Ed Husain and Carly Maisel
Muslims, Arabs and Israel: Changing Attitudes and Coming Challenges
Ed Husain - Muslims, Arabs and Israel: Changing Attitudes and Coming Challenges
- Hey, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us. I’m really delighted that we have Ed Husain back with us today. And Ed, there is not more apt time for us to have this conversation that we did schedule a few weeks ago as if one of us has a crystal ball. So I’ll just reintroduce you. But Ed Husain is a British writer and political advisor, who has worked with leaders in governments across the world. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and has held senior fellowships at think tanks in London and New York, including at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ed is the author of “The Islamist” and “The House of Islam: A Global History”. His writing has been shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize, a regular contributor to The Spectator magazine, BBC, CNN and The Telegraph. He’s also written in The Times, The New York Times, The Guardian and many other publications and previously appeared on lockdown. So, Ed, I think we’ll start with the kind of biggest news of the last few days where I could have testified live from Israel on Saturday night in what does go down as one of the more surreal experiences where for 48 to 72 hours before the strike, the rumour mill was in overdrive in typical Israeli fashion. The actual announcement from Home Front Command, informing the population to expect something didn’t come until about 9:00 PM on Saturday night where the Israeli Home Front Command and Preparedness Division of the IDF laid out the advisory for Israelis in good Israeli fashion.
But everyone’s biggest concern, was that nursery school the next day was cancelled, but work wasn’t. And parents would have to solve that. And people thought they should buy a few bottles of water. And that was basically the only preparation that I saw happen. But in all seriousness, it was a pretty uncomfortable, nerve-wracking couple of hours. And with great thanks to the Israeli Air Force, the American Air Force, the Jordanian Air Force and several other UK, France and other unnamed partners, 99% of the Iranian strike was able to be repelled. There was sadly a 7-year-old Bedouin girl, who was badly injured and now seems to be in serious but stable condition. And you will all have seen on social media the images of the 890-pound rocket that landed in the Dead Sea, just to really drive home that I think the theory that this was a practise run, may not hold up. So we could go down a few different avenues here. But for me, the part that I think was most remarkable, was some of the members of the coalition, who helped repel the strike. So perhaps you could reflect to start with on what you were hearing sort of in the Arab world in the run-up to Saturday night. And then what your understanding is of how that coalition came together and what it might mean.
Carly, thank you. And as always, a real joy to be speaking with you. And I don’t know if you can hear sirens in the background.
No.
Good, good, good, good. So I see there are about 500 people online as participants and I think it’s just worth as many of us as possible acknowledging the fabulous work that Carly does behind the scenes often very quietly, heavy-lifting and travelling to parts of the world that most people don’t travel to and addressing issues that most people often don’t know about. And I say this as someone who’s seen Carly in operation firsthand. We were organising a huge conference in Israel in Tel Aviv in the run-up to October 7th. And that’s what it made sure that I was there on October 7th and I saw what happened. I’ve been obviously following it very closely, but thanks to the support and the kindness and advice that Carly and her colleagues constantly provide us on many fronts and many jurisdictions. So thank you, Carly. And on what happened over the weekend and with Iran, I think I have a few brief reflections. One is that our Saudi, Emirati and other Gulf Arab friends, who would’ve been quietly relieved that the Iranian attack was not as intensive, or as sustained or as successful as some had feared. So that was one, a gift from God and two, an attempt on the parts of Israel and her allies, most of whom you’ve named already to make sure that Iran and Iran’s attempts were warded off. The second is that the surprise for most of us, was the Jordanian assistance and the Jordanian involvement. And I think, I would caution us as thinking of the Jordanian government led by the Jordanian king and their attempts as being anything as too pro-Israeli.
If anything, it was much more about their own domestic situation. He has a revolt on his hand for the last two years, two-and-a-half years backed by others in the Middle East. And the Jordanian king knows that if he is not seen to be openly supporting an American ally and Israel and most likely American assets inside of Israel where he is the host of the CIA headquarters in Jordan, then if three weeks later, two weeks later, one month later, there’s a rebellion in his country, a security threat that poses a genuine risk to the Jordanian monarchy, don’t expect the Israelis and the Americans to pull out every stop for you. So it’s a quid pro quo. It’s a strike ahead of the strikes that are going to be facing him. And I think on the other more ambiguous support from both Saudi Arabia and from the UAE, that was caveated, “We will share with you intelligence, but we won’t open up our airspace.” Because the missiles cross Jordanian airspace and it makes perfect sense for Jordan to be much more proactively involved than some of our Gulf allies. And I think finally the real point that is this, and you touched on this, Carly, is that the Iranians, the Iranians government killed an innocent Bedouin, Muslim child. I mean, that’s who they killed. I’m not saying killing anyone else is justified, but that’s the level of the incompetence that we’re dealing with that they kill innocent people and they targeted Jerusalem and their rockets would’ve landed on the mosque and on the Temple Mount. And Israel protected those holy shrines where the buffoonery of the Iranian government, was to attack those shrines. And I think if you look at Arabic Twitter across the region, there was some degree of relief that the Iranians were not successful. But there was also some degree of joy that if this is Iranian capacity and if this is all they can do, and then within minutes, say, “We consider the matter to be closed,” there is a fear that if Israel and its allies were to respond, the response may hit the Iranian mainland, which has not been an Israeli-declared operation so far. So we are at this strange space now that it almost falls on Israel as the more powerful, more strategic nation to hold back rather than to strike. And that I think is the general mood in most parts of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.
And we are still gathering more facts from Saturday night. There’s an article today in The Times of Israel about actually much of this was run from a Doha-based control room. And that actually, this perhaps presents the real strategic opportunity for the Israelis. And perhaps, the calculation they must now make on how to respond, is what does this mean for the coalition that came together after several weeks of navigating? Even by the way, the Saudi’s working, feeding intelligence into a Doha-based control room, some of the challenges around Jordan. Let’s reflect even just on the relations between the Arab partners and countries. Is this actually a case where my enemy’s enemy is my friend? And actually this has also helped some of the Arab countries work together more closely, or have ties improved there regardless in the last few years?
I think both of those reasons Carly. Ties have improved, but also the Iranian government threat, we should always be careful and I know we speak in general terms or at least I do, by Iranian we mean the Iranian clerical government and not the innocent people of Iran, tens of millions of whom, or who oppose the Theocratic Shia government. And I think that’s the issue. The nature of the Iranian government, is that it is revolutionary, that it seeks to impose its ideology on Arab and Sunni countries, is that it seeks to destroy Israel in word and deed through its proxies and now for the first time direct attacks and that it seeks to expand its fear of influence. And for all of those reasons, almost every Arab Sunni country, opposes the Iranian government’s many attempts at causing subversion in their countries. Now, Arab countries, both for cultural, political and military reasons, do not prefer to combat or confront Iran directly and also for commercial reasons. But they applaud it when Israel does and when America does. And I think the fact that Iran was going to be attacking an ally, i.e. Israel, if the attack on Israel were to be successful, the message is to Iran that others can also be in its target zone, direct target zone. So therefore it was imperative for their own security reasons to make sure that the attack on Israel was not successful. And any future attacks are also damaged in a similar light, which by the way, who would’ve thought this could be the case five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? So despite the gloomy situation in the Middle East, this is genuinely a silver lining in the cloud and something on which we ought to build.
And although geographically, it wasn’t necessary, there’s been no mention of Egypt’s role. Do you think that was because they weren’t required, or because they chose to sit this one out?
I think it’s the former. They weren’t required. And Israeli Egyptian intelligence and counter-terrorism corporation is probably the deepest in the region. It’s up there in the top three. And if Israeli military intelligence, required Egyptian military involvement, that would’ve come without any hesitation whatsoever. And the Egyptians pay less of a political price on their street than to the Jordanians. So I’m confident, if need be, the Egyptians would’ve stepped in. But I don’t think there was a necessity at this point.
And so now post Saturday and the injuring of the Bedouin child and the images of the shooting-firework-like look over the top of Al-Aqsa, when you look at Arab social media, is there any reflection on the nature of these attacks and a kind of acknowledgement and understanding that actually it’s Israel’s Arab community in this case that almost more than anything else could have been most at risk? Hezbollah launched a strike at Israel today. They injured 14 soldiers and four civilians in an Arab town. Do you think there is that level of awareness inside Israel, understanding that 20% of the population is Arab? And how is that shaping out across the Arab world?
Exactly what you’ve just identified is part of the debates, A, on social media, B, on news channels, popular news channels, such as Al Arabiya and Sky News Arabia, but not on Al Jazeera. Friends in the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking Middle East, often spend a lot of time watching television. And that debate is live and ongoing. The other debate complimenting the contours that you’ve just identified in terms of the Arabic Sunni Muslim population at 20% and those communities being attacked and those communities incidentally now more loyal to Israel, polls suggest than previously. There’s also the other issue of the innocent people in Gaza being caught up in Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar’s games. And small-scale, yes, the odd incident recorded, yes, but those have been amplified in the Arabic-speaking social media or legacy media too that where is Hamas and where is Iran? Iran, it is understood, has A, supported and B, engineered the kind of attacks we saw on October 7th. Well, where are Iran’s assets now? Now Hezbollah was supposed to have opened a second front in the battle. It was nowhere to be seen. So Arab social media and much of this is in the public domain that there are legitimate outbreaks of horror that the Iranians are prepared to slaughter, the Iranian government is prepared to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza and sacrifice others inside the Israeli mainland, while holding back their Hezbollah assets. Because they saw American military presence increase in the region. So I mean, there isn’t much private or public polling done, but Iran’s popularity is or should be at an all time low, depending on the kind of, judging by the kind of conversation we’re seeing on Arabic social media. So our joint enemy as it were is in a place of weakness.
And the party that we haven’t yet discussed is Turkey. Erdoğan has made probably the strongest statements since October 7th, very quickly accused Israel of all types of war crimes, has changed trade relations between the countries. And according to reports was informed if nothing else by the Iranians of their plans for the weekend. And depending on which report you read, either nodded, acquiesced, or certainly didn’t do anything else about it. Where do you see Turkey in this?
Yeah, I’m a bit of a dissenter on all things Turkey. I just think that I’m not saying President Erdoğan’s rhetoric is right, or justified or understandable in the least bit, far from it. But I genuinely believe that the Middle East hinges on two big pillars on either side of it. Most of the Middle East is bracketed between Iran and between Turkey. And for the strategic strength of both Israel and our Gulf Arab allies and friends and for the Sunni Middle East, we need one of those two pillars to be beside us. Otherwise, if both of those pillars are against these allies in the centre, the allies become weak. And what we saw just before October 7th, was Turkey had become ever closer to Israel. Turkey had become closer to Saudi Arabia and the UAE and slightly more distant from Qatar. And Turkey had become closer to Azerbaijan and the Turkish president’s visits to Azerbaijan and his comments in Azerbaijan, which incidentally is a Muslim country with a Shia majority and with excellent relations with Israel, Khomeini is from Azari background, so when we bring Azerbaijan and Turkey and the Sunni Gulf Arabs closer to us, the West and Israel, we weaken Iran and its strength and its outreach in the region. And that’s the strategic heavy block that we need on our side. Without Turkey, I feel that too often we are too weak. And whatever the situation is in Turkey, domestically, politically and the rhetoric that the president has issued, I mean, it appears that he and his government, have been supporting the Israeli government’s needs for aluminium and other exports from Turkey. So until about two weeks ago, they were prepared to continue to do trade. I think aircrafts are still flying between those countries. And the Turkish military is not a shabby military, it’s the second largest NATO army in the region. I mean, it’s not a country that we should isolate. So yes, Turkey has made mistakes, but if there’s one country in the region that we ought to work hardest to bring back onto our side, it ought to be Turkey.
And perhaps embrace the phrase that “All politics is local.”
Because he’s playing to his base, indeed. Yes, which means that in the last election, he’s lost Istanbul. We have a different mayor in Istanbul. And that mayor by all accounts isn’t someone, who’s necessarily anti-West or anti-Israel.
So there was reports post Saturday and obviously the continued discussions around 107 and the Saudi official voicing for the first time what others had said, which was Iran launched 107 to derail Saudi-Israel normalisation. The general impression I hear in DC, is that a Saudi-Israel-US normalisation deal, is really only possible under President Biden that democratic votes will be led by him, but under a Republican presidency would be very hard to get it passed. And therefore, the question, is are we approaching a kind of time clock on that to November and where do you see things on the kind of Israel-Saudi track?
I was in Saudi Arabia last month. And I mean, I should say this, because it comes from someone very high up in Saudi Arabia, and I’ll say it in the interests of just saying the truth and relaying to friends in the audience what the sentiment is. Saudis say that, and this is someone who’s watched the 43-minute video of horror and terror that’s been circulating in certain Israeli embassies and other private locations. So having watched that, he’s formed this opinion and his opinion is that the 7th of October, gives Israel one week of batshit crazy in Gaza. It doesn’t give Israel six months of batshit crazy in Gaza. And that’s a verbatim quote from someone very senior in Saudi Arabia. So there is genuine concern in Saudi Arabia that the Israeli reaction has been too strong and has gone too far and lasted for too long. Now when you push back and say, “Well, what kind of response is considered to be proportionate,” you don’t get much of an answer. But I’m just kind of relaying what the sentiment is. Now given that’s the sentiment, what the request, I think spoken and unspoken, is prove to us that Hamas is destroyed, prove to us that Hamas will no longer be in government and prove to us that the last bastion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, which is in government, i.e. yes, the brotherhood is in Jordan and Kuwait, but it’s not in government in the same way that it runs Gaza. That is now destroyed. And that only strengthens our Gulf Arab allies, because the Muslim Brotherhood after Iran is their public enemy number one. And you are entirely right, Carly that this is the talk of the town here in Washington DC that you need President Biden and the Democrats to carry over the requisite number of votes to give our Saudi friends what they need in terms of security guarantees and a civilian nuclear facility under American supervision.
But the problem is this, the price that America and Israel has to pay for that, is now higher than it was before October 7th. In other words, the Saudis want to see some kind of viable Palestinian state. What was politically a horizon is now a state. And I think that’s when it becomes difficult. Because in all honesty, it’s not an Israel’s gift to grant a Palestinian state. There has to be Palestinian leadership. And there isn’t leadership on the Palestinian side now that is serious about anything resembling a state that does not threaten Israel’s security, or doesn’t create the suicide-bombing culture that the West Bank and Gaza have done previously. So I think that’s where we’re stuck again. We’re stuck on whether it’s West Bank or Gaza, having some kind of viable Palestinian entity that could become a state 10, 15 years from now. And I think there, we have a genuine challenge. One last point, if I may, on this question, I think my Saudi friends are mistaken to think that the attack on Israel came from Iranian kind of direct involvement. October 7th happened because of Yahya Sinwar and four people knew in addition to Yahya Sinwar. The Israelis say if a fifth person knew, we would’ve known. So I think maybe I’m putting too much kudos on Israeli intelligence. I’d like to think I’m right in believing that assessment. And I like to think that the Israelis are right when they say the Iranians did not have direct knowledge of the date or the type of attack. And the Iranians nor the Qataris knew that this was the timing and the type of attack. And the intelligence that’s come out of Gaza so far according to friends in the highest levels in Israel, does not corroborate the theory that Iran was directly involved, or it was normalisation that had threatened it as in threatened this, Saudi-Israeli normalisation, was what they were trying to scupper. That does not seem to have been the major one concern for Hamas for launching October 7th.
You might have slightly more faith in Israeli intelligence than the rest of us post October 7th. But we’ll say that we hope had a fifth person known, they would have also known.
In defence of Israeli intelligence, they did strike the exact right location in Damascus.
Yeah, they had some ground to repair, but yes.
But on the same time, they bodged up on the world’s soup kitchen and whatnot. So I get it, it’s a mixed picture.
[Carly] Yeah.
If I had to believe Israelis versus Iranians, I think it’s clear to me who I want to believe.
Yeah, noted. And let’s follow the Saudi discussion slightly further in this, maybe a kind of can of worms to open. But the Houthis have periodically since October 7th, weighed in. We’ve all seen their terrorist dance music videos alongside their drones coming in towards Eilat. Arguably the Saudis attempted to deal with the Houthis in previous years, not particularly successfully. Is there any kind of discussion from a Saudi perspective about the war with Yemen and where things landed and perhaps the power that the Houthis still have, or has a line been drawn over that and-
It is the strangest thing that, I mean, only friends in the Emirates talk about this. They talk about the fact that when the Houthis were put back on the US terror list, it was the same day, two years previously that the Americans had asked the Emiratis and the Saudis to stop the war in Yemen. The Emiratis have noted that particular date in the calendar. And the Saudis and Emiratis said that “We were ahead and we were stopped by our Western friends from winning that war.” I don’t think there’s much in the way of tears for the damage done in Yemen. But that’s not something that came up in conversations in Saudi Arabia. And I can’t explain why. I think the bigger focus is on Iran, on Israel and Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s 2030 plan. And they’re focused on their domestic issues. They want to address challenges around gender equality, clerical control, greater liberties, economic prosperity inside their own country. And I think that’s got to be a good thing that Saudi Arabia is focused on upgrading its own social fabric, rather than focused on wider regional conflicts.
And perhaps this is a moment to reflect on the kind of role that the Palestinians play in the kind of Arab psyche. Even if you just think about the Arab streets’ response to the war in Yemen versus what’s going on in Gaza, we’ll obviously turn to talking about the West in a few minutes, but help our audience understand, often you hear a number of different things. You either hear like normalisation, we’ll quote the inaccurate John Kerry for a minute, “Normalisation goes through Jerusalem and Ramallah, or normalisation requires the Palestinian question to be dealt with at the end.” But it’s always in the sentence. And it may not be the same across the Arab world, of course, but where does the Palestinian question and the psyche fit in here?
It’s a fascinating question, Carly. Because over the last 10 years, the Palestinian question has been not in the top 10, or at least the top seven of Muslim concerns. And I think without sounding in any way disrespectful for our Jewish friends, I’m assuming most of our members of the audience are Jewish, is just there’s really only two countries that are on the top of our friends’ heads or on their minds. One is the country that they’re living in and two, what’s going in and around Israel most of the time with few exceptions. For most Muslims, we don’t have that luxury. We’ve got about 56 countries, most of whom are in the global south and with all of the challenges of the global south. So on any given day, most Muslims have got to think about or at least confront, if not do anything about, but at least think about Kashmir, the Kurdish issue, Syria, Yemen, Uyghurs, Iraq, Iran’s interference in a whole range of theatres of conflict. And most recently, the issues in India pertaining to both Christian and Muslim minorities. Large numbers of Muslims in the West come from an Indian background. So that keeps playing up. And then there is the issue of domestic “Islamophobia” in those countries, in most western countries. And I know we’re coming to that in a moment. So most of the time, Muslims have a whole range of issues to be dealing with. So for the last 10 years, it was first the Arab Spring, then it was the Civil War in Syria and then it was the situation with China and the Uyghurs, then it was Kashmir and then it’s constantly Turkey and the Kurdish issue keeps playing up. And then there were issues around Russia and the Tatari-Chechnyan Muslims. So there are so many issues that Muslims have to contend with, think about on a given day, give charitable money to go on marches for that Palestine had almost become issue number eight or nine. But then after October 7th, it came back and it came back with a vengeance.
And I remember speaking with friends here in the State Department and I just couldn’t believe the naivety that they thought, they could just ram home the Israeli-Saudi normalisation with absolutely no care for the Palestinians. And wearing my other hat for the N7, I’d gone to see Palestinian leaders and they would talk about Palestine and some kind of, not shutting down the US Embassy in Jerusalem, but opening a US consulate in East Jerusalem. I mean, that’s a long way to come from saying, “We want a capital in Jerusalem,” saying, “We’ll actually accept a small US consulate in East Jerusalem, so we don’t have to then go and recognise the US embassy in the rest of Jerusalem.” So that’s not saying, “Shut it down.” It’s saying, “Cater for us.” My point in saying all of this, is that the State Department here wouldn’t be open to realising that if you don’t at least be seen to be listening to Palestinian grievances, you’re ignoring that and it can blow up in our faces in a terrible way. For weeks, I remember saying to them that “At least listen to their concerns, or be seen to be engaging with it.” And they would dismiss it. And then it comes back and then suddenly in the Muslim and Arab psyche, Palestine enters front and centre again. And it’s for a new generation who had moved on from Palestine, for whom issues in Bahrain were much more interesting. Why is there a Shia population there agitating? Now all of that’s been forgotten. And Palestine as an idea, Palestine as a concept, Palestine as a cause has taken centre stage. Now there are several problems and several attractions as to why that happens. Now, I can easily say that most of Syria is under Alawite control. Now Alawites are a small minority in the mountains of Syria.
And yet the 20-plus million Syrians, have quietly accepted Alawite control of their country. They’ve forced civil war, they’ve lost, three to 5 million Syrians are outside of the country. And so no one’s saying, “Liberate Syria.” No one says that Australia, New Zealand are under some kind of British control, because the Brits have been the white colonialist settlers. No one’s saying America should be liberated. No one’s saying China should be liberated from the Han Chinese. But the native people of Judea, Samaria, wider Israel, Jerusalem returned to the land after 2000 years of exile. And suddenly, there are calls in vast parts of the “Muslim world” that we’ve got to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation. So my point is that there’s a mental inconsistency in the way that Muslims approach this question of Israel-Palestine. Because accepting Jewish state’s power, supremacy, laws, is some kind of a front. Because there’s an old racism that Jewish people ought to be under our control, which was the norm for 1400 years from Spain all the way across the Arab world. Now how can we accept minority status in a majority-Jewish state? So there’s a psychological, legal, mental challenge that we haven’t overcome. There is something else I want to say and I say this often, but very few people pick up on it, is that in the Quran, there’s a verse that says that God is saying to the Prophet Muhammad what he said to Moses. And this is in the Quran. It’s not in the Bible, it’s in the Quran. That’s God is saying to Moses, all people, i.e. Moses’ people, Moses is saying to my people, “Please enter the holy land that God has prescribed for you.”
And I think we all understand, every Arab, every Muslim knows that’s not Uganda, that’s not Brazil, that’s not Peru. That is the land on the other side of Egypt, or the north of Saudi Arabia. It’s in the Middle East. So we know that God had promised that land. We know that the Jewish people belong there. And we know by the way that after 500 years of Roman exile, it was the second caliph Omar, who brought and invited Jewish people back in the year 636-637 CE in order to recognise that Jewish people belong in that country, in that region. It was the Romans and the Christians, who’d exiled them for 500 years. So all of that history gets written away for all kinds of reasons. But fundamentally, primarily it is this, Carly. The reason is that in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded. In 1947-48, the Muslim Brotherhood and some of its Syrian members, led them, went and fought against the Israeli soldiers that delivered such glorious victory. Hamas was founded in ‘87 as a Palestinian arm or the Gazan wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it’s the brotherhood that continues to make this issue so central that unless we solve Palestine, we are not good Muslims. It’s become part of a Muslim identity, the issue of Palestine. And I mean, if you look at most Muslim literature until the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine is not our number one issue.
But now it’s become the number one issue, because it’s a great combination or a great concoction of America, Israel, Britain, Jews, oppressed Palestinians. I mean, all of the kind of ugliness that we wish to see suddenly finds itself in a perfect expression. And in order to break the back of that argument, the Saudis and the Emiratis said, “Do you know what? We are not going to let the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood play politics with Palestine. And therefore open a schism with us and our people and our interests continuously.” The Abraham Accords were a way to saying two fingers to the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood narrative and saying, “We will normalise with Israel as it is, as it stands as a full member of the families of nations, who are from and belong in the Middle East.” And I think that’s really the only way forward. Because the average Muslim in Bradford or Michigan cannot become more Arab and more Muslim and more Palestinian than Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and hopefully more countries to come in the nations that become friendly with Israel in the coming months, years.
And those in the West come at this, I think from kind of their frame of reference and try to kind of layer on their worldview, firstly around kind of regimes in the Arab world, the role of democracy and a kind of lack of understanding or clarity about how Arab countries run and whether or not these regimes that are progressing, you touched on the areas Saudi are much more focused on. The first time I went to Qatar 15 years ago, looks different to now, similarly with the UAE. From a kind of political perspective, do you see this kind of style of government, regime, whatever the appropriate wording to be the one of success in the Arab world, perhaps when you compare it to the more traditional form in the West of the Winston Churchill quote of “Democracy’s the least bad option of everything we’ve tried,” or whatever the exact phrasing is?
Yeah, friends who are listening, I’d encourage them to read Simone Weil. Simone Weil wrote a book on why political party, they are a bad idea. And she wrote that in the early part of the last century. And Simone Weil, famously French, famously Jewish, famously touched by Christianity, but refusing to convert. Because of the antisemitism of the church, the Catholic church. But Simone Weil makes a very powerful point in her writings when she says that multi-party politics and democracy was an invention in England that worked for ladies and gentlemen, who went hunting and watched rivals and fought rivals and then became friendly in the evening when one party was Whig and another party was Tory. But her argument, was that kind of multi-party civilised politics, requires civil wars as a precursor, requires that whole Anglo-Saxon mindset as a precursor, doesn’t always work. Jeffersonian democracy isn’t always appropriate for every nation that hasn’t gone through civil wars, The War of the Roses, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the multiple attempts at expanding the franchise. There’s a long history that goes back before England becoming democracy.
Now just as democracy in Britain is not I’m afraid the same as democracy say in Hungary, or the so-called Democratic Republic of Korea, it’s just not, there are degrees of differences, similarly, we can’t look at Saudi Arabia and the UAE and other Gulf countries and say, “Oh yeah, they’re Soviet-level dictatorships.” They’re just not. So I think we have a binary that you’re either a democracy, or either a dictatorship that is flawed. So again, at the risk of sounding controversial, but I believe this is the truth and therefore I feel compelled to say this, what our Arab friends in the Gulf are trying to pioneer is a different way of governance. And that different way, is that you don’t put democracy first. You put liberalisation and the rule of law first. And their argument is, if we place elections first as popularly understood to be democracy, what you have is Kuwait, Gaza, Iran, Algeria and Egypt under Morsi, which is the bad guys win. Because they’re best mobilised. And these countries and nations have not gone through that multi-century process of the Enlightenment, Reformation, Industrial Revolution, Renaissance and so on. And they’re going through that at the moment, concurrently as trying to govern and liberalise. And part of the Abraham Accords, or the outreach to Israel is exactly that. Learn the values of tolerance, respect minorities, accept the rule of law, equal citizenship with Jews, with women, with gay people and others. Once all these are in the psyche of a nation, then you can open it up for multi-party elections. But unless just as Germany did, they had to ban their Nazi party before they opened democratic election. The Muslim Brotherhood is our Nazi party.
And I don’t exaggerate it when I say it was founded in 1928, mirroring fascism and mirroring Nazism with this paramilitary organisations and the purification of Egyptian identity and so on. So what our friends in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia are trying to do, is embed that culture, the rule of law and greater liberalisation. And in that, Israel, America, Britain can be useful and helpful to them and they have listened to us. We can see just over the last 10 years, there’s been a shift in their attitude towards women, minorities, gay people and others. But if we force democracy on them now, I think it’s premature and again, I cite Sir Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah Berlin’s work on the three concepts of liberty are brilliant in highlighting what matters most, is the individual being protected, that the individual can live the life of an eccentric liberal and the state protects them. And sometimes, democracies do not provide that. I mean, you are in New York, I’m here in Washington DC. America’s one of the most conformist societies on the planet. And this is a democracy, whereas England has greater shades of eccentricity that it allows for. And I think the Emiratis and the Saudis are trying to get to that place. We leave the individual be the individual. And to that end, we don’t need democracies in ballot boxes at this stage. Because whether it’s in Jordan or Kuwait or Gaza, we see that the bad guys are much more effective in using the democratic argument by leveraging Western support for democracy. And what we end up, is with undemocratic, illiberal government. So I’m afraid, I firmly believe that liberalism as defined by Sir Isaiah Berlin, is a prerequisite for religious people and others before we get to free-flowing democratic elections.
I think two Brits in America, we do just about manage to hang onto our eccentricities, especially when we are together in person. But yes, it is a struggle.
When you refuse to say water and you say water.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, when I hold onto my pronunciations, it’s my last bastion of rebellion. But let’s continue on the Muslim Brotherhood discussion and turn to the streets of Europe, New York on Monday where there was burning of American flags, or blocking of the Golden Gate Bridge, et cetera. So it wasn’t more than October 8th when protests ignited around the world several days before the Israelis had gone into Gaza, or launched any form of response. And Bret Stephens likes to quote that he went to Times Square on October 8th and was kind of, I think, I don’t know if he was actually surprised, but dismayed to understand that what was already being protested, was effectively a pro-Hamas support rally. And these groups are very well organised, very well funded and actually very extreme, right? There was Hezbollah flags visible in London and in New York this week. There is the gloves and the masks are off in terms of what this movement is calling for. And first of all, I would say it seems to be surprisingly kind of accepted with not a great degree of sophistication of kind of law enforcement or police authorities deciding what is or isn’t okay if you climb a flagpole in the US and remove a US flag and replace it with a Palestinian flag. Those are things I would’ve expected to see more force or response from authorities. But also, there does seem to be a kind of permeation of the Muslim Brotherhood sentiment that you’ve touched on in these pockets. There was also leaked documents on anti-Iranian regime TV channel yesterday that shows the April 15th disruption was called for directly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. So how do you see this kind of response in the West, even before there was very difficult images coming out of Gaza and what do you think it means for the health of western societies?
A great question, Carly. I think we’ve faced two problems, one, ideological, two, tactical. Ideological problem is that the Muslim Brotherhood has over the last 20, 25 years in the West hidden itself behind the wall of Islamophobia. If you criticise them, the Muslim Brotherhood, they say you’re being Islamophobic. So they are what we call Islamists. In other words, those who have politicised the faith. But they refuse to see themselves as Islamists. They hide behind being Muslim. And so if you criticise them, somehow you are Islamophobic. So they’ve tried to legislate to prevent any form of criticism against them. That’s one. Two, they, I’m afraid, to friends who are more left-leaning, found political allies in the far-left. So whether it’s Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, or whether it’s others here in the US, the Squad, Ilhan Omar and AOC and others politically, or other factions across Europe and the rest of the world, the political hard-left has allied itself with the Islamist hard-right. And we should be surprised by that. Michel Foucault, the famous French philosopher was an ally of the Iranian Khomeini revolution until he fell out with them when they turned against homosexuals and so on.
But we make the same mistake again and again, the far-left, almost like a horseshoe theory gets in bed with the Islamist far-right. And then causes this ideological paralysis that stops the center-left from going after its political base. So for example, now in the UK, Sir Keir Starmer has done a fantastic job in delineating lines of antisemitism. But he can’t pronounce on this side of an election. Because he looks at 30, 35 constituencies that could now cast him also as an Islamophobe and lose elections. Here in the UK, sorry, in the US, President Biden is reluctant to go after that same constituency. Because he needs to win Michigan and needs to win other parts of the country. So there is that political and ideological issue that stands between the vociferous nature with which we go after the far-right when it’s white supremacists. But we won’t go after the far-right when it’s led by Islamists against Jewish people and others who they disagree with. So there we have a real problem ideologically in the fabric of the West and the lack of confidence in the West and going after our enemies, domestically and externally. The second is this and I think this is a reflection from the first, it’s a tactical problem. Because if you go into MI5 headquarters and ask MI5, “Why are you not monitoring or prosecuting, or collecting the evidence on tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood operations that are antisemitic, openly full of Jew hatred, attacking other democratic governments and undermining LGBTQ rights and openly misogynistic and comes under the hate speech category,” they would say to you, “Well, we are currently monitoring 43,000 active terror cases.
Which of those would you like us to drop in order to go after a few guys having a kebab on a Friday night in a Turkish restaurant? And yes, they’re having a bit of a rant.” That’s how it’s seen, the terrorism situation from about 10% from white supremacists, 90% from Islamist extremists. It’s so severe in England and similar numbers here in America with the offshoots of the Klan and the Proud Boys and QAnon and so on. And on the election year, do you really want the FBI to be going after so-called non-violent Islamists for a bit of hate speech and a bit of flag-burning and a bit of death to America and death to the Jews and death to Israel, whereas we’ve got real-time live cases that are planning acts of violence and terror. So that’s the tactical and ideological threat, or the threat level, which I think prevents the kind of harshness, which we expect western governments to prosecute the Muslim Brotherhood. And by the way, the Brotherhood, it is banned in Mecca. So those days when we could blame Saudi Arabia are now gone. The Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Mecca. But it gathers in London. Sayyid Qutb if you like, Qutb spelt Q-U-T-B for friends who are interested, he wrote a book in 1953, called “Our Battle with the Jews”. This is five years after the founding of Israel.
And that book was translated by Khomeini, young man then at a clerical institution. Now Khomeini is the president or the supreme leader of Iran. So there’s a direct line, I’m afraid, between the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran and those two forces influencing Muslims in the West to continually spout that level of hatred against our Gulf Arab allies, Sunni Muslim leaders and our Israeli ally and as well as their own governments here, which I think begs a bigger question. What is the future of those organisations as more and more people on the far-right become angrier and angrier, watching their streets being taken over and their flags being burnt and their country being denigrated? And I genuinely fear what the future holds. And I think it’s 2027, the French election, the French presidential election, that will be the first open coming out of the gates of a serious far-right force that will then trigger all of us to evaluate the space of political Islamism, or a form of Nazism in our midst.
And what do you think, the UK, let’s start there, could or should be doing over the next few years to try and turn back the tides? If a Saturday brings out two to 300,000 people on the streets of London, they may not all subscribe to these views. But they don’t have enough differences that they’re not prepared to march alongside them.
But Carly, these marches have been organised by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee. These marches have been backed by a number of organisations that have refused to condemn Hamas, that have openly fund raised for Hamas. Interpal is banned here in the US and banned across the Middle East, but allowed to function in the UK openly. And I say this sadly with a deep heart, I believe in the old-fashioned way of “Don’t criticise your country when you’re abroad.” But I just feel that on this issue that the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain should have been banned five years ago under David Cameron. It was not banned. Cameron refused to go as far as the Emirati and Saudi allies asked him to go on the Brotherhood. Now we’re in a situation where I think, and again, I’m being really honest, I think Minister Tom Tugendhat, excellent thinker on these issues, who speaks Arabic, Farsi, served in Iraq and Afghanistan understands this. But my sense is that, and I don’t like saying this, but it’s the truth, the bank manager that is running the country, called Rishi Sunak has no interest in any of this. He just wants to balance the books, bring down inflation, increase wages and then go to an election on economic grounds, rather than on the health and the culture and the vibrant nature of the country. So as long as we have a prime minister at the helm and genuine lack of leadership in understanding that the Muslim Brotherhood is our version of the Nazi party that threatens women, threatens gay people, threatens Jewish people and is a threat to 40-plus political constituencies and 5 million Muslims before they’re a threat to Jewish people or others, we won’t have a country that is genuinely united and we’re just letting a beast and a monster grow in our midst. In 10-years time, their numbers will grow and they increasingly are seen to be “The legitimate voice of ordinary Muslims.”
So I think that’s the real challenge. And I put it fairly and squarely on Rishi Sunak’s door. And Jeremy, Jeremy or James, James cleverly, the Home Secretary, hasn’t gone as far as he needs to. Because they think if they go too far, they will be cast as Islamaphobes by the Labour Party and they will lose more seats at the next general election. And I think that is the ugly nature of the political calculation that we’re having to deal with that stops us from doing this, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, shut down its bank accounts, close down its television stations, reinstate the leadership in its mosques. And that sends a serious signal to 5 million Muslims that Britain is not a soft spot for the enemies of the West and for the enemies of Israel to be gathering across the country in 5-million-plus numbers. And sure, 300,000 people are gathering and though they all don’t subscribe to that ideology, but we’ve seen again and again, placards that hold up the final solution, placards that hold up denigrating images of Jewish people in Judaism. We’ve seen placards that condemn Hamas being attacked and removed. If you are all such peaceful demonstrators, why don’t you condemn Hamas, who led to the cause of this conflict? We’ve seen this on three different occasions. There’s an Iranian Jewish gentleman, who holds up a placard that says “Hamas is a terrorist organisation.” They linch him. It’s like a mediaeval lynching, they go after him.
Not only did they lynch him, but occasionally the Met Police arrest him as well.
So I find it difficult to have sympathy with those kind of protests that somehow Martin-Luther-King-level civil rights movement, they’re not.
And we didn’t even get to touch on American universities as the President of Columbia testifies in front of the House Affairs Committee today to try and explain why her campus as one of many, has become a refuge for exactly the types of things. Now, with the last question, you are obviously an adjunct professor at Georgetown. How have you found the academic life and university experience since October 7th? We won’t ask you to criticise your own actual institution, but just kind of reflecting generally.
No, Georgetown so far has been clear from the kind of backlash we’ve seen both at Harvard, Columbia, Penn and other places, one. Two, the dean of the School of Foreign Services, is a Jewish gentleman called Dean Hellman. He’s been very supportive. And I’ve had nothing but support from Jewish friends and Jewish students. But I’ve had some hostility from students, who are from a Palestinian background. What I’ve found is an open channel where we can actually talk and communicate in the way that we are. And it’s lent a genuine challenge function to them. But I think in a weird way, George Washington University has had it much worse than we have at Georgetown. Maybe because Georgetown is a Jesuit campus and it takes religion much more seriously. We respect our Jewish students as Jewish first and foremost and Israeli students are welcome and we’ve had students from Israel on campus. But there have been one or two incidents where idea of soldiers have had protests outside events that they’ve spoken at. The only pressure I’ve had is I think I retweeted JK Rowling and I had a couple of students come after me on claiming that I was a transphobe and I’m generally not. I mean, I’m a father of two daughters and I believe a woman is a woman as a man is a man. If he has an operation and changes his life, welcome on board to the other side. So those are the issues where there’s been difficulty. But on Israel and Jewish students, generally speaking, it’s been better than most campuses.
And in which case, we’ll all register for Georgetown in the form.
But even Columbia’s been good today. The dean said-
Well, let’s just say that they had a pretty low bar to clear in comparison to the previous testimony of Penn, MIT and Harvard. She did manage-
But it remove four tenure professors, right?
[Carly] Were a problem.
It removed four tenure professors, no? I mean that’s-
Well, supposedly they were removed four, except that then got hold of the record and pointed out that at least two of them were still on committees. I think it became a more difficult conversation. And yes, it was important that the president of Columbia said, “Calls for genocide are against the code of conduct in the university.” So yes, it was not as much of a flaming response as the previous round, but I suspect-
There Carly, I put that with you and your friends in New York, you and your friends have done a fantastic job in bringing some of these people to congress. And you were at Harvard, you met some of our friends from Saudi Arabia, who went there. You’re doing a brilliant job again behind the scenes and putting pressure where legally and in other ways we can to make sure that professors don’t spout hatred in the classroom and normalise it. So you carry on and I’ll do whatever I can to be supportive.
Thank you. Well, Ed, we could have continued for hours. And from the comments in the chat, people would love you to join us again at the next opportunity. I’m not sure I can prepare as much of a crystal ball in advance to know that the week we book, we’ll have had quite such relevance for all of the topics we’ve touched on. But it’s always a pleasure. And thank you very much and thank you for sharing your thoughts with us all.
Pleasure is mine, Carly. Always great to see you and look forward to seeing you in person soon. Thank you.
Thanks, bye.