Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Ross Douhat-- A Voice of Reason
Imam Rauf and Moderate Islam
To some extent, the controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative’s Lower Manhattan venture is really a controversy about how non-Muslim Westerners should relate to the would-be spokesmen for a moderate (or “moderate,” depending on your point of view) Islam. One school of thought, prominent among conservatives but associated with liberal thinkers like Paul Berman as well, holds that anything short of an absolute commitment to Enlightenment values is unacceptable from such figures, and that moderate Muslims must demonstrate this commitment, and prove their secular bona fides, by making a frontal assault on Islamic culture as it currently exists. To this school, explicitly-liberal figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji represent the beau ideal of moderate Islam, because they’re forthright in their critiques of Muslim societies’ failings, and unstinting in their insistence that the Western way of faith and politics is ultimately superior. A high-profile bridge-builder like the ubiquitous Tariq Ramadan, on the other hand, is much more suspect, and possibly beyond the pale — because he tends to use different language and strike different notes depending on his audience, because he often seems to be making excuses for illiberalism in the Islamic world, because he’s less-than-forthright in his condemnations of certain kinds of extremism, and so on down the line. To his critics, such bobbing and weaving is proof enough that his “moderate Islam” project is really just a flowery fraud and a Trojan Horse for Wahhabism, with no redeeming value whatsoever. And this critique is easily extended to many other self-described moderates as well — including, lately, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who arguably has a stronger claim to moderation than Ramadan, but who seems to share some of his more evasive qualities when the conversation turns to, say, Hamas or the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This school of thought strikes me as misguided. Manji and Hirsi Ali are brave and admirable, but what they’re offering (Hirsi Ali especially) is ultimately a straightforward critique of Muslim traditions and belief, not a bridge between Islam and the liberal West that devout Muslims can cross with their religious faith intact. If such bridges are going to be built, much of the work will necessarily be done by figures who sometimes seem ambiguous and even two-faced, who have illiberal conversation partners and influences, and whose ideas are tailored to audiences in Cairo or Beirut or Baghdad as well as audiences in Europe and America. That’s how change — religious, ideological, whatever — nearly always works. I hold no particular brief for Tariq Ramadan, and his critics have provided ample evidence of his slipperiness over the years. But we have to be able to draw intellectual distinctions on these matters, and if we just lump a figure like Ramadan — or any Muslim leader who has one foot solidly in the Western mainstream but a few toes in more dangerous waters — into the same camp as Islam’s theocrats and jihadists, then we’re placing an impossible burden on Muslim believers, and setting ourselves up for an unwinnable conflict with more or less the entirety of the Muslim world. The Andy McCarthy conceit, which holds that anyone (like Ramadan, and like Rauf) who cites or engages with illiberal interpreters of Islam automatically forfeits the title “moderate,” seems out of touch with the complexities of religious history; moreover, it’s a little like insisting circa 1864 that Pope Pius IX’s critique of religious liberty and church-state separation requires American Catholics to immediately sever all ties to the pope. It’s both dubious in theory and self-defeating in practice.
But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package. (This is particularly true because Westerners have a long record of seeing what they want to see in self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, from the Ayatollah Khomeini down to Anwar Al Awlaki, and failing to recognize extremism when it’s staring them in the face.) And what’s troubling about some of the liberal reaction to the Cordoba Initiative controversy is that it seems to regard this kind of pressure as illegitimate and dangerous in and of itself — as though the First Amendment protects the right of Rauf and Co. to build their mosque and cultural center, but not the right of critics to scrutinize Rauf’s moderate bona fides, parse some of his more disturbing comments, and raise doubts about the benefits (to American Islam as well as to America) of having him set up shop as an arbiter of Muslim-Western dialogue in what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center.
So Jonathan Chait, in a representative post, suggests that what’s at stake in the Cordoba debate is whether American Muslims “should be presumed to be terrorists unless proven otherwise … or whether they should be afforded the same general presumption of innocence enjoyed by other religions.” But surely these two options don’t exhaust the ways that non-Muslim Westerners can react to a figure like Rauf, and a project like the Cordoba mosque. Surely respecting Muslim Americans doesn’t require pretending that all religious cultures are identical, or that the intellectual climate in contemporary Islam is no different from the intellectual climate in Judaism or Christianity, or that the West doesn’t have a particular reason to worry about what’s said and done by high-profile clerics in high-profile mosques. Surely in an age of Islamist terror, there’s a particular kind of scrutiny that’s appropriate to religious entrepreneurs who insist that they can represent the Islamic world to the West, and the West to the Islamic world. And surely, when it comes to a seemingly complicated and now extremely high-profile figure like Feisal Abdul Rauf, we can trust but also verify.
To some extent, the controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative’s Lower Manhattan venture is really a controversy about how non-Muslim Westerners should relate to the would-be spokesmen for a moderate (or “moderate,” depending on your point of view) Islam. One school of thought, prominent among conservatives but associated with liberal thinkers like Paul Berman as well, holds that anything short of an absolute commitment to Enlightenment values is unacceptable from such figures, and that moderate Muslims must demonstrate this commitment, and prove their secular bona fides, by making a frontal assault on Islamic culture as it currently exists. To this school, explicitly-liberal figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji represent the beau ideal of moderate Islam, because they’re forthright in their critiques of Muslim societies’ failings, and unstinting in their insistence that the Western way of faith and politics is ultimately superior. A high-profile bridge-builder like the ubiquitous Tariq Ramadan, on the other hand, is much more suspect, and possibly beyond the pale — because he tends to use different language and strike different notes depending on his audience, because he often seems to be making excuses for illiberalism in the Islamic world, because he’s less-than-forthright in his condemnations of certain kinds of extremism, and so on down the line. To his critics, such bobbing and weaving is proof enough that his “moderate Islam” project is really just a flowery fraud and a Trojan Horse for Wahhabism, with no redeeming value whatsoever. And this critique is easily extended to many other self-described moderates as well — including, lately, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who arguably has a stronger claim to moderation than Ramadan, but who seems to share some of his more evasive qualities when the conversation turns to, say, Hamas or the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This school of thought strikes me as misguided. Manji and Hirsi Ali are brave and admirable, but what they’re offering (Hirsi Ali especially) is ultimately a straightforward critique of Muslim traditions and belief, not a bridge between Islam and the liberal West that devout Muslims can cross with their religious faith intact. If such bridges are going to be built, much of the work will necessarily be done by figures who sometimes seem ambiguous and even two-faced, who have illiberal conversation partners and influences, and whose ideas are tailored to audiences in Cairo or Beirut or Baghdad as well as audiences in Europe and America. That’s how change — religious, ideological, whatever — nearly always works. I hold no particular brief for Tariq Ramadan, and his critics have provided ample evidence of his slipperiness over the years. But we have to be able to draw intellectual distinctions on these matters, and if we just lump a figure like Ramadan — or any Muslim leader who has one foot solidly in the Western mainstream but a few toes in more dangerous waters — into the same camp as Islam’s theocrats and jihadists, then we’re placing an impossible burden on Muslim believers, and setting ourselves up for an unwinnable conflict with more or less the entirety of the Muslim world. The Andy McCarthy conceit, which holds that anyone (like Ramadan, and like Rauf) who cites or engages with illiberal interpreters of Islam automatically forfeits the title “moderate,” seems out of touch with the complexities of religious history; moreover, it’s a little like insisting circa 1864 that Pope Pius IX’s critique of religious liberty and church-state separation requires American Catholics to immediately sever all ties to the pope. It’s both dubious in theory and self-defeating in practice.
But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package. (This is particularly true because Westerners have a long record of seeing what they want to see in self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, from the Ayatollah Khomeini down to Anwar Al Awlaki, and failing to recognize extremism when it’s staring them in the face.) And what’s troubling about some of the liberal reaction to the Cordoba Initiative controversy is that it seems to regard this kind of pressure as illegitimate and dangerous in and of itself — as though the First Amendment protects the right of Rauf and Co. to build their mosque and cultural center, but not the right of critics to scrutinize Rauf’s moderate bona fides, parse some of his more disturbing comments, and raise doubts about the benefits (to American Islam as well as to America) of having him set up shop as an arbiter of Muslim-Western dialogue in what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center.
So Jonathan Chait, in a representative post, suggests that what’s at stake in the Cordoba debate is whether American Muslims “should be presumed to be terrorists unless proven otherwise … or whether they should be afforded the same general presumption of innocence enjoyed by other religions.” But surely these two options don’t exhaust the ways that non-Muslim Westerners can react to a figure like Rauf, and a project like the Cordoba mosque. Surely respecting Muslim Americans doesn’t require pretending that all religious cultures are identical, or that the intellectual climate in contemporary Islam is no different from the intellectual climate in Judaism or Christianity, or that the West doesn’t have a particular reason to worry about what’s said and done by high-profile clerics in high-profile mosques. Surely in an age of Islamist terror, there’s a particular kind of scrutiny that’s appropriate to religious entrepreneurs who insist that they can represent the Islamic world to the West, and the West to the Islamic world. And surely, when it comes to a seemingly complicated and now extremely high-profile figure like Feisal Abdul Rauf, we can trust but also verify.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Moral Myopia at Ground Zero
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 20, 2010
It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.
Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.
It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.
Where the president flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.
The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent just outside Auschwitz? (Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.) How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity, this order to pray -- but not there? He doesn't even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."
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That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?
At least Richard Cohen of The Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."
Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.
Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.
Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaged in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia -- because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?
Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers -- according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls -- it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.
Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam -- the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name -- should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground and take up the governor's offer.
Friday, August 20, 2010
It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.
Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.
It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.
Where the president flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.
The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent just outside Auschwitz? (Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.) How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity, this order to pray -- but not there? He doesn't even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."
ad_icon
That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?
At least Richard Cohen of The Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."
Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.
Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.
Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaged in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia -- because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?
Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers -- according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls -- it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.
Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam -- the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name -- should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground and take up the governor's offer.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Vive la Difference (non)
Vive la Différence
A review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike, by Peter Baldwin
In January the new permanent president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, renewed the European Union's urgent call for a new tax. There was no time to waste: Brussels needed the dough to preserve what Van Rompuy called the "European way of life." As a statement released by his office last November put it, "The financing of the welfare state...will require new resources."
As the reaction against Obamacare demonstrated, if the president of the United States said he needed more money to preserve the "American way of life" and then made clear he meant ponying up more money for welfare schemes, most voters would wish him an unemployment check without delay. But they would be shocked to discover in Peter Baldwin's very amusing book, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike, that the "European way of life" pretty much describes how people in, say, Iowa live.
In fact, Baldwin, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, reached his conclusion in a distinctly Midwestern way: he harvested. Baldwin's numbers—fertilized by studies from the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other international organizations and institutions, where statistics grow as thick and high as Iowa corn—fill his book. They show that despite our assumptions, despite a thousand op-eds, and a couple of centuries of squabbling and bickering, and even wars and revolutions, the statistical differences between Western Europe and America are trivial—in fact less than the differences between various European states. All that stuff about us Americans and them Europeans? Statistically speaking, them is us. Incroyable, non?
However, one vast difference between Europeans and Americans is in the mastery of groundless condescension. So this is a great book to take to a dinner party in Paris or to a curb-sweep in Glasgow. What can be more tiresome than meeting a hung-over Brit and waiting for the inevitable jibes about misery and mayhem, poverty and illiteracy in the U.S.A.? Let them eat Baldwin. They'll be shocked to learn that going by the numbers—on money and work, crime and violence, health care and education, the environment and the family—we're depressingly alike.
One graph after another in this highly contrarian and entertaining book shows a big black line indicating where America stands in the European tables, and it's almost always somewhere in the middle, often with Scandos and the make-believe Luxembourgers a notch or two above us, the British and Irish a notch or two below. In common with most other Western Europeans, we give thanks that we're not Portuguese, who seem to have a hard time with almost everything. The differences are as minor as Baldwin says: generally speaking, to use a term from the '60s, we are all bozos on this bus. We all work hard, raise families, pay taxes, and die—and we do these things in remarkably similar ways. When Le Monde ran its famous headline, "We are all Americans," on the morning of September 12, 2001, what they might have meant on any other day was "We are all middle-class people with weight problems who recycle and watch too much TV."
For those on the American left who love holding up European solutions for American problems, Baldwin's collection of discoveries will be a blow. Who knew that in the U.S., taxes are more progressive than in all of Europe? Or that American social welfare policies are as generous as Van Rompuy's cherished continental welfare state? Or that the Germans are even more litigious than Yanks? Or that for education, state spending by Americans and Europeans is about the same and achieves about the same results? Or that Americans have been more successful in reducing carbon dioxide output per unit of GDP than nine European countries, some of them notoriously sanctimonious? Or that the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, and Italians—with their expensive public transportation networks—all own more passenger cars per capita than Americans do? Or that New Yorkers are the politest big-city residents on either side of the Atlantic? Fuggedaboutit! Europeans ridicule perceived American religiosity, yet, as Baldwin notes, "About a third of Germans, Austrians, and Irish, and even more French and Swiss, believe that fortune-tellers can foresee the future."
A review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike, by Peter Baldwin
In January the new permanent president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, renewed the European Union's urgent call for a new tax. There was no time to waste: Brussels needed the dough to preserve what Van Rompuy called the "European way of life." As a statement released by his office last November put it, "The financing of the welfare state...will require new resources."
As the reaction against Obamacare demonstrated, if the president of the United States said he needed more money to preserve the "American way of life" and then made clear he meant ponying up more money for welfare schemes, most voters would wish him an unemployment check without delay. But they would be shocked to discover in Peter Baldwin's very amusing book, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike, that the "European way of life" pretty much describes how people in, say, Iowa live.
In fact, Baldwin, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, reached his conclusion in a distinctly Midwestern way: he harvested. Baldwin's numbers—fertilized by studies from the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other international organizations and institutions, where statistics grow as thick and high as Iowa corn—fill his book. They show that despite our assumptions, despite a thousand op-eds, and a couple of centuries of squabbling and bickering, and even wars and revolutions, the statistical differences between Western Europe and America are trivial—in fact less than the differences between various European states. All that stuff about us Americans and them Europeans? Statistically speaking, them is us. Incroyable, non?
However, one vast difference between Europeans and Americans is in the mastery of groundless condescension. So this is a great book to take to a dinner party in Paris or to a curb-sweep in Glasgow. What can be more tiresome than meeting a hung-over Brit and waiting for the inevitable jibes about misery and mayhem, poverty and illiteracy in the U.S.A.? Let them eat Baldwin. They'll be shocked to learn that going by the numbers—on money and work, crime and violence, health care and education, the environment and the family—we're depressingly alike.
One graph after another in this highly contrarian and entertaining book shows a big black line indicating where America stands in the European tables, and it's almost always somewhere in the middle, often with Scandos and the make-believe Luxembourgers a notch or two above us, the British and Irish a notch or two below. In common with most other Western Europeans, we give thanks that we're not Portuguese, who seem to have a hard time with almost everything. The differences are as minor as Baldwin says: generally speaking, to use a term from the '60s, we are all bozos on this bus. We all work hard, raise families, pay taxes, and die—and we do these things in remarkably similar ways. When Le Monde ran its famous headline, "We are all Americans," on the morning of September 12, 2001, what they might have meant on any other day was "We are all middle-class people with weight problems who recycle and watch too much TV."
For those on the American left who love holding up European solutions for American problems, Baldwin's collection of discoveries will be a blow. Who knew that in the U.S., taxes are more progressive than in all of Europe? Or that American social welfare policies are as generous as Van Rompuy's cherished continental welfare state? Or that the Germans are even more litigious than Yanks? Or that for education, state spending by Americans and Europeans is about the same and achieves about the same results? Or that Americans have been more successful in reducing carbon dioxide output per unit of GDP than nine European countries, some of them notoriously sanctimonious? Or that the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, and Italians—with their expensive public transportation networks—all own more passenger cars per capita than Americans do? Or that New Yorkers are the politest big-city residents on either side of the Atlantic? Fuggedaboutit! Europeans ridicule perceived American religiosity, yet, as Baldwin notes, "About a third of Germans, Austrians, and Irish, and even more French and Swiss, believe that fortune-tellers can foresee the future."
Monday, August 16, 2010
Hummus and Whiplash in Ramallah
My column this week in Jewish Journal and Huffington Post:
It was the best hummus I’ve ever tasted. It came in a bowl, drenched in olive oil, with a few small garbanzos and shreds of parsley and hot green peppers sprinkled on top, and just the right amount of lemon juice. The elderly Palestinian man had made the hummus from scratch and served it to us with a salad plate, a bowl of falafels and a tall stack of hot pitas for just under 8 shekels.
I was eating in a refugee camp in Ramallah with Bassem Eid, the founder and director of an NGO called Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. We ate at this hole in the wall off a skinny alleyway nestled in a labyrinth of ramshackle houses, tiny grocery stores and one little mosque, with a U.N. mini-truck riding around the alleyways picking up random garbage.
Outside the camp was a different story. Ramallah is a happening city with construction everywhere and a sea of people lining the sidewalks of boulevards teeming with commerce. Eid, it seems, knew every street.
I met him the way I’ve met a lot of people in Jerusalem — one meeting leading to another. In this case, I was having dinner in Jerusalem with my friend Hillel Neuer and professor Irwin Cotler, a Canadian Member of Parliament and a well-known human rights activist. We were talking about the many human rights NGOs in Israel, and I mentioned that we rarely hear about NGOs that monitor Palestinian society.
At which point the professor exclaimed: “Oh, you must meet my friend Bassem Eid!”
The next day, I was at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem surrounded by foreign correspondents wearing crumpled linen — it could have been a movie set right out of “Lawrence of Arabia” — having one coffee after another with my new best friend, the chain-smoking Eid.
For Israel-lovers tired of seeing Israel get beaten up by the world press, Eid is your dream come true. I sat listening to him for hours in scorching heat, and I didn’t want to leave.
It’s not that Eid isn’t loyal to the Palestinian cause. He is. It’s just that he’s a fine practitioner of that popular Jewish sport we call tough love. He puts a large part of the blame for the plight of the Palestinians on the Palestinians.
As much as he loves peace, he hates violence even more.
In fact, had he been running the Palestinian Authority 10 years ago, when Ariel Sharon made his provocative visit to the Temple Mount — allegedly triggering the Second Intifada — there probably never would have been a Second Intifada.
“I would have received him at the Temple Mount with honor,” Eid told me. “I would have had 10 prominent Palestinian personalities receive him and explain to him how holy the Temple Mount is to us and give him a sightseeing tour.”
In other words, he would have provoked Sharon right back, but not with violence; never with violence.
He thinks the extraordinary violence of the Second Intifada killed more than people. It killed the Palestinian cause, which has become, he says, a “profitable enterprise for the people on top.” Because Arafat chose violence even in the face of Ehud Barak’s peace offer at Camp David, Eid doesn’t see trust being rebuilt or peace breaking out for at least a generation.
So he immerses himself in the only arena he knows: human rights. He worked with the Israeli NGO Betselem for many years before starting his own NGO about 15 years ago, because, he says, “I didn’t see too many NGOs criticizing my people and holding them to account.”
He started to document cases of financial corruption and torture inside the Palestinian Authority and, along the way, was arrested once and has been routinely defamed and slandered as an “Israeli collaborator.” About seven years ago, to get away from the pressure he was feeling in his hometown of East Jerusalem, he moved his family to Jericho.
As we drove through Ramallah the other day, it was hard to make sense of it all. For every sign of hope I saw — like busy people on busy streets looking like they love life — there were the forlorn looks on some of the faces in the refugee camp.
For every building with a sign of hope — like the one for the Sartawi Center for the Advancement of Peace and Democracy — there was a large poster promoting “One Indivisible Struggle for Palestinian Return” by a committee to commemorate the Nakba.
When we sat down for our homemade hummus, the whiplash continued. Eid reminisced about the good old days before the two intifadas, when thousands of Israelis would visit Ramallah on weekends to taste the hummus and contribute to the local economy. The sound of those words tasted too good.
On a whim, I asked Eid to ask the old man making the hummus if he’d like to see Jews from Israel visit his restaurant and give him more business.
“Jews are forbidden here,” the old man replied in Arabic, and, for the first time all day, it occurred to me that I was glad I wasn’t wearing my kippah.
It was the best hummus I’ve ever tasted. It came in a bowl, drenched in olive oil, with a few small garbanzos and shreds of parsley and hot green peppers sprinkled on top, and just the right amount of lemon juice. The elderly Palestinian man had made the hummus from scratch and served it to us with a salad plate, a bowl of falafels and a tall stack of hot pitas for just under 8 shekels.
I was eating in a refugee camp in Ramallah with Bassem Eid, the founder and director of an NGO called Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. We ate at this hole in the wall off a skinny alleyway nestled in a labyrinth of ramshackle houses, tiny grocery stores and one little mosque, with a U.N. mini-truck riding around the alleyways picking up random garbage.
Outside the camp was a different story. Ramallah is a happening city with construction everywhere and a sea of people lining the sidewalks of boulevards teeming with commerce. Eid, it seems, knew every street.
I met him the way I’ve met a lot of people in Jerusalem — one meeting leading to another. In this case, I was having dinner in Jerusalem with my friend Hillel Neuer and professor Irwin Cotler, a Canadian Member of Parliament and a well-known human rights activist. We were talking about the many human rights NGOs in Israel, and I mentioned that we rarely hear about NGOs that monitor Palestinian society.
At which point the professor exclaimed: “Oh, you must meet my friend Bassem Eid!”
The next day, I was at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem surrounded by foreign correspondents wearing crumpled linen — it could have been a movie set right out of “Lawrence of Arabia” — having one coffee after another with my new best friend, the chain-smoking Eid.
For Israel-lovers tired of seeing Israel get beaten up by the world press, Eid is your dream come true. I sat listening to him for hours in scorching heat, and I didn’t want to leave.
It’s not that Eid isn’t loyal to the Palestinian cause. He is. It’s just that he’s a fine practitioner of that popular Jewish sport we call tough love. He puts a large part of the blame for the plight of the Palestinians on the Palestinians.
As much as he loves peace, he hates violence even more.
In fact, had he been running the Palestinian Authority 10 years ago, when Ariel Sharon made his provocative visit to the Temple Mount — allegedly triggering the Second Intifada — there probably never would have been a Second Intifada.
“I would have received him at the Temple Mount with honor,” Eid told me. “I would have had 10 prominent Palestinian personalities receive him and explain to him how holy the Temple Mount is to us and give him a sightseeing tour.”
In other words, he would have provoked Sharon right back, but not with violence; never with violence.
He thinks the extraordinary violence of the Second Intifada killed more than people. It killed the Palestinian cause, which has become, he says, a “profitable enterprise for the people on top.” Because Arafat chose violence even in the face of Ehud Barak’s peace offer at Camp David, Eid doesn’t see trust being rebuilt or peace breaking out for at least a generation.
So he immerses himself in the only arena he knows: human rights. He worked with the Israeli NGO Betselem for many years before starting his own NGO about 15 years ago, because, he says, “I didn’t see too many NGOs criticizing my people and holding them to account.”
He started to document cases of financial corruption and torture inside the Palestinian Authority and, along the way, was arrested once and has been routinely defamed and slandered as an “Israeli collaborator.” About seven years ago, to get away from the pressure he was feeling in his hometown of East Jerusalem, he moved his family to Jericho.
As we drove through Ramallah the other day, it was hard to make sense of it all. For every sign of hope I saw — like busy people on busy streets looking like they love life — there were the forlorn looks on some of the faces in the refugee camp.
For every building with a sign of hope — like the one for the Sartawi Center for the Advancement of Peace and Democracy — there was a large poster promoting “One Indivisible Struggle for Palestinian Return” by a committee to commemorate the Nakba.
When we sat down for our homemade hummus, the whiplash continued. Eid reminisced about the good old days before the two intifadas, when thousands of Israelis would visit Ramallah on weekends to taste the hummus and contribute to the local economy. The sound of those words tasted too good.
On a whim, I asked Eid to ask the old man making the hummus if he’d like to see Jews from Israel visit his restaurant and give him more business.
“Jews are forbidden here,” the old man replied in Arabic, and, for the first time all day, it occurred to me that I was glad I wasn’t wearing my kippah.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Bean-Counters and Baloney by Thomas Sowell
The bean-counters have struck again-- this time in the sports pages. Two New York Times sport writers have discovered that baseball coaches from minority groups are found more often coaching at first base than at third base. Moreover, third-base coaches become managers more often than first-base coaches.
This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.
At the heart of such statistics is the implicit assumption that different races, sexes and other subdivisions of the human species would be proportionately represented in institutions, occupations and income brackets if there was not something strange or sinister going on.
Although this notion has been repeated by all sorts of people, from local loudmouths on the street to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, there is not one speck of evidence behind it and a mountain of evidence against it.
Ask the bean-counters where in this wide world have different groups been proportionally represented. They can't tell you. In other words, something that nobody can demonstrate is taken as a norm, and any deviation from that norm is somebody's fault!
Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred black players score touchdowns-- and not one black player kick the extra point. Is this because of some twisted racist who doesn't mind black players scoring touchdowns but hates to see them kicking the extra points?
At our leading engineering schools-- M.I.T., CalTech, etc.-- whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different?
As for baseball, I have long noticed that there are more blacks playing centerfield than third-base. Since the same people hire centerfielders and third-basemen, it is hard to argue that racism explains the difference.
No one says it is racism that explains why blacks are over-represented and whites under-represented in basketball. Bean-counters only make a fuss when there is a disparity that fits their vision or their agenda.
Years ago, a study was made of the ethnic make-up of military forces in countries around the world. Nowhere was the ethnic make-up of the military the same as the ethnic make-up of the population, or even close to the same.
Nearly half the pilots in the Malaysia's air force were from the Chinese minority, rather than the Malay majority. In Nigeria, most of the officers were from the southern tribes and most of the enlisted men were from the northern tribes. Similar disparities have been common among various groups in many places.
In countries around the world, all sorts of groups differ from each other in all sorts of ways, from rates of alcoholism to infant mortality, education and virtually everything that can be measured, as well as in some things that cannot be quantified. If black and white Americans were the same, they would be the only two groups on this planet who are the same.
One of the things that got us started on heavy-handed government regulation of the housing market were statistics showing that blacks were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites. The bean-counters in the media went ballistic. It had to be racism, to hear them tell it.
What they didn't tell you was that whites were turned down more often than Asians. What they also didn't tell you was that black-owned banks also turned down blacks more often than whites. Nor did they tell you that credit scores differed from group to group. Instead, the media, the politicians and the regulators grabbed some statistics and ran with them.
The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it-- and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.
This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.
At the heart of such statistics is the implicit assumption that different races, sexes and other subdivisions of the human species would be proportionately represented in institutions, occupations and income brackets if there was not something strange or sinister going on.
Although this notion has been repeated by all sorts of people, from local loudmouths on the street to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, there is not one speck of evidence behind it and a mountain of evidence against it.
Ask the bean-counters where in this wide world have different groups been proportionally represented. They can't tell you. In other words, something that nobody can demonstrate is taken as a norm, and any deviation from that norm is somebody's fault!
Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred black players score touchdowns-- and not one black player kick the extra point. Is this because of some twisted racist who doesn't mind black players scoring touchdowns but hates to see them kicking the extra points?
At our leading engineering schools-- M.I.T., CalTech, etc.-- whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different?
As for baseball, I have long noticed that there are more blacks playing centerfield than third-base. Since the same people hire centerfielders and third-basemen, it is hard to argue that racism explains the difference.
No one says it is racism that explains why blacks are over-represented and whites under-represented in basketball. Bean-counters only make a fuss when there is a disparity that fits their vision or their agenda.
Years ago, a study was made of the ethnic make-up of military forces in countries around the world. Nowhere was the ethnic make-up of the military the same as the ethnic make-up of the population, or even close to the same.
Nearly half the pilots in the Malaysia's air force were from the Chinese minority, rather than the Malay majority. In Nigeria, most of the officers were from the southern tribes and most of the enlisted men were from the northern tribes. Similar disparities have been common among various groups in many places.
In countries around the world, all sorts of groups differ from each other in all sorts of ways, from rates of alcoholism to infant mortality, education and virtually everything that can be measured, as well as in some things that cannot be quantified. If black and white Americans were the same, they would be the only two groups on this planet who are the same.
One of the things that got us started on heavy-handed government regulation of the housing market were statistics showing that blacks were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites. The bean-counters in the media went ballistic. It had to be racism, to hear them tell it.
What they didn't tell you was that whites were turned down more often than Asians. What they also didn't tell you was that black-owned banks also turned down blacks more often than whites. Nor did they tell you that credit scores differed from group to group. Instead, the media, the politicians and the regulators grabbed some statistics and ran with them.
The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it-- and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Are 70% of Americans racist?
Illogical Immigration
Once a law stops being considered quite a law, all sorts of even stranger paradoxes follow.
Some 11 million to 15 million illegal aliens are now residing in America, most after crossing into America unlawfully. Once a federal law is arbitrarily not enforced, all sorts of bizarre paradoxes arise from that original contradiction. As proof, examine the following illogical policies and contradictions involving illegal immigration.
Take profiling — the controversial questioning of those who appear likely to be illegal aliens. Apparently, American border guards have developed criteria for profiling those deemed likely to be unlawful aliens. Otherwise, how would they have arrested and deported hundreds of thousands in 2009?
Yet apparently, at some arbitrary point distant from the border, those who cross illegally are not supposed to be asked about their immigration status. Okay, but exactly why did procedures so radically change at, say, five, ten, 20, 100, or however many miles it is from the border? A border patrolman often profiles, but a nearby highway patrolman cannot?
The federal government is suing Arizona for the state’s efforts to enforce federal immigration law. The lawsuit alleges that Arizona is too zealous both in enforcing immigration law and in encroaching on federal jurisdiction.
But wait — for years, several American cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. City officials have even bragged that they would not allow their municipalities to enforce federal immigration statutes. So why does Washington sue a state that seeks to enhance federal immigration laws and yet ignore cities that blatantly try to erode them?
Something is going very wrong in Mexico to prompt more than half a million of its citizens to cross the border illegally each year. Impoverished Mexican nationals variously cite poor economic conditions back home, government corruption, a lack of social services, and racism. In other words, it is not just the desirability of America but also the perceived undesirability of Mexico that explains one of largest mass exoduses in modern history.
But why, then, would Mexican president Felipe Calderón, whose country’s conditions are forcing out its own citizens, criticize the United States, which is receiving so many of them? And why, for that matter, would many of those illegal immigrants identify, if only symbolically, with the country that made them leave, whether by waving its flag or criticizing the attitudes of the Americans who took them in?
And how does Mexico treat the hundreds of thousands of aliens who seek to illegally cross its own southern border with Central America each year? Does Mexico believe in sovereign borders to its south but not to its north?
Is Mexico more humane or less humane to illegal aliens than the country it so often faults? Why, exactly, does Mexico believe that nearly a million of its own nationals annually have claims on American residency, when Chinese, Indian, European, and African would-be immigrants are deemed not to? Is the reason proximity? Past history?
Proponents of open borders have organized May Day rallies, staged boycotts of Arizona, sued in federal and state courts, and sought to portray those who want to enforce existing federal immigration law as racially insensitive. But about 70 percent of Americans support securing our borders, and support the Arizona law in particular. Are a clear majority of Americans racist, brainwashed, or deluded in believing that their laws should be enforced? And if so, why would immigrants wish to join them?
It is considered liberal to support open borders and reactionary to want to close them. But illegal immigration drives down the hourly wages of the working American poor. Tens of thousands of impoverished people abroad, from Africa to Asia, wait patiently to enter America legally, while hundreds of thousands from Latin America do not. How liberal can all that be?
America extends housing, food, and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States. Are Americans then subsidizing the Mexican government by extending social services to aliens, freeing up cash for them to send back home?
These baffling questions are rarely posed, never addressed, and often considered politically incorrect. But they will only be asked more frequently in the months ahead.
You see, once a law stops being considered quite a law, all sorts of even stranger paradoxes follow.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Take profiling — the controversial questioning of those who appear likely to be illegal aliens. Apparently, American border guards have developed criteria for profiling those deemed likely to be unlawful aliens. Otherwise, how would they have arrested and deported hundreds of thousands in 2009?
Yet apparently, at some arbitrary point distant from the border, those who cross illegally are not supposed to be asked about their immigration status. Okay, but exactly why did procedures so radically change at, say, five, ten, 20, 100, or however many miles it is from the border? A border patrolman often profiles, but a nearby highway patrolman cannot?
The federal government is suing Arizona for the state’s efforts to enforce federal immigration law. The lawsuit alleges that Arizona is too zealous both in enforcing immigration law and in encroaching on federal jurisdiction.
But wait — for years, several American cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. City officials have even bragged that they would not allow their municipalities to enforce federal immigration statutes. So why does Washington sue a state that seeks to enhance federal immigration laws and yet ignore cities that blatantly try to erode them?
Something is going very wrong in Mexico to prompt more than half a million of its citizens to cross the border illegally each year. Impoverished Mexican nationals variously cite poor economic conditions back home, government corruption, a lack of social services, and racism. In other words, it is not just the desirability of America but also the perceived undesirability of Mexico that explains one of largest mass exoduses in modern history.
But why, then, would Mexican president Felipe Calderón, whose country’s conditions are forcing out its own citizens, criticize the United States, which is receiving so many of them? And why, for that matter, would many of those illegal immigrants identify, if only symbolically, with the country that made them leave, whether by waving its flag or criticizing the attitudes of the Americans who took them in?
And how does Mexico treat the hundreds of thousands of aliens who seek to illegally cross its own southern border with Central America each year? Does Mexico believe in sovereign borders to its south but not to its north?
Is Mexico more humane or less humane to illegal aliens than the country it so often faults? Why, exactly, does Mexico believe that nearly a million of its own nationals annually have claims on American residency, when Chinese, Indian, European, and African would-be immigrants are deemed not to? Is the reason proximity? Past history?
Proponents of open borders have organized May Day rallies, staged boycotts of Arizona, sued in federal and state courts, and sought to portray those who want to enforce existing federal immigration law as racially insensitive. But about 70 percent of Americans support securing our borders, and support the Arizona law in particular. Are a clear majority of Americans racist, brainwashed, or deluded in believing that their laws should be enforced? And if so, why would immigrants wish to join them?
It is considered liberal to support open borders and reactionary to want to close them. But illegal immigration drives down the hourly wages of the working American poor. Tens of thousands of impoverished people abroad, from Africa to Asia, wait patiently to enter America legally, while hundreds of thousands from Latin America do not. How liberal can all that be?
America extends housing, food, and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States. Are Americans then subsidizing the Mexican government by extending social services to aliens, freeing up cash for them to send back home?
These baffling questions are rarely posed, never addressed, and often considered politically incorrect. But they will only be asked more frequently in the months ahead.
You see, once a law stops being considered quite a law, all sorts of even stranger paradoxes follow.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Book Review: "The Tyranny of Guilt"
Self-serving white guilt
21st July 2010 — Issue 173
Guilt, stirred up by leftist thinkers, is now de rigueur in the west. But Pascal Bruckner believes our soul-searching is both hypocritical and injurious
by Pascal Bruckner, trans Steven Rendall (Princeton, £18.95)
According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man’s will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite.
Bruckner represents a distinct species of French intellectual. Born in 1948 and coming of age in the upheavals of 1968, he initially indulged the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris but soon became affiliated with the nouveaux philosophes, a group of anti-Marxist intellectuals. Consisting of figures like Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levy and Jean-Marie Benoist, this cenacle may be considered France’s second generation of anti-communist thinkers.
Bruckner’s day job is that of novelist—one item in his bulging portfolio, Bitter Moon, even received film treatment at the hands of Roman Polanski. As a result of his literary background and immersion in the fiery French essayist tradition, he writes in a sparkling prose, captured well here by his translator, Steven Rendall. The resulting tone is redolent for Anglo-Saxon readers of an earlier era, when social critics like Marx or Nietzsche conveyed their ideas with combative gravitas.
Beneath Bruckner’s eloquence is a serious message: we remain prisoners of a white guilt whose victim is its supposed beneficiary. Our guilt, he writes, is actually a means for us to retain our superiority over the non-white world, our masochism a form of sadism. After all, if everything is the fault of the west then the power to change the world lies squarely in the hands of westerners.
This belief demeans Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”—the non-western poor who we are supposed to redeem. Worse than this, it excuses the barbarism of tinpot dictators from Mao to Mugabe, who are considered irresponsible children, their crimes the result of colonialism, racism or capitalist exploitation. In upholding one moral code for the west (and Israel) and another for the rest, we retard human progress. Surely the column inches devoted to Israel’s atrocities, which Bruckner doesn’t gloss, should be overshadowed by the more significant carnage of Darfur. Yet “Nazi” Israel excites leftist ideologues like Gilles Deleuze, while the more serious war crimes of Congo et al do not.
The left avoids these contradictions through relativism. Bruckner, however, staunchly defends Enlightenment liberalism. He has no truck with those who blame the west for jihadism—notably the postmodernist stalwart Jean Baudrillard, who reacted in “pornographic jubilation” to the fall of the twin towers. Moreover, leftist radicals remain cloaked in a respectability which we would never accord the far right, and Bruckner seeks to rip through this bogus status.
Take multiculturalism, which for Bruckner “imprisons” minorities in separate boxes outside the mainstream. He rightly fulminates against the creed of identity politics that originated on the left and took the western policy elite by storm in the 1970s and 1980s. He saves special bile for the purveyors of collective guilt, exemplified by the Holocaust memorial industry. Despite his Jewish heritage, Bruckner characterises Auschwitz as our new Golgotha, “as if Christ died a second time there.” Holocaust fetishism set in motion a process that has resulted, he argues, in the “penitent state” whose history consists of a litany of shameful episodes. The result is a profusion of victim groups—racial, regional, sexual—each seizing on particular episodes to stake their legal and moral claims against the majority. This hampers the integration needed to address social exclusion.
Bruckner imagines a playground in which French children introduce themselves as descendants of slaves, colonised peoples, slave traders, bandits, peasants, beggars. Since only victimhood confers identity, one must ransack one’s family history for any usable wrong. Public policy and official proclamations take their cue from this new zeitgeist. Immigrants are to be welcomed out of guilt—as a means of repaying the debts of colonialism—rather than selected for their ability to contribute to society. The result is that Europe bars talented Africans and Asians while accumulating an unskilled migrant underclass.
Substituting the complex reality of history for victimology, Bruckner’s spade turns up some awkward truths. For instance, there has not been one slave trade, but three: an Arab, an African and a European. The first two were more enduring and trafficked more people than the western variant. The west’s innovation was to end slavery on moral grounds, while it lingered in the Arab world until the 1980s. Despite these inconvenient facts, any questioning of the idea that slavery is a predominantly European crime immediately places one beyond the pale. On this note, Bruckner neatly juxtaposes the tirades of a contemporary professor who urges reparations for slavery from “the Christian nations” with the actual words of Frantz Fanon, the black intellectual whom the reparationists appropriate without a proper reading: “Don’t I have other things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the seventeenth century… I am not a slave of the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors.”
Bruckner seeks a more rounded history. Nations should celebrate their heroes and victories while acknowledging their stains, because there are “no angels and sinners among nations.” In the west, the balance needs to tilt back toward a celebration of achievements and heroes who have fought for freedom and equality. Elsewhere, a little self-criticism would go a long way.
The book is not without its faults. Bruckner tends, like Alexis de Tocqueville two centuries ago, to project his dreams onto America. Yet if anything the US— home of the Afrocentric curriculum, political correctness and affirmative action—is more guilt-ridden than Europe. I recall a panel at the American Political Science Association meetings where a Native Indian panellist answered the impeccable liberal arguments of leading political theorist Jeremy Waldron by haranguing the room for “400 years of occupation.” Throughout his diatribe, white heads nodded. Only when a black member of the audience spoke up for Waldron’s arguments did sanity return.
Bruckner also wrestles with a number of contradictions. He wants Europe to embrace universalism, yet criticises the universal vision of the EU; he champions self-criticism as Europe’s greatest achievement, but fails to come clean about the connection between self-criticism and guilt. He wants a forward-looking Europe which breaks with its past, but celebrates those “bizarre customs, old fashioned civilities and ancient solidarities” that make it a better place than the US, with its “crudeness of money.” Despite his attack on the politics of memory, he also commends George Bush’s apology to Japanese Americans, and asks for more for the Native Indians and African-Americans. He castigates European defeatism, but kicks the continent time and again: “France is no longer where it’s happening. The centre of gravity has shifted.”
There is more, too, to be said about guilt itself. Could it be that making guilty noises signals sophistication and status, with the high priests of the left earning psychic wages equivalent to bankers’ bonuses? Or, given the collapse of ideology, are we witnessing a new form of spontaneous guilt, where ideas such as socialism give way to knee-jerk impulses like “my comfort makes me guilty.” For all its flaws, this is a stirring and important book.
Dennis Prager on The New Racism
Black Murders Eight Whites; Media Blame Whites
In today’s new racism, white criminals are criminals, but black criminals are largely victims.
The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.
After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.
Here’s the Associated Press report from August 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in the Washington Post and throughout America:
To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken. . . . But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.
“I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,” said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.
“He always felt like he was being discriminated [against] because he was black,” said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. “Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.”
Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.
The New York Times’s August 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: he had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”
On August 7, the Washington Post’s headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”
In fact, just before he started shooting, Thornton had been told he had the choice of quitting or being fired for stealing beer, and there was video proof of his doing so. But this fact — the one indisputable and most pertinent pre-murder fact — got lost within the larger context of Thornton’s claims of being a victim of whites.
Those preoccupied with Thornton’s charges of workplace racism might wish to reflect on this: Racists and otherwise bigoted murderers always blame their victims. Medieval Christians who murdered Jews blamed the Jews for poisoning wells, using Christian children’s blood in making their matzo, or some other terrible crime. Whites who lynched blacks blamed those blacks for rape or some other terrible crime. Nothing is new about the Thornton racist murders except that the society in which they occurred concentrated on the racist’s excuses rather than on his murders.
Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives — until there was no possibility of denying them — to recent Muslim attacks on Americans, so the liberal media — i.e., almost all news outlets in America — are not branding these Connecticut murders for what they are: racist. Thornton actually told the 911 operator, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people [i.e., whites].”
We are repeatedly told by liberals — both whites and blacks — that America needs an honest dialogue on race. Needless to say, they don’t mean it, because the moment a white or a black says anything critical of black behavior, he is labeled racist or Uncle Tom. So most nonliberal whites and blacks just keep quiet.
One result is this morally upside-down reporting of the murders in Connecticut.
Another example is the liberal narrative on blacks in prison: “There are more black men in prison than in college.” Every decent American regards this fact as a major tragedy. But most Americans believe that the fault lies primarily with the black criminals, not with a racist society. Most Americans believe that blacks who mug, rape, rob, or murder commit those crimes for the same reason whites do — they lack a sufficiently strong conscience.
But the dominant liberal narrative is that while white criminals are criminals, black criminals are largely victims.
Another example was the liberal narrative of the 1992 “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles. It was perfectly expressed by the major newspaper of that city, the Los Angeles Times. During the riots, in which innocent Koreans, whites, and others were beaten, maimed, and killed and their businesses burned to the ground, the daily special section on the riots in the Times was titled “Understanding the Rage.” When blacks riot, whites are the reason. When a black murders eight whites in Connecticut, whites are the reason.
One terrible consequence of this liberal attitude toward black violent crime is that too many blacks come to believe that less is expected of them morally than from whites. And the truth is that most Americans on the left do expect less from blacks.
But saying any of this gets us nowhere because it is simply labeled racism. If you don’t believe me, check leftist reactions to this column on the Internet.
Most liberal leaders want an honest dialogue about race as much as they want to honestly describe the murders in Connecticut.
In today’s new racism, white criminals are criminals, but black criminals are largely victims.
The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.
After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.
Here’s the Associated Press report from August 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in the Washington Post and throughout America:
To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken. . . . But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.
“I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,” said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.
“He always felt like he was being discriminated [against] because he was black,” said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. “Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.”
Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.
The New York Times’s August 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: he had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”
On August 7, the Washington Post’s headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”
In fact, just before he started shooting, Thornton had been told he had the choice of quitting or being fired for stealing beer, and there was video proof of his doing so. But this fact — the one indisputable and most pertinent pre-murder fact — got lost within the larger context of Thornton’s claims of being a victim of whites.
Those preoccupied with Thornton’s charges of workplace racism might wish to reflect on this: Racists and otherwise bigoted murderers always blame their victims. Medieval Christians who murdered Jews blamed the Jews for poisoning wells, using Christian children’s blood in making their matzo, or some other terrible crime. Whites who lynched blacks blamed those blacks for rape or some other terrible crime. Nothing is new about the Thornton racist murders except that the society in which they occurred concentrated on the racist’s excuses rather than on his murders.
Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives — until there was no possibility of denying them — to recent Muslim attacks on Americans, so the liberal media — i.e., almost all news outlets in America — are not branding these Connecticut murders for what they are: racist. Thornton actually told the 911 operator, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people [i.e., whites].”
We are repeatedly told by liberals — both whites and blacks — that America needs an honest dialogue on race. Needless to say, they don’t mean it, because the moment a white or a black says anything critical of black behavior, he is labeled racist or Uncle Tom. So most nonliberal whites and blacks just keep quiet.
One result is this morally upside-down reporting of the murders in Connecticut.
Another example is the liberal narrative on blacks in prison: “There are more black men in prison than in college.” Every decent American regards this fact as a major tragedy. But most Americans believe that the fault lies primarily with the black criminals, not with a racist society. Most Americans believe that blacks who mug, rape, rob, or murder commit those crimes for the same reason whites do — they lack a sufficiently strong conscience.
But the dominant liberal narrative is that while white criminals are criminals, black criminals are largely victims.
Another example was the liberal narrative of the 1992 “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles. It was perfectly expressed by the major newspaper of that city, the Los Angeles Times. During the riots, in which innocent Koreans, whites, and others were beaten, maimed, and killed and their businesses burned to the ground, the daily special section on the riots in the Times was titled “Understanding the Rage.” When blacks riot, whites are the reason. When a black murders eight whites in Connecticut, whites are the reason.
One terrible consequence of this liberal attitude toward black violent crime is that too many blacks come to believe that less is expected of them morally than from whites. And the truth is that most Americans on the left do expect less from blacks.
But saying any of this gets us nowhere because it is simply labeled racism. If you don’t believe me, check leftist reactions to this column on the Internet.
Most liberal leaders want an honest dialogue about race as much as they want to honestly describe the murders in Connecticut.
Monday, August 9, 2010
A Calm Voice on a Heated Topic
The Marriage Ideal
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Here are some commonplace arguments against gay marriage: Marriage is an ancient institution that has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, and we meddle with that definition at our peril. Lifelong heterosexual monogamy is natural; gay relationships are not. The nuclear family is the universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.
Susan Etheridge for The New York Times
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These have been losing arguments for decades now, as the cause of gay marriage has moved from an eccentric- seeming notion to an idea that roughly half the country supports. And they were losing arguments again last week, when California’s Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that laws defining marriage as a heterosexual union are unconstitutional, irrational and unjust.
These arguments have lost because they’re wrong. What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The default family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient, has been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is often communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological children.
Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable. In crudely Darwinian terms, it cuts against both the male impulse toward promiscuity and the female interest in mating with the highest-status male available. Hence the historic prevalence of polygamy. And hence many societies’ tolerance for more flexible alternatives, from concubinage and prostitution to temporary arrangements like the “traveler’s marriages” sanctioned in some parts of the Islamic world.
So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It’s a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes.
Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.
In this landscape, gay-marriage critics who fret about a slippery slope to polygamy miss the point. Americans already have a kind of postmodern polygamy available to them. It’s just spread over the course of a lifetime, rather than concentrated in a “Big Love”-style menage.
If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.
But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.
But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Here are some commonplace arguments against gay marriage: Marriage is an ancient institution that has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, and we meddle with that definition at our peril. Lifelong heterosexual monogamy is natural; gay relationships are not. The nuclear family is the universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.
Susan Etheridge for The New York Times
Go to Columnist Page »
Ross Douthat’s Evaluations
The columnist’s blog on politics and culture.
More From Evaluations »
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (162) »
These have been losing arguments for decades now, as the cause of gay marriage has moved from an eccentric- seeming notion to an idea that roughly half the country supports. And they were losing arguments again last week, when California’s Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that laws defining marriage as a heterosexual union are unconstitutional, irrational and unjust.
These arguments have lost because they’re wrong. What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The default family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient, has been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is often communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological children.
Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable. In crudely Darwinian terms, it cuts against both the male impulse toward promiscuity and the female interest in mating with the highest-status male available. Hence the historic prevalence of polygamy. And hence many societies’ tolerance for more flexible alternatives, from concubinage and prostitution to temporary arrangements like the “traveler’s marriages” sanctioned in some parts of the Islamic world.
So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It’s a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes.
Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.
In this landscape, gay-marriage critics who fret about a slippery slope to polygamy miss the point. Americans already have a kind of postmodern polygamy available to them. It’s just spread over the course of a lifetime, rather than concentrated in a “Big Love”-style menage.
If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.
But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.
But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
The People vs The Elite
Liberal Piety and the Memory of 9/11
The enlightened class can't understand why the public is uneasy about the Ground Zero mosque.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.
It doesn't take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.
There is no better exemplar of that faith than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though in this he is hardly alone. Compared with the Obama White House, Mr. Bloomberg is a piker in the preachments and zealotry department. Still, no voice brings home more unforgettably the attitudes that speak for today's enlightened and progressive class.
Immediately after the suspect in the attempted car bombing near Times Square was revealed to be Faisal Shahzad, of Pakistani origin, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the public. In admonishing tones—a Bloomberg trademark invariably suggestive of a school principal who knows exactly what to expect of the incorrigibles it is his unhappy fate to oversee—the mayor delivered a warning. There would be no toleration of "any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers."
That there has been a conspicuous lack of any such behavior on the part of New Yorkers or Americans elsewhere from the 9/11 attacks to the present seems not to have impressed Mr. Bloomberg. Nor has it caused any moderation in the unvarying note of indignation the mayor brings to these warnings. It's reasonable to raise a proper caution. It's quite something else to do it as though addressing a suspect rabble.
It's hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad's identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.
The citizens were, of course, right. Those leaders bent on dissuading them from their grasp of the probable cause of this near disaster were left with their red herrings hanging—but remembered. Mr. Bloomberg's "someone who doesn't like the health-care bill" would be inscribed in the golden book of howlers these events have yielded, along with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's brisk assurance there was no evidence this was anything but "a one-off."
The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that's of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.
Such values were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.
Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.
In the plan for an Islamic center and mosque some 15 stories high to be built near Ground Zero, the full force of politically correct piety is on display along with the usual unyielding assault on all dissenters. The project has aroused intense opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country. It has also elicited remarkable streams of oratory from New York's political leaders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
"What are we all about if not religious freedom?" a fiery Mr. Cuomo asked early in this drama. Mr. Cuomo, running for governor, has since had less to say.
The same cannot be said for Mr. Bloomberg, who has gone on to deliver regular meditations on the need to support the mosque, and on the iniquity of its opponents. In the course of a speech at Dartmouth on July 16 he raised the matter unasked, and held forth on his contempt for those who opposed the project and even wanted to investigate the funding: "I just think it's the most outrageous thing anybody could suggest." Ground Zero is a "very appropriate place" for a mosque, the mayor announced, because it "tells the world" that in America, we have freedom of religion for everybody.
Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America's devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?
It's unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg's exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.
It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center's funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes "It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam."
The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.
The enlightened class can't understand why the public is uneasy about the Ground Zero mosque.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.
It doesn't take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.
There is no better exemplar of that faith than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though in this he is hardly alone. Compared with the Obama White House, Mr. Bloomberg is a piker in the preachments and zealotry department. Still, no voice brings home more unforgettably the attitudes that speak for today's enlightened and progressive class.
Immediately after the suspect in the attempted car bombing near Times Square was revealed to be Faisal Shahzad, of Pakistani origin, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the public. In admonishing tones—a Bloomberg trademark invariably suggestive of a school principal who knows exactly what to expect of the incorrigibles it is his unhappy fate to oversee—the mayor delivered a warning. There would be no toleration of "any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers."
That there has been a conspicuous lack of any such behavior on the part of New Yorkers or Americans elsewhere from the 9/11 attacks to the present seems not to have impressed Mr. Bloomberg. Nor has it caused any moderation in the unvarying note of indignation the mayor brings to these warnings. It's reasonable to raise a proper caution. It's quite something else to do it as though addressing a suspect rabble.
It's hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad's identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.
The citizens were, of course, right. Those leaders bent on dissuading them from their grasp of the probable cause of this near disaster were left with their red herrings hanging—but remembered. Mr. Bloomberg's "someone who doesn't like the health-care bill" would be inscribed in the golden book of howlers these events have yielded, along with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's brisk assurance there was no evidence this was anything but "a one-off."
The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that's of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.
Such values were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.
Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.
In the plan for an Islamic center and mosque some 15 stories high to be built near Ground Zero, the full force of politically correct piety is on display along with the usual unyielding assault on all dissenters. The project has aroused intense opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country. It has also elicited remarkable streams of oratory from New York's political leaders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
"What are we all about if not religious freedom?" a fiery Mr. Cuomo asked early in this drama. Mr. Cuomo, running for governor, has since had less to say.
The same cannot be said for Mr. Bloomberg, who has gone on to deliver regular meditations on the need to support the mosque, and on the iniquity of its opponents. In the course of a speech at Dartmouth on July 16 he raised the matter unasked, and held forth on his contempt for those who opposed the project and even wanted to investigate the funding: "I just think it's the most outrageous thing anybody could suggest." Ground Zero is a "very appropriate place" for a mosque, the mayor announced, because it "tells the world" that in America, we have freedom of religion for everybody.
Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America's devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?
It's unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg's exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.
It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center's funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes "It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam."
The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Radical Peace
My column this week in Jewish Journal and Huffington Post:
It’s a sign of how the peace movement has fizzled out in Israel that even the peace process itself rarely cites peace as the goal — it’s now the “two-state solution” that is the mantra. It’s as if everyone realizes that after decades of mutual hostility and mistrust, real peace between the Jews and Palestinians is simply too much to ask for without being laughed at.
Being in the city of messianic dreams — i.e., Jerusalem — it didn’t surprise me yesterday to meet a man who dreams of changing all that. His dream is to revitalize the peace movement in Israel by making it deeper, richer and more inclusive. He wants peace to be a hot topic not just among liberal peaceniks but also radical settlers; not just among poets and artists but also hard-nosed and cynical right-wingers.
Alick Isaacs is a teacher and philosopher who, for the past 12 months, has been matchmaker-in-chief for ideological opposites. With the help of expert staff, like Sharon Leshem-Zinger and Avinoam Rosenak, he has brought together 14 influential Israeli personalities from all walks of life and, about once a month, gathered them in the same room to talk about peace.
Not peace platitudes, but intimate, personal, even raw expressions of what peace means to each of them.
The program’s core idea is to validate — and value — these individual visions of peace. But getting everyone to the table wasn’t easy. Settler rabbis, for example, dismissed the project at first. Isaacs appealed to them by talking their language. In one marathon session, he recruited a leading settler rabbi by studying the texts of his hero, Rav Kook, and pulling peace quotes such as these:
“The Lord will bless his people with peace. And the blessing of peace, which comes with the [blessing of] strength, is the peace that unites all opposites. But we must have opposites so that ... something might be united, and the blessing is evident in the power of these, and these are words of the living God.”
Isaacs and his group are trying to inject vitality and freshness into an idea that has been beaten to death by the corrupting world of politics. Politics’ virtue is that it creates systems and structure to try to effect change. Isaacs’challenge has been to take a theoretical idea and give it structure.
So he has made his Talking Peace initiative a pilot program for a much bigger venture called the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel, which will be hosted by Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an international cultural and conference center located in Yemin Moshe in Jerusalem.
All group meetings have taken place at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, which also houses an art gallery, a restaurant and guesthouses (where I am staying, and where I met Isaacs). A major player in the venture is Uri Dromi, who is director of Mishkenot Sha’ananim and is helping put the whole project together. (Dromi, incidentally, is also a blogger for The Journal.)
Isaacs, who wears a kippah and has a doctorate in Jewish history and anthropology from Hebrew University, was careful not to put down the Israeli government’s failed efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. But it was hard for me not to draw a contrast between the emptiness of the political peace process and the seriousness of Isaacs’ initiative.
This seriousness was evident in the wrenching moments that have occurred among the 14 participants during their many encounter sessions. Animosities flared. Mistrust was common. They were strangers stuck in a room with people with completely different worldviews. It helped to have a professional group facilitator who ensured that meetings wouldn’t unravel into nasty political arguments. As the months went by, and more and more participants got to “speak their peace,” raw emotions gave way to empathy for differing viewpoints.
The real value of the program will come when Talking Peace goes on the road. As one example, Isaacs plans to team up a well-known leftist columnist from Haaretz, Akiva Eldar, with a prominent settler leader, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed. As a result, followers of Melamed will learn about Eldar’s vision of peace, and Eldar’s readers will learn about Melamed’s.
The idea is not to change people’s minds, but to open them; not to push for compromise but to push for authentic expressions of peace. Compromise is more likely to occur when these expressions of peace are ingrained in people across the ideological spectrum.
Isaacs hopes to leverage the success of Talking Peace to raise the funds that will make the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel a full-time reality.
Ultimately, Isaacs knows that a similar process will need to happen on the Palestinian side for real peace to catch on. At least he’s not starting with illusions. He knows that it’s useless to charge full speed ahead with a peace train that is empty. For peace with the Palestinians to have any chance, it will need a multitude of peace riders from both sides to hop aboard, even if that takes a generation or two.
Until then, the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel will be advancing an idea that also deserves its share of attention: the peace process among the Jews.
It’s a sign of how the peace movement has fizzled out in Israel that even the peace process itself rarely cites peace as the goal — it’s now the “two-state solution” that is the mantra. It’s as if everyone realizes that after decades of mutual hostility and mistrust, real peace between the Jews and Palestinians is simply too much to ask for without being laughed at.
Being in the city of messianic dreams — i.e., Jerusalem — it didn’t surprise me yesterday to meet a man who dreams of changing all that. His dream is to revitalize the peace movement in Israel by making it deeper, richer and more inclusive. He wants peace to be a hot topic not just among liberal peaceniks but also radical settlers; not just among poets and artists but also hard-nosed and cynical right-wingers.
Alick Isaacs is a teacher and philosopher who, for the past 12 months, has been matchmaker-in-chief for ideological opposites. With the help of expert staff, like Sharon Leshem-Zinger and Avinoam Rosenak, he has brought together 14 influential Israeli personalities from all walks of life and, about once a month, gathered them in the same room to talk about peace.
Not peace platitudes, but intimate, personal, even raw expressions of what peace means to each of them.
The program’s core idea is to validate — and value — these individual visions of peace. But getting everyone to the table wasn’t easy. Settler rabbis, for example, dismissed the project at first. Isaacs appealed to them by talking their language. In one marathon session, he recruited a leading settler rabbi by studying the texts of his hero, Rav Kook, and pulling peace quotes such as these:
“The Lord will bless his people with peace. And the blessing of peace, which comes with the [blessing of] strength, is the peace that unites all opposites. But we must have opposites so that ... something might be united, and the blessing is evident in the power of these, and these are words of the living God.”
Isaacs and his group are trying to inject vitality and freshness into an idea that has been beaten to death by the corrupting world of politics. Politics’ virtue is that it creates systems and structure to try to effect change. Isaacs’challenge has been to take a theoretical idea and give it structure.
So he has made his Talking Peace initiative a pilot program for a much bigger venture called the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel, which will be hosted by Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an international cultural and conference center located in Yemin Moshe in Jerusalem.
All group meetings have taken place at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, which also houses an art gallery, a restaurant and guesthouses (where I am staying, and where I met Isaacs). A major player in the venture is Uri Dromi, who is director of Mishkenot Sha’ananim and is helping put the whole project together. (Dromi, incidentally, is also a blogger for The Journal.)
Isaacs, who wears a kippah and has a doctorate in Jewish history and anthropology from Hebrew University, was careful not to put down the Israeli government’s failed efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. But it was hard for me not to draw a contrast between the emptiness of the political peace process and the seriousness of Isaacs’ initiative.
This seriousness was evident in the wrenching moments that have occurred among the 14 participants during their many encounter sessions. Animosities flared. Mistrust was common. They were strangers stuck in a room with people with completely different worldviews. It helped to have a professional group facilitator who ensured that meetings wouldn’t unravel into nasty political arguments. As the months went by, and more and more participants got to “speak their peace,” raw emotions gave way to empathy for differing viewpoints.
The real value of the program will come when Talking Peace goes on the road. As one example, Isaacs plans to team up a well-known leftist columnist from Haaretz, Akiva Eldar, with a prominent settler leader, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed. As a result, followers of Melamed will learn about Eldar’s vision of peace, and Eldar’s readers will learn about Melamed’s.
The idea is not to change people’s minds, but to open them; not to push for compromise but to push for authentic expressions of peace. Compromise is more likely to occur when these expressions of peace are ingrained in people across the ideological spectrum.
Isaacs hopes to leverage the success of Talking Peace to raise the funds that will make the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel a full-time reality.
Ultimately, Isaacs knows that a similar process will need to happen on the Palestinian side for real peace to catch on. At least he’s not starting with illusions. He knows that it’s useless to charge full speed ahead with a peace train that is empty. For peace with the Palestinians to have any chance, it will need a multitude of peace riders from both sides to hop aboard, even if that takes a generation or two.
Until then, the Center for the Advancement of Peace in Israel will be advancing an idea that also deserves its share of attention: the peace process among the Jews.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
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