By Russell A. Berman · Friday, September 15, 2006 On September 12, Pope Benedict delivered an address at the University of Regensburg entitled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections.” The first part of the subtitle, “memories,” refers to the start of the speech, Benedict’s recollections of early years in his own academic career in Germany, which then sets the stage for a reflection on the place of theology within the university: that is to say, the relationship between faith and reason. The setting he invokes is one very much of modern universities, but in which theological faculties were still well integrated into the fabric of intellectual life.
The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God.
Benedict’s large concern in the address will become the unraveling of this fabric in western culture, but the prose of the passage is worth nothing: he cites the unnamed “colleague” and reports his lack of belief in the existence of God—Benedict presumably thinks otherwise.
This small act of citation, with its touch of humor at the outset, leads into another, more serious, which has become the bone of contention in Islamic condemnations of the speech. The head of the Turkish Religious Authority, Ali Bardakoglu, has demanded that Benedict take back his comments and accused him of a “crusader mentality.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, September 14, 2006 The fabled Shiite crescent stretches majestically from Mohammed Khatami’s unctuous propaganda of dialogue to the brutal rejectionism of Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah. The cultural message of the tyrant-as-intellectual is exposed by the latest outbursts of the Islamic fascist. Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” means Nasrallah’s anti-western attacks, including a hostility to the Lebanese government reminiscent of earlier fascist extremists’ opposition to the “system” of Weimar Germany.
First, Khatami at Harvard. In the meantime, we are learning more about the event and how bad it truly was. The former president used dialogue to deceive, while hiding behind the protection of language difference: he spoke in Farsi, with an English translator. This allowed him to please the crowd in Cambridge without offending his friends back in Teheran. As argued by Amir Taheri,
For example, Khatami would speak of khoshunat, which means “roughness,” but the interpreter would translate it into “violence” or even “terror.” Thus, the Harvard audience would think that Khatami admits that there may be terrorism in the realm of Islam – while back in Tehran, he would appear talking only about “roughness” and “coercion.”
His responses to questions about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not mention him by name—in Khatami’s Farsi answers. He could therefore seem to distance himself from Ahmadinejad’s positions in English, while in fact affirming them in Farsi. Quite a “dialogical” position!
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, September 13, 2006  The previous issue of Telos included a collection of articles concerned with one side of the totalitarian experience in Germany, the Nazi regime and some of its ramifications for political theory, philosophy, and historiography. This current issue, which rounds out the collection of essays organized by Amir Eshel and myself, was initially envisioned as a companion discussion of the second of the two evil twins, Communism, especially in East Germany. After all, the original theorization of totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt’s study on The Origins of Totalitarianism was based on a parallelism (but no simple equation) of Nazism and Communism, although her reference point in a study published in 1951 was of course Stalin’s Russia, not Ulbricht’s Germany. Yet this companion volume has not turned out to be a neatly delimited and symmetrical treatment of East German Communism, and it is worthwhile reflecting on this outcome.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, September 12, 2006 Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, on a controversial speaking tour through some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, has been served with a summons and faces a law suit for his role in the detention and imprisonment of Iranian Jews during the 1990s. As reported by PR Newswire,
On Friday [September 6] evening copies of the complaint and summons were served on Khatami at a reception in Arlington, Virginia hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Khatami has twenty days to file an answer denying the allegations or default the case.
This blog previously discussed the challenge Khatami faced at Harvard when a questioner confronted him with the arrest, rape and murder of Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi. This new revelation of Khatami’s role in persecuting Iran’s Jews only confirms the fraudulent character of his call for dialogue. Such make-believe dialogue is only the “human face” of the tyranny of the Iranian regime, a propaganda decoy designed to distract attention from the really-existing oppression, the character of which Khatami helped forge. Celebrating him at prestigious American venues and indeed the misguided decision to invite him are an embarrassment, especially in the context of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 11, 2006 In response to the publication of the “Euston Manifesto, in London,” a hard copy of which appears in Telos 136, a group of writers in the US co-authored “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto,” a link to which is posted at the top of the main page of this site. For technical reasons, discussion cannot take place there, but it is invited in the form of comments after this brief note.
The statement, like the original “Euston Manifesto,” speaks for itself as a restatement of liberal values in the current world situation. It describes the challenge posed by Islamic extremism as the key challenge of the age, and it calls for liberals not to cede this agenda to the conservative end of the political spectrum. This is where the situations in the UK and the US differ. In the UK, a Labor Prime Minister with extraordinary rhetorical and intellectual skills has been the proponent of an aggressive resistance to the jihadist forces increasingly described as “Islamo-fascist.” Politics in Blair’s England have had a distinctively different character than those in Bush’s America. The highly polarized situation in the US has encouraged parts of the liberal and left political spectrum to slide toward a neo-isolationism or what some call a return to McGovernism, with the potential for political marginalization. Meanwhile it has been the Republican President who has articulated a critique of a neo-totalitarian ideology and the imperative of a “war for civilization”—instead of a “clash of civilizations.” “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto” presents an argument for liberals to rise to the challenge of developing a foreign policy that includes consistent opposition to reactionary movements in the Middle East and that purposefully combines support for liberal-democratic values at home with advocacy of those values overseas as well.
The text displays clear signs of a range of opinions, from the center to the democratic left, with various judgments on current foreign policy. The authors agreed to disagree on some points in order to unite in this appeal. Nonetheless there remains plenty of room to continue discussion of those differences. You are invited to post your comments on the Euston texts here, or at the Euston site itself.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 11, 2006 Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami advocates a dialogue between civilizations, and Harvard defended its controversial decision to give him the prominent forum of the Kennedy School invitation because of the importance of the free exchange of ideas.
Yet Khatami evidently cannot tolerate dialogue within a civilization, i.e., free and open discourse within Iran; and Harvard has given a forum of freedom to freedom’s enemy.
This became painfully evident in a detail of the exchange following his speech. An Iranian in the audience questioned him about an egregious case of the suppression of free speech: the arrest, rape and murder of Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi.
Khatami’s propaganda mission has been to present a softer image of Iran to a West perplexed by the antics of his successor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet the material of this question was not immediately relevant to that project, since it involved an internal Iranian scandal—no matter how much it also involved Canada and the world public. “Dialogue between civilizations, but tyranny at home”—this seems to be Khatami’s motto. He offered no condemnation of Ahmadeinjad’s call to purge Iranian universities, no apology for his own role in the suppression of dissidents in Iran.
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