On July 25, I spoke on a panel at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies on the topic of Combating Olympic Terrorism (video of which can be found here). This entry is adapted from my remarks.

Here is a provocative question: how much did hosting the 2004 Olympics contribute to Greece’s current economic meltdown?

The Olympics were probably a more significant contributor than you would intuitively think. In general, the Olympics is a very expensive spectacle event to host, and the costs of the past three summer games (including London) have skyrocketed. But cities and countries still want to host the Olympics because they realize the games can serve as a valuable investment. If you have been to a city that hosted the Olympics in the past twenty or thirty years, and paid attention to development patterns, some of the host cities have been revitalized by the Games. That is the case for Los Angeles (the 1984 host), and it isn’t difficult to discern how the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics produced development and revitalization.

But the Greece Olympics faced a double disadvantage that simply could not be foreseen when the country won the bid in 1997. The first problem was that the Athens Games would be the first post-9/11 Olympics, which increased security costs exponentially. Greece had initially budgeted about $1.6 billion for the entire Olympics, not including infrastructure and development projects. But unfortunately for Greece, the cost of security itself ended up being about as large as the entire estimated budget for hosting the Olympics. (The 2004 Olympics ran over budget in virtually every way: they cost $15 billion, about ten times as much as the initial proposed budget. This is in addition to about 20.9 billion Euros spent on venues and infrastructure upgrades.) The other problem that Greece faced was the collapse of the global economy in 2008. Because of the financial collapse, the gains that Greece expected to make from its investment in the Olympics did not materialize to the degree expected. Greece’s economic and fiscal problems obviously run far, far deeper than the Olympics — but hosting the Games did not help, and other commentators have also pointed to the causal role that the Olympics may have played in Greece’s debt crisis (along with other factors, of course).

The reason I begin with this point is because when I think about the Olympics and terrorism, the main lens I look at it through is economic. My major argument in Bin Laden’s Legacy is that al Qaeda’s strategy has focused on economics. The economy of the foe was important to Osama bin Laden since before he declared war on the United States. He first cut his teeth in the Afghan-Soviet War, and his perspective was that this war brought down the Soviet Union — that not only had he defeated a superpower on the battlefield, but also actually caused its collapse. (His self-perception was overly grandiose, of course: foreign fighters were entirely incidental to the outcome of the Afghan-Soviet war.) If you think through the logic of that perception, it clearly points to the importance of economics. Nobody would contend that leaving Afghanistan is what caused the Soviet Union to fall. Rather, the way you might get from the Afghan-Soviet war to the Soviet Union’s demise is through economics: through the argument that the costs imposed by the Afghan-Soviet war prevented the Soviet Union from adapting to other problems, such as a major grain crisis and the collapse in the worldwide price of oil (something that the Soviet Union’s budget depended upon because it was a major oil exporter).

I am not endorsing the view that the Afghan-Soviet war brought about the Soviet Union’s demise; but bin Laden thought so. He expressed that belief repeatedly, even explaining how it was the economic cost of the war that destroyed the Soviet Union. This colored his view of how to make war on a superpower. Thereafter, al Qaeda’s war against the United States and the West went through a number of identifiable phases. But the global financial crisis left an indelible impact on al Qaeda’s strategy. The group’s current strategy has been articulated in a significant document, a special issue of Inspire (the English-language online magazine of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) published in November 2010. That special issue dramatically illustrates the differences in how the U.S. has viewed this war and how al Qaeda perceives it.

The November 2010 issue of Inspire was a commemorative issue celebrating a plot that occurred in October 2010, in which bombs disguised as ink cartridges were put onto two planes (a Fed Ex plane and a UPS plane). What we might think is odd about the publication of this special issue of AQAP’s magazine is the fact that the group would issue a special edition of its magazine to celebrate a plot in which nobody died. Saudi Arabian intelligence was able to infiltrate the plot, and alerted U.S. officials to the danger. Locating and defusing the bombs was harrowing: after the tip came in from Saudi Arabia, the UPS plane was diverted to Britain’s East Midlands Airport, where officials cordoned off the cargo area and emptied the plane. They conducted a thorough search, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Even a seemingly innocuous printer cartridge hiding 400 grams of PETN was cleared by security. Fortunately, officials called from Dubai. They had discovered PETN in a Hewlett-Packard cartridge routed through their country, and instructed their British colleagues on how to locate the explosives, which were disguised to avoid detection by an X-ray machine. British authorities again cordoned off the area, and this time found the bomb. So the process was harrowing, but to us this was a failed plot. Yet AQAP issued a commemorative issue of their magazine devoted to it. Why?

The reason is that AQAP believed all they needed to do was get the bomb on board the plane. Anwar al Awlaki wrote in Inspire that blowing up cargo planes “would have made us very pleased but according to our plan and specified objectives it was only a plus.” He continued: “The air freight is a multi-billion dollar industry. FedEx alone flies a fleet of 600 aircraft and ships an average of four million packages per day. It is a huge worldwide industry. For the trade between North America and Europe, air cargo is indispensable and to be able to force the West to install stringent security measures sufficient enough to stop our explosive devices would add a heavy economic burden to an already faltering economy.” To Awlaki, even this failed plot is a victory, presenting the enemy with a dilemma: either Western countries spend billions to address such plots, or AQAP is free to try again.

This special issue of Inspire dubbed this late stage in al Qaeda’s economic war against the U.S. the “strategy of a thousand cuts.” In their view, they don’t need to launch another 9/11. Rather, attacks focus on driving up the West’s costs, particularly security costs, and jihadi groups hope that their foes will collapse under their own weight.

The reason I focus on al Qaeda is because when you review recent security events related to the Olympics, we can see that the threat of al Qaeda and al Qaeda’s fellow travelers looms largest in the perception of security planners. To be clear, Islamist terrorism is not the only kind about which there are concerns. There are also concerns about far-left and far-right terrorism (think Anders Breivik, or else Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Olympics bomber). There are also fears of nationalist terrorism, although I think IRA attacks are exceedingly unlikely.

In terms of Islamist terrorism, the British press reported that an alleged militant thought to have fought for Shabaab in Somalia crossed through Olympic Park five times, breaking a ban that officials had placed on him. This is not as concerning a story as it has been portrayed: the reason we know he passed through Olympic Park this many times is because he wore an electronic tracking device: when you think of the greatest threats to the Games, someone wearing an electronic tracking device isn’t going to be in your first quartile. But there have been other incidents. In June, two Muslim converts were arrested on the suspicion that they were plotting to attack the Olympic canoeing venue in Waltham Abbey, Essex. And this month two separate anti-terror operations yielded fourteen arrests. So when you look at the combination of presence, persistence, and capabilities that al Qaeda and fellow travelers have demonstrated in Britain, much of the concern about terrorism underlying terrorism-related security expenditures has been driven by them. And these security expenditures, which many now see as so routine, are enormous. They are costly to the British government, costly to Londoners, costly even to Olympic sponsors.

The London Olympics has a security force of over 50,000, including 18,200 soldiers. (This number was larger than planned because a security contractor, G4S, was unable to provide the manpower that it had promised.) In addition to security costs, there is widespread perception of a city under siege due to these measures. Visible aspects include a 17.5 kilometer electrified fence around Olympic Park, constant surveillance by closed-circuit television cameras, and six surface-to-air missiles on downtown buildings. Londoners love to complain, and there have been a lot of complaints about the Olympics, but one has to concede that there is validity to these complaints. We have sadly reached a point where the threat of terrorism — and the way that it massively increases costs for events like this, as well as imposes great inconveniences — is taken as a given.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix. Even if you didn’t have the threat of terrorism, security outlays would be large due to concerns about crime, crowd control, and maniacs who can’t be classified as terrorists (such as what we just witnessed in Aurora, Colorado). However, looking for ways to reduce these costs moving forward is vital. In looking at security measures that have been reported in the press, those that hold the greatest promise for cost reduction are multilateral efforts where capabilities are paired. Interpol has played a role, with workers “compiling databases on fugitives and terror suspects who shouldn’t cross borders,” as well as “keeping track of lost passports to make sure they haven’t fallen into the wrong hands.” The U.S. is also providing assistance.

Combining capabilities in this manner can help to create economies of scale, so not every country that hosts the Olympics has to rebuild the whole security apparatus again and again. When we think of the Olympics and terrorism, it is worth keeping in mind the strategy of the terrorist group that has driven the past decade of U.S. national-security policy, and the centrality of economics to this strategy. Solutions are not easy, but we should be attuned to the crushing weight imposed by security for such events.

My recent post with Lauren Morgan, “Islamism in the Popular Imagination,” serves as a rebuttal to a remarkably inane Huffington Post article about the terminology Westerners use to describe political Islam. One rather implausible claim put forward in that piece is that Rick Santorum is in fact more extreme than are newly empowered Islamist politicians in Egypt:

In his own interviews, for example, [Mansoor] Moaddel has found that, “In some respects, Mr. Santorum is more extremist” than leading figures of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, who today talk relatively less about Islamic law than about having to face the challenges of economic development and cutting back on pollution.

There are also a number of other misleading arguments advanced in the Huffington Post, as our entry outlines at length. But Bernard Finel, in a thoughtful entry that is on the whole supportive of our argument, challenges our comparison of Santorum and Islamist figures. The thrust of his argument is that — while the policies advocated, put in place, or likely to be maintained by Islamist parties are in fact worse than anything Santorum has proposed — the comparison itself is misleading:

I’d argue this is an apples to oranges comparison. Santorum’s limits are defined, I think, more by the limits imposed by American institutions rather than his ideology per se. In other words, GR is comparing institutionally unconstrained ideological positions with those heavy constrained by institutions. It actually is not at all difficult to find actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed.

I have two responses to this. First, in most countries where Islamist parties have been victorious or ascendant, there are in fact institutional constraints on their political programs. Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Libya all have significant and very visible constraints on the agendas of their respective political parties. (Iran and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, have institutions that in practice support theocratic rule.) That being said, Finel is correct that institutional constraints do play a role in shaping the policies that religiously-inspired political actors will advocate, or can implement, in the West versus those they will advocate or can implement in the Muslim world.

That being said, my second point is that the role of institutions doesn’t actually undercut our initial argument. (Although we didn’t mention them explicitly in the earlier post, we certainly had them in mind implicitly: for example, constraints created by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas account for some, but by no means all, of the differences in terms of the legal treatment of homosexuality.) In comparing the relative extremes of Santorum versus those of Islamist parties, we were not trying to offer a moral judgment on the relative righteousness of those two actors (to be clear: we use “actor” in the loosest possible sense here, since Islamist politicians are by no means a unified actor). Rather, we were comparing exactly what we have just specified: the policies Santorum has advocated or implemented versus those that Islamist parties have advocated or implemented. It is true that institutional constraints play a role in defining said policies, but our goal was illuminating policies that are likely to have an impact on anyone’s life, and not judging Santorum’s “heart of hearts.” Hence, it is a direct apples to apples comparison of what policies are advocated by these two different actors. It would only be an apples to oranges comparison if our goal were moral judgment.

So Finel writes: “It is surely true that Santorum is not worse than various Islamist regimes in the Middle East, in terms of religious freedom, women’s rights, and gay rights, but man that is damning with faint praise isn’t it?” That would indeed be damning with faint praise if our purpose were to praise — but instead it was to correct a flawed analogy, one where Finel (by his own framing of the subject) actually agrees with the substantive points that we made.

Finel makes one interesting point at the end in terms of moral comparison: “But the bigger issue is that comparing ideology to ideology is perhaps more useful than comparing policy outcomes simply because institutions matter.” Again, our purpose was not moral comparison, but I do want to make one point in response: institutions and context help to shape our ideology. The ideology of a 21st century American Christian is likely to be very different than the ideology of a Christian living in 16th century Spain; the ideology of a white 21st century American on racial matters is likely to be very different than the ideology of a white 19th century American. And the ideological and societal context with respect to the relationship between religion and state that Santorum has known all the life is different than that which has shaped politicians in the Brotherhood. So, while it is a bit beside the point I intended to make in my earlier post, I think Santorum would still almost certainly look less extreme in this regard even in a direct ideology-to-ideology comparison that ignores policy outcomes.

The term “Islamist” has been bandied about frequently since revolutionary events gripped the Arab world last year. It is a term meant to signify those, including political parties, that wish to incorporate their understanding of Islamic law into the laws of the state. Political parties commonly described as Islamist won significant victories in Tunisia and Egypt, and were narrowly defeated in the recent Libyan elections. But is the term Islamist appropriate at all to describe these parties and politicians? In a recent piece for the Huffington Post entitled “Is It Time to Reconsider the Term Islamist?” David Briggs argues that the answer is no. His argument is confused, drifting without apparent direction from a terminological critique to the argument that the Islamist political program isn’t really as immoderate as is generally believed. Flaws aside, Briggs’s piece plays upon some more widely-held misconceptions about the political program embraced by Islamists that are worth addressing.

Briggs’s article itself has the distinction of interweaving major factual or analytical errors into virtually every paragraph, and is an exemplar of how not to approach these issues analytically. Notably missing from a piece that touches upon the Islamist political agenda is any concrete discussion of what Islamist politicians actual stand for — other than the entirely banal observations that the phenomenon of political Islam is “quite heterogeneous,” and that Islamist politicians talk about “having to face the challenges of economic development and cutting back on pollution.” Instead, Briggs reaches his conclusions about the moderation of Islamist politicians by simply interviewing a bunch of university professors who all have the same opinions about the issue.

The confusion in Briggs’s article is evident from the very outset, as he sets up his discussion of the term Islamism by trying to make us question whether an equivalent term might be applicable to American politicians:

At this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama said his policies were grounded in his Christian beliefs. In a 2008 speech, former GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said America was in the middle of a spiritual war in which “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” Are Obama and/or Santorum Christianists?

It is always good to make sure one’s intellectual principles are consistent by asking whether they are applicable in other contexts. But in case anybody is stumped by Briggs’s question, we will answer it: No, Barack Obama — who favors abortion rights and gay marriage — is not, in fact, a Christianist. Briggs’s introduction to the subject represents an intellectual sleight-of-hand, perhaps one that is unintentional, in that he is comparing apples to oranges. You would be hard pressed to find anything beyond a few fringe commentators who are worried about Islamism because politicians representing this movement refer to Islamic principles in their rhetoric. Rather, it is the specific relationship between religion and state that worries observers. (I mean, really, does Briggs think that Obama will make canon law the law of the land if given a second term?)

Briggs bolsters his case by quoting Mansoor Moaddel, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist, as saying that in his interviews, he found that “‘in some respects, Mr. Santorum is more extremist’ than leading figures of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.” Nor is Briggs the only Western commentator to fatuously compare Santorum to Islamic extremists. To actually approach the claim being made by Briggs and others — that Islamist politicians possess an agenda that is less extreme than that of Rick Santorum — a better approach is to look at the practice in Middle Eastern states, as well as the policies advocated by Islamist politicians with significant audiences (as opposed to mere fringe players). That is what we do in this entry. Our purpose is obviously not to mourn the overthrow of the brutal dictators who have fallen in the Middle East, nor to preserve those who are threatened. Rather, threats to liberty can come not only from dictatorial regimes, but also theocrats who are first swept into power through democratic means. It is certainly possible that the election of Islamists will ultimately be a good thing — both for the people of the region, and also from a perspective of U.S. interests — but the U.S. will be hard pressed to play a positive role if its policymakers do not understand the challenges posed by the new players. And Briggs’s analysis is a road to confusion. This piece examines four key issues of relevance when assessing the impact of Islamist policies on individual rights and liberties: apostasy, blasphemy, the rights of women, and gay rights.

Apostasy. Because one’s conception of God is so fundamental to how we understand the world, the right to change one’s religion is fundamental to freedom of conscience. It would be unthinkable for an American politician, no mater how conservative, to argue for laws preventing American citizens from converting to Islam. But in a number of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian countries, conversion out of Islam (in practice, usually to Christianity) is outlawed — and this situation has existed even before Islamist parties have had a chance to leave their imprimatur on the laws of the state:

• In Saudi Arabia, “children born to Muslim fathers are deemed Muslim, and conversion from Islam to another religion is considered apostasy and punishable by death.”
• In Iran, apostasy is punishable by death, and during the reporting period from July through December 2010, the State Department noted that “at least two death sentences for apostasy or evangelism were issued under judicial interpretations of Sharia.”
• In Yemen, “the conversion of a Muslim to another religion was considered apostasy, which the government interpreted as a crime punishable by death.”
• In Kuwait, there are laws against apostasy, and in November 2010 the country’s court of cassation “upheld a lower court’s decision not to allow a 27-year-old citizen convert from Islam to Christianity to change his stated religion on his birth certificate, which it deemed a violation of apostasy laws.”
• In Qatar, converting from Islam to another faith is a capital offense, but under-enforced. As the U.S. State Department notes, “there has been no recorded punishment for such an act since the country gained independence in 1971.”
• Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. has expended so much blood and treasure, apostasy is considered an offense punishable by death.

Even in countries generally considered to be moderate exemplars, individuals have had trouble exercising their freedom of conscience to pick their own religion. In Jordan, the State Department reports that “some family members of converts have filed apostasy charges against them in Islamic law courts, which have led to convictions depriving them of civil rights, including annulment of their marriage contracts and loss of custody of their children.” Apostasy charges similarly loomed as a threat in Egypt even prior to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascension.

Hand in hand with restrictions on apostasy are restrictions on the ability of non-Muslims to evangelize for faiths other than Islam. Though Westerners are hesitant for justifiable reasons to advocate the right to evangelize to Muslims in Muslim majority countries, one must understand the net impact of how these two laws interact. Non-Muslims can convert to Islam, while Muslims cannot convert out; Muslims can evangelize to non-Muslims, while non-Muslims do not enjoy a similar right to evangelize. The net effect is a visible subjugation of non-Muslim populations in areas where both apostasy and anti-evangelism laws operate together. If Santorum were to advocate for similar restrictions on Muslims in America, writers like Briggs would justifiably be outraged by the kind of second-class treatment such a set of restrictions would necessarily entail.

Does Briggs believe that Islamist parties will be more protective of freedom of religion than the status quo? It is difficult to imagine that this would be the case. Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi — one of the most popular Islamist figures in the region, and a man who drew a crowd of over 200,000 to a speech at Tahrir Squre — has on multiple occasions affirmed that those who leave the faith deserve to be killed.

Blasphemy. Another example of the incorporation of religion into the laws of the state can be seen in the widespread prohibition on speech that is deemed blasphemous or insulting to Islam. Blasphemy prosecutions have only increased since the Arab Spring began. One notable case is that of Hamza Kashgari, a Saudi writer and poet who was charged with blasphemy for several tweets that he sent on Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. A review of these tweets clearly reveals how blasphemy laws can run roughshod over free expression:

• On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
• On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
• On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

These are not the words of a man seeking to slander his faith, but rather to grapple honestly with his complex feelings about the religion’s major prophet. (And even if they were designed to denigrate Islam, not even the supposedly “frightening theocrat” Rick Santorum has suggested that speech insulting to Christianity should be legally prohibited.) After his tweets caused an uproar, Kashgari fled Saudi Arabia, and entered Malaysia on February 7. Two days later, Malaysian authorities detained Kashgari and deported him to Saudi Arabia, where he continues to be held without charge.

The rash of blasphemy prosecutions in areas where Islamist parties are ascendant can be seen by the fact that they are occurring even in places with longstanding secular traditions, such as Tunisia and Turkey. In Pakistan, two prominent politicians — Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti — were murdered last year for their opposition to the country’s blasphemy law. (That law is particularly problematic because it has had a disproportionate impact on the country’s Christian community, seemingly even being used to bludgeon Christians in the course of routine property disputes.) Disturbingly, the killers of Taseer and Bhatti have been celebrated in Pakistan, and defended even by clerics described as “moderate” by the Western press.

The rights of women. The rights of women are a much-discussed topic in the region. Saudi Arabia, most visibly, features a very clear legal subjugation of women, including its ban on female drivers and its strict gender segregation. But there are also broader questions about equality before the law.

• The State Department reports that in Yemen, “women do not enjoy the same legal status as men under family law, property law, inheritance law, and in the judicial system. They experienced discrimination in such areas as employment, credit, pay, owning or managing businesses, education, and housing.” Courts award custody of children to the divorced husband as a matter of course; daughters receive half the inheritance of their brothers; and two women’s testimony in court is equal to that of one man. The State Department’s report makes clear that many of these restrictions are linked to the prevailing interpretation of sharia in Yemen.
• The State Department also notes that the way religion is interpreted as applying to the laws of the state in Qatar has placed women on unequal footing. “Traditions and interpretation of Sharia also significantly disadvantage women in family, property, and inheritance law and in the judicial system generally,” its most recent human rights report notes. “For example, a non-Muslim wife does not have the automatic right to inherit from her Muslim husband. She receives an inheritance only if her husband wills her a portion of his estate, and even then is eligible to receive only one-third of the total estate. The proportion that women inherit depends upon their relationship to the deceased; in the cases of siblings, sisters inherit only one-half as much as their brothers.” As in Yemen, the testimony of two women in court is equal to that of one man, “but courts routinely evaluated evidence according to the overall credibility of the witness and the testimony being offered and not on the basis of gender.”
• In Kuwait, the State Department notes that women “do not enjoy the same rights as men under family law, property law, or in the judicial system, and they experienced legal, economic, and social discrimination.”
• In Oman, there has been progress, but “some social and legal institutions discriminated against women.” For example, “in some personal status cases, such as divorce, a women’s testimony is equal to half of a man’s. The law favors male heirs in adjudicating inheritance.”

The rise of Islamist politicians and parties is unlikely to remedy the discrimination that women face, and early signs point to significant concerns of further backsliding. Take Egypt, for example. Although the country banned the practice of female genital mutilation in 2007, newly elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi reportedly called the practice a private matter that should be decided by families, and not by the government. In addition, Egypt’s parliament saw “proposals to decrease the age of marriage for girls from 16 to 14 and revoking a woman’s right to divorce her husband.”

Gay rights. In at least eleven countries in the MENA region, consensual sex between people of the same gender is a criminal offense. In seven majority Muslim countries, it is punishable by death. Some examples of how homosexuality is treated under law:

• In Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death or flogging. It is reportedly “difficult to arrive at an accurate figure” as to how many people are executed for this offense, but the number is not zero.
• Under Saudi Arabia‘s interpretation of sharia, “same-sex sexual conduct is punishable by death or flogging. It is illegal for men ‘to behave like women’ or to wear women’s clothes and vice versa.”
• In Yemen, “consensual same-sex sexual activity is a crime punishable by death under the country’s interpretation of Islamic law. Due to the illegality and possibly severe punishment for homosexuality, there were no lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) persons’ organizations.”
• In Qatar, “the law prohibits same-sex sexual conduct between men but is silent on same-sex relations between women. Under the criminal law, a man convicted of having sexual relations with another man or boy younger than 16 years old is subject to a sentence of life in prison. A man convicted of having same-sex sexual activity with another man older than 16 is subject to a sentence of seven years in prison.”
• In Algeria, “the law stipulates penalties that include imprisonment of two months to two years and fines of 500 to 2,000 dinars (approximately $7 to $27).”
• The State Department notes that in the United Arab Emirates, “under Sharia the death penalty is the punishment for individuals who engage in consensual homosexual activity.” There were no such prosecutions during the reporting period in question; but “the government deported cross-dressing foreign residents and referred citizens to public prosecutors.”

The ascension of Islamist parties promises to make life more difficult for gay citizens. As The Economist reports, “Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a New York-based lobby group, says that religious awakening is strengthening hardline interpretations of Islam and a repressive backlash on all kinds of sex-related issues.” It should be noted, for context, that the article goes on to say that “the laws left behind by the former regimes in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt seem draconian enough to satisfy the new governments.” However, the fact remains that Islamist parties are likely to stand in the way of more progressive laws on sexual orientation.

Conclusion. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been beset by a host of problems that run far, far deeper than religion. But when certain forms of legal discrimination — against women, religious minorities, and others — derive from a specific interpretation of religion (whether an interpretation rightly or wrongly derived), favors are done to nobody by ignoring that linkage.

We are indifferent to the use of the term Islamist. We both employ it in our writing because it is easily understandable, possessing a definitive meaning within the relevant literature. If a better term were offered, we wouldn’t hesitate to embrace it in the place of Islamist. But pretending that Islamists are the equivalent of Barack Obama — simply claiming religious inspiration for policies that in practice have nothing to do with religious law — is misleading. And the claim that Rick Santorum’s policies are somehow more extreme than those outlined above is simply insulting. Such an argument preys off of a combination of popular derision for Santorum and cultural relativism to reach a conclusion that is truly meretricious — perhaps persuasive upon first hearing it, but crumbling under the weight of even the slightest critical analysis.

This blog entry does what lazy analyses like that offered by Briggs should have done in the first place: looks at existing legal regimes in Muslim majority countries, examines the direction that Islamist politicians have said they will take these legal regimes, and reaches conclusions about the impact that Islamist parties are thus likely to have. Again, we do so not because the rise of Islamist parties will inherently be a bad thing for rights in the region and for U.S. interests. The rise of these parties is a complex phenomenon, with some promise and also some distinct challenges. Ignoring those challenges, as Briggs’s analysis does, is the road to being unable to contribute productively to addressing them.