ussing the present crisis of identity in the West. Specifically in Europe, there is a crisis of the nation state, because of globalisation and European integration. What does it mean now to be Dutch, French or British? We are confronted with the crisis of national identity, and we tend to blame Islam.’
Where would we be without sociologists?
A musical written by Eric Idle and based on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is about to open in Chicago before moving on to Broadway. Dave Eggers (of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” fame) explains in this interview and this article why he’s a Python fan. As was Elvis apparently: known to quote Idle’s “Nudge Nudge” skit to his friends.
I’m quite happy to read of Americans praising British humour, but one of the key differences between US and British comedy is that generally we know when to quit. The Pythons, to their credit, moved on – or at least all of them did except Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. Chapman took the Peter Cook route and drank himself to death, but Idle has been living off Python ever since. Spamalot – presumably the title is a not-so-subtle reference to the Pythons’ main claim to linguistic immortality – sounds a terrible idea. Mind you, a West End revival of Mary Poppins sounds a terrible idea but it’s opened to rave reviews, so what do I know.
Interesting interview with Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on “experiencing European Anti-Americanism and Anti-Israelism” (via David’s Medienkritik):
Gedmin considers that since 2002 it has been simultaneously the most interesting as well as the worst time to be an American in Berlin. He expressed public support for the war in Iraq in German newspaper columns and in television interviews. In a methodological approach to assessing today’s confused situation, Gedmin believes that vignettes often illuminate it best. They put key issues more in focus than detailed analysis might do.
“As a Catholic I was struck by the amount of virulently anti-Semitic hate letters and email I received. There were many dozens of items. I was called a ‘Jewish war criminal,’ a ‘Jewish pornographer.’ Pardon my language, but more than once, these texts stated that I was a ‘Jew fucker’ or ‘a son of a whore, who should be covered with napalm.’
“During the last two years in Berlin I was publicly insulted, heckled, and refused service in a restaurant because I supported the war to remove Saddam Hussein. Once I was sitting on a bench in Berlin, in front of the famous Adlon Hotel. Three young men recognized me as someone who supported this war, and heckled me from a distance. They were nicely dressed twenty-something youngsters in polo shirts, not skinheads. They said, ‘You’re not wanted here. You don’t belong here. Why don’t you get out of this country?’ It made a deep impression on me.
It took me a while, reading Marc Cooper’s post about the suicide of journalist Gary Webb, to realise why the name rang a bell: he was the guy back in 1996 who broke the story about the Contra link to the crack cocaine flooding into Los Angeles. His series, in the San Jose Mercury (later published as “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion“), explained how “a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” At first the story went nowhere, but under public pressure – especially from outraged black politicians – the press heavyweights like the Washington Post and the LA Times weighed in, and dumped all over Webb and the Mercury. The evidence for CIA involvement turned out to be thin, but Webb did make it as a hero of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair’s highly entertaining “Whiteout“.
Cooper’s first post on Webb has all the details, which don’t reflect well on the mainstream press.
l1501.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/12/15/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=74293″>editorial ( via Backword Dave) surely gets it right:
Until we hear the case against Mr Griffin – if any is to be brought to court – there are three observations that ought to be made. First, why did the West Yorkshire police think it necessary to send four plain-clothes policemen to arrest the BNP leader at dawn at his farmhouse on the Welsh border, in the week before Christmas? Here is a man who has never made any secret of his longing to be arrested, and to have his martyr’s day in court.
The police say that, since July, a team of officers has been working 10 hours a day, five days a week, watching videos handed to them by the BBC. Is there so little crime in West Yorkshire that they have nothing better to do with their time?
The second observation is that it is a very serious matter to arrest the leader of a political party for stating his opinions – no matter how unpleasant we may find them, or how misguided we may think the 800,000-odd voters who backed the BNP at the European elections in the summer.
The third is that there are surely far more effective ways of silencing Mr Griffin and his kind than the law and the threat of prison. The most effective weapons in the liberal arsenal are argument, scorn and public ridicule.
t, with no modern precedent and registration not even begun in Sunni areas plagued by violence. […]
Data from US polling organisations indicates that secular parties — such as that of the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi National Accord — will take about 60 per cent and Islamic parties 40 per cent. But the dynamics are complex. One international observer said that while Kurds and Shias are united in seeking punishment of former Baathists — and will be heartened by the announcement yesterday that senior Saddam lieutenants will appear in court next week — the Kurds have sided with Sunnis in wanting to prevent Shia hegemony. “What you are seeing is very unusual in the Arab world. I don’t think I have seen anything this dynamic in terms of political negotiation and bartering,” one Western diplomat said. “Everything is wide open.”
Another complicating factor is that the Shia vote is not a monolithic bloc.
The well-organised Islamic parties — notably Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — will undoubtedly mobilise their Iraqi voters, boosted, sceptics allege, by Iranian ringers. The council dismisses allegations of undue influence from Tehran, where many of its members were exiled during Saddam’s era.
Saad Jawwad, head of the council’s political office in Baghdad, said that its post-election priorities were to write a constitution, ensure participation by all and to work “with all Iraqis for the interests of Iraq”.
However, many resent the power of the Islamic groups.
Senior police officials and ordinary Shias in Basra told The Times that the factions’ shadowy militias regularly enforce their hardline brand of Islam by gun. Middle-class Iraqis accustomed to a secular life under Saddam have no desire to see Khomeini-style rule imported from Iran, and appear likely to vote in large numbers for secular parties such as Mr Allawi’s.
“I’m not going to vote for someone who is killing people just because they sell beer or music CDs. They are a bunch of thugs,” Abdul Sahib, a taxi driver, said.
The Economist reports on the continuing repression in Iran (via Oxblog):
In the past few months detentions have swelled of “bloggers” who have set up internet sites, which the state has taken great trouble to block. A number of well-known campaigners for human rights have been prevented from going abroad or arrested on their return. Human Rights Watch, an independent lobby group, said this week that “secret squads operating under the authority of the Iranian judiciary have used torture to force internet journalists and civil-society activists to write self-incriminatory confession letters”.
The clampdown seems to be working. Many of the liberal and sophisticated professionals of northern Tehran, downcast by Mr Khatami’s failure, seem to have withdrawn into a private life behind the walls of their villas. Many are emigrating, at an estimated rate of 200,000 a year, especially to the United States (where there may be 800,000 Iranians), Canada (perhaps the most popular destination), Britain, France and Australia. […]
The one thing everyone knows is that Iran is in a jam. Above all, plainly, there is a crisis of legitimacy. Only half of Iranians bothered to vote in February’s election; not much more than a quarter of those in Tehran, which embraces at least 8m people, turned out. Western diplomats reckon that barely 15% of Iranians still support the ruling order. The low turnout reflected not just apathy and fatalism, which are indeed strong. Many sour and embittered Iranians consciously decided not to go to the polls as a gesture of protest.
But despite the unpopularity of the regime, and the poor state of the economy, there’s seems little hope for change in the short term:
Is there a Gorbachev elsewhere among the mullahs? It is an unlikely prospect, but the inner workings of Iran’s clerical establishment are mysterious and supremely opaque. Mr Khamenei’s standing, such as it is, has fallen—even, it is said, among the clergy. The opposition, at present, is numb. Only if the price of oil, say, halved, and the economy really dived would the anger and frustration well up again and bring people out on the street. And so long as that does not happen, the Iranians are miserably stuck with what they’ve got.
Meanwhile life goes on as normal:
A teenage girl with a mental age of eight is facing the death penalty for prostitution in Iran. The trial comes only four months after the hanging of another mentally ill girl for sex before marriage in a case that has prompted a human rights lawyer to prepare a charge of wrongful execution against the presiding judge.
The girl, known as Leyla M, is in prison while the Supreme Court decides on her “acts contrary to chastity”, among the most serious charges under Iranian law. Under the penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be executed.
In an interview on a Persian-language website, the 19-year-old says she was forced into prostitution by her mother at the age of eight. Amnesty International refers to reports that say she was repeatedly raped, bore her first child aged nine and was passed from pimp to pimp before having another three children.
Theo van Gogh ran a website, De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker). Dutch blogger in Vancouver Pieter Dorsman at Peaktalk has translated some of the more interesting stuff, in this post. Well worth a read.
mains true that the promotion of democracy by the United States has proved to be a dependably good idea. America may be more unpopular than ever before, but its hegemony really has coincided with a democratic revolution around the world. For the first time in history, a majority of the world’s peoples live in democracies. In a dangerous time, this is about the best news around, since democracies, by and large, do not fight one another, and they do not break up into civil war. As a result — and contrary to the general view that the world is getting more violent — ethnic and civil strife have actually been declining since the early 1990’s, according to a study of violent conflicts by Ted Robert Gurr at the University of Maryland. Democratic transitions can be violent — when democracy came to Yugoslavia, majority rule at first led to ethnic cleansing and massacre — but once democracies settle in, once they develop independent courts and real checks and balances, they can begin to advance majority interests without sacrificing minority rights.
sed at five – if you want the gory details of what female circumcision involves, by the way, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look them up. She fled from an arranged marriage at 22. She overcame enormous handicaps to become a Dutch MP and, as free men and women are entitled to do, decided she didn’t believe in God. Needless to add her secularism made her dangerous enemies, and the police had to protect her from Islamists. Their guard was increased when the killer stuck a five-page letter addressed to her to van Gogh’s body with a dagger.
In the 20th century, feminists had a little success in persuading Western liberals that women should be treated as independent creatures whose intelligence ought to be respected. But these small gains can go out of the window when brown-skinned women contradict the party line that religious fundamentalism is all the fault of poverty or racism or Bush or Israel and isn’t an autonomous totalitarian ideology with a logic of its own. Jayasekera dismissed Ali as if she was some silly geisha girl. That her experience of mutilation and abuse could be expected to inform her mature thinking didn’t occur to him. She was a traumatised fool who had allowed a white man to manipulate her into an ‘exploitative working relationship’.
And, in answer to Blunkett’s sorry arguments:
Why not go along with the new tough liberalism and, as David Blunkett is suggesting, make it a criminal offence to incite religious hatred? There are plenty of reasons why not; many were well made in the Commons last week, but MPs didn’t point out that when society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to the priests and the devout for whom religion does indeed matter most.
To their shame, many on the left have broken with the Enlightenment to perform this manoeuvre. They have ridden the Islamic wave and agreed to convert one billion people into ‘the Muslims’. A measure of their bad faith is that they would react with horror if this trick was pulled on them, and they were turned into ‘the Christians’ whose authentic representatives were the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘Dr’ Ian Paisley.
With an equal inevitability they have reinforced the very Islamophobic stereotype they claim to oppose and betrayed their comrades in the Arab world and in their own countries on an epic scale. Index on Censorship ‘s dismissal of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is scarcely novel. The supposedly socialist Stop the War coalition has dismissed the Iraqi Kurds, who were the darlings of the left when Saddam was America’s ally, and all the Iraqi communists, socialists and democrats who want free elections. Instead they told the beheaders and bomb-planters from the Islamist far right and the remnants of Saddam’s fascist Baath Party, that they should fight with ‘whatever means they find necessary.’