The Republic of Dissent

The video du jour II: ethics and torture

This is a somewhat old clip asking some interesting questions.

Food for thought: intentions and actions

“If our inner soul is good our outer actions must, by definition, be good. This is a naïve idea in the extreme and the source of a certain kind of American nationalism. The person who expresses this idea with intuitive ease is George W. Bush. He said after the 7/7 bombings, while he was in Britain: 'If they could only see into our hearts they would know how good we are', and he honestly believes that. He looks into his own heart and believes he is a good man and therefore his policies must be good, and everything the US does must be good. But there is a flip side of that. Other people say, 'Well, my own heart is not so good. I see envy, rapacity, greed, lust, therefore I know I am not a good person, therefore nothing the United States does can be good. Everything must be bad.' It's George W. Bushism flipped on its head. There is a great deal of this. People say, 'what are we doing trying to fight bad guys in other parts of the world? We should look in our own hearts and see that we are bad'. Instead of trying to rescue oppressed people in other parts of the world, let us try vigorously to improve our own characters. […] I think some element of that entered into the Bush administrations thinking about Iraq. Like everyone I have been dumbfounded at the stupidity of many of the things that have been done, and I try to understand how they could have thought things through so poorly. I think there was a simple faith that everything was going to work out for the best. Bush thought his intentions were good in his own heart and therefore the results were going to be good.” Paul Berman.

The video du jour: Fabulists and realists

I find this clip interesting because it exemplifies how sinister things can appear when they are kept secret. I believe that so many people have conspiracy theories about the Bush administration because it is so secretive and because it insists in keeping the citizenry in the dark arguing that it is for its own good.

Denying Denial

Bill Kristol has an article in the Weekly Standard arguing that, contrary to what Bob Woodward is asserting, it isn't President Bush who is in denial, but Democrats. Money quote:

[…] The left wing of the party continues to insist on withdrawal now. The center of the party wants withdrawal on a vaguer timetable.

Bush, on other hand, understands that the only acceptable exit strategy is victory. (If, as Woodward reports, he's been bolstered in that view by Henry Kissinger, then good for Henry. Invite him to the Oval Office more often!) To that end, Bush should do more. He should send substantially more troops and insist on a change of strategy to allow a real counterinsurgency and prevent civil war. But at least he's staying and fighting. And the great majority of Republicans are standing with him. The Democrats, as Bush has put it, "offer nothing but criticism and obstruction, and endless second-guessing. The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut-and-run."

So there really is a profound difference between the parties, as Democrats are happy to acknowledge, since they think Iraq is a winning issue for them. The Democratic talking point is this: We're against Bush on Iraq, but we are as resolute as Bush in the real war on terror (understood by them to exclude Iraq). Except that they're not.[…] But it remains the case that a vote for Democrats is a vote for congressional leaders committed to kinder and gentler treatment of terrorists (emphasis added).

It is fascinating and disturbing to see how good Neocons are at denying reality and at framing the issue in terms of toughness and cowardice as if their policies have been successful for the last six years. Neocons are very good at pretending that they are still a rebellious minority without any power and at disparaging them by arguing that the people who don’t agree with them don’t understand the world as if their understanding of the world has made it a better place. I am getting sick and tired of Bill Kristol and of the standoffish way with which he expresses his absolute truths when he should have learned to show some humility, given the fact that he has been proven wrong so many times. In the Neocons’ little world what matter aren't results and facts, but rather moral clarity, resolve, and toughness. Thus, it doesn’t matter if Bush is losing their war in Iraq as long as he keeps pointing out that “Islamofascists” want the United States to fail and as long as he vows to keep following the master plan to make Iraq a democracy so that it can change the Middle East. The scariest thing about this kind of arguments is that it is impossible to engage with the people making them for they have a simplistic and very dangerous vision, according to which  there is evil in the world and that those who are on the side of the good are allowed to fight it by any means necessary. Twenty years from now, Bill Kristol will still be arguing that he is right and that America just needs to keep at it, to keep being tough against the world, which will eventually thank it for saving it from the bad guys. But of course, we all know that Rambo cannot succeed in our world and that bad actions and errors of judgments have consequences, which morals and ideals can neither erase nor overcome without acknowledging and accepting the lessons from the hard and humbling realities of failures.

Torturelight is still torture

There is a post on Patterico Pontifications on waterboarding and its efficacy, which is worth reading because it shows how terrifying slippery slopes can lead a democratic society to compromise not only with its ideals, but also with its morals. The only argument, which is used to justify waterboarding and other forms of torturelight, is that they work and they help crack hardened and dangerous terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, those who try to justify the unjustifiable by using its efficacy on terrorists miss the point for if that were the case then we would be living a totalitarian society for after freedom is dangerous since they allowed people to become terrorists and to cause our society harms. The question that I have is the following: if the only criteria for allowing something in the post 9/11 world is that it makes America safer then why don't we just make things easier and transform America in a state where anything, which can make America less safe is outlawed and where things that make us safe are allowed. I guess that we are not far from Orwell's universe after all. If Americans want absolute security, there is one way they can get it by accepting to have a totalitarian and a paternalistic government who watches over them like an overbearing father. In democratic society, there can be such a thing as absolute security for the simple fact that as Albert Camus wrote more than 40 years ago in the Rebel, “Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

Creepy, just plain creepy: Mark Steyn enjoyed Gitmo

Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt had what I think is a creepy conservation about Gitmo and the way “enemy combatants” are treated. Tristram Shandy has some excerpts of it (hat tip: Glenn Greenwald) and my reaction to the whole episode is that it is disturbing how people seems to be enjoying using force and demeaning people in the name of protecting this country. Mark Steyn talked about Gitmo as I would have talked about a trip to Nice or to Tahiti with giddiness and with pleasure. I guess the genie is out of the bottle, for some people such as Steyn who have a complex of superiority is the war on terror is just an opportunity to get some and to kick some behinds just to prove their masculinity. Money quote:

They were being treated very lavishly (emphasis added), as you know, to Ramadan, and we at the meal that...when I was down there, that the detainees eat, and very proudly, we were told, as they served up this fantastic meal, that it featured homemade pastries, especially cooked for the detainees for Ramadan. So I can tell you something. They eat much better food...I've eaten MRE's with American troops in Iraq, and these detainees eat much better than American troops do (emphasis added). Whether that is the right approach to fighting this war, I don't know whether...I think that there are legitimate differences of opinion about that. [...]Yes, I did, actually. (laughing) I spoke briefly to a rather lovely female interrogator. As you know, Muslim young men often have complicated attitudes to women. And they...and she, in fact, found that although Saudi males were incredibly hostile to her the first couple of times she interrogates them, that they've been deprived of female company for so long, that actually, they warm up to her by about the third or fourth meeting. So I found the interrogation, I think...I had the opportunity to kind of eavesdrop on a couple of interrogations, which are certainly surreal, if you're used to this sort of anti-American propaganda, where the guys are in dungeons and chains, chained to these little, wooden chairs under the bare light bulb, or some guys beating the information out of them. In fact, they're interrogated in a La-Z-Boy recliner, which is this oddly surreal point. It's a very unusual set up down there.

Ideology and pigheadedness are a dangerous combination

The NY Times has what I believes is the must read article of the day in which discusses Bob Woodward's latest book about Bush, his style of management and the ways he deals with conflict. We learn that the President was unwilling to hear bad predictions about the Iraq War plan and his father was worried about his son's decision to invade Iraq. Here is the money quote:

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq— a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

Food for thought : A dangerous obsession

“I will not withdraw even if Laura [his wife] and Barney [his dog] are the only ones supporting me.” George W. Bush quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book “State of Denial: Bush at War Part III.”

The video du jour: Jesus camp

I have seen numerous reports on the documentary "Jesus camp" who opens today and which I'm planning to see this weekend because it is both disturbing and fascinating. Here are an Abc's news clip about the documentary. Judge for yourself.

Ouch ! "Slutification" and Hypocrites

Wonkette has what I think is going to be the best post of the day. It is about a renowned conservative blogger, "slutification," and hypocrisy. All I have to say is ouch !

The video du jour : Dennis Miller on Immigration

I never found Dennis Miller funny, but now, I think he is just scary and that he has mistaken stupidity with maturity and with realism. His point of view isn't illegitimate, it is the way he chooses to express it and to defend it, which is.

The photo du jour

Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf dine with Bush, Condi, and Cheney yesterday. I found very unsettling the spectacle of those two major partners of the United States in the fight against terrorism bickering. It makes me suspect that there is more under the surface and that the feud between those two can only have negative consequences since it makes more difficult. thecooperation between the two countries which are breeding grounds for Islamism and where Bin Laden most likely is.

Food for thought : Art , fear, and religion

“The sensitivity of many Muslims with respect to the Prophet and insults against him has unsettled our understanding of artistic freedom. There's an upside to that: the unsettledness has lead to a heightening. The debate on the Muhammad caricatures didn't only frighten Western artists, it also made them more aware of the effectiveness of art than they had been for a long time. What unholy fury art can release in societies that have yet to dissociate art from seriousness! For this and other reasons, cultural respect of religious feelings has grown markedly. In the midst of modern society, art accrues religion - Christianity included - as a kind of forgotten relative, viewing it with scepticism, new-found respect or animosity.” Harald Jähner, “Self-censorship in major and minor.”

“The artistic director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, Kirsten Harms, has cancelled a performance of the Mozart opera "Idomeneo" that is critical of religion. The reason: She could not rule out that such a production would represent a danger for employees of the opera, or the public. 

These fears are based on a danger-analysis done by the state criminal police. The analysis was carried out upon request of the state interior minister. According to the report, the opera – which was already performed three years ago, without fanfare – represented an "incalculable risk." (…) If this supposition is true, then it is because Muslims could feel that their religious feelings were hurt or insulted. But above and beyond the acknowledgement that it is regrettable to insult anyone's religion, many questions come to mind in this instance: Will Muslims' feelings really be hurt? What about Christians? Buddhists? And what about people who believe in Greek mythology?” Marcel Fürstenau, “Beware of Slippery Slope.”

The best of yesterday: Paint, color, race, and the real thing

The best post I read yesterday was written from Siddhartha from Sepia Mutiny titled, “Burnt Cork and Grease.” It is about race and about the media and other producers of culture don't know how to talk about and use false and manufactured images, which focus on superficiality, without getting to the core of the issue. Here is the money quote:

The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside. (...) Though we’ve long had our own backlash against “PC” here in the United States, the prospect of a prominent white actor or model appearing in actual or virtual blackface is, I’d venture to say, more remote. But other communities — whether ethnic, religious, regional — that have not achieved a certain degree of recognition and respect in the US should see this as a cautionary tale. The urge to appropriate, marginalize, and trivialize, with an amazing level of ignorance and insouciance, is apparently built into the workings of our consumer society. Ah, them crazy whitefolks, what will they come up with next?

I agree with Siddhartha for two main reasons. The first is that too often to talk about race, people would rather focus on color and ignore the bigger points about culture and about diversity. The second is that the depiction of Kate Moss painted in black is shocking because of what it says which that all people have to do is to paint their faces in black to understand race and to become black. I have an idea for the Independent the next time for a cover that would actually make people focus on Aids and Africa what about putting on the cover the face of an African dying from aids, what about showing us the real thing instead of trying to cover it with beauty and artificiality. The challenge isn't to clean up the image of the damages of Aids in Africa, but to show them no matter how ugly and disturbing they are.

The video du jour: Colbert on the Torture compromise

Food for thought : Petro-authoritarianism

“But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.” Tom Friedman, “Fill ’Er Up With Dictators.”

Worse not better: Iraq and the war on terror

Here is a copy of the declassified Judgments of National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006, which dominated the news last weekend. It asserts what anybody who reads the newspapers knows and that is that Iraq has made things worse in the fight against terrorism in the immediate term. However, the question that it does not answer is what should be done about it? We are more in need of ideas since the facts about the state of our world are stubborn. What is the plan? More of the same or minor adjustments, or drastic changes? At some point, ideology has to bend in front of reality and to be replaced by pragmatism.

The Video du jour: amour, ahava, love...

I'm having a lovely day! If you're having a bad day, this video should help.

Food for thought: Truth and biases

“Clinton, on the other hand, is a narcissist who finds it difficult to grasp in any real sense that there is a place where his "inner man" ends and the rest of the world begins. Clinton's stock phrase, "I feel your pain," is really the insistence of a man who does not truly feel anyone else's pain, does not truly understand that there are other inner realities as urgent as his own.
Take Clinton's misuse of women. One way to understand it is as a symptom of his inability to come to terms with anything that would not conform to his own desire, imagination and grandiose sense of himself.
To put it in his own terms, Clinton has never understood what the meaning of "is" is, the fact that some things happened and others didn't, that some things are true and others simply are not. He believes that his legacy will be created in the spin cycle of history rather than in the fitful but persistent human search for history's truth.”Andrew Klavan, “Clinton Doth Protest Too Much.”

The photo du jour

Who is he? He is Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen who just got reelected with more that 77 percent of the vote in a "democratic" election. Something tells me that we will hear more about Yemen in the next few years for it is going to become with Pakistan one of the first exporting countries of terrorism.

Food for thought

“For many who remember -- just as these women do, and my own parents do -- what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.Torture aims for a single goal -- obtaining information -- but it achieves a slew of others. For one thing, it martyrizes the tortured. Think of the old Christlike images of Che Guevara's corpse in Bolivia-- or even of Christ himself.” Edwidge Danticat, “Does it work?”

Video du jour : blame it all on Clinton

Our man in Pakistan

Pervez Musharraf seems to be doing everything that he can to ensure that his book, In Line of Fire, is an international bestseller even if it means revealing details, which can hurt the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. I watched the 60 minutes interview and my first reaction was to wonder about his motive for doing both the book and the interview. Does he sense that his rule of Pakistan is near the end and needs money to prepare for exile or does he simply wants to show the world that international relations are about power and money? One of the most explosive assertions made in his interview was that his country was paid to hand over Al Qaeda’s suspects. To be honest, I don’t know how to react to this information even though some part of me is repulsed by the fact that the US is dealing in that manner with a country such as Pakistan. I don’t know whether this act just shows the cold realism of the Bush administration or just its unwillingness to be restrained by laws whether they are international or national in their war on terror. I think what Pervez Musharraf has shown why the United States is wrong to associate itself so closely with him and his government. Although this relationship has immediate benefits, it is going to make it very difficult for whoever comes after Musharraf to cooperate with the United Statesm for the temptation to follow the path of Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez will be irresistible. In an article in the Guardian, last month, Benazir Bhutto, the ex prime minister of Pakistan wrote the following, “To some, the disquieting pattern of the link between Pakistan and terrorist plots against the west may seem irrelevant and coincidental. To me the pattern is a consequence of the west allowing Pakistani military regimes to suppress the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan, as long as their dictators ostensibly support the political goals of the international community.” I think that the world will soon realize that she is right.

The ghosts of Osama

I have to say that I'm a bit ticked off by the lack of information and the fact that there is so much mystery around the death of Bin laden. Following the example of its French counterpart, Time magazine is quoting an anonimous Saudi source, which affirms that although Bin laden isn't dead, he is very ill and could die soon. I wonder if he dies, anybody is ever going to be able to confirm and if the millions of people will ever accept his death, but will instead make him eternal by swearing as Elvis's fans do that they have seen him here and there. It would be one of its century's greatest tragedies if Osama were to escape justice by dying or just disappearing into thin air.

Food for thought : Torture is still torture

“So we are reduced to fighting over a word, “torture”. President George W Bush’s preferred terminology is “alternative interrogation techniques” or “coercive interrogation” or “harsh interrogation methods”, or simply, amazingly, his comment last Thursday that a policy of waterboarding detainees is merely a policy to “question” them. Suddenly I am reminded of George Orwell. One essay of his, Politics and the English Language, still stands out over the decades as a rebuke to all those who deploy language to muffle meaning. One passage is particularly apposite:

“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” It is time to concede that in America right now the atmosphere is bad.” Andrew Sullivan, “Torture by any other name is just as vile.”

Redefining Rape

The New York Times has a disturbing editorial on the compromised reached on Torture by the senate and its definitions of rape. It makes the point that the proposed bill even though it does not restrict Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions narrows the definition of rape in order to protect American soldiers from rape accusations and to make it difficult for them to be convicted of that crime. Here is the money quote:

In the bill, rape is narrowly defined as forced or coerced genital or anal penetration. It utterly leaves out other acts, as well as the notion that sex without consent is also rape, as defined by numerous state laws and federal law. That is the more likely case in a prison, where a helpless inmate would be unlikely to resist the sexual overtures of a guard or interrogator.

The section on sexual abuse requires that the act include physical contact. Thus it might not include ordering a terrified female prisoner to strip and dance, which happened in Rwanda, or compelling a male prisoner to strip and wear women’s underwear on his head, or photographing naked prisoners piled together, both of which happened at Abu Ghraib.

I have the feeling that the bill is going to be passed no matter how problematic its language is on rape and other issues because we are in an election year and because control of congress is at stake. However, as I have said before, this isn't the end of the issue for all the senate has done with this bill is to punt the ball and it is going to come back to them soon or later. Marty Lederman has more on the problematic nature of this problematic bill. Cut at Flopping Aces takes the other side of the argument and writes that we should be treating our enemies the way that they should be treated, but of course, he missed the point, the fight against terrorism isn’t about who the enemy is, but about who we are.

Food for thought

“It is time to see dialogue and diplomacy as what they are: not as a favor to bestow but as a favor to ourselves. Diplomacy is not a moral judgment but a tool with the potential to advance U.S. interests. We should have the confidence to employ it; if we do, we are more likely to isolate others than ourselves, which too often is now the case.” Richard Hass, “Coffee With the Enemy.”

Bin Laden dead ?

A small regional French newspaper, L'Est Républicain is reporting that Saudis are convinced that Bin Laden is dead (Hat tip: All Things beautiful). I’m having a hard time believing it, but at the same, it is frustrating to realize that five years after 9/11, he is still out there and that more than likely he will never be captured alive. Unfortunately, the death of Bin Laden will just contribute to the mystification of the character by making him a holy man to many people in the world who will continue to believe in his ideas. It is for that reason that the solution is to capture him alive, but it may no longer be possible to do.

All of that for this? the agreement on torture doesn't change anything

I just glimpsed at the agreement (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan), which was reached between McCain and the others on the interpretation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and torture. I have to say that I am disappointed for I believe that things are as unclear as they were before the deal was reached and the President won for his authority is strengthened by the fact that he will now most likely have the backing of Congress for continuing to flirt with illegality and with moral ambiguities. I thought that the point of all of this standup was to force the administration to be not only clear, but also not to make distinctions, which are without a difference when it comes to torture. I guess that I was wrong. Kevin Drum and Glenn Greenwald have interesting posts about this useless deal, which are worth reading.

Playing hardball with Musharraf ?

According to Musharraf, Richard Armitage, who was at the time the second in command in Colin Powell's State department, threatened to bomb Pakistan if it didn't support the war in Afghanistan. It is hard for me to believe Musharraf, but if what he is saying is true (Armitage just denied it), it would be hard to condemn him for playing hardball because otherwise, Pakistan would have probably continued to support the Taliban regime. At the news conference today with President Bush, Musharraf diplomatically dodged questions about this story. Josh Marshall has more on the Musharraf-Armitage affair.

Food for thought: Anti-Americanism and power

In the affairs of nations, too much hard power ends up breeding not submission but counterpower, be it by armament or by alliance. Likewise, great “soft power” does not bend hearts but twists minds in resentment and rage. Yet how does one balance against “soft power”? No coalition of European universities could dethrone Harvard and Stanford. Neither can all the subsidies fielded by European governments crack the hegemony of Hollywood. To breach the bastions of American “soft power,” the Europeans will first have to imitate, then to improve on, the American model—just as the Japanese bested the American automotive industry after two decades of copycatting (and the Americans, having dispatched their engineers for study in Britain, overtook the British locomotive industry in the nineteenth century). Imitation and leapfrogging is the oldest game in the history of nations, and in the civilian aircraft market, Europe’s Airbus is already a worthy competitor of Boeing. But competition has barely begun to drive the cultural contest where Europe, mourning the loss of its ­centuries-­old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception clauses”) or seeks solace in the defamation of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen. If we could consult Dr. Freud again, he would take a deep drag on his cigar and pontificate about inferiority feelings being compensated by hauteur and ­disparagement. Josef Joffe, “Überpower:The Imperial Temptation of America.”

McCain and the others caved

It might be a misrepresentation, but my feelings is that John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham cave to the desires of the president when they realized that standing up was too difficult and it was better to reach a compromise, which would permit the Bush administration to keep doing what it is doing and for John McCain to maintain his virginity by saying, "I told them they were wrong."  Something tells me that this issue isn't settled and that it is going to prop up once again probably in the next presidential election. Marty Lederman has more on the so-called compromise.

Food for thought

“Men should be barred from public office for 100 years in every part of the world. ... It would be a much kinder, gentler, more intelligently run world. The men have had millions of years where we've been running things. We've screwed it up hopelessly. Let's give it to the women” Ted Turner.

Hugo and the devil

I wasn't surprised by Hugo Chávez 's speech to the United Nations. In recent years, Chávez has grown increasingly confrontational as he has sensed that the US weaknesses. He realized that with the end of Castro near, to remain in power in Venezuela, he needed to enlarge his political message and to take on the US by defining his struggle as one between good and evil, between the weak and the powerful and between an hegemon and the people who are resisting its hegemony. As I have written before Chávez isn't an authentic character, he isn't a true believer; he doesn't drink his own Kool-Aid. Chávez has just decided to do the contrary on whatever the United States and Bush does. He has decided to go the left because Bush is on the right and because that is the only place left for him to go. He is a friend of Ahmadinejad and to all the enemies of the United States just because they are the enemies of the United States. Hugo Chávez survived a coup, which he believed Bush authorized; he has decided since then that to survive he needed to be something bigger than another dictator of an oil-rich country. Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I take Hugo Chávez seriously because I believe that if the US plays his game and legitimize him then he will become a bigger threat for he has something, which Castro never had and that is money, which comes of course from oil. The solution is not of course to ignore him, but to avoid the mistake that was made with Ahmadinejad and Iran, which was to use name-calling and threats of regime change to solve a lethal situation. Chávez is making a lot of noise because he feels threatened as all of those who are obsessed with the devil are because they believe that he might cause them harm. The goal for the United States should be to avoid a needless confrontation and to pacify with the situation with cooler rhetoric.

Thursday's video: Hugo Chavez at the UN

Food for thought

“Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam. […] Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.” Martin Amis, “The Age of Horrorism.”

Faith and torture

Andrew Sullivan had a post yesterday on torture and the Christian Right, which I thought was pertinent in he deplored the fact that it isn't putting pressure on this issue. He writes, “Torture is not a hard issue for any Christian. It is an unmitigated moral evil. There is no theology on earth which can make it a less grave moral matter than, say, gay marriage. And yet it has been enforced by this president for five years and where is the outrage?” I think that the fact is that the Christian Right can tolerate torture, because they believe that it is done to Muslim evil-doers who want Christianity to disappear from the face of the earth and who are going to go to hell anyway. So they are probably thinking who cares if a few dozen evil people are tortured as long as the President stands with them on  issues that really matters since they have to do with Christianity and with the morality of the American society. Gay marriage causes more passion among the members of the Christian Right because they take it personally since they fill that their daughters, that disease may infect their sons and that society may come to the realization that being gay is acceptable if the union between two gay persons is deemed to be legitimate in America. On the other hand, it is harder for them to take torture personally because they believe that it will never happen to one of them because after all only Muslim extremists get torture. As Peter Laarman (hat tip: exgaywatch) has argued the problem with the Christian Right is its “clear-sighted realism” which leads it to accept or at least tolerate torture because it gives evil-doers what they deserve and protects the good.

The photo du jour

The pic shows Condi Rice meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni yesterday in New York. There is something, which both fascinating and perplexing about this photo. I just can't put my fingers on it.

Today's video: Colbert on Torture

Fighting words

Here are some of the anti-French comments I gathered from some blogs after the announcement by Jacques Chirac yesterday on Iran. President Bush met with Chirac today in New York before speaking to the UN and he said this on this issue, “France and the United States share the same goal, (emphasis added) and that is for the Iranians not to have a nuclear weapon. Secondly, we share the same goal; we'd like to solve this problem diplomatically. And we understand working together is important. And the Iranians have got to understand we share the same objective, and we're going to continue to strategize together.” Chirac responded by saying, “I hope I've been very clear -- and let me take this opportunity once again to say that the present views of the United States and I again see eye to eye on this one(emphasis added). I totally agree with President Bush. We are both determined to push forward on this one, to move ahead in a constructive manner. And the first thing we need to do is to find a solution so that, indeed, and end be put to the uranium enrichment activity being engaged in, and then we can move on to finding solutions to the other problems that arise and stem from this issue." I invite (politely because of my French culture) all of those bloggers who just wanted an opportunity to bash France to have a glass of French wine and some brie to reflect on how much stupid and ignorant, their anti-French sentiment is making them look.

“Only Francecould manage to lose a war in which it did not fight.” Hot Air

“Bush needs to announce an “axis-of-ass****s” with France as the only member. ” Rosetta, a commentator on Hot Air.

“While France continues to rollover to terrorists, we must forge ahead! With friends like France, who needs enemies!” Right Voices.

“Many countries have been state sponsors of terrorism, but France has just become the first state sponsor of hostages.” Confederate Yankee.

“There is no way we actually believed in the Fwench right? There is no way we thought they would behave any differently than they have historically right? They are spineless, di*kless wonders, the opposite of everything admirable and respected in the  indomitable American spirit.
Just promise me when we save the world (again), this time, we don't save the French. Sleep with dogs ..............” Atlas Shrug.

The best of yesterday: actors and blinders

Sam Harris had an article in yesterday’s LA Times titled, “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals,

Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists” (Hat tip: Kevin Drum). He argues that liberals don't accept that Muslim extremists are people who want to destroy the West. According to Harris, liberals are most willing to empathize with them than with the people who are doing everything possible to fight them. Here is the Money quote:

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

[…]We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Before making those criticisms, Sam Harris asserted that he is a liberal as if confessing that sin made his arguments more relevant and more convincing. What irritates me about Sam Harris’s criticisms is the fact that he is willingly choosing to put liberals on the side of the Muslim extremists to delegitimate and to misrepresent the point of view. Harris is in fact saying that the larger truth of our century so far is that Western civilization is under attack and anybody who disagree about the characterization of the struggle and about the way for the West to survive has her/his head in the Sand. I know that in difficult times, people always want simple answers and that complexity is unappealing in those times precisely because it rejects simplicity and refuses to react without thinking things through. After reading Harris’s article one gets the impression that because liberals aren’t willing to ruthless are denying the significance and even fact that 9/11 happened and are stuck in a time where they believe that all we need is love. Every time, I read an op-ed such as the one of Sam Harris, which is so viciously wrong that it makes me want to throw up, I think of Camus and of one of his most famous quote, “Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.”

Tuesday's Video

I find this old video very disturbing. I wonder how strange the atmosphere will be at the banquet, which the heads of state and of government of the world will have after their speeches at the United Nations. Ahmadinejad has said that he won't be there because alcohol will be served. I wonder also next to whom President Bush and Chavez will be seated.

Food for thought: Is what is happening in Darfur Genocide and does it matter?

“In spite of efforts to describe the killing in Darfur as genocide, neither the UN nor the EU went along with this description. It was not because of moral myopia, but because they understood the difference between a brutal civil war and a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. Darfur is not Rwanda. Only the US accepted the genocide description, though this seemed a concession to domestic lobbies rather than a matter of conviction. Washington never followed through with the forcible intervention in Darfur that international law requires once a finding of genocide is made.”  Jonathan Steele, “A brutal civil war, but not genocide.”

“I call it a process of genocide. If we let it continue it will end in genocide. Genocide is not a one-time action. It's a process. They began a process. And therefore I think the United Nations will have to accept that definition. I am usually very, very careful in using that word.” Elie Wiesel, during his visit to the United Nations to ask the world to act on Darfur.

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Article II of Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

“The campaign of massacres, rapes, and ethnic cleansing may well fit the definition of genocide established by the Genocide Convention, which does not require a Rwanda-style extermination campaign but, rather, an attempt to “destroy” a substantial “part” of a group “as such.” But genocide is a crime based on intent, and pin-pointing who has acted with the goal of destroying Darfur’s non-Arab groups will remain difficult unless investigators dig up the wells, examine the ravines, apprehend perpetrators, and ascertain the command-and-control relationships among Sudanese leaders, Air Force pilots, and Arab militiamen. This will not happen soon: the major powers have not established an intelligence-gathering operation in Darfur that is sophisticated enough to gauge either the death toll or the intentions of perpetrators. In the meantime, the debate over semantics has only further distracted the international community from the more important debate about how to save lives.” Samantha Power, “Dying in Darfur: Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped? ”

Words or Genocide? What is more outrageous?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a great column in today's Independent titled, “Where are the Muslims protesting about Darfur?” She laments the fact that the Muslims are most outraged about the harmless words of the Pope than the deaths of hundred of thousands of Muslims in the Darfur region of Sudan. She writes, “Where is the shrill outrage when Muslims kill and ethnically cleanse other Muslims from their meagre homes? Why is the anti-African racism of the Arab Sudanese government and militia not damned by Muslims? Where are the perpetually appalled Muslims today?” The fact that the answer is nowhere speak volume about Muslim solidarity and about the fact that it is easier to demonstrate and vent against the West and Non-Muslims than to demonstrate against the genocide of Darfur. The point isn't that that Muslims aren't entitled to their outrage for they are and as I have argued the words of the Pope were regrettable and even responsible. The point is that outrage to keep its moral dimension and to remain legitimate must be consistent. The words of the Pope are nothing compared to the genocide that is happened in Darfur and that will certainly continue because the world isn't prepare to do everything that it can to make it stop. Tomorrow, most of the world leaders will be at the UN for the start of its General Assembly, I wonder if one of them will speak to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and say, “Have you no decency, Sir?”

The best of Yesterday

The best article, which I read last weekend, was the Sunday's Times article on the biggest news story of last week Lonelygirl15 pondering whether it was a prank or art. Here is the money quote:

There is nothing new about the simulations of Lonelygirl15 except the technology,” said the author E. L. Doctorow, whose own novels are well known for manipulating the tensions between reality and invention by placing historical figures and circumstances alongside fictional ones. “There will be more and more of this genre blurring and some genuine art could come out of it.”

And what of Lonelygirl? Can it be called a false document, and thus gain some credibility as a work of art?

“If the author wants to truly fool his or her audience, it’s not a false document,” said Eileen Pollack, an English professor at the University of Michigan. “If the intent is just to say ‘gotcha,’ it’s a prank.”

I believe that the whole think was a prank, whose purpose was to attract a lot of attention, to create a buzz and eventually to make a lot of money. Of course, one doesn't need to have noble motives to create a work of art, but the intention of the creator combine with the fact that the clips on youtube will stop to matter a year, a month from now tells me that this whole affair wasn't about art. If anybody remembers this scandal in the future, it won't be because of the content of the video, but rather for the fact that it was a scam, which worked.

It isn't Religion, it's People !

These two clips show that religion is a pretext for people to diffuse, to teach hate. I think that the point that they both make is that that religion whether is Christianity or Islam, is only a vehicle to Fundamentalists, which they use to divinize unacceptable and dangerous views.

Food for thought

“Because the immigration debate is conducted without reference to development, it is couched in terms of American ideals; we don't want to let people in and then treat them harshly, for that would offend our own self-image. But if you bring development into the picture, it's obvious that extremely harsh poverty afflicts billions of people and that opportunities to alleviate this suffering are few and precious. An expanded temporary worker program is one such opportunity. If American ideals stand in its way, what does that say about them?” Sebastian Mallaby, “Migrating to Modernity.”

The pope expresses his regrets

Benedict XVI said this morning that he was sorry that his homely in Germany offended many Muslims. Here is part of what he said:

At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.These in fact were a quotation from a Medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought. Yesterday, the Cardinal Secretary of State published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words. I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.

It isn’t fair to say that the Pope backed down, he just realized that he was no longer Cardinal Ratzinger, the principal theologian of the Vatican, but Benedict XVI the head of the Catholic Church. It is the role of the pope to not only lead the faithful, but also to be a diplomat and to realize that blunt speech cannot lead to the dialogue that is necessary for people of different faiths to have to change the world. The reactions in the Muslim World are of course excessive, oversensitive, and hypocritical, but they were predictable. It is more important now than ever that the Pope goes on with his plan trip to Turkey to show that he is open to dialogue with people who don't share his ideas and all of his values and he respects Islam even though he disapproves of the actions of Islamists.

Today's video : Borat and Guns

You've probably heard of Borat, the character created by Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G) who is from Kazakhstan and investigate life in Britain and America. Here is one of his best performances.

Food for thought

“Catholic traditionalists, however, have never liked this tardy acceptance of religious difference: after all, how can you believe your Pope is infallible and that Catholicism holds the full content of truth if you grant that other religions, and other Christian denominations, are also an authentic path to salvation? (…) Pluralism, the idea that people should be allowed to follow their own beliefs and value systems, or none at all, became in John Paul’s view a recipe for cultural relativism: “a new form of totalitarianism”, he called it. The answer was the single infallible magisterial truth proposed by Catholicism. (…) In 1999 it was Ratzinger who wrote a document for the entire world, albeit signed by John Paul, stating that all religions were defective other than the Catholic faith. There was outrage, but there was no retraction. Whatever the Pope intended to impart to his audience at Regensburg, the effect has been to alienate rather than forge connections with Islam by pointing up what he sees to be a striking contrast between the two faiths.” John Cornwell, “Focus: Pope vs. Prophet.”