By Adrian Pabst · Saturday, January 12, 2008 Last Sunday Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, published a controversial article in The Sunday Telegraph, linking Muslim immigration and multiculturalism to the loss of the Christian culture that, in his words, “made Britain great.”
Unsurprisingly, the political and religious establishment reacted in entirely predictable ways. Politicians from both right and left condemned his remarks for being divisive and excessive. Religious figures, especially some representatives of the Muslim community, accused the Bishop of scaremongering in the face of Christianity’s decline in the UK. In either case, the implicit charge is that his analysis is one-sided and that it feeds the growing Islamophobia that apparently threatens the country’s unity and cohesion.
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By B. Venkat Mani · Sunday, December 30, 2007 State-sponsored suppression of political opposition is the first step for a polity’s regression to political tyranny. Use of terror and torture without recourse to trial is the second. Use of extremist forces to kill political opponents is the third and final step to assure the death of democracy. Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), the former prime minister of Pakistan, was well aware of all three steps when she boldly opposed General Parvez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and suspension of human rights and free speech in Pakistan on November 3, 2007. Ms. Bhutto’s political career was shaped by the struggle between populist and absolutist power, and informed by the moderate and extremist ideologies, that often threatened to obstruct democratic lifelines of Pakistan. These struggles were rehearsed within the family as they were performed on the public stage. Her father and political mentor was the former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), who was executed in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a political opponent. Her brother Murtaza opposed her allegedly ambitious “misrepresentation” of their father’s democratic political legacy; a family dispute that led to her brief political falling-out with her mother Nusret in the early 90s. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari—one of the main reasons for her last departure from Pakistan in 1999—faced many charges of corruption and political opposition on grounds of abuse of spousal power.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, December 29, 2007 Telos 141: Nature and Terror is available in our store.
 Classical figures of thought endure. A long-standing image of the health of nature contrasts the bucolic landscape with the corruption of the city, where violence abounds. The only security is a natural way of life, far from the brutal metropolis—until nature turns out to be a threat, and we succumb to the uncontrollable fear named for that destructive god: panic. The state of nature is the homeland of violence, its only law the law of the jungle, as we scurry back to the city to find security—until it morphs into the security state. Critical Theory described this dynamic as a sometimes too narrow narrative of domination: the human mastery of nature, in the interest of self-preservation, turns into the mastery of humanity by an encompassing machinery of control. This is an old story, but it comes to us anew in this political season, in which nature and terror—the anxieties about the environment and fear of terrorism, as well as the reaction to it—haunt us, in public and in private.
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By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, December 9, 2007 Whether correctly or not, the National Intelligence Estimate has been read (or misread) and seized upon by the press as claiming that Iran no longer has nuclear ambitions. Happy Days are Here Again, and the pre-election season is spiced up with this one more seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the mendacity of the administration.
Or maybe not so incontrovertible. Neither the French nor the British seem inclined to back down from their hard line on sanctions, effectively dismissing the findings of the American “intelligence” community. On the contrary, they have reaffirmed their concerns about Iranian ambitions, and even Putin has strengthened his position on sanctions. It’s as if the NIE has no credibility outside of Pulitzered op-ed pages and the circles where those pages are avidly celebrated in Tehran.
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The release of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, from incarceration in Iran is an encouraging development. But the international community is still pondering what to do about Iran. Western leaders have not found a suitable means of responding to Iran’s nuclear program, support of insurgents in the Iraq war and Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of the alternatives now being publicly discussed seem promising. Either the West can use a military intervention to compel Iran to change its behavior or attempt to pressure Iran through diplomacy. But the West, and particularly the United States, appears to have little leverage with the current Iranian leadership—which has historically depended upon demonizing the West for legitimacy, while prohibiting internal dissent to guarantee stability. With the United States and NATO fully committed in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, there is no military force capable of conquering and controlling Iran. Moreover, a military strike against Iran would prove that the hyperbolic rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was correct, and his many critics would likely rally around his leadership in order to protect their nation. It would be, in fact, the worst possible decision.
Perhaps there is a strategy that the West could pursue toward Iran, akin to one that worked well in undermining the totalitarian government of Czechoslovakia: the example of Charter 77. Charter 77 was a human rights group founded by a politically diverse group of Czech and Slovak dissidents who openly signed a petition insisting that the communist government live up to its own legal and international obligations to protect human rights. Charter members, such as Václav Havel—who later became president of the country—maintained that Charter 77 was not—at least not overtly—a political opposition that formally challenged communist one-party rule. Rather, the Chartists defined themselves as a human rights movement that by its very existence helped to create a parallel polis—and widen social space for authentic existence outside to and independent of the dictates of the state. Despite its apolitical principles, the government actively prosecuted Charter 77, some of whom were given long jail sentences. Yet Charter 77 persisted and never collapsed. In 1989, when fortuitous circumstances allowed communism to unravel in Czechoslovakia, Charter 77, reborn as Civic Forum, became the nexus of an opposition, and later formed the first non-communist government, committed to establishing democratic institutions—including the rule of law, an independent judiciary, private ownership, and free and independent media. Thus the “parallel polis” of the communist era was to serve as a model for a functioning civil society in a healthy and consolidated democracy.
Could such a model of supporting a human rights opposition work in Iran? To fully answer that question we must consider what happened in Iraq, where no legitimate opposition was capable of taking the reigns of government when Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Evidently, U.S. policy makers expected that the prospect of “free and fair” elections would produce legitimate and capable rulers. But thirty years of ruthless dictatorship and an American intervention strategy based on a misguided belief that average Iraqis would see occupiers as liberators, robbed Iraqis of a legitimate home-grown opposition movement or nascent civil society. Amidst the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, social trust defaulted to tribal identity or sect. Only in Kurdistan, where an opposition leadership was able to develop under the protection of a U.N. mandate and American airpower, have civil institutions been established.
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By Kenneth Anderson · Sunday, November 18, 2007 Two weeks ago, on October 31, a court in Madrid handed down verdicts in the March 11, 2004, Atocha train station bombings that killed 191 people and wounded over 2,000 others. They were, on any standard of substantive justice, a major disappointment—three murder convictions out of 28 defendants, others convicted, barely, on far lesser charges, such as weapons possession, or minor conspiracies, or mere membership in a terrorist organization.
The court, it must be said, acted scrupulously within the confines of the Spanish criminal code. It excluded vast amounts of hearsay evidence, for example, collected from tapped telephone conversations in Italy, which was subject to much debate about Arabic translation, reliability, and provenance. The problem is that any outside observer, looking objectively at the pile of circumstantial evidence and not from the standpoint of that very special social game known as the criminal law, would have reasonably concluded that those being tapped, and many, indeed overwhelmingly likely nearly everyone on trial, had something culpable, big or small, to do with the terrorist plot.
We accept that freely, if not happily, in the case of ordinary criminality. Part of the reason we do so, however, is that we understand that the stakes are not as high in ordinary criminality as they are in the case of jihadist terrorists bent on suicide and mass murder. We accept—and should accept—a high standard of proof in order to protect the innocent in ordinary criminality, although a few minutes’ conversation with any public defender will suffice to show that in reality, there are relatively few genuinely innocent criminal defendants out there. They exist and deserve all the protections Western systems of justice offer—and, as the Duke lacrosse case demonstrates—in our ordinary justice system, the prosecutor has too much power and too much discretion.
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