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

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.

But you're (again, again!) defining this so that the only possibility is intervention! Can't you see how faulty your logic is here? Because the US has influence everywhere in the world, it has a choice to use that influence in the form of good or bad intervention. But influence is compatible with tolerance, intervention is not. Democracy must be won by the blood of the people who fight for it, not by an alien power (no matter how "influential" coming in and shedding someone else's blood to impose it from above.

Both kinds of intervention you outline (war, reform) mean walking right into the trap that Bin Laden and his ilk have set for America. Just as Al Qaeda used the judo technique of directing American energy (in the form of passenger jets) against America, so they've been using the same technique ever since: they've goaded the US into aggressive responses and then used that energy for their own purposes of recruitment and radicalisation. Al Qaeda weren't that keen on Saddam either, as you may recall. They were chased out of their training grounds in Afghanistan only to see the whole nation of Iraq become a training ground with real live American targets.

If you followed the link Blount supplied to Nat Hentoff's column in the Voice, you'll have read the story of how the Danish cartoons are being used in exactly the same way: by engineering big spectacular media events, organisations like the OIC hope to polarize and extremize public opinion:

"The role of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), representing 57 Muslim states, in creating a climate for violent confrontation over the cartoons [was shown when] the OIC set the stage for anti–free speech demonstrations at its extraordinary summit in Mecca in December 2005. The 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."

What the Bush administration and radical Islamists have in common is the belief that you just spelled out: that the Americans and the Islamists must totally meddle in each other's affairs, including their legal and political systems.

Because the US has influence everywhere in the world, it has a choice to use that influence in the form of good or bad intervention.

No, it has a choice to use that influence as good or bad influence. The two words do not mean the same thing, as you point out: "influence is compatible with tolerance, intervention is not." So why are you pretending they're inseparable in that sentence up above?

Democracy must be won by the blood of the people who fight for it, not by an alien power (no matter how "influential" coming in and shedding someone else's blood to impose it from above.

Oh wait, it's worse: now "influence" necessarily means "bloodshed!" I'm pretty sure the original kind of influence we were talking about was "cartoons."

Both kinds of intervention you outline (war, reform)

Umm, what? Are you actually reading my posts, or just scanning them for things to pretend you disagree with? I haven't advocated a single method of intervention. I haven't even advocated intervention. All I've said is that when making decisions about things like cartoons, we should keep in mind whether they foster peace or division. And all I said that's led you to such depths of ridiculousness is that EVEN AT LEAST BUSH would claim to be more interested in fostering peace than fostering division.

You still have a bunch of questions to answer if you want to argue about this: what would it actually look like -- in concrete, practical terms -- for the west to take a stance that had absolutely no influence on the rest of the world?

(As linked to way up above) - the fruits of the last concerted Western effort to 'reform' muslim culture:

"The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials also confirm independent evidence that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do with World War I “Armenian provocations”. Emphasis is placed, instead, on the larger pre-war context dating from the failure of the mid-19th century Ottoman Tanzimat reform efforts. These reforms, initiated by the declining Ottoman Empire (i.e., in 1839 and 1856) under intense pressure from the European powers, were designed to abrogate the repressive laws of dhimmitude, to which non-Muslim (primarily Christian) minorities, including the Armenians, had been subjected for centuries, following the Turkish jihad conquests of their indigenous homelands.

Led by their patriarch, the Armenians felt encouraged by the Tanzimat reform scheme, and began to deluge the Porte (Ottoman seat of government) with pleas and requests, primarily seeking governmental protection against a host of mistreatments, particularly in the remote provinces. Between 1850 and 1870, alone, 537 notes were sent to the Porte by the Armenian patriarch characterizing numerous occurrences of theft, abduction, murder, confiscatory taxes, and fraud by government officials. These entreaties were largely ignored, and ominously, were even considered as signs of rebelliousness. For example, British Consul (to Erzurum) Clifford Lloyd reported in 1890,

Discontent, or any description of protest is regarded by the local Turkish Local Government as seditious.

He went on to note that this Turkish reaction occurred irrespective of the fact that ”..the idea of revolution..” was not being entertained by the Armenian peasants involved in these protests.

Roderick Davison has observed that under the Shari’a the “..infidel gavours [“dhimmis”, “rayas”]” were permanently relegated to a status of “inferiority” and subjected to a “contemptuous half-toleration”. Davison further maintained that this contempt emanated from “an innate attitude of superiority”, and was driven by an “innate Muslim feeling”, prone to paroxysms of “open fanaticism”. Sustained, vehement reactions to the 1839 and 1856 Tanzimat reform acts by large segments of the Muslim population, led by Muslim spiritual leaders and the military, illustrate Davison’s point. Perhaps the most candid and telling assessment of the doomed Tanzimat reforms, in particular the 1856 Act, was provided by Mustafa Resid, Ottoman Grand Vizier at six different times between 1846-58. In his denunciation of the reforms, Resid argued the proposed “complete emancipation” of the non-Muslim subjects, appropriately destined to be subjugated and ruled, was “entirely contradictory” to “the 600 year traditions of the Ottoman Empire”. He openly proclaimed the “complete emancipation” segment of the initiative as disingenuous, enacted deliberately to mislead the Europeans, who had insisted upon this provision. Sadly prescient, Resid then made the ominous prediction of a “great massacre” if equality was in fact granted to non-Muslims.

Despite their “revolutionary” advent, and accompanying comparisons to the ideals of the French Revolution, the CUP’s “Young Turk” regime eventually adopted a discriminatory, anti-reform attitude toward non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. During an August 6, 1910 speech in Saloniki, Mehmed Talat, pre-eminent leader of the Young Turks disdainfully rejected the notion of equality with “gavours” , arguing that it “…is an unrecognizable ideal since it is inimical with Sheriat [Shari’a] and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Muslims…”. Roderick Davison notes that in fact “..no genuine equality was ever attained..”, re-enacting the failure of the prior Tanzimat reform period. As a consequence, he observes, the CUP leadership “…soon turned from equality…to Turkification…” Indeed, an influential member of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, Sheik Abd-ul-Hack, a “progressive” Young Turk, made this declaration writing in a Parisian Muslim review, in August, 1912:

Yes! The Musulman religion is in open hostility to all your world of progress. Understand, you European observers, that a Christian, whatever his position may be, by the mere fact of his being a Christian is regarded by us as a blind man lost to all sense of human dignity. Our reasoning with regard to him is as simple as it is definitive. We say: the man whose judgment is so perverted as to deny the existence of a one and only God, and to make up gods of different sorts, can only be the meanest expression of human degradation; to speak to him would be a humiliation for our intelligence and an insult to the grandeur of the Master of the Universe. The presence of such miscreants among us is the bane of our existence; their doctrine is a direct insult to the purity of our faith; contact with them is a defilement of our bodies; any relation with them a torture to our souls. Though detesting you, we have condescended to study your political institutions and your military organization. Over and above the new weapons that Providence procures for us through your agency, you have yourselves rekindled, the inextinguishable faith of our heroic martyrs. Our Young Turks, our Babis, our new Brotherhoods, all our sects, under various forms, are inspired by the same idea; the same necessity of moving forward. Towards what end? Christian civilization? Never! Islam is the one great international family. All true believers are brothers. A community of feeling and of faith binds them in mutual affection. It is for the Caliph to facilitate these relations and to rally the Faithful under the sacerdotal standard.

During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 Armenians between 1894-96. This was followed, under the Young Turk regime, by the Adana massacres of 25,000 Armenians in 1909, and the first formal genocide of the 20th century, when in 1915 alone, an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians were slaughtered.

Contemporary accounts from European diplomats make clear that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy. For example, the Chief Dragoman (Turkish-speaking interpreter) of the British embassy reported regarding the 1894-96 massacres:

[The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the “rayah” [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their Mussulman [Muslim] masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians."

"As has now been well established by the Western press, five months ago a vicious right-wing propaganda rag in Denmark, possibly edited by a cryogenically preserved Nazi collaborator, sought specifically to denigrate Islam by commissioning a series of unspeakably horrible caricatures that baselessly portrayed Islam as having a tendency towards violence and intolerance.

Now, Muslims are not normally a people to congregate in mass protest and burn flags, hurl stones or break things. But this unprovoked act of cultural aggression (coming, as it did, out of the blue and occurring in Islam’s heartland, Denmark) was simply too much to take. Therefore, after five months of consideration, it was decided to make an exception for this case, and spontaneous protests broke out..."

I hope Nabisco realises that responding to my polite, reasoned arguments by calling me a "giant asshole" opens him up to potentially violent protest from Momus fans all over the world. Momism doesn't allow that kind of representation of its prophet.