The Republic of Dissent

Tolerance and securalists

Sugary except of the day from Norm Geras:

There are believers who, in the name of religion, act to silence, harm and sometimes indeed kill others, and there is, unfortunately, a lot of this sort of thing about. No secularist is obliged to adopt a relaxed attitude towards it. On the contrary, in defence of freedom of belief, they should be intolerant of it. Secularism, just like genuine liberalism, does not entail tolerance of the appeal to religion to justify intolerant, cruel or murderous ends.

Stout simplicities

The conclusion of Christopher Hitchens's article on the upcoming anniversary of 9/11:

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any "simple" solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Hitchens states the obvious (which may be virtuous, but more often than not unproductive when the goal is to refuse that even stout simplicities lead to uneasy complexities) in an ideological manner. He does it to avoid posing the tough questions, and be on his high horse when he refuses to acknowledge that in life, politics or in any aspect of life being on the right side, fighting 'evil' doesn't make things simpler, but more complicated because it means that there is a duty to act as if  only the final result matters for the other side is evil.

Hitchens fails to understand the question is never in the characterization of evil as evil, but in the uncomfortable notion that stating it doesn't solve anything and does make things simple. 

In short, 9/11 did make life, the world easier, it make it more complex because the 'evil' of the act was so obvious that reflexion and the morality of political acts mattered more tha ever before.

Women as human shields

Sugary excerpt of the day or rather of the night from Juan Cole:

Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.

I have to admit that I have stopped watching Bill Maher years ago because I couldn't take him seriously. He is exactly like the people he criticized, arrogant and fanatically persuaded to be on the right side except that his views are  seen more fashionable and more 'cultured' (some forms of inculture in America and elsewhere are tolerable/fashionable than others when they lead to more palatable conclusions).

Bill Maher doesn't care about the status of women in the "Muslin world," to use an expression that I hate. He is using it to make a cheap point to win an argument that isn't about women, but about a group of people he considers as savages.  My own point here isn't that there is no there there, but to make the assertion that consistency matters when being self-righteous.

I will not foolishly assert that women in America are not privileged compared to others or that foreign countries especially those in certain parts of the world have a 'woman problem.' I will just argue that saying that isn't saying much for the question remains what is the ideal, what are absolute and universal values, and to stop using women as human shield, as props to win ideological wars.

We are all Westerners

Richard Cohen doesn't get it and is stuck in a place where people are too different too immature, too barbaric to know what to do with the good things in life, which to him are 'western values':

Egypt's problems are immense. It has a population it cannot support, a standard of living that is stagnant and a self-image as leader of the (Sunni) Arab world that does not, really, correspond to reality. It also lacks the civic and political institutions that are necessary for democracy. The next Egyptian government - or the one after - might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval.

My take on all this is relentlessly gloomy. I care about Israel. I care about Egypt, too, but its survival is hardly at stake. I care about democratic values, but they are worse than useless in societies that have no tradition of tolerance or respect for minority rights. What we want for Egypt is what we have ourselves. This, though, is an identity crisis. We are not them.

I'm not buying into that ideological distinction between 'us' and 'them' and into the racialist notion that traditions are everything and that identity is a non-evolving state in all societies meaning that people are their history and their traditions. The lesson of our post-globalized world is precisely that 'we' are all westerners now in the sense that 'we' all choose who want to be and thus decide the future, which doesn't have to be like the past.  It comes to Hannah Arendt and to her favorite quote of René Char, which I never get tired of using:  notre histoire n'est précédée d'aucun testament.

People are not chained to their past. Egyptians are not the slaves of history, of what they may have been.

A divided and uncivil country

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

(...) the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

The problem in America and elsewhere is that people no longer know how to debate and to discuss issues because everything has been religionized.  When everything is sacred, there can only be blasphemy and blasphemers, true believers and faith looking to obliterate people who disagree. Will things change? No or at least not yet for the simple fact that change when it is more than Obamastic (symbolic) takes time and having a civilized society requires a committed belief in education and in intelligence rather than in faith and churches.

The Sarah Palin fantasy

Alex Massie affirms with too much satisfaction and guile for his statement to be true that Sarah Palin is done:

Palin is tarnished goods at the moment. More than any other would-be candidate in the prospective field she needs to build an inevitability strategy. She lacks the chops to win a policy battle (or even the appearance of one) and needs instead the kind of whirlwind operation that whips up a storm in state after state. That requires massive enthusiasm and persuading people to ignore their suspicion that she cannot win a general election. Unfortunately that also creates a collective action problem for Palin: people might vote for her if they think other people will too. But they don't think other people will and so they won't either.

I have to admit that I don't understand the rationale of Massie's assertions for Sarah Palin never begun. She has always only been the witch that liberals needed to convince themselves that they were good and that Obama was the best s*it !

To the contrary of many, I have never thought that Palin was stupid or that she was an abomination, I thought that she was likable enough as Obama once said arrogantly and with spite of Hillary Clinton, but that the problem was that she was never as good as her defenders thought that she was and more importantly as bad and evil her detractors believed. Palin is a legitimate political figure, but saying that doesn't mean much for she has yet too become real rather than a fantasy in the mind of her friends and her foes. 

Is Sarah Palin done ? Of course, she isn't. She just isn't real, that's the problem. Sarah Palin doesn't exist. Elle n'existe pas !

Paradoxes and liberalism

The first sugary excerpt of the day of the year is from the great Norm Geras:

It is indeed paradoxical, as a liberal, to think that other people should have to dress as you prefer or dictate; but it is not at all paradoxical to think - as a liberal - that people are most likely to be able to 'grow and thrive' best in societies in which they are guaranteed a wide space of personal freedom. I'd say that the liberal was a strange one who thought that growing and thriving could take place equally well anywhere - under tyranny just as well as not, oppressed within the home as well as not, with not enough to eat, etc.

It is those kinds of paradoxes who make me wonder whether liberalism can remain true to itself if it becomes solely political (in the Obamanian sense of the word) and thus a form of devotion.

Religion and unkindness

Sugary excerpt from Christopher Hitchens in his debate against Blair on Religion

Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord. No, it is -- as the great physicist Stephen Weinberg has aptly put it, in the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you'll need religion.

Moralist like Tony Blair

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Barber's review of George W. Bush's memoirs Decision Points:

Like Tony Blair, painted in the book as a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, Bush is a moralist. Like Blair, Bush insists all the major intelligence agencies thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the threat of WMD falling into terrorist hands was too great to bear. Like Blair, he cannot understand why more people still do not accept the moral argument for removing Saddam. “I didn’t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced human rights,” he writes.

I'm tempted to accept this excerpt with  a quote from John Steinbeck: only fools do not learn fro experience. However, neither Blair no Bush are fools, they are just complaisant moralists who believe that God made them kings because it/s/he knew they could make the right decision based on faith, on what it/s/he wanted them to do. What is the difference between Bush, Blair, other political leaders who believe religiously that God is on their side and  Ahmadinejad?

Gender as a nonnegotiable gift

Sugary excerpt from the New York Times' portrait of Priscilla Shirer, a female woman evangelist in Baton Rouge:

Shirer and many conservative Christians believe that the Bible defines gender as a divinely ordained set of desires and duties inherent in each man and woman since the Garden of Eden. Gender is not an act or a choice, but a nonnegotiable gift. To these Christians, the story of Adam and Eve’s creation granted man authority over woman, and they understand the New Testament teachings of Paul and his comrades — in particular, that wives should submit to their husbands — not as cultural relics of the first century but as universal teachings that Christians apply today.

In an era when sexual liberation has saturated American culture, when women are climbing the corporate ladder and bearing fewer children, and mainline churches are ordaining women and homosexuals, conservative evangelicals are escalating their counteroffensive. Many call themselves complementarians, signaling their belief that God ordained complementary — not identical or flexible — roles for men and women.

Well, my reaction is only in America ! That isn't quite accurate only in America, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. I know that  many Americans don't like to believe their fundamentalists can be identical or as disturbing and dangerous to the ones of other countries as if they were more sophisticated and superior because they were Americans and  America is after all a great nation (an opinion that I share), but that reluctance is solely based on foolish pride and snobbish chauvinism. In fact, one could make the argument that because America is as great as it is, its fundamentalists are worst, scarier than those of say a nation like Afghanistan (I'm not yet willing to go that far). What will happen to the US when/if its government and more importantly, its judiciary cannot ensure that there is an unconditional separation between church and state? The future doesn't look good.

The eternally Puritan nation

Suary excerpt of the early morning from Roger Ebert:

America has a historical Puritan streak, and is currently in the midst of another upheaval of zeal from radical religionists. They know what is bad for us. They would prefer to burn us at a metaphorical stake, but make do with bizarre imprecations about the dire consequences of our sin. Let me be clear: I am not speaking of sexual behavior that is obviously evil and deserves legal attention. But definitions differ. Much of their wrath is aimed at gays. I consider homosexuality an ancient, universal and irrefutable fact of human nature. Some radicals actually blamed it for 9/11. For them the ideal society must be Saudi Arabia's, which I consider pathologically sick.

I don't disagree with Ebert, I just believe that people like him (I am more like him than not) also want to tell peope whom they disagree with what kind of persons they ought to be (good people thinking good thoughts) and what what they ought to believe. It seems to me that the more you moralize your politics and your beliefs, the more likely you are to believe that they have to be absolute and that people  have to believe what you believe to be acceptable.  That's my reason for loving Eluard's quote Le bien et le mal doivent leur existence à l'abus de quelques erreurs.

Betraying the tradition of the Enlightenment

I agree with Brendan O'Neill on this:

(...)The great irony of the French government’s restrictions on the burqa in public places, and to a certain extent the Belgian government’s restrictions, is that they have been presented as being in the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is about liberating women from oppression, they say, and therefore it is a good, Enlightened, Voltairish thing to do.

In fact, banning a religious garment is counter to the spirit of the Enlightenment. What these authoritarians forget is that the Enlightenment sprang from a defence of religious liberty. The Enlightenment has its origins, not in any attempt to censor certain minority religious symbols, but in a belief that minority religions, even ones we consider ‘heretical’, should be protected from state intervention, censorship and oppression.

So in calling for the state to restrict a certain form of religious expression, these pseudo-Enlightened censors are doing something that the original men of the Enlightenment would have considered pretty outrageous.

Democracy as the enemy

Via Andrew Seal, a quote from Slavoj Žižek, which is always provocative, but may just be without moronic because often, Žižek is so focused on the forest that he forgets the essentiality of trees:

We do not vote about who owns what, or about worker–management relations in a factory; all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain lie outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures can, of course, have a positive role to play. But they remain part of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose is to guarantee the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy. It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations…

Religious Hitchens

Sugary excerpt from a Guardian article on Christopher Hitchens:

To say that Hitchens is stirred – even obsessed – by the question of courage would be to state the obvious. It seems therefore highly likely that his longing for the great Orwellian test – the momentous moral challenge to match the 1930s – might tempt him to overstate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. "Do I ask myself," he replies, "do I think our civilisation is superior to theirs? Yes, I do. Do I think it's worth fighting for? Most certainly."
That wasn't really the question.
"Well, I know how to correct atavism in myself, yes, I do," he retorts. As evidence, he offers the fact that after 9/11 he voted against his Washington apartment block flying the American flag. "So I was pleased to find out I wasn't in the mob majority in that way." But then he adds, bizarrely, "The other thing is, what happens when this ebbs, and the flag gets tatty? And you start seeing cabs with flags worn to rags, making the flag look crappy."

I 'm convinced that Christopher Hitchens is going to end up becoming one of the type of people that he hates the most, that is a man who is so religious about everything that he likes that he stops thinking to descent to believe in his own grandeur just as any evangelical preacher who is convinced that he is a prophet who is always right.

Dangerous thoughtlessness and free speech

The statement of the day is from Juan Cole about the draw Muhammad Day:

I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

I agree with Cole's sentiment, but disagrees with his conclusion. It's always better to live i a society where thoughtlessness, even when it is bigoted and can produce violence, can be expressed because it reminds us that the civility and the education necessary to maintain a liberal and open society are never a given

Contraception and fanaticism in Congo

Once in a while Nick Kristof gets things right:

In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.
Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.
Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.
So the pill, 50 years old this month in the United States, has yet to reach parts of Africa. And condoms and other forms of birth control and AIDS prevention are still far too difficult to obtain in some areas.

One of the most appalling facts about the  limited use of contraception isn't used in Congo and other African countries is the role that American evangelism plays in strengthening old beliefs that women are breeders and not contraception isn't just bad, but evil. The point isn't here that the problem has been imported or is being created by American evangelists, thus making the issue one of identity or one of eternal victimization but rather that that imported fanaticism is making an already catastrophic situation  worst by convincing well intentioned, but limited people that ignorance, poverty, and anti-intellectualism  are not just bliss, but also close to Godliness.

Genital mutilation and culturalism

Another example of the dangers and absurdities of culturalism:

At the end of last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a revised policy statement on female genital mutilation (FGM) called "ritual genital cutting of female minors," suggesting that the federal and state law in the US should permit paediatricians to offer a ritual "nick" of girls' genitalia as a compromise to appease the cultural needs of their immigrant clients.

Soon, in the name of the divinity of culture, honor killings will be allowed. May be it is time to assert that there isn't such a thing as culture.In my view, no 'cultural compromise' is palatable if it comes at the costs of Lockean Liberalism

Salafism and American Protestant Fundamentalism

Oliver Roy on the similarities between Salafism and American Protestant Fundamentalism :

It is a mistake to think that the phenomena of religious radicalism (Salafism) and political radicalism (Al Qaeda) are mere imports of the cultures and conflicts of the Middle East. It is above all a consequence of the globalization and Westernization of Islam. Today's religious revival is first and foremost marked by the uncoupling of culture and religion, whatever the religion may be. This explains the affinities between American Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic Salafism: both reject culture, philosophy, and even theology in favour of a scriptural reading of the sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith, to the detriment of educational and religious institutions.

Roy's comparison is appropriate in my view because it emphasizes the fact that globalization has a lot to do with the rise of religious extremism. It is striking to realize that the less people feel in control, the more they are likely to turn to a vengeful God requiring them to be pure and to purify their world to make it more to their liking.

Fanaticism, ridicule, and the steps forward

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the whole South Park and Muhammad affair:

Islamists seek to replace the rule of law with that of commanding right and forbidding wrong. With over a billion and a half people calling Muhammad their moral guide, it is imperative that we examine the consequences of his guidance, starting with the notion that those who depict his image or criticize his teachings should be punished.
In "South Park," this tyrannical rule is cleverly needled when Tom Cruise asks the question: How come Muhammad is the only celebrity protected from ridicule? Now we know why. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right. I'm only wondering whether the whole cycle of shock, awe, screams of cultural insensitivity, apologies or a refusal to back down lead anywhere, but down the ground. It is true that backing down is dangerous when an essential value such as free speech, which includes the right to make fun of gods and prophets is challenged there must never be a surrender to fear and to threats. The most difficult question to me isn't about fighting extremism and refusing to accept that in the name of  religion or whatever else some forms of speech are forbidden, the capital question is what happens afterward standing the confrontation.

Cultural insensitivity

Thought-provoking examples from Margaret Wente of the most outrageous of censorship and of blackmail:

In 2005, Burger King in Britain got in trouble when some Muslims thought the swirly design on the wrapper of the ice-cream cones looked like the word “Allah.” “I feel humiliated,” complained one unhappy customer. “I’m going to make [the person who did this] see that it was the biggest mistake in his life.” Burger King promptly recalled the ice cream and apologized. Instead of telling people to get a life, the Muslim Council of Britain said: “We commend the sensitive and prompt action to prevent any hurt being caused to the religious sensibilities of others.”
Nike got in trouble in the U.S. for the same reason – putting a design on a running shoe that some Muslims thought resembled the name Allah. Nike eventually negotiated a settlement with a leading Muslim group. It apologized for any unintentional offence, recalled all products carrying the design, introduced training for Nike designers in Islamic imagery, and agreed to investigate how the design came about. McDonald’s goofed up too, in quite a different way. A few months ago, for fear of offending Muslims, the Singapore chain pre-emptively omitted a pig from a series of animal toys it had created to depict every sign in the Chinese zodiac. This time it was the Chinese who were infuriated. They demanded that their beloved pig be reinstated, and blasted McDonald’s for cultural insensitivity.

The problem is both in the US, in Canada, and many other countries, culture has become sacred as a result of the supremacy of identity politics. The implication of this sacralization is censorship and the crippling fear to appear to be insensitive to others' cultures because it is seen as the most unacceptable of all violations. Wente's examples are also a proof that an eroding togetherness created by the segregation of differences and the reinforcement of different communities at the expense of the whole society. Unfortunately, this trend is going to continue because identity politics is the present and I'm afraid the future.

Paul Berman, Tariq Ramadan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Josh Gohlke reviews Paul Berman's latest The Flight of the Intellectuals and highlights his views on 'Western Journalists' and their preference for Tariq Ramadan over Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Ramadan is attractive to Western journalists partly because he is moderate in manner, always seeking consensus and middle ground. But Berman encourages us to ask: A middle ground between which poles? Between stoning adulteresses and maybe not stoning them if we can come to an accord?
Berman figures Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee-turned-activist who has unequivocally condemned mistreatment of women in the Muslim world, as Ramadan’s foil. Hirsi Ali is infallibly immoderate in tone. For that she has earned the backhanded admiration (at best) and disdain (at worst) of Buruma and other journalists. But at least some of her principles—a woman’s right to keep her genitals intact, for example—aren’t the sort on which democratic societies can afford to compromise.
How did Western journalists come to be more respectful of decorous fundamentalists than they are of brash secularists? For one thing, they fear that Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of her own tradition will embolden anti-Muslim bigots and xenophobes in America and Europe. Berman adds another answer that’s startlingly simple: rejections of Islamism have become life-threatening. 

I agree with Berman's main point about the attractiveness of Tariq Ramadan and the fact that he has acquired a legitimacy because he is moderate in tone while Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn't. I think that such a disparity in treatment shows that the notion of difference is so ingrained in certain elites that they are willing to apply different moral values to unacceptable situations as long as one is able to agree on them one some issues and thus to reassure that they are on their side, which means being on the left politically. Tariq Ramadan is perceived as being a lslamic leftist while Ayaan Hirsi Ali as radical conservative, which isn't as attractive. To use a telling comparison, I would say that in the mind of most journalists, Ramadan is close to Barack Obama while Ayaan Hirsi Ali is closer to Sarah Palin. That explains the difference in their treatment by the media. However, these realities don't lead me to the same conclusions as Berman.  I think that the mistake is always to draw a line in the sand and to chastise those such as Ian Buruma who are uncomfortable with absolutism. In short, Paul Berman is unable to accept the idea that there isn't just one way to fight extremism and that confrontation can be about something other than a brutal clash and the castigation of the wolves in sheep clothing. That inflexibility may be a sign of moral rectitude, but is problematic because it strengthens one's intellectual status without providing  solutions that change reality. But again, Berman's problem might be that he isn't interested in changing reality, but simply in condemning abnormalities and atrocities while scolding those who don' t do i with the same vigor as him.

Fanaticism works

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Neal Gabler:

The real problem with extremism as an attention-grabber isn’t that we don’t know what to do about it. The real problem is that it works. By knocking down the Twin Towers and announcing a constant stream of threats, the Islamic radicals got and continue to get publicity out of proportion to their numbers — just as the Tea Partiers have been dominating the national airwaves even though their ranks, according to survey data, constitute no more than 13 percent of the American public. Similarly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are very well remunerated for their high-decibel hate. In other words, we may say we hate fanaticism, but we pay attention to it and may even reward it.

America doesn't have a 'Muslim' problem

Essential questions from Glenn Greenwald responding to Ross Douthat's op-ed on South Park and its caricature of Muhammad

Who could possibly look at the U.S. and conclude that brutal, inhumane, politically-motivated, designed-to-intimidate violence is a particular problem among Muslims, or that Muslims receive special, unfairly favorable treatment as a result of their intimidation?  Do you mean except for the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we've tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination?

Un-Islamic music

Another proof that there is something rotten in the Republic of Somalia:

Last week, in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, more than a dozen radio stations switched off their music in accordance with an ultimatum from Islamist rebels.
Apparently seeking to bolster their global-jihadist credentials, Somali extremist groups Hezb al-Islam and their sometime-allies al-Shebab decreed that all music - Arab, East African or Britney Spears - ­ is "un-Islamic", and ordered all radio stations to cease playing it, in any form, or face "serious consequences".
Broadcasters were quick to devise light-hearted alternatives to their scheduled music, re-recording ads and replacing bridging jingles with the sounds of car horns, frogs croaking, roosters crowing and, with grim irony, gunfire. ­ The situation was bizarre enough to earn the beleaguered Somalis a spoof-tribute on America's National Public Radio.

Canadian multiculturalism and extremism

Quote of the day from Ujjal Dosanjh:

I think what we are doing to this country is that this idea of multiculturalism has been completely distorted, turned on its head to essentially claim that anything anyone believes – no matter how ridiculous and outrageous it might be – is okay and acceptable in the name of diversity.  (...) Where we have gone wrong in this pursuit of multiculturalism is that there is no adherence to core values, the core Canadian values, which [are]: That you don’t threaten people who differ with you; you don’t go attack them personally; you don’t terrorize the populace

Uganda, homophobia, and the responsibility of the 'West'

I agree almost totally with Ken McLaughlin's assertion that Uganda's homophobia has been exacerbated (not created) by outside influences:

Care needs to be taken not to overstate the influence of three extreme and objectionable American evangelical Christians. Ugandans are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with whatever nonsense such people pour forth. The reasons for the current anti-homosexual climate are complex, influenced by historical, social, religious and cultural factors. However, the role of the West, from the colonial to the contemporary period, is of relevance when considering what is happening in Uganda today.
Attitudes to homosexuality in Uganda, as in most countries, have varied historically – at points being tolerant, at others intolerant. However, the current criminalisation of homosexuality is a legacy of British colonialism, whereby the colonial powers sought to punish local practices that they deemed to constitute ‘unnatural sex’. More recently, the US administration under George W Bush praised Uganda’s heterosexual, family-values policies and donated millions of dollars to sexual abstinence programmes. And now, Uganda finds itself being used as a proxy site for Western culture wars, with politicians, church leaders, gay and anti-gay activists getting involved in the debate and escalating the situation.

It is indisputable, in my opinion, that homophobia in Uganda and elsewhere has become a major political issue in part because of outside factors and influence. In those countries, it is used as both a political and an identity tool (identity politics here again is key); it is a way to reaffirm the omnipotence of traditional values which are seen as the basis of an imagined 'Africanity' which is seen as under assault from the outside world and oneeds to be revived to fix all problems including the one of development. I don't believe that the world should remain silent in front what is happening to Uganda, but rather that it should not make it an issue as one between the 'West' and the 'rest' by moralizing it, but rather should simply humanize it to avoid stupid debates about colonialism, neocolonialism, cultural imperialism, and every other silly pretexts used to justify the unjustifiable.

Pakistan as a sexually repressed country

Quote of the early morning from Shazia Mirza:

Pakistan is a sexually repressed country, and that is the root of many of its problems.
The last time I performed in Lahore I was told: "You can talk about anything you like – religion, politics, drugs, you can swear and curse, just don't mention 'The Sex'."
Any sexual words or connotations were banned – because in Pakistan there is no mention of sex on television, radio, or in public

Something is rotten in Québec

Another 'veiled' woman taken away from a French class in Montreal:

One morning recently, a young Muslim woman whose face was hidden by a religious covering was pulled out of her government French class near Montreal and told to unveil or leave the course.
But, while Ms. Ahmed was portrayed in media accounts as difficult to accommodate, Aisha, as she has asked to be called to shield her identity, didn’t make waves.
According to former classmates and officials at the suburban centre she attended, the young woman was a model student who placed no demands on others and even teamed up with male students for class assignments.

I'm just wondering if the burqa/niqab/hijab/islamic veil is the biggest threat to Quebec society. It is of course a rhetorical question for history shows that it is easier to pick on women when a society has no easy answers to complex identity issues and yet feels threatened by change whether perceived or real. I'm just waiting for the Quebec to show its manliness to the end and deport these women from their province to show that they mean business instead of once again, using them as political tools.

The Taliban aren't Islamists

Pertinent observations from Adam Curtis on Afghanistan and the Taliban:

There is a growing sense in the West that we no longer know what we are fighting for in Afghanistan. The question that is almost never asked is what they are fighting for? What do the Taliban want?
We are told that we are fighting to prevent terrorist attacks in Europe and America. But the reality is that the Taliban have no interest in attacking the West. In the public imagination and in much journalism the Taliban are seen as exactly the same as political Islamists such as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. The truth is that they are the very opposite of each other.
The radical Islamists see themselves as modern revolutionaries. They want to reshape Islam and fuse it with the modern world of science, technology and mass politics to create a new kind of society. The Taliban rose up because they thought the Islamists had failed to do this. And instead the Taliban decided to go back into the past and try and reinvent an old world.

My observation is while I believe that Afghanistan is not a winnable war, I'm wondering whether the sole consideration about assessing the Taliban should be the threat that they pose to the 'west.' In any case, that's a choice for the Afghans to decide. Still while agreeing that humanitarian intervention is a thing of the past, I'm thinking/hoping that they ought to be a way for other countries to show that they disapprove of the values of the Taliban without belittling the Afghans and using well-intentioned paternalism.

Witchcraft and witch-hunts

Appalling and frightening stuff:

Here is one story. It happened in India's Jharkhand state in October 2009, but might have come from any part of early modern Europe. Five women were accused of causing harm, a suspicion bolstered by local witchfinders and a cleric. A mob dragged them before a large crowd, where they were stripped and beaten until the authorities intervened. They were lucky. Every year hundreds of Indians, mostly women, are murdered by their neighbours, usually in the most atrocious manner.
In sub-Saharan Africa the problem is even worse. The war in Congo (1998-2003) killed millions, mostly through starvation and disease. High child mortality was widely blamed on "night dancers" – witches who steal blood and smear poisons on houses. European witches of the 16th century were charged with identical crimes, for instance the Swiss plague-spreaders known as engraisseurs. In 1999 the pro-government chief of Mwenga fled an advancing rebel army, leaving his wife behind with the town's protective charm; the soldiers publicly buried her alive with the charm. In the province of Ituri, as many as 4,000 may have been killed.

Just one more reason to decry the sacralization of traditions and other old, ridiculous an inhumane beliefs justifying the unjustifiable.

Scams and free speech

Different take from Bill Tieleman on Ann Coulter's visit to Canada and her assertion that she was a victim of censorship and of a hate crime:

God bless the University of Ottawa students who did something in one night that millions of Americans have spent years hoping for -- they shut up Ann Coulter!
But don't call this a "free speech" issue. Coulter -- the ridiculously rabid right-wing American commentator, and federal Conservative Party activist Ezra Levant played the media like a cheap fiddle to make it appear she was muzzled -- not at all.
Coulter and Levant -- not the police, not the University of Ottawa -- cancelled her speaking engagement last week -- not because of a riot, or because violent protesters bashed down the doors -- but because it was a great publicity opportunity.
And most media bought it, hook line and sinker -- reporting that no matter how offensive Coulter's views are, they should be tolerated in a free and democratic society, especially at a university, blah, blah, blah.
What rubbish!

I feel dirty for even taking about Ann Coulter so I'm going to stop.

The Pope as a normal being

I agree with Christopher Hitchens on this, but I recognize the rest of the world doesn't agree with us:

For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church?(...)This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.
This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets.

Hitchens is right on principle, and it doesn't not matter here for the Pope is a powerful little grisly man who will never have to answer any question. He is the head of the most powerful church and that fact protects him. It makes him in fact above the law. There are always going to be priests, people willing to fall on their swords for Benedict XVI, believing that martyrdom will earn them a special place in paradise if someone dares to examine the Vatican's role in all the sex abuse scandals.

Still waiting for Jesus

Well, no comments necessary (hat tip: Alex Massie) Why am I seeing Obama instead of Jesus?

The merits of free hate speech

I agree in part with Rick Salutin on this::

The best response to Ann Coulter is – to respond. Tell her to piss off, not shut up. Challenge her, as a Muslim student in London, Ont., did, saying she has no flying carpet (a Coulter witticism) to “go back home” on. So get a camel, says la Coulter. Then it's the protesters' turn; they can hiss, walk out, pie her – I don't consider pie-ing violence, I consider it symbolic speech. It's what you do when you don't have the podium and a mic. Think shoe thrower of Baghdad. That was a shoe (or two) heard round the world.
Nor do I feel like joining in the ritual statements that find Ann Coulter's views appalling. The only point of free speech is when it's about views you find appalling. Otherwise, it's “allowed speech,” because it doesn't offend you.
One Ottawa student protester said a campus should be a safe and positive space. I agree with safe but not so much with positive. I'd even say a university should be a safe and negative space, in the sense used by Herbert Marcuse, whose student I was. He praised the power of negative thinking, by which he meant learning to be critical of the way things are. Little kids deserve a safe and positive space, largely so they can gain the self-assurance to deal with all the negative space they'll meet later on. In fact, one of the unheralded merits of free hate speech is that it can give those vilified and maligned a sense of their own strength.

What amazes me is that Ann Coulter manages to irritate and to unnerve too many people when it should become obvious to almost everybody that wrestling with a pig in the dirt is pointless because it likes it, pigs like dirt.

It takes a nut to change the world

Paul Sagar's latest post disappoints me because it is narrow-minded and more dangerously, it is expressing the self-fulling prophesy that a nut guided by Sarah Palin can destroy Obama and his plans for America

Remember: One lone nut got to Abraham Lincoln. One lone nut got to JFK. One lone nut got to Reagan and was unlucky not to succeed.*
It only takes one lone nut. My guess is that, right now, there are a great many nuts – lone or otherwise – laying their plans.

I'm disappointed because it seems to me that Sagar and others would have never expressed the same views about virulent and fanatical opposition to George W. Bush and to Ronald Reagan who got shoot by a nut. My complaint isn't that Sagar isn't right that there was a lot of nuts willing to harm Obama, it is that he implies both implicitly and explicitly that the America and the Americans who oppose Obama are nuts and willing to kill him.  These views coming from a man as honorable as Paul Sagar who knows better is disappointing and willfully ignorant.

Curry as the positive aspect of immigration

Here is Nick Griffin's answer, the Chief of Britain far right party, the BNP the British National Party)  to put things mildly, to the question put to me by Iain Dale about the positive side of immigration:

Well, a wide range of curries is a plus. But there again, I've got the recipes.

I'm not appalled, just reassured that I'm right not to take Griffin seriously for he reminds me of Ann Coulter. He has a backbone or a little bit of political culture, he would have put things differently, Neither Geert Wilders nor Jean-Marie Le Pen, who are as far right as Nick Griffin, would have given that answer. In short, Nick Griffin is a clown.

South Africa, violence and the demons of the past

S'Thembiso Msomi on the difficulty of many South Africans including members of the majority party, the African National Congress to accept that Apartheid is over and that political violence is unacceptable in a democracy:

Just this weekend, a number of shacks and dozens of poor families were left homeless in Claremont, Durban, after a mob went on a rampage "evicting" supporters of the Congress of the People from the area.
Why ANC supporters would be so threatened by the presence of a few Cope members in the area that they feel the need to engage in violent acts escapes me.
But the problem is much bigger than political intolerance.
It has to do with the unintended consequences of the militant mass struggles of the 1980s and 1990s, which helped bring apartheid to its knees.
(...)Though the repressive political environment of the time necessitated the use of militant methods to achieve political objectives, it also had the unfortunate consequence of convincing certain sections of the disadvantaged that nothing can be achieved without violence.
Political leaders, especially those of former liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC, have a duty to undo this damage by teaching their supporters that violence has no place in a democratic society.

One has to wonder whether South African, in spite of its strong institutions and civil society, can survive without strong and fearless political leadership exercised by people who will resist populism, but realizing that for South Africa not to become Zimbabwe, the many will have to learn to accept the few in spite of the attractiveness of identity politics.

Feminism and troubling personal choices

Ilham Moussaid who became known as the veiled candidate of one of the French extreme left party to the last regional elections on Feminism and her choice to wear to veil:

For my part, I'm not submissive: it's a personal choice. I'm a feminist. I fight for women's rights with my women comrades. I fight for equality between men and women. I fight for the right to abortion, the right to contraception. It's true they see it as a symbol of oppression but unfortunately they forget that there are women who wear it out of choice. A certain number of women are obliged to wear it, of course, I don't deny that, and I'll fight for these women. But you can't say that all those who've chosen to wear a headscarf are submissive. It's not true. Once it's a question of personal choice you can't say the person is being oppressed, as these feminists argue.(...) For me, being a feminist means defending the right of women to have control over their own lives. I have control over mine and I've made this choice but it's not respected. These feminists don't respect it because I haven't made the same choice as them. My response is that there's not just one way to be a feminist; there's not just one way to be a woman. We can't all be alike. We need to concentrate on what unites us, on the fight for equality between men and women, and not to say we should all dress the same way, that you can't wear a headscarf because otherwise you're not a feminist. I think that shows a lack of respect. I don't feel represented by feminists who say that the headscarf is always a question of obligation. There are a lot of feminists who agree with me, who see that I'm fighting the same battles as them, and they support me.

I'm all for Moussaid's right to make the personal choice to wear the veil or even to be submissive. I'm just wondering since when feminism has become the sole ideology/movement/whatever else it has become acceptable to affirm a woman right to be whoever she wants be even it means displeasing other members of the same sex or ignoring the constraints/so-called obligations of gender .

Coulter and Canada

As always, Ann Coulter knows how to be dignified after suffering 'a setback' in Canada, here is her reaction:

You guys used to be so cool. You were smokers. You had epic hockey fights. We had half our comedians from Canada. Now you’re all a bunch of girls named Francois.

I wish Coulter had been able to speak in Ottawa and  that Canadians to the contrary of American had been able to put her down nicely by showing her that she doesn't deserve to be taken seriously even though she is entitled to speak and by not taken the bait of antagonism and just ignoring. I will bet by favorite left toe that Coulter isn't going to have the guts to go through with her threat to file a human-right complaint alleging that she was the victim of hate speech. That would be a further proof that she is commercial figure who only believe in her principles when they protect her or earn her a few bucks.

The vulgarity of hate speech laws

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

For as long as I'll live, I'll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes, will never understand the view that it's better to try to suppress adverse beliefs than to air them, and will especially never understand people's failure to realize that endorsing this power will, one day, very likely result in their own views being criminalized when their political enemies (rather than allies) are empowered.  Who would ever want to empower officious technocrats to issue warnings along the lines of:  be forewarned:  if you express certain political views, you may be committing a crime; guide and restrict yourself accordingly?  I obviously devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to critiquing the actions of the U.S. Government, but the robust free speech protection guaranteed by the First Amendment and largely protected by American courts continues to be one of the best features of American political culture.

Hate speech laws are both paternalistic and ineffective, More importantly, they are vulgar, because they assume that hate is solely a problem when it is expressed and that the State is a nanny that can forbid the content of expression without eduction.  All one has to do is to look at Europe to realize that the attempts of governments to disinfect and to civilize through force rather tan education lead to the rise of marginal groups, to the fetishism of the forbidden views and of disobedience within society and to the multiplication of zones (football stadiums) where people express violently point of views that can express publicly.

Burka, right wing ideology and feminism

Mona Eltahawy on the ban of the Burqa/burka,right-wing Muslim Ideology and women's right(hat tip: Norm Geras):

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe. The European political right – be it President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ultra-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen (who did alarmingly well in the first round of those regional elections) or Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders – do not give a rat's ass about Muslim women or their rights: they are merely using the issue in an attempt to win votes.
The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National party were shamefully elected to the European parliament — are very real. But the silence of the left wing and liberals isn't the way to fight it. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.

My disagreement with Eltahawy comes from the fact that I don't view women as victims or particular creatures that have to remain clean, pure, and always make good choices. I consider that they have the right to be whoever they want to be even if it means becoming an object and making disturbing choices. My point on the burka/burqa/niqab debate is simple, women are instruments to fight Islamic ideology or to promote secularism, they are normal individuals whose rights to individuality should be judge by the usual criteria used in a society to decide when individuality becomes criminal and dangerous to a society. I'm not against a burqa ban in France and elsewhere in the name of feminism, because I don't think that women's rights (whatever that expression means) is the issue, but that the right of women as human beings to define their womanhood and their femininity is in question. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell what is the male's equivalent of the burqa to reconsider my position.

Niqab and normality

Telling anecdote from Lysiane Gagnon:

A reporter from La Presse spent two days walking around Montreal dressed like a fundamentalist Muslim, with a long black robe and a niqab that covered everything but her eyes, but in most places – in the Metro, fast-food restaurants or on the streets – she went rather unnoticed and was not subjected to any aggressive reaction, except a few hard glances.

Is it possible that the debate about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil isn't about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil but about something else?

American multiculturalism and homegrown terrorism

Quote of the day from Jonathan Laurence :

(...) recent cases show that the combination of extreme alienation from US foreign policy, whipped up with religious fervor, can trump even the relatively harmonious multicultural setting of American society.

Celibacy, gender, and the Catholic priesthood

 Hans Küng on the need for the Pope to stop to refuse stubbornly to reconsider the issue of celibacy for priests:

Why does the pope continue to assert that what he calls "holy" celibacy is a "precious gift", thus ignoring the biblical teaching that explicitly permits and even encourages marriage for all office holders in the Church? Celibacy is not "holy"; it is not even "fortunate"; it is "unfortunate", for it excludes many perfectly good candidates from the priesthood and forces numerous priests out of their office, simply because they want to marry. The rule of celibacy is not a truth of faith, but a church law going back to the 11th Century; it should have been abolished already in the 16th Century, when it was trenchantly criticized by the Reformers.
Honesty demands that the pope, at the very least, promise to rethink this rule -- something the vast majority of the clergy and laity have wanted for a long time now.

My view on the question is that celibacy is just one of the symptoms of an archaic Catholic church, which believes fanatically and dangerously that inhumane traditions and rigidity are the only way to maintain its purity and its authenticity. Hans Küng ought to advise the Pope to let women be priests for that would revolutionize his church and send the message that Catholicism at last believes in equality and that women can communicate with God without any sexual tensions. Moreover, having women priests is a better way to address sex abuse than having married men as priests not because women don't abuse children, but because their inclusion would force the wall of silence to crumble and would make it a lot more difficult for the Catholic Church to believe that children and women are inferior to men and be ignored when they are abused by its members.

Islamism and Irony

TF Lane argues that Islamists are 'ironists':

Irony tends to be used in one of two ways: as an ideology or a tool. Used as a tool, it is possessive of a deeply affirmative power: that individual refusal to be coerced or to submit to tyranny – what WH Auden calls the “Ironic points of light / [that] Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages”.
Islamists believe this is the way they employ irony. The car bombs and beheadings, the audiotapes and jihadist websites, the curers who kill and the vocal opponents of free speech – all of them are “points of light”. Each is a message from the Just, piercing the obscure lies of liberalism.(...)
Many secular commentators talk of Islamism as a radical ideology. But jihadists believe there is nothing idea-listic about it: to them, there is a moral map beneath their feet as ordered and patterned as a well-spun rug. It is a code written down more than a thousand years ago, the unchangeable words of God, and a glimpse into a higher realm. What we engage with as reality, they view as an elaborate fiction.

The only question that I have is whether the use of irony here isn't common to all religious fundamentalist groups, which want to merge the religious with the political and needs enemies in this militant conquest. Are Islamists a particular breed of fundamentalists? I don't think that they are, but I could be wrong.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Amnesia Nigeriana

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on the Nigerian propensity to ignore bad news or rather to live with it as if it is part of the Nigerian normality

I’VE heard it said that we Nigerians are the happiest people on earth. We’re also accused of being passive about issues that would stir up revolutions in other countries. For instance, it’s been just over a week since ethno-religious violence left hundreds dead around Jos, a city in central Nigeria, but the slaughtering of our fellow citizens has already largely faded from our headlines and conversations.(...)Amnesia Nigeriana, someone called it: that tendency of Nigerians to blank out national trauma. As it happens, more than anything else, it is the reports that persist on the BBC and CNN that remind us that hundreds of innocent Nigerians, women and children, were slaughtered in their sleep that Sunday night. When I look up at the huge TV screen in the newsroom where I work, there’s usually a foreign reporter with a look of high seriousness, scenes of Jos in the background.
Every time Nigeria experiences an episode of violence, we seem to go quiet while the rest of the world becomes fixated. Perhaps it’s understandable that we begin to resent these foreign journalists and the constant focus on our disasters.

Something tells me that Amnesia Nigeriana is an affliction that does not plague uniquely Nigerians...

Domesticated intellectuals

Slavoj Zizek on the state o fintellectualism today :

The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges; the philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundation of our societies...
One should thoroughly reject not only this criminalization of intellectuals, but, even more, the defensive domestication of radical intellectuals who, so the story goes, offer a provocative correction to democracy which,through his exaggeration, renders visible the inconsistencies and weaknesses of the democratic project. The idea is that radical theories are provocations which are not really “meant seriously,” but aim, through their “provocative” character, to awaken us from the democratic-dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy itself… This is how the establishment likes “subversive” theorists to be: turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us to inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise – God forbid to take their project seriously and try to live them…

Zizek is always pertinent, but I wonder whether his love affair with radicalism hasn't done to him what he believes modernity, capitalism, and democracy have done to other intellectuals, that is whether he hasn't been domesticated. To put it differently, I'm coming to the realization the sole major distinction between Zizek and BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy)  image and other technicalities because both of them seem very domesticated to me in the sense that they sell and don't really bother the powerful, which means that they are not really gadflies, which doesn't mean that they aren't relevant and useful. I wonder how Zizek would feel, if he had enough distance and was less narcissistic, if he realized that he was the BHL or the Olivier Besancenot of a pseudo radical philosophy, which for some reason is extremely marketable in a capitalist society..

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

Wole Soyinka's Nigeria

Wole Soyinka reminds me of Fela Kuti when he talks about politics. When he analyzes the situation in Nigeria, he gets a lot of things right, but unfortunately, he also perfumes reality with his own extravagances making it more fantastical than it needs to in order to justify radicalism and impossible revolutions. Case in point:

Mr Soyinka condemned what he called the "industry of lies" that had grown up around the President's medical condition. He said Nigeria's first lady, Turai Yar'Adua, who has denied access to her husband and kept his true condition a secret, should stand trial for her role in the power vacuum. "This woman is there standing guard against the truth of his health," Mr Soyinka said. "When will the rest of the nation wake up?"
Mr Yar'Adua was taken to hospital in Saudi Arabia in November and only came back to Nigeria last month. Since his return he has been kept in an ambulance; he is treated only by Saudi doctors and no one outside his wife's inner circle has seen him, including the acting president, Goodluck Jonathan.(...)
Mr Soyinka said Nigeria had a failing "neocolonial constitution", a wave of "political assassinations" and was a place where power failures were "the norm" and its leaders were "robber barons" looting the country. "There is this myth of Nigerian resilience, that we will always pull back from the brink, but there is a critical mass at which some things implode," he said.
He defended the "real militants" in the Niger Delta, whom he said had a right to take on the government over decades of neglect, rights abuses, environmental crimes and theft of resources. He called Mend "a small, well-organised and resourceful militant group" that could choke the government's lifeline of oil. Yesterday, Mend launched its biggest attack since last year.(...)The author compared the task of reforming Nigeria to that of Sisyphus, saying: "You roll that damn rock up the hill, you don't get anywhere and the rock rolls back down."