Month: November 2009

A reader writes:

I don't think the reader comparing actual attacks by American/European Muslims is constructive with regard to your point about Muslims in America. I've spent a bit of time in Europe, and European Muslims, very generally speaking, have not integrated one bit into mainstream European societies. I hate to use such sweeping allegations, but when a Ft Hood event happens here, I am always proud and heartened by the Muslim community's immediate rejection. My Muslim-American friends live all over this country, and though they have their quibbles with American foreign policy (and not nearly as much as one might think), they are PROUD to be Americans, and love their country, at least as much as your average American does.

In France, England, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Muslim communities are – yes, generally – wildly hostile to their governments. This is most apparent in the United Kingdom, where Muslims preach British destruction, virulent homophobia and anti-Semitism, loudly, in the street, to anyone willing to listen. Yes, this is the fringe, but it is not as widely condemned and rejected as it would be here.

And by the way, while I definitely find Muslim European communities to be alarming and worthy of plenty of scrutiny, I think their host societies shoulder plenty of blame in this regard. Americans deserve credit for – generally – looking past religious and ethnic differences a hella lot better than their European counterparts.

I wrote my thesis, in part, on the Muslim experience in France, and it's not pretty. Ask many a Frenchman for his views on Muslims in Paris and try not to be appalled at his reaction. When I was in Denmark this summer, I was surprised at how openly the Danes (ever tolerant and progressive) resented the Muslim immigrant population. This rejectionist attitude only further strengthens the radical imams that are shipped into European cities to prevent assimilation with the infidels.

I should add that your dissenter, and anyone interested in this topic, should read Irshad Manji or Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the subject, because they can express this much better than I can. But the divide is great: both between the manner in which Americans and Europeans have reacted to Muslim societies growing in their midst, AND in the way those Muslim societies react to and view the countries they currently live in.

A soldier reader (and Friend of the Dish) emails to point out this staggering photo-essay from the Afghan war:

For the past seven years, David Guttenfelder has witnessed and documented the changing landscape of Afghanistan. Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press and over the past seven years has offered the general public a close-up, intimate look at the lives of troops fighting in the mountains and remote regions of Afghanistan.

The Dish has tried to pay regular tribute to the amazing photographic work being done by working photo-journalists today (that's one reason we set up the Face of the Day series). But the work of war photographers is especially important. Our great failure has been to keep these soldiers constantly in our public eye, to connect their sacrifice with our security, to weigh decisions of war and peace with them in front of us – not as abstract principles but as flesh-and-blood human beings. Yep: they're soldiers. This is what they do. They don't complain and we shouldn't molly-coddle them.

But that doesn't mean we should be unaware of the sacrifice.

One thing one takes from these images is the constant press of heat exhaustion. These soldiers are not merely fighting an entrenched, vicious and ubiquitous enemy; they are doing so in an extraordinarily tough environment. The stress and the heat and the lack of sleep and the exposure in an almost lunar landscape at times: these photos bring that alive. I suspect that Obama has become more and more aware of this. I would take my time before deciding to throw more thousands of young Americans into this vortex as well.

After the jump: the toll of heat exhaustion on one soldier in the wilderness:

Dreher is confused:

I genuinely don't understand [Andrew Sullivan's] position. He doesn't believe the Catholic Church teaches truth, except insofar as it coincides with what he believes. Staying inside the Catholic Church makes him truly miserable. So why stay? If he wants liturgy, smells, bells, and a complete blessing on the way he chooses to live his life, there's the Episcopal Church. I actually did believe in Catholicism, but for my own reasons was so tormented by staying that I lost my faith … and so I left. I left in tears and heartbreak, but I left. Truly, it's a mystery to me why any free man would stay in a church in which he did not believe, and that made him so unhappy.

So Rod left the church even though he did believe. Make what you will of that. Perhaps Rod's social or aesthetic comfort trumped his actual beliefs. We all have to follow our own path, and, unlike Rod, I am not going to peer into another's soul and make that decision for him. It is between him and his conscience.

But I want to rebut Rod's assertion that I  do not "believe the Catholic Church teaches truth, except insofar as it coincides with what he believes." This is a slur, the kind of slur used by people more interested in smearing another than listening to him.

I can recite the Creed with as clear a conscience as any of my fellow Catholics. I do believe that the Catholic church teaches truth in the single unifying credo I can recite at every mass. I do believe in the message of the Gospels as deeply as I believe in anything. I do believe in the Catholic communion as the core guardian of those Gospels and of the sacraments that keep Jesus in our tangible, physical midst. And I do believe in the task of spreading God's love as the core mission of a Catholic today.

What I do not believe in are the Church's contemporary social and reactionary political positions, and its cultural hostility to women and gays, and its profound ethical corruption and sexual hypocrisy, all of which have led to astonishing scandal and evil. I do not believe that this evil should be tolerated or enabled by those who love it. And I do not believe that tackling this evil is best accomplished by leaving, as Rod, for reasons that I deeply respect, has.

In this, I try imperfectly and unworthily to follow in the wake of countless Catholics across the centuries and millennia who refused to bow down to these crass calls for total obedience from a corrupt and blinkered hierarchy when their conscience tells them it is wrong. And the idea that the Catholic church does not accept this role for the laity is belied by the Second Council – the Council Benedict is doing his utmost to downgrade.

Sometimes, the gate is very straight – pun deeply intended. And some of us decide we would rather be constricted and conflicted in this narrow passage than avoid this spiritual challenge altogether. Because we still believe. And because this church is also ours.

Above is Jon Stewart's version of watching Sean Hannity. Yes, I've tried to as well. It's like listening to Hugh Hewitt. Or reading Pravda in the old Soviet Union. But somehow watching a human being so brainwashed and engaging in conscious brain-washing makes it worse. Hannity is a pathological level of propagandist, because his entire reality, his entire mindset is programmed for ideology and partisanship. There is no world for him but politics; and no perspective within politics except conflict and warfare. He greets views that do not comport with the opportunistic ideology of the moment as threats to be extinguished, not ideas to be engaged.

Whatever else this toxic, shallow and brutal perspective is, it is not now and never will be conservative – unless that word has now been so corrupted it has no meaning at all.

Here I am at a conference on two of the greatest conservative minds of the last century: Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott. Perhaps Strauss would have regarded this poisonous propaganda as a necessary evil to keep the demos in check (perhaps that's how cynics like Kristol can support and enable this sophomoric, near-fascist crap). Oakeshott would have never stopped throwing up, if, of course, he would even have stooped to watching. 

At the core of real conservatism is a distinction between theory and practice, a deep resistance to ideology, a respect for free inquiry and the philosophic spirit, a respect for social stability and coherence, a moderation in governance and a deliberation in action.

It is really time to point out that what Hannity represents, what much of Fox News represents, is not a defense of conservatism but one of conservatism's deepest, most vicious and most pernicious enemies. I am sick and tired of having this political tradition coopted and vandalized in this manner.

Conservatism will not recover as a coherent governing philosophy until it takes this monstrous propaganda on. Conservatism will not somehow emerge through the wreckage of this current moment, until it finds the courage to note that what it has become is not some variant on its tradition rightly understood, but its conscious, active, pernicious nemesis.

And yes, this makes the actual, living breathing representative of political conservatism in our time the current president of the United States. And anyone with any passing concern for the legacy of conservative philosophy knows it.

A reader writes:

I hope you might indulge me a few additional comments about the developments here in Utah. First, it is stunning that LDS Church President Thomas Monson has proven to be a more fierce advocate for gay rights during the last year than has U.S. President Barack Obama. Las Vegas would have offered astronomical odds to the contrary on election day a year ago, when Obama was elected with a gay rights platform, and the LDS Church successfully championed Prop. 8 to strip gays of marriage equality in California. Stunning on both scores.

Second, you are right to note that Mormons are, on the whole, decent people. You might also mention another characteristic of LDS culture that helped bring about the recent gay rights revelation. Mormons tend to be pragmatic and realistic. Unlike fundamentalists, Mormons do not insist that the world was created in seven days. Mormons tend to be persuaded–and not threatened–by the objective evidence supporting the theory of evolution. In this instance, the LDS Church has finally acknowledged in a tangible way that gay people exist. They are not just people suffering from bad choices or needing a cure to resume heterosexual ways. The recognition that homosexuals are a class of people is the true revelation here. Today it permitted the Church to accept reality and support a non-discrimination law. Ultimately the same pragmatic strain in the LDS Church will lead the Church to offer some path for LDS gays to enter into meaningful relationships recognized within the faith. Not soon, but eventually.

Third, the LDS Church is extremely sensitive about its public image and wants to be accepted in the mainstream of American life.

There's a reason why the LDS Church spends millions of dollars each years on sappy commercials. There's a reason why an LDS prophet accepted blacks into full membership of the Church after the tide had turned in the Civil Rights Movement. And now, at a time when the Catholic Church should be afraid that it's becoming all about abortion, the LDS Church had rightly become concerned that it was becoming synonymous with homophobia at a time when the arc of history was moving in the other direction. There's reason (and public relations) behind this week's revelation.

Fourth, Tuesday's announcement promises a sea change in the western states because Mormons tend to be devout and accepting of the authority of their Church. Already attitudes are changing. Legislators with extremely hostile records against gay rights are suddenly conciliatory—and the sole cause of this change is the Church's public pronouncement. Perhaps even more importantly, the Church's announcement gives permission to Mormons to be the tolerant people they are in their hearts. Mormons no longer have to show hostility to gays to show devotion to their faith.

Finally, since there always needs to be a Mitt Romney angle, you can safely predict that another Mitt-flop is coming. First he was for gay rights. Then he was against them. And now, thanks to this announcement, he can be for some of them.

Marcy Wheeler reacts to the news that KSM will be brought to trial in New York:

While I’m glad a trial of KSM will demonstrate that our criminal system can deal with the worst of the worst, it’s the treatment of the others–al-Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah, and al-Qahtani–that will truly demonstrate the strength of failures of our legal system. KSM, after all, has said he wants to be executed; KSM freely boasts of his role in 9/11. That’ll make it easier to avoid discussing his brutal torture.

But what do you do with someone like Abu Zubaydah, who is probably not fit for trial, whose diaries (which the government still won’t give him) would prove he was tortured, and who wasn’t who they said he was when they waterboarded him 83 times?

Red State is flipping out. Greenwald is upset not every detainee will get a trial.

A reader writes:

NPR / Dina Temple used the word "torture" two or three times to refer to waterboarding in an reporter-to-reporter chat this morning on NPR. It was in the context of the 'evidence' gathered against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Somewhere, Orwell is happy.

As the Democrats in New York State again stick it to their gay supporters, just as the Democrats in Washington continue to do, it's worth watching this brief interaction. A constituent of state senator George Maziarz asks him a question at a constituency meeting. The question is civil, it contains many arguments, it offers any number of ways to address its points. What does Maziarz do? He simply dismisses the arguments, addresses none of them, reiterates his position that marriage is between a man and a woman, period, and gets a round of applause. No argument, no engagement – just raw majority power against a tiny minority in often desperate straits.

And that's what it will surely do, as all populist protest movements do, after they have eaten up the Republicans. And burped loudly.

Ambers wonders if Pawlenty is becoming a Romney:

It's no surprise that no potential 2012 aspirant wants the Romney-esque tag. Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) is in danger of acquiring the label. Dan Balz, an influential and well-respected political journalist, pointed to Pawlenty's flip-flop on climate change, his seeming eagerness to plunge into the tea party crowd's daily obsessions — whether they be the president's address to schoolkids or the notion that health care mandates violate the 10th amendment or the idea that Sen. Olympia Snowe isn't sufficiently conservative to be a Republican.