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Epic struggle between good and evil (September 19 2012) Epic struggle between good and evil (September 19 2012)

Tarak Barkawi the American Senior Lecturer in War Studies believes that Tony Blair and Desmond Tutu share a vision of world politics as an epic struggle between good and evil, in an article he published on Aljazeera titled ‘Invasions and evasions: The Tutu-Blair paradox’. Barkawi states “Retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu refused recently to appear with former prime minister Tony Blair at the Discovery Invest Leadership Conference in Johannesburg. Tutu did not want to speak alongside a leader who had lied. “If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth?” asked Tutu. The lie in question was the formal US-UK justification for the invasion of Iraq: that “intelligence assessments” had established that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). …Tutu accuses Bush and Blair of “destabilising” and “polarising” the world “to a greater extent than any other conflict in history”. …accuses the Anglo-American leaders of being “playground bullies”. He even blames them for the current situations in Iran and Syria. …However, allowing finance capital and big banks to range unchallenged and unregulated certainly has cost Western governments vast amounts of treasure. As for blood, just how much sweat and tears, hopelessness and stunted lives, among millions suffering in the Great Recession of recent years, equate to some few thousands killed and displaced by petty warlords? Desmond Tutu needs to reconsider just who the great purveyors of lies and human suffering are in the contemporary world. The rest of us need desperately a new political and ethical language by which we can equate the suffering caused by the economy with that inflicted by force of arms.”

 

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/dEkHg image source New School ow.ly/dElT5

Larbi Sadiki the Tunisian writer, political scientist and senior lecturer recalls his meeting with Egyptian Aboul Fotouh in 1992 while a fresh doctoral candidate at the Australian National University. The subject of Sadiki’s investigation at the time was notions of democracy in the discourse of four Islamist movements. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (EMB), Tunisia’s Nahda Party (NP), Jordan Islamic Action Front (IAF), and Sudan’s Islamic Front led then by Hassan Al-Turabi. Sadiki states “Of all of the Islamists I met and engaged with in discussion over democracy during that period, coming soon after the Algerian debacle, Aboul Fotouh was amongst the limited number of interlocutors who felt at ease with that concept and the whole notion of good government. Then, the concept was not as yet popular with most Islamists. Not even the creative Rashid Ghannouchi, whom I sat with and interviewed many times for the purpose of my PhD and beyond, had at the time acquired a firm grip on the term. It was largely considered for being a specifically Western concept underpinned by Western values. At the time, ‘democracy’ in Islamist parlance, lacked the scruples and rigour of shura, Islam’s consultative ethos, even though the likes of the innovative Hassan Al-Turabi in Sudan sought a move towards defining a shura-democracy synthesis.”

 

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/bzInt image source Studiahumana ow.ly/bzI9P

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