I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

Erm...could I turn your attention to some of the great conflicts and atrocities of the 20th century for a moment ? World WarI, World WarII and the Holocaust, Pot Pol in Cambodia, Stalin in Russia, Vietnam...You would have a hard time finding the Muslim side, or even the religous side, in these conflicts. So why don't you say "Germans/Cambodians/... shouldn't immigrate because they have a tendency to commit genocide" ?

you could be into che and mao and still get high and get laid

Great stuff.

Everything seems to depend on what Nabisco's definition of the word "is" is.

It's pointless picking this apart again, but note how he drew attention to the word "spirit" this time rather than the word "project". In his original statement he obviously means the Bush project. We should support the Bush project. He's backed away from that since, and I salute him for doing that. As for my January 22nd statement, it was certainly a statement about intervention, but not a statement about intervention in the Middle East. Breaking down "demagogues" is not what I want my government to do in an era when it just takes one anti-Israel speech (or an imaginary weapons program) for a leader to become a "demagogue".

Thus a quite appalling article in the Guardian – even by its own standards – which sought with unprecedented ferocity and malice to paint Israel as an apartheid state, even though anyone with even a passing knowledge of that country can see at a glance that this is an utterly baseless lie and despicable libel. Did I say article? It ran to 14 pages over two days. What kind of sick obsession is this?

The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) has published a riposte. As it says:

• Did black South Africans have the right to full citizenship in apartheid South Africa? No
• Are Israeli Arabs citizens with full rights? Yes

• Did black South Africans have full political rights in apartheid South Africa? No
• Do Arab citizens of Israel have full political rights, including voting rights and representation in the government? Arab citizens of Israel are full citizens with voting rights and representation in the government. There are currently 11 Israeli Arab and Druze MKs.

• Did black South Africans have the right to pursue any type of education or employment they desired in apartheid South Africa? No
•Do Arab citizens of Israel have the right to pursue any type of education of employment they choose in Israel? Yes

•Did apartheid South Africa have segregated public transport? Yes
•Does Israel have segregated public transport? No

•Was there severe censorship of the press in apartheid South Africa? Yes
•Is there complete freedom of speech and freedom of press in Israel? Yes

•Who were the majority in apartheid South Africa? The black community
•Who are the majority in Israel? The Jews

This extensive piece of work published in the Guardian offends not only British Jews but all friends of democracy as well as friends of Israel. Direct comparisons to apartheid South Africa and insinuations about collusion between Jews and Nazis are simply abhorrent. The content and associated imagery are inflammatory and one-sided. They are conveyed with a degree of emotion and hatred that should have immediately alerted the Guardian’s editors to question the writer’s professional integrity. There is a difference between criticising what Israel does and what Israel is. This article puts Israel’s right to exist in question and therefore crosses a very dangerous red line.

At any time, crossing this most dangerous red line would have been utterly disgusting, a travesty of journalism. But at this particular juncture, with Muslims in Britain and around the world being incited to violence against Jews in particular and the west in general on the basis of just such lies and libels, with demonstrators on the streets of London calling for more human bomb attacks on Britain and for the beheading of people they don’t like, with Islamists rampaging around the Middle East seeking Europeans to kidnap at random and with Iran racing to equip itself with nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel, such an ‘article’ takes on a different hue altogether. Along with the unrivalled platform the paper affords the Muslim Brotherhood on its op-ed pages, the article looks like a placard for the Farringdon Road wing of the jihad.

The British press is supposed to regulate itself. I hope there are complaints about this monstrosity to the Press Complaints Commission; if the British press had any moral fibre left, it would call the Guardian to account not just for this egregious display of its pathological hatred of Israel but for the likely consequences in these most incendiary of times. The press is supposed to spread enlightenment; instead, articles like this merely spread the darkest kind of prejudice which is casting ever lengthening shadows over Britain.

it just illustrates how the Guardian (love it as I do) and the British media in general are perfectly prepared to publish "offensive" material, to "offend" certain (racial/religious) groups and use the justification of free speech, but not others.

which is why their holier than thou attitude to the European press strikes me as disingenuous. better (presumably) to piss off those who will call for strong letters of protest to be written to the press complaints commission than those who will place prices on the heads of your staff and call for your reporters to be butchered.

I don´t think the real problem/issue is the 12 Muhammad cartoons, the agenda is a very different one.

As I have gently tried to indicate to you, your small set of facts, with which you are so impressed, are not nearly sufficient to undergird the huge conclusions you would like them to support. You cling stalwartly to your facts as true(!) and unquestionable(!) and incontrovertible(!), which they no doubt are.

The sad thing is that this smug knowledge that your facts are unquestionable (as genuine facts always are) has led to a totally unjustified belief that your conclusions are unquestionable. They are not. I have questioned them and I still do. I think they are, at best, terribly misguided. It is you who have feared to answer my questions or to follow them into territory you find frightening. This reluctance reeks of ordinary, garden variety intellectual dishonesty.

It is time to reopen your mind on this matter. Consider it seriously. It wouldn't matter much to me, except that jumping to bold and unwarranted conclusions such as yours is what drags nations into stupid wars, such as Iraq.

Which is, for those wondering, why someone like Bush will condemn the cartoons. The whole logic of his mid-east plan is that people really want freedom and democracy, and they've just been hijacked by theocrats and extremists. It's absolutely essential to him to make that distinction, and it was critical in selling military action there -- i.e., "once we get rid of extremists and corrupt governments, the bulk of the citizens will be relieved and just want to go about their lives." Again, methods aside: the general thrust there is better than this. Plenty of people will still believe lots of the same things that extremists do. But this is a long-term project. And I think we should commit to the spirit of the long-term project, if not the invasions -- which is that breaking down extremists demagogues and empowering people in the mid-East to participate fully in their own societies will lead to new generations for whom this kind of fundamentalism has no appeal. This is a big project, but it's the only thing that can work. Rehabilitation is the only option here, because you can't imprison or execute an entire culture.

Momus’ most recent response:

It's pointless picking this apart again, but note how he drew attention to the word "spirit" this time rather than the word "project". In his original statement he obviously means the Bush project. We should support the Bush project.

That’s an evasive reading. You don’t gloss what “the Bush project” is, nor what Nabisco alleged it to be—you simply enlist the name “Bush” to condemn by association whatever it is Nabisco had to say. Nabisco already provided an example of this logic taken to its extreme, but I’ll try another one: Let’s say I think it’s bad for people to shove other people in front of moving trains. I suspect that it was also illegal to do so in Pinochet’s Chile. Does opposing the shoving of people in front of moving trains make me a Pinochet apologist? Or put another way, does the fact that Pinochet also opposed the shoving of people in front of trains mean that we ought to endorse the shoving of people in front of trains?

OK, let’s examine your rhetoric more closely rather than resort to analogies. You have reduced Nabisco’s statement to the following: “We should support the Bush project.” Which you take as a Bad Thing, seemingly because supporting anything associated with Bush is, to your mind, a Bad Thing. But notice how Nabisco defines that project, above: “breaking down extremists demagogues and empowering people in the mid-East to participate fully in their own societies will lead to new generations for whom this kind of fundamentalism has no appeal.” Note that in that paragraph he suggests, and later he has explicitly, that this project belongs to many more than George Bush; indeed it’s a project shared by a great many, across the political spectrum (and to which certain of your own statements have suggested a strong affinity). Nabisco is careful to distinguish between this larger “project” and the particular logic—and fact, and policy—of the invasions, of which he clearly disapproves (as you well know, not just from the paragraph above, but from Nabisco’s posts over the past three years).

What you seem to be most incensed by—or should I say rather, seem most keen on getting rhetorical mileage from—is the idea that Nabisco would dare to suggest that at least part of the rhetoric, the stated ideals, of the Bush administration is something worthy, something that can be widely shared. Now it’s clear that you, me, and Nabisco are quick to condemn the policies to which the Bush administration have applied these ideals to justify. We may even very well doubt the sincerity of Bush et al in repeating the rhetoric of democracy and pluralism. But I don’t think it ought to be verboten to recognize the potential rightness of certain ideals as expressed.

Note that you can easily use Bush’s rhetoric of democracy and pluralism against Bush’s policies. Bush’s use of a set of ideals does not give him exclusive rights to those ideals or the rhetoric he uses to advance them. As an example: you suggest that you don’t endorse the aforementioned project because you’re concerned that the category of “extremist demagogues” might include people of sympathetic political persuasions who simply run afoul of Bush et al (by the way this is a new objection to Nabisco’s argument, not one you voiced before; Momus-rhetoric in action). But the very ideals of democracy and pluralism that Bush occasionally gives voice to can be used to remind us of the value of opposing points of view, of the necessity of letting certain voices be heard. This is the quandary that Bush seems to find himself in now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections; his response to this event may reveal how much he really believes in, or wants to act upon, the rhetoric that he often employs.

Well, yes, I'm also in favour of denying immigration rights to Stalinists, Nazis and members of the Khymer Rouge.

It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa’s most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and setting him ablaze. ...

Thousands of rioters burned 15 churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said. Security forces arrested dozens of people, Iwendi said.

Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.

This is getting silly, but it's absurd to say I'm being evasive! Nabisco defines the Bush project for the Middle East perfectly adequately as "once we get rid of extremists and corrupt governments, the bulk of the citizens will be relieved and just want to go about their lives". He then witholds his approval from the method Bush used to achieve that, ie war, but lends his support to the rest of it, and asks us to do the same, and adds that it's "the only way". He also goes to the absurd length of digging up a statement I made saying we were political eunuchs if we didn't stand up for things we believed in, and condemn things we didn't approve of, and making it look like it's support, in theory, for the idea of intervention in the Middle East, when in fact I would use this very argument to attack the attacks on the Middle East. The war was fought on false pretences, and has only increased extremism in the Middle East. But it's not just the war I condemn, but the whole idea of going into other regions and trying to give them our system of government. One of Nabisco's sophistries in the argument I'm so objecting to was painting European non-interventionism as "dismissing a whole section of humanity", ie if you don't intervene you just don't care enough, and are even ethnocentric. It's quite the reverse; you're ethnocentric if you do intervene. Angrael's conduct, rhetoric and action, throughout all this has been completely reprehensible, brutal, and illegal. I'd like to see it condemned more ringingly here, by people as smart as you and Nabisco, Amateurist, rather than justified by slippery arguments.

I mean, just to catalog a couple of the nine or ten willful lies contained in that paragraph, let's look at two:

(1) "Empowering people to participate in their own societies" DOES NOT MEAN "giving them our system of government." I pointed this out, above. I pointed out that I could have saved myself a whole lot of typing by putting "democracy" in place of that "empowering" phrase. But I didn't, because I meant something more subtle.

(2) When I talked about "dismissing a whole section of humanity" I WAS NOT referring to "European non-interventionism." I was referring to the whole argument we were having up there about "taking sides." I was referring to the spirit I worried may have been present in the original cartoons, which was one that invited division. This is the opposite of "non-interventionism." The spirit I was worried about is one that asks people to take sides and harden stances, to write off the entirety of the Muslim world as some sort of "lost cause," such that our only options are to subdue it by force.

You've missed that context from the beginning. I talked about the spirit of Bush's project and said "the general thrust there is better than this." What I meant was that at least in Bush's mind there is some hope that certain types of progress might be made that would allow the west and the Muslim world to exist peacefully and mostly non-antagonistically with one another. I said that that idea was "better than this" -- and by "this" I meant the spirit of division, the spirit that says Muslims are hopelessly extreme and irrational and there's nothing to do about it but fight.

But you clearly misunderstood that sentence. You misunderstood it so much that when you quoted it, you put brackets in there to make it mean something else: the general thrust [is that] there is better than this

You added a verb to make it mean something you disagree with! And now you just won't let go and admit that you completely misread something. In fact, as much as you keep making smug arguments about my being "smart," you won't offer me the courtesy of believing that I meant what I said, and not what you've chosen to imagine I said. As of a day or two ago, I was trying to get myself to just ignore you and let this thing drop, but I've decided this is actually more fun -- because you're just WRONG, and the longer we argue about it, the more you're just going to keep demonstrating that you TOTALLY MISREAD those paragraphs. The more you keep trying to make them say what you think they said -- the closer and closer we look at them -- the more they reveal themselves as not saying that at all, to the point that you had to actually add words to them to change their meaning! It's okay if you misunderstood me; don't worry about it. Just stop pretending you didn't.

Focusing only on the violence (instead of having a conversation about the world) bugs me when I read it as filled with xenophobic self-satisfaction (i.e., "The only thought I'll take from this whole experience is 'They're Bad'"), and it bugs me because it's never expressed what anyone thinks should be done with that disapproval. The implication is that they're Bad, and so we'll fight them. This is weird, because it seems to me more responsible to think about what we can do to support them in being less Bad. This isn't imperialist guilt or asking us to cave on principles -- it means thinking about ways to help. Even Bush at least seems to believe there's a point in encouraging democracy and moderation and development there, whatever the problems with his methods. I worry that these cartoons want (or anyway just will) lead some down a path to giving up on even that -- writing off a whole portion of humanity.

I will totally fess up to one thing: I can see how you'd read that as me calling for "democracy" and "development," two things which aren't the sudden magical answers we want them to be. But the purpose of those words was to delineate Bush-thinking, not mine. And the purpose of the paragraph is very clear. It says that I'm worried about writing off the Muslim world as nothing but an enemy, nothing but an antagonist. Hence the wording. You've focused in on the "Bush" part, but not the words around it -- "EVEN Bush AT LEAST." It's an argument against hardening of divides, and it says that even Bush at least is offering some kind of vision -- however fucked-up -- of how the west and Islam might be brought to exist more harmoniously together. Nothing you say here can change that very clear intent. No lies, no misreadings, no nothing. That paragraph speaks for itself, and I stand by it. It says: if we're going to identify these things as problems, then we need to advance some sort of vision about how those problems might be solved (even if it's as simple as the non-interventionist "leave it be") -- not resort to some hardened position where Islam becomes an intractable enemy and our only option is to fight it.

Don't you see what you do in this passage? You criticize a certain hardline section of Western public opinion (call this group A) for focusing only on Islamist violence and drawing the conclusion that it should be answered by violence, but then your proposed alternative (call it group B, overlapping with the Bush Project but not supporting war) accepts the same framing. Your proposed alternative also focuses on Islamist violence, because you then accept the "They're bad" part of the argument you're criticizing, and propose a way to "support" them to be less bad. You later urge us all to join B rather than A, and tell us there is no alternative. What you don't admit is that the extremist violence (this "bad" that you don't want people to use as a pretext to fight) you use as the justification for intervention is the product of intervention. Your framing of the "solution" exacerbates your framing of the problem, and the result is an endless, escalating "war on extremism" that throws gasoline on the fire.

on the non-existence of moderate Islam.

"If we're going to agree with the people who dismiss a whole section of humanity, then we need to advance some sort of vision about how to make that section of humanity less than entirely worthless."

The West is wrong to think its machinery and concepts "neutral" or "universal" and try to impose them on other civilizations.

Modernization is not the same as Westernization.

Demographic and economic growth of other civilizations will result in a much more multipolar civilizational system in the future.

China is the real threat to the West's dominance.

An "Islamic-Confucian connection" is emerging in which China will cooperate more closely with Iran, Pakistan and other states to augment its international position.

a) people are polite and basically respect the differences they encounter.

b) immigrants are able to "maintain separate civilizational spheres" within their host countries, ie not be pressured to assimilate. (There's a difference between integration, which respects difference, and assimilation, which doesn't. Linguists would say it's the difference between a syntagm and a paradigm.)

Unfortunately it's precisely this right to be different, to be in Rome without doing as the Romans do, to integrate without assimilating, which the cartoons affair is bringing under attack. We're edging closer to a world where Kassim has to call himself Claude-Francois, or leave. And then there's even the possibility that "back home" (wherever that is) Kassim will find an occupation by a neo-colonialist power which also wants him to become "Claude-Francois" in one way or another.

But a society consisting of separate civilizational spheres brings quiete some problems: Some differences between them can't just be "respected" without compromitting the core of one's own civilizational sphere.

First, there's the question of behavior in the public (some people don't want to talk to strangers in the metro at all, some like to talk very loudly, some like spitting on the sidewalk). I think mutual respect COULD work to some extent here, although it would be a great effort for everyone concerned.

Second, there's the question of democracy in a society consinsting of very different groups. Trust is a key issue here, because if you're living together with people whose motives you don't trust, you obviously don't want this group to influence your life (the rightwing in Austria: getting Austrian women to produce more children than immigrant women *sigh*). One way to improve trust would be to improve knowledge about the different civilizational spheres, but in a rapidly changing world, I don't know if people are willing to keep up with the flow of information. Another way would be to force some universal (in the context of one society) values on every civilizational sphere, which would make it a lot easier to trust other groups, because "Hey, they just have the same values like us !". This would be assimilation.

i guess that's the motive behind the "citizenship test" that we over here (UK). immigrants are taught what to do if they knock someone's pint over in a pub, and that getting a drink at the bar is "a situation where a strict queuing policy may not operate".

"Trial Opens for Accused Holocaust Denier
By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer

A right-wing British historian goes on trial Monday on charges of denying the Holocaust occurred — a crime punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment in this country once run by the Nazis.

The trial of David Irving opens amid fresh — and fierce — debate over freedom of expression in Europe, where the printing and reprinting of unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has triggered violent protests worldwide.

Irving, 67, has been in custody since his arrest in November on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. An eight-member jury and a panel of three judges will hear the proceedings, which officials said could produce a verdict as early as Monday.

Within two weeks of his arrest, Irving asserted through his lawyer that he now acknowledges the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers.

The historian had tried to win release on bail, but a Vienna court refused, saying it considered him a flight risk.

His lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, said last month the Third Reich historian was getting up to 300 pieces of fan mail a week from supporters around the world, and that while in detention he was writing his memoirs under the working title, "Irving's War."

Irving was arrested Nov. 11 in the southern Austrian province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989 and charged under a federal law that makes it a crime to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust.

In the past, however, he has claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little if anything about the Holocaust, and has been quoted as saying there was "not one shred of evidence" the Nazis carried out their "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jewish population on such a massive scale.

"What was he doing in Austria? God only knows. Possibly looking for an audience," Austrian state television said in a pre-trial commentary.

Vienna's national court, where the trial is being held, ordered the balcony gallery closed to prevent projectiles from being thrown down at the bench, the newspaper Die Presse reported Sunday.

It quoted officials as saying they were bracing for Irving's supporters to give him the Nazi salute or shout out pro-Hitler slogans during the trial, which will continue into Tuesday if a verdict is not forthcoming on Monday.

Irving is the author of nearly 30 books, including "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust, and has contended most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

In 2000, Irving sued the American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a British court, but lost. The presiding judge in that case wrote that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist."

Irving has had numerous run-ins with the law over the years.

In 1992, a judge in Germany fined him the equivalent of $6,000 for publicly insisting the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax"

Mohammed sculpture at top US court

Depictions of the prophet at US public buildings draws mild rebuke from US Muslim leaders.

By Jocelyne Zablit - WASHINGTON

Amid an international outcry over cartoons of Mohammed, some American Muslim leaders have expressed concern about depictions of the prophet at US public buildings, including the Supreme Court.

At the same time they draw a sharp contrast between the cartoons, which they consider blasphemous and designed to offend, and statues or sculptures meant to honor Mohammed as a historical figure and lawgiver.

"We have expressed the Muslim community's concerns about a variety of images of the Prophet Mohammed, whether it be in textbooks, editorial cartoons or even in the Supreme Court," Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said.

The sculpture of the prophet at the country's top court is part of a marble frieze depicting 18 influential lawgivers, including Moses, Confucius and Charlemagne.

The sculpture of Mohammed shows him holding a Koran in his left hand and a sword in his right. The frieze has adorned the courtroom since the building opened in 1935.

Hooper said CAIR in the past has requested that the sculpture be removed, as Islamic tradition forbids any depictions of the prophet. But the court turned down the request, saying that altering the frieze would compromise its artistic integrity.

It agreed, however, to change literature about the sculpture to refer to Mohammed as the "prophet" rather than the "founder" of Islam.

"The court ruled that the good outweighed the bad ... and the community's response was one that was very tempered," said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington. "They (community leaders) came out and said that they disagreed with the court ruling but they appreciated the thought and the intention behind the sculpture."

Hooper said though Muslim leader still objected to the sculpture it did not "mean we are going to force our views on others."

A statue of Mohammed that stood in the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse in New York was removed in the 1950s following protests by representatives from various Muslim nations.

CAIR in 2001 also succeeded in having a 14th century Persian painting with an image of the Prophet Mohammed removed from a PBS documentary about Islam.

There have also been cases in which US Muslim leaders have succeeded in having images of Mohammed removed from public school textbooks.

Hooper said while depictions of the prophet on public buildings or in textbooks were objectionable, they bore no resemblance to the cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper and which have sparked violent protests in the Muslim world. One of the cartoons shows the prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban.

"The cartoons were published with the stated intent of incitement and insult," Hooper said.

He pointed to a cartoon that appeared in various US newspapers in 2002 that showed Mohammed driving a truck with a nuclear bomb and a headline that read, "What would Mohammed drive?"

"The stated intent in that instance was political commentary, not to gratuitously insult Muslims," Hooper said. "Intent is a big factor in this whole controversy."

Funnily enough, here's me and you arguing, as of January 22nd:

ME: "We can muster up a lot of objection to the specific actions or policies of a government, or the people acting on its behalf, but it does very little good beyond demonizing people to aim vague condemnation at a 'culture' of separable individuals -- especially when the rhetoric behind it is clearly more interested in scoring demonization points than actually investigating the culture in question."

Translation: "It's pointless to make this issue about Them being Bad. Better to talk about the specific events and circumstances -- specific actions, practices, and ideas -- that we have problems with."

Oh but no, when I said that, you had to disagree with me, very strongly! You said it was imperative to generalize about cultures! You were in favor of blanket They're Bad-ness! Because not-generalizing "would ... defer a lot of political speech, and a lot of moral judgement at times when it's exactly those things that a situation needs: we need to influence situations while they happen, not at some notional (and impossible) point in the future when all the relevant data is visible, and nobody has any vested interests any more." As of January 22nd, it was, in fact, our "moral obligation" to do this, because "if we don't do this we can't fight the things we disagree with; we become political eunuchs." Oh but then I reminded you -- remember this -- I reminded you how maybe what we needed to "influence" or "fight" was just the specific stuff we had problems with, the "warps" in the culture, and not the culture as a whole. But NO, you wouldn't take that, either, because you had a nice-sounding piece of rhetoric that allowed you to disagree: "A warp can mean a fault, a squinty bent bit that deviates from the standard pattern. But it can also mean an integral part of that culture, reproduced throughout it, as in the phrase 'warp and weft.'"

You're really quite amazing. Right, so. Post again. Make up something new to disagree about. Make up some new position to pretend I've advanced, one I really obviously haven't. I write posts fast -- I'm sure you can find a typo or a sloppy agreement somewhere that'll let you claim that I'm a murderer or something. Try this: "Some trees have leaves." Go on, disagree with it. I know you can find a way.

NABISCO: The culture has some problems, but that shouldn't turn us against the culture; we should look to help solve the problems.

MOMUS: It's imperative that we turn against the culture! How else will we fight the problems?

NABISCO: The culture has some problems, but that shouldn't turn us against the culture; we should look to help solve the problems.

MOMUS: It's imperative that we don't focus on the problems! We must avoid messing with the problems!

What's amazing is that -- so far as I can tell -- you and I don't substantively disagree about anything we've discussed here! You're just having fun trying to find something in each post that supports a misreading you made nearly a week ago and refuse to admit you're wrong about.

this jane smiley blog post seems indirectly relevant to the issues at hand. (i mean, the non-momus-related issues.)

I really think this (AND what they've done with Abu Hamza) is harsh considering these are mere opinions and words being thrown about. If there's a difference it's that Irving was not inciting violence in the way Hamza was proven to have done/attempted. So where's the justification really?

Feel like I should stipulate I don't like either of these people and don't agree at all with the views they've expressed. But nor do I agree with the level of the punishment.

"We strongly denounce and condemn this horrific action," he said in a statement posted on his Web site and dated Tuesday.

Al-Sistani, who wields enormous influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, made no call for protests and suggested that militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting Islam's image.

He referred to "misguided and oppressive" segments of the Muslim community and said their actions "projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood."

"Enemies have exploited this ... to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms," he said.

http://www.sistani.org/html/eng/

If only! :(

okay, what's the acceptable response on the part of a Muslim leader?

Now, you might think this argument lumps me in with the Islamophobes. It doesn't. For you being a liberal is mostly about refraining from making big essentialist generalisations about whole sections of humanity (despite the fact that you're fine doing that if those people happen to be Europeans -- search back through this thread for your very essentialist use of the phrase "very European"), but nevertheless, after that liberal duty is fulfilled, you're okay for your liberalism to find itself paddling along supportively in the wake of the Bush project for the Middle East. For me, as I said back in January, being a liberal is about coming to liberal conclusions. It's fine to look at cultures in general terms, it's what you do with that which makes you a liberal or a conservative.

NABISCO: The culture has some problems, but that shouldn't turn us against the culture; we should look to help solve the problems.

And what if the "problems" are the culture? With the "problem" called Hamas running the PA, that's looking very much the case, isn't it? How do you "solve" someone else's government? How do you separate a people from its elected leadership?

Your mistake, in your characterization of our debate in January and now, is that you think that because in January I said we needed to think culturally, you thought I was asking people to condemn entire cultures. I wasn't, I was asking people to think culturally, and to quit making these arguments which distinguish cultures from problems, separate "the majority" from "a few evil individuals" (who happen to be the majority's leaders, cultural heroes, and so on). I'm fine with making generalisations about cultures (what else is electing a government but making a broad generalisation about one's own culture?), but I want to see a liberal end result to that process of thinking. No matter how liberal your decision not to generalize is, if it leads you to support an intervention that sees "problems" where I see cultures, it doesn't have a liberal end result. You continually distance yourself from war as a method for solving problems, without seeing that the way you frame "problems", cropping out the cultures they're part of, leads inevitably to war, as it has in this case.

In fact, it's you who has done a 180 turn, because you're now actually using the word "culture" in a positive way. In that January thread, you railed against "bald groupthink demonization". You said "I'd also suggest that people think hard about what they're saying when they start talking about "a culture of X" in any situation." But now you characterize your argument using precisely the culturalist terms you were so suspicious of then: "The culture has some problems, but that shouldn't turn us against the culture; we should look to help solve the problems."

But if the culture and the problems are not easily separable, if problems to be solved turn out to be entire cultures, your arguments are justifying intervention. In these circumstances, there can be no such thing as a surgical strike against "insurgents". The whole beast is connected, and the whole beast will roar and rise up.

Yes, we can make cultural generalisations. Yes, that sometimes leads us to decide a whole culture needs to be resisted. It's a radical remedy that almost always involves total war, a last resort. In the case of the Islamic/Islamist "problem", I don't think this is the case. I don't think it justified war, and I think war is only strengthening the extremists, and connecting them more surely to the whole culture. And none of this has made Americans safer.

The thing we need to fight is the thing with overwhelming power, and at the moment that thing is inside our own culture. We need to effect regime change in our own societies, particulary in the US, not regime change in the Middle East (though we seem to be doing that too, and in a pretty counter-productive way). Changing our own society from within is our most urgent political battle now, not the battle with Islam/Islamism. Unfortunately, because I take a culturalist view of the US, I'm not too optimistic about that regime change either, but I'd love to be proved wrong in 2008.

On this thread, you're claiming that identifying something as a "problem" necessarily leads toward intervention, and intervention necessarily exacerbates the original problem. You ask: "What if the 'problems' are the culture?"

But you're ignoring something simple: cultures are capable of change. They really are, Momus. No matter how coherent they aspire to be, they're capable of diminishing aspects of themselves and acquiring others. You argued in favor of making moral judgments about how a culture operates, and accused me of being too "individualistic" in resisting that. But a culture mainly exists as it's acted out by individuals, and that's a lot of why it's capable of shifting over time. It's acted out by individuals differently -- individuals who are less or more attached to different parts of the culture, or different parts of other cultures -- and that creates the possibility of balances shifting. It creates the possibility of a culture changing and getting "better." I believe this; I would be really appalled if you didn't.

Cultures change both in response to things inside the culture and in response to things outside of the culture. In this situation, we are outside the culture we're talking about. And consider this: anything we do will have some effect on shaping that culture. Interventionism has an effect; non-interventionism has an effect; dialogue has an effect; economics have an effect; ad infinitum. Our behavior has an influence that we cannot run away from. When it comes down to it, the main statement I made that you disagreed with was this: that instead of "writing off" that influence -- instead of hardening ourselves as intractably opposed to a given culture -- we should investigate ways we might behave that will have what we consider a positive effect in shaping that culture. That's not interventionism; that's reality.

The funny part is that you recognize this fact. You understand very clearly how our current interventionist methods are actually making the "problems" worse. You accept that change can occur, but then with the same breath you deny it. You talk as if Hamas running the PA is an endless expression of Palestinian culture, but it's not: it's an event that's happened in a specific moment, in response to specific stimuli. (Bush-style intervention may even be among those stimuli!) You ask: "How do you separate a people from its elected leadership?" And I say: that's precisely the kind of question I've been asking all along. We have an inescapable influence on this culture. How we can behave that will help the culture get better? It is dialogue? Support? Development? Total hands-off non-interventionism? I've never claimed to know, but I think it's worth thinking about.

So let's circle around to my original point, the one you chose to attack. I was talking about these cartoons. These cartoons, I said, do basically the same thing Bush-style intervention does: they exacerbate problems. My whole worry was that the people responsible for them might not have cared. It seemed possible to me that the people responsible for them were actually using the influence they had on another culture to make that culture disappoint them even more: I wondered if they were deliberately baiting a culture to behave badly so that they could turn around and put up that wall, write the culture off as an intractable enemy. And I said that even Bush at least recognizes that we can maybe behave in ways that make the culture better. There is no question in my mind that he is failing at this; there is no question in my mind that his approach is wrong; I don't even trust him to correctly identify the "problems." But if the question is between provoking a culture into being our enemy and provoking a culture into being our friend, I'll take the latter.

(By the way, your humor meter is broken: my "very European" line was a joke about what it looks like to choose the former.)

Again and again you present the situation in these binary terms: we can write off a culture or we can intervene in it, we can provoke them to be our enemy or we can provoke to be our friend. But there's an obvious third option (I'd prefer to think of it as the first, actually): just don't provoke at all, just co-exist peacefully with a culture, acknowledging that differences exist and doing nothing about them. Why do you always present the two options "hate them" and "change them" but never this third one, "tolerate them"?

Muslim states resolved, through these many demonstrations, to pressure through a program of joint Islamic action, international institutions, including the U.N., to criminalize insults of Islam and its prophet.

...The Organization of Islamic Conference's goal is to inhibit criticism of Islamic jihadism by threats of violence. It's beginning to work. On February 9, the European Union called for a voluntary code of conduct to avoid offending Muslims. On the same day, Kofi Annan agreed with an OIC proposal mandating that a revised U.N. Human Rights Council "prevent instances of intolerance discrimination, incitement of hatred and violence . . . against religions, prophets, and beliefs." The language is intentionally very broad.

This would enforce censorship by U.N. members and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations there) against purported defamation of Muslims in print and other forms of speech.

That phrase does at least allow us to shout (from the rooftops!) "But Nabisco, the question isn't that!" But scroll up the thread and you'll see that he also said:

"This is a big project, but it's the only thing that can work. Rehabilitation is the only option here, because you can't imprison or execute an entire culture."

The only option: he just won't look beyond "reform them or kill them all", the two sides of the coin of interventionism.

We are living with the consequences of Rummy's 9/11 memo "go massive, sweep it all up, things related and not", but that doesn't mean we need to accept its insanity as any kind of sanity.

[A]nything we do will have some effect on shaping that culture.

Let's talk practicalities, not abstractions. What would it look like, in this case, to "co-exist peacefully with a culture, acknowledging that differences exist and doing nothing about them?" What path of action on our part will have no effect whatsoever, no influence at all? Do we continue to import oil, and thus indirectly support the people who benefit from that? Do we cease to import oil, and thus indirectly pull the rug out from their economies? How do we react when they seek to influence our behavior? Do these cartoons constitute "doing nothing" about those differences? Or do they constitute "doing something?" Do you really imagine there is an answer to these questions that is actually neutral? Do you really imagine there is anything we can do that will not shape and affect other people? And you're the one who thinks I'm too much of an individualist and not enough of a collectivist!

I mean, here's the deal: you're trying to make my point much simpler and blunter than it is. You're trying to pretend that I'm in favor of "correcting" another culture, and you're trying to pretend I'm advocating active, forceful steps to do that. But all I've said, Momus, is that our actions have influence, and that we should be making the best of that influence. These cartoons have influence. And the only distinction I made was between using that influence in ways that help achieve good things and ways that help achieve bad ones. That's not a binary. That's a spectrum of consequences to our actions -- consequences to every action -- and a recommendation that we be aware of those consequences, and act in a spirit of hope rather than cynicism.

And I'm seriously going to ask that you quit pretending I mean more than that, because that's the part here where you're being an absolute asshole. The two things we're saying here are completely compatible. If you ask me what I think would "help" with those "problems," I think my vision would be very close to yours -- it would involve allowing other cultures to develop without our leaning on them to conform to our tastes. I've never said otherwise. But our actions have effects nonetheless, and we have to acknowledge that. We have to aim those actions the right way, because we can't just step out of the picture.