The Republic of Dissent

Being afraid of 'the Mormon'

Sentences from David Kopel to munch on this Sunday:

I find it disgusting that a Gallup Poll found 22% of Americans (18% of Republicans, 19% of Independents, and 27% of Democrats) say that they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate of their party who happened to be a Mormon. That’s actually an increase compared to 17% who gave the same answer in 1967.

Another argument for politicians making their religious faith private instead of showing it off as they do their wives.

Attacking Islam and racism

Sugary excerpt from Hanif Kureishi:

I come from a Muslim family; I come from a Muslim country: Pakistan. I’m well aware of how dangerous religions like Islam can be. It’s ridiculous to think it’s racist to attack a religion. In fact, it’s racist not to attack a religion. These are systems of power, huge political forces of the world—you have to speak back against it, otherwise you exist in an authoritarian system. Look at the way these societies have attacked and tortured intellectuals in the past, in places like Iran, Egypt and Libya. The West has continued to patronise them and refuse to attack them. A very robust exchange is extremely important.

Obsessing about making history

The sugary excerpt of the day comes from the great Stephen Smith from his must-read article on Laurent Gbagbo:

‘Gbagbo was born before shame,’ ordinary people in Abidjan used to say. It didn’t necessarily mean they disapproved of him. It was more a case of stating the obvious. The way he looked at it, history was the victors’ account of a merciless fight. ‘It’s difficult for us to make history,’ he once explained to me. ‘We have to carry out our own French Revolution with Amnesty International peering over our shoulder.’ Murder, intrigue, corruption, bare-faced lies, betrayal, ethnic cleansing: all means would be justifiable provided the end was attained. In Gbagbo’s home region, where Ivory Coast’s main cash crops are grown, the sons of the soil, the Bété, turned against migrant workers from poor Sahel states and against fellow Ivorians from other parts of the country.

It is alarming, to say the least, that so many political leaders are worried about making history rather than governing and improving the lives of their 'people.' Obsession with history is one of the reasons why there have been so many Mugabe, Gbagbo, Amin, Doe, Taylor, Gaddafi on the African continent for after all if one's only concern is history, the people become means to achieve greatness not much else, politics is religionized and political violence becomes acceptal and even normal.

Zombies at the Vatican

Another proof from R.W. Johnson that faith in politics is about the bling and should remain in the private sphere:

The news that Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace were among the million people (including 22 ‘world leaders’) who thronged St Peter’s Square for the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II lends a piquant note to what was already a gothic occasion. Their presence was not, in itself, surprising: Mugabe tends to remember he is a Catholic whenever it is convenient – as in the case of his marriage to Grace, celebrated in a Catholic high mass in Harare, although they had by then already had two children. More recently, however, the main point has been to evade the EU’s targeted sanctions and thus provide Grace (widely known as ‘Dis-Grace’) with opportunities for her extravagant shopping trips. The Mugabes were in Rome in 2005 for John Paul II’s funeral, and again in 2008 and 2009 for UN food conferences – they get a free pass from the Vatican and from the UN, of which Zimbabwe is still a member.

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.

It isn't that complicated

Interesting stuff from Charlemagne:

The West is guilty of two errors, in my view.

Firstly, in the contest between the police state and the mosque, it too easily fell into the trap of backing the police state. It therefore became associated with oppression and hypocrisy in the minds of many Arabs. It never sought to help foster other democratic opposition forces, or to criticise rulers for their oppressive ways. President Barack Obama’s brilliant speech in Cairo in 2009 criticised the Bush-era’s (short-lived) notion that democracy could be brought at the point of a gun, but did not shy away from making a powerful case for freedom. The trouble is, Mr Obama’s America then did little to support the cause of democracy in the Arab world. The same was true of Europe.

Any promotion of democracy in the Arab world cannot avoid the encounter with some form of Islamism. And this is Europe’s second error: its failure to distinguish between different currents of political groups inspired by Islam. Not all groups bearing the name of “Islamic” are puppets of Iran’s mullahs, or comrades of Osama bin Laden. Hamas may be the violent Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt. But the Egyptian branch declares itself to be non-violent and democratic, and is hated by al-Qaeda. At the very least, its democratic credentials should have been tested through greater dialogue.

I disagree with Charlemagne's implied affirmation that there is such a thing as the Western world. Nevertheless, he isn't wrong. The trouble is that he doesn't assert explicitly that the problem comes precisely from the too-easily made assertion that some foreigners are different, not mature, brutal, have an exotic or homogeneous or simply an essentialist culture, which makes it impossible for them to have self-determination and other good things in life. In short, the issue is always going to come to Sameness, commonness, that is to how much Charlemagne's West believes that the people from the rest of the world have in common with them.

The racism of lower expectation

Sugary excerpt of the day from Anjad Khan:

Essentially, Islamists have been successful in the UK where they have failed elsewhere. They have duped the establishment into thinking that they represent Muslims and Islam, all the while using that as a guise to promote divisive and potentially explosive identity politics. Their job has, of course, been made easier by soft deluded “liberal” multiculturalists who are in fact guilty of  the racism of lower expectation and who don’t apply universal norms to the ‘exotic’ others who we can’t expect to behave like us.

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.

Legitimacy and emotional reactions

Over at the OUPblog, Elvin Lim has the best article(and the last one I will quote) on the whole NPR and Juan Williams episode. Sugary excerpt:

But NPR, in firing Williams, wasted an opportunity to make such a pedagogical statement. It wrapped up its reasons in faux reasons of journalistic standards and objectivity, and ironically, ended up implicitly endorsing the legitimacy of Williams’ first, emotional, reaction. Indeed, I suspect that Juan Williams was fired because his bosses at NPR were, in turn, uncomfortable that he had articulated his own discomfort. And that is the problem. One reflex knee jerk begot another, but no reasonable explanation followed.

One thing we do know is that emotions cannot be bottled up. We either feel them or we don’t, and Juan Williams apparently feels them when he sees someone dressed up in Muslim garb. What NPR did, in firing him, was send the emotional message that his emotions were illegitimate. But – and here was their mistake – NPR said nothing about either the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the reasons which provoked Williams’ particular emotional reaction.

Emotions indicate the salience and intensity of issues, and they should be addressed even – and,  in fact, especially – when they are based on bad reasons. NPR pushed a discussion of the legitimacy of these emotions under the carpet by firing Juan Williams under the faux reasons of journalistic objectivity and this is why in one fell swoop they lost both a journalist and a teaching moment. If NPR wanted to be politically correct, it might as well have gone all the way.

What has been alarming about the whole episode is the realization that America is under a strong emotional dictatorship, one where feelings ,especially when at their center is outrage or pain giving one the perception that s/he is victimized, are seldom questioned as the basis for political and other important decisions. I still remember George W. Bush responding to Al Gore's legitimate criticisms of his record as Texas's governor by saying that he was hurt that his heart was being questioned. Just take the one of Obama telling Democrats to either get over their disappointment or not to feel discouraged because it is only the first quarter of the game. In short, emotions are the center of every debate because they make it so difficult to think or rather so easy to shoot from the hip and to indulge on junk without even considering the need to exercise or to eat healthy.

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.

The dangers of subjective analysis

Jay Rosen on the Juan Williams's firing from NPR:

Here is what I, Jay Rosen, New York Jew, liberal Democrat, and professional student of the press think... Given its existing codes NPR was in an untenable position from the moment Juan Williams started working for Fox, where his job is to be a liberal foil for the conservative alternative in news. There was no way he could abide by NPR’s rules–which insist on viewlessness as a guarantor of trust–and appear on Fox, where the clash of views is basic to what the network does to generate audience, and where Williams relished the give and take with outsized personalities like Bill O’Reilly.

NPR recognized the problem but tried to finesse it by re-classifying Williams as an “analyst.” Big mistake. The job of analyst, as NPR defines it, is so tightly constrained that it excludes almost everything Williams was doing for Fox. So why didn’t NPR simply get rid of Williams years ago when he began to generate view-from-somewhere controversies with his appearances on Fox? The likely reason was identified by Farai Chideya, who used to work at NPR: a diversity problem. NPR had almost no black men on the air.

Jay Rosen is right, but I'm also convinced that the focus on the 'whys' of the Juan Williams episode is convenient because it puts the essential question on the back-burner and that question is what does it mean to be a journalist in America. There are a lot of bad and discomforting answers to that question, but no sustainable attempts to provide thoughtful answers.

Acceptable biases and fears

Quote of the day from Glenn Greenwald about the firing of Juan Williams from NPR for expressing his fears over 'Muslims' 'who look Muslims' in certain situations:

The principal reason the Williams firing resonated so much and provoked so much fury is that it threatens the preservation of one of the most important American mythologies:  that Muslims are a Serious Threat to America and Americans.

I have to say that the whole thing makes me more than uncomfortable. America has entered an age where free speech is about content precisely because it is no longer possible for Americans to have a dialogue about issues. The goal of political or social discussions is to shut up the opposition and to make the argument that it is either simply or solely bigoted or dumb. Where there is a prevalent notion in a society that people have to be careful about what they say, it is in general because there also exists the prevalent and uncomfortable one that people can't change, that people are their vilest thought, and that education and dialogue don't matter.

Christian America and the red scare

Fascinating stuff from the Economist's Democracy in America's blog:

In 1942, before Americans came to see the Soviets as their mortal enemy, the ideas of "Strong, immediate limitations on national sovereignty" and "International control of all armies and navies" could seem an enlightened path to the abolition of war. But by the war's end, it quickly became apparent that this sort of thing would amount to an impracticable power-sharing agreement with communist regimes. And as Americans became more and more likely to believe that only a more thoroughly Christian nation could save the world from godless communist tyranny, the principled, cosmopolitan globalism of the Federal Council of Churches swiftly came to seem a dangerous absurdity and practically communist itself. Anyway, that's what I think happened to the Federal Council of Churches' 1942 platform. Of course, it's now been a good while since we were haunted by the spectre of communism. Yet America's oddly religion-soaked politics remains in many ways the creature of its mid-century anti-communist reaction. Isn't it a bit depressing to think that American national political and religious life has yet to recover from the red scare?

I'm wondering whether we aren't in a similar period in American history where the Islamist scare this time is increasing the religionization of American politics with potentially more dire consequences.

Aggressiveness and extremism

I don't agree totally agree with Mehdi Hasan on this, but the fact that I can't say he is just wrong, shows that he has a point:

On Thursday the US president said Pastor Jones's plans to burn the Qur'an would be a "recruiting bonanza" for al-Qaida. Yet he fails to recognise how the west's war in Afghanistan provides a similar boost to extremists – on both sides. The "enemy" in Afghanistan, concluded the IISS report released on Tuesday, is "incentivised by the presence of foreign forces". And inside the US the likes of Jones and rightwing Republican bigots, frothing at the mouth over the "Ground Zero mosque" take their cue from aggressive leaders like Blair, Bush and Obama – who send more and more troops to fight and die abroad, in faraway Muslim countries, while denying any link between Islamic militancy and western foreign policies.

Unjustified offense and the “Ground Zero Mosque”

Brilliant stuff from Ilya Somin on the "Ground Zero" mosque:

I lost half a dozen relatives in the Holocaust. But I don’t see any inherent problem with having a German cultural center near the site of a former Nazi death camp. So long as the center does not interfere with the operations of the memorial established at the camp, does not promote anti-Semitism, and doesn’t advocate the sort of virulent nationalism that helped cause the Holocaust, it should be unobjectionable. As Krauthammer notes, Germans as a group are not to blame for the Holocaust. And German culture is not reducible to Nazism and anti-Semitism. A center promoting elements of German culture that are not implicated in those phenomena does not somehow offend against the memory of Holocaust victims. A German cultural center that actually condemns Nazism and extreme nationalism while celebrating positive elements of German culture could actually make a useful contribution to reducing prejudice and honoring the victims. 
I recognize, of course, that some Jews might still be offended, and avoiding such offense might be a pragmatic justification for not building the center. But the issue is whether the offense-taking would be justified. No one has a moral obligation to change their plans merely because others take unjustified offense. 
The same points apply to the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero. Islam is not reducible to terrorism and oppression. A Muslim center near Ground Zero that promotes positive aspects of the Muslim tradition is unobjectionable. One that also denounces terrorism and radical Islamism would be a positive good.

It is difficult to say, but this controversy is just another proof that in America, it is increasingly becoming difficult to have serious conversations because too many are persuaded to have either "god" or "the truth" on their side and those who oppose them are just stupid or simply evil. The alarming thing is that the POTUS, the decider chose to avoid the debate even though he has always described himself as a man who isn't afraid of doing the right thing even if it means losing. Bush used to talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, in Obama's case, I think we should talk about the flashy arrogance of great expectations.

Spots of brilliance

I'm probably late to the game, but I was impressed by Obama's speech on Friday on the controversy over the construction of a Mosque near Ground Zero. I heard about it in the Cab that was taking me from JFK to Manhattan for I spent Friday in two airports and in a plane. My first thought was to say "at last, the Potus does something impressive that isn't solely self-serving." I thought the speech was on point and unlike the other flashy speeches Obama gives, I believed that it had meaning.

So was I disappointed by the fact that Obama "retreated" from his comment the next day? No and I wasn't even surprised. I expected him to do it for two reasons. The first is that Obama is a great politician and that as all great politicians of our era, he knows that it is difficult to educate the electorate or to lead on a issue when  the real issues are fear and resentment. Obama said what was in his heart on Friday, but then had to clarify it because he did the math and realized that once again, being himself, saying what he meant wasn't going to be good for him politically in the short term.

The second reason why I expected Obama to kill the greatness of his Friday's speech with clarifications is that he isn't an ideologue in the good sense of the word. There are few things Obama is willing to die, politically, for, I would write that there is nothing, but I have decided to be nice because I'm still infected by the Parisian atmosphere.

Obama knows that he has to get reelected for his presidency to become meaningful and to be something more than a symbol of what America wanted to be when it elected him without of course having to work for it. I always thought to Obama was an attempt by a symbolically out of shape America to put itself back in shape by having surgery instead of course of exercising and deciding to have better eating habits.

I have never thought that Obama was too good for America, to the contrary, I have always thought that America didn't have enough faith in itself, in its ability to repair the wounds of its early and recent history (Bush's eight years) for it to choose Obama blindly knowing full well the odds of a rookie quarterback doing well without years of training are slim. But again, America loves believing in the improbable and it is also one of the reasons why it is a country to I love passionately.

The absurdity of deathbed conversions

The sugary excerpt for this Sunday is from Roger Ebert's excellent entry in his journal about  Christopher Hitchens, life,religion and what happens when even though you couldn't wait for death, she stops for you, even though she doesn't do it kindly as she did for Emily Dickinson:

Deathbed conversions have always seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass, proving nothing about religion and much about desperation.

Sick of seeing grown men cry

 Gideon Rachman who was in South Africa for the World Cup on how pathetic it is to seen grown men cry over a game:

I am sick of seeing grown men cry. Asamoah Gyan of Ghana was in floods, after missing that crucial penalty against Uruguay. Last night, it was Cardozo of Paraguay who missed a vital spot-kick and then left the field, blubbing. Really chaps - it’s only a game.

My take on the whole thing is that football has stopped being a game long ago to become the last 'hope' or rather the new opiate of the masses especially in countries where politics seem to lead to a dead end and economics is about everything but merit and effort.

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.

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.

Papal satire

No comment necessary (via)

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.

As impotent as the pope

Quote of the afternoon from Andrew Brown :

The pope, as is well known, can't even stop Catholics from using birth control, let alone the rest of the world; and while I understand he is not keen on sex of any sort, I have never been turned down by anyone on the grounds that the pope would disapprove. Somehow, they have all managed to find even more compelling reasons. Perhaps more fanatical atheists have had a different experience.

There are no Western values

I agree with Kenan Malik on this:

what we now regard as "Western values" – individual rights, secularism, freedom of speech – are modern values, distinct from those that animated European societies in the past. And it's not just medieval Europeans who would reject contemporary European values. Many contemporary Europeans do too. The British writer Melanie Phillips is militantly hostile to what she sees as the "Islamic takeover of the West" and what she calls "the drift towards social suicide" that comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created "a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets." Muslims "have concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a moral cesspit", Phillips argues. "Is it any wonder, therefore, that they reject it?" Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West's current encounter with Islam may be "painful and violent", it has also been, "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West", for which we need to express our "gratitude".
There is, in other words, no single set of European values that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values. Nor indeed is there a single set of western values today. The very values against which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are the very values that so disgust some of Islam's greatest critics.

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.

Fierce unclarity

Quote of the afternoon from Anthony Grafton:

The Pope seems to have seen priestly abuse of children, for a long time, as an American problem, rather than the general one it clearly is. He still seems to regard journalistic discussions of it as part of a broad, deliberate attack on the Church, a line that his surrogates and some outside defenders have made their own. He responds to accusations defensively, in the first instance, like many long-serving officers in powerful established institutions whose members wear uniforms and live, in some ways, outside the normal social world—think of the armed forces or the police. At bay, as he is now, he has not yet acknowledged, and may never accept, the wisdom that any competent PR consultant would offer: cover-ups are always worse than the crimes they are meant to conceal. Instead, for the most part, he has turned his spikes outward, as hedgehogs do.

Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski

Dominic Lawson denounces what he believes to be a double standard in the difference of treatment that the Pope receives and the one given to Roman Polanski:

The point is, I suspect, that whereas the Pope does understand that great wickedness has been perpetrated – systematically – by individuals within the Catholic priesthood, Polanski genuinely regards his own conduct as blameless. In fact, he sees himself, and not the 13-year-old girl he sodomised, as the victim.

Lawson isn't wrong. I am of the opinion that Polanski ought at least to be made to come to California not necessary to go to jail (I don't believe he will ever spend any time in prison, but even if he does, it will be shorter than it will shorter than the time he spent in a Swiss), but to face the court even if at the end, it is decided that jail isn't a suitable punishment. The key difference between this case and the one of the Catholic Church is that Benedict XVI is given the status of a semi-God in the sense that as the Pope, the head of powerful religious organization, it is assumed that he is closer to God than anybody. Just this fact makes it impossible to justify not really imperfections, but the refusal to follow the values of his church or at least to make a good faith attempt to. 

In any case, the fact that to defend the Benedict XVI, Lawson has to compare him to Roman Polanski is indicative of the moral decay of the Catholic Church and of its Pontiff.

The freedom to be veiled and liberal society

I agree with Norman Geras on this point clarifying his position against a ban of the burqa/niqab/hijab/veil in Quebec, France and in any society, which proclaims itself as 'liberal':

In a liberal society, however, there is nothing at all reasonable about this balance. If individuals have extensive rights and freedoms, as they ought to have - up to the limit where their actions harm others - then, in one critical sense, all of us are indeed obliged to accept things which affront us, provided these do not also harm anyone, violate their rights or liberties. Of course, we don't have to like what affronts us, and if we dislike something enough we don't have to tolerate it in spaces over which we have exclusive rights. You don't want someone wearing the niqab in your house or your car? You don't want a crucifix or a yarmulke or a shirt bearing the logo of French Connection UK worn there? Then you aren't obliged to accept any of them. But in spaces over which you don't have rights of control you can't forbid them. And there's a second sense in which you needn't accept what affronts you. You don't have to pretend to be happy about it. You're free to tell the bearer of the affront what you think of it, and of her for putting the affront your way. But, once again, you do have to accept that she may go on putting it your way in shared spaces, and in that sense you are compelled to accept it - or should be in a liberal society.

Don't mess with veiled women

Via Feminist Philosophers an image, which I approve. No other comments necessary.

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

Christianity and communism

Slavoj ZizeK's thought provoking thoughts on Christianity:

At the very core of Christianity, there is a vastly different project: that of a destructive negativity, which does not end in a chaotic void but reverts (and organises itself) into a new order, imposing it on to reality.
For this reason, Christianity is anti-wisdom: wisdom tells us that our efforts are in vain, that everything ends in chaos, while Christianity madly insists on the impossible. Love, especially a Christian one, is definitely not wise. This is why Paul said: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise" ("Sapientiam sapientum perdam," as his saying is usually known in Latin). We should take the term "wisdom" literally here: it is wisdom (in the sense of "realistic" acceptance of the way things are) that Paul is challenging, not knowledge as such.
With regard to social order, this means that the authentic Christian tradition rejects the wisdom that the hierarchic order is our fate, that all attempts to mess with it and create another egalitarian order have to end up in destructive horror. Agape as political love means that unconditional, egalitarian love for one's neighbour can serve as the foundation for a new order.
The form of appearance of this love is what we might also call the idea of communism: the urge to realise an egalitarian social order of solidarity. Love is the force of this universal link that, in an emancipatory collective, connects people directly, in their singularity, bypassing their particular positions in a social hierarchy. Indeed, Dostoevsky was right when he wrote: "The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist" -- yes, dreaded by his or her enemies.

If Zizek is to be taken seriously (there are times when it is difficult to do so), it was a mistake for Communist states to abolish religion or to view it as an enemy.

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.

Even for Catholics, image is capital

Ross Douthat is seldom right that when he gets part of the truth, it is necessary to say it to encourage him to let his brain out the box as he did when he wrote this:

The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon. His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. “Santo subito!” the Roman crowds chanted as he lay dying. Sainthood now!
The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon. His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. “Santo subito!” the Roman crowds chanted as he lay dying. Sainthood now!
They will not chant for Benedict XVI. The former Joseph Ratzinger was always going to be a harder pontiff for the world to love: more introverted than his predecessor, less political and peripatetic, with the crags and wrinkles of a sinister great-uncle. While the last pope held court with presidents and rock stars, Cardinal Ratzinger was minding the store in Rome, jousting with liberal theologians and being caricatured as “God’s Rottweiler.” His reward was supposed to be retirement, and a return to scholarly pursuits. Instead, he was summoned to Peter’s chair — and, it seems, to disaster.

Of course, image and style aren't the only causes for the  current Pope's problems. They are symptoms of a larger malaise and bigger flaws of the Catholic Church, which make it enable to understand to the realities of its members. If the Cardinals who chose Joseph Ratzinger as pope had known a little bit about a world that they execrate, the modern world, they would have chosen somebody able to sell Catholicism to the masses or at least to defend it vibrantly and convincingly.The point is just the sex abuse scandals are the most convincing proof that Ratzinger cannot be Pope in this century and that in any case, he is not the biggest worry for the Vatican in times where religions are popping from everywhere.

Seizing upTariq Ramadan

George Packer on his participation to a talk given by Tariq Ramadan in New York:

I asked Ramadan two questions. The first was historical: drawing from a chapter in Paul Berman’s forthcoming book “The Flight of the Intellectuals”, I described the relationship between Ramadan’s grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi ally who made a series of genocidal broadcasts on an Arabic radio program transmitted from wartime Berlin, urging Arabs to rise up and kill Jews. I cited quotations from al-Banna expressing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic views; I quoted Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a follower of al-Banna who is a hugely popular TV preacher on Al Jazeera, expressing similar views. And I asked Ramadan why he had never acknowledged, let alone condemned, these things.
(...) Ramadan and I went back and forth a number of times. And he couldn’t give me a direct answer. He hedged, he spoke about context, he suggested that the quotes were mistranslated, that they didn’t actually exist. But he refused to acknowledge that his grandfather and the Muslim Brotherhood in its origins were characterized by anti-Semitic or totalitarian views. It seemed clear that there was a limit to what he would allow himself to say or think, and that I had found it.
Weisberg had asked me at the outset whether I thought Ramadan said different things to different audiences, and whether I thought he evaded hard questions about the conflicts between the open society and fundamentalism. On the first, I said no—he has no hidden agenda, he’s an open book, and it’s essentially moderate. On the second, I said I wasn’t sure and hoped to find out. By the end of the evening, I knew the answer. Ramadan is building a worthy bridge on a rotten foundation.

My impression of Tariq Ramadan is almost the same as the one of Packer. I don't think that Ramadan is a Ben Laden or a Jihadi in sheep clothing. However his vision of society is as troubling as Jerry Farewell or any other religious men who cannot stay away from politics. He fails to make the difference between religion and politics and for that matter, he seems to believe that they are one and the same for religion must invade and dominate every sphere of society. It is this lack of separation between faith, society, and politics that bothers me. I believe that religion beliefs ought to remain private and never allowed to invade the public space and to dominate a society even if the goal is to give it moral foundations or to cleanse it. In short, I don't think that Ramadan's problem is extremism, but rather his politics and his inability to separate his religious faith from it. Those traits in a way make him very 'American' except of course that we are talking here about Islam, which tends to scare people; nevertheless the issue  for me is that all politicians who are defined by the faith, guided by it and use religious texts to inform all of their choices always make me uncomfortable and scare me most of the times.

When feminists ally themselves with bigots

Quote of the day from Haroon Siddiqui commenting on the recent controversies around the Niqab in Québec:

We are witnessing an unholy alliance of leftist feminists, right-wing bigots and Quebec nationalists. That's why Lucien Bouchard, former PQ premier, publicly warned his party last month against playing identity politics, something he said René Lévesque would never have approved of. Picking on Muslim women smacks of hypocrisy or, worse, the pathology of "bigots and chauvinists who, like bullies, direct their vitriol toward the weak,"

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.

Burqa-free Belgium

Belgium has moved closer to passing a law banning the burqa:

Belgium today moved to the forefront of a widening campaign to restrict the wearing of the Muslim veil by women when a key vote left it on track to become the first European country to ban the burqa and niqab in public.
The home affairs committee of the Brussels federal parliament voted unanimously to ban the partial or total covering of faces in public places.
"I am proud that Belgium would be the first country in Europe which dares to legislate on this sensitive matter," the centre-right MP Denis Ducarme said.

I would give this more than a thought except that it's all for show for the European Court of Human Rights will strike it down if it is even passed and becomes a law. In short: the law will never be applied and is a political version of showing off. I will take this ban seriously when I hear that the Belgian police arrested a woman for daring to provoke/shock the poor streetwalkers by wearing the burqa.

The Vatican and the fear of reform

I agree with Henry Farrell on this:

The church is faced with a very tricky set of organizational trade-offs. It seems to be opting for a bare minimum of external accountability (acknowledging that there is a problem, and apologizing for it, while refusing to undertake substantial reforms or to admit that the rot has spread to the top), combined with an appeal to the loyalty of the faithful. This plausibly shores up the position of those at the top – but at the risk of provoking mass exit (at least among churchgoers in industrialized democracies – I don’t know enough about the church in the developing world to speculate). Senior figures in the church have been muttering for years that, if it comes down to it, they would prefer a smaller and more orthodox church to one which had more members but had to accommodate greater heterodoxy. I suspect they are about to get their wish, although I imagine that they would prefer that it occurred under somewhat different circumstances.

For too many within the Catholic Church, its archaic organization is what makes it authentic. To reform means to modernize, which is still the most feared enemy because it leads to change and the admission that the ways of the past were not always good. In fact, Joseph Ratzinger became Benedict XVI to preserve the status quo while making sure that the moderns remained a minority and that the church went back to its strict rules. 

Ideologizing the Catholic sex abuse scandals

Ross Douthat finds a way to make the Catholic sex abuse scandals about ideology:

The lesson of the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit in the scandal. (...) This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

It is very difficult for the pious to admit to see that their church wasn't corrupted by a permissive culture, but rather by its own flawed structure, and by the fact that priests became more important than values and chidlren. In short, there is something rotten within the Vatican and the Catholic establishment.

The freedom to wear the niqab is as simple as...

Clifford Orwin has a blunt take on the whole niqab controversy in Québec:

Yes, Canada, some of those fellow citizens, being Muslim, dress so as to conceal more of themselves than do their sisters of other faiths. And yes, their veil bears a name so unfamiliar as to sound downright un-Canadian. They pay taxes, however, in the very same currency as we do, and are entitled to the very same services. They cannot be denied these for exercising their religious freedom.
Yes, their religious freedom. Forget about “multiculturalism”: The issue here is both older and more fundamental. It's the right of every resident of a liberal state to conduct herself as she thinks pleasing to God, on the sole condition that such conduct not violate the rights of others. And while wearing a niqab may send some observers into a high dudgeon, it impairs neither their civil interests nor their religious ones. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, whether their neighbour wears no niqab or three niqabs neither picks their pocket nor breaks their bones.

I agree with Orwin. However, the matter to me isn't about religion. It is about women's choices and their right that they have, as individuals, to do whatever they choose with their body, to dress however they choose even it means sending messages society is not comfortable with.  I have never bought the whole sacredness of religion argument it isn't very convincing. I believe in individual rights for everybody even people who are still viewed as sexual objects or as people who either have to be invisible, transparent, hidden or just good to look at  In short, the niqab/hijab/burka/burqa/veil is about equality and liberty

America and delayed secularization

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Eric Kaufman:

America really is a case of delayed secularisation, what happened in Europe in the middle of the last century is happening to America now in terms of the young turning away from organised religion. Currently America is about 14 per cent secular, that is unaffiliated, and we predict this will grow to about 17 per cent by 2050, then plateau out.

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?

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

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.

America and sin

I don't agree with Stephen Kinzer on this:

Rather than embrace Mitt Romney's aggressively ignorant view of the world, Americans should try to accommodate themselves to history. That means accepting the reality that every nation, like every human being, has sinned. Nations have the moral authority to point fingers at others only if they also reflect on how their own policies have contributed to the suffering, rage and violence that is shaking the world. "We abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own," Montaigne wrote five centuries ago. Then he quoted one of his favorite Latin proverbs: Stercus cuique suum bene olet. Everyone's shit smells good to himself.

My problem is with Kinzer's use of the word "sin" which is too religious and too absolute and negates the reality that Nations, countries aren't godly. I prefer to use  the term "error" or "mistake" for one of the things that plagues our time is the religionization of history and politics, which leads too many to ask for apologies and to divide humans incessantly, cunningly, and spitefully between victims and sinners. America has never committed any sin. It has made mistakes, outrageous and reprehensible mistakes that apologies or atonement cannot erase, but which acknowledgment can enable it to uplift itself above the unnecessary guilt by enabling it to avoid to repeat them through responsibility and the acceptance of the obligation to do and to be better.