Kelly Beaucar Vlahos delivers a surprisingly temperate examination of the role of women in today’s fighting army; Allan Carlson, author of Third Ways and other fascinating books about political movements that tried to defend the patriarchal family against capitalism, argues that our current affirmative action regime pits white women against black men; Freddie Gray celebrates the record of Pope Benedict XVI, including both his conservative doctrinal views and his vociferous opposition to the war in Iraq, and hopes that the upcoming papal visit to the USA will encourage like-minded Americans to speak up; reviewing Samantha Power’s new biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, Wayne Merry praises the book as a fine example of reportage and Vieira de Mello’s longtime employer, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as an instrument of Realpolitik (“the UN is a mechanism of plausible deniability for its member states; it is a crucible for shameful acts- including acts of omission- that the media no longer permits governments to engagein themselves”); Paul Gottfried traces the development of “the New York Intellectuals” from the Trotskyite radicalism of the 30’s generation of Philip Rahv and the Partisan Review circle to the cautious patriotism of the 40’s generation of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Seymour Martin Lipset to the founding of neoconservatism by the 50’s generation of Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine.
Piers Paul Read finds much to praise in The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left, by Ed (short for Muhammad) Husain, though he lists a great many questions Husain does not address. For example, quoting Husain’s claim that “A primary reason for Western failure in the War on Terror is an innate inability to understand the Islamist psyche,” Read asks “Isthere a single psyche to understand?” This question may seem easy, but Read lists a dozen more, some of them quite thorny. The last paragraph merits quoting in full:
The Islamist is stylistically pedestrian, but it provokes thought. What are the limits of free speech? Should our first loyalty always be to a nation state? If Britain rejected the legitimacy of the state of Israel and worked against it, where would the loyalties of the Jewish community in Britain lie? Is it beyond dispute, as the French Dominican Jacques Jomier wrote in The Bible and the Koran, that “the Koran texts are not conducive to peace”? And should moderate Muslims be blamed for failing to disown them? Are the young Britons who go to fight for a cause they support in Bosnia or Iraq [emphasis added] different in kind from those who went to fightfor the Left in the Spanish Civil War? Is the political activism of Islamists in our universities any worse than that of Marxists? Think of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. Indeed how different are they from the young terrorists portrayed by Dostoyevsky in The Devils? Perhaps we should resign ourselves to the fact that rebels will always find a cause.
acilius
believer1
lefalcon
losthunderlads
vthunderlad
Panther Red 
lefalcon
/ April 29, 2008Is it beyond dispute, as the French Dominican Jacques Jomier wrote in The Bible and the Koran, that “the Koran texts are not conducive to peace”? And should moderate Muslims be blamed for failing to disown them?
As we once observed in a conversation long ago, many Christians seem scandalized by the fact that Islam is not hypocritical about violence, i.e. does not “officially” condemn it, as Xnty may, to a large extent.
Some people seem like they are less bothered by violence in and of itself, than they are by the notion of religiously-sanctioned violence. But why is religiously-sanctioned violence so much more disturbing than the apparently wanton and inexplicable violence the US regularly metes out around the globe? Like it would be so sick to bomb the shit out of Baghdad for religious reasons … but it’s just fine to do so for economic / political reasons … or for no discernible reason at all.
acilius
/ April 29, 2008I don’t know whether Islam is entirely free of hypocrisy about violence, or whether Christianity is entirely drowned in hypocrisy about violence. Can anyone, regardless of religious background, engage in violence and not divide his/her mind against itself? Is it possible to commit an act of violence while in a state of full awareness, while examining one’s views to check for contradictions? George Orwell claimed that ideologies make it possible for those who believe in them to simultaneously entertain mutually contradictory ideas. Don’t you have to believe in contradictory ideas in order to embrace violence? We are acting to establish law- we are wreaking boundless havoc. We are bringing democracy to Iraq- Iraqis must obey us or die. We hold the key to prosperity- we inflict utter poverty. We uphold the value of love and compassion- we carry out disappearances and practice torture. Unless you accept the first belief in each pair, you’ll never muster the self-confidence and charisma necessary to create a force capable of putting the second belief into action.
Nor am I convinced that Christian pacifism is merely hypocrisy. Certainly it is difficult to see much evidence of it in the policies pursued by states with majority Christian populations. To the extent that these states have behaved differently than have other states, it has been because their technological superiority has endowed them with a capacity to commit violence on a scale of which other peoples can only dream. But the sayings of Jesus, “Just War” doctrine, and other peace-oriented ideas do give us a language in which to express opposition to violence, a language which the ancients lacked. From time to time such opposition has in fact restrained violence.