Politics

Jewcy’s comic artist turns his gimlet eye away from the Jewish people and towards their detractors.

As Britian’s former European minister noted in The Washington Post this fall, antisemitism is on the rise in the UK. Jews are four times more likely than Muslims to be attacked because of their religion, according to a widely circulated article in City Journal, and hate crimes against Jews have doubled since 2001.

Below, Eli Valley imagines what happens when this trend hits the schools.

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According to an article over at the Forward, Ms Magazine has refused to run an advertisement (pictured below) that features images of Israel’s top female political leaders, and the American Jewish Congress is pissed off about this.This is Israel: And it makes Ms. Magazine uncomfortable.

The ad was submitted by the American Jewish Congress to Ms. Magazine, and spotlighted photographs of Dorit Beinisch, president of Israel’s Supreme Court; Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Dalia Itzik, speaker of the Knesset, over the text, “This is Israel.”

According to the AJCongress, Ms. initially approved the ad but then reversed course, saying that the ad would “set off a firestorm.”

Says AJCongress President Richard Gordon:

“Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the women’s movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable.”

But according to Ms. Magazine’s executive editor, Kathy Spillar, it's not "the women’s nationality but their party affiliation that was the problem. Two of the featured officials, Itzik and Livni, are both members of the Kadima political party," and thus, Spillar said, "the ad would leave Ms. Magazine open to the charge of political favoritism."

The AJCongress created the ad to highlight the fact that women now occupy leading positions in Israel’s executive, legislative and political branches. In response, a Ms. representative said that “we would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this,” according to the AJCongress.

But, for me, this is the kicker:

“Not only could the ad be seen as favoring certain political parties within Israel over other parties, but also with its slogan, ‘This is Israel,’ the ad implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men,” she said. “Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women.”

Oh, no, god forbid that a feminist magazine recognize the fact that women in Israel have more opportunities than women in surrounding countries. That wouldn't be fair to Saudi Arabia.

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that the equality gap between men and women has completely closed in any nation. But it's hard to deny that there are some countries that have done a much better job of narrowing this gap than others. In particular, I can think of many countries in the same region as Israel (i.e., again, Saudi Arabia, where women can't even drive cars) that have done virtually nothing to rectify this situation. In my opinion, the position of women in Israel is one of the best in the world (comparatively), and the fact that women can hold positions of political influence in Israel should be celebrated by a feminist magazine, especially when considered in contrast to other countries in the Middle and Near East.

I don't know that I agree with the political ideologies of all three of these Israeli women, but I do appreciate the fact that they have been given the opportunity, as women, to hold these positions of power, and I think that is something worth celebrating (or, at least, acknowledging). But the only thing worth acknowledging here is the ease with which Ms. Magazine is able to flaunt its own political and ideological biases at the expense of their own cause.

Bush is in Israel, the one country that actually likes him. The President is in the region to carry forward the momentum of the Annapolis peace summit. Traffic stops, and speeches begin.

And what of the speeches? Sycophantic praises and hollow pledges.

If I have to hear one more time about how Israel and the US have an unshakable and eternal bond, I am going to toss my cookies.

Seriously though, when people in a relationship keep on publicly stressing how great and wonderful their bond is, you do not have to be Freud to know something is amiss. Who are they trying to convince? Just imagine if your significant other began obsessively reiterating how in love they are with you — cause for concern indeed.

People have opined that Bush's visit to the region is "historic" (another vomit word). He is after all, only the fourth American president to have visited the holy land (Richard Nixon in 1974, Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were his predecessors). But I believe that Bush’s visit is historic for another reason all together: Bush will be the last American president to support the Jewish state in such a lopsided manner.

I know, it seems quite far fetched—naïve even. But the writing is on the wall, and not just on the one dividing up Palestine. In the last few years it has become possible and even fashionable for all kinds of folks—politicians, intellectuals, academics, journalists, and students—to call into question the benefits of America’s relationship with Israel.

As a result, the climate of public opinion has begun to turn against the status quo. The current buzzword in the US presidential race is “change”, and if you think that Israel is not part of that equation then in the immortal words of Rob Halford, “You got another thing coming.”

But before you reach for that kleenex, ask yourself: What fruits has this relationship really produced? Would we not all be better off with an "honest broker" that was actually honest? Could Israel and Palestine not benefit from some Dr. Phil-like love?

The winds of change are blowing for American-Israeli relations. I, for one, am ready for a change.

I'm in D.C. today having a nice meet-and-greet with political bloggers, and I find myself in a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. Who's sitting next to me right now, you ask?

He chews up uni-ball pens by the packet, scribbling out Bush's most acclaimed speeches in longhand on a yellow legal pad. He sometimes takes days to produce a first draft. And he does some of his best writing in the nearest Starbucks, where his muse is the largest latte on the menu and the ambient noise of an espresso machine. When he was crafting Bush's inaugural address, he waited in pre-dawn darkness for the coffee shop to open at 5:30 a.m. near his home in Alexandria, Va. (The real West Wing speechwriter's office is a windowless room in the basement.)

That'd be Michael Gerson, who also wrote -- or took credit for writing -- Bush's State of the Union address following 9/11. Attentive Jewcy readers may recall an earlier post about another Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's poisoned pen portrait of his colleague in the Atlantic:

 My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

Have these stirrers and chocolate-covered espresso beans have heard Churchillian rhetoric in the making? It's the guy sitting next to Mike -- now a WaPo columnist and Council of Foreign Relations bigwig -- who's doing the writing. Point, Scully.

It’s Tim Russert.  The moment he said to Dennis Kucinich at a “debate” among Democratic presidential candidates, “This is a serious question,” you knew it wouldn’t be.  A responsible journalist might have asked, “Why do think that Dick Cheney should be impeached rather than George Bush?”  But Russert wanted to further marginalize Kucinich--to ridicule him in a flying saucer kind of way--and, like a trial lawyer who already knows what a defendant’s answer will be--his “serious question” was “Did you see a UFO?”

Kucinich tried to explain that the U in UFO means “unidentified” flying object.  He joked, “I’m moving my campaign office to Roswell, New Mexico and Exeter, New Hampshire.”  He pointed out that Jimmy Carter had seen a UFO, and  “More people--”  Russert interrupted him with a statistic: 14% of Americans had seen UFOs.  Kucinich asked him to repeat that number, as if to thank him for inadvertently providing him with the UFO sighters vote.  Russert repeated the number and, with the smug satisfaction of having generated a guaranteed sound bite, he said, “I want to ask Senator Obama...”

There was a predictable trickle-down effect.  Even Bill Maher mocked Kucinich, though Maher’s real target should’ve been Russert.  A few days later, I met a woman who asked me who my ideal candidate is.  “Dennis Kucinich,” I said.  She responded, “Isn’t he the one who said he saw some Martians?”  Of course, there’s a video of that encounter in the secret government implied-blackmail lock-box, along with the video of a threesome--Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and a billy goat--and the video of Rudy Guliani performing an abortion on Pat Robertson’s mistress.

Ironically, Russert’s co-moderator, Brian Williams--in his capacity as host of Saturday Night Live--referred to the mainstream media’s proactive assumption that Hillary Clinton will win in the primaries and then in the general election.  Fundraising is the name of that particular political game, because the candidates with the most money will buy the most TV commercials and print ads.  Tim Russert gives a claymation face to that open conspiracy.  And in the process, that old saying and song, “There’s no business like show business,” lands in the outdated metaphors graveyard.  There is indeed a business like show business.  It’s the news.    

The Onion cuts through the election bullshit and discovers more.

Ruminating to the New York Observer about his party's prospects come 2008, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer dropped this prediction:

Bombing Iran, says Chuck Schumer, would be a big political loser for Republican candidates in 2008.

“It would change the landscape against them, big time,” Mr. Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said about a scenario in which the Bush administration launches a military attack on Iran before leaving office. “I don’t think they are likely to do it, because they are so weak—not because they are chastened—but I also think it is very likely to be a negative political for them.”

Now, far be it from me to offer sound political advice to the man who engineered a remarkable victory for Democrats in the Senate in last year, picking up six seats (his aid in ending the political career of George Allen is reason alone to consider his tenure as DSCC chair a success), but is Schumer here indicating a belief that presidential administrations should determine grave foreign policy decisions based upon whether or they will be net "negative" or "positive political" for them? Or is he just blaming the Bush administration for this sort of cynical calculation? If short-term political viability was the utmost concern of the Bush administration (and Congressional Republicans), would not the president have removed all American forces out of Iraq a long time ago? The crass, score-keeper way in which Schumer discusses matters of war and peace is unsettling.

But since Schumer brought it up and fashions himself such a keen strategist, let's take a look at the actual numbers, shall we? According to a Zogby poll published last week, 52% of Americans said they would support a military strike against Iran in order to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons. Lest one think that the poll somehow indicates a right-wing preference, 41% of Democrats would support one a strike and 21% of all those polled believe that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to deal with the Iranian threat, more than any other candidate.

I offer this poll not by way of saying that Schumer should emulate the cynicism he seems to accuse the Bush administration of exhibing by rallying Democrats in support of a strike, but to point out that his vaunted knowledge of the electorate and how to win is a bit over-hyped (that 52% number will only increase, by the way, as the Iranians progress in their nuclear program and as Iraq's political situation continues to stabilize). Americans want to hear how the Democrats propose to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, not the score-keeping of a campaign strategist whose ultimate interest is picking up Senate seats. Casting aspersions on the administration by insinuating that -- were it to seek authorization for strikes against Iran -- such a move would be predicated entirely upon a desire to boost GOP poll numbers hardly instills confidence in the political party that has long lacked voter trust when it comes to issues of national security. Indeed, the fact that Schumer brings up such crude motivations at all suggests that he is the one willing to play politics with national security. 

Jamie has already alluded and linked to the big, sopping valentine Andrew Sullivan delivers to Barack Obama in next month's Atlantic. At the risk of affirming an official Shvitz position on this cover story, let me just say that it's one of the most homiletic and trite pieces of political journalism I've seen in a long time.

One is told, repeatedly, that Obama is the cure for what ails America because he's post-Boomer, multiracial and has an evocative full name that will cause some pleasantly puzzled expressions in Lahore and Jakarta. The man is the message, in other words, and never you mind about his policies, experience or whether or not he'd make the best wartime commander-in-chief.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Now consider this hypothetical. Long before sacred terror afflicted these shores or most Americans had even heard the name Osama Bin Laden, a civil war was raging in the Islamic world that pitted the theologically pure against the reformist, the moderate and the apostate. We've seen how Abu Musab-al Zarqawi treated his co-religionists, who weren't up to snuff and were thus "polytheists" worse than Jews and Christians. In Darfur, a genocide that has been blessed and encouraged by Bin Laden, is currently underway to eliminate black Muslims whom their Arab Muslim killers refer to as "niggers." If we're to judge a candidate for high office on the basis of his gene pool, I can't think of a better rallying point for Al Qaeda than a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African" and "attended a majority-Muslim school," then came to America and discovered Jesus Christ. If you thought hope was powerful, wait until you see the audacity of dashed expectations.

Obama's heritage neither qualifies nor disqualifies him as president any more than Hillary's protean head of hair does her. And, as if to underscore the nonsense of his previous observation, Sullivan goes on to laud Obama for taking up his non-Muslim faith:

The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his religious conversion:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

That would be the same Rev. Wright who traveled to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan to gladhand Muammar Qaddafi, and who spoke of 9/11 with the same roosting chickens rhetoric that has now become cliche on the radical fringes. Obama's spiritual awakening comes in a distant second to his political opportunism, since he has an odd way of rewarding his favorite apostle and phrasemaker. He disinvited Wright from delivering a public invocation last February, on the exact date he announced his White House run. According to one of the Obama's spokesmen, "Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself." Well, why shouldn't a church led by a man of questionable motive and political affiliations not have to defend itself when it is openly credited with imbuing the divine spark in a possible leader of the free world? If Wright had such a impact that Obama took up religion because of him, isn't he deserving of something more than this calculated and weasely distancing? In short, how is Obama's religiosity any different, or any less meretricious, than that of the other candidates?

I don't doubt that Obama is the freshest national politician the U.S. has seen in a quite a while. I admire him a lot and -- glib Skype conversations with my co-editor aside -- I still haven't made up my mind not to vote for him. But what benefits him and the country least are the kinds of shallow and sanctimonious hosannas that depict him as a saintly figure. Sullivan is good enough to confess that he's suffering from a kind of electoral affirmative action impulse that esteems black religiosity for being just that. Fine. But when it comes time for the 101st Airborne to touch down on Waziristan, or garrisons to be shuffled in Iraq so as to maintain the hard-won security that's been established there, I suspect we'll need tougher metrics for assessing leadership than smiling white condescension.

The current crisis in Pakistan is telling for how ineffectual the United States has been in exerting pressure on its "allies" in the war on terror. There is nothing at all surprising about a military dictator and coupist like General Musharraf declaring a state of emergency rule, which has turned his country overnight into a nuclear-armed Venezuela. (Despite squashing democracy, he had previously allowed dissent and criticism of his regime; there was also a constitution for him to suspend.)

Musharraf's real note of desperation was actually struck over a year ago when he, along with nervous American consent, signed the Waziristan Accords. This shameful pact recognized a kind Anbar Awakening in reverse: it ceded the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the border of Afghanistan to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The U.S., which has repeatedly offered to send ground soldiers in to help police and clear the mountainous terrain of Waziristan, is relegated to dropping bombs on it, acts which do little but rile tribal sympathies for Osama bin Laden and make for embarrassing media events. According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of The Weekly Standard:

Emblematic of the latter is an October 30, 2006, strike against a madrassa in a Bajaur village that allegedly served as an al Qaeda training camp. While Zawahiri may have been the strike's target, the madrassa was affiliated with another key al Qaeda confederate, Faqir Mohammed, who had contracted a strategic marriage with a woman from the local Mamoond tribe. A U.S. Predator strike destroyed the school, but it hardly slowed down Mohammed, who gave an interview with NBC at the scene of the wreckage and later spoke at the funeral for the victims.

Why are we allowing this to continue?  Because Musharraf claims (not without some justification) that the enemy within his own government is more perilous than the one without. (Leave aside for now the fact that the Taliban have already violated the FATA agreement by killing Pakistani forces outside of the designated tribal areas.) Indeed, Pakistan's Gen. Hamid Gul and Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg are openly flirtatious with the Bin Ladenist element, and there is every chance if that Musharraf falls they, not Benzair Bhutto, stand to benefit. The country would then become what Iran hopes to be in five years.

But now we get photos of Pakistan's professional class taking to the streets to defy an authoritarian the U.S. has supported to the hilt and with absolutely no evidence that doing so has been in its national interest. Condoleeza Rice sheepishly admits to being "disappointed" with Musharraf's crackdown on civil liberties, which is nice, even if it means that her boss's policy of democracy promotion doesn't always work out the way he planned it. 

It all has me nostalgic for the salad days of 2004, when every liberal thought Pakistan's security apparatus, the ISI, was coordinating its arrests of Al Qaeda personnel to maximize Bush's electoral profile. Bin Laden was to have been paraded out in a cage at the climax of GOP festivities at Madison Square Garden. If only...

My buddy Chris Crain, former editor of the Washington Blade, expresses disappointment with my latest column in said newspaper, which accused Barack Obama of employing a Nixonian "Southern Strategy" to win over black, socially conservative southern voters by refusing to disassociate with gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, who says that gays our "trying to kill our children" and says that the Lord rescued him from homosexuality. The Obama campaign had invited McClurkin to head up its "southern gospoel tour" event in South Carolina. Chris writes:

C'mon Jamie… Don't you see a wee bit difference here? Even if you accept that Obama selected McClurkin (which he didn't) as part of a calculated ploy to play to homophobes (which it wasn't), the huge difference here is that Nixon's political positions fit his strategy. He was no friend to African Americans or civil rights.

I'll certainly concede that there's more than a "wee bit of difference" between the tactics of Nixon and Obama, as the former's were far-reaching had a long-lasting effect on the tactics of the Republican Party. But just because the analogy does not fit perfectly (as few analogies do) does not mean that a comparison of sorts simply can't be made at all. Is the intent -- cynical vote-getting -- behind Obama's double-dealing much different than Nixon's coded appeals to southern whites? Obama says he supports gay rights but is perfectly willing to have a man like McClurkin front for his campaign. And while Nixon was without question an old-fashioned bigot (heaping hate on not just blacks, but gays and especially Jews in hours upon hours of tape-recorded White House conversations) who employed questionable tactics in the 1968 presidential race, it's just not true -- as Chris asserts -- that "he was no friend to African Americans or civil rights." Nixon, whipping boy of all liberals past, present and for far into the future, significantly expanded affirmative action programs in the federal contracting business and substantially increased the number of women and African-Americans in his administration.

Chris also draws attention to "Hillary's Donnie McClurkins," the anti-gay black preachers Eddie Long and Harold Mayberry, asking why gay activists have not raised more of a fuss over the Democratic frontrunner's glad-handing with first-rate homophobes. He's absolutely right, and his point illustrates what I've been saying for a long time: Democrats think that by mouthing support for "gay rights" they can get away with associating with the most vile of bigots. Liberals and gays apply a double-standard when it comes to the Left's homophobia and it's long past time that gays -- and, more importantly, all people of good conscience -- say enough is enough.

None of this is to say that gays -- or anyone supportive of gay equality for that matter -- should withhold support from Obama because of this one incident. Similarly, however, I would expect liberals so critical of Richard Nixon to acknowledge that while the man was a crude bigot, he also supported policies to increase opportunities for women and blacks. What's ultimately more important; what the man said in private or did in public? Indeed, Obama actually seems to have a better record on gay rights than any other mainstream presidential candidate. What this sorry episode does demonstrate, however, is two important points; the first being that while some in the media are touting Obama as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Obama has shown that he has little trouble adopting the cynical triangulation tactics of the Clintons -- apologizing if he offended anyone but giving a platform to someone who uses it to denigrate gay people. This, again, does not make Obama a bad leader, but it ought to disillusion those who somehow think that electing him will cure the country of its partisan ills.

Secondly, and more importantly to those concerned with electing a Democrat in 2008, is that the McClurkin episode demonstrates the remarkable ineptitude of the Obama campaign. It has been amateur hour for the past two weeks. I can't imagine the tough-as-nails warriors in the Clinton campaign enduring a scandal like this for more than 15 minutes before dealing with the problem decisively by dumping McClurkin.

A man who looks like Jack Palance's lesbian sister gets to say things like this:

Putin is enormously popular. The device by which he is continuing his leadership, behind a competent but happily subordinate technician, is accepted there as good news. I suggest that we should agree with the Russian people. They are getting what they want and they want it because Putin has governed Russia for Russia and Russians, has put back self-respect in a country whose nadir reflected an American zenith.

Hat tip: Scoop Shachtman.

Joe Klein thinks Obama's coy way the "get her!" nature of these Democratic debates is a sign of his political viability. Only the desperate get nasty. (Is that why front-runner George W. Bush unleashed hell on John McCain in 2000?)

But Klein sees Obama's no-bullshit rhetoric as a large part of his appeal to voters: 

But then, Obama's low-key campaign has been confusing to the press, and perhaps to the public, from the start. A few days before the debate, I spent a day with Obama in Iowa, and the most striking thing to me about the Senator's performances was the scrupulous honesty of his answers, his insistence on delivering bad news when necessary. A woman asked if he believed that stay-at-home moms should be eligible for Social Security. There is a way most politicians answer such questions: a moving tribute to the virtues of child-rearing, then on to the next question without ever making the commitment. Obama did the moving tribute — with a joke about his ineptitude as a parent — but then he told the woman no. "We can't extend those benefits without huge financial implications," he said.

And as for Hillary's wound-licking from a few nights ago...

That's how The American Prospect's Sam Boyd characterizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, more accurately described (IMHO) by the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick (and seconded by Ron Rosenbaum) as "The Bravest, Most Remarkable Woman of Our Times." Anne Appelbaum recently called her "possibly the greatest womens' rights activist of our time," (the only quibble I have with Applebaum is that the question is not up for debate, she is the greatest womens' rights activist of our time), praise which earned Boyd's ire. In response to Ali Eteraz's latest missive, could you ask for a better example of the stark divide between the "decent" and indecent left?

Does Sam Boyd believe that Ayaan Hirsi Ali killed Theo Van Gogh? How about Pim Fortuyn? Does she represent a threat to anyone's security? How is Hirsi Ali -- who suffered genital mutilation, child abuse, indoctrination in a totalitarian ideology -- a "dangerous fanatic?" In the minds of leftists like Boyd (whose slandering of Hirsi Ali is even less charitable than Ian Buruma's "enlightenment fundamentalist" smear), the irrational, murderous, religious-inspired rage of fanatical Muslims (or any non-white, non-Western fanatic) can always be laid at the feet of the West. Robert Mugabe may have gone to far, but can you really blame him after so many years of British colonialism? And aren't the death threats against Ali at least understandable? She's a dangerous fanatic!

There's plenty of room to disagree with Hirsi Ali. I happen to believe that there is a peaceful, non-threatening version of Islam that is practiced by millions of people every day. I don't agree with Hirsi Ali when she says that "there is no moderate Islam" and advocates shutting down Muslim schools in the United States. But you know what? She knows a hellva lot more about Islam that either me, Sam Boyd, Ali Eteraz or anyone else opining in the blogosphere, and though I happen to disagree with her based upon my own understanding of Islam, I am not going to call this most courageous of 21st heroines a "dangerous fanatic."

Most importantly, whatever her views on Islam, they in no way impair her credibility as a feminist, her record as which, after all, is the subject of Applebaum's praise. This is a distinction that Boyd seems incapable of understanding.

Perhaps the folks at The American Prospect can enlighten us as to who the real "dangerous fanatics" are in addition to Ayaan Hirsi Ali; after all, they even have a Lyndon LaRouche groupie on their senior staff to aid them in that quest.

Heartwarming scenes in Kampala, Uganda, today, as emissaries from the notorious Lord's Resistance Army arrived in the city on a rather belated mission of peace. The gruesome civil war has been going on for over two decades since President Museveni took power in a coup in 1986, but it seems the end may finally be in sight. The rebels are in town for the first time since the war began all those years ago to talk peace with government officials, and they certainly talk the talk:

LRA spokesman Godfrey Ayoo admitted that the team had security fears about their visit but insisted that they will forge ahead with their mission.

"The value of what we are doing starting today is much higher than the fear, we want this to be the last conflict in Uganda whereby people will never again take up weapons to resolve their problems"

Stirring stuff indeed. It's a bit late, of course, for the tens of thousands who have died in the years of fighting, but better one sinner repenteth than ninety and nine who have no need, right? Well, maybe. But the LRA's belated decision to talk turkey is, as you might expect, less about peace and reconciliation and more to do with their growing isolation.

Even by the standards of African conflicts, the Ugandan civil war has been particularly pointless and bloody. The government has been guilty of war crimes, but in the Lord's Resistance Army it has found itself up against an almost unbelievably brutal band of rebels who have shown themselves willing to stoop to almost unbelievable levels in their fight for power.

The LRA's activities were laid bare in a chilling Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens last year (one that I urge you to read when you have the chance), and among the most nightmarish aspects of their rebellion, apart from their fondness for cutting off the breasts, lips and noses in the villages they raid, has been their widespread use of children, both as soldiers and sexual slaves. Terrified of being abducted and forced into service as soldiers, the children walk for miles every night to towns and shelters where they can find a measure of safety, thus earning the name "night commuters". Hitch:

Here's what happens to the children who can't run fast enough, or who take the risk of sleeping in their huts in the bush. I am sitting in a rehab center, talking to young James, who is 11 and looks about 9. When he actually was nine and sleeping at home with his four brothers, the L.R.A. stormed his village and took the boys away. They were roped at the waist and menaced with bayonets to persuade them to confess what they could not know-the whereabouts of the Ugandan Army's soldiers.

On the subsequent forced march, James underwent the twin forms of initiation practiced by the L.R.A. He was first savagely flogged with a wire lash and then made to take part in the murder of those children who had become too exhausted to walk any farther. "First we had to watch," he says. "Then we had to join in the beatings until they died." He was spared from having to do this to a member of his family, which is the L.R.A.'s preferred method of what it calls "registration." And he was spared from being made into a concubine or a sex slave, because the L.R.A. doesn't tolerate that kind of thing for boys. It is, after all, "faith-based." Excuse me, but it does have its standards.

The turning point in the LRA's fortunes seems to have been the 2005 peace deal in Sudan, which deprived them of the succor and support of the Islamist government in Khartoum. A strange, if not unholy, alliance, given the LRA's Christian fanaticism and their claims to be inspired by the Ten Commandments - but convenient for the Sudanese; their own troublesome rebels were supported by the Ugandan government prior to the peace deal, so it made sense to provide the LRA with bases to launch their attacks on the Ugandan regime. And so two sets of proxies were employed to sow violence and death in their neighbors' countries. A squalid mess indeed.

There are still sticking points, most notably over the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, a self-professed spirit medium and fearsome thug, who is wanted for crimes including the killing of children and mutilation of civilians. President Museveni has stated that he is happy for rebel leaders to submit themselves to traditional tribal justice such as mato oput, in which the offenders accept responsibility for their actions and make reparations to the families of their victims, before sharing a bitter drink made from the herbs and root of the oput tree. But the ICC are, understandably, not wild about letting mass murderers off with a punishment barely worse than a challenge from Survivor, fearing it may set a worrying precedent.

Whatever happens, cynicism should not blind us to the reality that 21 years of suffering may be coming to an end for the Ugandan people. But cynicism is hard to shake. The leader of the LRA delegation that traveled to Kampala today, Martin Ojul, made a dramatic symbolic gesture for the assembled press in an attempt to affirm his movement's seriousness about the peace talks. Unfortunately, though - well, here's the guy from Reuters:

As a symbol of what he said was the LRA's commitment to peace, he released a live dove into the air, which flapped about before flopping downwards into the lap of a diplomat.

Let's hope the humans can do a bit better.

I don't accept Jamie Kirchik's argument that in order for the left to deal with its naïve post-colonialists and their blind eye towards terrorists and fanatics we have to use the epithet “Islamofascism.” It was because this is such an unreasonable conflation of two separate issues that I didn't even bother to address the part about Islamofascism in my first reply and moved straight to the real issue: what do we, in the left, do about those who are naïve?

Fact is, there is no logical or even pragmatic relationship between using the term Islamofascism and the left cleaning its house. If you want to deal with the Massads and Spivaks, engage them, and pull at them by offering them a better narrative, not by slapping them with a term that is already politicized, already obfuscatory, already a part of the right-wing lexicon, and already divisive. I made one attempt at such an engagement with Chomsky when I wrote him an open letter. I didn’t need to shove a meaningless term down his throat.

Perhaps Jamie considers these members of the left to be of such little value that he wishes they would simply go away. I think that is a very incorrect thing for the left to engage in. I studied continental philosophy in college, read Fanon and Said by the ton, and wrote my thesis (on Nietzsche) under post-structuralist philosophers. Under Jamie's view I should be laughing with glee when militants kill Americans or fanatical patriarchs engage in honor killing or stoning. Yet that is hardly the case. I turned out to have quite a healthy antagonism and moral clarity towards Islamic militancy and fanaticism, not despite the influence of post-colonial thinkers, but because of them. They helped me see that the nature of oppression – all oppression – is not just overt, but subtle, sinister, and sometimes seductive. Their assistance in helping uncover the labyrinthine structures (and strictures) of historical patriarchy, both in the West and East, allowed me to deconstruct Islamist misogyny. It wasn’t my conservative professors who taught me that when Islamists talk about “family values” they are using it as a code word for keeping women subjugated. Quite the contrary, it was the allegedly naïve post-modernists like Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, who exposed the history of physical and sexual discipline on the basis of authoritarian religions (by showing to me how it occurred in the Christian West).

Those on the left who want to so casually give into Dadaist terms like Islamofascism do it not out of intellectual defensibility of the term but out of convenience. If the issue is that post-colonial and post-modernist theories are producing students and activists who do represent a form of self-hate, then what we have to do is re-orient these theories, not dismiss the flock that follows them as unworthy of our time. Remember, post-modernism was not supposed to be a rejection of Enlightenment; it was a continuation of it (see, for example, Foucault’s Was ist Aufklarung or 1970's Lyotard).

That reorientation is not difficult, though it does help having the facility to offer something more than just the rote narratives – “all naïve leftists are enablers of Islamofascism!” It also requires speaking to those with whom we disagree with a modicum of respect. Jamie is willing to allot time and respect to someone who promotes such beacons of freedom as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum (what are their views on homosexuals again?) but has no time for the other, far more valuable, project? Clearly his theoretical and verbal skills are superior to most of the rest of us, or else he would not be so accomplished at such a young age. However, in this instance his skills are misdirected.

My co-blogger Ali Eteraz has published a thoughtful critique to my post in defense of the word "Islamofascism" to describe the Islamic fascist enemy. But he does not provide much in the way of argument to oppose the use of this admittedly provocative (but entirely correct) word, other than fault my defense as "unsatisfactory."

Rather, Eteraz lists a plethora of academics and academically-affiliated individuals who stand four-square against Islamism as a way of challenging my secondary charge that large segments of the left are insufficiently concerned with the threat it poses to our way of life. I too, however, could just as easily make a list of feckless, terrorism-apologists at American universities, beginning with the execrable Joseph Massad, a prominent disciple of Edward Said, who is very much considered (or, at least, considers himself) a man of the left and was defended as such several years ago when Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies department made national headlines for its anti-Israel faculty. "Why honor him by pretending that he's 'the left?'" Eteraz asks. I agree, but he should be asking that question to the post-colonial theorists who very much populate the academic left and fawn over him and his truly sinister work, blurbed his book, and the prestigious University of Chicago Press which published it.

The problem with this whole debate, of course, is one over nomenclature, what Eteraz characterizes as my having "little focus on keeping the terms 'the left' and 'liberals' straight." I plead guilty to over-generalizing, and perhaps from now on we should differentiate between the Hitchens's and Massad's by employing Michael Walzer's language of the "decent" (and its corollary, the "indecent") left. But for every Haleh Esfandiari he throws down on the table, I'll match him with a Joseph Massad and raise him a Hamid Dabashi (and I've got the entire Columbia University MEALAC department in my hand). To respond to my argument about the troubling state of the anti-totalitarian left with a list of a handful of anti-totalitarian leftists does not negate the existence of the problem.

It goes without saying that David Horowitz is a blunt object, but he nonetheless has an important message about Islamic fascism, as much as liberal smart-asses like Max Blumenthal and Josh Marshall would like to ridicule it. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers put it well:

There are many people on college campuses as prestigious as Harvard and Yale, that genuinely hope that the Islamofascists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world prevail, just to poke a finger in America's and the West's eye.

Perhaps like so many leftist[s] do, they don't think past their intentions and their feelings to what outcomes would actually take place if say, Iraq became a nation state ran by the equivalent of a Taliban. They of course would claim that they are violently against "fascism," but wouldn't dare apply that term to a non-white, non-Western group.

There is a sickness as vile and nihilistic as the Islamofascists themselves. Whether or not they consciously support the beheaders and bus bombers, they for all practical purposes do support the Islamofascist enemy. I don't think Horowitz's comment is out of line in the least.

This element exists on the left, and it's bigger and more influential than Eteraz would care to admit. It's up to him and other decent men of the left to ensure that it does not grow.

Read Kirchick's Original Post and Eteraz's Reply to it.

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:56 AM
i think im voting for hillary. the more the other dems pick on her, the more i want her to win

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:57 AM
my landlord -- who literally watches CNN from 7 AM to 11 PM every day -- thinks she's going to win. and i assume anyone who watches that much CNN probably has a good handle on the election

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:57 AM
i do too. it'll be hillary v giuliani and giuliani is just too dim on the stump. he doesn't play in peoria.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yeah. also, he's terrifying. you think it'll come down to New York vs New York?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yup. subway series!

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
because hillary doesn't necessarily play in peoria either

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yes she does. i mean, not to the far right, who will always hate her. but her biggest base in ny is upstate farmers. she's very, very shrewd. actually pretty conservative, which can't help but come across, even as she's attacked by both parties for essentially the same behavior.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
well, but those farmers have had her as senator for a while

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
which is why she's still a hawk on foreign policy

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah, she really is

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah but in that time she's learned to speak their language. she's nestled up to the status quo as much as she can without actually turning republican. i still think - despite the anti-hillary sentiment - that people will vote for her wanting her husband back

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
right. but do you think that given the choice between a thrice-married Republican and a Clinton Democrat, conservative rural types will vote for the Democrat?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:00 PM
and he will be back if she gets elected.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
yeah, he totally will

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
well, it depends on the segment of conservative rural types. if thomas frank's "what's the matter with kansas" argument has any legs, then hillarycare, etc. should play well in the sticks. giuliani isn't reagan the way thompson also isn't but wants to be. rudy will have a tougher time convincing the cultural conservatives that he's not too new york, a john lindsay with a testosterone surfeit. whereas hillary's never suffered from island-itis. her unspoken appeal to moderates in the heartland is her metro-phoneyness. if she can fool yankees fans into voting for her, anything's possible.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:01 PM
that's true

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
so really it'll come down to one of the most hawkish senators following 9/11, and the guy who ran the country on 9/11. rudy has more cachet as a muscular leader, no question. but that's not all he needs. and hillary's not willowy enough to make it all he needs

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:02 PM
yeah, she's tough enough to give him a run for his money

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:03 PM
also, it'll be one of the most entertaining administrations.... all the corruption, double-dealing, memory lapses before senate subcommittees. vince foster flitting through the west wing like banquo's ghost. i can't wait.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:03 PM
hee. yeah, it'll be good. also fun to have a lady president. i'm excited for four years of gender commentary -- "what does it mean that the President wore a mauve pantsuit to the peace talks?" that kind of thing. i'm also just excited to see what happens to Colbert and the Daily Show

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
my mom hates her which is funny because she reminds me of my mom (with anger management classes under her belt)... i think he jumped the shark with that, to be honest

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
yeah, it's sort of a dumb stunt. but what i'm wondering is how their audiences will deal with them satirizing a Democrat

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
let's see: robin williams makes a box office bomb about a colbert-type late night news satirist running for president. colbert decides to put williams' dead script to work for himself...hmm.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
ha ha

They came in their hundreds. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is in Britain to pay a visit on Her Majesty, and he ain't travelling incognito. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques showed up at Heathrow yesterday in five - count ‘em, five - jumbo jets, with an entourage of 400 assorted princelings, aides and factotums in tow (all male, naturally), and 84 limousines were on hand to whisk the royal visitors to a variety of top London hotels; Buckingham Palace doesn't have space for them all. This is clearly not a man who gives a shit about his carbon footprint.

His visit is not without controversy. Even before he left home, Abdullah gave an interview to the BBC in which he claimed - and you're going to like this - that Britain was "not doing enough to fight terrorism". As soon as he arrived, human rights protesters were out on the streets, protesting against the brutal treatment meted out to criminals, homosexuals, and women who fall foul of the strict religious laws of the repressive kingdom. The negative press coverage was hardly ameliorated by a risible statement this morning from Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, who opined to general hilarity that the two states could "unite around their shared values", whatever the hell they may be.

The protesters who greeted King Abdullah today wouldn't stand a chance, though, even if they weren't outnumbered four to one by the monarch's retinue. British trade with Saudi Arabia is worth a very great deal of money; we send billions of pounds' worth of commercial exports to the Kingdom, not least in arms. Last year, a long-running probe into corruption charges surrounding a massive defence contract for 72 Typhoon Eurofighters was abruptly cancelled on the orders of Tony Blair, after diplomatic pressure from the Saudis. And then of course there is the small matter of 25% of the world's known oil reserves. Even more crucially, Saudi Arabia is a powerful ally in a region where those are few or far between. He may be a bastard, as the old saying goes, but at least he's our bastard.

But is he? It was [perhaps] unfortunate timing that his visit coincided with the publication a major report by a British think tank, Policy Exchange (pdf here), on the prevalence of extremist hate literature in Britain's mosques, which concluded that much of it came directly from the Kingdom. The malign influence of Saudi petrodollars in spreading the particularly intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism is a well-documented phenomenon, but even so, this report makes sobering reading. Researchers despatched to a wide sample of mosques in the UK found literature in 25% that they assessed as ‘radical' and ‘extremist' in nature. These were not just small underground radical bookshops run by obscure sects, but large community mosques and education centres funded by Saudi initiatives and, in some cases, officially opened by members of the British Royal Family.

Here, for example, is an excerpt from a textbook for High School Grade 1 pupils (11 year-old boys) at the King Fahd Academy in London, titled Al-Hadith wa'l-thaqafa al-Islamiyya [Prophetic Tradition and Islamic Culture]. The name may not be familiar, but the gist will be: 

Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

It is a secret document which is thought to come out of ‘the conference of Bal.' It was revealed in the nineteenth century. The Jews tried to deny its existence, but there is a great deal of evidence which proves its existence and the fact that its source was indeed the Elders of Zion. We can summarise the content of the protocols with these points:

1 To shake the foundation of the current world society and its system of governing, in order to allow Zionism to exclusively rule the world.

2 The destruction of Nationalism and religions, especially the Christian nations. 

3 To work towards increasing the corruption of the current governing European regimes, for Zionism believes in their corruption and elimination.

4 Controlling of media, propaganda, and newspaper venues. Using gold to instigate instabilities. Tempting the masses with physical pleasures and spreading pornography.

The indisputable evidence of the truth of the existence of these Protocols and their contents of the hell-raising Jewish plans is: the fact that a lot of the schemes, conspiracies, and instigations found in it have been implemented. Although it was written in the nineteenth century, it will become clear to anyone who reads it the extent of how many of its articles have been implemented.

I repeat for emphasis that this is a textbook used in a flagship London academy which operates under the direction of the Saudi embassy, teaches around 1000 pupils including the children of Arab diplomats, and has in its time been visited by the Prince of Wales, Baroness Thatcher and her successor John Major, as well as Abdullah himself and his late half-brother, King Fahd, after whom the school was named.

The report contains scores of similar examples, from texts on the stoning of ‘adulterers and sodomisers', through injunctions against mixing with Christians, to a charming volume called "Women who deserve to go to Hell" that I might just pick up myself. And time after time, the books were clearly of Saudi Arabian origin; stamped with Saudi imprimaturs, or marked "not for sale" because they had been distributed free of charge by the Kingdom and its agents. As the report's conclusion states (p169), "The shadow of Saudi Arabia falls heavily across these pages".

This isn't solely a British problem; a particular problem in the US is the radicalisation of young Muslims in prisons, by groups such as the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which distribute radical pamphlets and Wahhabi translations of the Koran inside US jails, as described in The Weekly Standard last year by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who once worked for Al-Haramain (and is, among other things, the only Jew I've ever met who converted twice; first to Islam and then to Christianity). The Saudis use their oil wealth to proselytise on a vast, global scale.

It's been estimated by a leading writer on the Wahhabi sect that the House of Saud has spent some $70 billion on Islamist missionary work since 1979. But if it's difficult to control such immense sums of money, it's impossible to control the consequences of spreading such radical teachings to mosques, schools and madrassahs around the world. Many of the extremists that their seed money helped to nurture now believe that the Saudi royals are corrupt and decadent (hard to disagree with that, of course); we may see them as intolerant, brutal reactionaries, but to radical Islamists, it seems, Saudi ultrafundamentalism doesn't go far enough. Hence Osama bin Laden's stated aim of overthrowing the dynasty and the 2003 bomb campaign in that country; and hence the Saudi royals' newfound concern in fighting terrorism. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap; or at least so it says in my holy book.

We walk a fine line when we treat with dictators, human rights abusers and intolerant regimes, whether theocratic or not. It is clearly unrealistic to expect Britain and the US to suddenly cut all ties with Saudi Arabia, and the consequences of such a move might potentially be disastrous. And it's a fantasy to imagine that the fall of the House of Saud would lead to a cuddly liberal democracy springing up in the Arabian peninsula; after the brief flurry of starry-eyed idealism that saw neoconservatives proclaiming that the Arabs were ready for democracy, the State Department seems to have looked at the gains made by Islamists in countries like Egypt, Sudan and Palestine where they have been able to contest national elections, and come to the conclusion that Arabs may or may not be ready for democracy, but we are probably not prepared for its results.

But, as realistic as I am, I'm glad that I am not the only one who watches us sign ever more lucrative contracts with these people and grow ever more dependent on their oil, and watches our politicians bow and scrape and promise tough talk on human rights that everybody knows is insincere bullshit... and wonders if there really is no alternative to simply gritting our teeth and sucking it up, let alone putting Her Majesty (pbuh) through all this for the sake of a few fighter planes. We put up with it because we believe the benefits outweigh the costs, but it seems to me that we ask for - and get - very little in return, except a massive global program of state-exported bigotry and intolerance that now threatens our own way of life in the most direct way imaginable.

"There needs now", concludes the Policy Exchange report, "to be a proper audit of the costs and benefits of the Saudi-UK relationship." I'll second that.

State Department investigators offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad — a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode, government officials said Monday.

The State Department investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the officials said. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added.

Most of the guards who took part in the Sept. 16 shooting were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised that they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true.

But at a news briefing Tuesday, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said the immunity extended to the Blackwater Guards was limited and would not entirely shield them from federal prosecution.

"The Department of State cannot immunize an individual from federal criminal prosecution," said McCormack. "And the kinds of, quote, immunity that I've seen reported in the press would not preclude a successful criminal prosecution."

McCormack said the State Department would not have asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department to get involved in a case that they could not potentially prosecute.

In each of the statements, the guards begin by saying "I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry," and that, "I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding, except that if I knowingly and willfully provide false statements or information, I may be criminally prosecuted for that action under 18 United States Code, Section 1001."

“Blackwater employees and other civilian contractors cannot be tried in military courts, and it is unclear what American criminal laws might cover criminal acts committed in a war zone. Americans are immune from Iraqi law under a directive signed by the United States occupation authority in 2003 that has not been repealed by the Iraqi Parliament.

A State Department review panel sent to investigate the shootings concluded that there was no basis for holding non-Defense Department contractors accountable under United States law and urged Congress and the administration to address the problem.

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill this month that would make such contractors liable under a law known as the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The Senate is considering a similar measure.

Some legal analysts have suggested that the Blackwater case could be prosecuted through the act, which allows the extension of federal law to civilians supporting military operations.

But trying a criminal case in federal court requires guarantees that no one has tampered with the evidence. Because a defendant has the right to cross-examine witnesses, foreign witnesses would have to be transported to the United States.

Several legal experts said evidence gathered by Iraqi investigators and turned over to the Americans, even within days, would probably be suspect.

Another law that may be applicable covers contractors in areas that could be defined as American territory, like a military base or the Green Zone. But the Blackwater security contractors in the Sept. 16 shootings were in neither place.

Jonathan Chait picks up on Rudy's laissez-faire economics:

Giuliani... is not indifferent to the plight of the uninsured. He actually seems to revel in it:

 

I don't like mandating health care. I don't like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country--the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We've got to let people make choices. We've got to let them take the risk--do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because, ultimately, if they don't, well, then, they may not be taken care of.

Where does this bizarrely punitive view of the health care system come from? It apparently arises from Giuliani's experience with welfare reform, which he constantly likens to health care. "You don't start off by promising you're going to insure everybody," he warned earlier this year. "It's the same mistake the Democrats made with welfare." So providing health coverage to the uninsured will make them irresponsible.

[...]

Giuliani also thinks that insulating people from the costs of sickness or injury will make them more likely to get sick or injured. "There is no incentive to wellness," he complains. 

Very true. Not only can't we help those who can't help themselves, but they just want to get the fucker over with already and die of some wasting disease.

Putting aside the debate over whether Islamofascism is historically appropriate (Hitchens says it is) or pragmatically sound (Gen. Abizaid says its not), I found Jamie Kirchick's thesis that liberals are not adequately opposed to violence and oppression in the Muslim majority world, to be quite unsatisfactory.

My primary complaint is that in his post there seems to be little focus on keeping the terms "the left" and "liberals" straight. While JK starts, rightly, by putting Hitchens and Berman on the left, by the end of the piece, he's handed the left off to some ultra-post colonial academic. Why? Someone who apologizes for gay oppression is as much a member of the left as an apologist for big government is a conservative. Why honor him by pretending that he's "the left"?

Further, I wouldn't be so sure that those who decry American excesses and unilateralism, cannot be opposed to violence and oppression in the Muslim majority world.

In fact, if anything, many such people, located in our academies no less, were and are leading the charge against theocracy, anti-semitism, fundamentalism, and disenfranchisement in the Muslim world. This was why I found Horowitz' strange assertion that the academies aren't concerned with, let's say, the oppression of Muslim women, to be utterly laughable. For JK to implicitly buy into that is regrettable.

It was at a university where I met Riffat Hassan, the well-known Pakistani anti-honor killing activist from the University of Louisville. It was at a university where I met Amina Wadud, the Quran scholar, who was the first woman to lead a mixed-congregation prayer in recent Muslim history and quite courageously challenged Muslim patriarchy. It was at a university where I met Abdullahi An-Naim, the Sudanese Islamic scholar whose message calls for the equality of men and women in and whose teacher was executed in 1983 for such ideas (and who has subsequently argued for Islamic secularism and is going back to Sudan). It was a university where I met Rafia Zakaria, the feminist activist whose commentary on issues affecting Muslim women is published in Pakistan and India (currently on her way to Pakistan). It was at a university where I heard of Laleh Bakhtiar who has now published a feminist translation of the Quran (and we know how important translations of the Quran are in the fight against extremism). It was at a university where I encountered the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the Iranian activist whose speciality is Muslim divorce law, with a focus on women's rights in Iran. IT was an American university which was home to Haleh Esfandiari, the soft-spoken Princetonian who became a prisoner of conscience at Iran's Evin Prison.

In fact, the universities have been on the forefront of supporting many Muslim reform projects, and the area of Muslim women is not the only one they have supported.

It was at a university where Iranian dissenter and Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi went to make her speeches. It was at a university where Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissenter, went to consult with leading left philosopher Richard Rorty. It was at a university where a Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt started to translate anti-holocaust-denial books into Arabic and Farsi. It was a university that gave shelter to Muslim scholars from South Africa whose homes were firebombed. Even that reviled leftist Juan Cole started up an Americana Translation project in order to send our classical liberal books – Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson – to the Arab world.

Having met most of these aforementioned people, I know that they know their Fanon, quite enjoy Edward Said, have been influenced by the post-colonial left, and even reject the term "Islamofascism." Yet, I submit that most of them do more to combat the things that JK is rightly outraged about than he or I are doing (no offense). We liberals should be trying to make alliances with the most promising of such individuals, not marginalizing them.

An internal critique of the left like the one JK engaged in his post, which does not bring to light the positive work of such people – such left-leaning people – sounds less like liberal introspection (which is what I assume its supposed to be) and more like the usual far-right polemic against the apathetic and naive leftist.

The left is hardly apathetic to issues of Islamic theocracy and violence. Just one bit of proof lies in the fact that as we speak, Alternet -- condemned by many liberals as a hopeless progressive site -- has my piece on the Making of the Muslim Left on its frontpage.

Read Kirchick's Original post, and his Counter-Reply to this one.

I knew something was absent from Rachel Morris' excellent exposure of the trespasses and constitutional encroachments of the Giuliani mayoralty. Now I know what it was. It was Rudy's political philosophy. John Judis at TNR goes farther back into the biography to cull this telling episode:

Of course, Giuliani made his career as a prosecutor rather than a philosopher, and there are certainly Catholic teachings he has repudiated or ignored. In 1989, wanting the New York Liberal Party's endorsement for his GOP mayoral bid, Giuliani renounced his past opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade. But his exposure to Catholic and classical political thought clearly had a lasting impact on him. At a forum on crime in March 1994, sponsored by the New York Post, Giuliani voiced views on liberty and authority that seemed to flow from these teachings. He criticized liberals for seeing only "the oppressive side of authority." "What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be," he said. "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." Asked in the question period to explain what he meant, Giuliani said, "Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy." Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was "floored" by Giuliani's definition of liberty and authority. But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani's words.

Nor would Mark Lilla be, as his well-received new book, The Stillborn God, defines American exceptionalism -- or why our democracy is so different from European or Asian democracies -- as a "post-Christian phenomenon." It was Thomas Hobbes who first sought to examine revelation from the bottom-up, asking why it is we believe what we do, rather than from the top-down, simply applying assumed revelation to the various levers of state power. Transported to these shores by persecuted Protestant fundamentalists, the bricks and mortar of the wall that separates church and state were easily assembled, ab initio.

Here is Lilla in a fascinating discussion he started at Cato Unbound:

What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment – and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l’infâme must be écrasé. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term “liberalism” is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in “toleration”; they wanted victory.

For a politician like Giuliani, raised (forgive the alliteration) in a tight ethnic and ecumenical enclave, Catholic political theology is still paramount. What accounts for his vaunted liberal tendencies -- his approval of gay marriage, abortion rights, etc. -- is the head-on collision that such theology has had with another breed of exceptionalism: the New York one. The strict law-and-order mayor of the city was also one of its most cosmopolitan mayors. (The man who tried to shut down a museum over a dung-slathered Christ painting also dressed up as Marilyn Monroe.)

Glib talk of Il Duce of Gotham, then, misses the larger point about Giuliani's true character, which was, after all, once attracted to the muscular, theodicy-based liberalism of the Kennedys. The Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis, the tensest moments of the Cold War, were really fought between an American Roman Catholic dynasty and the Russian Communist clerisy.

This is why neoconservatism, although pioneered by Jewish ex-radicals, has proved so enticing to political Catholics like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigl. They have recognized in it the germ of a deeply Christian phenomenon -- the Manichean worldview that binds recovering City College Trotskyists and their children to Thomas Aquinas. (Not for nothing did the French philosopher-historian Raymond Aron once term Marxism a "Christian heresy.") In other words, they are the exceptions American exceptionalism.

There's no question that an international purview will only strengthen the core Catholic doctrine in Giuliani. For one thing, the Manichean rumble will now be properly situated between two open faiths, one amenable to Western democracy, and one violently opposed to it.

The popular refrain among progressive alarmists today is, "If you liked Bush, you'll love Giuliani." But this isn't quite right because Giuliani would be staggeringly competent as president, regardless of whether or not you liked the results he produced, or how he set about producing them. Indeed, the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention is, as I've been banging on about for months, the closest analog to what constitutes the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

So rather it should be said that if you didn't like him as mayor, you'll downright hate Rudy as president.

Last seen preciously explaining why "[t]he discussion of [Che] Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be," the good folks over at Campus Progress have launched a jihad on use of the word "Islamofascism." They've been prompted to do so by David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a right-wing roadshow that the former left-wing radical is taking to college campuses across the country. Anyways, it would be nice if liberals expressed as much outrage over actual Islamic Fascism as they have at David Horowitz's supposed exploitation of it for his own, nefarious political purposes.

The first (of many) errors in the piece is its authors' (Annika Carlson and Sarah Dreier) attempt to label the use of "Islamofascism" a "conservative smear tactic." It's true that many of those who use the word are "conservatives," but it was neither originated by conservatives nor is there anything inherently "conservative" about it's use." Christopher Hitchens, no conservative he, wrote about "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is also a popularizer of the term. The authors attack Stephen Schwartz (a Jewcy contributor) without bothering to mention that the man is himself a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. But, alas, he is brushed off as a writer for the Weekly Standard, and thus his thoughts can be discarded.

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

There's a lot of this walk-softly, lets-hold-hands type of stuff in the essay, and the best case for the continued use of the "Islamofascist" descriptor comes, unsurprisingly, from Christopher Hitchens. He was not responding to the Campus Progress piece in particular, but likely anticipated the liberal reaction that would likely follow from Horowitz's deliberately provocative campus outreach project. Hitch first points out that the Left has never had a problem using the word fascist to describe its political enemies (and I'll add that "fascist" flows from liberal lips today like shit from a goose when describing the Bush administration), particularly when referring to the ties between the Catholic Church and right-wing, authoritarian governments in Latin America, Spain and the Balkans. It appears then, that the Left's aversion to use of "Islamofascism" has much to do with the simple fact that Islam is a non-Western religion, supposedly comprised of the wretched of the earth, and thus, a different standard must apply to its most fanatical adherents, whose real motivation must, at "root" be a legitimate anti-imperialist impulse (for the most sinister and perverse form of this sort of thinking, see my essay on Columbia University professor Joseph Massad's rationalization of Muslim state homophobia as just that).

Read Ali Eteraz's Reply to this post, and Jamie Kirchick's Counter-Reply. 

In his piece on the Crossroads series by PBS, Gary Kamiya of Salon made the observation that when it comes to reform within Islam, someone whose “views are actually representative” is the best candidate to speak about the subject. Presumably this means that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is out, since she’s atheist and works for American Enterprise Institute; Irshad Manji is out since she’s -- as he called her -- “eccentric” not to mention a lesbian; and someone like Tariq Ramadan is in because a lot of Muslims consider him somewhere near the mainstream and he has a well-kept Muslim beard.

I would like to offer the observation that conceptualizing Islamic Reform in terms of which personality has, or can have, the most influence is a flawed way of evaluating how change in Muslim societies takes place. Over the last year, while working closely with Muslim activists in various countries, I have learned that wherever in the Muslim world positive change occurs, it is not from the influence of a “personality.” Rather, it is a legislative, judicial or regulatory act, brought about – and this is something we Americans can appreciate – by pressure from the people. In other words, the way we in the West conceptualize “Islamic Reform” is upside down.

Where the Muslim world changes, it occurs because its citizenry, galvanized by every day activists and politicians trying to make a name for themselves, wants it changed, not because a personality with appeal (and in the West at that) tells Muslims to change. To be even more blunt: Muslim public opinion shapes clerical opinion, shapes the opinion of legislators, shapes the course of the change itself. When we in the West casually accept that the only way for successful change in the Muslim world is through a through a powerful religious “personality” – a Luther – we simply reinforce the same anachronistic tropes we have always held about Muslims: they are slaves to their imams.

Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, in most parts of the Muslim world, imams are the laughingstock. Second, reform is actually taking place in the Muslim world and “personalities” are simply not driving the change. Recognizing this might help explain why a majority of Americans never hear about the “successes” of Tariq Ramadan, Irshad Manji, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And We won’t. Ever. Cult of personality is not the answer, and we have to ask why we are such slaves to it.

My hypothesis is that we link Islamic reform to a personality instead of to a set of structural, legal and regulatory changes, for one simple reason: Bin Laden.

In 2001, he came on the scene, sitting in a cave, a total rebel. He talked not about Afghanistan versus the US but of Islam versus Satan. He was not bound by any norms applicable to anyone else. This was because he was a member of a state – the Taliban -- that didn’t exist. As such, he was one of the “dead” people of the world: a stateless man. Normally, becoming stateless is a great tragedy. But for Bin Laden, it added to his mystique. It allowed him to appear as if he was bigger than the rest of us, because he was beyond the rest of us, freer than the rest of us. When we couldn’t catch him, we figured we’d just contain him.

How? We imagined that if we could just get an anti Bin Laden, who could convince Muslims of everything that was opposite of what Bin Laden preached, we’d be straight. First we thought it would be Irshad Manji – the NYTimes called her “Bin Laden’s worst nightmare,” remember? Then we thought it was Ramadan, because he could sweet-talk Muslims. These days we think its Hirsi Ali, because she talks down to Muslims. Tomorrow we’ll think the anti-Bin Laden is someone else entirely. We keep running through our list of personalities trying all sorts of different combinations.

Yet, the fact is, the opposite of Bin Laden is not a person; it is an idea. That idea is called Islamic reform. And Islamic reform is not magic dust sitting somewhere in some heretofore undiscovered individual’s pocket, nor is it the act of rewriting a new Quran or coming up with dreamy visions of Islamic theology in which angels are androgynous and God is cupid. Islamic reform is a set of structural, political, and legal changes that occur within each individual Muslim majority nation-state; changes that will be brought about through political parties and other collectives of Muslims.

In short, if you want Muslim reformers, start looking for post-Islamist groups and political parties; Muslims who have figured out how to break the stranglehold of Islamist political theory upon Islam, and who want to work within the nation-state as opposed to outside of it.

These are days of woe for the New Republic, so let me be the first -- or last -- to congratulate the magazine for publishing the best moral argument for the Congressional passage of the Armenian Genocide resolution that I've yet read. Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today, nails it:

America remains the only country in the world with a universal constituency. Domestic politics in the United States often have a profound effect in every corner of the earth, from determining immigration flows and investment patterns to handing leaders and their heirs the excuses they crave to blur the lines between God and government.

[...]

The question for Americans ought to be: Since when is it wrong to speak out against genocide, however many years have elapsed? People of good conscience continued raising their voices against slavery in the United States well after abolition. Are they reckless or sinister for offending many Americans? In any event, is causing offense a reason to stop remembering?

Here is the question for Turks: Why should your history be immune to America's judgment when, according to surveys of global attitudes about the United States, you as a nation are among the most anti-American (read: judgmental) in all of the Muslim world?

Of course, these are precisely the considerations being sidelined by both the left and the right in favor of more urgent matters of foreign policy: the war in Iraq, winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, etc. But ask yourself: If the U.S. failed to rebuke an ally for its shameful record of denial and distortion about a 20th century atrocity, don't you think the same critics of the Armenian Genocide resolution would eventually use that failure as a cudgel against cynical American self-interest when it became convenient to do so? Of course they would.

The more one thinks about Fallows' Law (perhaps I should downgrade it to an Axiom, since he's only written one blog post about it), the more one sees how hollow it is. The U.S. makes decisions of international scope all the time that alienate other countries with which it otherwise maintains amicable relations. What can Turkey do out of umbrage for having had a parliamentary finger wagged in its face? Start sponsoring terrorism? That'd put a damper in its campaign against the PKK, wouldn it? Invade Iraq? That'd pit it militarily against a NATO ally and further diminish its chances for inclusion in the European Big Boys' Club.

In short, even the dread Nancy Pelosi comes out looking good on H.Res.106., if she sticks to her guns against Bush and company.

I said yesterday, w/r/t Iran, that one could tell a lot about a country by how it wages wars. Well, one can also tell a lot about a country by how it reacts to tough love. Guess who Turkey blames for the resolution? Come on, now... Try harder.

In an interview with the liberal Islamic Zaman newspaper on the eve of the resolution's approval October 10 by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said he had told American Jewish leaders that a genocide bill would strengthen the public perception in Turkey that "Armenian and Jewish lobbies unite forces against Turks." Babacan added, "We have told them that we cannot explain it to the public in Turkey if a road accident happens. We have told them that we cannot keep the Jewish people out of this."

The Turkish public seems to have absorbed that message.

An on-line survey by Zaman's English-language edition asking why Turks believed the bill succeeded showed that 22 percent of respondents chose "Jews' having legitimized the genocide claims" - second only to "Turkey's negligence."

But why did Yerevan State University bestow an honorary doctorate and a gold medal upon a politician, who has shown disregard to basic historical research and memory by denying the Holocaust of the Jews during WWII?

It is worth noting that one of the manifestations of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial is calling for further “impartial” studies on WWII. We have heard that very same argument regarding the Armenian genocide from Turkey and its allies.

I'll try to simplify as much as I can: A few years ago, the remaining Trotskyists in England teamed up with the swelling Islamists to form the RESPECT Party, or "Unity Coalition." The idea was to counter Tony Blair's New Labour and oppose the war in Iraq; at least, that's the idea that the media fell for. But if you've heard of this Halloween contingent at all, it's because it has managed to get exactly one member of Parliament elected, George Galloway, who is a kind of patchwork goblin himself, part Stalin, part Saladin.

Anyway, the delicious news is this: RESPECT is now imploding because the Trots are calling it quits. Turns out, Marxists don't really like theocrats who call for the murder of Jews, queers and apostates and the enslavement of women. (Who knew?)

My comrade David T at Harry's Place has been blogging furiously about this, but I think he hit pay-dirt today with this post, written by "Dave Dudley (Editor Leninist Vanguard – writing in a personal capacity)."

I can't tell which is funnier -- the content itself or the commenters at HP who aren't sure if it's a parody or not:

RESPECT has made huge strides in the past four years – taking on and defeating New Labour across its heartlands, bringing millions on to the streets to oppose imperialism, forging deep and lasting links between class conscious workers and the massed ranks of Celebrity Big Brother viewers.

George, (I’m on first name terms with him since he stopped talking to the SWP), has been an inspiration to us all and has led RESPECT out of the trenches of sectariana and into battle with the mainstream political parties – now the SWP has stabbed him in the back.

We have been warning George of this danger for several months (see my pamphlet 'On the Cliffite Threat') but initially, probably due to his Labourite-Stalinist bureaucratic-collectivist background, George was unable to see the dagger being drawn. Now though, George has woken up to find the knife hanging out of his back with the bloodstained hands of German and Rees all over it.

I am aware that some of our comrades in Leninist Vanguard have been alarmed by George’s recent derogatory comments about “Leninists” in RESPECT but I can assure you, having spoken personally with George about this, he was not referring to any of us. I quote: “No, don’t worry about it Dave, you’re a good lad”. In fact George bought me a samosa as we walked back from the Tower Hamlets branch meeting – a clear signal that the alliance we have forged remains strong.

Thousands of Venezuelan students took to the streets to protest Hugo Chavez's attempt to alter the country's constitution so that he can keep running for president indefinitely. Daniel Duquenal has details:

The march was held to ask the National Assembly to postpone the referendum until February 3 2008, because as anyone with enough common sense will admit, you did not discuss the validity of 70 constitutional amendments in 4 weeks. The very least would be to give at least one day of electoral campaign per amended article, no?

Of course as it is now usual the Nazional Guard across Venezuela now blocks any bus that goes toward Caracas for an opposition rally of any type. The only result as usual is propaganda points for the opposition and another black mark on a guard whose reputation is so low that even Chavez is trying to get rid of them, no matter how much they try to support Chavez fascism. Meanwhile the whole states of Carabobo and Aragua slided into a gigantic gridlock just because some stupid fat assed Nazional Guard tried to score brownie points with Chavez.

What's a fair indication that a fascist masquerading as a socialist has lost his "base"? When a student named Stalin says enough is enough:

"The message to the Congress and to the government is that there is ... a part of this country that rejects these reforms and we want to be heard," student leader Stalin Gonzalez told a local television station.

Izzy tells me an episode of 30 Rock already had oodles of fun with this, and every pundit a year ago was gibbering away at how easy it would be for, say, Hillary to accidentally say "Osama" when she meant her charismatic Democratic rival for the White House.

Still, this is pretty funnny:

“I think that is a position which is not consistent with the fact,” Mr. Romney said. “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”

The comment set off some confusion among the press corps. Glen Johnson of the Associated Press was momentarily frantically searching for comments made by Mr. Obama, another Democratic presidential contender, about jihadism and Iraq.

The last paragraph is almost a perfect Evelyn Waugh set-piece.

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UPDATE: Found the 30 Rock clip!