Alastair Crooke
Director and Founder
Founder of Conflicts Forum – an international movement which engages with Islamist movements broadly; organiser of US and European unofficial dialogues in 2005 with Hezbollah, Hamas and other Islamist movements; former special Mid-East adviser to European Union High Representative, Javier Solana; facilitated various Israeli-Palestinian ceasefires during 2001-2003; instrumental in the negotiations leading to the ending of the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem; mediated in the negotiations leading to the ceasefire declared by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in June 2003; staff member of President Clinton’s Fact Finding Committee, led by Senator Mitchell into the causes of the Intifada; direct experience of conflict over a period of 30 years in Ireland, South Africa, Namibia, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia; co-ordinator in hostage negotiations; author of articles and contributor to television productions on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and on insurgency and political Islam more generally.
Pingback from Is my mind occupied? « The Home of Toddism
Time: February 22, 2009, 1:03 pm
[…] Alastair Crooke provided this revelation in a talk he gave to City Circle on his new book Resistance. This book argues that the heritage from which my politics flows is one in which individualism remains “the organisational principle around which society, politics and economics are organised”. My social democratic views might seek to humanise markets and the individualism upon which markets are based. But, ultimately, they accept them. In contrast, it is argued, political Islam rejects markets in favour of a world view that insists upon a primacy for “human beings behaving to one another with justice, equality and compassion”. […]