“We are for human dignity and justice and freedom from oppression for all of mankind,” CMS President Talib Syed told The Colorado Independent. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s here in the United States or in Africa or in Europe or the Middle East. Anything that happens that restores human dignity and gives rights to every human being throughout the world, we embrace it.”

Syed, who is of Indian descent, points out that only 20 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide live in the Middle East. He said no single country of origin dominates Colorado’s estimated 10,000 to 15,000-strong Muslim community, although in recent years a growing number of refugees from war-torn nations such as Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq have come to comprise the congregation of 2,000 to 2,500 at the society’s mosque on Parker Road in Denver.

Syed said the United States must support the spread of freedom and human dignity around the globe, even if it sometimes runs counter to the nation’s strategic interests.

“Sometimes we embrace this if it suits us and sometimes we just shut up and try to pretend that no, it doesn’t apply to us, because it may have some negative consequences for us,” Syed said. “What it means is democracy is good if it suits me and it’s bad if it doesn’t suit me. I’m free and I’m not free.”

In the wake of popular uprisings starting last month that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and threatened hard-line rulers backed by the United States in Yemen and Bahrain, the unprecedented wave of democratic protest sparked bloody confrontation in Libya over the weekend, where strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reportedly ordered the slaughter of demonstrators.

The unrest and crackdown sent oil prices sharply higher Tuesday and also touched off ripples of nervousness throughout the region, where Israel reacted coolly to Iranian warships passing through the Suez Canal and Saudi leaders took measures to appease people in the world’s largest oil-exporting nation.

Syed said he and the Colorado Muslim Society’s membership, made up of Muslims from all around the world, appreciate the tricky position the Obama administration is in. It is difficult to only selectively support democracy when it is in the national interest, he said.

“I think that’s what our administration is also faced with because we are realizing now that if we want to push democracy throughout the world and then suddenly we find out that certain decisions that are made might not suit us, then we look bad,” Syed said.

In the small gulf nation of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, U.S. policy on human rights and a lack of support for the nation’s repressed Shiite majority is being called into question. But some on the American right, including Tea Party stalwarts like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, have expressed fear that Islamic fundamentalists will fill the leadership void in the Middle East and stop the flow of oil to the United States.

Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation have remained relatively quiet on developments in the Middle East, with Democratic Sen. Mark Udall expressing support for democracy in Egypt after 30 years of oppression under President Hosni Mubarak. Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn last month posted a statement calling for greater domestic energy production.

“With the recent turmoil in Egypt, speculation has ensued over the possible shutdown of the Suez Canal, which ferries through about 1.8 million barrels of oil every day,” Lamborn said. “Events of recent days underscore our need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil so our economy is not dependent on volatile foreign issues. America needs American-made energy.”

Muhammad Ali Hasan, a former Colorado Republican political figure who helped found Muslims for America, told TCI that fears of a fundamentalist takeover are overblown.

“It is wrong for anyone to state that the protests in the Middle East are a bad thing, because ultimately the Muslim world should be given a chance,” Hasan said from California, where he is joining the Democratic Party in Orange County. Hasan said that in 2008, 53 of the 56 Muslim nations worldwide were working with the United States to combat terrorist groups like al-Qaeda.

“During these changing times, we should naturally expect the political climate in the Muslim world to change, and based on data by Terror Free Tomorrow, we should expect that change to be charged by pro-liberty agents who are sympathetic to America, not al-Qaeda,” Hasan said.

However, Hasan agrees with Lamborn that there could be interruptions of the flow of oil to the United States and therefore impacts to the global economy.

“I do think that Congressman Lamborn brings up a good point about finding alternatives to oil or pushing domestic production, because in the short term oil sales could be disrupted,” Hasan said. “However, even the harshest dictator, including [Venezuela’s] Hugo Chavez and [Iran’s] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loves to sell oil. If anything, over the long term, this will bode well for oil prices because there’s less unity now in OPEC price fixing, so the natural course should be more competition and lower prices.

“However, oil prices aside, our motivations should not be dictated by oil,” Hasan added. “The Muslim world needs an injection of liberty, and these protests give this world that chance. It is an encouraging sign.”

Joined by Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Udall was speaking ahead of an anticipated speech by Mubarak as the Egyptian military increases its role in handling the three-week-old protests that have already resulted in Mubarak saying he will not seek re-election in September. Protesters want Mubarak to step down immediately.

Mubarak later came on state television and infuriated crowds in the streets by refusing to step down.

Matthews had asked Udall and Casey earlier about the American Tea Party movement, in which some of its biggest stars, Glenn Beck of FOX News and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, have been highly critical of President Barack Obama’s handling of the Egypt crisis. Palin has called this Obama’s 3 a.m. phone call, referring to campaign ads from then presidential candidate Hilary Clinton claiming he didn’t have the foreign relations experience for the job.

Beck has been railing against a caliphate sweeping the Middle East that will entrench radical Islamists in positions of power. He is particularly fearful of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – an 80-year-old party that has so far remained in the background of the current uprising.

Udall said what’s needed in the current situation is “another Atatürk,” referring to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – the father of modern, secular Turkey. There is a clear division among some in the Tea Party movement who fear an increasingly radicalized Middle East and its inherent threat to American capitalism and old-school conservatives in the Bush-Cheney mold, who see the current string of uprisings, from Tunisia to Egypt, as the positive and inevitable spread of Democracy

That debate should stay within American borders, Udall said, allowing that there are likely many within the Tea Party movement who support the spread of Democracy and freedom.

“Our politics ought to end on the water’s edge on this,” Udall told Matthews.

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“Fortunately, it currently appears unlikely that the political turmoil will result in any disruption in oil production or transportation,” Bingaman said, according to Politico. “However, I note that whenever geopolitical events remind us of our vulnerability to world oil supply disruptions, it is a spur to consider energy policies that help us reduce that vulnerability.”

Bingaman has been pushing for increased renewable energy production in the United States and recently backed nuclear power as a source of energy.

The administration has so far used cautious rhetoric, which Nelson describes as an effort to avoid retreading the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when the toppling of a U.S.-sponsored dictator allowed a fundamentalist regime to seize power, a prospect that has prompted fears in other countries, including Israel. #

In an effort to calm the protests and cling to power, Mubarak has appointed a new vice president and ordered him to begin negotiating with the opposition and has sworn in a new cabinet. Not enough, Nelson wrote. Mubarak should announce plans to put his presidency (which has so far spanned three decades) on the line in elections that measure up to international standards: #

To put real credibility into the promises of reform, President Mubarak should immediately submit to this core principle of democracy. #

The next presidential election in Egypt is scheduled for September of this year. Right now, there are no term limits in Egypt’s constitution restricting Mubarak from running for re-election for the sixth time. #

Mubarak must immediately open these elections to international observers and give his written assurance that his name won’t appear as a contender. I believe this could help quell the protests. #

Read the whole thing. #

[…] if you seek, as you said Friday “political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people,” your administration should publicly acknowledge
those reforms will not be advanced by Mubarak or any of his adjutants.

The number of signatures, up from an initial 100 to more than 300 in just 24 hours, continues to balloon. The academics who joined the effort include U.S.-foreign relations
expert and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, Iraq war journalist and NYU fellow Nir Rosen, four other professors who teach at UT-Austin and a host of educators from universities across the nation. Brownlee said he expects the number to reach 1,000 within two days from today.

After spending the morning in D.C. presenting his message to the National Security Council, Brownlee’s inbox has been full with a string of interested academics hoping to get their names on the letter. Critical of the Obama administration’s cautious and “conventional” rhetoric, Brownlee, who is working on a book about U.S.-Egyptian relations, says U.S. leaders are “hedging their bets,” acting as spectators and not the participants that they are. A fear of losing Mideast security arrangements built from a three decades-old relationship restrains the administration from a full throttled endorsement for democratic change of Egypt’s “blatant oligarchy,” says Brownlee.

“The U.S. is very much a part of what is going on in Egypt,” he said. “Through years of military aide, we have helped keep the military loyal to the Egyptian president, although they should be loyal to the citizens who are trying to catalyze real change. The U.S. now needs to side with the demonstrators in the street, the young disenfranchised people,
not the guy who put them in that position.”

Brownlee was surprised by the diversity of signatures, only anticipating a small circle of foreign relations academics and policy experts to sign on. The pool, he says, is growing
by the hour with a frustrated coalition from all ideological, scholarly and professional backgrounds standing alongside the UT professor and his message.

QUESTION: On another issue, the State Department issued a report about criticizing the human rights record of Egypt. And what kind of – in order for Egypt to enhance its record, what do you recommend or ask Egypt to do?
SECRETARY CLINTON: We issue these reports on every country. We consider Egypt to be a friend and we engage in very forthright conversations with our friends. And so we hope that it will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered, that we all have room for improvement. The United States, as you have seen under our new President, is moving to remedy some of the problems that we have had. We view human rights as very important. It’s central to our value system and to our foreign policy, and so we want to enlist others to make progress.
QUESTION: Is this file, by any chance, connected to the invitation – extended invitation – for President Mubarak to visit the United States?
SECRETARY CLINTON: No. It’s an annual report. It is not in any way connected. We look forward to President Mubarak coming as soon as his schedule would permit. I had a wonderful time with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.

[Emphasis mine]

Meanwhile, Mubarak’s son, Gamal, made a low-profile visit to Washington to meet with Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Howard Berman, and had small meetings with experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations.

The human rights report for 2008 read, “In 2005 President Hosni Mubarak won a fifth consecutive six-year term with 88 percent of the vote in the country’s first presidential election, which was marred by low voter turnout and charges of fraud.” It added, “The government’s respect for human rights remained poor, and serious abuses continued in many areas. The government limited citizens’ right to change their government and continued a state of emergency that has been in place almost continuously since 1967.”

Secretary Clinton was loathe to criticize Mubarak’s human rights record in public, but as the report and subsequent Wikileaks cables show, they had significant doubts about the regime in private.

Secretary Clinton’s statement Friday did not mention Mubarak by name but equivocated on the use of violence: “We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters and we call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain the security forces. At the same time, protesters should also refrain from violence and express themselves peacefully.”

President Barack Obama on Wednesday (epa/ZUMApress.com)

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

[Security1] “The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

But now Fox News has topped it:

Progressives have long suspected Fox News of desiring to redraw the map of the region, but few thought the network would ever succeed.  At least it’s not like the United States ever actually spent six and a half years at war in Iraq, because if so, this kind of mistake would be embarrassing.

President Barack Obama’s speech on June 4, 2009 failed to advance the promotion of human rights in the Muslim world, Human Rights Watch said today. In a much-anticipated address, Obama spoke bluntly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but kept to generalities when it came to the pressing need for human rights and democratic reforms in the region.

“If Obama wanted to tackle the issues that cause Muslim ill-will toward the US, he should have taken on the region’s repressive regimes, many of them US-backed, including his hosts,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Egypt and others will interpret his bland generalities as a signal they have nothing to fear from their friends in Washington.”

Speaking before 2,500 invited guests at Cairo University, Obama addressed democracy as a major source of tension between the United States and Islam around the world. His choice of Cairo for this much-anticipated speech was controversial because of Egypt’s record of stifling the opposition, holding tainted elections, and imprisoning dissidents.

Only by 8:09 p.m., the group appeared to soft-peddle that message in a release entitled “Obama Mid-East Speech Supports Rights, Democracy: But U.S. Message Needs Stronger Message for Repressive Regional Allies”:

President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world avoided confronting authoritarian governments directly, but sent a welcome message that Washington would not let the prospect of empowering Islamist parties deter it from supporting democracy in the region, Human Rights Watch said today.

Speaking before 2,500 invited guests at Cairo University, Obama said the issue of democracy and human rights was a major source of tension between the United States and Islam around the world, in part because of the Bush administration’s use of democratic rhetoric to justify the war in Iraq. He pledged, however, that the United States would continue to support human rights and democratic principles in the region.

“For the US to regain credibility, it will have to follow through even when voters in the Middle East elect governments Washington doesn’t like,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “If Obama wants to tackle the issues that cause Muslim ill-will toward the United States, he should take on the region’s repressive regimes, many of them US-backed – including his hosts.”

Whitson’s comments, at least, are consistent between the two releases.