Month: December 2009

Gentle mullahs transformed

by Andrew Sprung

Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (1985) combines a quick march through Persian and Shiite intellectual and political history with an almost novelistic tracking of the experience of a single mullah from grade school in the early fifties to the eve of the Islamic Revolution. Tantalizingly, the mullah's experience of the Revolution is only touched on in an epilogue — where one gets this portrait of a great divide:

In fact, honor and a strong distaste for violence have separated Ali and some like-minded mullahs from the mullahs who have thrown themselves, from their giveh shoes to their turbans, into politics and into other people's business. Ali keeps telling mullah friends who share his distaste for the purges and killings other mullahs have directed, "But I know for a fact that years ago they would walk out of their way to avoid stepping on an ant."  Maybe the cousin of Parviz [Ali's childhood friend] would still avoid stepping on an ant, but he has turned into a vindictive judge who orders flogging and execution  with abandon. He was one of the vocal supporters of the reintroduction by parliament of Islamic criminal law, and he was openly pleased at the official "removal" of Shariatmadari (supposedly for treason) from his position as a "model" because Shariatmadari said the drastic punishments of the criminal law, like the chopping off of hands, were to be applied only when a perfect society was constructed so that no temptation other than the inner whisperings of Satan could be held to have misled the criminal.

The uncanniness of this experience — watching gentle or at least ordinary people become murderous thugs — reminded me of a scene in Eric Maria Remarque's Arc of Triumph, set in Paris on the eve of World War II.  An American woman turns up in Paris, having just divorced her Austrian husband and left Vienna. Her debriefing:

"It's good to be back," she said. "Vienna has become a military barracks. Disconsolate. The Germans have trampled it down. And with them the Austrians. The Austrians too, Ravic. I thought that would be a contradiction of nature: an Austrian Nazi. But I've seen them."

     "That is not surprising, Kate. Power is the most contagious disease."

     "Yes. And the most deforming. That's why I asked for a divorce. This charming idler whom I married two years ago suddenly became a shouting stormtroop leader who made old Professor Bernstein wash the streets while he stood by and laughed. Bernstein who, a year ago, had cured him of an inflammation of the kidneys. Pretending that the fee had been too high."

There are many testimonials of that all-too-common experience of watching one's neighbors or loved ones become butchers and thugs when greater thugs take over a country. And no country is immune.  The Bush torture program reminded us of that.

Criminalizing Homosexuality In Rwanda

by Patrick Appel

Jim Burroway wonders if Rick Warren will speak up again:

[Box Turtle Bulletin] has just learned that the Rwandan Parliament is scheduled to take up consideration of a change to Rwanda’s penal code which would criminalize homosexuality with a punishment of five to ten years. It would also ban counseling and advocacy that could be interpreted as “encouraging or sensitizing” people to enter into same-sex relationships….If Warren is serious about opposing the criminalization of homosexuality, he should engage his nationwide Rwandan PEACE Plan to put a stop to this bill. And send a personal copy of his video encyclical to his friend, President Kagame.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish we saw DC formally embrace marriage equality, marijuana appeared to surpass tobacco use among the youth, Hizballah rebranded itself, and things looked grim for Americans detained in Iran. Regarding news that detainees are headed to Illinois, a reader from that state got tough and Jennifer Rubin got petty. Hannity, meanwhile, got scary.

Patrick corralled and participated in the bloggy debate over Lieberman here, here, here, and here. He also surveyed the death of the Medicare buy-in. Sprung dissected Lieberman's record on Medicare expansion, rounded up comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam, went another round with Greenwald over war justification in Afghanistan, and explored with Elizabeth Warren the government's approach to big banks. Friedersdorf discussed the role of contrarianism in media, scrutinized a profile of Secretary Clinton, touched upon the hysteria over sex crimes with Balko, and chewed over the future of immigration with Manzi.

In other commentary, Dan Savage reacted to the legalization of male prostitution in Nevada and Douthat discussed prison reform. Our conversation on Houston's charms continued here and here, and our look at holiday spending ended here. We also watched octopuses and I looked at explosions.

— C.B.

Fomenting Fear And Loathing

by Chris Bodenner Above is an appalling act of exploitation. Sean Hannity assembles a group of 9/11 victims – understandably roiled by grief and frustration – and frames the segment around the “betrayal” of Obama putting terrorist suspects on trial in New York.  The exploitation is not so much of the family members themselves, who would harbor the same feelings and opinions regardless of Hannity’s forum. Rather, Hannity is exploiting the empathy that millions of viewers hold for those victims. By stoking their sadness, and providing no counterbalance from grieving victims with alternate views, Hannity creates pure propaganda. And he channels that raw, seething emotion not just toward a particular policy decision, but a personalized individual – Barack Obama – who also happens to be the nation’s leader in a time of war. Here’s an excerpt from the clip if you don’t want to watch it all:

“It may be pushing the envelope a little bit,” Gadiel added, “but I, I wonder, you know, The Constitution has provisions for people who provide aid and comfort for the enemy and I just – there’s no exemption for high officials, including the president and the attorney general. I just wonder when, when it will be that people would, will decide or will there be people around who will be willing to point fingers if he crosses the line and when does he cross the line?”

So how did “patriotic” Hannity react to his guest calling, essentially, for our president to be arrested for treason? By encouraging the rest of his audience to agree. “Let me ask for a show of hands once again. How many of you – show of hands (Hannity raised his own hand as a blatant cue for others to do so, too) – high, if you can. How many of you agree with what Peter just said?”

Almost the entire studio audience raised their hands.

Politics Of Tough

by Chris Bodenner

A reader from Illinois responds to Jennifer Rubin’s opposition to the detainee transfer to Thomson, IL:

We’d love to have those Gitmo prisoners here. And we’d love to have them break out. They would last maybe two days in that part of Illinois. People here are armed and dangerous and as soon as it went on the local news that somebody had gotten out of that prison. I know at least a couple of dozen guys who’d be out there, armed to the teeth, looking for some “personal” revenge for 9/11. I don’t know where you live Lady, but Americans, real Americans, would love the chance to hunt us some terrorist scum in the plains. It’d be fun.

I imagine the reader is exaggerating, but I think his underlying sentiment — “we’re not afraid of these bastards” — has been underrepresented in the debate over detainees, particularly among conservatives. The old partisan stereotypes say that Republicans are tough when it comes to national security and Democrats are weak. Yet in the current debate over Thompson and other prison sites, Republicans are the ones screeching with fright. The party of “Bring ‘Em On” has changed its tune to “Not In My Backyard.”

Yet when you actually talk to people living near potential prison sites — as I’ve done in Leavenworth, KS, and Standish, MI — you quickly find that a great deal of them, regardless of political bent, are not afraid. And many of those who are afraid were driven to fear because of the hysterical rhetoric and misleading information from their leaders.

One of the most impressive characters I met in Standish was Dale Hughes, a state prison supervisor. Dale, if allowed to guard detainees, faced the most personal risk of anyone. Yet he never thought twice about doing his duty.  Here’s what he told me in an early draft of the TNR piece:

The mayor is on board, as is the outspoken city manager, Michael Moran. “If anybody did escape, they’d have a surprise. We’re a community of hunters,” said Moran, a former Air Force policeman. While Granholm has taken a wait-and-see approach, both Michigan Senators support the transfer. One of them, Carl Levin, told CBS’s Bob Schieffer: “We cannot allow the terrorists to be intimidating us from trying them and keeping them in our jails.”

Dale Hughes, a Standish Max supervisor, is far from intimidated. “We have Level-5 guys who are just as bad as these jokers,” he says, referring to detainees. One guy in Level-5 — the most dangerous category of prisoners — recently pulled Dale’s arm through a food slot, requiring shoulder surgery. “Had he gotten my arm just right he could have broken it at the elbow. I’m healing well and don’t hold a grudge, it’s just something that can happen in my line of work.”

Dale, age 57, also won’t hold a grudge if he must forgo his job and home to a federal guard. “If you have to sacrifice those of us who work there for the surrounding community,” so be it, Dale says. “Most of us will still have jobs at other facilities, and Standish and Arenac County will get the federal money, the tax money, the sewer money.”

The rest of the story — which centers on the efforts of a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pete Hoekstra, to block a transfer to Standish — is here. One of Hoekstra’s opponents in the race, state senator Tom George, is one of the few Michigan Republicans who supports a transfer. And he has used the sort of rhetoric that national Democrats (like the spineless Harry Reid) could learn from:

During World War II, Michigan was the site of more than a dozen prisoner-of-war camps. We accounted for approximately 20 percent of America’s armament production. The Ford Willow Run plant, which employed my grandfather, produced more than 300,000 military aircraft. Other Michigan plants manufactured tanks, jeeps and guns. Despite the risks of making Michigan a military target, our citizens did not hesitate to aid the war effort.

Hopefully more Republicans, and Democrats, will take that same cue from the Greatest Generation. The trial and imprisonment of detainees is one of the very few issues that should rise above partisanship. Steve Benen, writing about Thomson this morning, offers some hope:

[T]he split won’t fall along traditional left-right lines — some prominent conservative leaders are on board with the transfer plan, too. In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr, the conservatives said moving suspected terrorists to the Thomson prison facility “makes good sense.” They added, in a message to the GOP, “The scaremongering about these issues should stop.”