“Yunus Muhammad” says in the interview that the Quran instructs Muslims to “terrorize the disbelievers.” It does no such thing. The Quran instructs Muslims to live at peace with non-Muslims who are at peace with them.

The verse to which this individual referred was in the chapter of the Spoils (al-Anfal), 8:60:

Wa a`iddu lahum ma istata`tum min quwwatin wamin ribati ‘lkhayli turhibuna bihi `aduwwa Allahi wa`aduwwakum

Which means, “Prepare against them all the power, and all the war horses that you can, whereby to strike fear into the enemies of God and your enemies.”

The context of this verse is the Battle of Badr on March 17, 624 of the Common Era. In the 610s, the pagan Meccans had persecuted the new religion of Islam and ultimately chased Muhammad and the Muslims out of Mecca for preaching the one God. They took refuge in the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as Medina (i.e., the City [of the Prophet]). The wealthy Meccan polytheists hoped to wipe Islam and the Muslims out, and fought skirmishes with them. The early Muslims riposted by raiding Meccan trading caravans, in hopes of weakening their foe economically. That March in 624, the Meccans sent out their best fighters to protect a caravan. A Muslim force more or less stumbled onto this expedition. Badr, named after a well south of Medina, was the first major battle between the two sides, and the Muslims won it, thus saving themselves from genocide.

So what the Quran is saying in 8:60 is that the Muslims should keep a stable of fighting steeds at the ready and let the Meccans know about it, to strike fear into the hearts of an enemy trying to wipe out them and their religion.

The verse does not command any act of “terrorism.” It commands that Muslims attempt to forestall irrational violence against a Muslim state through deterrence. It is defensive in intent.

The verse does not say anything about mere ‘disbelievers’ or non-Muslims. It is warning of the designs of “enemies of God,” i.e., militant and violent anti-Muslims. Moreover, there is no implication that Muslims should act as individuals or vigilantes. Medina was a city-state that the Prophet Muhammad ruled, and he gave the orders. Muslims could not just run off and attack whomever they pleased whenever they pleased. A duly constituted Muslim state was in charge of defense of the community.

So unless Yunus Muhammad can find a group of armed individuals who aim at violently attacking Muslims en masse and trying to wipe out them and their religion, he should stuff a sock in it and go home.

In fact, trying to import terrorism into the Quran is an infinitely greater blasphemy than that of any Western cartoonist, and one would hope Muslim groups would get more upset about Yunus Muhammad and “Revolution Muslim” than about an irreverent American TV program.

Unfortunately, along with people with genuinely hurt feelings, there will be some cynical political forces that manipulate Muslim fundamentalists and will try to advance their agendas by taking advantage of this “South Park” controversy. (The show depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit to avoid showing him — which is about as close as “South Park” gets to deference to religious feelings.)

The Obama administration is now moving to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, as an alternative to a more direct approach. These measures include pressuring countries and firms not to buy Iranian petroleum and gas; pressuring them not to sell gasoline to Iran; and attempting to make it difficult for Iranian banks to interface with the world economic system.

While these measures could impose costs on Iran, these costs can easily be borne by the country, and more especially by the regime.

Moreover, it is unclear that President Obama can even swing further sanctions on Iranian petroleum and gas. Such harsh measures are opposed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC bloc of nations that are emerging diplomatic and economic players outside the U.S.-dominated G-7 nations. At the BRIC summit in Brazil last week, a consensus emerged against strong new sanctions on Iran. Brazil is on the U.N. Security Council at the moment, and in May Lebanon will assume the rotating chairmanship of that body. Given that Turkey also currently has a seat and is strongly opposed to new Iran sanctions, it may be difficult for Obama to get a significant new resolution.

Financial sanctions are not all that they are cracked up to be. Iran Oil & Gas reports that from March ’09 to March ’10, Iran swapped 450,000 tons of petroleum products. Some 90 percent of the swaps were with nations of the former Soviet Union (CIS), and 10 percent were with Iraq. Likely we are talking about Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This item is an example of how Iran can import refined gasoline (it has a temporary shortage of refineries) without needing to go through the international banking system. Even if some sort of official ban on trading with Iran could be arranged by the U.S. with these CIS countries and Iraq, private traders and corrupt government officials would simply step into the resulting black market and make a pile. Smuggling oil products out of Iraq on trucks was a specialty of Jordan and Turkey in the 1990s, and that sort of black market would operate quite efficiently were Iran to be put under the sort of sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein.

Few commodities are more easily transported and more fungible (easily exchanged for other goods or for cash) than gasoline, and the plan for a gasoline embargo on Iran (popular in Congress) is a pipe dream.

But we are hardly in a stage of black marketeering. Rather, direct deals are being done by major players, despite the withdrawal of some players, such as Lukoil, from exporting gasoline to Iran. Chinaoil just directly sold Iran 600,000 barrels of gasoline, and Sinopec, another Chinese oil giant, is preparing to resume direct gasoline sales to Iran. Soft gasoline demand in Asia because of the global economic downturn has left petroleum companies with high inventories that they are eager to offload anywhere they can, and Iran as a destination suits them fine.

Reuters reports, “As long as there is money to be made, and economic benefits to be taken advantage off, Iran will always find ready sellers of gasoline from the international market,” a trader said. “The politicians don’t understand markets … sanctions are cosmetic.”

And if direct sales became difficult, indirect ones would be substituted. And if that became difficult, smugglers would step in. A lot of Iraqis would get rich. And while paying extra to smuggle things in would hurt ordinary Iranians, the regime would use its oil profits to cushion the elites and keep them happy. (That cushioning is why very severe sanctions on Iraq never had a chance of shaking the Baathist regime.)

The man said it all: “Sanctions” are purely cosmetic, designed to make it look as though U.S. politicians had taken some dramatic and effective step. It is odd that the politicians in Washington, who are always loudly proclaiming their belief in the market, think its iron laws can be suspended by a simple vote on their parts.

And another development taken as a bellwether of increasingly effective sanctions turns out to have been a mirage. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak clarified remarks he made last Thursday about creeping sanctions on Iran. He was misunderstood to have said that Petronas, the Malaysian petroleum company, had suspended gasoline sales to Iran, but he never said any such thing and it never happened. He referred to a canceled third-party spot oil deal that collapsed for purely economic reasons.

Moreover, Iran’s need to import gasoline is probably temporary. It has the wherewithal to build new refineries, and is doing so. Germany’s ABB Lummus has a a $512 million deal with the National Iranian Oil Co. and a consortium in Iran to raise gasoline production at the Bandar Abbas refinery to about 3.5 million gallons a day from the present 1.3 million gallons.

In fact, there are 10 such projects to expand existing refineries, which could allow Iran to nearly double its production of gasoline by 2012. In addition, Iran is investing nearly $40 billion in building seven new refineries. So even a successful squeeze on Iran’s gasoline imports, if it could be implemented right away, would only have much effect for two years. But such a squeeze is unlikely to be successfully implemented in the first place.

Nor is Iran lacking for customers. A Swiss company just signed a deal worth $13 billion to import Iranian natural gas over the next 25 years. As for financial sanctions, so far Iran is evading them through banking partners in the United Arab Emirates, and Iran and Venezuela have two joint banks. These measures provide Iran with a back door, allowing it to mitigate the effects of financial sanctions.

Very few sanctions have actually produced regime change or altered regime behavior. The U.S. could not even accomplish this goal with regard to a small island 90 miles off its shores, Cuba. That an oil giant halfway around the world with a population of 70 million that is as big as Spain, France and Germany can be effectively bludgeoned with sanctions is not very likely.

The U.S. needs to engage in comprehensive security talks with Iran, in hopes of striking a grand bargain. Because as Adm. Mullen rightly says, there are no good military options here.

As for the first question Wright raises, of the legal implications of assassinations, such as the one President Obama authorized for American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, they are horrible. Having CIA officers operate the drones makes the attacks a covert operation, which cannot be spoken about publicly by U.S. government officials, and which cannot be investigated by ordinary Americans worried about the direction of their government. The drone assassinations are lawless, and they have killed large numbers of innocent civilians, as Wright notes. For Obama to take out a contract on al-Awlaki diminishes us as a nation. If al-Awlaki is guilty of a crime, he should be brought to justice if possible, and tried, even in absentia. Yemeni authorities should arrest him and extradite him on that basis. For the U.S. to allow 300 al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula guys to draw it into unethical actions and perhaps even into an unwinnable war in Yemen, would be foolish.

Jordan’s study seems to me generally sound, and one can think of lots of supporting evidence. It seems to me that it would be useful to further amplify a distinction that Jordan makes, between highly organized and more inchoate religious organizations, with the latter being more common.

1. I would argue that social movements (as opposed to organizations) are particularly difficult to decapitate. Organizations are characterized by a high degree of integration and are tight systems. Movements are more informally arranged than are organizations, and their flexibility and vagueness can help them withstand attacks on leaders. Charles Tilly defined movements with reference to to campaigns, claim-making repertoires or performances, and the demonstration of qualities such as unity, commitment and numbers.

The Greens in Iran since last summer have been a movement, and it seems obvious that Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as leaders are not all that central to it. The Sadrists in Iraq are a movement, and after a campaign of arrests and assassinations waged against them by the U.S. and British militaries and then the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over years, they continue to survive and reemerged to take some 12 percent of seats in the Iraqi parliament on March 7.

What is often missed about Hamas is that it, too, is a movement. They have gotten up big demonstrations, and waged campaigns, including political campaigns. They aren’t just a terrorist group, and they depend on kinship links and informal networks, not a corporate-style leadership flow chart.

Movements that are embedded (as most are) in a particular population can draw on enormous resources.

Ariel Sharon was convinced by some game theorist who knew nothing about Palestinian Arab society that if he could kill off one-quarter of the Hamas leadership, he could cause the organization to collapse. What I heard was that the original basis for this thesis was risk studies of corporations like IBM, where the models had shown that in case of a catastrophe that took out a quarter of the management, the organization would implode.

So Sharon’s government assiduously assassinated suspected Hamas leaders, killing the spiritual leader of the movement, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, in his wheelchair as he came out of a mosque, along with 17 others, including juveniles. Then titular leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was assassinated. And so on and so forth. But Hamas did not collapse. It won the 2006 Palestine Authority elections, and even when the resulting government was overthrown by the PLO in the West Bank — with U.S. and Israeli help — it proved powerful in Gaza. The Gaza war was another Israeli attempt to destroy Hamas, which failed miserably. Israeli military leaders professed themselves astonished at how little resistance to the invasion Hamas put up, showing that they don’t understand movements. Movements can afford to lie low during attacks, because they have the resources and support to reemerge once the heat is off.

Assassinating movement leaders, as opposed to organization leaders, is usually worse than useless, especially if the movement has a strong social base in a compact population.

On the other hand organizations such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping (al-Gama’a al-Islamiya) in Egypt were effectively defeated by the Egyptian security forces. They arrested some 30,000 militants in the 1990s, and they engaged in running street battles with armed members. Since 1997, these groups have been defeated in the Nile Valley and seldom can pull off even a small attack. The Egyptian government caught a break, because the radicals’ 1997 attack on Western tourists at Luxor produced profound revulsion toward them among almost all Egyptians. The leadership of the Islamic Grouping (whose blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, is in an American penitentiary for involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing) has even renounced violence and now sees the Koran as forbidding terrorism. This leadership had not been systematically killed, however. It was incarcerated in Tura prison.

In this regard, U.S. drone attacks on al-Qaida figures in Pakistan must be contrasted to assassinations of Taliban leaders. Al-Qaida is more like an organization, and its leaders seldom have a lot of local support (the Arabs in the northwest of Pakistan are not embedded in a local population that adulates them, but rather live among Pashtuns who have a variety of views of Arab expatriates). There has never been a big al-Qaida demonstration (I mean by al-Qaida Osama Bin Laden’s organization, and don’t consider the Islamic State of Iraq to be actually al-Qaida), because they don’t have the numbers to pull it off.

In contrast, just killing Pashtun insurgent leaders, whether in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, is unlikely to destroy the Taliban, because they are a movement embedded in an often supportive population.

The two sides “may say to themselves, ‘We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear,’” Obama said.

Obama reiterated that peace is a vital goal, but one that may be beyond reach “even if we are applying all of our political capital.”

Obama may be right. But note the implications of no progress between Israel and the Palestinians on political settlement of their dispute:

1. Iran – the primary rejectionist state in the region, will grow in power and popularity in the Middle East
2. Anger in the Arab world toward Israel and the US will grow in intensity
3. Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem could itself be the cause for a war. Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as to Jews
4. Israel’s status as a de facto Apartheid state will be made permanent and the boycott movement will grow, ultimately affecting the Israeli economy
5. If the two-state solution is dead as a doornail Israel will either have to give the Palestinians citizenship or face a long and bitter struggle to make their own state in the teeth of Israeli opposition

Obama’s team tried to get Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to restart negotiations last year, but the long-suffering Abbas insisted first on a freeze of creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. That is, he insisted that Israel not be actively annexing the very territory at issue while the talks proceeded. It would sort of be like negotiating to buy a mansion from a seller who was dismantling wings of it, carting them off to his new residence, while he kept jacking up the asking price on his increasingly diminished domicile.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally agreed to an eight-month settlement freeze on the West Bank. But the offer was insincere. Building within existing settlements would continue; they would just get denser. And the parts of the West Bank Israel had illegally and unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem would continue to be settled.

The first, flawed offer by Netanyahu was enough to bring Abbas to indirect negotiations. But then the implementation of the second bit of insincerity scotched any movement toward peace talks as the Palestinians decided that they had to retain a modicum of self-respect. The building of 1,600 new homes on Palestinian land near Jerusalem was announced just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel to kick off the proximity talks made it look as though Israel is not only a fickle and unreliable diplomatic partner. Beyond that, it looked as if its government was intent on kicking Biden in the teeth and humiliating Washington.

One problem Obama faces is that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for the Israel lobbies, has successfully mobilized congress against him with regard to putting further pressure on far right-wing Netanyahu to stop building settlements. Congress decides on how much money to give Israel annually, and how many weapons to sell it. Obama cannot effectively threaten Netanyahu with a reduction in the billions of dollars a year in aid, trade privileges, loan guarantees, and military equipment sent to Israel by the U.S. Those goods are giftds from Congress, and Congress typically yields to AIPAC and its colleagues.

As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have demonstrated in The Israel Lobby, these lobbies cultivate congressmen and senators from the beginning of their careers. The Christian Zionists, who form a significant movement within U.S. evangelicalism, probably number some 10 million, and it is not hard to get them to write their senator on behalf of Israeli expansionism. Pro-Israel organizations and individuals are disproportionately politically active and likely to give to political campaigns.

A recent Israeli government decree that could lead to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank has stirred extreme anxiety in the region.

Aljazeera English has video on the new rules:

According to the London pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Arabi, the Jordanian government fears that Netanyahu and his even more right wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, will engineer clashes between Israeli colonists on the West Bank and the Palestinian villagers on whom they are encroaching, as a pretext for pushing tens of thousands of Palestinians into Jordan.

Certainly, Israeli-Jordanian relations are at their lowest point since the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries — a treaty that King Abdullah II says he is beginning to regret. He worries that Jerusalem is a keg of dynamite, that Gaza and Lebanon could explode into hot war at any time, and even that Israel and Iran may go to war against one another.

Yep, that’s what  you worry about if you know the region well.

The Guardian summarizes objections of Israeli peace groups who complain that “Palestinians, and any foreigners living in the West Bank,” would be liable to deportation within 72 hours if they lack the right permit. “Valid permit” is not defined by the Israelis.

Rory McCarthy writes,

The orders … are worded so broadly such as theoretically allowing the military to empty the West Bank of almost all its Palestinian inhabitants,” said the 10 rights groups, which include Ha-Moked, B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Rabbis for Human Rights. Until now the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have not been required to hold a permit just to be present in their homes, the groups say.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 requires two things of Israel, the occupying power in the Palestinian West Bank:

Art. 49. Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive . . . The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Al-Jazeera English has a video report:

Meanwhile, Palestinians have begun a petition drive to collect a million signatures asking President Obama to end their occupation. There is an increasing push among Palestinians to simply declare statehood within the next year or two, in hopes of forestalling the complete destruction by the Israelis of Palestinian nationhood.