Sherry Rehman

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the Guardian, another story that only should only increase fears for the future of Pakistan:

All Sherry Rehman wants is to go out – for a coffee, a stroll, lunch, anything. But that’s not possible. Death threats flood her email inbox and mobile phone; armed police are squatted at the gate of her Karachi mansion; government ministers advise her to flee.

“I get two types of advice about leaving,” says the steely politician. “One from concerned friends, the other from those who want me out so I’ll stop making trouble. But I’m going nowhere.” She pauses, then adds quietly: “At least for now.”

It’s been almost three weeks since Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was gunned down outside an Islamabad cafe. As the country plunged into crisis, Rehman became a prisoner in her own home. Having championed the same issue that caused Taseer’s death – reform of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws – she is, by popular consensus, next on the extremists’ list.

Giant rallies against blasphemy reform have swelled the streets of Karachi, where clerics use her name. There are allegations that a cleric in a local mosque, barely five minutes’ drive away, has branded her an “infidel” deserving of death. In the Punjabi city of Multan last week opponents tried to file blasphemy charges against her – raising the absurd possibility of Rehman, a national politician, facing a possible death sentence.

Absurd? Not in Pakistan, a country where madness is clearly in the ascendant.

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The Jews did not invent modernity

Posted on January 19, 2011 by David Hume

Glenn Beck’s Jewish Problem:

It’s become clear to me that the Fox commentator Glenn Beck has something of a Jewish problem. Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.).

Many Jews and anti-Semites are focused on the necessary and sufficient role of the Jewish people in the modern West. In the case of Jews I believe it derives in part from the same sense of national pride which is at the root of embarrassing imitations such as Afrocentrism. But the reality is that Jews did not become part of the mainstream of Western intellectual and cultural life until after their emancipation. For most of Europe this was at some point in the 19th century, and for Jews who did not convert to Christianity it was probably later in the 19th century at that.

To put a not too fine point on it, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Rene Descartes were not Jews. Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume, were not Jews. John Stuart Mill was not a Jew. There were plenty of gentiles involved in the “invention” of modernity, and because of the social constraints placed upon Jews, there were very few of that people of any note before the 19th century in Western public life. The religious minority often seen to be disproportionately involved in the French Revolution were Protestants, not Jews. The exception to the Jewish abstention from early modernity would probably be Baruch Spinoza (I don’t think Moses Mendelssohn would be noteworthy were he not a Jew, while Spinoza would have been).

The enormous Jewish contribution to the 20th century intellectual world is undeniable. Jews were critically involved in the maturation and ripening of Western modernity. But they were not present at, or instrumental, in its birth. Therefore, it is ludicrous to claim that Jews “invented” Western modernity. Whether the invention of Western modernity is something to be proud of depends on your perspective, of course.

Note: In Catholicism and American Freedom the author argues that after World War II American Jews turned away from the tacit “white ethnic” coalition with Roman Catholics, and aligned themselves with the liberal post-Protestant Eastern Establishment in the incipient culture wars. But the narrative seems to indicate that initially Jews were junior partners in the project, even if they eventually became peers, or even dominant, vis-a-vis the old W.A.S.P. coterie.

Posted in culture | Tagged | 22 Comments

Europe, the big five

Posted on January 15, 2011 by David Hume

The New York Times Magazine has a Europe-themed edition. I thought it would be interesting to look at the five big Western European nations in Google Data Explorer.

Continue reading →

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After the revolution

Posted on January 14, 2011 by David Hume

Here’s an interesting point in relation to Tunisia:

…The protesters came together after circulating calls to rally over social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Many were unemployed college graduates, and they angrily demanded more jobs and denounced what they called the self-enrichment of Tunisia’s ruling family….

There will be no jobs. Many Arab countries have autarkic economics where good white collar jobs come from the government. Petro-states can fund these jobs through revenues which gush in during commodity booms. Tunisia is not a petro-state. In a modern economy only the private sector can drive real growth. Without reforms this revolution will sour.

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A true cultural topography

Posted on January 12, 2011 by David Hume

There are quite often two extreme reactions when it comes to cultural variation.

– To assert that cultural differences are to a great extent incommensurable. The more extreme caricatures of this position fall into the class of cultural relativism.

– To assert that cultural differences are fundamentally superficial, and that all differences are easily resolvable through reconciliations of semantic confusions. The idea that all religions “believe in the same God” falls into this category.

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Free Publicity

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Bradlaugh

Was the Tucson shooter inspired by the American Renaissance race-realist website/newsletter?  The Obamarrhoids planted a suggestion that he was; Fox News took the bait; American Renaissance denied and disproved the slur; now the accusers seem to have backed off. 

This little episode left me wondering whether perhaps the liberal Left has been infiltrated by American Renaissance moles.

Consider:  Every February American Renaissance has a conference. Last year’s was nearly derailed by a leftist mob phoning in death threats to employees of the conference hotel. I blogged about it on Secular Right at the time.

Now this year’s conference is coming up, and the Left is once again giving American Renaissance some timely free publicity (of which commodity, please be reminded, there is no such thing as bad).

Coincidence? I think not.

(I recently did a Q&A with Taylor here.)

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No illusions, just reality

Posted on January 11, 2011 by David Hume

In Pakistan, the Shooter Is the Hero: The depressing public reaction to the assassination of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer:

“Nowadays, he’s perfectly heroic,” says Imran Shiekh, the owner of a small jewelry store tucked away in the market’s depths. “Qadri did the right thing, and he did it well. Ninety-nine percent of Pakistanis would agree.”

I’d like to see some surveys on this. But note the following results from Pew Global Attitudes Project:

Continue reading →

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Thinking in black & white

Posted on January 10, 2011 by David Hume

Slippery insinuations about a “climate of hate”:

People have been having a hard time holding two ideas in their head at the same time:

1. What Paul Krugman calls “eliminationist rhetoric” is bad.
2. Contrary to his suggestion, there is no evidence that such rhetoric caused Saturday’s events. Even if such evidence is later found, it would not justify the evidence-free claims that have been made in the last 48 hours.

It is interesting how selective people have been when reporting Jared Lee Loughner’s literary tastes.

Posted in culture, politics | Tagged | 24 Comments

The Rise of Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox (Ctd.)

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

The Daily Telegraph reports on another dismal chapter in the rise of Israel’s ultra orthodox:

An Israeli activist who defied orthodox Jewish custom by leading a group of women in open prayer at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall has been told to expect years in prison for breaching the peace. Anat Hoffman has been awaiting her fate since being arrested in August amid a worsening debate about her campaign to allow women to pray at Judaism’s holiest site in the same way as men. The police have now chosen to ask prosecutors to charge her with “disrupting a policeman performing his duties under dire circumstances”, a crime that carries a mandatory prison sentence of up to three years. Many in the country’s rapidly growing ultra-orthodox community believe that a woman’s role at the wall should be limited to silent worship. Women should not be allowed, they believe, to read aloud, sing or read from the Torah…

…There are now over 100 state bus routes, many of them in Jerusalem, that offer segregated services requiring women to sit in the back. Israel’s High Court yesterday ruled that the practice could continue. Many offices in the city also keep the sexes apart while a growing number of clinics require men and women to book appointments on different days.

“The religious world in Israel has become more and more extreme,” Mrs Hoffman said. “Much like in Islam, religiosity is now measured by the distances at which women are kept from society.”

Despite the threat of jail, Mrs Hoffman and her supporters are continuing their monthly services at the Wailing Wall. Mrs Hoffman and her fellow members of the Women of the Wall group test the boundaries of religious strictures by singing and praying out loud but they refrain from reading the Torah. As they broke into song at a recent gathering, the men’s section grew more restive as resentment started to stir. A bearded man, his black cloak marking him as ultra-orthodox, shook a fist at the women and yelled: “Burn in hell, you dogs.”

Appalling.

This unpleasant story is yet another reminder of the growing threat to the liberties of secular Israelis from the religious zealotry spreading within their midst, a zealotry that they have subsidized for far too long. That fact is bad enough, but it’s hard not to think that this development also represents a threat to Israel’s external security. Much of America’s willingness to support Israel stems from the fact that the country is at least an approximation of a western-style democracy in a region dominated by authoritarian rule. The more theocratic the country becomes, the less true that will be…

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Salman Taseer

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

The tragic events in Arizona are a hideous conclusion to a week already scarred by the assassination in Pakistan of Punjab governor Salman Taseer. The ominous implications of Taseer’s killing have only been underlined by its aftermath. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, one of Taseer’s sons (the two were estranged, and the story of their relationship—described in the same article—casts an interesting light on the complexities of today’s Pakistan) takes up the story:

For if it is science and rationality whose fruit you wish to see appear in your country, then it is those things that you must enshrine at its heart; otherwise, for as long as it is faith, the men who say that Pakistan was made for Islam, and that more Islam is the solution, will always have the force of an ugly logic on their side. And better men, men like my father, will be reduced to picking their way around the bearded men, the men with one vision that can admit no other, the men who look to the sanctities of only one Book.

In the days before his death, these same men had issued religious edicts against my father, burned him in effigy and threatened his life. Why? Because he defended the cause of a poor Christian woman who had been accused – and sentenced to die – for blasphemy.

My father, because his country was founded in faith, and blood – a million people had died so that it could be made–could not say that the sentence was wrong; the sentence stood; all he sought for Aasia Bibi was clemency on humanitarian grounds. But it was enough to demand his head.

What my father could never say was what I suspect he really felt: “The very idea of a blasphemy law is primitive; no woman, in any humane society, should die for what she says and thinks.”

And when finally my father sought the repeal of the laws that had condemned her, the laws that had become an instrument of oppression in the hands of a majority against its minority, he could not say that the source of the laws, the faith, had no place in a modern society; he had to find a way to make people believe that the religion had been distorted, even though the religion – in the way that only these Books can be – was clear as day about what was meant.

Already, even before his body is cold, those same men of faith in Pakistan have banned good Muslims from mourning my father; clerics refused to perform his last rites; and the armoured vehicle conveying his assassin to the courthouse was mobbed with cheering crowds and showered with rose petals.

I should say too that on Friday every mosque in the country condoned the killer’s actions; 2,500 lawyers came forward to take on his defence for free; and the Chief Minister of Punjab, who did not attend the funeral, is yet to offer his condolences in person to my family who sit besieged in their house in Lahore.

More background on this topic here.

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