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'Moderate' Muslim for U.N. chief? (If truly is such a thing as a moderate muslim)
Joseph Klein covers current race for body's secretary general

As the race for new UN Secretary General comes down to the wire, South Korea's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ban Ki Moon remains the front runner.   In a straw poll vote held by the Security Council on October 2, Ban Ki Moon was the clear winner.  China’s Permanent Representative Wang went so far as to inform the media that Ban Ki Moon will be the Security Council’s nominee, declaring:  “…it is quite clear that from today’s straw poll that Ban Ki Moon is the candidate that the Security Council will recommend to the General Assembly.”  A formal Security Council vote is scheduled for Monday, October 9th, after which the Security Council’s recommendation will go to the General Assembly for final approval.

But as Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over until it’s over.”  A campaign to tarnish Ban Ki Moon has recently surfaced involving charges that his country has been buying votes with promises of lavish aid to African countries and attractive trade deals in Europe.  The South Korean government, already beset by its own internal corruption problems that may strain its credibility, denied any intention to buy votes for its countryman.   Regardless of what the Security Council may recommend, it is certainly possible that the majority of developing countries in the General Assembly may be influenced to vote against the Security Council’s choice as a way of asserting their independence.  Despite the fact that Ban Ki Moon has not been implicated in any wrong-doing, the charges of buying votes may be used to derail his candidacy at the last moment.

 

Thus it may be more than a coincidence that a moderate Muslim from Thailand could be emerging as a dark horse candidate with tacit support from the United States – perhaps as a hedge in case a nasty surprise upends Ban Ki Moon’s candidacy.   He is former Thai Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan, who would presumably replace Thailand’s declared candidate, Surakiart Sathirathai, a deputy prime minister in the government that was ousted in a recent military coup.   Interestingly, Pitsuwan has not spoken out against this military take-over of his own country and indeed seems to think it might have been justified.

 

Reports over the last several days have been promoting Pitsuwan as a bridge between the so-called Eastern and Western civilizations.  He is a Western-educated man who is sophisticated in the workings of a modern economic system adapted to South East Asian cultural and historical circumstances and who has also been widely recognized in the international community as a spokesperson for a tolerant, democratically oriented brand of Islam.

 

Pitsuwan has neither confirmed nor denied the report about his possible future as UN Secretary General, while U.S officials have distanced themselves from the speculation about any U.S. lobbying for his selection.  Nevertheless, on paper at least, Pitsuwan would seem to be the perfect candidate to demonstrate the West’s support for a positive Islamic role model at the helm of the United Nations.  For example, in a speech back in 2003 entitled “Can Islam have a democratic future? It has a glorious past and present”, Pitsuwan said that “Islam can inspire you to become a good democrat.  Islam can also inspire a society to become a democracy”.  His message was that Islam should not be perceived monolithically, defined solely through the lens of Islamic fundamentalism.  At the same time, Pitsuwan’s candidacy would potentially isolate the more radical Muslim regimes, who would likely oppose him, from the majority of Muslim member states who would likely support a fellow Muslim.

 

The question is whether Pitsuwan, or any self-styled moderate Islam like him, could live up to the expectation that he would speak out forcefully against the Islamic terrorists from the Secretary General’s bully pulpit.  Unfortunately, there is little evidence to suggest that he would go so far.   His speech, for example, contained no denunciation of the terrorists who wantonly kill innocent people in the name of Islam.  Rather, he continued to enunciate the victimhood apology for Muslims’ cauldron of frustrations – that it was the product of humiliation at the hands of the West and enduring poverty:   “Muslims are very proud of their past but are reminded of the injustices that have been imposed upon them”, he said.  And he pointed to the “establishment of the State of Israel” as an issue that is “deep, emotional, frustrating and unforgiving for a lot of Muslims around the world, not only for the Palestinians and Arabs”.   This appears to be a nice way of saying that terrorist acts against Israeli civilians – including blowing up children on busses, killing participants sitting down to a Passover Seder, or bombing a wedding celebration –  may be understandable emotional responses of resistance fighters against Israel’s existence.

 

To be sure, Pitsuwan has tried to distinguish between what he believes are the open, diverse, economically vibrant Muslim societies in South East Asia and the more rigid, economically stagnant and all-controlling regimes in the Middle East   It is this distinction, he believes, that has insulated South East Asia from becoming a breeding ground for terrorists.   But Pitsuwan’s rhetoric falls short of reality in today’s world.  The fact is that al Qaeda has extended its reach deeply into his own Thai homeland and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.   Its ideology has little to do with economics or social justice.  As long as its supporters have funding, weapons and recruits ready to die for their cause, they will not simply yield to a more pluralistic brand of Islam that produces material wealth – in Southeast Asia or anywhere else.  Indeed, al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists regard moderate practitioners of Islam, who are willing to live peacefully in a pluralistic, economically developed democracy, as apostates who should be the first to die for their betrayal of “pure” Islam.  We are not dealing with a mutation of Soviet-style Communist ideology, whose adherents certainly hated the capitalist United States but were not sacrificing their lives in martyrdom to defeat us at any cost.  Islamic-fascist terrorism has its own dynamic, which is to spread fundamentalist Islam by force throughout the world and to abolish any form of democracy that would challenge the supremacy of Islamic law.   Causing mass death in this world is the Islamic-fascists’ currency to obtain their twisted version of the noble life in the next world.

 

No prominent moderate Muslim spokesperson for an alternative vision of Islam has commanded global attention and displayed the moral courage to condemn the Islamic-fascists as megalomaniac pretenders whose nihilism should be firmly rejected by Muslim people everywhere.   Surin Pitsuwan surely has not, which is why he could turn out to be nothing more than a chameleon as Secretary General.   Indeed, he will be branded by many Islamic fundamentalists as a “token” Muslim, controlled by the United States and its allies, while at the same time not really confronting the evils of Islamic-fascist global terrorism any more than Kofi Annan has done.   Instead, in order to build bridges between the civilizations, he would most likely expand the money and time wasting UN Alliance of Civilizations and lobby for the Organization of Islamic Conference’s initiative to criminalize defamation of religions – especially Islam – as part of international law.  And he might follow in Annan’s footsteps by pushing for expanded permanent veto-bearing membership by developing countries in the Security Council and pushing expensive utopian solutions to real global problems.

 

If Pitsuwan or another moderate Muslim does emerge as a serious candidate for Secretary General, we should first encourage him to speak his mind about the Islamic-fascist threat to democracies everywhere and explore his views on the concrete measures it would take to eliminate this threat.  I hope we see the moral courage necessary to take on the ideology of the Islamic-fascists rather than cower to them.  If that does not turn out to be the case, then let us rally behind the current front runner, Ban Ki Moon, who has at least shown some courage in his outspoken defense of democracy in his own country against the nuclear dictatorship to his north and has advocated top-to-bottom reform at the United Nations.