“Neocon is an insult used to obliterate the existence of this liberal position,” says Paul Berman, a writer often so insulted.
Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of U.S. military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.
Without such action in Bosnia and Kosovo, Europe would not be at peace today.
One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.” His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed.
For this left, anyone who supported the Iraq invasion, or sees merits to it despite the catastrophic Bush-Rumsfeld bungling, is a neocon. That makes Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and Kanan Makiya and Bernard Kouchner neocons, among others who don’t think like Norman Podhoretz but have more firsthand knowledge of totalitarian hell than countless slick purveyors of the neocon insult.
Today, us Canucks have the holiday that Americans have to wait several weeks for. That’s because of Martin Frobisher’s celebration on Baffin Island in 1578, which was before the American pilgrims’ feast in 1621. Or maybe not.
To Protestant clergymen, the early history of Thanksgiving is, perhaps, a tragedy, since they lost control over the holiday. From another perspective, it is a story of triumph. Catholics, workers, ethnic minorities and other groups excluded from the clergy’s notions of Thanksgiving and Canadian identity democratized the holiday and adopted their own holiday practices, asserting that they, too, had something to contribute to Canadian society and culture.
Meanwhile, certain other Canadian clergymen are setting themselves up for the same defeat:
The Khalid Bin Al-Walid Mosque says to “avoid participating” in dinners, parties or greetings on Thanksgiving because it is a kuffaar, or non-Muslim, celebration.
No turkey at our place this weekend. It was halal chicken all round. Wicked good too.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An estimated 100 students staged a rare demonstration Monday against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling him a “dictator” and scuffling with hardline students at Tehran University.
Ahmadinejad, who was giving a speech to a select group at the university to mark the beginning of the academic year, ignored the chants of “death to the dictator” and continued with his speech on the merits of science and the pitfalls of Western-style democracy, witnesses said.
If there’s anyone with a firm grasp of the mullahs’ paranoia about regime change, it’s Haleh Esfandiari. Jailed for eight months in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for the crime of visiting her aged mother — surely a pretext for doing State Department reconnaissance — Esfandiari is that rara avis of an Iranian-American, one who has an intimate knowledge of both countries’ power structures. (She’s director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which didn’t help her at customs in Tehran.)
Her advice is that the U.S. should stop funding Iranian NGOs since that only makes it harder for them to go about their business:
The intractable realities in the diplomatic arena and on the ground in Iran call for a change of approach to one that would reverse the current focus of U.S. policy: Governments should talk to governments, while Iranian and American NGO’s should be permitted to interact in a transparent fashion without the intrusion of governments. If the United States is to have any chance of enlisting Iranian cooperation on issues of major concern — stabilizing Iraq and resolving the nuclear impasse — it must make clear that its objective is a change in Iranian behavior, not a change of regime. That would shift the onus to Tehran and force its multiple power centers to confront the consequences of Ahmadinejad’s policies for Iranian interests. Although such a U.S. assurance is no guarantee of success, it is the prerequisite for a change in Iranian foreign-policy behavior, as well as for positioning the United States to win multilateral support for meaningful action at the United Nations if Iranian intransigence continues.
The problem with this recommendation is that it, too, is premised on the desirability of “velvet revolution” in Iran. By letting NGOs alone, Esfandiari argues, they’ll be better able to do exactly what the U.S. wants: destabilize the regime. Will the Iranians fail to see through this gambit of what I’ll call positive neglect? To the totalitarian, all strategies of an opponent — whether that opponent be real or imagined — are suspect and worthy of counteracting with feverish, far-reaching methods. Iranian NGOs will not go unpunished just because they’re free of the largess of the United States.
I don’t see why we couldn’t have it both ways: Engage the mullahs diplomatically and also continue a $75 million program to aid their opponents. The argument that Iran must be dealt with lightly because it continues to abet terrorism in Iraq is valid. But given that the Shia parties in control of the Iraqi government are more interested in nationalism than they are in becoming a satrapy of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s influence next door will likely diminish anyway–with or without a continued American troop presence. (If it doesn’t, then Iran’s takeover of Iraq is an inevitability, which frees us to act even more liberally with respect to funding its opposition.)
We adopted the same mailed-glove handshake policy during the cold war when the Soviets were likewise funding forces responsible for U.S. military casualties in Korea and Vietnam. Given that Iran represents an even greater danger in the age of sacred nukes, why should we act any differently?
The president of the Canadian Auto Workers is urging Ontario voters to turn their backs on a party that largely owes its existence to the labour movement.
Buzz Hargrove, leader of Canada’s biggest private sector union, yesterday slammed Howard Hampton and the NDP, arguing the party has “lost complete touch” with the people of the province.
“They are worse than they’ve ever been. I see absolutely no reason to vote NDP,” said Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers. His union has 185,000 members in Ontario and 265,000 nationally, mainly in the auto industry but also in other important manufacturing sectors.
In an interview with the Star, Hargrove lavishly praised Premier Dalton McGuinty’s record, claiming the “Liberals have been more left than the NDP over the last four years” and predicting left-leaning voters will vote Liberal on Oct. 10.
The problem with the NDP, said Hargrove, “is they don’t understand economics.”
No to mention they kicked him out of the party because of a policy of strategic voting, a policy that was adopted by the union’s national convention.
There is a new edition of Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left‘ out and this gave the Guardian the chance to yet again unleash a hostile reviewer in their paperbacks section. To be so irritating in such a small space takes a special quality. The reviewer, Aimee Shalan, repeats familiar misreadings. For example, this is could have been lifted from any number of negative reviews.
Cohen depicts those opposed to the invasion of Iraq … as perverse defenders of fascism.
This is where comprehension skills would help. Cohen actually writes sympathetically of most, but not all, of those who opposed the war - what really gets to him are those who, once the war was over, failed to support democratic institutions, such as trade unions and secular left parties, and instead romanticised Islamist and Ba’athist terrorists fighting against the establishment of an Iraqi democracy. Methinks he has a point (and Scoop’s excellent post below might also give pause for thought).
It’s the final paragraph that takes the biscuit.
Having denounced the left for failing to confront persecution unconditionally, he ends by making Israel the exception, declaring that the occupation, humiliation and collective punishment of the Palestinian population are evils worth fighting until you ask the question: “What is anti-semitism?” All of a sudden, it’s fine for human sympathy to be conditional and double standards are apparently acceptable.
Once again, this is the complete opposite of what Cohen has written. The convoluted logic (?) of the paragraph seems to be utterly dismissive of anti-Semitism. One of the key points of Cohen’s book is that some ‘leftism’ hides its anti-Semitism behind a critique of Israel, whereas what Shalan is repeating is the old accusation that allegations of anti-Semitism are used to deligitimate criticism of Israel. Cohen is scrupulous in distinguishing between the two and makes evident a persistent and unpleasant anti-Semitic streak in left thought (and you can find it in 19th Century socialist tracts as well).
Compare this review with Cohen’s latest call for clarity in the Observer about how the use of the passive voice in reporting the conflict in Iraq clouds the attribution of responsibility in a way in which the active voice would not.
‘What’s Left’ is one of the better contributions to a growing critique of ill-thought out and muddled thinking that is a prominent feature of the contemporary political scene. This review is a prime example of what it is up against.
Let me be clear, Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and all, or any other malignant religious toss, is a pox upon humanity, as history fully demonstrates.
Until religious force is neutralized along with the other maleficent forces of the world we can not rest easy. I can’t imagine there being any question about this at all, unless of course, interest in the subject is just a vacuous intellectual game, which it does sometimes seem to be for some ignorants and apologists.
Saying all that — here’s some more reasons to despise stupid fuckers and the stupid fuckers who uncritically adhere to dogmatic and incoherent, irrational, tribal, cultist blather.
