By Fred Siegel · Friday, October 20, 2006 Last Thursday, October 12, NYU sponsored a forum on “Religion and the Limits of Tolerance” in the Netherlands. On one side were Fritz Bolkestein, an articulate critic of Dutch immigration policy, and the now famed Hirsi Ali, the Somali and Muslim born Dutch woman whose criticism of Islam has produced Islamist death threats so that she’s been forced to live under guard. On the other side were the self-described Leftists, novelist Bas Heijne and NYU professor Tony Judt, who served as both moderator and participant.
Bolkestein, a large thick bodied man in his 60s with a shock of white hair, acknowledged that there should be “leeway for Islamic practices on matters such as slaughtering and burial practices, but not on basic values.” Using as his yardstick the UN Declaration of Human Rights, he said Western culture was far superior to a “fossilized Islam.” “I am judgmental,” he smiled, “I prefer New York to Philadelphia.” Noting that such statements led some to accuse him of “triumphalism,” he quipped that people in the third world shout “Yankee go home, but then add please take me with you.” His comment reminded me of a visit to the Arab village of Um El Fahem, which lies at the narrowest point in Israel right on the Israeli-Palestinian border. It’s a well to do town of beautiful red tiled roofs atop three and four story houses. When I asked the mayor, who is an Islamist, if he wanted, as had been suggested by Israeli rightists, to join Palestine as part of land swap, he replied, “No, we have a very high standard of living here.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, October 19, 2006 Today’s NYT editorializes against the European discussion of the use of the veil by Muslim women. First Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, and then both Tony Blair and Romano Prodi have made statements, critical of the veil as a hindrance to assimilation. The Times knows better.
First, the editorial marginalizes the question of the veil with the transparent rhetorical ploy of minimization: ” . . . one has to wonder how many [veiled women] are regularly encountered by Jack Straw . . . or any other Briton.” If it’s not widespread, we need not be concerned? Alright, let’s apply the same standard to the Times: one has to wonder how many veiled women participate in the editorial board discussions. So few? Well then what do these people know about it?
In a second move, the NYT runs away from the veil and expands the topic: “The issue in need of serious discussion is not the niqab—the veil that covers all but a woman’s eyes—but the larger question of the place of Europe’s Muslim minority.” This is no doubt the case: context matters, but the expansion of the topic is a rhetorical strategy to avoid the matter at hand. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner. Any specific issue can disappear by putting a frame around it: this is liberalism, after all. Still, just because the NYT makes a claim does not mean that it’s wrong.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, October 19, 2006 While the Western press has devoted considerable attention to the situation of prisoners in Guantanamo and in Iraq, hardly any reports of the situation in Iran circulate. Articles on inmates in the Islamic Republic apparently do not sell papers. Clearly, the rights of prisoners are viewed as a function of electoral politics: since stories of Iranian prisons will not detract from Republican support in November, the New York Times et al. do not consider it newsworthy. The inconsistency is glaring.
If you won’t talk about Evrin prison in Tehran, then don’t talk to me about Guantanamo.
But the “anti-imperialist sentiment” current in liberal and left circles is prepared to jettison every one of its principles in order to celebrate, or at least apologize for, regimes deemed to be opposed to US hegemony: no matter how egregious their abuses.
Reports from Iran Press News are mixed. The student leader, Ahmad Batebi has been released—but after 79 days in solitary confinement and a hefty bail.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, October 18, 2006 At this point, it seems that the grand diplomacy around North Korea has led to another illusion of solution. Diplomacy means finding language that simulates action and therefore prevents it. What is to be done? Nothing. North Korea faces sanctions, which, apparently, may not be enforced; a warning with no consequences. Of course, the North Koreans and their illustrious leader may test again and (possibly) provoke a genuine reaction, but for now they face just the Potemkin village of UN anger.
Which brings us back to Lebanon, and the success of diplomacy there. The much touted European military force, it is now clear, has no intention of disarming Hezbollah. Its value is solely semiotic, a display of a sign, showing the flag. Again, a pretense of action is the outcome of diplomacy. The irrational is the real. In fact, however, matters are worse. The Syrians are shipping arms into Lebanon (despite the UN resolution—are we not shocked?) so UNIFIL is actually just guarding the rearmament process. To the extent that Israel intervenes to block that rearmament, it may find itself at odds with . . . France.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, October 16, 2006 The real impact of the Khatami lecture at Harvard, discussed previously in this blog, is now clear: he has been invited to deliver an address and receive an honorary doctorate at St. Andrews in Scotland. The Harvard gig, in other words, was a vehicle to lend him credibility as the poster boy of the Iranian regime. Whitewashed in Cambridge, he can now move on to the European lecture circuit. One more pretty face? The point was never to engage in a genuine dialogue of cultures, as the useful idiots explained his visit; it has only been about the propagandistic outreach from Teheran and the variously motivated western factions who are eager to collaborate.
To those who misrepresent Khatami as a reformist, one can only ask: where has he ever criticized the current regime directly? When has he called for a release of the political prisoners, including student leaders (for whom, arguably, university communities might have a particular interest)? Or—as proposed here earlier—had he wished sincerely for reconciliation with the United States, why did he not visit the survivors of the 1979 embassy seizure and ask for their forgiveness? But: no truth and no reconciliation.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, October 14, 2006 The action of the French National Assembly, to criminalize any statements that deny that the mass killings of Armenians during and after the First World War constituted genocide, raises many problems, but foremost among them is the threat to free speech.
To be sure, this bill is not yet law, and it may never become law. While the vote was lopsided in favor (106 to 19), most of the 577-member chamber did not vote at all. Nor is it likely that the proposal will proceed successfully through the upper house or be adopted by the Chirac government, which has criticized it. When all is said and done, this may have only been an electoral ploy by the Left (which supported the bill): it is a way to jump on the popular bandwagon against the expansion of the EU to include Turkey, without fishing in the racist waters of the far right or adopting theological arguments about a Christian Europe. It’s ideologically easier to irritate the Turks through a symbolic gesture about Armenia, in the hope that an irritated Turkey will then turn away from Europe.
Or perhaps the French socialists were just angling for the Armenian vote (a large community in France).
Nonetheless the matter needs to be taken on face-value as well. Whatever the ulterior motives, the important chamber of a major parliamentary democracy has now declared certain speech acts, historical claims, to be so inimical to the values of society that they would warrant incarceration and a significant monetary fine. This was not a matter of the National Assembly declaring its own esteemed understanding of early twentieth-century history in a hypothetical statement that might have condemned the genocide. Nor does this involve a judgment on statements of whether or not the killings took place (as in standard Holocaust denial). Rather, the newly defined crime would involve the articulation of doubts as to whether such killing “rose” to the level of genocide. While—to make my position clear—this author accepts the historiographical consensus that the catastrophe that befell the Armenians was indeed genocide, the logic of freezing such debate through a criminalization of expressions of alternative opinion seems dangerous indeed. Dangerous because it will necessarily poison the atmosphere around this question between Turks and Armenians; dangerous because it sets a precedent of providing legislative sanction to matters of historiographical judgment; but also, and most importantly dangerous because the august stage of the National Assembly of the French Republic has now become the most prominent venue to date on which the value of free speech has come under such systematic attack.
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