By Anton Oleinik · Wednesday, October 11, 2006 The recent acknowledgment that the US runs a network of secret prisons where terrorist suspects have been held outside any legal regime produces a sense of déjà vu for those familiar with Russian society. At the beginning of his tenure, the Russian president made a very similar statement about his resolve to fight terrorists everywhere—including in the dark of Russian public toilets. The effect of déjà vu is strengthened when one looks at a number of other aspects of social, political and economic life in Russia and the US.
We become more and more similar—for worse or for better?
One of the basic indicators of social “health,” the level of generalized trust shows negative trends both in Russia and the US. While about a half of Americans in the early 1970s believed that most personally unknown people can be trusted, their number shrank below 40% in the 1990s to reach the current low of 31.5% in 2002. The intensity of communitarian life, this social fabric of civil society, has decreased accordingly.
Very similar trends have been observed in Russia since the late 1980s, i.e., since the start of reforms that aimed at opening the society towards the outside world. While more than a half of Russians were of opinion that most people can be trusted in 1989, this number has sharply declined by more than a half toward the end of the 1990s.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, October 10, 2006 A lecture by Tony Judt on “Israel Lobby,” scheduled to take place at the Polish consulate in New York, was cancelled. The report in the New York Sun attributes the decision to the incompatibility of Judt’s increasingly bitter critique of Israel and the growing rapprochement between the Polish and Israeli governments:
“It is a diplomatic post. Whatever is organized here should be in compliance with Poland’s foreign policy,” the deputy consul general of Poland in New York, Marek Skulimowski, said. “The consulate is not a Hyde Park, it’s not a discussion club, it’s a consulate.” Mr. Skulimowski said that Mr. Judt had been “very critical” of Israel, while the president of Poland had just made a warm visit to Israel a few weeks ago.
In contrast, Judt, who was to speak on the thesis of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that an Israeli Lobby directs US foreign policy, evidently also believes that a similar lobby controls the scheduling decisions of the Polish consulate:
Judt . . . blamed the Anti-Defamation League and [the ADL National Director] Mr. [Abraham] Foxman for the cancellation. “The pressure was brought by the ADL,” Mr. Judt said. “They had no choice. Foxman had been leaning on the consulate all afternoon.”
In fact, Judt has only recently had a high-profile opportunity to debate his points not far away in Cooper Union. The arguments of Mearsheimer, Walt and Judt reportedly did not fare very well.
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By James V. Schall · Monday, October 9, 2006 The Washington Times recently (August 12) published a useful and insightful Editorial, “It’s Fascism,” that I will use to comment on this nomenclature. First, the Editorial points out the gradual change in President Bush’s designation of the enemy. He, with Mr. Blair, began using the word “terrorist,” but more recently he has used the designation “fascist.” “Is this a legitimate use?” the Editorial asks itself. Fascism, it continues, is a “political philosophy” that exalts a group or nation over the individual. It could also imply a religion. Fascism promoted central rule, subordinated individuals to “political leadership.” The term thus can legitimately be used to designate those responsible for the recent “terrorist” understandings of themselves.
The Editorial identifies groups like “al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas” and other organizations as “fascist,” that is, they operate in effect on these principles. “Non-Muslims” are regarded as “a lesser breed of expendable or contemptible dhimmis and infidels.” Social and economic restrictions are placed on every group that does not conform to the ruling power. The Editorial says that “this is not mainstream Islam. . . . It is a corruption of the faith.”
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By James V. Schall · Sunday, October 8, 2006 The war in which we are currently engaged confuses us, in part because many will not admit it is a war. We do not know what to call it. Nor do we know what to call the self-declared enemy who has been attacking us in one form or another for some twenty-five years, ever more visibly and dangerously since September 11, 2001, with subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Spain, London, Bombay, Bali, Paris, Lebanon, and Israel. Those there are who insist that it is not a “war” at all but perhaps, at best, a police issue, no big problem. Others contend that it is a result of American or Western expansionism so that its cure is simply for us to return to our frontiers and be content with what we have. If we do this withdrawal, every threat will immediately cease at this point. No, in another view, it is due to poverty and oppression, even though most of the perpetrators of the war are quite rich. Yet another interpretation is that this turmoil stems from a very small minority with no relation to national or religious origins, a kind of floating international brigade of bandits, like the Mafia, out for their own profit and glory. The variants on these themes are almost infinite.
What names should we use that will accurately define and designate the cause? Calling things by their right names is the first requirement of reality; refusing to do so, the first cause of confusion, if not defeat. At first, we were told that the war is against something called “terrorism.” Its perpetrators were logically called “terrorists.” It was considered “hate-language” to call them anything else. However, we find listed on no map a place called “Terroritoria,” where said “terrorists” otherwise dwell in peace plotting our demise. It has no capital, no military uniform for its mostly invisible troops, no rules of combat. In this designation, some difficult ensues when we try to identify or designate a group that just wants to “terrorize” others, as if that is an explanation. Some may like to travel or to fish for pleasure; they like “terror” for terror’s sake, just a question of taste.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, October 6, 2006 Robert Redeker’s essay on Islam and the Free World has been discussed here during the past two days. Its publication in Le Figaro on September 19 led to a wave of death threats against the author that have forced him into hiding. The advocate of free speech—the key theme of his essay—has lost his freedom. Here two documents characterizing recent developments: a letter by Redeker to André Glucksmann and excerpts from the editorial of Le Monde of October 1.
A Letter of Robert Redeker to André Glucksmann
Dear André,
Bonjour.
I am now in a catastrophic personal situation. Numerous and very precise death threats have been sent to me, and I have been condemned to death by organizations of Al-Qaeda. The Anti-Terrorist Coordinating Force [UCLAT] and the Bureau of Territorial Surveillance [DST] are involved, but . . . I no longer have the right to stay in my home (the websites where I am condemned to death include a map describing how to get to my house to kill me; there is a photograph of me and the places where I work, with telephone numbers, along with the declaration of condemnation). At the same time, I have no place to go, I am obliged to wander, two nights here, two nights there . . . I am under constant police protection. I have to cancel all my planned talks. And the authorities oblige me to keep me moving. I have become homeless. A terrible financial situation results, since all these costs are my responsibility, including the possibility of having to rent somewhere far from here, the costs of two households, legal fees, etc. . . . It is terribly sad. I exercised my constitutional right, and I have been punished for it, on the very soil of the Republic. This affair is also an attack on our national sovereignty: foreign laws, decided by fanatic criminophiles, punish me for having exercised a French constitutional right, and even in France, I must suffer great damage.
In friendship
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, October 5, 2006 The circumstances around the publication of Redeker’s article in Le Figaro of September 19 were discussed in a prior blog, as was the first half of the essay. In the second half Redeker addresses the question of violence in religion, particularly in Islam, but with reference to the status of violence—and their surpassing—in Judaism and Christianity as well. The argument proceeds through three levels: a characterization of the founding prophecy and the figure of the prophet in Islam; a discussion of the anthropological standing of a central ritual in Islam; and finally a comparative treatment of violence in the three Abrahamic traditions.
Redeker draws briefly on the work of Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist historian of Islam, known especially for his book on Mohammed (and additionally one of the initial sources for a theory of “Islamic fascism). The portrait Redeker paints is far from complimentary, including quotations from Rodinson that convey “some truths that are as important as they are tabooed in France.” These include the recounts of Mohammed’s early militarism, his reliance on a private army, the attacks on caravans, the destruction of Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula, as well as his marital practices.
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