Tariq Ali: Toward A New Radical Politics

This couldn't have been said any better: On Hizbollah, Tariq Ali says:

I don’t agree with their religious views, obviously. I’m not a believer. That’s hardly a secret: I state it in public. However when a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it’s important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist.

However, he sounds quite despondent when talking about secular forces in the Muslim world, who he says are lacking in self confidence. Tariq Ali says:

... in many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend now to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases—not in all—they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting. And that I think has been a very, very dangerous development in the Islamic world. And when I go often I meet very, very good people—intellectuals, writers—just sitting completely despondent, trapped between the American hammer and the Islamist anvil, not knowing which way to turn.

Ali is indeed speaking the minds of so many other people.