Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.
I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …
After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.
The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:
For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:
Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.
This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.
How is it that the extremely busy columnist, author, and television commentator David Brooks
can find the time not only to inject new ideas into the bloodstream of the great national debate (okay: it’s actually the culture war circus) but also to read and coherently critique entire books by his ideological opponents
[H]ey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.
Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.
but that a whippersnapper blogger like Matthew Yglesias is too bored *** to engage serious, knowledgeable critics like Noah Pollak on substantive issues
Peretz clearly has the better understanding of Gaza, and the better argument. But he became annoyed, told Yglesias to shove off, and let the ignorant party come away appearing more reasonable. That’s too bad, because Yglesias’ writings on the Middle East, I’m afraid to say, have a distinctively hanging-out-at-the-coffee-shop feel to them. Yglesias believes that “Hamas-Fatah violence is largely the result of deliberate American policy.” If Peretz won’t have a go at this argument, I will.
and entirely dismissive of the ideas (which he won’t even read)+++ of certain public intellectuals in favor of the ideas of other public intellectuals whom he’s more inclined to trust … well, just because (i.e., for unstated reasons)?
I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I’ll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma’s Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I’m more likely to take Buruma’s word for it than Berman’s.
The last time Yglesias chose certain smart people over certain other smart people to take at their word, of course, he ended up supporting the Iraq war. Under the circumstances, I’d be more wary both of trusting my own instincts and of laying out the politically correct stance on issues for others. But then I’m not under 30.
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*** and intellectually dishonest: Yglesias pretended that the entire “dust-up,” rather than being a fierce debate about the reason for the horrifically violent fighting between Hamas and Fatah, was a mere ”feud” between him and Marty Peretz and that Jonah Goldberg had “piled on”:
I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz’s efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. I’m done with this feud as there’s really no point in arguing with someone who’s proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.
+++ at least not all the way through: Yglesias later tackled the Berman piece, in a manner of speaking. He used his second post to attack Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In a photo gallery, Der Spiegel asks:
Does Germany already Have Sharia Law?
In Dissent, Pascal Bruckner (class of ‘68, French chapter, or, way more obnoxiously, soixante-huitard), ponders, among other things, the meaning of internationalism some forty years after our cohort came alive politically.
The third-worldism that set the wretched of the earth in opposition to the sated North is moribund as a political movement, yet it survives in our minds as a subtle poison, in the way we spontaneously denounce ourselves for the world’s disorders. We live off the dividends of our self-accusation. We are supposedly forever in debt to the poor, the oppressed, the immigrants, and our only obligation is to expiate endlessly. Consider the wave of repentance sweeping through the continent nowadays-like an epidemic, especially in the major religions. This is an excellent thing, a salutary realization of past offenses, provided that other cultures and other beliefs also recognize their errors. Contrition cannot be restricted to a few and innocence attributed to everyone who claims to be persecuted. For too many countries, particularly in the Arab world, self-criticism is confused with the search for a convenient scapegoat: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s.
Johann Hari, also writing in Dissent, reviews some current books about Islam in the West and concludes on a surprisingly hopeful note. He sees an exciting opportunity for Europe to play host to a reformation of Islam.
[A]cross the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularized by the mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative. And if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. …
The Ni Putains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for “no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads.” Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one “pure” Islam, represented by elderly mullahs. Now that Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach places European states closer to the reactionaries than to the feminists and liberals. We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics. …
To host an Islamic civil war—one where the liberals win—Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism. The potential prize is extraordinary.
I would like to believe this is possible. Unfortunately, things are just too damn weird. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less next week or next month or next year, is just full of shit.
The world is upside down. A while back, Spengler said we should sit back and enjoy the chaos. I note that he hasn’t published a word about up-to-the-minute events since Tall Tales from Tehran went into heavy rotation in the global media
until it was thrown off the air temporarily by Sob Stories from the Royal Navy and Marines.
Meanwhile, here at home, Nancy’s Really Big Adventure
was quickly overshadowed by Don Imus’s Really, Really Bad Manners
which got him suspended from NBC.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Which is exactly the way the media wants it. They want our eyeballs, and they get ‘em. Because infotainment rules.
The NYT’s Caryn James is one person who gets this, although she doesn’t quite connect the dots. Today she writes about our other national obsession—Anna Nicole Smith:
From the Who’s the Daddy question to the trumped-up murder-mystery element attached to both her death and to her 20-year-old son’s, her true story has played out in real time, as breaking news. Yet to the public it has also taken on the qualities of a long-running entertainment series, part reality television and part online game show. As on any reality show, the audience has been offered characters to root for or to hiss against. Mr. Stern and Mr. Birkhead have had their personalities shaped by television producers in much the way editing turns contestants on “Survivor” or “Big Brother” into heroes or villains. In the Smith case, there are competing camps, with infotainment shows aligning with the man who has given them access, and rarely bothering with the pretence of objectivity.
My point is this: for the seemingly narcotized (if not depraved) West, the Anna Nicole Smith story is no different from the British Hostages Nabbed by Iran story. Interestingly, Iran’s master propagandists are way ahead of our guys, because they get that.
These are the days of our lives…
