By Claudia Parsons

Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of “good” and “evil” and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

It said extremists from each of the three faiths often have tangible grievances — social, economic or political — but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law, including killing civilians and members of their own faith.

The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead of a conference on Thursday in New York titled “Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization.” The report will be updated and published after the conference.

The authors compared ideologies, recruitment tactics and responses to violent religious extremists in three places — Muslims in Britain, Jews in Israel and Christians in the United States.

“What is striking … is the similarity of the worldview and the rationale for violence,” the report said.

It said that while Muslims were often perceived by the West as “the principal perpetrators of terrorist activity,” there are violent extremists of other faiths. Always focusing on Muslim extremists alienates mainstream Muslims, it said.

The report said it was important to examine the root causes of violence by those of different faiths, without prejudice.

“It is, in each situation, a case of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’” it said. “That God did not intend for civilization to take its current shape; and that the state had failed the righteous and genuine members of that nation, and therefore God’s law supersedes man’s law.”

Read more here.

By Conn Hallinan

Some 230 miles north of Perth, at Geraldton on Australia’s west coast, the Bush administration is building a base. When completed, it will control two geostationary satellites that feed intelligence to U.S. military forces in Asia and the Middle East.

Most Americans know nothing about Geraldton, just as they know nothing about other Australian sites such as the U.S. submarine communications base at North Cape or the U.S. missile-tracking center at Pine Gap. But there is growing concern Down Under that Prime Minster John Howard’s conservative government is weaving a network of alliances and U.S. bases that may one day put Australians in harm’s way. According to Australian Defense Force Academy Visiting Fellow Philip Dorling, once the Geraldton base is up and running, it will be almost impossible for Australia to be fully neutral or stand back from any war in which the United States was involved.

Indeed, that may already be the case.

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By Jonathan Freedland 

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America’s standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation’s foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

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By Sean Parnell and Mark Dodd.

A GLEAMING, high-walled building in the middle of a muddy marketplace will be the focal point for tens of thousands of US and Australian troops as they improve their preparedness for war.

To a growing number of protest groups, the newly constructed building - part of the Urban Operations Training Facility at Shoalwater Bay in central Queensland - is a mosque, demonstrating the West’s deep-seated suspicion of Islam.

But to Lieutenant Colonel Peter White, overseeing construction of a fictional town at Raspberry Creek, due to be occupied for the first time in Exercise Talisman Sabre, which is getting under way, the building is simply a generic cultural centre.

Although the building could be used to depict a mosque in exercises - some of the US marines who have arrived at Shoalwater Bay see it that way - it could also be a church or museum.

In a place known to contractors as “Legoland”, the cultural centre is the only building with glass windows instead of kickable perspex, and is built of brick instead of reconfigured shipping containers.

“The purpose is for troops in exercises to treat this building differently, with the appropriate respect and sensitivity,” Lieutenant Colonel White told The Australian.

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by Dilip Hiro

For countries — small, middling, or great — acquiring nuclear weapons is all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or nation. Joining the “nuclear club” has proved an effective strategy for survival. The possession of city-busting, potentially planet-ending weaponry threatens to bring about a MAD — the Cold War acronym for “Mutually Assured Destruction” — world. While the “madness” of this strategy is apparent, a rarely mentioned aspect of today’s geopolitics is that acquiring nuclear arms has proven a logical step for a regime to take when its survival is at stake.

The United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, stacked up nuclear weapons by the thousands as “deterrents,” well aware that the use of even a tiny fraction of them would annihilate the planet many times over. The doctrine worked, maintaining a precarious peace until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

When Communist China acquired an atom bomb in 1964, it joined the four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with veto power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France — which possessed nuclear arms, thus gaining an entry to the “nuclear club.”

Read more here.