Sept 11-

In the interest of continuing this thread, here is the next installment of the survey-

Who is using whom in Egypt and Morocco?

King Muhammad VI, a liberal reformer?

THEY are not “failed states”. Both are “pro-American”. But they are a mess. At opposite corners of North Africa, Egypt and Morocco are swamped by social problems. Both have parliaments and elections, but neither is remotely democratic. In Morocco ultimate power rests with a king, Muhammad VI, with the power to appoint the prime minister and cabinet. Egypt is run by a president, Hosni Mubarak, who has sat on his perch since 1981 with little check on his authority. Both have secular opposition parties, but in both places the only serious challenge to the regime comes from the Islamists. What do the Islamists want?

Abdul Moneim Abul Fotouh is a doctor, the head of the Egyptian Medical Association and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation to which Sayyid Qutb belonged, and which is now tolerated, within limits, by Mr Mubarak's government. It has not dabbled in violence since the 1960s, but the Brotherhood is banned as a political party—though 17 of its members sit as “independents” in the toothless People's Assembly.

Dr Abul Fotouh will never be the toast of Washington's neo-conservatives. He argues that the West has turned against Islam mainly because “the Zionist colonial-settler project” (Israel) needs western protection and so has poisoned western attitudes to Islam. On the other hand, he does not subscribe to Qutb's notion that the West is in a state of jahiliyya. “In general, I don't find the western way of life at odds with Islam,” says the doctor. “At the end of the day, we have a set of common humanist values: justice, freedom, human rights and democracy.”

Saeddine al-Othmani is vice-president of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), which everybody will tell you is the only legal Islamist party in Morocco. Everybody, that is, except the party's members. On meeting The Economist, Mr al-Othmani and his colleagues disavow the Islamist label. Yes, the party puts somewhat more emphasis than others do on Morocco's Islamic identity. But it is dedicated to democracy, not Islam. “For us”, they say, “the problem is that 50 years after independence Morocco is way behind on justice and economic development. So our two priorities are to fight corruption and put ethics back into public life, and then to diminish flagrant social inequality by investing in human capital.”

From Cairo, Dr Abul Fotouh sends the same message; the people demonised in the West as wild-eyed Islamists are just democrats in search of justice. He swats aside questions about the role the Brotherhood would want for sharia in a perfect Egypt. Of course sharia should be honoured. However, Egypt's crisis is not the absence of sharia but the lack of freedom. The Brothers have faced torture and prison; he himself was jailed for five years. “The West has to understand that these regimes are crooks and thieves who just want to sit on their thrones. They worsen the image of Islam in the West and create Islamophobia.”

Along with the PJD, Morocco also has a bigger Islamist movement, Adl wal Ihsane (Justice and Charity). This one is banned from operating as a political party and its charismatic leader, Sheikh Yassine, is under house arrest. Its explicit aim is to turn Morocco into an Islamic state. But this, says its spokesman, Fathallah Arsalan, is for the long term. In the meantime, it concentrates on education and welfare. “The present social crisis is not the time for political competition,” says Mr Arsalan. “What we need now is a transitory period when Islamists, leftists and rightists should all be involved in making conditions better.”

Lumping them all together
Such encounters show that political Islam is no monolith. The mild spokesmen of the PJD,Adl wal Ihsane and the present-day Muslim Brotherhood seem a world away from the violent men of al-Qaeda. So why do people bundle such movements together under the label of “political Islam”? Because they are linked, even if in no other way, in the minds of the regimes.

Take Morocco. Last May, suicide bombers in Casablanca killed 45 people. The perpetrators were said to belong to a group called the Jihad Salafists. No evidence links the attacks to the PJD, which was quick to condemn them. And yet the attacks prompted a clampdown on the PJD. Some palace officials said the bombings showed that the king's cautious political reforms were moving too fast. At one point, the government was said to be thinking of banning the PJD from this month's local elections.

This reaction is no surprise. In Morocco, Egypt and many other Muslim countries the regimes tend to arrange Islamists along a spectrum in which they are all in the end connected. At one end are imams whose only sin is to stir too much politics into their Friday sermons (which the regimes carefully monitor). At the other end are proper terrorists such as the Jihad Salafists in Morocco or the Gamaa Islamiya (currently observing a ceasefire) in Egypt. In the middle are movements such as the PJD, the Adl wal Ihsane and the Muslim Brothers, which claim to be non-violent but which the regimes accuse of “creating an atmosphere” of militancy in which the men of violence flourish.

The oddity of all this is that the regimes do not just fear the Islamists; they also manipulate them. Morocco's government once saw Adl wal Ihsane as a useful conservative bulwark against the left. Then it encouraged the PJD to become a moderate counter to Adl wal Ihsane. Then—when the PJD started to do well in elections—the palace began to worry that the PJD was growing too big for its boots. In Egypt, likewise, the regime has often seen the Muslim Brotherhood as a tool. Dr Abul Fotouh, now in his 50s, belongs to a generation of Brothers that was encouraged by then-President Sadat to act as a counterweight to the radical left on university campuses.

It seems grossly unfair to associate parties such as the PJD, which will not even call themselves Islamists, with the wilder jihadis. But such parties are not above a bit of dissembling of their own. The PJD's leaders may disavow the “Islamist” label, yet they harp on about Morocco's Islamic “tradition”. Its spokesmen are evasive when asked how extensive sharia would have to be in their ideal Morocco. And the party is built on top of an underlying network of associations, called Unity and Reform, which is much more outspoken about its goal of Islamising society.

Given this, it is not only the government that worries about the growing influence of the Islamists. Driss Ksikes, a playwright and editor-in-chief of Morocco's TelQuel, a current-affairs magazine, says he deplores the way the state used the Casablanca bombings to demonise all Islamists and slither back into authoritarianism. But he has his own reservations about the Islamists. In the end, he says, the moderate PJD and the more radical Adl wal Ihsane both want to create an Islamist state based on sharia. They have just chosen different methods. While Adl wal Ihsane prepares the people patiently for the coming of the caliphate, the PJD works the political system and promotes a softer image. But both are heading for the same destination.

In the absence of a credible secular opposition, all this has a paradoxical result. Mr Ksikes notes that secular Moroccans are forced to hope that the king, of all people, will become the champion of modernity. The king may not actually believe in liberal democracy—what king would?—but has to pretend to believe in it a bit if he is to keep Morocco's relations with its western allies sweet.

In Egypt, too, it suits Hosni Mubarak to have an Islamist opposition at hand. This helps him to persuade the United States that if he falls, Egypt will collapse into fundamentalism. The same argument is made right across the Muslim world, from the kingdoms of Arabia to the dictatorships of Bashar Assad of Syria and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Kings and dictators point to the Islamists and say that they would be worse than their own regimes. Meanwhile the non-violent Islamists say that they will be replaced by violent ones if the state persists in repressing them. “If we have no democratic process, we will see the resurgence of the extremist groups,” says Mustapha Khalfi, political editor of Morocco's Attajdid newspaper.

In Egypt, argues Bahgat Korany of the American University of Cairo, the staid Brotherhood has become less alluring than the jihadis since September 11th. The younger generation, he says, is less likely to focus on domestic issues alone: they identify beyond Egypt with the position of Muslims at large.

Are Egypt and Morocco typical? They could hardly be more different even from each other. One was the birthplace of Arab nationalism; the other is a monarchy. One is at the centre of the passions that sweep the Arab world; the other is a conservative backwater. But the politics of Islam in these very different countries repeats itself throughout the Muslim world. By throttling the secular opposition, authoritarian regimes have left the Islamists as the only groups with a following. It seems obvious that unless the moderate Islamists are given a fair hearing, disaffected citizens will turn to the violent organisations on their fringes which, since Iraq and Afghanistan, have a potent message of global Muslim beleaguerment to recruit more followers. So why does nothing change?
 
ANd a little more-

Two theories

Sep 11th 2003
From The Economist print edition


Is political Islam past its peak or a mounting danger?

BY AND large, and simplifying mightily, analysts of political Islam can be grouped around two opposing theories. An optimistic theory holds that violent Islamism reached a peak in the 1980s and 1990s and has now been defeated. The pessimistic theory holds that the Islamists are gaining strength and continue to pose a grave threat to the political order of Muslim states and possibly to the wider world.

The optimists draw heavily on a magisterial book by a French academic, Gilles Kepel, called “Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam”, and on a shorter book by another Frenchman, Olivier Roy, called “The Failure of Political Islam”. Mr Kepel's book was first published in 2000, before the attacks of September 11th, but he sees no need to revise his overall conclusion. His argument is that almost wherever the Islamists have tried to capture majority support—from Algeria to Iran to Afghanistan—they have failed. Like communism, the blueprint has lost its appeal. “Muslims no longer view Islamism as the source of Utopia,” he says, “and this more pragmatic vision augurs well for the future.”

Part of this theory cannot be argued with. Whereas September 11th jolted people in the West into noticing the perils of Islamism, the Muslim world itself had been convulsed by the challenge of political Islam throughout the preceding decades. And by the end of the 1990s it really was beginning to look as if the secularists, not the Islamists, or at least not the violent ones, were beginning to prevail.

Consider how things had changed. In three countries—Iran after its 1979 revolution, Afghanistan after the eviction of the Soviet Union and Sudan after an Islamist coup in 1989—Muslim governments had tried to create something resembling an authentic Islamic state. In Iran and Afghanistan Muslim revolutionaries defied one superpower and humbled another, briefly electrifying Muslims everywhere. And yet by the end of the 1990s the experiment in Sudan had collapsed, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan into a reviled dystopia and the Iranian theocracy was losing its hold not only on its foreign admirers but also on its own people. As these failures sank in, the simple slogan that “Islam is the solution” began to look somewhat less plausible.

During the same decade, Islamists suffered another sort of setback. In countries where armed jihadis decided to do battle with the state, they were defeated. Egypt crushed the Gamaa Islamiya. After more than 100,000 deaths, the Algerian civil war of the 1990s petered out with a victory, if a Pyrrhic one, for the regime. The mujahideen guerrillas who routed the Red Army in Afghanistan failed to turn Bosnia into another jihad. Hence Mr Kepel's conclusion that by the end of the 1990s violence had become a dead-end for the Islamists. It did not lead to power, and it terrified the middle classes. If political Islam has a future, says theory one, it will henceforth consist of working within the rules of democracy and making the appropriate compromises.

The advocates of theory two, the pessimists, agree with some of this analysis. They accept that the jihadis failed when they clashed head on with the state. But they are less sanguine about the present state of affairs. They worry that although the states have crushed the violent groups, the influence of political Islam has not only survived but grown stronger. And they do not altogether, or at all, buy the claim of the non-violent Islamists to have adopted democratic values. Of course the Islamists say they have: they calculate that they would do well in free elections. But what if these parties turn out to be Trojan horses? What if they used elections to capture power but had no intention of letting anyone vote them out afterwards?

Again, part of this theory cannot be argued against. Despite the setbacks of the 1990s, the influence of political Islam—the idea, that is, that Islam should have something important to say about the way society is governed—has spread. Sometimes this growing influence can be measured in electoral victories, such as the landslide victory in Turkey in November 2002 of the Justice and Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the capture a month earlier by Pakistan's Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, an alliance of six Islamist parties, of 60 out of 342 seats in the National Assembly plus control of the provincial government of North-West Frontier. But success in elections is only one bit of the evidence.

The power of opposition
Even where Islamists do not win elections, or are not allowed to, they often form the only opposition that governments really worry about. There is no longer much of a “left” left in large parts of the Muslim world. Whereas the secular parties are often shells, the Islamists tend to have large and active memberships, often linked to mosques, who combine impressive welfare work with what is known as dawa (spreading the faith), designed to Islamise society from the grassroots. And whereas “civil society” in most poor countries is starved of money, cash pours into the Islamists. This makes them powerful even when they are not in power. “It would not be an exaggeration”, says Graham Fuller, a former vice-chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, “to state that Islamists are probably more focused on civil society and the creation of institutions within it than any other political force in the Muslim world.”

Besides, the Islamists do not need always to win power in order to get their way. Secular regimes that feel Islam snapping at their heels have long responded by throwing tidbits its way just in case. Indonesia's former president, Suharto, tried to present himself as a devout Muslim in a vain attempt to save his regime. So did Pakistan's Zia ul Haq, a military dictator, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secular socialist. Other regimes have bowed to Islamist demands by putting bits and pieces of sharia into the law of the state, or, like Egypt and Syria, saying in their constitutions that Islamic law is one source for national law. In Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamed, under pressure from the Islamists of the PAS opposition, broke with his country's secular tradition in 2001 and declared Malaysia “an Islamic state”. Morocco's king styles himself “defender of the faith”.

Indeed, such have been their gains in opposition, and in cultivating their grassroots networks on the ground, that some Islamists think they might be better off opposing and cultivating than being in power. Rashid al-Ghannushi, an influential Tunisian exile in London, has said that if the Islamists' social-missionary work comes into conflict with their political interests, the former must be put first, because Islam's social achievements are liable to be more permanent than its political ones. “The most dangerous thing”, he says, “is for the Islamists to be loved by the people before they get to power and then hated afterward.” (Iran take note.)

The pessimists say the “successes” notched up this way by political Islam in opposition shift the centre of gravity in Muslim societies towards religion, bigotry and censorship and away from secular liberalism. The optimists demur. Do not think that the aim of Islamist parties is only to give religion a bigger say, they argue. These groups are trying to reform society in numerous ways, using Islam to make their message more appealing. They are not lying: it really is Islam that shapes their view of the world. But they are pragmatists inspired by the progressive values they discern in their faith, not ideologues scouring scripture in search of some ready-made blueprint.

One extreme optimist of this kind is Mr Fuller, that former CIA analyst. He calls political Islam (except in places where the Islamists have grabbed power by force) “the single largest, most vibrant, growing, widespread and active movement in the Muslim world in seeking to strengthen democracy, human rights, civil society and, generally, liberal economies.” But even in the Muslim world, this rosy view is controversial, to say the least.

Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University of Cairo, is a believer: political Islam, he says, is “the wave of the future”. But just down the corridor, Bahgat Korany voices the misgivings of many Muslim intellectuals. “On the one hand, the Islamists are a vibrant force of civil society, an oppositional force with some semblance of a conceptual alternative. On the other, I have lots of questions about what sort of political system they are trying to establish. Plus I wonder whether this is the road to permanent democracy.” Some of the Islamists, he says, are too apt to cite religious text as all the authority they need, and not ready enough to admit the possibility of error.

A lot of non-Muslim scholars are a good deal more sceptical than this. Emmanuel Sivan, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues that people like Mr Fuller, who think the Islamists are the progressives in Muslim societies, pay too much heed to what such groups say to outsiders and too little to what they say among themselves. Though there are liberal voices among the Islamists, says Mr Sivan, these are drowned out by the extremists. The liberals publish learned papers; the extremists have mastered the art of spreading their message far and wide by means of sermons and debates distributed on audiocassettes. Mr Sivan reckons that of the 400 or so tape-cassette preachers, none is a liberal.

It may not matter whether western scholars believe that Islamists are genuine democrats. It does matter what fellow Muslims think. This is because most Muslims say they want democracy. The same Pew survey in June that reported growing Muslim rage at America also found a strong appetite for democratic freedoms. A poll of some 50 countries—from kingdoms such as Jordan and Kuwait as well as authoritarian states such as Uzbekistan and Pakistan—found strong support for freedom of expression, freedom of the press, multi-party systems and equal treatment under the law. In some parts of the Muslim world, these values scored higher than in parts of central and eastern Europe.

But can you trust them?
Encouraging. But will Muslims who support democracy in theory support it in practice if they cannot trust the Islamists to abide by the rules of the game? Mr Sivan argues that by monopolising the opposition in Muslim countries the Islamists have, as it were, put the fear of God into the very middle classes which might otherwise be democracy's champions. Like Latin America's middle classes when Marxism was strong, they hesitate about taking a chance on fair elections, lest that should hand power permanently to the extremists. “The reason democracy has not penetrated Islam has nothing to do with some essential opposition from the religion,” says Mr Sivan. “It's not long since Catholics were looked upon in this light. Democratisation has failed to a large extent because of the radical danger: the fear that it will be one vote, one man, one time.” Will it?
 
If this is a dead issue- I will stop posting.

The law of man or the law of God?

Sep 11th 2003
From The Economist print edition


Islam and democracy

THE fear that a vote for Islamists would mean “one man, one vote, one time” is not something dreamt up by outsiders. It is voiced throughout the Muslim world. In 1991, the government of Algeria gave just this reason for cancelling the second round of an election in which an Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front, was poised to displace the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had ruled since independence. Once they grabbed power, said the FLN, the Islamists could never be trusted to give it up again.

This seems a bit rich, coming from a government that was not itself willing to give up power in a fair election. Arab politicians who complain that the Islamists are no democrats should be reminded that they are not democrats either. And it is clear that many things other than Islam—the arbitrary borders left by imperialism, the entrenchment of single-party states—have hindered the growth of democracy in the Muslim world. Still, those who argue that “Islam is the solution” need to confront the other possibility. Might Islam be the problem? Is something hard-wired in the faith incompatible with democracy?

The short answer is yes. Democracy is based on the idea that men make laws. Islam contains, in the Koran, a set of God-given laws, dictated directly to Muhammad and therefore not open to revision. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a specialist in Islamic law at the University of California, says a case for democracy that is presented from within Islam has to accept the idea of divine sovereignty. “It cannot substitute popular sovereignty but must show how popular sovereignty expresses God's authority, properly understood.”

That is obviously a formidable complication, which gives a lot of power to anyone who can claim some special authority to “properly understand”. However, it is not one beyond the wit of man to wriggle around. For it is no less obvious to Muslims than to other people that some of God's orders leave gaps to be filled in, and that others require interpretation. This opens the way for men to make plenty of rules for themselves. The Koran, for example, does not prescribe any particular system of government. And yet government requires rulers, who must be chosen by some method that is open to argument.

Modern states also require many more laws than are inscribed in the unalterable Koran. In fact only about 80 of the Koran's 6,000 verses lay down rules of public law, and not many of those have much application in the modern world. Much of what is loosely called sharia derives from other sources: the sunna (the teachings of the prophet); the ijma (the consensus of religious scholars); and the qiyas (legal reasoning). So here is ample room for interpretation (what Muslims call ijtihad). Even some explicit laws laid down in the Koran are routinely circumvented by Islamic judges. The Koran, for example, says pretty plainly that a thief should be punished by losing his hand. But the number of crimes requiring these so-called hudud punishments is small, and most Muslim countries with hudud laws on their statute books have found ways to ensure that the punishments are seldom if ever carried out.

Those who are willing to look for it, in other words, can find sufficient wriggle-room within Islam for the faith to co-exist with democracy. Some Muslim democrats go on to make a further, less plausible claim. By heroic extrapolation, they find an endorsement of democratic ideas in the Koran's fleeting references to consensus (ijma) and consultation (shura).

That is probably too much of a stretch. The required consultation is only with the Muslim jurists, not the people. Although plenty of the values associated with democracy—such as equality, justice and compassion—are to be found within Islam, the holy texts of this religion, like the other great religions, do not prescribe democracy. The best that can be said is that they do not altogether proscribe it. And even this is in contention. To Sayyid Qutb, remember, man must not be under the dominion of man. The blind sheikh, Umar Abd al-Rahman, who was implicated in the first attempt on the twin towers in 1993, has issued a fatwa banning all political parties, including Islamist ones. The simple fact is that there is no agreed-upon blueprint for politics in Islam.

For evidence that there is no blueprint, look somewhere surprising: Iran. For most of the two decades since Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution, it has seemed to epitomise the opposite of democracy. Khomeini imposed a doctrine known as wilayat al-faqih (rule by the jurist) under which the final arbiter of political power should be the cleric best qualified properly to understand (that phrase again) the true meaning of Islamic law and tradition. By—for him—happy coincidence, he it was who was deemed best qualified to be supreme leader. Though Iran's constitution allows for an elected president and Consultative Assembly, legislation must be vetted by a mullah-dominated Council of Guardians to make sure that it complies with Islamic law as they see it.

So make it up as you go along
This is hardly democracy as the West understands it. But is Iran proof that an Islamic state cannot be democratic? Arguably, what Iran really shows is how those who espouse the cause of political Islam are pretty much free—or pretty much forced—to make up what it is they mean by this as they go along. Although Khomeini did not just dream up the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, the version he imposed was very much his own invention. The doctrine itself is by no means accepted by all Shia spiritual leaders. And it may not last even in Iran.

Right now Iran is divided between reformers led by the twice-elected President Muhammad Khatami and conservative mullahs who will brook no change that might weaken the power vested in the clerisy. It is possible that the conservatives will crush the democracy movement, or vice versa. But it is also possible that some middle way might be found. This is the hope of Noah Feldman, an American scholar and adviser to the American government. “Such an outcome”, he says, “would not only begin to solve the problems that Iran faces today without violent upheaval, but would also represent a model for other places in the Muslim world to emulate.”

Until then, political parties which claim that “Islam is the solution” will find it hard to describe the sort of political order they envisage creating, or to point to an admired example. Most prefer to be vague, dwelling on the inadequacies of the status quo. They all say an Islamic state would apply sharia. But sharia is not yet comprehensive and is subject to varying interpretation. God would be sovereign, of course, but who would actually rule? The answer depends on whom you ask. The pessimists may well be right to say that the Islamists are bogus democrats, interested only in one man, one vote, one time. But nothing in Islam itself necessarily makes it so.
 
1) There are no reformers in Iran, there are the Illusion of reformers. They give ghost powers to people who are vitrual puppets of the people who control the shithole
2) "Render unto Caeser's that which is God unto God". Nothing like that anywhere in Islam
3) The Mid East is naturally divided among Muslims, Liberal Muslims, Herectical Muslims and Christians. THere is no room for "semi-democracies" without 1922 like expulsions.
 
Actaully this is a question I am having with regard to Pakistan where the choice seems to be between military or democratic rule, but what if it was Islamist? What is the better alternative.

You do have democratic experiments going on in such places as Indonesia and Turkey- perhaps they don't count.

CC- in an earlier email you mentioned that with time your fanaticism might fade, but one question I have for you know is what alternatives are you actually considering for this problem.

In the middle east you can either have authoritarian, a junta type, a democracy or an islamist state. The authoritarians and military types have done an awful job of staying in power. Both would be willing to repress the democratics and less so the socialists. If you have no faith in democrats and can't see the islamists than you open the door for more Saddam Husseins. That or you liquidate everyone, which is the most the extremist camp, and then turn the middle east into either a shopping mall or a second Las Vegas.

My point here is that you are not really offering much in the way of solutions. I realize that this discussion has not opened itself to that. Rather we are more about talking about the nature of the problem first before getting it resolved, but I am not even seeing a hint of a solution in your position.

Fanaticism can be both idealistic and cynical, unrealistically hopeful or nearly self-destructive. Either way it allows for illogical reasoning. I see much of the promise of a discussion as a way to map problems in order to find solutions. I am not all that keen on the idea of banner waving for a cause. Perhaps, and this is just advice, you might turn your reasoning more to solutions.
 
Turkey. Turkey is a perfect example of what could possibly be in the middle east in a few years. True, it has it's imperfections, but it is well on the way to being the most modern nation in the Muslim world.

I think that Tunisia is more or less on track. Repress the Fanatics, bring in a form of Democracy, and let the support of the Fanatics dissappear.
 
Like the new avatar CC.

And yes this is gravedigging, but I couldn't resist.

For those of you who saw the special commemorative 9-11 coins, and thought it was a tacky rip-off of a tragedy.

Or those of you who bought the coins-

note-

Court Halts Sale of September 11 Coins

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press Writer

ALBANY, N.Y. - New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on Wednesday obtained a court order to temporarily suspend the sale of commemorative Sept. 11 coins heavily advertised as being minted from silver recovered at ground zero.

Spitzer said the sale of the silver dollars emblazoned with the World Trade Center towers on one side and the planned Freedom Tower on the flip side is a fraud and he's investigating the claim the silver came from the ruins of the twin towers.

"It is a shameless attempt to profit from a national tragedy," Spitzer said. "This product has been promoted with claims that are false, misleading or unsubstantiated."

Spitzer said the National Collector's Mint, based in Port Chester, N.Y., claims the coins engraved with "In God We Trust" are legally authorized silver dollars, when they aren't.

He said the coin advertised as nearly pure silver is only silver plated, produced by a Wyoming company called SoftSky Inc.

The TV and print ads include one fashioned after a news story that reads: "Today, history is being made. For the first time ever, a legally authorized government issue silver dollar has been struck to commemorate the World Trade Center and the new Freedom Tower being erected in its place ... Most importantly, each coin has been created using .999 pure silver recovered from ground zero!"

The dollar pieces are priced at $39 each, but sold at $19.95 with a limit of five per customer.

A company spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. On Sept. 10, the U.S. Mint issued a notice on its Web site that the coin "is not a legally authorized government issued" product.

The temporary halt on sales is pending a civil suit filed by Spitzer in state Supreme Court. Spitzer seeks civil penalties, restitution to those who bought the coins, greater consumer disclosure and full disclosure that the coins aren't endorsed by the federal government.

The company sells a variety of novelty coins, including those with characters from the "Harry Potter (news - web sites)" books and movies.
Click to expand...

Be careful of those that sell you on the national tragedy line, it could just be a big lie.
 
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