QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The vice president’s office will never be quite as independent from the White House as it has been. That will end. Cheney never operated without a degree of [presidential] license, but there are people around who cannot believe some of the advice [Bush] has been given.” – a key Bush associate, according to Thomas DeFrank in the Daily News.

TOCQUEVILLE AND THE RIOTS

Some interesting insights here. Money quote:

For [Olivier] Roy, political Islam is very much a modern phenomenon because it is driven by masses of displaced or deterritorialized Muslims who have left their traditions and are searching for an “essential” Islam. Roy notices a strongly individualistic streak among them. For instance, he observes that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta’s suicide note contained significantly more references to himself than to Allah, which he takes signifies a modern obsession with the self. The rioters are indeed Islamists, as evidenced by their frequent chant, “Allahou Akbar!” – “God is great!” Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to identify the “essence” of a 1,500 year old tradition. Ironically, Islamists do what Westerners do when the latter express their “Orientalism” in reducing that complex tradition to a few slogans such as, “Islam is a religion of peace” and “Islam is a religion of war.” Islamists paradoxically, and perversely, treat themselves as “the Other” in reducing their own tradition to some kind of “pure Islam.” Doing so enables them to identify (and destroy) those deemed apostate but also because Muslims can no longer take their religion for granted as something connected with the soil. Their traditions have been uprooted over the past several generations, which contributes to a radicalized sense of identity politics.

This is also related to Paul Berman’s insight that Islamism as a political ideology was born in Europe, not the Middle East.

THE “INTIFADA”?

Here’s one take on what’s going on in France:

“The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity. But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state.
When the police tried to take back the streets, they were driven out with the demand that they leave what the protesters called the ‘occupied territories’. And far from the claim that the disturbances have been caused by French policy of segregating Muslims into ghettoes, this is a war being waged for separate development.
Some Muslims have even called for the introduction of the ancient Ottoman ‘millet’ system of autonomous development for different communities.”

That’s from British writer, Melanie Phillips, on her blog.

THE “SIXTH REPUBLIC”? An alternative view of the riots is available here. Money quote:

[T]hey are going to continue, one suspects, for as long as the political establishment presumes to deliberately and systematically misunderstand why they are occurring. At the moment, the governmental call is for ‘above all, the return of good order’; scant mention is yet to be made of even the possibility of making some effort to correct the absurd embedded racism of France’s so-called meritocratic power-structures, whose professed egalitarian ethic could not be further from practical truth. Headlines moronically blurt out: ‘how long will this go on?’ as if it is the temper tantrum of an infant, not the organised scream for help of an entire and dismembered portion of society. Senior ministers have been threatening longer jail-terms of all things, in blackly comic, American justice style.

d) the immigrants may soon be joined in the pillage by a host of left-wing organisations. Since the riots of 1968 made the error of not going far enough and thus resulting in minimal long-term change, there is implicit consensus that for this action to be justified it must be pursued to its natural extreme: all-out civil disobedience, until the government falls. While official opinion seems to be that this political activity will quickly run its course, there is evidence that it is steadily mounting and indeed heading from outside the city into the centre. I have noticed in my very central quartier here that there has been a steady and ominous thickening on street corners and among shadows of determined looking folk from the banlieues (it reminds me a little of Hitchcock’s The Birds).

These two views convey the spectrum of analysis on what’s happening. But there’s a broader context as well …

POLITICAL PARALYSIS: This editorial from the London Telegraph also highlights the backgrounf of political ennui in Europe as a whole:

France is marked by fin de régime rivalry between Mr Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister. Germany faces the sclerosis of a grand coalition. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is more discredited than ever. In Britain, while Tony Blair defiantly bangs the security drum, the electorate waits for him to step down. And all this is taking place against a chronic inability to boost sluggish growth. 1968 or 1848 it may not be, but there is in western Europe a general feeling of malaise, of disillusionment with politicians, expressed by low voting figures. On this, the riots rocking France could feed.

What we are witnessing may be the beginning of the collapse of the old regime in Europe.

MULTI-DETERMINED? A reader upbraids me on my fashion judgments:

Well, the people who did the bombing on the London underground weren’t wearing Osama-wear, either. They were wearing exactly what they always wore, and liked wearing: izod shirts, blue jeans, running shoes. That didn’t protect the 53 people who they blew up.
The “Islamic” point here is that being stopped to show papers to (non-Muslim) police, even for reasonable reasons, is a “humiliation” for an Islamic male. They call interference from the police “the occupation”. Meanwhile, the call from the “mature Muslim leadership” in France is explicitly for an Ottoman-style “millet” system of “separate development”: i.e., you French give us tons of money and we’ll rule ourselves in these apartment blocs around Paris with Sharia. Even as it is, for a decade or more these places have been mostly “no go” areas for the police, which is part of the problem.
This is the intifada brought home from the West Bank to Western Europe. In Aarhus, Denmark, the rioting is because of a cartoon in a newspaper making fun of Mohammed. It doesn’t matter what the specific issue is that is touching it off: the issues are different everywhere. But it is definitely a Muslim/non-Muslim clash.

Of course, it could be what my shrink helpfully calls “multi-determined.” It could be Islamism and underclass violence and the French economic model. The situation is also dynamic. Ideologues are very good at exploiting violence and disorder for their own ends. In this respect, this video, showing masked men burning cars and screaming “Allahu Akbar” is not exactly encouraging.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“If Brokeback Mountain starred two macho, hunky, out, gay actors, it would be much less of a cultural moment, with much less chance of drawing a general audience. It’s the straightness of the male leads playing gay that generates the energy and the buzz. Will they kiss? You betcha. Will they go further? Probably not, that would be too gay. From at least as far back as Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, the straight-playing-gay setup functions as the evidence of exceptional commitment, exceptional acting ability: if they’re willing to play gay, in spite of how repellent they must, as real straight men, find it, well obviously they’re artists of the highest, purist level. So on the one hand I’m grateful to these two actors for making what, from all I hear, is likely to be a terrific movie that I will love for the way it portrays gay people with individuality and authenticity. And on the other hand, I resent these two actors for leveraging gay people’s outsider status to show how talented and hip they are.”