Indian children play in a waterfall at the Lumbini Water Cascade in Hyderabad on May 2, 2010, to beat the high temperatures. India's monsoon, vital to hundreds of millions of farmers and of crucial importance after the worst drought in 37 years, will be normal strength this year, the weather office said last month. By Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images.
The times they are a-changin'. From France:
A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions.
JCall, which describes itself as "the European J Street" and is to be officially launched Sunday with the presentation of the letter, has raised a storm with its call to stop construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem.
The letter is signed by some 3,000 Jewish intellectuals, among them philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut, considered some of Israel's strongest defenders among French intellectuals. Signatories also include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student protests in the 1960s and now a member of the European Parliament, as well as other Jewish members of the European Parliament. The letter calls occupation and settlements "morally and politically wrong," noting that they "feed the unacceptable delegitimization process that Israel currently faces abroad."
Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia, 6.30 am
An Arabic-speaking counterterrorism expert, SERE training expert, and a combat veteran with twenty-eight years of operational experience in the Middle East, Malcolm Nance, takes on the torture-defenders:
I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the subject. Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim of expertise. As for his claim about the relationship between Pol Pot–era waterboarding and what we have done derived from the SERE program, he’s wrong. Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in Cambodia. Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training program. Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies. I was waterboarded on arrival at SERE, and then as a senior staffer, I performed the technique or supervised it through hundreds of evolutions.
Thiessen’s central purpose is apparently to glorify the most extreme practices used by the CIA in the Bush era and to argue that each of these practices, including waterboarding, is vitally necessary to our national security–even though no president used them before, and it seems that President Bush himself halted many of these practices over Cheney’s objection. We have prosecuted and convicted men for using these techniques in the past, and we were right to do so.
This suggests to me that, while he may cite Thomas Aquinas, Thiessen has no sense of honor and no moral compass. I give him credit for his loyalty to the Cheneys, but he’s blind to their errors in judgment. The use of waterboarding and other torture techniques was a powerful recruitment tool for Al Qaeda; it spawned thousands of would-be suicide bombers. Thiessen claims that we gained “intelligence” by using these torture techniques. But this shows that he knows nothing about the intelligence process or how our enemy grows and sustains itself.
Thousands of American POWs died and suffered resisting torture practices that we have always called the tools of the enemy. The SERE program was designed to help them grapple with this inhumanity and retain their dignity in the face of it. Now Thiessen and his boss want us to embrace the tactics we used in that program–taken from the Russians, the Communist Chinese, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge–as our own. He claims that these techniques are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact. Really? I challenge him to put up or shut up. I offer to put him through just one hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the Bush Administration’s OLC memos–including the CIA-approved variant of waterboarding. If at the end he still believes this is not torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint. But not until then. By the way, I can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of falsehoods. He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the torture.
Philip Jenkins explores the impact of the Vatican sex scandals on the steady shift of Catholic influence into the southern hemisphere:
The secular media also don’t enjoy the same pervasive presence in Africa and Latin America that it does in Europe, and the Church has its own powerful media voices that will defend the faith. […] Indeed, as the crisis quickens the wane of Europe's Catholic influence, it will help solidify the Church's new roots in the south. Membership there will continue to burgeon, and Church's hierarchy will increasingly be paved with southern clerics. When the time comes to choose someone to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, the cardinals, acutely aware of the effects of the abuse crisis, will probably consider more innovative international candidates, untainted by European connections. A Latin American pope would be a likely choice.
This is Jenkins' usual line. But the abuse in these Southern hemisphere countries is likely to be much worse than in the West because the authoritarian culture is still resilient, if waning. At some point, without structural reform of the way the church is organized, the wave of revelations will hit the South as well. More to the point: it already has. Maciel was a Mexican, remember. Latin America is currently galvanized by tapes of a bishop abusing an altar boy. There was a pedophile scandal in Kenya. And marriage and polygamy are widespread among the priesthood in Africa. I suspect the South will be more affected in the future by priest scandals than the now-better-managed North.
In this, actually, I think Benedict was right. If the church loses the West, if it loses Europe entirely, it is doomed. A revival of the faith will have to occur outside existing structures rather than within them. The Southern escape hatch is a delusion. Modernity is the problem. Plunging into Africa and fundamentalism will not be real answers.
William Underhill reviews Philip Pullman's new novel re-imagining of the Gospels:
According to Pullman's fable, Mary gives birth not to a single son but to twins: Jesus and Christ. Jesus is a firebrand preacher with a revolutionary message but no time for showy miracles. His brother, who serves as his chronicler, is a darker, more introspective figure, ready to provide a distorted version of events that will lay the basis for the Gospels and eventually lead to the foundation of the church. Those looking to find grounds for offense won't be disappointed: the Annunciation in Pullman's story is, in fact, a seduction; the Resurrection is a stunt. To compound the injury, Pullman suggests that in some respects his words may be closer than the Bible's to what Jesus would have actually said.
One motive in writing the book is to shake the faith of believers. He hopes to send readers back to the Gospels to compare his story with the originals. "They will see for themselves how contradictory, how inconsistent, and different the narratives are," he says. And Pullman is not shy about spelling out what he sees as the pernicious consequences of human institutions like the papacy that assume an unquestionable God-given authority. Among them: the Inquisition, witch-burning, the persecution of the Jews, and child abuse by Catholic priests.
Nick Clegg's favorite author is Samuel Beckett! Somehow I cannot imagine a presidential candidate in the US unloading this five days before voting:
My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape. Back then I remember images of Beckett making as great an impression on me as his work. He always looked so impressive – that beak-like nose, eyes staring dead into the camera – and he had an austerity to him, even when he was young, that makes it very easy to connect the man to the words.
Since then I must have read Waiting for Godot – of course – a hundred times. Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets
any easier.
It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?
But amid the bleakness, there is also humour, and it's no surprise that there are so many comedians among Beckett's fans. His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected. He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words. Direct and disturbing – it is impossible to grow tired of Beckett.
Hilary Bok contributes to a forum on the meaning of freedom. She uses traffic laws to make her essential point:
Normally, the point of driving is to get somewhere. The traffic laws enable us to get where we are going much more quickly and safely than we would if each of us had to decide for him- or herself which side of the street to drive on. The traffic laws do not tell us where to go. They leave the choice of destination, and for that matter the decision whether to drive at all, entirely up to us. They simply tell us which side of the road to drive on, that we should stop at various points, and so forth. By taking away our freedom to drive on the left, or to blast through busy intersections, they grant us much more freedom in the form of a greatly enhanced ability to get wherever we want to go quickly and safely.
Anyone who thinks that the traffic laws enhance our freedom should acknowledge that in some cases, including this one, government action can enhance our freedom, even if that action takes the form of restrictions on what we can and cannot do. An enormous number of questions about which (other) forms of government action might enhance our freedom would remain to be answered, but the fact that some government policy involves either a more active government or new restrictions on our action would not, by itself, imply that it diminishes our freedom.
The Dish 