Progress in Iraq

Dave Price:  This Is What Real Political Progress Looks Like

Plus this from Michael Hirsh at Newsweek:

Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass. That notorious battle, which took place in Tunisia in late February 1943, marked the first large-scale encounter between untested American troops and the battle-hardened Germans. The Americans, to put it mildly, did not do well. But they quickly fired incompetent commanders, adjusted in tactics, and never lost another major battle. In Basra the nascent Iraqi Army—also riddled with incompetence and self-doubt—actually came out looking better against Iraq's well-established militias than the American Army had 65 years earlier against the entrenched Nazis, says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "At Kasserine we got our asses kicked. These people didn't," McCaffrey says. Despite a spate of early grim assessments of Basra in the U.S. media, U.S. military observers on the ground in Iraq are more sanguine, says McCaffrey, who has long been a critic of the war.

Remembering MLK

On a side note, sorry if posting from me remains light for the next couple of weeks.  He probably didn't mean academia when he wrote it, but T. S. Eliot was on to something when he wrote that "April is the cruelest month."  At the moment I'm swamped with research papers, a stack of books to get through before the end of the month, chairing a panel at a conference, grad school committee priorities, conducting research on two different projects, and writing a couple of academic book reviews.  I think it was Prof. Schaff who once remarked to me that grad school was boot camp for academics.  I find the experience very enjoyable and rewarding, but it's hard to argue with his perspective.

Hildebrand and Obama v. Hillary in North Dakota

Obama's campaign is criticizing Clinton before his visit to Grand Forks:  "'Barack has the ability to expand the map for democrats if he is the nominee,' said Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand."

SDP Jazz Note: The Sad but Natural End of Record Stores

I just read another obituary for a great book store: Duttons, in the Los Angeles Times.  It struck home, as sometime in the next few days I will be visiting the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago.  It is a wonderful place for jazz nerds like me, and it is probably not long for this earth. 

The independent bookstore is almost gone.  The record store, independent or otherwise, is history.  The business model that works these days is that of Barnes and Noble, Borders, and their low budget competitors, Hastings and Books A Million.  These chains have cornered the market on books, CDs, and DVDs.  Privileged, pretty people in urban Bohemias can cry all they want, but the chains have brought books and music to places like Saint Joseph  Missouri and Jonesboro Arkansas, where once there were only paperback racks and card shops. 

The other thing that has done in the record store and quaint little book store is, of course, the internet.  In the last few years I have put together a jazz library that would have been impossible, at almost any price, a few decades ago.  Last Christmas I gave my brother a great gift: Amon Duul II, Hijack, a German rock group CD.  I snagged the last copy from an independent store on the Web, after years of trying to find it.  He couldn't quite believe his eyes when he tore off the rapping paper.  It is stupid not to recognize this as progress.  At least when it comes to recorded music, we are far richer than any generation in history.  I am sure the same is true for books. 

Obama's Abortion Extremism

In today's Washington Post, Michael Gerson examines what he calls Barack Obama's "abortion extremism." 

But Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called "too close to infanticide." Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

On this and on other issues Obama seems to have bought into the Thanatos Syndrome that typifies the age.

McCain on Letterman Last Night

Thune and His Roots in South Dakota

Don't miss this lengthy Black Hills Pioneer story entitled "Man from Murdo: Senator Thune is on national stage but his hometown ties still run very deep," which includes some thoughts on his name coming up in the VP discussions.  Best line in the story:

Heavy snow forced Thune to cancel an appearance in Spearfish and delayed his arrival in Rapid City.

“I apologize for being a little bit late,” Thune said. “But when we landed out here at the airport, we were taking a little sniper fire.”

An Alternative Candidate for President

Light Blogging Ahead

Professor Schaff and I are off to the Midwest Political Science Association Meeting, and so blogging may be light in the days ahead. 

Susan Orr Appointed Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs

Why is that worth blogging about?  Mostly because Susan is a buddy of mine since Grad School.  She is also, according to the following article, the locus of all evil:

Family planning advocates denounced President Bush’s appointment of a contraceptive critic to be head of the federal program responsible for providing birth control and other family planning services to the poor.

Dr. Susan Orr, an associate commissioner at the Department of Health and Human Services, was named by Mr. Bush to be the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs (DASPA). She would oversee Title X, the nation's family planning program.

Orr is currently on the board of directors of Teen Choice, a non-profit groups advocating for abstinence in lieu of contraception.

Before joining the Bush administration (where she has served in the Administration on Children, Youth and Families at HHS), she was senior director for marriage and family care at the Family Research Council (a religious advocacy group founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family), and director of the Center for Social Policy at the Reason Public Policy Institute.

Susan is a great choice for the job. 

 

Outdoor Life: The Dakotas A Great Place For Hunters

Outdoor Life has ranked the best 200 places in the nation for hunters to live. The Dakotas come out very well.  North Dakota placed Bismarck at #10, Williston at #18, Jamestown at #54, and Dickenson at #60.  I am surprised that South Dakota didn't come out better, but we still had Mobridge at #62, Mitchell at #78, Aberdeen at #81 (Life is Good!), and Spearfish at #82.  Frankly, some of their rankings surprise me (really, is Bemidji, MN at #19 that much better than anywhere in South Dakota?).  Still, our state and our neighbor to the north come out looking pretty good.  Hunters, come live in the Dakotas! 

For the curious, the Top 10 looks like this:
1.Mountain Home, AR
2. Lewiston, ID
3. Sheridan, WY
4. Cody, WY
5. Pocatello, ID
6. Lewistown, MT
7. Marquette, MI
8. Dillon, MT
9. Page, AZ
10. Bismarck, ND

Odd Formulation

Barack Obama was asked about abortion and sex education.  This is part of how he responded.

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

I realize he was speaking off the cuff, but "punished" with a baby?  An odd way of describing your theoretical grandchild. 

More Problems for Obama

Another hateful reverend:  "The problem for Obama is that Rev. James Meeks, like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaches a message that appears to be directly at odds with the promise of hope, unity and bridging social, racial and political divisions upon which his campaign is built. . . . Perhaps of even more concern than race-baiting diatribes like these is Rev. Meeks disturbing history of antagonism towards the LGBT community. A spring 2007 newsletter from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) named Meeks one of the '10 leading black religious voices in the anti-gay movement . . . . On a more personal level, Meeks has reportedly blamed 'Hollywood Jews for bringing us Brokeback Mountain'."

Plus, this:  "Democrats should now ask themselves how a party of supposed racial transcendence inevitably ended up with primaries predicated along hardening racial lines, and a unity, trans-racial candidate who for twenty years was intimate with a pastor and spiritual advisor who seems to have derided almost everyone and everything, from America, to Italians, to Jews and Israel, to whites and moderate blacks, with serial slurs worthy of a Don Imus or Michael Richards."  Also note some more Wright problems.

Christopher Hitchens on Hillary's Big Fib

My favorite newly-minted American is Christopher Hitchens, the acerbic, frighteningly intelligent, and very well-read immigrant from the mother country.  I do not care for or agree with his militant atheism, but nobody is better at warming the feet of political scoundrels. 

Hitch turns his attention in his latest Slate column to Senator Clinton's fabrication du jour, her claim to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia.  It has been by now thoroughly documented that Ms. Clinton's story was false, but Hitchens shows why the falsehood cannot possibly have been innocent. 

I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer of 1992 after an agonizing flight on a U.N. relief plane that had had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid Serbian flak and ground fire. As I hunched over to scuttle the distance to the terminal, a mortar shell fell as close to me as I ever want any mortar shell to fall. The vicious noise it made is with me still. And so is the shock I felt at seeing a civilized and multicultural European city bombarded round the clock by an ethno-religious militia under the command of fascistic barbarians. I didn't like the Clinton candidacy even then, but I have to report that many Bosnians were enthused by Bill Clinton's pledge, during that ghastly summer, to abandon the hypocritical and sordid neutrality of the George H.W. Bush/James Baker regime and to come to the defense of the victims of ethnic cleansing.

I am recalling these two things for a reason. First, and even though I admit that I did once later misidentify a building in Sarajevo from a set of photographs, I can tell you for an absolute certainty that it would be quite impossible to imagine that one had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had not.  Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, national-security "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States.

I am willing to bet that Hitch's story is every bit as honest and true as Hillary Clinton's duplicitous and false, and I think that it tells us a lot of what we need to know about the character of the woman who still has a distant chance at the White House.

But the Clintons have long sold themselves as a team, and Senator Clinton's claim to experience rests almost solely on her part in her husband's presidency.  So it is worth while considering Bill Clinton's Balkans policy.    

Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?  In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise.

Candidate Bill Clinton promised that he would use American bombers to stop Serbian genocide in Bosnia.  But when the time came he did what a Clinton does with a promise.  He was afraid that action in Bosnia would get in the way of Hillary's health care reform initiative. 

It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself.

Of course, President Clinton (42) did eventually intervene in Bosnia, but only after a quarter of a million people had died.  That is the context in which one has to judge Ms. Clinton's lie.  She wanted us to believe that she flew in heroically to save these poor people.  That woman is a piece of work. 

 

SEAL Gets Medal of Honor

AP:

An elite Navy SEAL who threw himself on top of a grenade in Iraq to save his comrades will be posthumously awarded the nation's highest military tribute, a White House spokeswoman said Monday.

The Medal of Honor will be awarded to Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor. His family will receive the medal during a White House ceremony April 8.

Monsoor is the fourth person to receive the honor since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"Petty Officer Monsoor distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism on Sept. 29, 2006," press secretary Dana Perino told reporters during a briefing aboard Air Force One as President Bush headed to Europe for a NATO summit.

Monsoor was part of a sniper security team in Ramadi with three other SEALs and eight Iraqi soldiers, according to a Navy account. An insurgent fighter threw the grenade, which struck Monsoor in the chest before falling in front of him.

Monsoor then threw himself on the grenade, according to a SEAL who spoke to The Associated Press in 2006 on condition of anonymity because his work requires his identity to remain secret.

"He never took his eye off the grenade, his only movement was down toward it," said a 28-year-old lieutenant, who suffered shrapnel wounds to both legs that day. "He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs' lives, and we owe him."

Latest Video From Palestine

A couple weeks ago I posted a video from a Hamas produced children's show where a Mickey Mouse type character preaches hatred of the Jews.   Here is the latest video from Palestine.  In this Hamas produced video a child kills George Bush.  This is an offense to decency and good puppeteering.  From the people at MEMRI.

Memri1
by luvnews

Democrats Push Panic Button

I don't know whether or how much trouble the Democrats are in yet, but a lot of them are pushing the panic button so hard and fast they are beginning to suffer from carpotunnel syndrome.  Here is the New Republic:

When Obama or Clinton eventually claims this nomination--and it increasingly looks like that won't happen until June--he or she will have only a short time to formulate general-election narratives; the period for testing arguments and laying groundwork will be impossibly compressed. And that compression will prove especially problematic on issues, such as national security, on which Democrats must tack back to the center. When a candidate prepares policies and rhetoric for the fall, it's clearly better to do it in subtle, little nibbles rather than grotesquely large bites. But, with Clinton and Obama fighting for the allegiance of liberal-minded primary voters, they won't make these important adjustments for months.

All of which is to say that it's about time for the Democratic Party to panic. If it wants to win this election, it needs this race to end as soon as possible. Every day spent on the primaries represents an opportunity cost and diminishes the chances for ultimate victory.

That is a good point.  With their genius for reforming political institutions, the Democrats have managed to create a situation where almost all the delegates were distributed by the end of February, but a candidate won't be nominated and so won't be able to begin his or her campaign until well after June.  That is special. 

But the real evidence of Democratic panic is this piece from the British Telegraph:

Plans for Al Gore to take the Democratic presidential nomination as the saviour of a bitterly divided party are being actively discussed by senior figures and aides to the former vice-president.

The bloody civil war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has left many Democrats convinced that neither can deliver a knockout blow to the other and that both have been so damaged that they risk losing November's election to the Republican nominee, John McCain.

If the Democrats are really considering Al Gore as their relief pitcher, they are in worse shape than I thought. 

Thune Veep Talk

Chris Cillizza at the WaPo's The Fix blog:

* John Thune: The argument for the South Dakota Senator is very similar to the case for Pawlenty. Thune is young (47), was an early endorser of McCain's presidential bid and comes from the plains states -- a big battleground this fall. Thune enjoys a higher national profile than Pawlenty as a result of his defeat of former Sen. Tom Daschle (D) in 2004 but doesn't have the executive experience that Tpaw [Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty] boasts.

Barack Caught in Another Lie

The Politico:

During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion– positions that appear at odds with the more moderate image he’s projected during his presidential campaign.

The evidence comes from an amended version of an Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat.

Late last year, in response to a Politico story about Obama’s answers to the original questionnaire, his aides said he “never saw or approved” the questionnaire.

They asserted the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who “unintentionally mischaracterize(d) his position.”

But a Politico examination determined that Obama was actually interviewed about the issues on the questionnaire by the liberal Chicago non-profit group that issued it. And it found that Obama – the day after sitting for the interview – filed an amended version of the questionnaire, which appears to contain Obama’s own handwritten notes adding to one answer.

Ed Morrissey writes:  "Those positions won’t even fly with a large number of Democrats, let alone in a general election. The Hillary Clinton campaign has already begun making the argument to superdelegates that Obama holds extremist views so out of touch with the American electorate that he can’t possibly win in November. The questionnaire will bolster that argument, especially on guns, where the Democrats had tried to soften their stance since Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee in 2000."

UPDATE:  Today in alternative history.

Thune Advocating Coalbased Fuel

KXMC in Minot:  Thune: Coalbased fuel could save money, power security interests

Obama's Historical Revisionism

Back at the beginning of March, Barack Obama told a crowd in Selma that the 1965 March on Selma resulted in his conception.  The media couldn't do simple math and determine that Obama was born in 1961, not 1965.  Obama also tried to assert that the Kennedy administration was responsible for his father's arrival in America, although his conception predates Kennedy's oath of office.  The Washington Post's Michael Dobbs looks into the Obama/Kennedy myth and explores his historical revisionism:

Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his “very existence” to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.

The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which “history replays itself” and by how “two generations of two families — separated by distance, culture and wealth — can intersect in strange and wonderful ways.”

It is a touching story — but the key details are either untrue or grossly  oversimplified.

Contrary to Obama’s claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama’s father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

Be sure to read the whole thing.  Like Hillary Clinton, Obama is toying with his life story to transform himself to whatever his audience wants to see.  As the post-racial candidate, he downplays race.  In Chicago, he rubs elbows with radicals like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.  For the Democrats longing for JFK, he falsely ties himself to the Kennedys.  For those seeking a candidate with civil rights credentials, he tries to draw a connection with Selma.  Like Hillary Clinton's bogus stories, Barack Obama is a fraud.  Had the mainstream media done the math when they covered his Selma speech in 2007, this would be common knowledge.

An Email About The Film They Don't Want You To See

I received an email from someone who I take to be Muslim regarding the Fitna film I displayed yesterday.  The email is too long to produce in total, so I want to concentrate on the arguments the emailer makes regarding Geert Wilders' claims concerning the Koran:

1- Verse 8:60 which talks about an obligation to be strong to defend oneself from the enemy is immediately followed by a verse requiring muslims to lean to peace if their enemy reciprocates.  The producer of the movie chose not to mention that following verse (Verse 8:61)

2- Showing scenes from 911 or the train explosions in Europe is meant to stir the emotions of the western viewer to link these crimes to muslims rather than linking them to terrorists.  Why not show scenes from the Basque terrorist acts or scenes of Tamil terrorists in South Asia or Hindu terrorists in India. What about Sebrenisca in Bosnia?

3- Verse 4:56 describes scenes in the Hereafter and has nothing to do with actions in this life.

4- Verse 47:4 talks about conduct during war and about standing firm in battle but also talks about how to treat prisoners of war. The producer chose not to translate the context of war and on how to treat prisoners of war.

5- Verse 4:89 calls for pursuing the "war criminals" who killed muslims to force their conversions from the Faith.  Of course the producer did not translate the whole verse to explain the context and did not translate the following verse 4:90 which lists circumstances when pursuing War Criminals may not be allowed.

6- The producer showed a speaker talking on TV about fighting the enemy but again did not translate the context.  The speaker explained that fighting should be in self defense.

7- Showing scenes of an innocent little girl stating she hates Jews because the Qur'an stated they are like pigs and monkeys.  This is in reference in the Qur'an to an ancient Jewish tribe before Islam and Christianity who used to make tricks to overcome the requirements of the Sabbath observance.  Some people try to politicize this verse but despite what the Zionist giving bad name to Jews this is not how the vast majority of Muslims regard Jews.

8- The scene showing a Palestinian Iman calling for fighting the Israelis is again out of context.   He is a person whose land was stolen and whose nation was kicked out of their homes by the Israelis. The Israelis claim that their religion ordered them to do what they did.  What do you expect from oppressed people in similar circumstances?

The emailer goes on to make the familiar argument that jihad is about personal struggle, not violence against others.   The author than makes various historical arguments about the peaceful nature of Islam as compared to other religions and other movements.  For example:

If history could be called as witness it will testify that religious minorities always prospered in Muslim lands until the 19th and 20th Centuries when European colonized the entire World and started stirring troubles.  It was Muslims who saved the victims of the inquisition of the Middle Ages and many oppressed scientist during the Renaissance.

As I have other points to make here, I shall simply state that this is dubious history, at best, and tries to explain the world's woes as the product of European colonialism. For example, Islam did not go from a small local religion in the Eighth Century to dominating the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe by the Sixteenth Century simply because the people of those regions were asked nicely to convert. For a discussion of colonialism as an explanation current maladies, see Bernard Lewis's indispensable article Roots of Muslim Rage.

As I said in the original post, I am not a Koranic scholar so I will not try to adjudicate a dispute over interpretations of that book. So let me just say this.  First, there are "sayings attributed to the Prophet" that also have authority for most Muslims, so one must take those into account when discussing the Islamic belief system. For example, it is a saying of the Prophet that there shall not be two religions in the holy land (this is not a direct quote but the gist of it), which explains why non-Muslims are not allowed in Mecca and why Christian churches are not allowed in Arabia.  Also, while certain verses of the Koran speak of jihad as a personal struggle, there are other verses that clearly lend credence to the notion of jihad as commonly translated as "holy war."  And throughout history this more violent interpretation of jihad has been accepted by many Muslims. 

But let's not get distracted by theology.  As Prof. Blanchard intimates, the question isn't necessarily what the proper interpretation is of the Koran, but that fact of Muslim violence.  Even my fairly reasonable interlocutor gives a partial pass to Palestinian terror and hate by blaming those darn Israelis for creating a state in the 1940s.  The emailer states "What do you expect from oppressed people in similar circumstances?"  I expect them not to preach race hatred and the glory of killing innocents.  And if one is to be a warrior, I expect the warrior to put on a uniform and fight as a soldier in an army, not sneak among civilians, using the non-combatant as a kind of cover.  The Palestinian leadership fails to do any of these things. 

Geert Wilders may have produced a piece of propaganda, and Rod Dreher seriously considers that notion. Does Wilders have an anti-Muslim streak?  His Wikipedia entry (admittedly not definitive) gives a little evidence toward that conclusion, for example his comparison of the Koran to Mein Kampf, but mostly he seems like a mainstream liberal (as in liberty loving) politician.

The fact that there has been considerable outcry about this film tells you Wilders is onto something.  If Wilders had offended any other religious group in the world there wouldn't be nearly this much anger, and certainly no one, Wilders himself or the folks at LiveLeak, would have to fear for their personal safety.  Heck, in America Wilders could get a government grant for bashing Christianity.  If he attacked Jews at the UN half of the member nations would vote a commendation for him.  The attention Wilders is getting stems largely from the fact that we all know that what he is saying can get him killed and those who promote his film are in the same boat.  As Dennis Prager wrote last week, if the Tibetans were violent they would garner more world attention, too.  The focus on Geert Wilders is explained only by the fact that we all know that there is a credible threat of violence behind those who condemn him loudest.  Capitulation to that, as Prof. Blanchard notes, means the end to liberal society. 

Perhaps the segment of the Islamic world that is anti-Western, anti-modern and pro-violence represents a perversion of Islam.  But they exist and they are making demands.   Opposition to this militant faction is an offense to Islam only if Islam is at its heart anti-Western, anti-modern and pro-violence.  I suspect it is not, and it is the Muslims themselves who must lead the way in denouncing those who sully the name of Islam. 

When the Danish cartoons came out, I was opposed to publishing them (scroll down).  I find it juvenile to insult people just because one can.  That's a pretty low use of one's freedom.  But as the threats of violence mounted my opinion changed.  The violence and vitriol surrounding that incident made publishing those cartoons a defense of freedom, not simply a childish insult.  The Wilders film is the same.  Whatever its shortcomings, the death threats against the film maker and those who distribute the film make it's reproduction an act of a free person combating those with tyrannical souls.  Thus, I will post it here again:

The Changing Face of the Democratic Party

Joe Lieberman:  "I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It's not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It's been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will --and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I'm a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It's a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain."

The Problem of Islam

My colleague, Professor Schaff, posts a link to the ten minute film Fitna, on YouTube.  You can view it from his post.  The film is a dramatic presentation of passages in the Koran that encourage violence, coupled with graphic images of terrorist attacks.  As Professor Schaff reports, the clip was removed from the website LiveLeak (a YouTube clone hosted, I believe in Britain) after members of its staff were threatened.  As my colleague notes, there is no small irony in this.  The threats confirm the thesis of the film. 

Islam is a problem for modern civilization.  It is not that all Muslim endorse religious violence, or that other religions are innocent of such violence.  But contemporary Islam contains within it a radically militant and murderous faction, and that faction is much larger than anything resembling it in any other major religion and it is widely distributed.  Outside Sri Lanka, perhaps, almost no one has to fear religiously inspired violence from Buddhists.  Even in Israel, religiously inspired violence by militant Jews is a very rare event.  When was the last time that militant Christians planted a bomb on a subway train, or threatened to murder a film-maker?  But anyone who lives in a country with a substantial Muslim population, and who dares to publish anything that offends Muslims, may find himself or herself in the position of LiveLeak's proprietors.

The standard liberal response has been to be as accommodating as possible toward Muslims.  Universities have built foot baths for Muslim students, and recently one has established sexually segregated gym hours.   A British cleric went so far as to recommend that Sharia (Islamic law) be respected within Muslim immigrant communities, which would grant to the clerics a power over their congregations that no other religion is allowed.  There is a problem with all this.  If accommodating Muslims means allowing them liberties we do not allow any other religious population, it means that liberal democracy is in retreat. 

The best thing I have seen on this is in the current New Republic.  Leon Wieseltier has a piece entitled "Theologico-Politicus."  The title is a reference to Spinoza's great Treatise.    Wieseltier is responding to articles in the New York Times Magazine, Time, and elsewhere presenting the face of  "moderate Islam," while pointing out how repressive Orthodox Jews can be. Here is the key passage in  Wieseltier's essay:

I do not want The New York Times to become the voice of moderate Judaism, or of any Judaism. I want only that liberals desist from granting Muslims a reprieve from the rigors of liberalism.

Yes.  That is it pretty much the point on which our civilization either stands or falls.  By "liberalism" Wieseltier means liberal democracy, a regime in which human beings govern themselves, both individually and collectively.  Such a regime ought to offer the greatest possible accommodation to religion, because that is part of what individual self-government entails.  But the price for enjoying such a liberty is respect for the liberties of everyone else.  And that means everyone, even those whose cartoons offend thee, even those who are members of thine own church.  Anything more is "granting Muslims a reprieve from the rigors of liberalism."

Muslims should be offered all the liberties available to any religious minority in a modern democracy, but no more than that.  If they insist on more as the price of peace, if they want to censure the press or limit the freedoms of their own faithful, then the price is too high.  If modern liberal regimes are not prepared to fight about this, then liberal democracy is finished.