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Charles Cameron, an expert on forensic theology, is doing a series of guest posts here on Islamist extremism. His prior posts can be found here, here and here:

Breaking News on the Mystery of Maj. Hasan’s Powerpoint

by Charles Cameron 

I am in the middle of writing up an extended, contextualized commentary on the 50-slide PowerPoint presentation that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan made to his colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a senior-year psychiatric resident in June 2007, but wanted to make one data point available to other analysts right away.

In the final bullet point of slide 11 he writes in quotes, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

This last phrase is a direct quotation from a statement made by Jeff Hammad, a Muslim in the Marines, reported by the SF Chronicle religion writer Don Lattin in an article in SFGate, the Chronicle website, titled “Muslims in the military walk fine line: War tensions put pressure on rising minority“. A quick search suggests that this is the original source for this particular phrase, which Hasan’s own use of quote marks suggests he was drawing from some source other than himself, although this saying of Hammad’s was also quoted from Lattin’s article in a 2006 Maxwell AFB Research Report by Timothy E. Stenmark, “Language, Cultural Awareness, and the Fourth Generation Warrior“.

The rest of Don Lattin’s article, and the contents of Stenmark’s paper, should therefore be subject to careful scrutiny.

Jeff Hammad’s opening comment in Lattin’s article: “The military has a tendency to demonize the enemy, and Muslims are on the receiving end of that hostility.”

ADDENDUM:

Zen here. Charles alerted me that readers can view the Hasan PPT presentation over at The Washington Post website. No embed option, sorry.

Herodotus, the “Father of History” has received some new props in terms of his reliability from archaeologists digging in Egypt.

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

….”We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.

Herodotus was long disparaged by historians as an entertaining and unreliable mythologizer, who instead upheld his younger and envious rival Thucydides as the model of ancient historical purity and accuracy. The empirical basis for this position is eroding fast and while Thucydides has his own greatness that can never be denied, the shadow he long cast over Herodotus has waned.

Give a Little: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World by Wendy Smith

At first glance, Give a Little, which has a theme of the transformative social effects of cumulative small charitable donations, is not the usual type of book that I review here. And in fact, I came across Give a Little in an unconventional way. Full Disclosure: I know the author slightly and met her a few times previously and for social reasons, received an invitation to the book release party, which required that I pick up the book and read it even though it was not my usual genre.

I was struck by several aspects.

First, the quality level is high ( it reminded me most of a narrowly focused Malcolm Gladwell book). Give a Little was refashioned from a more academic study with plenty of statistical data into a very readable book for a popular audience. The sense of depth carries through.

Secondly, though I’m certain that the author, Wendy Smith, who spent twenty years in the public/NGO sector wasn’t thinking in these terms, the principles behind the humanitarian programs she examines also have the potential to revolutionize foreign aid and economic development policies and breathe life into the “civilian side” of COIN.

Smith’s chapters delve into a variety of the most successful , and at times least well known, programs that have two things in common: first, they are directed at permanently improving the “human capital” or “social capital” of the recipients rather than sustaining a subsistence existence. Secondly, the programs all manage an enormous ROI for every donation due to generating powerful, downstream, “ripple effect” benefits. Cents given today translate into tens or hundreds of dollars of positive outcomes gained and negative costs avoided tomorrow

There are many worthy organizations profiled ( ex. Ounce of Prevention, Bridges to Prosperity etc.) and Smith offers the readers anecdotes that are deeply positive and uplifting narratives of individuals, families and communities transformed by the power of small donations designed to empower the people of the “bottom billion”. Mircolending and philanthropy issues are discussed, as is social investment policies but these subjects are not generally the focus of the readers of this blog.

Of this section of the blogosphere, who should read Give a Little and garner some “Aha!” moments?:

Those interested in COIN and “connecting the Gap“.

Those interested in building “resilient communities“.

Human Terrain experts.

Those who write about foreign aid, development and humanitarian NGO’s

Advocates of public diplomacy.

Supporters of “decentralized” or “localist” strategies

Reformers who talk of Gov 2.0 and national security

The Social capitalists and unevenly distributed futurists.

Goldman Sachs and other banksters wrangled swine flu vaccines ahead of most medical workers and high risk patients. Nice.

Do not hold your breath waiting for a Congressional investigation or a New York Times or Newsweek expose of how this happened and who is responsible. Much like when we endured the ridiculously laudatory coverage of the death of the corrupt and not especially pro-American Benazir Bhutto,  whose Ivy League matriculation and socializing with the American elite decades ago ensured her enduring American political support, plenty of MSM senior editors went to school with these guys. And the congressional staffers with their sons.

The Greco-Roman historian Polybius is instructive on this matter. He writes in his The Histories :

Rise and Fall of Aristocratic Rule

15    But as soon as the people got leaders, they cooperated with them against the dynasty for the reasons I have mentioned; and then kingship and despotism were alike entirely abolished, and aristocracy once more began to revive and start afresh. For in their immediate gratitude to those who had deposed the despots, the people employed them as leaders, and entrusted their interests to them; who, looking upon this charge at first as a great privilege, made the public advantage their chief concern, and conducted all kinds of business, public or private, with diligence and caution.

16    But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.

The Oligarchy of Good Feelings is here.

ADDENDUM:

Dan of TDAXP has sharp commentary and additional links on this disgusting story of insider corruption.

Of course, we should not be surprised. Recall during the Anthrax terror attacks how Senators, staffers and connected Beltway bandits who were not exposed to Anthrax, hoarded Cipro for themselves while the postal workers who had been endangered by bioterrorism received nothing? The mail guys were only peons of course. Not like they went to Harvard Business School or Yale Law or anything….

UPDATE:

Fabius Maximus takes issue with how the media, and by extension, myself as well, have characterized this issue:

More media madness: rich fat bankers get flu vaccine while children die!

It is a good counterpoint and worth reading – though I still find the damage control effort of the public health official cited  by FM to not be terribly convincing, the program would at least seem to be legal. Whether scarce vaccines should be distributed this way is another issue.

Charles Cameron responds at length to a comment left by RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt in the previous post:

In response to David Ronfeldt:

David Ronfeldt wrote an important comment on my last post, taking off from it in a very interesting direction, and I think its deserves its own thread. I am going to quote the main thrust of it here, then address some of the issues he raises. David writes:

What i wonder about is the nature of a mind bent on measured reciprocity vs. a millenarian mind (like those you’ve written about before)? Millenarians, I gather, aren’t much into measured tit-for-tat thinking. If they are, then maybe they really aren’t all that millenarian. they may think they are on a righteous, vengeful mission ordained by God – but it’s so tit-for-tat that it falls short of being truly millenarian.

Or is there a spectrum of combinations? I can imagine a millenarian using tit-for-tat thinking as part of a rationale for wanting to inflict apocalyptic punishment. But I can also suppose that it’s a mental game that a millenarian leader uses to help explain his views to attract new adherents. If so, who/what may be examples of minds that combine millenarian with measured reciprocity?

Here’s my response:

I think it boils down to a difference between two types of millenarian. Some millenarians are just outright antinomian from the gitgo. Their apocalyptic beliefs fundamentally contradict the moral tenets of the
surrounding culture, and they feel cut loose from them. The Brethren of the Free Spirit felt free to cut the purses of others for the benefit of the cause, but I’m not sure that the Perfecti of the Cathars did, and I’m pretty sure the early Franciscan “spirituals” wouldn’t dream of it. So there are others, like the Spirituals, who are far from antinomian, living according to a strict code — which in their case presumably included the moral injunctions of Christ in the Beatitudes, albeit interpreted pretty stringently.

This raises the possibility that some millenarians may feel obligated to the constraints of a traditional path up until such time as their messianic hope-figure appears, at which point he will himself be able to give specific, timely (end-timely) guidance. Thus reports of the Mahdi as warrior must be distinguished from reports of warfare engaged in by his followers in the hope of attracting him.

The Christian apocalyptic writer Joel Richardson made an interesting comment touching on this issue. Describing an interview he gave on NPR, he wrote (in what he would agree are broad strokes with possible
exceptions):

I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.

The whole issue of “hastening the arrival”, including means proposed to achieve it, and whether indeed it is even possible, deserves serious comparative religious study. I’d only note here the Israeli analyst Reuven Paz’s seminal 2006 essay, “Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude Towards Hizballah and Iran“, and follow up with Tim Furnish’s comment on the way this concept has been stretched by others (Paz writes only about Sunni jihadists) to cover (putatively) Iran’s (Shi’a) nuclear program. Furnish, who attended one of the recent Mahdist conferences in Tehran, explains the misapplied notion:

It posits that there is a strain of Islamic eschatological thought which hopes to force Allah’s hand in sending the Mahdi, as it were, via sparking a major conflagration (nuclear, or otherwise) with the West (either the U.S. or Israel). This may be true of some of the Sunni jihadits with an apocalyptic bent, but there is very little evidence that such an idea is operative in the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ayatollahs may be cut-throat, anti-Israeli and anti-American-but they are not stupid. They know full well that any nuclear attack on Israel of the U.S. would be met with a crushing retaliation. (Besides, what good would it do for the Mahdi to come and establish his global caliphate over smoking radioactive ruins?)”

Discussing Christian apocalyptic rhetoric in his book, Arguing the Apocalypse, Stephen O’Leary writes, “The End itself is beyond the capacity of human discourse to hasten or postpone; the deterministic construction of the tragic apocalypse eliminates contingency from history”.

By the time the arriving or returning one has arrived or returned, things are very different. Having the absolute divine sanction — being, in the case of the Mahdi, by definition “Rightly Guided” — he (or I suppose, “she” if appropriate) can order people killed in much the same way that Krishna at the Battle of Kurukshetra could, saying in effect, “they’re dead already”.

To be sure, this “black and white” quality of alignment between the forces of good and evil will more than likely be building towards a climax during the “end times” run-up to the appearance — Stephen O’Leary again, “as the predicted End approaches, apocalyptic rhetors increasingly tend to view their opponents or interlocutors as representatives of demonic forces…”

Bin Laden, it seems to me, clearly feels constrained by Quranic notions of warfare, and his address to the US before the 2004 elections contained by my count at least four echoes of the ayat I cited from the
Quran, the most vivid of which was his comment, “And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in
America in order that they taste some of what we tasted…” — which takes the idea of measured reciprocity very literally sense indeed! Another example: as Steve Coll noted in a Washington Post piece in 2005,
“Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese
imperial surrender policy.”

Finally, I’d like to point out the enormous discrepancy here between two worldviews.

The view enshrined in the Geneva Conventions holds that certain acts are permissible in warfare, while certain others are so ruthlessly immoral as to constitute “war crimes” and are never permitted.

The Quranic view also holds this — but with the specific exception of measured reciprocity.Here is Brig. SK Malik on the topic, in his book The Qur’anic Concept of War:

According to an age-old tradition, fighting in Arabia was prohibited during the three sacred months of Ziqad, Zil Haj and Muharram, and the Holy Qur’an issued directions for the observance of this custom. ‘The prohibited month for the prohibited month,’ the Book said, ‘and so for all things prohibited,– there is the Law of Equality. If then anyone transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him but fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.’ [2.194] The book likewise commanded the Muslims to respect the Arab custom of observing truce at the Sacred Mosque, on a reciprocal basis. ‘But fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there,’ was the Quranic injunction in the matter [2.191]. On both these issues, the Muslims, no doubt, were nevertheless counseled to show restraint. The Quranic injunction that ‘Allah is with those who restrain themselves’ speaks of the importance attached to tolerance and forbearance.

One system draws a line, and what is below it is impermissible — the other holds a mirror up to the opposing force, and what goes beyond the limits of image it reflects is impermissible. And both systems call for
restraint — which in time of war is not the easiest of virtues to maintain.

But that’s another story — the story of the duel of Ali bin Abi Talib with ‘Amru bin ‘Abd Wudd, in fact…