Sic Semper Tyrannis.\" TCS Daily, October 12, 2006.

Accessed at:
[[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101206A]{.underline}](http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101206A)

\[Excerpt: \"Kim Jong Il is not your average individual. Anyone who was
raised to think of his father as a god is not going to fit in well at
your average high school reunion. But persistent attempts to portray him
as \"crazy\" in popular discourse are both inaccurate and dangerous.
They are inaccurate because \"crazy\" is not what Kim Jong Il is.
Ruthless, with an insatiable lust for power - that is an apt
description, and one that does not usually apply to those who are
mentally unbalanced\.... To dismiss an adversary as \"crazy,\" when in
fact he exhibits\...tyrannical behavior\...forces us to make and accept
strategic arguments that we otherwise would not.\"\]

\(4\) WAR ON TERROR:

Islamica Magazine. \"When All Is Said and Done\...\" October 2006.

Accessed at:
[[http://www.islamicamagazine.com/issue-17/editorial.html]{.underline}](http://www.islamicamagazine.com/issue-17/editorial.html)

\[Excerpt: \"Words\...do have intended and unintended consequences, and
this is what makes language so critical in human interaction. Our
ability to ignite or to defuse tension depends very much on using
language in a responsible manner. The recent crisis in the Middle East,
that engulfed Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel, was yet another example where
the fusion of rhetoric with ideology led to the killing of many innocent
lives. The United States and Israel constantly remind the international
community about the threat of Islamic/Muslim \'terrorism\',
\'extremism\', \'fundamentalism\', and have used such terms to create a
culture of fear that has allowed it to suppress fundamental rights and
bypass enshrined codes of conduct agreed between nations. The problems
in the Middle East will not be solved with such terminology.\"\]

Oliveti, Vincenzo. \"The Myth of \'The Myth of Moderate Islam\'.\"
Islamica Magazine, #15, 2006. At:

<http://www.islamicamagazine.com/issue-15/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-moderate-islam.html>

\[Excerpt: \"\`The Myth of a Moderate Islam\' reflects a dangerous trend
in the war on terror\.... . In fact, less than 5 % of Muslims could be
classified as fundamentalist in outlook, and of that 5 %, less than 0.01
% have shown any tendency toward enacting terrorism or \'religious
violence.\' It is thus \'the height of illiberalism\' to define as
terrorists over 1.3 billion Muslims who have nothing to do with
\'religious violence\' because of the misdeeds of a fringe minority of
0.005 %. At most, one in every 200,000 Muslims can be accused of
terrorism. That is to say there are a maximum of about 65,000 terrorists
worldwide-roughly the same figure as the number of murderers on the
loose in the U.S. alone, with over 20,000 homicides a year and a
population of only 300 million.\" Argues against the \"claim that
terrorism and extremism are inherent to Islam. Following this approach
is exactly how we will lose the war on terrorism.\" Also argues that
\"\`moderate\' Muslims\...{are} the only ones in fact who can
effectively isolate the extremists and thus protect non-Muslims.\"\]

Scoblete, Gregory. \"Root Canal.\" TCS Daily, October 16, 2006.

Accessed at:
[[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101606A]{.underline}](http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101606A)

\[Excerpts: \"It has been five years since the September 11th terrorist
attacks, and we are still struggling desperately to describe\....the
root causes of Islamic terrorism\.... The debate over root causes breaks
down into roughly two camps\.... In one camp are those\... {who} argue
that radical Islam is striking out against the United States for what we
do (and have done) in the Arab and Muslim world and not so much for
\'who we are\' as freedom loving libertines\.... our battle isn\'t
ideological or apocalyptical, it\'s political\.... In the other camp are
those\...who argue that radical Islam is less a reactionary force than a
revolutionary one, spurred to violence by a totalitarian impulse that
can brook no earthly concession short of global submission to its
creed\... a\...potentially genocidal fundamentalism is the true root
cause of Islamic terrorism\.... This interpretative divide, however, is
purely a Western invention, one that obscures more than it clarifies.
The larger truth is that in Islam, especially in its more radical
interpretations, politics and religion are indistinguishable\... This
fusion ensures that political grievances become religious affronts that
demand violently corrective action\.... There is, then, a dangerous
interplay between the political and spiritual in the Muslim world.
Appreciating that radical Islam is a reaction against U.S. policies and
an expression of implacable fundamentalism puts the U.S. in a difficult
bind. We cannot address the dangers of fundamentalism without addressing
the larger political context, but nor can we simply address the
political context and hope that the fundamentalism will evaporate. They
are symbiotic\.... we must have an honest appreciation for how much we
can do to address the \"root causes\" of Islamic terrorism within the
realistic bounds of U.S. politics and interests. The committed jihadists
willing to martyr themselves find moral authority for their violence in
the religious edicts of radical clerics, but this small population swims
in a larger sea of Muslim antipathy toward the West that is driven by
political grievance. We can only address these grievances on the
margins\....\"\]

\(5\) WAR ON TERROR - IRAQ:

Arab News. \"Editorial: Part of the Problem.\" October 15, 2006.

Accessed at:

[[http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=88246&d=15&m=10&y=2006]{.underline}](http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=88246&d=15&m=10&y=2006)

\[Excerpt: \"\...the Blair government has asserted that the chief of
General Staff {Sir Richard Dannatt} still enjoys its complete
confidence. Can it be therefore that the general was meant to say these
things? Could it be that when this officer, well known for his
outspokenness, was appointed in August to the most senior job in the
British Army, it was fully expected that he would go public with his
inevitably stark and critical analysis? If so, then the British are
preparing the ground for their own withdrawal. How is Washington
planning and justifying similar actions at its end?\"\]

Brown, Colin. \"Blair Devastated As Army Chief Savages His Approach to
Iraq.\" The Independent, 14 Oct 2006. At:

[[http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1870873.ece]{.underline}](http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1870873.ece)

\[Excerpt: \"The devastating assessment by General Sir Richard Dannatt,
the chief of the general staff, infuriated ministers and caused alarm in
Washington. However there was widespread backing across the Army
yesterday as soldiers of every rank praised General Dannatt for standing
up to the Government.\"\]

\(6\) WAR ON TERROR - PAKISTAN:

Shahzad, Syed Saleem. \"Pakistan Foils Coup Plot.\" Asia Times, October
14, 2006. Accessed at:

[[http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ14Df02.html]{.underline}](http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ14Df02.html)

\[Excerpt: \"A plot to stage a coup against Pakistan\'s President
General Pervez Musharraf soon after his recent return from the US has
been uncovered, resulting in the arrest of more than 40 people. Most of
those arrested are middle-ranking Pakistani Air Force officers\...All of
those arrested are Islamists\.... \'This is just one glimpse of upcoming
events as a result of Musharraf\'s pro-American policies, which are in
contrast to the thinking pattern of Pakistan\'s state institutions,\'
said retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI official who
went to Afghanistan after his forced retirement and fought alongside
Osama bin Laden against Soviet Russia in the 1980s\.... It is all too
apparent that Pakistan\'s head and tail are moving in opposite
directions: while Musharraf is fully behind the \"war on terror\", the
strategic institutions are reluctant to follow Islamabad\'s
instructions.\"\]

B.Wayne Blanchard, Ph.D., CEM

Higher Education Project Manager

Emergency Management Institute

National Emergency Training Center

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Department of Homeland Security

16825 S. Seton, K-011

Emmitsburg, MD 21727

\(301\) 447-1262, voice

\(301\) 447-1598, fax

wayne.blanchard@dhs.gov

[[http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu]{.underline}](http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu)

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