Markmaking

Scary Food

In Policy Review, Miller and Conko review the achievements of the anti-genetically-modified-food lobby:

In 2003, the Food Safety Agency tested six organic cornmeal products and twenty conventional corn meal products for fumonisin contamination. All six organic corn meals had elevated levels — from nine to 40 times greater than the recommended levels for human health — and they were voluntarily withdrawn from grocery stores...

But modern technology — specifically in the form of gene-splicing — is already attacking the fungal problem at its source. An excellent example is “Bt corn,” crafted by splicing into commercial corn varieties a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. The “Bt” gene expresses a protein that is toxic to corn-boring insects but is perfectly harmless to birds, fish, and mammals, including humans...

Activists have mounted intractable opposition to food biotechnology in spite of demonstrated, significant benefits, including reduced use of chemical pesticides, less runoff of chemicals into waterways, greater use of farming practices that prevent soil erosion, higher profits for farmers, and less fungal contamination...

John Rosenthal on French Poverty

In TCS Daily, John Rosenthal praises France's breathtaking achievement in rising above the barbarity of Anglo-Saxon capitalism:

Coming nearly two years after it pronounced European poverty non-existent, one might think that this belated acknowledgment of Parisian homelessness might be a source of some embarrassment for the paper. But no. As if in an attempt to salvage the postulate of the supreme efficacy of European social protection even in the face of manifest evidence to the contrary, the Times article manages to transform seemingly the vast majority of Paris's homeless into... Poles.

Gelinas on Housing

Nicole Gelinas discusses the ingenuity of socialist New York City's rigged housing system -- a lottery set up to benefit those lucky by accident of birth, or political connections, at the expense of all other residents of the city.

Of Bloomberg’s 165,000 “affordable” homes, he’ll build 112,200 for New York families earning less than $50,240. The problem: this category includes 1 million New York families. Bloomberg will build another 18,150 units for families who earn between $50,000 and $75,000. The problem: another 300,000 families qualify. And what about New Yorkers who earn more than $75,000, but who don’t earn enough to disqualify them from middle-income housing? Bloomberg will build 34,650 apartments for them—but nearly 400,000 families are eligible.

Indeed, before the mayor had even broken ground on most of his 165,000 apartments, advocates at a May affordable-housing conference were saying that the city should build 500,000 “affordable” units. Unless Bloomberg effectively nationalizes the city’s entire private housing stock to ensure that everyone who he believes “deserves” affordable housing gets affordable housing, all he has done is create a lottery in which 10 percent of the people who qualify win. But this isn’t a voluntary lottery; everyone else pays through higher home prices and higher taxes.

If socialists had invented radial tires

Bill Gates on the future of Microsoft: "'When they invented radial tires, they should have shot the guy,' he said. 'The whole industry went through a crisis, because it took nine years to squeeze out the extra factory capacity, because the tires lasted longer.'"

If socialists had invented radial tires, the out-of-work tire makers would have been paid full wages and benefits to go to work and do nothing, or to make useless tires to be destroyed, for at least nine years. I predict that the radial tires of the future will not be invented in France.

Glucksmann on French moral standing

At Signandsight.com, Andre Glucksmann explores the unique moral superiority of French foreign policy.

This heterogeneous black cabinet which prefers to avoid publications and media attention, quietly gathers together post-communist intellectuals and post-Gaullist elite-bureaucrats under the banner of a respectable anti-Americanism, open to both left-wing anti-imperialists and right-wing sovereigntists: Regis Debray and Emmanuel Todd are esteemed advisers

This endearing family presides - without either undue modesty or parliamentary control - over the worldly destinies of France. A country with a mere hundredth of the world's inhabitants has worked its way up to be the planet's third-biggest arms dealer. Cock-a-doodle-doo! In a demonstration of "soft power" and universal moral sovereignty, Dominique de Villepin's famous speech at the UN in 2003 revealed to the four billion people of the world, in Jacques Chirac's words, that France was still France. The Paris-Moscow axis pursues its objectives to the detriment of Europe of the 25; arms and patents are delivered to China to the detriment of the Atlantic Alliance: all this raises our camarilla far above the classic, measured anti-Americanism from De Gaulle to Mitterrand which in times of danger (be it the Cuba Crisis or the question of the Russian SS20 missiles) always came home to the fold of Euro-American democracies. Today, all of that is history. Down with "hyper power"! What purpose does the Atlantic Pact serve any more? The French foreign ministry rejects its extension to Ukraine and Georgia, so as not to ruffle feathers at the Kremlin.

Sowell on Streetcars

Thomas Sowell on Jim Crow and Rosa Parks.

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem.

Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit -- and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about...

Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.

These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply.

None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront...

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying.

You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want...

Sowell on white flight

Thomas Sowell on so-called "white flight."

The phrase "white flight" is completely misleading. All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion, or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white people do it.

A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly different zones.

When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been found among all sorts of groups.

When blacks move into a neighborhood and whites move out, that is something visible to the naked eye but there is nothing unique about such "white flight." The phrase is misleading for the same reason that saying white people have toenails would be misleading. It is true in itself but suggests something unique that is in fact common to human beings of all sorts.

Intercultural harmony in Russian America

Fort Ross, though economically unsuccessful, was an excellent example of intercultural harmony in an 'enchanting land.'

A deed "releasing land to the Company" was drawn up and agreed upon in 1817 by the local Indian chiefs (Chu-gu-an, Amat-tan, and Gem-le-le), but it was signed only by the Russians present—Hagemeister and six other officials. It stated that "the chiefs are very satisfied with the occupation of this place by the Russians" and that "they now live in security from other Indians who used to attack them." A copy of the agreement, the only one known to have been executed between Indians and Europeans in California, was dispatched to Russia. Chief Chu-gu-an was presented a silver medal inscribed with the words "Allies of Russia."

The three-way culture of Native Californians, Native Alaskans, and Russians at Fort Ross was chiefly one of genuine cooperation, which some attribute to the religious values that had been instilled earlier in the Russians and Aleuts, by clergymen in Alaskan Russian America...

Not once was the settlement threatened by outside attack. The climate was mild yet invigorating, and the beauty of the surroundings imparted a sense of well-being recorded by many who were there. Manager Rotchev was to look back nostalgically at the time spent in this "enchanting land" as the "best years" of his life.

The World's Worst Library

Tim Harford on the world's worst library.

At first glance the new library was impressive. With the exception of the principal’s palatial house, it was the only two-story structure on campus. Its design was adventurous: a poor man’s Sydney Opera House. The sloped roof, rather than running down from a ridge, soared up in a V from a central valley like the pages of an open book on a stand.

When you’re standing in the blazing sunlight of the Cameroonian dry season, it’s hard to see at first what the problem is with a roof that looks like a giant open book. But that’s only if you forget, as the architect apparently did, that Cameroon also has a rainy season. When it rains in Cameroon, it rains for five solid months. It rains so hard that even the most massive storm ditches quickly overflow. When that kind of rain meets a roof that is, essentially, a gutter that drains onto a flat-roofed entrance hall, you know it’s time to laminate the books. The only reason the school’s books still existed was that they’d never been near the new building; the librarian had refused repeated requests from the principal to transfer them from the old library.

I was tempted to conclude that the principal was in an advanced stage of denial when I stepped inside the new library to see the devastation. It was in ruins. The floor contained the stains of countless puddles. The air carried the kind of musty smell associated with a damp cave. The plaster was peeling off the walls. Yet the library is only four years old.

This is a shocking waste. Instead of building the library, the school could have bought 40,000 good books, or acquired computers with Internet connections, or funded scholarships for poor children. Any of these alternatives would have been incomparably better than an unusable new library. The school never even needed a new library in the first place—the old library works perfectly well, could easily hold three times as many books as the school owns, and is waterproof.

If the library was such a pointless endeavor, why was it built at all? It’s all too tempting for the visitor in Cameroon to shrug his shoulders and explain the country’s poverty by presuming that Cameroonians are idiots. Cameroonians are no smarter or dumber than the rest of us. Seemingly stupid mistakes are so ubiquitous in Cameroon that incompetence cannot be the whole explanation. There is something more systematic at work. We need to consider the incentives of the decision makers.

First, most of the senior education officials in northwest Cameroon come from the small town of Bafut. Known as the Bafut Mafia, these officials control considerable funds for the education system, which they hand out based on personal connections rather than necessity. Not surprisingly, the principal of this prestigious private school was a senior member of the Bafut Mafia. Wanting to convert her school into a university, the principal needed to build a library of university size and quality. It was irrelevant to the principal that the current library was more than sufficient, and that the taxpayers’ money could have been better spent in other ways or by other schools.

Second, nobody was monitoring the principal or her spending. Staff members are paid or promoted not on merit but at the principal’s command. This is a prestigious school with good conditions for teachers, so staff members would be particularly eager to keep their jobs, which meant keeping in good favor with the principal. In fact, the only person able to defy the principal was the librarian, who was accountable only to the Voluntary Service Overseas office in London. She turned up after the library was built but was at least in time to prevent the book collection from being transferred and destroyed.

Either the principal was so stupid that she did not realize water ruins books, or she did not care very much about the books and simply wanted to demonstrate that the library had some books in it. The second explanation seems more likely. With the money at her fingertips and nobody to object to the wastefulness of building a second library, the principal had full control over the project. She appointed a former pupil of the school to design the library, probably to demonstrate the quality of education provided by the school; she did prove a point, although perhaps not the one she intended. But no matter how incompetent the architect, the flaws in the design would have been spotted if anybody concerned had a strong interest in making sure the library functioned as a library. But that was never the prime concern of anybody with authority. The people in power simply cared about putting up something that could qualify the school as a university.

Consider the situation: money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than use; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: A project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. Cameroon’s tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in check.

Green MEP Ilka Schroeder on European Anti-Semitism

Ilka Schroeder of the Green Party and formerly of the European Parliament, on the depths of European anti-Semitism:

When a Jewish person calls something anti-Semitic, she noted, some Europeans discount it because it is coming from a Jew.

This kind of bias is not uncommon among Europeans, said Schroeder, and she has been fighting it ever since she decided that it was essential to speak out about the E.U.'s support of the Palestinian Authority.

Elected to the E.U. Parliament as a member of the German Green Party in 1999 (she later left the party to become an independent, but still allies with the left), Schroeder said she came to the body without a particularly strong view on the Middle East.

The Sept. 11 attacks changed that, she said, making her realize how widespread anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes were in the E.U. countries.

She saw the attacks not only as directed against the U.S., but against Jews as well, since al-Qaeda was attacking what it sees as the hallmarks of Jewish influence -- Wall Street and the U.S. government. But many Europeans reacted to Sept. 11 not with outrage, but with cries of "These people are poor, we have to understand them."

It was then she realized that she had to become an activist.

In the ensuing months, after published reports revealed that the P.A. was directing E.U. financial aid toward the financing of terrorism, she pushed the E.U. Parliament to open an investigation into the matter. She said the only way she could get fellow legislators interested in the matter was to emphasize the P.A.'s corruption, since not many were particularly concerned about the diversion of the money for violent acts.

Eventually, she said the Parliament did convene a "working group" on the matter -- on which she was not included -- but that no investigation was launched because it could not be proven that the E.U.'s money went directly from their pocket to paying for suicide bombs, which Schroeder found ridiculous.

"They were asking for something impossible" to prove, she said.

Since Hamas took over the Palestinian government, the E.U. has suspended its $600 million in aid to the Palestinians, but Schroeder is not optimistic that the freeze will continue indefinitely. She believes that the eventual E.U. goal is to "challenge the U.S. position [of pre-eminent power] in the Middle East" and across the globe, and funding the Palestinians is one way to do that.

The E.U.'s failure to take Palestinian terrorism seriously is one manifestation of a common theme among many in Europe, particularly on the left: an unwillingness to believe that "Israel may not always be the perpetrator ... [and] Palestinians the victim," she said.

Schroeder estimates that as many as one-third of Europeans might believe that Israel was behind a conspiracy to commit the Sept. 11 attacks. And she says that displaying sympathy for Israel has led to accusations from fellow legislators that she is being "paid by the Mossad."

For many, their anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views fit into their anti-globalization ideology, which states that the "financial sphere" dictates how the world operates and that Jews are influential in that sphere, Schroeder said.

African Tyrants: Always welcome in friendly regimes

Our friends the Saudis, always ready to step up and help a poor genocidal ruler:

It's not just the Africans who are protecting tyrants. Idi Amin Dada, the former president of Uganda and reputedly the most bloodthirsty despot in Africa's post-colonial history, spent 25 peaceful years in the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah after he was toppled. He died of kidney failure shortly after his 75th birthday. His friends called him "Big Daddy" and the Saudis treated him like a good friend. He got room and board for free, a decent annual entitlement and always had the latest limousine in his garage. Everyone knew he had had at least 300,000 people killed. But he was a good Muslim and visited the mosque twice a day. That was more important to the Saudi theocrats...

Amin was never seriously challenged over his criminal past. People preferred to forget that he had fed his political opponents to crocodiles or forced them to crush each other's skulls with sledgehammers. Even the West remembered him not as a mass murderer but as a slightly stupid clown.

Iran, East Germany, USSR

Via SignandSight.com, the Frankfurter Rundschau interviews Giwi Margwelaschwili on literature in Iran:

Almost everything by Ignazio Silone has appeared in Iran, and it's still hugely influential today. His attitude towards fascism under Mussolini has so many analogies that Iranian readers identify easily with the protagonist. They read the way people used to in the GDR, between the lines. And like in the Soview Union, paper is in the hands of the state. That's still the best means of censorship. For years Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' was the novel par excellence in Tehran, by the way. Everyone read it.... Bulgakov's target was the structure of brain-washing. And that's just as acute today as it was in the past. You can simply take out Stalin's name, for example, and put in Khomeini. That's the advantage of literature. It retains its immediacy through the distance in space and time. And it creates a global space for reflection.

Yellow Peril Overrated

David Barboza reports in the New York Times that the self-regulating free market of globalization is leading to higher wages in China, hence a greater market for Western products among Chinese consumers; and hence more jobs for Westerners in export businesses; and better working conditions for in-demand Chinese workers; and more jobs in Vietnam, India and Bangladesh.

Clearly, this is an inhumane, repressive system deserving of violent protest against the cruel masters of international capital!

It may be in the spirit of "no enemies on the left" that evil globalizers draw more protest than does China's neo-Leninist state.

French Youth Strike to Keep Minorities Unemployed

Theodore Dalrymple on the utter non-altruism of the randaliering French youth:

It is often pointed out that French unemployment under the age of 26 is the highest in Europe, running at about 25 per cent. Moreover, in the banlieues it is 50 per cent. These banlieues are homes to millions of people, disproportionately young. It follows — does it not? — that there must be a considerable section of the young population in which unemployment is less than a quarter, actually much less. One would hardly have to be de Tocqueville to guess in which section of the young population the unemployment was less: the section from which the demonstrators, or at least their leaders and agents provocateurs, are drawn. In an increasingly desperate situation, the demonstrators are so afraid of the future that they want to hang on to their privileges and job security by hook or by crook, even if it means that the youth of the banlieues will eventually have to be kept in order by the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the much-feared riot police, the CRS. There is nothing idealistic or generous about the demonstrators, just as there wasn’t in 1968.

UAW prepares to drive Delphi over cliff

Micheline Maynard in the New York Times about the strategic struggle between labor and management at Delphi, the major auto-parts supplier to General Motors.
In the UAW-Delphi model of carmaking, unionized American workers receive $67-73 per hour to make terrible cars which nobody wants, followed by the union calling a lengthy strike which will permanently cripple the company and drive it further into decline, further costing thousands of workers their jobs.
In the Toyota model of carmaking, non-unionized American workers make wonderful cars which everybody wants, creating more and more good jobs for the workers, with no strikes, and eventually even more jobs for the workers.

Don't forget to check for the union label!

British picketers protest government brutality

The Telegraph weighs in on the horrific mistreatment of the British strikers by the government:

The strike was against the Government's decision to alter a rule allowing public sector workers to retire on a full pension at 60. The Government argues, rightly, that the rule is discriminatory. Were it to speak plainly, it would also say that it is an affront to the three quarters of the working population who must work until at least 65 - and, it is posited, in the future until 69 - to qualify for their pensions, and who in the meantime will be paying taxes to fund the feather-bedding of the public payroll(...)

With their prehistoric apparatus of picket lines and placards, the union militants must have hoped to attract public sympathy. In fact, any sane, tax-paying, non-superannuated citizen must have been looking on yesterday with a weary sense of disdain(...)

Few private sector workers under the age of 45 will understand what is going on. Their parents were used to an economic culture blighted by the British disease of striking, in which it was sullenly accepted that capricious and pointless withdrawals of labour were part of our life. Most people now have no regard for such niceties, and see such industrial action as a bore and an absurdity(...)

The Lobby

On Israel and the lobby: Daniel Drezdner, Martin Kramer. (Walt and Mearsheimer's "piss-poor monocausal social science" [Drezdner]).

United Union Militants Lead Membership Off Cliff

Louis Uchitelle has a compassionate story about some of the American workers who find themselves on the wrong side of globalization. Through labor-management cooperation, the airline mechanics at United Airlines had built a facility that was the envy of the world, with unbelievable turnaround times. If they had kept on the same track, why couldn't they have continued to be a great success story wherein the U.S. competes successfully with India and China by using the countless advantages of a highly developed country?

Instead, about "300 militants" in the union decided to use their advantageous position to display a (seemingly unbelievable but to anyone acquainted with unions sadly not so) pigheaded, arrogant, utterly blind sense of entitlement, encouraging their colleagues to behave in the most uncooperative, destructive manner imaginable. Now all the workers at the plant have lost their jobs.

Uchitelle is far too polite and worshipful of the noble union men to ask any of those 300 militants whether they at all regret pushing down the path that lost everyone at the center their jobs.

The incident that started United down the road to outsourcing and layoffs seemed so minor. During the trusting years, the foremen had relaxed the restrictions on the number of mechanics who could take vacation days at the same time. For that Independence Day weekend, more than 100 mechanics had been granted time off — 10 times the prescribed number.

Mr. Mohr, the general manager, was himself on vacation in the days leading up to the weekend, and he called the office to remind his lieutenants to be careful about allowing too many mechanics to be away. Somehow that became a wholesale, last-minute cancellation of vacation time, outraging the mechanics. "To this day, they get upset when they talk about what happened that weekend," Mr. Doucey said.

The uproar over vacations stirred up other resentments — how United had gotten tough about sick days, how it had scaled back flexible hours, how it had substituted an 8-hour shift for a 10-hour one that allowed three- and four-day weekends, which the mechanics preferred.

No more four-day weekends?? Quelle horreur! What is this, France?

Lennart Meri 1929-2006

Lennart Meri, a great European statesman, has died. He deserves a lot of credit for helping to bring Estonia out of the nightmare of Soviet rule and into, if not the nirvana, at least the basic stability of post-Communist life. Official page; Wikipedia; City Paper; City Paper interview.
Estonia's economy, the most liberal in Continental Europe, features high growth and comparatively low unemployment. (What are those rioting French students so afraid of? The self-superiority of western Europe vis-a-vis the east is so difficult to take -- I'm very glad to be at least east of the Rhine.)
Furthermore, he was highly and unnecessarily magnanimous toward the ethnic-German refugees from Estonia, translated Remarque and Graham Greene into Estonian, and made films too. From the City Paper profile:

“You could say he’s spent his whole life preparing to be president,” said one former aide, who worked with Meri when he was foreign minister from 1990 to 1992. “There isn’t a better informed person in Estonia. When he makes a decision, it’s a very well informed decision. That’s the secret to his political success.”
Now pushing 70, Meri’s hunger for knowledge is still so great that he can often be found at his desk reading a newspaper, surfing the Net and rifling through the radio dial—virtually all at the same time. When he flies on a plane, aides say Meri frequently heads for a chair in the cockpit, quizzing pilots for hours on end about which button does what.
It’s not only that he gathers information: he remembers it.
“He’s like a walking encyclopedia,” said Mihkel Mutt, an Estonian novelist and once Meri’s press secretary, shaking his head in wonder. “His memory is really amazing.”
Aides recall Meri spellbinding assorted VIPs by skillfully dropping intricate details about almost any subject broached in conversation, on everything from French history to burial rituals of nomads in Outer Mongolia.
“If he was talking to a French diplomat, he’d know the first Frenchman ever to travel to the Baltics, and if it was a BBC correspondent, he’d recite the life story of some long dead BBC reporter,” the former foreign ministry aide explained. “He always had at least one amazing detail up his sleeve. It became hard to believe he could know such details, but he did.”

Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan, Syrian-American psychiatrist, in the NYT:

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Ahmed Subhy Mansour

Ahmed Subhy Mansour is a distinguished Egyptian Muslim scholar. CV from Free Muslims page; Subhy Mansour answers the charges of Fahmi Howaydy.

Bassam Tibi

Bassam Tibi, professor at Göttingen and Cornell, is a Sunni Muslim from Syria. He is a widely published scholar of Islam. Wikipedia page; Goettingen page; Spiegel: Why Europe Needs a 'Leading Culture.'

International Herald Tribune: The Clash of Shariah and Democracy

The post-Koranic character of the Shariah is made clear by the fact that in the eighth century, after the Islamic revelation, the four legal schools, or madhahib, of Islamic law were established on the basis of diverse interpretations of the Koran.

The call for Shariah that one hears today throughout the Muslim world, as religion becomes politicized and the law Islamized, is a call for an Islamic state based on the idea that Shariah can form a country's constitution. The global context is the political revival of religion - and along with it the idea of divine law. But is Shariah really constitutional law? And how does the call for Islamization of the law fit in with democracy?

In fact, Shariah understood as modern constitutional law is in conflict with individual human rights.

IHT: Jihadism's Roots in Political Islam:

It is wrong and even deceitful to argue that jihadism has nothing to do with Islam, because the jihadists believe that they are acting as "true Islamic believers" and learn the Islamist mind-set in mosques and Islamic schools, including those of the Islamic diaspora in Europe.

UPI: Scholar Warns West of Muslim Goals

WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement warned the West Tuesday against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes an intensive dialogue with Islam.

"The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other," said Bassam Tibi, in an interview with United Press International.

Syrian-born Tibi, who claims to be a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed and teaches political science at Goettingen University in Germany, appealed for intellectual honesty between both parties in these exchanges.

"First, both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world," explained Tibi, who is also a research scholar at Harvard University.

"This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought, a concept developed by (18th-century philosopher) Immanuel Kant."

"Similarly, when Muslims and the Western heirs of the Enlightenment speak of tolerance they have different things in mind. In Islamic terminology, this term implies abiding non-Islamic monotheists, such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, as second-class believers. They are 'dhimmi,' a protected but politically immature minority."

According to Tibi, the quest of converting the entire world to Islam is an immutable fixture of the Muslim worldview. Only if this task is accomplished -- if the world has become a "Dar al-Islam" -- will it also be a "Dar a-Salam," or a house of peace.

Tibi appealed to his co-religionists to "revise their understanding of peace and tolerance by accepting pluralism." Furthermore, he said, Muslim leaders should give up the notion of Jihad in the sense of conquest -- as opposed to Jihad as an internal struggle of the individual.

Ahmed H. Al-Rahim

Ahmed H. Al-Rahim of the American Islamic Congress, a tireless champion of liberalism within Islam. Boston Globe; Wall Street Journal; A Perspective on Islam in Iraq; Discussion at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; UPI report on EPPC discussion.

Ali Asani Makes the Pluralist Case

Harvard professor Ali Asani makes the case for the tolerance inherent in the Quran: On Pluralism, Intolerance, and the Quran. (Via NHB)

[M]y contention is that the Quran essentially espouses a pluralist worldview, one that promotes peace and harmony among nations and peoples. Through the centuries, however, it has been subjected to anti-pluralist, or exclusivist, interpretations in order to advance hegemonic goals, both political and religious.