TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Minister Faust speaks with Tariq Ali

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According to David Barsamian of Alternative Radio, the Rolling Stones wrote the song “Street Fighting Man” to honour the internationally renowned radical activist, author and atheist Tariq Ali.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Ali lived in exile since the 1960s to opposition to Pakistan’s then-military dictatorship.

A longtime editor at the New Left Review, Tariq Ali has authored and edited numerous books on history and politics including the classic The New Revolutionaries and the recent The Clash of Fundamentalisms which investigates US power and its role in the creation of global terrorism.

A novelist, Ali has published four books of his “Islamic Quintet" which portray Islamic civilisation counter to Western orthodoxy, and the first two volumes in his "Fall of Communism" trilogy. Tariq Ali has also written stage- and screenplays, and he is currently writing an opera about the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini. His most recent book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight of American Power.

Ali will deliver the closing keynote at the Parkland Institute conference on Sunday, November 16 on Western diversity and freedom of expression following the demise of the USSR, and how the market became supreme. For information on tickets, visit PARKLAND.

Tariq Ali spoke with me by telephone from his home in England a week before the American election. Among other things, we discussed:

• Western attitudes that justified the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq
• The killing of 1.5 million Iraqis by sanctions in the Clinton and Bush years preceding the war
• The appeal of a neo-liberal politician such as Barack Obama to millions of self-described progressives
• The reasons why John McCain did not choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate, and
• Muslim-baiting Canadian author Irshad Manji

But I began by asking him about recent remarks about Pakistan's instability by internationally acclaimed correspondent Robert Fisk. We’ll hear Fisk as interviewed by Democracy Now!’s Juan Gonzalez, and then we’ll leap into my discussion with Ali.