Month: February 2006

For the past fifteen years, basically zip. Nada. Zilch. They’d rather revisit the McCarthy era than deal with Islamist dictatorships that exist today that eviscerate women’s rights and dignity. Readers recommend three recent movies: Osama, Dayereh, and Kandahar. All were made outside Hollywod by locals in Afghanistan and Iran. Every now and again, when I hear Hollywood being trashed as "liberal," I find myself asking exactly how often the industry really does advance awareness of global brutality and injustice. It’s rare to see such a message – especially if it cannot be wielded against the West. I don’t think Hollywood is unaware of injustice. The decision-makers simply believe that the United States is responsible for most of it. More commentary on this lacuna here.

More capitulation to religious hooey. Yahoo will not allow one Linda Callahan to use her own name for an email address. Why? The name Callahan has the word "Allah" in it. Yahoo will apparently accept "god, messiah, jesus, jehova, buddah, satan and both priest and pedophile," but not ‘allah,’ ‘osama’ and ‘binladen.’ I wish I were making this up. The world is going completely bananas over mullahs.

A reader writes:

"I am straight, very straight. I am also very hairy (I am Italian American). When I lived in Washington, I dated a girl who used to call me her "bear" because I am so hairy (in DC, most of the WASP types tend to be wimpy looking guys). You have ruined that memory for me. Thanks!"

You’re welcome. I do that kind of thing every day.

SecDef says today that he just heard about the U.A.E. port company decision. This blog says he sat on the committee that unanimously approved the sale February 13. Hmmm.

I cannot express enough my contempt for the sniveling neo-Nazi, David Irving. That he has such an obviously first-rate mind makes his bigotry all the more repulsive. But … imprisoning someone for their beliefs, however vile, is a violation of basic Western freedoms. We cannot lecture the Muslim world on freedom of speech, while criminalizing it in the West. I know there’s a historical reason for the Austrian law. That doesn’t make it any less objectionable in principle. And what has just happened will only deepen the sense that the West has double-standards among many Muslims.

They’re incorrigible.

The bear subculture makes it to Wikipedia. But some are now officially post-bear, apparently. My own take on the phenom is here. Camille’s is here.

It’s increasingly the issue of our time: can Islam be reconciled to modernity, to a globalized world, dedicated to individual freedom and free markets? Most of the time, I tend to the gloomy view, especially when you see the variants of Islam who get the most press and wield the most influence. The content of the Koran, as well as its alleged origins as a direct message from God also make scholarship, and a reformation, much more problematic than for, say, Christianity. A reader nevertheless insists that there is another reformist current that we should neither ignore nor dismiss:

"Since the early 1900s there have been vigorous movements within Muslim and Arab countries to democratize; there have been activists, writers, thinkers, all of whom are unfortunately in eclipse today, but whose past influence and history make clear that there is another way, even in Islam. Here are two from Pakistan and India: from Pakistan, there was the Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; a great profile of him ran in the Progressive Magazine. Or, read about Maulana Azad, one of the leaders of the Indian independence movement and still revered among Indian Muslims as their most significant national leader.

Want something closer to the Arab heartland? How about reading up on al-Nahda – the Arab Renaissance – with its reformers, intellectuals, and political developments, including the great Egyptian intellectual Taha Hussein and the Egyptian secularist Ali Abd al-Raziq. And here’s an article about the debate in Egypt between secularism and Islamism."

Thanks for the info. I cannot vouch for all of it, as I am not an expert in this area. But more of us need to be. We should also be aware and more supportive of contemporary Muslim moderates who are speaking out. My reader recommends two more: columnists Ardeshir Cowasjee and Irfan Husain of the Pakistani paper Dawn. Then there’s blogospheric moderate Muslims, Imam Zaid Shakir, and the group blog, Aqoul. One thing I’ve learned these past few years. We need to be a little less certain of what we know about the Muslim world, who is our enemy, who isn’t. Winning this war requires subtlety, engagement, openness to the other’s argument. As readers know, I have no patience for the extremists in Islam, and no doubt about their current ascendancy. But they are not all there is. And we need to do a better job of reaching out to and understanding the arguments of their internal opponents.

The forces for democratization from below in Iran just got a boost – from Freddie Mercury. Keep hope alive.