avari | haroon moghul

Rachel Maddow on the Muslim Mafia Mess

Some People's Heads Look the Same, But Are Empty

So from time to time, I follow up on the comments to my Caldwell review.  Some are quite thought-provoking; several, however, are posted by obvious frothing-at-the-mouth types.  One such comment (#14) closes on what I thought was a hilarious qualification: "Muslims have shown there is no more intolerant belief than Islam, except perhaps Liberalism."

At first glance, it's just absurd.  Then you realize that apparently Muslims have shown liberalism to be the most intolerant belief.  Which is dandy.

Ramadan Mubarak.

Islam and Freedom: Slavoj Zizek on Berlusconi, Ahmadinejad and Political Framing

From the London Review:

What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Pointing Out Hypocrisies: It'd Be Better If You Killed Han Chinese, for Consistency's Sake

When Muslim radicals go nuts, it's a sign of barbarism.  When they don't, it's hypocrisy.  Except, of course, the fact that China doesn't claim to be a progressive democracy.  Even Muslims can smell the rank hypocrisy of European countries that claim to be secular and yet define religion for their marginalized populations; China claims no such authority, no such progressive humanism, and as such, their violence -- while deeply upsetting -- is not "surprising". That doesn't make it okay, but it does mean people have less to be shocked by, unfortunately.  Plus Denmark is tiny and Europe is militarily weak: Let's be honest.  Easy target.  That doesn't make it okay, but if we are political observers, we can understand political actors.

The deeper issue here is that -- and this is so important -- religion is judged by its adherence to an immaterial standard; the distinction is deeply problematic in Islam, among other religions, and any way, it implies a feeling that if a religious person is not one hundred percent perfect, s/he is a hypocrite.  Islam must go all the way!  Muslims must be fully Muslim, or their Islam is wack.  Is Naim encouraging Muslims to demonstrate like crazy, burn buildings and turn to violence?  Professor Sherman Jackson, while at NYU, noted that if such people were Muslim, they would very likely be fundamentalists in the worst sense, because they do not understand nuance, nor the give-and-take that Islam recognizes is part of reality.  You cannot have a "perfect" world -- when you try, it just makes it worse.  Traditionally, the Islamic legacy recognized this.  Why is it so hard for commentators to get this?

But... on top of this... I would counter that there is a reaction to this violence in the Muslim world, and it will get stronger.  It is not so much hypocrisy as, in part, strategic necessity (one cannot fight every battle one wants to -- if you did, you would be Gregory House, but the Muslim world is not pure genius and cannot risk the consequences) and the other part, media reality: What gets covered and what doesn't.  Keep in mind that until 1996, for example, and al-Jazeera, most Arabs got their news either through a "foreign" medium or through state-sponsored channels, in which case it was not actually news so much as Vicodin for the mind.  As China rises and simultaneously more media proliferates, you will see more Muslims agitated by cases such as East Turkestan.

In the meantime, China will invade Turkey, and they will in the process push all the Muslims between Kashgar and Edirne into Europe, making Eurabia a reality and then commentators can be happy at an absence of hypocrisy and excess of Muslims.  (That is some 420 million extra people; Arabs, no need to get up, China will go right by your northern flank.)  Then I will write a better blog post than this one.

Who died and made me God? Towards an Islamic Liberation Psychology

It might have been Marx who first said he saw the clothes, bereft of their emperor.  Art, culture, religion and philosophy, these did not determine the financial relations of the world, but rather the other way around. Critics soon contended that a direct correlation between the economic base and the cultural superstructure was too simplistic, but the pattern had been set.  The root would be determined by its branches, the specific forms of the material dictating the formlessness of the immaterial – and never the other way around. 

In Nietzsche’s cryptic, arrogant brilliance, these genealogies reached their apogee. Unearthing the supposed origins of Western moralities, Nietzsche transformed these into exposed, rotten cavities: What was good, just and beautiful was often the exercise of the victim against the otherwise unstoppable victor, the loser’s revenge on the winner. Today's scholars have inherited this legacy, and like the unquestioning sons of errant fathers before, are obsessed only with faithfulness. After all, if morality is just an exercise of power, or of restraining power, then that morality must be found and trivialized.

To try to find the roots of ideas from the appearances of their branches is akin to making obvious the immanence of those ideas. Mapping out the history of something is establishing its historicity, its reassuring lack of normativity. Writing the genealogy of a concept sounds unfortunately like performing the examination of an interesting corpse. It may be interesting, but it is still dead. It doesn't transcend us, as people, because it is the result of us, as people. Perhaps this is why, when societies reach the extreme of amorality, they endure the revenge of the opposite extreme.

The Israel Project: Selling Americans on the Settlements

In a recently released report, summarized here, you can find out how advocacy groups attempt to change the discourse in order to persuade the public of their cause.  A definite, absolute, complete must-read (then come back and tell me what it says.) 

Sympathy for the Uighurs: Why Iran Isn't Paying Attention

I'd already linked to this article, but felt it would be nice to draw attention to this paragraph, in light of some great recent comments:

“…if someone politically savvy planned this action, then they may have actually called on female participants to wear headscarves. The image of a crowd of apparently traditional Muslims facing down what looks like a faceless army of Chinese can draw on over a billion sympathizers.”

The story behind the picture has indeed become front page material on the websites of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Al-Quds, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, Today’s Zaman, Yeni Safak etc. etc. On Pakistan Daily, one headline read ‘China to further ties with Pakistan’ and next to it, ‘Muslim Unrest in China’. Some of them carry extremely gory pictures of dead people. Xinjiang is clearly important stuff in the Muslim world. But not in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The issue of Iranian media responses to the Xinjiang unrest carries some interesting points.

That Iran's Revolution long since went from revolutionary to conservative is well-known; that the recent elections and subsequent protests pitted the masses, resorting to religious slogans, against the head of a Shi'i Islamic state invoking the impermissibility of protest in the name of religion, only shows how damaging the institutional politicization of religion can be.

This happens all the time.  In claiming to oppose the un-Islamic West, Muslim states cozy up to Russia and China, as if the latter two are "more Islamic" -- never mind Chechnya or East Turkestan.  I applaud the Uighurs for pointing out this hypocrisy, which is especially severe when the political interests of a religious class trump the ideals and goals of the religion itself.  In other words, when power for Muslims trumps the ideals of Islam.

Iranians are noticing; reformists have picked up on the deep hypocrisies at work.  The comment below berates Ahmadinejad for being unable or unwilling to stand up to China, as if Palestinians were the only Muslims:

ا.ن فقط فلسطيني ها مسلمان مسلمان نيستنداگر مردي به چين اعتراض كن به سبب كشتار مسلمانان سين كيانگ.چين مسلمانانش را قتل عام كردو ا.ن خفه بود

On Naming Before Ending: Reflections on Mumbai

First off, as I must say, this was disgusting.  No question.  But closely following and importantly, how did it happen, and just as much, how were we told it happened?  The latter concerns me.

I found out about the attacks while waiting in Columbia's student center, hearing that the violence seemed sporadic, random and terrible, in all senses of the term.  By the time I got to a television, which was due to travel not till the next day, it was already India's 9/11.  Really?  It was 26/11, but that's about that.  There's no way what happened happened without local collaboration, never mind the very real possibility that the attackers were themselves Indians who, even if trained in militant camps outside the country, were in part shaped by an unfortunate climate of fear, violence, deprivation and depression amongst their 130-million plus community -- which, historically, should be understood as a reason in part for the Pakistan movement, the economic and political liberation of a huge and hugely deprived minority -- sitting at the bottom of the over-populated Indian barrel.  Hurt, then radicalized, turned inane and insane.  9/11 was an attack on America from outside America; American Muslims are not the bottom tier of American society, and certainly do not exist in a situation comparable to untouchables -- we were not often described as the fifth column before 9/11, either.  So it is amusing that the American media, which is always careful never to break a sweat thinking, dreaming or researching, found itself on the side of the Indian State within a matter of hours.  Not India's people, but the wider and broader purposes of the State, which are usually articulated incompletely.

Before the attackers were even gunned down or captured, the Indian government had leaked that they were Pakistanis.  How, pray tell, did they know?  Do the have databases of all Pakistani citizens?  Can they still be fighting off an attack and already know where it came from and who was involved in it?The numbers involved fluctuates, but the origins are certain.  While it is extremely doubtful, to the point of conspiracy-theory-mindedness, that the attackers were anything but Muslim, at least in self-identification, consider the way the media buys into narratives.  Pakistan's ISI has rogue elements, and finances terrorist attacks, but India's RAW cannot, because India is a democracy.  News flash: Democracies attack each other (who overthrew Mossadegh?), and other types of states.  Democracies can also finance violence and encourage human rights violations.  The continued laziness that runs through our public discourse, refusing to define what is "terrorism" -- this certainly was -- and what isn't -- Gujurat, maybe?  On NBC news, they called it the most brazen attack on India short of war.  Certainly 200 dead is a tragedy, a massacre, an outrage, and deserves condemnation as such.  But what about when armed gangs storm through Muslim villages, raping and killing hundreds, or when Christians are killed and their churches burned in Orissa -- why is it that those are not attacks on India, but attacks in India?  It makes sense for the State to blame the foreign, to draw attention away from its own failings -- just as official discourse in the Arab world focuses nauseatingly and endlessly on Israel -- to draw attention away from their own failings.

It is amazing how much difference one word makes, and how little difference our media makes, except in calcifying narratives that already exist, and encouraging unthought.  Terrorism is too often, and disturbingly, defined not only by who kills, and for what "reasons," but just as much if not more so by who is killed.  The "how" -- protests of the MSM aside -- is rarely nearly as important.  Explosions are explosions.  But who's exploding, and who's exploded?  We need to condemn, but we need to ask questions, too.

May God give peace to those who were killed, and serenity to those who gave their lives, health or wealth to help others under fire, and may He bring peace and calm and security to India, and may He stop all those who seek to harm.  May He grant us the wisdom to fight the ideas and beliefs that lead to such violence, and may He help us to never become content in our understanding of the world, but always eager to hear from the other, and better understand, rather than turn away in anger.

Bailout Plan Defeated! (Plus, More on "Obsession")

Bailout plan defeated!  Dow Jones plunges 644 points!  Here goes Europe.

(Elsewhere, Talk Islam and City of Brass are covering the hell out of the "Obsession" Fiasco.  Both are great resources.  Thank God for them and the many resources they've uncovered and made available.  Elsewhere no. 2: Ehud Olmert grants a surprising interview with fascinating insights into his attitude towards the peace process.  Too bad he had so little credibility.)

Like Sméagol, Growling "Prrrecious..."

So a whole bunch of newspapers, including the New York Times, agreed to bundle the DVD "Obsession" -- it a hate film, propagandistic anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim nonsense, which makes a joke out of the Nazi threat (equating Hamas with Nazis is, practically speaking, anti-Semitic, insofar as it pretends the Nazis were simply a glorified militia ruling a riven statelet and not commanders one of the world's most sophisticated and capable armed forces) and makes a mockery of any pretense to balanced journalism, filled with ominous music and ridiculous racism -- and so very few people find this weird, even disturbing.  How did the Holocaust happen?  Through media, first and foremost; dehumanize in order to decontaminate... but one newspaper stood up.  So far.  Not that we are anywhere near that level of violence, at all, but it must be said that the process is historically known and is therefore quite worrying: What have we learned?  28 million copies, to make Americans hate all Muslims, to make them vote for McCain, to destigmatize hate speech and promote vitriolic, spiteful, disgusting rhetoric.  And this is cool with the New York Times?