avari | haroon moghul

I Love Thomas Friedman's Real Palestinian Revolution

Maybe it's unfair for me to be picking on the little guy, but it's just too much fun. 

One of Friedman's ongoing themes is the importance of realizing capitalism in order to be deserving of human rights; that is to say, until and unless a society is "free" -- in the economic sense of the term he gives it -- then that society is less deserving of respect and even safety (similar to what we hear on the Bernard Lewis Right: attacking non-democratic nations is okay, because somehow the government gets conflated with the governed, a morally absurd platform that holds people responsible for government that is by definition not responsible to them.)

Friedman likes to bring this "perspective" to Palestinians; namely, that Palestine, once it becomes sufficiently business-friendly, will become deserving of independence.  In the meantime, as the essay below explains, Palestinians cannot have freedom, because apparently they have been building what Friedman actually describes as "a garbage yard" in place of an actual society.  I'm not even kidding, as much as I wish I was.  Thought experiment: Can you imagine if Thomas Friedman were alive during the American Revolution?  Can you guess whose side he would not be on?  Can you imagine what quick work Jefferson or Paine would make of his supposed love of freedom and location of humanity in big business-friendly economic policy? 

What is the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)?

The Council on Foreign Relations, the non-partisan think tank behind the bimonthly journal Foreign Affairs, has just published a much-needed backgrounder on the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world's second-largest intergovernmental body (after the OIC).  I was consulted during its preparation and quoted in the backgrounder; I hope you'll check out the resulting product and share it with interested persons -- the OIC is an increasingly prominent actor in global affairs, and needs to be better understood.

NYT: Why We Talk To Terrorists

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=620194&f=28&sub=Contributor

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Saudi Arabian Airlines Killed The Last Caliph

Looking at how the emergence of Muslim middle classes might change the hajj, and what the GCC's role within the Muslim world might become.  (A review at Religion Dispatches):

A middle-class vision of Islam might seem boring, but it will in fact become tremendously upsetting to established practice. As more Muslims can afford the journey, more will demand to come. How will these Muslims relate to Saudi control over the holy cities? Where will they stay? How many will be allowed to visit at any one time? How will they demand accommodations—because they will—be made to their particular pieties? And their wealth will effect how Mecca and Medina, long centers of intra-Muslim commerce, receive them.

Because of the weakness of post-colonial states, and the unrepresentative nature of many of their governments, the vision of an Islamic state, or a Caliphate, or some means of restoring dignity to Muslim populations was for a time attractive. But now even strong states are caught up in a network they cannot control: Greece sneezes, and Wall Street panics. In the Muslim world, the romanticism of pan-Islamism is fading, in part because it has no realizable form. In its place, Muslims will look to common practices to fuse their desire for better governance with their desire to keep religiosity a part of their public identity. Mecca and Medina offer the best means of doing so, as a site to confirm, express and link pieties—reinforcing religion in places very far from the Kingdom.

NYT: Feeling Bleu

Roger Cohen on Muslims, converts, veils and the World Cup.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=617417&f=28&sub=Columnist

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"yeah thats not what I was looking for at all."

This is too funny. I can't breathe. Thanks Wajahat Ali.

http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

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Letter from Istanbul, Part 2: Thomas Friedman is Either an Idiot Or He Is

Who pays this man? 

In this his second letter from Istanbul, Friedman attempts to paint Erdogan as a radical, Turkey as an undemocratic Chavezista hotbed and the flotilla incident as something other than what most of the rest of humanity considered it.  Before beginning this dispassionate analysis, some warnings.  Pretty much everything Friedman writes has the gravity and depth of the weekend grocery store coupon inserts.  Consider yourself embarrassed.  Or read Matt Taibbi for more:

along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

It's the same inanity, except not ecologically but politically.  I find him to be false, misleading, racist, offensive and elitist.  Again.

Walter Russell Mead is Wrong on Turkey

His pieces continue the argument that it is Islamism driving Turkey into the "embrace" of Arabs and Persians.  This is frankly odd.  If any (non-Muslim European) country had weak or problematic states on its borders, we would not find it odd that such states reached out to those governments to try to find stability in order to achieve their goals.  It's the inability to transcend culture that prevents Mead and analysts like him from appreciating that democracies do not have to agree with each other in order to be properly democratic.  It is the same logic that hinders democracy in the Muslim-majority world, because we prefer dictators we can relate to, the kind of silly logic that cheered Musharraf as a hero because he kept dogs and drank whiskey, reducing in the process all the achievements of Western culture to pets and hard drinks.

DeRadicalization

I'm at the Deradicalization Conference in Hartford, CT, where I spoke earlier (on challenges and opportunities in our mosques). People are starting to ask good, tough questions on the role and relationship of law enforcement vis-a-vis mosques and Muslim communities. You can watch a live webcast (I believe the link is www.deradicalize.org ).

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I Couldn't Hit the Ocean from A Boat: Kobe on Game 7 and Why LA Won