Islam’s Pirates: New Age Islam's Selection, 25 March 2016
New Age
Islam Edit Bureau
25 March 2016
• Islam’s Pirates
By Turki Al-Dakhil
• Brussels Attacks Mark Challenge to Traditional Warfare
By Richard Falk
• Glory Days of Nationalism Never Really Existed
By Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
• A Teacher from Palestine We Will Probably Forget
By Diana Moukalled
• Israel-Palestine: The Delusion of a Two-State Solution
By Sharif Nashashibi
• Time for Arabs to Get Off the Fence
By Eyad Abu Shakra
• Obama in Cuba
By Abdulateef Al-Mulhim
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Islam’s Pirates
By Turki Al-Dakhil
24 March 2016
It was a bloody day for Belgium. Explosions left dozens killed and over 140 wounded. Europe went on a state of alert and French President Francois Hollande called for urgent meeting in Paris. This hideous aggression dealt a huge blow to the country. If initial statements made by the Belgian attorney general are to be believed, the number of victims is expected to rise.
These attacks in the heart of Belgium were meant to avenge last week’s arrest of Salah Abdeslam, a key suspect in last year’s Paris attacks. For a long time, Belgium has been vulnerable to terror cells operating within the country.
The country has been a major base for activities of armed organizations operating across Europe. The cell of Tarek Maaroufi – which assassinated the Afghan military and political leader Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001 – was also based in Brussels.
Fundamentalists’ Hub
The area of Molenbeek in Belgium has been known to be the fundamentalists’ headquarter from where they have been active in planning assassinations in and outside Europe. The leader of the deadly Paris attacks was Abdulhamid Abaoud, a 27-year-old man of Moroccan descent, who has also operated from Syria.
A study by the Economist magazine in 2014 showed that Belgium is the western country to have provided the largest proportion of fighters to Syria and Iraq compared to its population.
The study showed that there are 22 extremist Belgians for each 1 million. In Denmark, it is 17 extremists for every million while in France it is 11 extremists for each 1 million. All in all, Belgium, whose population is estimated at 11 million, has 250 extremist fighters in Syria and Iraq.
It is frightening to see this bright continent which has enlightened the world with arts, sciences and law, witness such a horrible day as it comes under terrorist fire.
Source: english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2016/03/24/Islam-s-pirates.html
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Brussels Attacks Mark Challenge to Traditional Warfare
By Richard Falk
24 Mar 2016
This latest terrorist outrage for which ISIL claimed responsibility exhibits the new face of 21st century warfare for which there are no frontlines, no path to military victory, and acute civilian vulnerability.
As such, it represents a radical challenge to our traditional understanding of warfare, and unless responses are shaped by these realities, it could drive Western democracies step by step into a mental embrace and physical embodiment of fascist politics.
The attacks of March 22 in Belgium occurred in the departure area of the international airport in the town of Zaventem, seven miles outside Brussels and in the Maelbeek metro station in the heart of the city, near the headquarters of European Union.
Reports indicate that more than 30 persons were killed and as many as 230 wounded. It is not clear whether these figures include the ISIL suicide bombers who committed this atrocity against civilian innocence.
A Kind of Revenge
The timing of the attack makes it seem like a kind of revenge for the capture a few days earlier in Brussels of Salah Abdelslam, the accused mastermind of the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015.
It hardly matters whether this line of interpretation is confirmed or not. The essence of the event is one more deeply distressing challenge in a conflict that becomes ever more horrible, with ominous overtones for the future of human security the world over.
So far, the public utterances of the powerful have been articulated along predictable lines, and provide little evidence of an understanding of the distinctive realities of the situation and how best to cope with them. The prime minister of Belgium aptly called the attacks "blind, violent, cowardly", and promising the resolve required to defeat the threat.
So far, the public utterances of the powerful have been articulated along predictable lines, and provide little evidence of an understanding of the distinctive realities of the situation...
Francois Hollande of France, never missing an opportunity to utter the obvious irrelevance, vowed "to relentlessly fight terrorism, both internationally and internally".
What is missing from such responses is both tactical sensitivity to the originality of threat and a willingness to engage in self-scrutiny. From this perspective, the iconic conservative magazine, The Economist, does far better than political leaders.
It points out that the significance of the Brussels attack should be interpreted from a crucial policy perspective: the current limitations of national intelligence services to take preventive action that would alone protect society by identifying and removing threats in advance.
The Economist correctly stresses that it has become more important than ever to maximise international efforts to share all intelligence pertaining to the activities of violent extremists.
This New War
Although this shift from reactive to preventive approaches to defending the social order represents a fundamental reorientation toward the nature of security threats, and how to minimise their lethality, which is threefold: striking fear into the whole of society; creating a huge opening for repressive and irresponsible demagogues; and relying on reactive excessive force in distant countries that tends to spread the virus of violent extremism throughout the planet.
There are some deeper, overlooked aspects of the Brussels attack that need to be grasped with humility, and responded to by summoning the moral and political imagination to identify what works and what fails in this new era which places such a high priority on atrocity prevention as the source of the most widespread and intense forms of human insecurity.
Belgian flags seen at a street memorial service near the old stock exchange in Brussels [Reuters]
First, and most significantly, this is an encounter that ignores boundaries, is not properly equated with traditional warfare between states, and is between new types of hybrid political actors.
On one side is a confusing combination of a transnational network of extremists and a self-proclaimed territorial caliphate targeting the most sensitive civilian targets in the West?
On the other side is a coalition of states led by the United States, which has foreign bases and navies spread around the world that seek to destroy ISIL and its allies wherever they are found.
Other Versions Of Terror
Secondly, it is crucial to acknowledge that Western drones and paramilitary Special Forces operating in more than 100 states is an inherently imprecise form of state violence that spreads its own versions of terror among civilian populations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
It is necessary to realise that civilians in the West and the global South both regard themselves as victims of terror, which will continue to fuel the kind of hatred toward the enemy that offers a pretext for perpetual war.
What has totally changed, and is traumatising the West, is the retaliatory capacities and strategy of non-Western adversaries.
The colonial, and even post-colonial, patterns of intervention were all one-sided, with the combat zone reliably confined so as to avoid posing any threat to the security and serenity of Western societies. Now that the violence is reciprocal the equation has fundamentally changed.
Whether a creative diplomacy can emerge from this tangled web that exchanges an end to intervention for an end to terrorism is the haunting question that hangs over the human future. If it does, it will not come from government bureaucracies, but from intense pressures mounted by the beleaguered peoples of the world.
Source: aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/03/brussels-attacks-mark-challenge-traditional-warfare-isis-160324061622669.html
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Glory Days of Nationalism Never Really Existed
By Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
25 March 2016
The “Trump Phenomenon” in the United States is often described as “populism” and an anti-establishment revolt. It is no such thing. It is merely the next step in the evolution of the Tea Party movement. It is thus, an excess of nationalism, above all else.
And a peculiar form of nationalism too. This is not strictly speaking about America. It is about White America. And blue-collar, reactionary White America of a mythical past where everyone was Christian, where the word “gay” meant nothing except “joyful”, women knew their place, and black people were only ever singing while picking cotton.
You can tell that this is so, because the battleground for this revolt is what they call political correctness. The one thing that sets Trump apart is his unapologetic refusal to conform the way he speaks to what the “liberal media” would call decency.
He is not an especially gifted or talented businessman. As one observer noted, if Trump had put his inheritance into an S&P 500 index linked savings account, he would have been between $1 billion and $6 billion wealthier than he is today. He most certainly does not “say it like it is” – because the majority of what he says is a complete fabrication. But he does do one thing better than anyone else: he trolls the “liberal media”, up to and including Fox News.
This is the nasty outburst of a class of people who have been left behind by globalization and who do have every right to be aggrieved, but who, as things sadly often happen, have chosen to articulate their grievances in the tribal language and rituals of a shallow, unenlightened, bigoted nationalism. Einstein once said: “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Even if you do think that nationalism can take benign forms, it is hard to argue that America now is indeed suffering from a nasty, infantile collective disease.
Take Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again”. America, for all its faults, is a better place now than it has ever been for virtually every single identifiable demographic, except one: blue-collar white men. That there is the only fact you need to know to understand the Trump phenomenon. But, of course, defending white male privilege in America in explicit terms will no longer fly.
Even the Trump demographic would no longer be comfortable with explicitly racist or sexist arguments. So their grievance at the loss of their relative status in society has taken the form of cheap ‘fly-the-flag’, bumper-sticker nationalism. But a nationalism which, though intellectually thin and barren, is becoming increasingly radical and visceral. And a nationalism that is now swaying many people outside of the traditional Tea Party.
Beyond America
But this kind of cheap nationalism is far from a uniquely American phenomenon at the moment. Right now, it seems almost every country has a version of this. When I visited Turkey they continuously refer to the great achievements of the Ottomans and how they must go back to those glory days. In Greece, a country now on its knees and on the verge of bankruptcy, they spend more time daydreaming about the glory-days of ancient Greek civilization, than actually trying to fix the present.
In Greece, a country now on its knees and on the verge of bankruptcy, they spend more time daydreaming about the glory-days of ancient Greek civilization, than actually trying to fix the present.
And the same is true of Muslims around the globe who simply cannot accept the loss of power of Islamic civilization, and the complete failure of the Muslim nations to produce anything of substance for centuries after having led the world in science, mathematics and engineering whilst Europe was in the dark ages.
Of course, “the glory days” never really existed. Or at least, they never existed as advertised, as some sort of pristine, morally unspoilt, lost paradise. And America surely must be the best example of this. Name any “golden decade” or any glorious period of time of your choosing, and then only go and read up on what life was actually like for ordinary people in that time, trying to make ends meet. And then read up on what life was like for people at the very bottom of society. Can any blue-collar American genuinely believe that it was better to be a blue-collar American during Jim Crow? Or during the Gilded Age? Or during the United States’ colonial wars in the 19th Century? That is absolute nonsense.
This is not to say that they are not right to be angry. But angry about what? They should not be angry that the technology and globalisation is changing the world rapidly. That is the given fact. They should be angry that they have been deprived of the education and the opportunities to make the most of this new world – largely by politicians they have elected to cut taxes and also cut investment in education for the past four decades. The problem with fixing the education of an entire culture is that it takes resources and over a generation of hard work and dedication. Would it not be much simpler to blame everything on Muslims and Mexicans?
Source: english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2016/03/25/Glory-days-of-nationalism-never-really-existed.html
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A Teacher from Palestine We Will Probably Forget
By Diana Moukalled
25 March 2016
Palestinian teacher Hanan al-Hroub was the proud recipient of the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize 2016 that was awarded recently. We shared her joy as she jubilantly stood on stage after receiving the award.
Hroub grew up in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. She worked hard to prevent her students from getting caught in the vortex of frustration in the extremely miserable circumstances for Palestinians. Hroub refused to get fatalistic about the situation on the ground and chose to fight even after her husband was shot by Israelis and her children were shocked to see their father getting wounded in front of their eyes.
Yet, Hanan refused to believe in violence and decided to make her children and other students see hope and discover joy by learning via playing. She did that successfully for years and managed to limit her children and other students’ tendency to become violent. She dedicated herself to becoming a great mother and a teacher full of positive energy.
Global interest in the story of the year’s best teacher has brought spotlight on the Palestinian tragedy, which almost seems forgotten due to other developments taking place in the region.
This Palestinian teacher’s story has become a source of inspiration for the Palestinians, Arabs and the world in general. Many global media outlets have narrated her story. She has become a role model representing a positive dimension to resisting the Israeli occupation. She is doing this at a time when some people are mobilizing others to resort to violence. Growing instances of stabbing in recent months is an example of this approach.
Yes, we can triumph over occupation by smiling as we take hits. We can triumph by gaining more knowledge, by possessing more tools to acquire knowledge and by refusing to be dragged into violence. These are not mere words or statements which ignore the depth of suffering. Hanan has taught us a lesson. Global interest in the story of the year’s best teacher has brought spotlight on the Palestinian tragedy, which almost seems forgotten due to other developments taking place in the region.
Palestinian Tragedy
Yes, there is a tragedy called the Palestinian tragedy and there is occupation by the state of Israel. This is something that regimes like that of Bashar al-Assad have sought to make us forget by committing acts that are worse than the Israeli occupation.
Hanan al-Hroub has persistently and calmly prevented many students from being dragged into violence. This story has elicited global interest in the Palestinian people, albeit for some time. The world has been reminded of what the Palestinians are suffering from. Otherwise the news about Palestine is limited to stabbing incidents or murder of protesters. Yet, as many as 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis have been killed in the past five months.
Hanan al-Hroub notwithstanding, limited coverage of Palestine doesn’t mean that the Palestinian tragedy has lessened. The Palestinian cause hasn’t indeed been of primary interest in recent years. This is because a sense of hypocrisy regarding Palestine has marginalized the Palestinians. Some even believe that the road to Jerusalem passes through Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Hanan al-Hroub, the path is clear and it is rejecting violence and showing the determination to live, learn and have the audacity of hope. So what is resistance if it is not what this teacher has done?
Source: english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2016/03/25/A-teacher-from-Palestine-we-will-probably-forget.html
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Israel-Palestine: The Delusion of A Two-State Solution
By Sharif Nashashibi
24 Mar 2016
It is duplicitous enough for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to convince audiences outside his own country from time to time that he supports the creation of a Palestinian state. Worse still is that he portrays his efforts in this regard as being constantly thwarted by the Palestinians themselves.
In other words, Netanyahu would have us believe that he is a greater proponent of such a state than those who have been denied it by almost half a century of Israeli military occupation and colonisation.
He reiterated this fallacy on March 22, while addressing the annual conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Washington's most influential pro-Israel lobby group.
He said he was willing to resume talks on a two-state solution "immediately … anytime, anywhere", if only his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas was willing to do the same.
This just one day after the Israeli government issued notices to seize nearly 120 hectares of land from Palestinian villages in the northern West Bank, and days after it declared more than 2,300 dunums of land in Jericho as "state lands", which are then usually granted to Jewish settlers.
Never mind that in the same speech, Netanyahu urged the United States to oppose any UN resolution calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. It seems no one else apart from him - not the international community or even the Palestinians - is allowed to seek such a state.
And no one else is allowed to define its parameters. Israel's ever-expanding settlement enterprise, which controls around half of the West Bank - including its water aquifers and most fertile land - and has made a Swiss cheese out of the Palestinian territory - must be largely maintained.
Preconditions and Obligations
Israel must keep illegally annexed East Jerusalem - whose boundaries have been expanded to comprise some 10 percent of the West Bank - as well as the Jordan Valley, which comprises about another 30 percent.
Whatever is left for a Palestinian state must be "demilitarised" - in other words remain defenceless - and recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way people view the conflict and ways to solve it. That involves acknowledging that Israel has created a one-state reality, and finding ways to make that state equitable rather than a vehicle for the apartheid system that exists today.
This demand was not made of Egypt or Jordan, and would further imperil Israel's Palestinian citizens, who comprise more than 20 percent of the population and are already treated as second-class.
If all these criteria - and others - are met, then Netanyahu is all ears, because he knows that the end result would not be a state in any sense of the word. That the Palestinians would not - and could not - accept such a "state" is precisely why he can claim to support its creation, because he knows it will never come to that.
Do not call them preconditions, though - he does not like them, and apparently only the Palestinians have them.
In reality, while Israel's entail flouting international law, that of the Palestinians - a halt to settlement expansion - is simply adherence to it.
As Saeb Erekat, the former chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority (PA), told Al Jazeera: "That is an obligation, not a precondition."
When objective observers point out the obvious, that Israel cannot claim to be committed to peace with the Palestinians while colonising their land, they are subjected to the full fury of Israeli officials.
When UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did so in January, he was accused of "encouraging terror".
On the rare occasion when Israel's own allies do the same - most recently US Vice President Joe Biden on March 20 - they can safely be ignored, because Israel knows these words will never translate to pressure.
Remember how quickly the US President Barack Obama caved when Netanyahu rejected a halt to settlement expansion before talks with the Palestinians? He knew that Obama would not twist his arm.
And why listen to Biden now, when the US election season means presidential candidates are falling over themselves to appease the powerful pro-Israel lobby?
Even when the demise of the two-state solution is brought up, it is almost always portrayed as a possibility that could still be avoided, rather than something that has already happened.
This is convenient for those invested in the "peace process" because they can avoid having to admit they have failed, and having to acknowledge the one-state reality.
Point Of No Return
Those who continue to portray a two-state solution as a possibility are - inadvertently or otherwise - providing Israel with cover to continue wiping Palestine off the map, because the point of no return seems to forever be on the horizon, and as long as that is the case, Israel can avoid blame for passing the point of no return.
In reality, we passed it long ago. There was national upheaval in Israel about evacuating several thousand settlers from the Gaza Strip. This renders impossible the prospect of evacuating several hundred thousand from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, even if there was the political will to do so, which there has never been.
There is nothing radical about highlighting this. Netanyahu himself made clear in his last election campaign that there would be no Palestinian state under his watch - it is this pledge to his electorate that should be taken seriously, not his faux declarations to international audiences about seeking peace.
His government comprises individuals and parties that openly reject a Palestinian state. People are not listening. They do not want to listen. Delusion is always simpler, more comforting. It suits them, and it suits Israeli officials.
There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way people view the conflict and ways to solve it. That involves acknowledging that Israel has created a one-state reality, and finding ways to make that state equitable rather than a vehicle for the apartheid system that exists today.
This is actually easier than with two states, because issues of separation - borders, settlements, East Jerusalem, resources - no longer become the insurmountable obstacles they currently are.
Nevertheless, the debate over the desirability of one state for both peoples is moot given that the two-state solution is no longer feasible.
The only choice to be faced is whether to continue turning a blind eye to the facts on the ground.
Source: aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/03/israel-palestine-delusion-state-solution-160324132044351.html
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Time for Arabs to Get Off the Fence
By Eyad Abu Shakra
25 March 2016
A few hours separated two events last week: The Arab League picked Ahmed Aboul-Gheit as new secretary-general and its foreign ministers labelled Hezbollah of Lebanon a terrorist organization.
There is nothing untoward about Aboul-Gheit’s appointment as he is a veteran diplomat and politician. What is new is that he will find himself forced to deal with a different Arab scene where there is no room for niceties. We may have reached “the era of getting off the fence” and forgetting about running away from challenges through empty talks.
Since the “Arab Spring,” the comfort zone and room for maneuvers have shrunk drastically, and pressing internal and external issues are impossible to temporarily adjourn or permanently ignore.
Many Arab entities, within its 2011 borders, were running away from providing convincing answers to questions about their legitimacy, borders, popular representation and social cohesion. In fact, if some claim that the occupation of Iraq in 2003 was the incendiary device that ignited the Sunni–Shi’i conflict, others may point out that the seeds of this conflict were sown in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran decided to export his so-called Islamic revolution.
The policy of exporting the "Islamic revolution” in its unadulterated sectarian form was bound to encounter a reaction based on a logical argument that is self defence. Indeed, the Khomeini onslaught, with its Persian hard-core content, ‘Islamist’ and ‘revolutionary’ coating, and painted by the slogans of "Liberation of Palestine" and "Death to America & Israel" were soon confronted theologically, nationalistically, politically and militarily.
The Iran–Iraq conflict was a costly war in what we see today as an existential war between an Arab world that has understood Islam in an open and uncomplicated ‘generic’ format and an extreme nationalist and theocratic Iranian regime whose philosophy and discourse have been based on a melange of complexes including haughtiness, vengefulness and insistence on correcting of the wrongs of history and geography.
From the outset, the Khomeini project rejected coexistence and sought hegemony. And if Khomeini considered — in his own words — that he “drank the cup of poison” by agreeing to the cease-fire with Iraq, his project of hegemony has not died. It has not for two main reasons. The first and foremost was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Second, Iran’s success in absorbing the shock of the aborted war, and its re-launch of its penetrative offensive in a smart, silent and more diligent manner.
Actually, one example of how Iran managed to learn from its past mistakes was its refusal to be dragged into the Afghanistan quagmire when Washington was on the side of Taliban who were then viciously fighting the Shi’i Hazara. It also turned a blind eye in 1998 and let pass the murders of a number of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan.
Since then, the post-Khomeini Iran, led by self-proclaimed ‘reformers’ and ‘moderates’, knew how to benefit from the ever increasing Arab frustration, and mushrooming of Sunni extremists spreading from Indonesia (Bali attack) in the East, to the US outrage (Sept. 11) in the West. In such a climate, the political attitudes of several ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ western politicians matured to bring about the current positions of the ‘Democrat’ Barack Obama, ‘traditional Left-wing Labour’ Jeremy Corbyn and ‘ex-Communist’ Federica Mogherini, all of whom firmly believe that dialogue is possible — indeed, necessary — with ‘political Shi’ism’ but never with ‘Political Sunnism’.
Today, the Arab world is paying a heavy price because it is the closest Muslim neighbour to Christian Europe, it has a large Muslim population worldwide and because Sunnis make up around 75 percent of its population.
Source: arabnews.com/columns/news/900461
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Obama in Cuba
By Abdulateef Al-Mulhim
24 March 2016
How far is Cuba from the United States? Cuba’s capital city Havana is only about 220 miles from Miami, Florida’s largest city — that is half the distance between Miami and Pensacola (two cities of Florida), which is about 520 miles.
Despite the proximity between the two countries, the last time an American president visited Cuba was around a century ago. US President Calvin Coolidge visited Cuba in 1928. In addition to that the two countries had no political ties for over half a century. The world still remembers the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that had pushed the world to the brink of a third world war. Interestingly, in 1962 US President Barack Obama was only one year old. Now he has opened a new chapter in US-Cuba ties.
Cuba is a very interesting place and its relation with its much bigger and stronger neighbor always take very drastic turns. Cuba’s capital went from becoming the new world’s gambling capital and tourist attraction to elite of the US to the most dangerous and feared enemy of the US.
Geographically, it is considered part of North America but its culture is closer to Latin America. Even though it is part of the new world, which was colonized by the Spanish 500 years ago, Cuba has a very rich culture and interesting history.
Cuba has been under the communist rule since the 1960s with Fidel Castro its absolute leader from 1961 to 2011. In 2011, Raul Castro succeeded him. The two countries were at odds since Fidel’s took power. Animosity between the two countries had pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear war.
The US also tries to topple Castro through a preplanned invasion by dissident Cubans living in the US in 1961. In later years Cuba became a paradise for revolutionists from around the world. It became a training ground for many leftist groups and its forces and military advisers were present in many places such as Africa. During the years of the Cold War, Cuba was the smallest superpower in the world. Cuba remained isolated from rest from the world and especially the West for many years. It was embargoed and its wheel of development was at a standstill. Cars in Havana’s streets are more than 50 years old and most of its buildings are in bad shape.
The situation, however, boosted creativity of Cubans. The health care and education systems of the country are very developed.
Ironically, the strained relations between Cuba and the US were full of events that were considered serious at the time but now those issues are being looked at with humor. The US and the world still remember the so-called Cuban Boat People. It all started in 1980 when about 10,000 Cubans crammed into the Peruvian Embassy in Havana seeking asylum to Peru or any other country that would accept them. Instead of resisting, President Fidel Castro announced that he would open the seaport near Havana for anyone who wanted to leave Cuba as long as they had someone to pick them up. At that time, many exiled Cubans in Florida hired boats to pick their Cuban relatives and friends.
The US ultimately had the US Coast Guard to form maritime patrol to stop the flow of Cubans. It wasn’t easy for the coastguard because the number of boats heading to US shores was more than 1,700 and many of them were unseaworthy. The situation got more serious when it was circulated that Castro had opened the gates of prisons and mental institutes and dispatched most dangerous elements to Florida. It took three years for Florida to cope with the situation and absorb the influx of those boat people.
A few days ago, Obama was in the Cuban capital signaling the end of an era of hostilities. These hostilities were not ended by military. There are many lessons that should be learned from the American president’s visit to Cuba. No matter how hostile governments are to each other, it is better to leave them for time to make hostilities subside and disappear. Armed conflicts only leave scars that may not heal as fast or as easily. And now, Cuba will be rebuilt. There are many American investors who are ready to make investments. Many Americans of Cuban origin are willing to go back and build a new Cuba.
Source: arabnews.com/columns/news/899911
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URL: https://newageislam.com/middle-east-press/islam’s-pirates-new-age-islam/d/106748