It’s fun to be a detached observer of the Incredible Campaign of 2008, which has galvanized a nation. Our “mass of niches” culture seems to have coalesced in these past two weeks into a genuine mass audience. It’s probably temporary and of course there’s no guarantee that getting our attention will lead to our doing something (or even voting), but we are riveted to the political soap opera unfolding before our eyes.

The viewership for various segments of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions was huge.

As a television draw, John McCain was every bit the equal of Barack Obama.

The GOP presidential candidate attracted roughly the same number of viewers to his convention acceptance speech Thursday as Obama did before the Democrats last week, according to Nielsen Media Research.

It marked the end of an astonishing run where more than 40 million people watched political speeches on three nights by Obama, McCain and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Republican convention was the most-watched convention on television ever, beating a standard set by the Democrats a week earlier.

Three times in two weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the “American Idol” finale, the Academy Awards and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this year.

“It clearly suggests that a great number of Americans think that who will be the next president is important and worthy of their time,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter and director of the Project for Excellence in journalism.

One day, this will be seen as a watershed—the moment that the world of politics, borrowing from the world of showbiz, inspired the Couch Potatoes of Amercia to take a good, hard (though, possibly, brief) look at their country, their neighbors, and, most of all, themselves and to see if maybe we all couldn’t do a little bit more to get along, goddamnit, and while we’re at it, to do more for ourselves—individually and collectively.

But I must be dreaming, because that would be true progress.

However, I do have some hope that something better will result from the election of 2008, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats win the White House this time around, because all of the candidates are dedicated—and inspiring—public servants (even if they are politicians and thus by nature suspect. Every one of the current crop has sacrificed something and done good things for others. Along the way, we unruly American, with our crude democratic system, shoved aside some folks who had already had their turn and we got rid of at least one rotten apple and we rejected alarmism as a way of daily life).

Well, goddamn!

Ain’t that America somethin’ to see, baby!

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, agree with ‘em or disagree with ‘em, we’ve finally got some great role models (new heroes and villains, as JFK memorably referred to them in 1959,***) that people are paying attention to.

And so we sail into uncharted waters.

————–

*** Admirably, JFK warned the people not to believe in the false idols launched by the new TV era. Then he proceeded to become one of them. He succeeded beyond his wildest imagination, because politicians are still emulating his style, and Democratic politicians all covet the imprimatur of the Kennedys and … but that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say for now that the imprimatur will long outlive the Kennedys.

Politicians cannot possibly accomplish everything they promise the people. They are ambitious above all else. John McCain knows this and is torn up about it, as the NYT reported the other day; nevertheless, he’s running for president for a second time. And he is using war strategies (such as surprise) in his political campaign. He means to win—with honor and within the rules of the arena.

The dramatic rescue of Ingrid Betancourt also exposed an interesting mind-set in Europe, as The Economist notes:

How dare the Colombians rescue Ingrid Betancourt?

THAT, more or less seems to be the reaction from slabs of the European press, notably in the Francophone world, to the astonishing military operation that rescued Ms Betancourt and 14 other hostages from the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.

The grudging reactions come from left and right in France, where successive governments had pushed the Colombian government hard to accept demands made by the FARC, and negotiate the release of Ms Betancourt, a politician from a small ecological party with dual Colombian and French nationality. French leaders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, had also put much faith in the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, as a negotiator with the FARC. Instead, in the end, it was the Colombian army under the tough right-wing president, Álvaro Uribe, that rescued the hostages in a daring undercover operation.

Not that this didn’t stop Sarkozy from claiming as much credit as possible, to the deep annoyance of many, as The Times (London) noted last week:

The French Senate gave an emotional standing ovation to the 46-year-old politician and magazines and television were still saturated by the image of what Paris Match called “the new global icon”.

But dissent surrounding Ms Betancourt, who was freed last week from the Colombian jungle after six years in captivity, has now spread from the internet to mainstream opinion, with some saying that France has overdosed on “Ingridmania”.

“It is irritating,” said Dominique Dhombres, a television columnist for Le Monde newspaper. “It’s a beautiful story about a beautiful woman, but she has been turned into the Madonna of modern times . . . Everything else has been forgotten and it suits Sarkozy fine,” he told The Times.

Perhaps M. Sarkozy is trying to compete (in an oh so gentlemanly way) with Mme. Sarkozy, who, incredibly, is peddling her music at the moment:

Here’s your chance to listen to the new musical oeuvre from Carla Bruni. In a marketing build-up worthy of Madonna or a Stones release, Mrs Sarkozy’s record company has put Comme si de rien n’était (As if nothing happened) on the internet for free listening.

This must be the first time that the presidency of a leading nation has promoted a pop album. The Elysée Palace has been working closely with Naive records to maximise the launch of breathy love songs by the first lady. The repercussions have even gone as far as Japan, which was miffed by Bruni’s decision not to join the other spouses at this week’s G8 summit. She decided to stay in Paris to advance the release date. Today, she was on France-Inter radio doing the first of a series of promotional interviews which culminate with a long live session on TF1 television news — the most watched show — on Friday evening.

Listen: I’ve been telling you that infotainment rules. (In France, they even have a new word for it: “pipolisation***.”)This is what I mean! It’s Marketing Above All^TM

The sultry first lady of France is peddling love songs written for her husband!

Think about it!

—————
*** pipolisation is probably akin to Bush Derangement Syndrome, but, as with all things French, it is more clearly defined (specifically, as a mental illnes):

“Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among the French: obsessive Sarkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name,” Dr. Hefez said. “He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror.”

The French project themselves onto Mr. Sarkozy, too, Dr. Hefez said.

“He’s the incarnation of the postmodern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic,” the psychiatrist said. “And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.”…

Television covers Mr. Sarkozy’s every gesture, in both homage and mockery, itself an effort to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the “pipolisation” of political life, a term, presumably derived from People magazine, that refers to the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera. Dr. Hefez considers the trend an example of “democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw.”…

In the wake of the flawlessly executed rescue operation that liberated fifteen hostages (including three Americans and the cause celebre Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt), who had been held in the jungle, in chains around their necks, by the Colombian terrorist group FARC for more than five years, Charles Krauthammer describes the hard problems facing the world that have only hard-power solutions:

Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy — Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about — the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who’s going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the last two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor — the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world’s first democracy — and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done — often with the support of the American military. “Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work,” explained The Washington Post. “It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces … a vast intelligence-gathering operation … and training programs for Colombian troops.”

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.

The United States will get no thanks. Nor should the United States expect any thanks in this political and geopolitical climate.

Nevertheless, the United States should continue to do this kind of job.

Anybody disagree?

Unsurprisingly (at least to me), the Irish have declined to sit under the EU umbrella, and have decided to remain a sovereign nation. The Guardian “reports” in a fit of pique:

The long campaign to forge a new dispensation for the European Union descended into panic and uncertainty yesterday when Ireland turned its back on its 26 EU partners and voted down the Lisbon Treaty.

EU leaders in Brussels and governments across the union, particularly Germany and France, were stunned by the Irish verdict, which amounted to a huge vote of no confidence in the way the EU is run.

The referendum in Ireland was the sole popular vote in the EU on the grand plan to give Europe a sitting president and foreign minister, and reconfigure the way the EU is governed. The result left the project severely wounded, perhaps fatally.

Almost the entire article is given over to how screwed the EU is as a result of this. Only when we reach the last paragraph are readers told why the Irish voted down the notion of being dominated by a “European” parliament [e.a.]:

The no vote was boosted by concerns over sovereignty, possible tax harmonisation, neutrality, and fears that the treaty could erode Ireland’s abortion ban, all issues that analysts say are fatuous.

So let me get this straight:

• sovereignty [the fundamental right of every nation-state  --ed.];
• tax “harmonisation” [calling Mr. Orwell!  --ed.];
• geopolitical neutrality [regardless of the national security interests of your people, and of stakes?  --ed.];
• culture-specific social laws [even if I personally am an enthusiastic supporter of overturning abortion bans---and I most certainly am---I would never think to impose my social-engineering beliefs on those of another culture; it is proving hard enough to maintain them in our own (familiar) culture  ---ed.].

These concerns are fatuous? In what universe?

These two headlines were next to each other at Memeorandum yesterday:

John Bolton to be target of citizen’s arrest at Hay Festival — John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen’s arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening. — George Monbiot, the journalist and activist …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Discussion: MoJoBlog and A Blog For All

Discussion:

Jonathan Stein / MoJoBlog: John Bolton to Be Target of Citizens Arrest in Wales

Lawhawk / A Blog For All: Journalist Seeks To Arrest John Bolton in UK

New York Times:

Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women — BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. — In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 

Discussion: Jihad Watch, JammieWearingFool, The Poor Man Institute and Danger Room

Discussion:

Robert / Jihad Watch: Muslim woman wages Internet jihad in Belgium

JammieWearingFool: ‘She is Very Radical, Very Sly and Very Dangerous’

The Poor Man Institute: I am beginning to suspect that the War on Terror is composed entirely of horses**t

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room: She Wages Online Jihad

I’ve been saying for a while now that the world is upside down. These headlines underscore that reality:

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN—whose role is to represent the United States in front of the world—is targeted by “progressives” [in this case, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper] as a criminal because he was ” ‘instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war by disseminating false claims through the State Department” while he was under-secretary of state for arms control.’ ”

Meanwhile, an acknowledged jihadist, whose role is “to inspire other people to wage jihad,”gets the front page treatment in the New York Times, which quotes the director of Belgium’s federal police force thus: “She enjoys the protection that [lenient Belgian law] offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.”

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that “war-mongering” is being treated as a crime on one side—namely, ours—but not on the other. Not very fair, that. Nor very confidence-inspiring for your normal everyday citizen of the West, who wants the authorities to prevent crimes—to act before a terrorist incident occurs, not to react afterward.

After all, anyone can react after a crime is committed—in any number of ways, including the extralegal. If the authorities allow too many such crimes to occur (through lenient laws, or lenient enforcement of laws), eventually the people being hurt by such crimes will start to take the law into their own hands.

Dave Marash beats around the bush a lot, but eventually he explains, more or less, why he left Al Jazeera English [e.a.]:

Just as Al Jazeera Arabic can rightfully claim to be a first-class news organization with high professional standards, but one that authentically represents the point of view and interests of the region defined by the Arabic language, less defined by but certainly involved in the Islamic faith, and most particularly the gulf region, I think that Al Jazeera English is a very competent, very professional news organization that does a particularly great job south of the equator, but tends to report almost everything from the point of view of either the Arabic-speaking world or at the very least what you might call the post-colonial world. And since I’m not authentically those things, I don’t belong there.

Huh?

Marash notes a shift in perspective, dating to the flexing of the Saudi Arabian muscle during the time of the Mecca Agreement (last year), when, Marash suggests, there was a shift in the balance of power in the region [e.a.]:

BC: What changed?

DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.

Marash also explains what drew him to the concept in the first place:

[T]he thing that I loved best about the original concept was the sort of fugue of points of view and opinions, because I think that’s what desperately needed in the world. We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.

Know thine enemy. Marash got closer than most.

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”

A new message from Osama bin Laden puts Europe on notice again, and as Reuters reports the story, “security analysts and officials” don’t seem particularly alarmed.

LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden’s latest message shows that he sees Europe as fertile soil for al Qaeda, especially at a time of tension between free speech and Muslim values, but is unlikely to signal an imminent attack.

Security analysts and officials say there is no evidence that bin Laden’s statements contain coded instructions to al Qaeda operatives and he has no track record of delivering warnings immediately before an attack.

No biggie, Reuters suggests, but notes a new twist:

But Wednesday’s message was striking in its focus on Europe as opposed to the United States, whose President George W. Bush earned only a passing reference as “your oppressive ally who … is about to depart the White House”.

It’s hard to see why Reuters is surprised by OBL’s stated target, considering that his new grievance is specifically against Europeans:

In the latest message, issued on the Prophet’s birthday, bin Laden said the [Mohammed] cartoons were “part of a new crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican had a significant role”.

The reference was part of a familiar bin Laden strategy to paint Islam and Western, Christian-rooted societies as being in a state of war with its origins dating back to the Middle Ages.

One European security official explained Al Qaeda’s tactic according to Al Qaeda’s mind-set [e.a.]:

“It’s the logic of the crusade. The Pope, in the imagination of the Islamists, may appear as the head of the crusade, which is clearly absurd but may have meaning for some Muslims and the Islamists. I do think it may indicate the Pope is a target,” said Claude Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

He said the Pope’s presence in Rome was one factor making Italy a target for al Qaeda. Other European countries in its sights included Denmark, because of the cartoons row, and the Netherlands, where right-wing politician Geert Wilders is set to release a video next week that is expected to condemn the Koran.

By the “logic of the crusade,” OBL targets anyone who displeases his perverted notion of Islamic justice. This is the Al Qaeda ideology: global vigilantism in the name of Allah.

But OBL has his vulnerabilities, as Wretchard notes:

 The rule of thumb in a fistfight is when you land a blow which makes your opponent yell, hit him there again. And the louder he yells the more you hit him in that particular area. Osama Bin Laden has just said “ouch”.

And here’s one of the things that hurts [e.a.]:

What makes the Mohammed Cartoon attack on radical Islam so potent that Bin Laden himself must oppose it, is two things. First, anyone can make fun of radical Islam. Second, the Cartoons are aimed at the weakest point of the Jihad: its sources of authority.  …

The real message of organized nihilism is that “everything is permitted” except to make fun of nihilism itself. Every act is lawful in radical Islam: to bomb markets, kill children, lie, cheat and steal. Everything: except to publish the Mohammed Cartoons.

Are we in the West going to let OBL or Al Qaeda write the rules about what is and is not permissible to say in public in our societies?

Stay tuned.*** 

—————–

*** As long as American commentators like Joe Klein continue to misunderstand the nature of the threat and to make absurd claims—such as the assertion that there is a distinction between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the “real” Al Qaeda—we’re not going to get too far:

As it now stands, McCain believes that Iraq, where 150,000 U.S. troops are chasing after 3,500 Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia terrorists, is the “central front” in the war against terrorism–and he is on the record opposed to taking military action against the real Al Qaeda, which is actively working to destabilize Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and may be planning the next 9/11 in the mountains of Waziristan.

The next 9/11 is not the only thing threatening the West. One day perhaps more people threatened by Al Qaeda and other fanatical Islamists will understand that.

Visit the Georgetown Bookshop site to order your poster.

When I see stupid stuff like this from a media outlet that is pretending to provide useful information to its viewers, it drives me up a wall:

 

Common Misunderstandings About Muslims

Are Muslim Women Oppressed? Why Do They Wear the Hijab? Find Out Below

Misconception: Muslim women are oppressed and forced to wear the hijab.

Truth:

Women often see it as empowering because they are not viewed as sexual objects but judged by their character.

The “truth” about the hijab has nothing to do with female empowerment or sexual politics.

Wearing the hijab is a religious custom practiced by some Muslim women.

(AP Photo )

Just as wearing a hair covering is a religious custom practiced by some Jewish women.

Somehow, the New Yorker artist who made the cover pictured below forgot—or didn’t want to—include a religious Jew in the picture. Some discussion here.

The Daily Mail attacks the British Olympic Association for its ourtrageous coddling of the Chinese with a vivid reminder of Britain’s shame and dishonor in the run-up to World War II:

National disgrace: In a picture from a German archive never before published in Britain, the England football team give Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938  [e.a.]

Here are the facts, from the Mail:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

Here’s the argument against, from David Mellor, also writing in the Mail:

The Chinese have no right to a free ride this summer. And it isn’t just because China isn’t a democracy or that basic human rights and fundamental freedoms are denied to its citizens.

China is a menace to the civilised world for many other reasons, ranging from its support for renegade regimes such as the government of Sudan, who used Chinese weaponry to commit the Darfur massacres, to its shameless emergence as the number one polluter.

The Chinese deserve as much criticism over their contributions to global warming as over their suppression of human rights.

Long live the British tabloid media!

I’m sooo sick of the campaign and I’m determined to look elsewhere for news to bring you, dear readers.

Shiraz Maher, writing in the New Statesman, says that London mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone is the lapdog of radical British Islamist groups, while he fails to address the local bread-and-butter concerns of his Muslim (and non-Muslim) constituents [e.a.].

Several Muslim groups took the unprecedented step this month of endorsing Ken Livingstone’s campaign for re-election as Mayor of London, publishing a statement on the Guardian’s website. The signatories told Muslim voters that doing so serves their “best interests”.

“His stands and policies have constantly championed justice in the Middle East and around the world, freedom for the Palestinians and withdrawal of occupying troops from Iraq, a rare trait of modern-day public figures,” reads the letter.

Herein lies a problem. An investigation by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that just under half of the letter’s signatories represented just two pressure groups: the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). …

Yet an Ipsos MORI poll released by Livingstone last November revealed that Muslims in the capital consider crime reduction, clean streets, education and affordable housing as their primary concerns - issues far removed from Palestine and Iraq.

I’m not surprised to hear that in London, as everywhere else, people’s actual political concerns are local. What fascinates and troubles me, though, is that radical Islamist organizations in Britain seem to be getting an outsize say in what is “good” for Muslims in Britain.

Perhaps this state of affairs will be challenged in the upcoming election for Mayor of London, a position that was only established in 2000, according to The Economist:

The third election for the mayor of London, an office created in 2000 for a city that had lacked its own administration since 1986, comes in May….

Many Londoners are indifferent as to who their mayor is (voting turnout was only 37% in 2004). Yet the office has come to matter. The mayor controls a budget of £10.6 billion ($20.9 billion)—up from £3.8 billion in 2001-02, and divided mostly between transport and policing (see chart). He also has powers over cultural matters and economic development; in 2006 he acquired more clout over housing, planning, the environment, and learning and skills. The biggest directly elected office in the country is also a bully pulpit.

Red Ken has got some competition this time, it turns out, and they’re going after him even as I write:

‘Trotskyites ran Ken Livingstone’s campaigns’
Times Online, UK - 12 hours ago

Livingstone aides ‘broke rules on poll campaigns’
Guardian Unlimited, UK - Jan 19, 2008

Mayor Ken Livingstone accused of ’shocking’ drinking habits by …
This is London, UK - Jan 19, 2008

Whisky & Ken: the row worsens
First Post, UK - 1 hour ago

Atma Singh’s full article on Ken Livingstone
Times Online, UK - Jan 19, 2008
I started work in City Hall in July 2001 as a policy adviser on Asian Affairs for Ken Livingstone. I had previously worked on his 2000 campaign and even .

Ken Livingstone’s aides ‘in secret Marxist cell’
Times Online, UK - Jan 19, 2008

Meanwhile, I just discovered that to vote in the election for Mayor of London and the London Assembly, you don’t even have to be a citizen of Britain: [e.a.]

The 2008 Greater London Authority (GLA) Elections which include elections for Mayor of London and London Assembly will be held on 1st May 2008.

To vote you must:

• live in London
• be a British, Commonwealth or EU citizen
• be at least 18 years of age on election day

That’s a very interesting notion of sovereignty, isn’t it?—allowing non-British citizens to influence the governance of British citizens—particularly in the areas of policing, economic matters, and culture. Frankly, I find it more than a little bit creepy.***

So I will be paying some attention to the election for Mayor of London. It turns out that Red Ken comes by his nickname honestly [e.a.]:

KEN LIVINGSTONE is embroiled in fresh controversy after allegations that his most senior aides have been members of a Trotskyite faction that plotted to turn London into a “socialist city state”. The advisers, who include the mayor’s chief of staff and his principal economic adviser, have refused to say whether they remain members of the secretive group Socialist Action, whose members greet each other using codenames.

He also has some very vocal competition in one Boris Johnson, a Tory, who is attacking Livingstone for his inattention to street crime:

Boris was on Nick Ferrari’s radio programme this morning talking about gun and knife crime, and setting out his five point plan to tackle the growing problem.

He explained to Nick how it was important to focus on areas such as strengthening the police presence on London’s streets and supporting grassroots organisations. Boris went on to criticise the current Labour Mayor who has said it is not something he or the Met Commissioner can solve.

Boris stressed that with 27 teenagers being killed by their fellow teenagers in London in 2007, this was exactly the problem that the Mayor had to get to grips with.

Commenting after the interview, Boris added:

“It frustrates me no end to hear the Mayor say nothing can be done to sort out gang and knife crime in London. He is in a position to make a real change and instead decides to stick his head in the sand. I will tackle this issue head on when I am Mayor”.

Johnson is an unusual challenger, to say the least—something of a celebrity in Britain and known by one name, the familiar “Boris.” The Economist offers a more sober assessment:

the Tories’ choice of candidate to run against him is a risky one. Mr Johnson’s journalistic career was stellar (he was editor of the Spectator, among other jobs) but punctuated by controversy. He became an MP, but concealing an affair led to his removal from the Tory front bench in 2004 by Michael Howard, the party’s leader; David Cameron, Mr Howard’s successor, restored him. His sense of fun knows few bounds (Mr Paddick calls him a “clown”), which critics say equips him ill to run a city with dire social problems.

The latest polls have Boris running neck in neck with Red Ken, according to The Independent:

The [YouGov] poll’s most interesting findings were that Livingstone was on 45 per cent, and Boris Johnson on 44. This implies that the contest is too close to call, and that the outcome will depend on how the second preference votes of those who voted for other candidates are distributed. In the previous two mayoral elections, in 2000 and 2004, it was pretty clear from the outset that Livingstone was going to win. Now he is fighting for this political life.

————-

***In researching for this post, I discovered that the position of Mayor of London has a counterpart: the Lord Mayor of London.

Hell-bent on keeping us informed, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, gave over an entire issue to books devoted to Islam. Odd behavior for a guy who’s been slimed as a “noted neocon” (and thus a hater), dontcha think?

Get cracking, dear readers. There will be a test.

The Islam Issue
‘The Suicide of Reason’
By LEE HARRIS
Reviewed by AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Arguing that the West’s “fanaticism of reason” is no match for the fanaticism of radical Islam.

Essay
Reading the Koran
By TARIQ RAMADAN
The Book of all Muslims, Tariq Ramadan writes, can be understood on many levels.
‘The Adventures of Amir Hamza’

By GHALIB LAKHNAVI AND ABDULLAH BILGRAMI
Reviewed by WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of medieval Persia is presented in a hefty new English translation.

First Chapter ‘Arguing the Just War in Islam’
By JOHN KELSAY
Reviewed by IRSHAD MANJI
A professor of religion traces the thinking behind Islamic holy war.
‘American Crescent’

By HASSAN QAZWINI
Reviewed by RASHID KHALIDI
From his mosque in Michigan, a cleric argues that Muslims can be integrated into national life.

First Chapter ‘Jihad and Jew-Hatred’
By MATTHIAS KÜNTZEL
Reviewed by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
A German scholar argues that Muslim anti-Semitism can be traced to a project of the Nazi Party.

First Chapter Essay
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
I doubted Samuel Huntington when he predicted a struggle between Islam and the West. My mistake.
‘God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215′

By DAVID LEVERING LEWIS
Reviewed by ERIC ORMSBY
David Levering Lewis’s history of Arab rule in Spain focuses on its ethic of mutuality.
‘Peace Be Upon You’

By ZACHARY KARABELL
Reviewed by JASON GOODWIN
Muslim rulers, Zachary Karabell says, did not force conversion upon their subjects.
‘Napoleon’s Egypt’

By JUAN COLE
Reviewed by TOM REISS
A historian takes a new look at Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.

Essay
Beyond the Burka
By LORRAINE ADAMS
Muslim women’s voices are being heard as never before. But which ones?
‘Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy’

By PETER GOTTSCHALK AND GABRIEL GREENBERG
Reviewed by SHIBLEY TELHAMI
A look at American media since 9/11 makes the case that Muslims have been unjustly demonized.

First Chapter Caught in the Ayatollah’s Web
Reviewed by SARAH WILDMAN
Memoirs by Marina Nemat and Zarah Ghahramani, two women who survived political prison in Iran 20 years apart.

Benazir Bhutto’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, has been named to succeed her:

Acting in accordance with Benazir Bhutto’s last wishes, her Pakistan People’s Party today named her teen-age son and her husband as its leaders.

Young Bilawal seems to have taken in certain Enlightenment ideas with his mother’s milk [e.a.]:

Phillippa Neal, 19, lives in the same on-campus housing as Bilawal. She says he was not accompanied by any security at Oxford. According to Neal, Bilawal posted a statement from his mother the day of her assassination, which read: “You can imprison a man but not an idea. You can exile a man but not an idea. You can kill a man but not an idea. — Benazir Bhutto.” The day of the assassination his Facebook status read: “Well behaved women rarely make history.” Neal is not sure whether that quote was portentious [sic] or posted after Benazir’s assassination.

During the meeting at which the Pakistan People’s Party succession announcement was made,

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a tall and composed Oxford student, took the center chair at the news conference at the Bhutto family enclave as he read the announcement that the party would contest the coming election.

“The long and historic struggle for democracy will continue with renewed vigor,” he said. “My mother always said democracy was the best revenge.”

Bilawal sounds like a worthy heir to a worthy cause.

Long may he live.

  [updated to clarify that this photograph was taken in Afghanistan, not Iran, as might be inferred from what I wrote below]   

Writing in Der Spiegel, Leon de Winter asks us not to turn away from but rather to contemplate the UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007. Click on the link, which will take you to a larger version of the picture of the 11-year-old girl sitting next to the 40-year-old she’s about to be married to.

De Winter writes:

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual — without disgust, nausea and rage.

He is not one of them:

Many of us in the West … ask themselves: Who are we to believe that it is inhumane to sell an 11-year-old girl? Who are we to impose our values so vehemently on the Afghans, on this man and on this girl?

I don’t have a clue who we are. But I know that this universe is not only a universe of iPods, Disneylands, CO2 penalties, tax write-offs, and New Year’s sales in our department stores. No, I know that this is also a universe of human rights. I know that this universe is deeply shaken — right down to its core — by the suffering of this lonely, lonely little girl.

A useful reminder: the legal age of consent for girls in Iran is 9, according to this piece in the BBC.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali campaigns against the terrible things done the world over in the name of Islam, this is one of the practices she is talking about.

The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).

Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:

This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University

Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].

By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.

“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”

And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.

The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopaganda^TM (PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.

Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)

Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.

The Flack writes:

Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.

Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.

The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.

It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

Munira Mizra does an admirable job of defending contemporary art against the bogus charge that it is left-wing:

It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. … Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?

Good question!

In my own view, most art—and I use the term reservedly, for the general culture—is politically incoherent, and dumb. Very unsophisticated stuff. Tired. Lacking in ways to explain the world we live in today.

Or are our artists, as Mizra suggests, simply afraid to go there?

[T]here’s plenty of anti-war art out there …, but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?

Another very good question, and I commend Ms. Mizra for raising it even if the larger artistic (and critical) community in the West, such as it is, does not.

Oh! I forgot! They’re too busy disapproving of Salman Rushdie!

What’s this the L.A. Times is reporting? cooperation between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq?

Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say.

In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland.

Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims.

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.

Of course if you’ve been reading Engram’s blog, you know that there was never, strictly speaking, a civil war in Iraq—it was way more complicated, and way less complicated—than that.

Not having been subjected to his rule—and thus to the notorious spinning that came out of his office—I have the luxury of considering Tony Blair’s comments and arguments on their merits. He hasn’t moved an inch on Iraq:

In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this [WMD] issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Read the whole thing.